This morning, Conor McGregor was trending on Google, Twitter and well, everywhere. Why? Because YouTuber and wannabe boxer Jake Paul challenged him to a boxing match in a video posted on social media. Attempting to bait him into the fight, Jake Paul chose to insult Conor McGregor’s fiancé Dee Devlin in an abhorrent sexist tirade.
‘Good morning Conor McGregor, I know you’re probably beating up old dudes in a bar right now or maybe you’re jacking off because you’re sick of f***ing your wife,’ Jake Paul said in the video. ‘I mean she’s a four Conor you could do a lot better.’
Going on to offer Conor $50million (£37.5milion) to take the boxing match, he had clearly decided that since he’s entirely unqualified to fight McGregor, he would attempt to rattle him by hurling abuse at the woman in his life.
Now, when you search Conor McGregor on Google Trends, ‘Conor McGregor fiancé,’ ‘Conor McGregor’s wife’ and ‘Dee Devlin’ are all breakout search terms as people rush to find images and stories of the couple. Presumably, to decide for themselves whether Dee Devlin is as Jake puts it, 'a four' out of ten. And it's unacceptable.
He’s done the same thing with another MMA fighter he’s currently baiting, Dillon Danis, publicly stating that he slept with his girlfriend, Savannah Montano and choosing to unfollow everyone on Instagram except Dee Devlin and Savannah Montano.
This is not to defend Conor McGregor – who himself has hurled vile sexist and racist abuse at former opponents in the past – but what’s absolutely intolerable is for any fighter to use sexist abuse against women to bait their opponent into a fight.
Watching the video, not only does it make your entire body cringe, it’s absolutely sickening to see another woman insulted in such a brazenly sexist way purely because of her association to such a well-known fighter. How many of these kind of insults have been hurled her way when people who have no business challenging McGregor want to bait him into a fight? Dee Devlin has been with McGregor for 12 years and has two children with him, surely she's been through this enough.
I say no business because if you’re not aware (and why would you be) Jake Paul has only fought two boxing matches his entire life and neither of them were against actual professional fighters. He won them both, but one was a fellow YouTuber, another a retired basketball player. ‘You’re 0-1 as a boxer, I’m 2-0’ he told McGregor, failing to mention that McGregor’s loss was to Floyd Mayweather.
This tactic, of hurling abuse at a proposed opponent holding absolutely nothing back, is one unproven fighters have used for decades to climb up the ranks quicker. They go after the biggest names, hoping they say something that makes them so furious they feel no choice but to take the fight and ultimately, even if the less experienced fighter loses, they win by virtue of having their name out there. They get more press, their agent can book them better opponents and ultimately, they end up with more money and fame as they begin to fight with the big names.
Jake Paul has been attempting to do this with Conor McGregor for some time now, with this attack on Dee Devlin just the latest in what’s likely to be a long list of attempts to get his attention – if Paul's history of fame-hungry, money-grabbing tactics to gain YouTube views is anything to go by.
But what he’s starting is a back and forth we’ve seen time and time again. Dillon Danis, for example, has now changed his Instagram picture to one of him and Jake Paul’s ex-girlfriend, Tana Mongeau.
Jake Paul is teaching his young audience women are nothing but tools to exploit for fame.
Ultimately, the more these men pull women into these fights, they prove that they only value them as tools to be picked up and discarded when needed, insulting them as they go and essentially treating them as objects, chew toys if you will, in their narcissistic agendas to make money and build their fame. And they teach their younger fans that this is perfectly fine behaviour. Jake Paul does at least, since his audience was built from his YouTube content, the majority are aged eight-18, and there’s millions of them.
He’s posting videos rating women on scales of 1-10, showing these children how exactly women can be used to tear another man down, as if a woman’s value rests on what men think of her, who she’s dating and whether they'll fight in her name. He’s calling McGregor an ‘Irish bitch’ and much worse, seemingly ignorant to the persecution Irish people have faced throughout history – spreading that to his young fans. Ultimately, he’s proving a disgrace to the sport he so desperately wants validation from, and to any men who find his actions acceptable because trolling your opponents is 'just boxing'.
It might've been once upon time, but it doesn't have to be now. And it certainly doesn't have to involve the women who have no involvement in it whatsoever.
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