This is my "official" review of The Alphabet of Manliness, which debuted today at #4 on the NY Times Best Seller List. Congrats Maddox, you deserve it brother:
Like many people I first heard of Maddox in October of 2002, when his pieces about children's artwork hit the mainstream. Before I got around to checking his site, I probably received 60 emails referencing him in the course of a week. Like any repetitive forward, this immediately became annoying, and almost as an act of spite I refused to even look at the site or read why he thought he was better than my children.
It took me two weeks before I stopped angrily deleting forwards with subject lines like "Maddox iz hiLaRiouS, LOLZ!!", and another week before I actually looked at his site. As soon as I saw the children's rendering of a fuzzy looking fire truck with this caption attached, "Ding Ding! Here comes the shit-mobile. I've never seen a fire truck that needed to be shaved. I would rather be burned to death than be saved by this hairy piece of shit," I was irreversibly hooked. Since then I have read, and often re-read, virtually every piece on his site, and I unapologetically consider myself a Maddox fan.
Writing a review of "The Alphabet of Manliness," I have to first get the most important thing out of the way: Reassuring his fans. If you are a regular reader of the website, please do not expect that the book will be exactly like his site. Maddox is an artist and an innovator, and he continues in that spirit in this book. Do not worry though; whatever issues you may have with the departure from his standard format will evaporate when you read paragraphs like this one on the greatness of hot sauce:
"The baby seemed like he was loving [the hot sauce] at first, but suddenly he started crying, so I did what I always do when babies cry: I put him in the garbage can. His mom started yelling and screaming, then she tried to punch me, so I stepped to the side and she accidentally tripped and fell down four flights of stairs, and then she accidentally got peed on."
The entire book is like the above paragraph: hilariously blunt, geniously subtle, and at all times thoroughly Maddox. Even my 64-year-old father laughed out loud repeatedly when he was reading this book, and if he can recognize the genius in "The Alphabet of Manliness," then so can Maddox's hard core fans.
I didn't write this review to tell Maddox's fans that his book is going to be awesome. This is something they should already know. I didn't really even write this review to explain the book to a non-Maddox fan; you can go to The Best Page in The Universe and read some of his site, and get the gist of his writing there. I am writing this because I think "The Alphabet of Manliness" is not only a work of brilliance, but I believe that it represents the vanguard of a new social movement, and I want to make sure that at least one review recognizes and celebrates this.
Some people will call this book immature "male" humor. They will call it sexist. It will be referred to as racist, homophobic, misogynistic and every other evil "-ist" and "-ic" term that that PC police use to bombard everything that is truly funny. I am here to tell you that they will all be wrong.
To begin, though the book is written with a male audience in mind, asserting that this book is only for men is ridiculous. At least a third of Maddox's fans are women. That might not sound like a lot, until you realize that he gets almost 5 million visitors a month to his site. Maddox himself gives the best answer to this assertion, "I would say that [this book] is only for men the same way that lesbian porn sites in the internet are only for women."
But more importantly, to see this book in any sort of sexist or misogynistic or homophobic light is to miss the entire point of Maddox's humor. Maddox is just the pen name for a real person, George Ouzounian. George created the Maddox persona many years ago as a sort of alter ego for him to be all the things on the internet that he couldn't realistically be in his life, i.e., an ass-kicking pirate with tabasco sauce for blood who eats beef jerky for every meal. Though the rants on his website and book closely track his real life beliefs, they are not 100% aligned. Of course he doesn't think women should be randomly groped, nor does he believe that children should be beaten, and of course he doesn't think that pirates shit leprechauns.
Maddox is a caricature. The opinions he holds are purposefully exaggerated, in some cases to draw attention to their absurdity and derive humor from it, in other cases to mock the opposite position. Maddox is misogynist like Stephen Colbert is ultra conservative, or Sarah Silverman is anti-semitic. This is one of the classic faces of comedy: the comedian pretends to be the most exaggerated version of something, taking an idea to its logical extreme in order to show its absurdity and thus mock it completely. Carol O'Connor did the same thing brilliantly with his Archie Bunker character in All In The Family. With these types of comedians, you are never exactly sure where their opinions end and the opinions that they are mocking begin, and in toeing that line comes the real humor. Some things they say are so absurd that no one would agree with them, but you find yourself laughing more at the taboo.
Though he does make many absurd statements in his book, Maddox is not mocking masculinity. In fact, quite the opposite, he represents the vanguard of a larger social movement: making masculinity masculine again. Warren St. John called the writers leading this new movement "fratire." I hate that name, simply because not one of the writers he profiled in his article (Maddox, Robert Hamburger, Neil Strauss, Frank Rich and myself) was in a fraternity, and beyond that, it is much larger than just a literary movement. I prefer to call it The New Masculinity. Did you ever think you'd read a brief history of feminism written by Tucker Max? Well, you're about to:
To understand where current culture is, you need to understand how we got here. Feminism came in three "waves"; 1st Wave, which was suffrage (the right to vote), 2nd Wave, which was the 60's and 70's sexual and social revolution fought for inclusion, and 3rd Wave, which is what we have now. It emphasizes freedom of choice for women regardless of what decision they make. Thus it endorses everything from porn to girly culture (in addition to a bunch of post modern horseshit which is irrelevant to any intelligent discussion, much less this one).
