Tom DeBlass Tells Men To Stop Sliding Into Women's DMs After BJJ Class — 'You Don't Do This For The New White Belt Guy'

Tom DeBlass just made every BJJ guy with that DM in his sent folder very nervous.

The Ocean County BJJ owner and 1.4-million-follower black belt posted a Saturday message that boils down to one question every man on the mats already knows the answer to: do you do this for the new white belt guy?

The "this," in DeBlass's words: "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." And: "If you rolled live with her, there is definitely no need to slide into her DMs afterward with, 'You did amazing tonight.'" Then he asks the only question that matters. "Do you message every new white belt after class? Do you message every guy you roll with to tell him he did great? If the answer is no, then why do you suddenly feel the need to message the women?" "Don't be that guy."

This is not a hard message. It's a Saturday post from a guy who has been doing jiu-jitsu professionally for over a decade telling other men to behave like adults at their hobby. The reason it's news is that every woman in your gym already knows exactly which three guys in the class needed to read it, and at least one of those guys is reading it right now thinking she did seem to really enjoy that compliment.

The Double Standard Does The Work

What makes DeBlass's framing land is that it doesn't moralize. It just performs a substitution.

You roll with the new guy who joined two weeks ago. You shake his hand at the door. You go home. You do not, that night, find his Instagram, send him a follow request, wait for him to follow back, and DM him "you did amazing tonight, keep showing up." If you did, he would block you, his coach would mention it the next day, and you would be, deservedly, the gym's main character for a week.

You roll with the new woman who joined two weeks ago. The math suddenly changes.

DeBlass's point isn't about politeness. It's about the gap between those two sentences. The behavior is identical. The interpretation by the only person who matters, the recipient, is not. You either acknowledge that gap exists, or you keep pretending the DM is just a friendly compliment, in which case your unwillingness to send the same friendly compliment to Steve from Tuesday class is doing all the work.

This particular dynamic has been present in martial arts gyms for decades, predating social media itself. Before Instagram DMs, it was phone numbers. Before phone numbers, it was handwritten notes slipped into gym bags or awkward conversations by the water fountain. The tool changes. The behavior pattern remains constant. What DeBlass is pointing out is that the medium doesn't matter—what matters is the asymmetry. The fact that you would never do it to a man makes the action, not the intent, the problem.

It's also a behavior pattern, not a one-off. Men who do this don't do it once. They do it to one new woman, and then to the next new woman three months later, and then to the one after that. A coach who's been at the door of his own gym for fifteen years can name them. A woman who's trained for two years can name them faster. They're not mysterious. They're not subtle. They're predictable enough that gyms develop informal mechanisms for warning new female students. Some women get whispered warnings in their first week. Others have to experience the pattern to understand it.

The repetition is actually the key to understanding why this matters. A single creepy message could theoretically be an accident, an unfortunate misjudgment of tone. But the pattern—the rotation through new women, the consistent choice not to engage men the same way—reveals intent. It reveals that the man making the DMs is aware, on some level, that he's doing something he shouldn't do, because he wouldn't do it to men. He's performing a calculation. And that calculation is what DeBlass is asking men to acknowledge.

Timing Isn't A Coincidence

DeBlass posted this on the same weekend that the IBJJF issued Melqui Galvão a permanent ban following his arrest in Brazil on charges involving minors, and a day after San Diego authorities closed the criminal case against Andre Galvão for insufficient evidence. Two Galvãos. Two countries. Two opposite outcomes in the same news cycle. DeBlass mentioned none of it.

He didn't have to. The Galvão coverage has been about who gets removed: one named coach, one specific charge, one outcome at a time. DeBlass's post is the wide shot. The cultural soil. The everyday creep behavior that doesn't get a court case, but gets every woman in the gym texting her one female training partner like "is this normal? am I being weird?" The Galvão prosecutions are about how the worst guys exit the sport. DeBlass is about how the worst guys ever got comfortable enough to do what they did inside the sport in the first place.

Both stories are running this week. Both stories are the same story, just operating at different scales.

The connection isn't forced. It's structural. High-profile cases of serious misconduct don't emerge from vacuum. They emerge from environments where smaller boundary violations go unchecked, where women are made to feel like they're being oversensitive for objecting, where the social cost of calling something out is higher than the social cost of tolerating it. The DM culture that DeBlass is addressing is part of the infrastructure that allows worse behavior to persist. It normalizes treating women differently. It establishes the pattern that what would be unacceptable for a man is acceptable for a woman. Once that framework is in place, it's easier to justify larger boundary violations.

