Tucker Max, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun
Over here at where is your line?, we’re pretty tired of Tucker Max’s caricature of masculinity/male minstrel show. To “change the game” of sexual relations for the better, sometimes you have to state the obvious — in this case, Girls Enjoy Sex. Here’s a 30 second antidote to the ills of male chauvinism/ignorance.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was whipped up (by fabulous Isaac with a few tweaks from me) in the week between our first international premiere, and hopping Amtrak to a screening at American University. Tucker Max and his book were on the periphery of my radar, but he seemed like this year’s Joe Francis, a privileged white guy capitalizing on people’s desire to be famous, and making a lot of money from it. When I saw the marketing campaign advertising his movie, we knew we wanted to respond. The grossest thing about his message is the notion that you need to sneak up, trick or coerce girls into sex. We have so much evidence to prove the contrary, we decided to show you.
Two years ago I went to Daytona, Florida to capture the Spring Break experience and use it in THE LINE. Girls Gone Wild was receiving something of a backlash, so people were wary of Yankees with cameras, especially business owners. I wanted to talk to the girls flashing their tits and dancing about sex: what they wanted, their own satisfaction, pleasure and behavior… and the guys, I wanted them to spill their secrets.
I bombed. Daytona was not the destination, the hotels, pools, bars and clubs wouldn’t let us film, and the beach was overrun with monster trucks. My plan to blend in and be a fly on the wall was a bust.
Incidentally, my friend Roy, a NY-based sound engineer and shooter went to Panama City, Florida to party for Spring Break. Roy travels the world hitting up party destinations between gigs. He has a knack for being a “dude” but also being an observer of the human condition. Donning a foam Trojan hat, shades and a video camera, within minutes of arriving to the beach, he was at the center of the action. Girls took him in like a sorority sister and frat boys treated him like a brother.
The result: a great week of partying for Roy, and two hours of footage for me. My favorite gem in this footage is an exchange between Roy and two guys sipping beers on the beach.
Roy: “So, how is it that you get a girl to flash you her tits?”
Dude A: “Flash ‘em some beads man, 10 cent beads.”
Dude B: “75% of the bitches out here are using alcohol as an excuse to fuck, 25% are just whores.”
Somehow, I think these guys are Tucker Max fans, don’t you?
The bottom line is girls don’t need an excuse to fuck. Most of us actually like to do it, so if we’re not doing it with you, it’s because we don’t want to. You don’t need to trick us. It’s that simple.
Tags: activism, celebrity, college, hookups, masculinity, men, pleasure, respect, sex, women
First, I’m glad you made this post and video.
Second, look at the source: 18-22 y/o males. Holy Shit! If anyone wants a cross-section of the least informed and simultaneously most opinionated sector of society – look no further. I was one once, and let me assure you – they are complete morons. Not partial – complete. Add alcohol and recent separation from parental supervision – and it’s “fuck-up City.”
Third, the reason this demographic is so challenged in the first place is that for the most part, society views women as sperm-buckets, housemaids and unpaid farm hands.
Add that up, and Voila! we have ignorant, uninformed, sexist, manipulative strategies for ‘stealing pussy’.
Which is why my daughter is in Tae Kwon Do this afternoon.
[...] is your line? By Jess The bottom line is girls don’t need an excuse to fuck. Most of us actually like to do it, so if we’re not doing it with you, it’s because we don’t [...]
I’m not sure I can handle the idea that women in this country are treated like it’s the Congo. At least not at like as there are actually places like the Congo.
Hey Marshall,
I’d like to know a bit more about what you mean.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that while women are living in a hell-on-earth and being raped repeatedly in the Congo, we can’t compare our situation to what they are living through?
Over here, we’re not trying to make a comparison with the conditions and the safety of women and children the Congo, whose lives are at risk on a daily basis and swept into a civil war, to how women are living in America. That isn’t accurate or remotely useful.
What we’re doing is pointing out to Tucker Max and his fans that we women actually like sex, so you don’t need to trick, coerce or force us into it. Try talking or flirting or coming from a place of respect, that might work better!
Apologies in advance for the wordiness.
Rape is a terrible thing.
