Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet theories about language and gender.

Jack Posobiec, for instance (described in Wikipedia as “an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent, conspiracy theorist and former United States Navy intelligence officer”), expressed impatience with people who found the spectacle unseemly:

Some of y’all just can’t handle 2 high-agency males going at it and it really shows. This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)

The last time I saw words like “phallocentric” and “gynocentric” being bandied about in public was probably in the 1980s, when poststructuralist theory was all the rage. Had Posobiec been dipping into the work of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray? On reflection that seemed unlikely: more probably he was just recycling what my book of the same name calls “the myth of Mars and Venus”, a set of stereotypical generalizations about men, women and communication which were popularized in the early 1990s in a series of bestselling self-help books, and went on to be repeated so widely and so often that they became part of our culture’s mental wallpaper. For instance:

• men are rational and action-oriented, women are more emotional and more attuned to others’ feelings
• men talk about things in the world, women talk (aka gossip) about people and relationships
• when men have something to say they say it directly, whereas women favour indirectness
• men can tolerate verbal conflict (and may even engage in it for fun), but women avoid or try to defuse it
• when women do engage in conflict they prefer indirect, manipulative or passive-aggressive strategies to the overt aggressiveness of men Posobiec was not the only right-wing commentator who invoked these ideas to explain the Trump/Musk bust-up as a clash between two elite Martians. (“I know you’re not used to it”, he added, implicitly referencing the alt-right belief that the modern quest for sex equality has turned the once-noble cultures of the West into soft, effeminate places where manly men are in short supply.) The same point was made by another online MAGA-supporter, the aptly-named Joey Mannarino. “People forget”, he mused, “how men with testicles spar. You’re watching two people with balls the size of the moon debate an issue. This is what masculinity looks like.”

But to many people this take was not convincing. What struck them about Trump and Musk’s behaviour was not its manliness but on the contrary, its reliance on communication strategies which are stereotypically associated with teenage girls and/or effeminate gay men. One commentator called the unfolding saga “Mean Girls, White House version”. The Hollywood Reporter headlined a report on it “The girls are fighting”. Elsewhere we were said to be witnessing “a catty gay breakup” or “two gay dads divorcing”.

It’s not hard to see where this view came from. Approving references to what the two men were doing as “sparring”, “debating” or “going at it”—all terms which imply direct, head-to-head combat, whether physical or verbal—gloss over the point that they were not talking directly to one another, but rather using social media (in each case primarily a platform they owned—X for Musk and Truth Social for Trump) to address attacks on each other to their own followers. This is an indirect way of sending a message to your actual target; it’s a digital-era version of the time-honoured mean girl tactic of saying nasty things about your enemy behind her back, while knowing full well that they will soon get back to her.

Musk in particular deployed a range of stereotypical mean girl moves in his posts attacking Trump. These included emotional manipulation (“I got him elected, how can he be so ungrateful?”), spreading damaging rumours (“he’s on the list of [child abuser and trafficker] Jeffrey Epstein’s associates”) and calling for other people to shun or punish him (“he ought to be impeached”). Trump made more use of direct threats (in particular, to cancel Musk’s lucrative government contracts), but he also used the classic manipulative technique of trying to discredit an adversary by accusing him of being crazy (“Elon has lost his mind”). At one point he insinuated that Musk’s behaviour reflected his excessive consumption of Ketamine. That may of course be true—and I don’t rule out the possibility that the Epstein rumour is also true—but my point is about the strategic weaponizing of rumour and gossip, which is stereotyped as something women rather than men do.

Also interesting in this regard were some of the interventions made by fans of Trump and Musk. Not all were of the type I’ve already mentioned, attempting to reassure anyone who was worried that what the two men were doing was just normal behaviour for “people with balls the size of the moon”. Some used language that was more reminiscent of the worried best friend in a romcom attempting to get the lead protagonists’ relationship back on track, or the wise elder in a marital melodrama urging the warring parties to stay together for the sake of the children (one right-wing billionaire urged them to “make peace for the benefit of our great country”). Others sounded as if the children themselves were pleading with their parents not to split up. Kanye West’s much-lampooned response, for instance, was “Broooos please noooooo. We love you both so much”.

Is this kind of emotional outburst really “what masculinity looks like”? In the mythological universe of Mars and Venus, definitely not; but in the real world it’s a bit more complicated. I’ve written before about the concept of “fratriarchy”, a modern form of male dominance (aka “patriarchy”) which depends less on the absolute authority of fathers (over younger men as well as women) and more on the homosocial bonds men of similar status forge with each other. Those bonds are maintained through various practices, including and especially forms of talk, which are culturally coded as female, though in reality they are not gender-specific—their function, whoever uses them, is to cultivate intimacy, trust and loyalty. We saw this, for instance, in the gossipy, confessional talk between Trump and a couple of other men that was captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape; we also saw it at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexually assaulting a high school classmate. The Republican Senators who came to Kavanaugh’s defence were nothing if not emotional—some were moved almost to tears by the suffering he claimed the accusation had caused him.

These were both classic cases of—putting it crudely—“bros before hos”, which is essentially fratriarchy’s motto. And when fraternal bonds fracture, as they have between Musk and Trump, that will often provoke emotional responses: it undermines the assumption that you can always count on your brothers, and forces men like Kanye West, who feel a strong allegiance to both parties, to decide where their loyalties should lie in future. (Musk obviously grasped this: one of his posts rather pointedly noted that 78-year-old Trump had only a few more years in office while he, unelected and much younger, would be around for decades to come.)

For me what this sorry saga has highlighted is (as I argued in The Myth of Mars and Venus) that men are from earth and women are from earth. Communicators of both sexes have access to, and make use of, the same broad range of communication strategies. Whether a particular way of communicating is interpreted in context as masculine “sparring” or feminine/effeminate “cattiness” depends not on the objective qualities of the language being used (e.g., whether it’s direct or indirect), but on who is using it and what lens we view it through.

It’s not, of course, a coincidence that the “masculine” interpretation of Trump and Musk’s behaviour was advanced by their supporters on the right, while the “feminine” reading was used by more liberal commentators to mock them. (As usual, “feminine” was the negative term–something progressive types might want to consider when they criticize powerful men for acting like girls.) But it surely says something about the power of Mars and Venus mythology that gender was the lens through which both sides viewed Musk v. Trump. Commentators reached immediately for well-worn gender stereotypes and metaphors: either the two men were “going at it” like rutting stags, or else they were catty, passive-aggressive mean girls proving that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

There are other metaphors these commentators could have chosen that would arguably have been more illuminating. What came to my mind as I watched events unfold was not the binary opposition between male and female but the contrast between adults and children. These ultra-privileged, wealthy and powerful men were behaving like giant toddlers, having tantrums in public and throwing their toys out of the pram. They displayed a toddler-like lack of self-control and self-awareness, along with the toddler’s uncontrollable rage when crossed; it was their egos rather than their balls which were “the size of the moon”.

To me this childish behaviour is not so much “what masculinity looks like” as what autocracy looks like–self-aggrandising, thin-skinned and vengeful. And while it’s true that autocrats tend not to like being laughed at, it generally takes more than ridicule to bring them down.