Remember the Girl Who 'Felt the Feminism Leaving My Body' Because a 'Guy's Guy' Paid for Their Date? Her Dad Abandoned Their Family to Become a Breakdancer.
You might remember this clip that went viral on a half dozen platforms a couple of months ago. Karim knocked it out of the park:
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... but the tl;dr shorthand of it is that this Gen Z girl from East LA went on a date with a guy - "a bro's bro" in her words - who paid for their whole evening. To the point when he went to the bathroom he told her to order them drinks and left his card with her. And she admitted to being blown away by such behavior to the point she "felt the feminism leaving my body" and jokes about whether it's time to get away from the kind of people she's been dating.
Why it went viral is obvious. This story strikes a nerve. The one that connects the Gender Roles neurons in your brain to the Sexual Politics chamber of your heart and the Masculine Identity receptors in your spine. Even though what this Guy's Guy did was exactly what men did on every date in the couple of centuries between the time when marriages were business transactions arranged by families and the internet age. Today, this once-common behavior makes him a unicorn. And breaks the brain of a feminist working the LA dating scene in the 2020s.
And now we have an update. Which makes her reaction to what seems like a pretty traditional social practice come into focus:
Source - A 'D-list celebrity' father who became famous for his breakdancing career which he began later in life has hit back at this TikTokker daughter who accused him of 'abandoning' their family in order to pursue his hobby.
In a lighthearted video posted last week, Madi Hart aired out her 'funny trauma' and claimed her father Ben Hart, stage name Beni-Hana, left his family and became a breakdancer at the age of 60.
The California-based comedian, who has more than 67,000 followers on the platform, said that her dad 'got really good' at the artform and his career 'blew up as he became the oldest performing breakdancer in the world. …
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'My dad abandoned my family when I was five years old - that is a wife and four kids - he abandoned us and then pursued amateur breakdancing,' she told her followers.
'And he got really good, he like blew up. He became a D-list celebrity status viral breakdancer. He became the oldest actively competing breakdancer in the world.'
She shared footage of Ben appearing on Good Morning America and danced along to the hip-hop song used in his choreography.
'This guy wouldn't pay my medical bills,' she said, slapping her hands to emphasis her point. …
Madi jokes in her video that 'he may not have paid for some of my medical bills, but he did give me this breakdancing merchandise' and pointed to the t-shirt she was wearing which featured a photo of Ben dancing on his head.
She claimed that Ben does try to contact her sometimes and shared a pictured of a text he allegedly sent her that reads, 'I lost track of the date. Happy birthday? I hope you're doing well.'
Now to be totally fair to Beni-Hana, he denies leaving his wife and children out to dry on their medical bills. In fact, he claims he paid millions in alimony and child support:
And to be even fairer to him, he's no D-List celebrity. That is damning him with faint praise when he's got sick moves like this:
That's the most important part of this story. Beni-Hana has a gift. And the real sin would've not been sharing it with the world. When he noped out on his wife and kids, he was the age I am now. Do you think for one hot second if I could spin on my head that way, I'd be sitting here talking about him and his family just to pay my bills? Hell no. And my sons are out of college and starting their careers. This poor bastard had a family of six to support, including a 5-year-old. Do you have any idea what kind of a prison that is for a 60-year-old with his abilities? Maximum Security, that's what kind. And he managed to do more than break out of it. He breakdanced out of it. And the world was a better place for all of us once he did.
One small point though. Look, I'm no Jordan Peterson. I'm just someone who's been trying to pay attention during all my many trips around the sun. And it kind of seems to me like you can draw a through line between a grown man ditching his kindergarten-aged daughter so he can roll around on a dance floor to entertain Michael Strahan, and that same girl 20 years later being shocked by another grown man acting like a grown man. It's hard to expect any girl to understand what being a man is when the first role model she ever had of one is The World's Oldest Breakdancer [tm].
Traditional masculine roles probably seem incomprehensible when you've never seen them in action before. And when you sit in college classrooms listening to lecture after lecture about Toxic Masculinity in every class from Sociology to History, English Lit to STEM, men acting manly is going to sound like a horrible idea. And something to be avoided at all costs.
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That is, until you meet up with one. And experience first hand that masculinity isn't some fake construct that society foists upon boys out of wanton, sadistic cruelty. It's nature. And a desirable trait to have in a mate. Whether that masculinity means picking up the dinner check, keeping you safe, killing bugs, changing tires, climbing a ladder to clean the gutters or working hard to keep a roof over your head. And that especially goes for sticking around to raise your children instead of humiliating your family by rolling around the floor on morning TV like a raging Boomer asshole and getting laughed at by the world.
Here's wishing nothing but the best to Madi Hart. She's being a better sport about all this than Beni-Hana deserves.