The Galvão cases are what happens when nobody stops at the DMs. They're what happens when a coach figures out that his gym's culture won't hold him accountable for treating female students differently than male students. They're what happens when that realization has time to calcify into behavior.

So DeBlass didn't mention the Galvãos. He didn't have to. Everyone reading his post knows what's in the news. What he's actually doing is describing the petri dish those cases grew in.

Why Him, Why Now

Plenty of black belts have made versions of this post over the years. A lot of them have 8,000 followers and a podcast their family listens to. DeBlass has 1.4 million followers, a gym in New Jersey that has produced multiple high-level competitors, a long career as a working coach, and twelve-plus years of being publicly on the record about gym culture, gossip, and which students academies should and shouldn't be retaining.

He is, basically, someone whose post about this gets seen by the exact guys who would scroll past the same post from a women's BJJ Instagram account.

That's why the post matters. The reason it works is the second-person construction. He's not saying "men should not." He's saying "do you." If your answer is "no, I would never message a guy that way," you have, in about three seconds, walked yourself through DeBlass's argument and arrived at his conclusion without him having to deliver it. The post does the math for you and then politely waits while you finish doing it.

If your answer is "yeah, I message everyone after class, I'm just a really friendly person," your gym's group chat is going to figure that out. Because other people have also done this calculation. And they're going to compare the list of men you message after rolling with the list of women you message after rolling. They're going to notice the gap. And they're going to understand what the gap means.

The audience matters, too. DeBlass built his platform partly on willingness to discuss uncomfortable aspects of gym culture without pretending they don't exist. He has credibility with people who dismiss "don't harass women" messaging from other sources. He's not some progressive voice scolding from outside the sport. He's a working coach talking to other working coaches. That distinction is significant. A message about gym behavior coming from inside the BJJ world, from someone with actual stakes in how the sport develops, lands differently than the same message coming from outside.

There's also something to the fact that DeBlass is male and using that position to speak to other men. Not to explain to women why they should accept better treatment (they already know they should), but to address men directly about their own behavior. That's a different rhetorical move. It removes the possibility of men dismissing this as a women's-issue post. It makes it a men-talking-to-men conversation about men's behavior. That's harder to ignore.

What This Isn't

This isn't a call to stop being friendly. It isn't a demand that men ignore women in the gym. The post is more boring and more useful than that.

It's a request to apply the symmetry test before you hit send. If the message you're about to send to a woman in your gym is one you would not, under any circumstances, send to a man in your gym, don't send it. There. That's the whole post. That's the whole conversation.

The symmetry test is also easy to apply to other behaviors. Do you correct this woman's technique more often than you correct men's technique? Symmetry test. Do you touch this woman to adjust her position in ways you don't touch men? Symmetry test. Do you ask this woman personal questions you don't ask men? Symmetry test. Do you make jokes around this woman that you wouldn't make around men? Symmetry test.

The beautiful thing about the symmetry test is that it doesn't require anyone to decide whether behavior is "actually" creepy or just well-intentioned awkwardness. It removes the question of intent entirely. It only asks: would you do this to a man? If the answer is no, don't do it to a woman. The reason doesn't matter. Your explanation doesn't matter. The impact on the woman receiving the behavior matters.

This framework also has the advantage of being scalable. You can apply it at any level. Gym owners can apply it to hiring, to who they give coaching opportunities to, to who gets the benefits-of-the-doubt in conflict situations. Instructors can apply it to feedback and attention distribution. Students can apply it to how they interact with peers. The principle stays the same. Symmetry. Would I do this to a man? If not, why am I doing it to a woman?

That this has to be said by a 1.4-million-follower black belt in 2026, the same week his sport is reckoning with two of its most famous Brazilian coaches, is the kicker. DeBlass didn't write that part. The week did. But the fact that he was willing to use his platform, at that specific moment, to address not the headline-grabbing cases but the everyday behavior that creates the conditions for those cases to be possible—that's the part that actually matters. That's the part that might prevent the next Galvão situation from taking root. Not because one post changes individual behavior instantly, but because it changes what the gym collectively acknowledges as normal. And once you can't pretend something is normal, it becomes harder to do.

The symmetry test is simple. The implications are not.

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'
• IBJJF Issues Melqui Galvao With Permanent Ban Amid Recent Allegations
• Breaking: San Diego Authorities Shut Down Case Against Andre Galvão