So terrible a thing as to never be a source for humor, you might argue. And if that’s your only argument, then the whole thing is little more than a disagreement over the level of transgressiveness you’re willing to tolerate in humor (and I DO believe there’s always a level of transgressiveness, even in something as unobjectionable as a lolcat). Such discussions are unlikely to be very fruitful, to be honest, and I think both sides of this argument are stuck yowling into echo chambers, but that’s not really my concern. Whatever makes you happy.
What I do have a problem with, as somebody who read the book (didn’t really like it that much, he and I have different senses of humor), saw the movie (deeply flawed, but with good to very good lead acting and a script rife with genuinely clever one-liners), and has done some research into Tucker himself (narcissistic, sometimes childish, but undeniably incredibly smart and motivated), is misleading and logically problematic arguments that seek to impugn huge categories of people you’ve never met.
Simply put, arguing that Tucker Max at all coerces women into sex, especially now, is just entirely wrong. If anything, women attempt to coerce him into sex; the idea that he’d have to get a girl drunk at this point is just silly. Furthermore, re: his fan base, you’re stretching logic to imply causation when there probably isn’t even correlation.
A lot of his fans are douchebags, and some of them might be misogynist. But to imply that simply because somebody is a fan of Tucker means that they’re a douchebag is simply wrong. Similarly, assuming that because seems to hold women in low regard that they’re a fan of him is also wrong. I don’t think we need a confusing, probably misleading explanation of Bayes’ theorem to agree on that.
Finally, I want to address this, because I feel like there’s a very easy middle ground, and both sides almost certainly agree on this point:
“The bottom line is girls don’t need an excuse to fuck. Most of us actually like to do it, so if we’re not doing it with you, it’s because we don’t want to. You don’t need to trick us. It’s that simple.”
This, if you didn’t know, is shockingly similar to what Tucker espouses. When he speaks about “game” ( a term I actually don’t like much), really all he means is “conduct without which the desired ends wouldn’t happen.” Most of the focus of his advice is internal — being more confident, better read, in better shape — it’s not about trickery or coercion. I implore you to read what he has to say about the subject, because it’s essentially the same as what you have to say, only from the perspective of a boorishly hyperliterate internet celebrity.
Thanks for reading this far.
Thanks for showing up and sharing your thoughts with us. We’re wondering, though, since when is mocking other people a display of confidence?
Mocking people isn’t a display of confidence. Tucker mocks people not because he’s confident but because he’s kind of a dick. The fact that he’s confident isn’t correlated.
I think it takes a lot of confidence to turn down millions of dollars because you think you can do something better than anybody has ever done it before. Whether or not he’s right is a subject of some debate, but his almost cartoonishly inflated confidence, is, I think, not.
She was referring to you mocking her, Nom.
You might have noticed, had you not been inflating your ego like a steroid-junkie with a penis pump.
Zero –
1.) I never claimed to be confident.
2.) I never mocked anyone.
3.) I’m pretty sure you’re wrong, and have added very little to the discussion. I implore you to find something in what I’ve written that’s mocking.
4.) Your metaphor didn’t do very much for me. It felt forced.
Nom, you’re not quite adding anything to the discussion either, with these last comments. Consider this a warning from your mostly friendly neighborhood blog community manager.
Tucker Max does not need “Game”, at least as it is currently understood, rather, the power of his minor celebrity draws women. However, to judge by one of his latest blog posts and attendant minor scandal, he is the target of at least some female status-chasing douchebaggery of the kind he markets to men. The apparent lack of mutual pleasure involved in the Courtney A/Tucker Max blog exchange is mystifying to me, but the Pandagon blog post “Tucker Max Hates Fun” discusses the ideological origins of the behavior of a man who’d rather be insulting than seductive, at times.
One of the more interesting aspects of the Red Band trailer of IHTSBIH is how Tucker Max uses banter to irritate and humiliate in a situation where women initially engage him in either a seductive or challenging way, preferring the hot woman who plays hard to get. So he’s all about a certain type of performative masculinity and male-initiated seduction process rather than sex per se.
[...] sticking to our message that good sex is consensual sex, and reminding frat boys everywhere that Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. We posted the video on our site and throughout our networks, and it got picked up on [...]
[...] sticking to our message that good sex is consensual sex, and reminding frat boys everywhere that Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. We posted the video on our site and throughout our networks, and it got picked up on [...]