On the occasion of the Canadian release of his film, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I don’t need to attack Tucker Max. Ever since he entered the public consciousness, when he started publishing his blog in 2003, he’s employed the great battle rapper’s tactic of getting out in front of insults by attacking himself first. Just read his own words: “My name is Tucker Max, and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.” Yup, that about sums it up. He’s a charismatic, quick-witted dude who revels in his single-minded dedication to booze and broads — Ferris Bueller meets Animal House. Why waste time heaping scorn on a guy who will just interpret your indignation as a compliment?

Besides, as the New York Times pointed out when his book was released in 2006, his writing is “highly entertaining and thoroughly reprehensible.” Though his film, which centres around Max’s quest to add various disabled — deaf, blind, “midget” — women to his list of sexual conquests even if it ruins his buddy’s wedding plans (see sidebar, this page), is less entertaining than his writing and is somewhat amateurishly produced, I’d say that’s all most of us would need to know about Tucker Max.

Or it would be, except that he is a New York Times bestselling author who has attracted a legion of young male followers who look up to him. In discussing this story, one of my EYE WEEKLY colleagues mentioned that her little brother recently admitted Tucker Max is his hero. And that concerns me. It’s not what Tucker Max is (an infantile joker) that bugs me. It’s what he and his popularity as a role model is a symptom of. And what he’s a symptom of is the slow, steady disappearance of manliness — and with it a popularly accepted, socially worthwhile role for men — in North American culture.




Manliness gets a bad  rap from almost all corners, and in many ways rightfully so. The bad old days of the patriarchy represented a monumental crime against women, and fit most men into a socially constructed straitjacket that kind of sucked too. The great gift of feminism (and of all the other isms that came with it) is the recognition that people should have choices about their lives, about what they want to be and do, and that those choices should not be limited by things like what sex you are or what the sex of people you like to sleep with is or what type of clothes you like to wear (or don’t like to wear).

And, in recognizing this, we managed to look closely at a lot of old tendencies — towards physical violence, sexual domination, codes of stiff-upper-lip behaviour, aversion to open emotion —  and call bullshit on them.

So enter, for women and men alike, the culture of self-affirmation. Rather than doing what society says people like us should do — the restrictive old patriarchal model — we’re now all encouraged to chase our bliss. To be all that we can be. We can have it all. The old commercial that summed up the feminism-fuelled attitude of the 1970s for journalist Tom Wolfe started with the line, “if I only have one life to live, let me live it as a….” (The commercial said “blond,” but in Wolfe’s reckoning it could be “let me live it as a doctor,” or “let me live it as a sexual revolutionary,” or anything. And everything.) And what did Tucker Max tell a crowd of university students earlier this year? “I can be the man I want to be, I can do the things I want to do and I can live the life I want to live.... I just have to stop believing the lies I have been sold, and stop caring what all those people think who don’t matter, and find the courage to go out and do it.”



So right: you can have it all! Do what you want to do! Don’t bow down to The Man! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, as  it  turns  out, some things have gone wrong. First, as has been widely discussed, women found that being allowed to pursue the things they wanted to do didn’t mean that anyone else would step right in to eagerly do the things they used to be responsible for — which leads us to the Mommy Wars, and the worrying imbalance in household duties, and the entire self-help industry devoted to teaching women how to juggle all the roles involved in an unrealistic quest to be a do-it-all superwoman. But that’s a whole other subject.

Second — and a key contributor to the first problem — men in increasing numbers have just decided to kind of drop out of the whole battle of the sexes thing and play videogames (or beer pong, or fantasy football, or Dungeons and Dragons, or just their iPods) instead. When women decided to stop taking orders from The Man, men decided to stop being The Man and focus on being The Dude. As women have realized that with great freedom comes even greater and more frustrating responsibility, men have increasingly realized that they can chase their bliss and reach self-actualization without owning up to any responsibilities at all. This phenomenon is not widely discussed outside of Judd Apatow movies and Nick Hornby novels.

It’s not as if men have dropped many of the old annoying characteristics of manhood. They are as competitive as ever, they are as lustful as ever, they still shun emotionalism and embrace codes and statistics and structures. It’s just that all the socially redeeming things that used to accompany those easy-to-spot external characteristics — things like a sense of honour and a feeling of responsibility to something greater than oneself, be it family or society at large — have been shrugged off like so much paternalistic baggage. To some large degree, Dude Culture has embraced all the entertainingly offensive trappings of the old idea of manliness (some of these increasingly appear to be inherent rather than socially constructed, which might explain their persistence) but has thrown out the few good qualities that came with it — the social imperatives to contribute.

I can hear your complaints about these generalizations. Of course — of course — when I say “men are like this, women are like that,” I do not mean every man and every woman. There are many, many exceptions on both sides of the gender divide (and in the middle of it), and no single “normal” person really exists. But there are differences in the average — men are taller, on average, than women, for example — and those differences are no less real for being generalizations. (For an excellent discussion of some of the differences between men and women and the ways in which many of those differences appear to be biological rather than sociological, see Canadian developmental psychologist Susan Pinker’s book The Sexual Paradox.)




