Tom DeBlass Said 'Don't Be That Guy' About Messaging Women — His Actual Argument Was About Consistency, Not Silence

Tom DeBlass posted an Instagram Reel about messaging women after class, and it did what these videos always do: split the room. Half the BJJ community nodded along, half felt defensive, and almost everyone missed what he was actually arguing.

The premise was straightforward enough on the surface. DeBlass told men in BJJ academies to stop messaging women after class. "Don't be that guy," he said. Standard internet lecture format. But the framing immediately started to splinter the response. One side heard: "Stop harassing women, this is a real problem." The other heard: "My friendly congratulations to a training partner just got criminalized." Both camps had a point, or thought they did. Both camps were also missing the actual argument happening in the middle.

DeBlass wasn't making a blanket case against communication. He was making a consistency argument, and it was sharper — and more defensible — than either side gave him credit for.

He broke it down by asking: "If a new woman walks into your academy, there is absolutely no need to message her after class telling her what a 'great job' she did." Fair enough. But then he pushed it further: "Do you message every new white belt after class? Do you message every guy you roll with to tell him he did great?" That was the actual move. That was where the specificity lived.

Think about what happens in a typical gym. A 190-pound male white belt, three days into his membership, rolls with an instructor and gets gassed after round two. What does he get? Usually a nod at the door. Maybe a "good roll" if someone's being chatty. The social transaction is minimal and calibrated to match the relationship: barely acquainted, so the acknowledgment stays basic. Nobody's crafting a personalized DM to the new guy telling him how impressed they were with his technical defense or his willingness to tap early. That would read as weird precisely because of the mismatch between the relationship stage and the intensity of the contact.

Now run that same scenario with a new woman. Same white belt timeline. Same training quality. Suddenly the inbox looks different. "You did amazing tonight!" "Great energy in class!" "Loved rolling with you!" The selectivity was the tell. DeBlass identified the right variable. And he was right that if you wouldn't do it for the male equivalent, the question wasn't really about encouragement — it was about something else entirely.

The problem was, he didn't stop there, and that was where things got muddier.

He added: "she doesn't need your encouragement." In principle, this wanted to say something correct: women are capable, they don't need to be treated like fragile newbies requiring extra validation just because they're new and female. Stop patronizing them with a lower bar. In that reading, the message was about treating people consistently regardless of gender. That was defensible.

But that line could also be read a different way, and a lot of people read it that way: "any friendly message to a female training partner is inherently suspicious, and women need a warning system to protect them from this type of contact." The second reading carried an assumption that made the entire message more condescending than the first interpretation. It assumed women couldn't figure out on their own whether a message was genuinely friendly or whether it was a pretext for something else. It assumed they needed a rule to protect them from contact. It took what could have been a consistency argument — "don't single people out based on sex" — and turned it into something closer to a protection narrative. Women have been managing unwanted attention and decoding male social behavior their entire adult lives. They knew the difference between a genuine check-in and a prospecting attempt. They could decline.

Here was another thing that didn't make it into most of the pushback, but should have: harassment isn't a single message. It's not. One DM, sent once, then left alone — that's not harassment. That's a misread. One DM that got no response, which triggered two follow-up messages, which led to a specific question in person at the next class about why she didn't reply — that was where it became a pattern. That was where it crossed into actual problem territory. The distinction between "he sent me a message" and "he sent me a message and didn't take no for an answer" was the entire difference between awkward and harmful.

A rule that prohibited first contact didn't clarify where that line actually was. It just erased the line entirely and assumed all initial contact carried threat. Which misidentified the problem. The real distinction should be: "Would he have sent this message to anyone, or only to her?" Those were two completely different situations, and they warranted different evaluations.

Consider the guy who texted "solid round" to three training partners after class, and one of them happened to be a woman. That's not the problem DeBlass was trying to describe. The guy who specifically and only targeted women he found attractive with post-class encouragement, and who treated any response as an opening to escalate contact — that was what DeBlass was describing. Those were distinct behavioral categories. The first was just... normal gym interaction. The second was the thing that actually required correction.

But here was the trap: if you built a prohibition to catch the second situation, you were going to catch the first one too. The rule became overbroad. It flagged behavior that wasn't the problem alongside the behavior that was. The gym isn't a workplace with formal protocols. It isn't a bar with explicit social conventions designed to manage boundary issues. The gym is a weird social space where instructors spend years telling new students to trust the people on the mat, to invest in the community, to be open and vulnerable. Then simultaneously, we ask those same people to treat every off-mat social gesture as something requiring careful interpretation and self-censorship. That was a hard instruction to layer on top of everything else. A blanket rule didn't make the space clearer. It made it weirder.

The consistency test, by comparison, handled this more precisely. It caught the actual problem — men singling out women they were attracted to for special treatment — without flagging communication that wasn't the issue. What about the training partner you'd been drilling with for two years who happened to be a woman? What about a quick check-in after someone took a hard fall on their way out of class? A flat prohibition swept those up alongside the behavior it was trying to stop. The consistency test didn't, because it was asking the right question from the beginning: would you do this for any training partner, or only for women in a specific category?

To DeBlass's credit, he had remained consistent on this topic. He had addressed how men should approach rolling with women who may have trauma histories, how to position yourself on the mat to avoid creating discomfort, and now how to conduct yourself once class was over. He was right that BJJ gyms exist in the same world as everywhere else, and the asymmetries that exist elsewhere don't get erased at the door. He was right that the selectivity was the tell.

He just didn't need to overstate it or let the framing slide into paternalism. The test was actually simple: "Would I do this for any training partner, or only for women I'm interested in?" Two seconds to answer. If the answer was yes, you'd do it for anyone — send the message. Your intent was what you said it was. If the answer was no, if you specifically targeted certain women for this treatment — you already knew what that meant. Which was the whole point he was making in the first place. The consistency test caught the real behavior without requiring a blanket prohibition that turned the gym into a place where every social interaction needed to be run through a filter. That wasn't protection. That was just making the space smaller and stranger for everyone.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• Tom DeBlass Calls Out How Women Are Treated in Jiu-Jitsu Gyms: 'Don't Be That Guy'
• Tom DeBlass Criticizes Men For Their Behaviour: 'So Many Men Are Classless & Thirsty'