It's easy to focus on caricatures such as Tucker Max or Adam Sandler here, which might lead us to believe that The Dude does not exist in real life and that I’m swatting at a straw man. But everywhere I look in my social circle — with a few noteworthy exceptions — I see my guy friends struggling with the very idea of accepting responsibility and my female friends striving diligently to build careers and/or families and to achieve much of the whole project of adulthood. Not that all the guys are boastful frat boys — some of them are hyper-self-conscious indie-rockers and some of them are socially oblivious computer nerds; they come in all shapes and sizes. But they share, to greater and (sometimes much) lesser degrees, a reluctance to “settle down.” This is true in my experience regardless of sexual orientation.

Everywhere one looks in society, we see similar evidence. Almost 60 per cent of university students are female — and this is truer in what we’d consider responsible professional programs. As Ken Coates and Clive Keen wrote in The Walrus in 2007, “By 2003, nearly 50 per cent more females than males graduated from Canadian law schools…. In each year since 2001 more females than males have graduated from Canadian medical schools. This year, 57 per cent of first-year students at the University of British Columbia medical school are female, as are 60 per cent at the University of Toronto, and over 75 per cent at the University of Montreal.”

Meanwhile, Canadian single women are twice as likely to buy a home as single men. Roughly 10 per cent of children in Canada have no contact with their fathers at all (and when it comes to single-parent households, kids are four times more likely to live with mom). Men are more likely to live with their parents longer. They marry later and have children later. They are more likely to drop out of school. Pick an indicator of maturity and men are achieving it more poorly than women and, perhaps more tellingly, more poorly than their own fathers and grandfathers did.

The male refusal to grow up is an accepted enough fact that it’s the basis for almost all our romantic comedies and television sitcoms and both chick-lit and the emerging field of dick-lit. And I’d suggest this is a crisis of a kind. A crisis of manliness.




We don't tend to talk about this in terms of manliness or masculinity. If we talk about it seriously at all, we talk about it in terms of feminism. And I think the reason we don’t talk about it is that when we think of manliness, we think of empty signifiers — of shallow displays of toughness and vulgarity, of an obsession with balls (of various kinds) and breasts and booze and brawn. In short, we’ve allowed Dudeliness to become our idea of manliness. We’ve got the definitions wrong.

But if you’d asked either of my grandfathers what it meant to be a man, they’d have pointed first, foremost and most importantly to responsibility — in their cases, to provide for their families, to contribute to their church communities, to be informed and active members of the body politic, to defend to the death, if necessary, their family and country. They would have said that the other things we’d associate with it — toughness, intelligence, courage, honour — would simply be necessary qualities that allowed a man to live up to his obligations.

See, it’s silly to contrast manliness with womanliness (or femininity). Men haven’t avoided manliness to become more like women — if they had, we’d have no problem, really. They’ve avoided it to become more like children. And that is a problem, I think. And Tucker Max is just Exhibit A.

So how do we get men to grow up? I don’t know. After spending my twenties and early thirties revelling — to some degree like Tucker Max — in a boozy monument to my own extended adolescence, I am trying in my own life, now that I have a couple of kids and everything, to figure it out for myself. But I think we collectively need to figure this out too, because having half the population become insolent non-contributors is clearly not going to help us all in the long run. I’m not inclined to believe a return to restrictive social norms is the answer — we couldn’t put that genie back in the bottle even if we wanted to, and I for one wouldn’t want to.

Whatever the answer, maybe it starts with recognizing people like Tucker Max for what they are and, rather than insisting to their great pride that they are examples of how objectionable manliness often is, we should call them out for their childishness. For their refusal to embrace adulthood and the responsibilities that should come with it. That is, for their refusal to become men.

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An open letter to Tucker Max on the occasion of reviewing his film

Dear Tucker Max,

Yo brah, first off I gotta say how awesome it was to see all the crazy shit you write about actually come alive up on a movie screen. I mean, I try to imagine it for myself when I’m reading your book and your blog, but I always get distracted in fits of laughter when you fill the stories with wicked asides like “I am slamming down straight vodka as fast as the low-rent wanna-be Ethan Hawke waiter can bring it” and “What the fuck is this; Gay Hockey Night?”

Also, whenever I try to “live the life I want to live” like you always advise, and get wasted and start acting like a dick, it’s just never quite the same. Like, before the I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell screening, I shotgunned a couple beers and was feeling pretty awesome, and then that little punk taking tickets started giving me shit about bringing Skittles into the theatre, but I straight up lied and told him I bought them at the concession stand. I know, don’t take shit from anybody, right? I can’t remember exactly what I said to him, but my bro tells me it was hilarious.

But fuck brah, that reminds me: how do you even remember what happened and manage to write it all down, not to mention turn it into a such a surefire cinematic blockbuster? Aside from being the film equivalent of inventing your own literary genre (fratire — er, sorry, dick-lit), IHTSBIH is such a wicked treatise on masculinism it should be required viewing for every young dude hitting puberty. How else are we going to defend ourselves against “whore logic,” right?

Now, I don’t want to get all harsh and come down on your film or anything, but I gotta ask: what’s up with the happy endings? I mean Drew can’t really fall for a stripper, can he? And it almost sounded like you found some moral high ground there at the end. I guess Hollywood isn’t quite ready for the real, no-holds-blogged Tucker Max, are they brah? Can’t wait for IHTSBIH 2.

Hang loose,
Chris Bilton

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