Of course, First Wave feminism was a substantial human advancement. Aside from universal suffrage, only the rule of law and the scientific method have done more to advance the human condition. Second Wave feminism was also necessary at the time. It threw off the stifling societal bonds limiting women's ability to be who they wanted to be and advance in fields they choose. However, Second Wave feminism went too far in some ways.
While many women did want to take advantage of the new paths available to them and become scientists or CEO's, many did not, and they didn't enjoy feeling like failures simply because they chose to be stay-at-home moms or strippers or whatever. The same was true for their sexuality. Because the Second Wave feminists fought for sexual equality against a patriarchal system that objectified them, as a result they held women to a standard of acting in accord with the gains they had won. But the Third Wave feminists did not want another set of rules, they wanted personal freedom, and some of them preferred the option of alternate sexual mores like bi-sexuality and slutiness.
This is why Third Wave feminism arose; it was a reaction against the oppression of the Second Wave. Plainly put, the Second Wave feminists were Jane Pauley and Gloria Steinem, and the Third Wave feminists were Britney Spears, Suicide Girls and Margaret Cho.
Why does any of this matter? Because feminism did not evolve in a vacuum. It interacted with and affected masculinity. Entire books could be written about this, but in short, men--especially in the media--reacted to Second Wave feminism by emasculating themselves and adopting a PC attitude that apologizes for nothing more than men being men. This attitude peaked in the early 90's (around the same time that Third Wave feminism started). The idea that men had to pay not only for the sins of our fathers, but had to suffer for simply being a man became pervasive in mainstream media.
[I would go so far as to say that many feminists, especially Second Wave feminists, actually HATE women. Not the minority of women who agree with them, but the majority of actual women in the world, the ones who wax their legs and wear high heels, who distance themselves from radical feminism and actually like men. The hard-core Second Wave feminists think so little of women that they are compelled to control them, tell them what's acceptable to read or enjoy or think is funny and dictate whom it's permissable to be attracted to, i.e. to tell them that they are supposed to hate Maddox and I because we aren't pussy-whipped sychophants. Well fuck that. It is not an accident that at 30-40% of our fans are women. Ladies, unlike the feminist illuminati who disparage your personal choices when they don't fall into line with their radical views, I will not ignore and disregard your decisions. I am glad you are reading and I personally welcome you as fans.]
When any pendulum swings too far to one side, it eventually has to start coming back. The first major player to refuse to buckle to this trend was Howard Stern. The demand for such a voice was so strong that by simply refusing to kowtow to the PC police, he became the "King of All Media." This is where fratire comes in. While Maddox and I are not Howard Stern, we do represent some of the first internet players in this post-PC, and fratire as a genre represents the non-mainstream reaction to the feminization of masculinity.
Jimmy Iovine, founder of Interscope Records, when asked about his effect on the musical revolutions he helped create, said, "I'm as powerless to stop a revolution as I am to start one." The last thing I want to imply is that Maddox or I started this movement. We did not. We are another part of it, simply the right people in the right place at the right time. I am not the only person out there getting drunk and hooking up and unapologetically living my life the way I want to; I am just the first guy to write about it. Maddox is not the first pasty guy sitting in front of a computer in his mom's basement typing out angry rants against Orbitz and Cameron Diaz; he is just the best one doing it right now.
While masculinity is starting to slowly coming back into vogue, the fight is only beginning. The fact is, at this point in entertainment history, the 2nd Wave feminists are the gatekeepers of media. The women who grew up in the 60's are now in charge, and they quite literally run shit, and these 50-year-old women heading media companies have personal preferences that do not reflect many American attitudes. The fact is, people are hungry for someone to tell it like it actually is instead of how these people want it to be. They want men to act like men, but the old school doesn't get this yet. This is why people like Maddox and me had such a hard time getting published, and why we still have such a hard time getting mainstream media coverage, even though we have more monthly readers than almost any other entertainer in America, and more than most MAGAZINES. It's because we refused to bow before the PC gods and destroy our art to meet their ideological demands, we suffer.
Doors were shut in our faces, yet our books hit THEIR list, WITHOUT their help. They aren't in touch anymore, even forgetting the internet aspect of this discussion. Think about it: Could they pimp Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) or Jessica Cutler (Washintonienne) anymore than they do? But their books FACEPLANTED. No sales. My book--by itself--has outsold both Wonkette and Washingtonienne...COMBINED. By a factor of three. And Maddox will outsell all of us put together. America is ready, America wants men who have the balls to stand up and be men, America is sick of being mothered and held down, and they are going to get it regardless of where it comes from.
This is not to imply that men's interests run counter to women's, or even that masculinity and feminism are mutually exclusive. They are not. Nor am I implying that feminism is bad, or that men are "superior" to women in some unspecified way. I agree with the basic tenet of feminism--that women are legally and morally equal to men--and I personally like women who are smart and can think for themselves and are independent.
None of that contradicts true masculinity, because masculinity is not about opposing feminity. It is our yin to their yang. Real men do not hate women; in fact, we want women to figure prominently in out lives. All we want is to stop being told that it's not OK to be a man. Men want to be men, and "The Alphabet of Manliness" is just that: A hilarious book about being a man.
NOTE: A modified version of this piece appeared in the Huffington Post. Instead of a review of AoM, it was a more generalized defense of "fratire" as a whole. Read it here.
Posted by Tucker Max at 4:15 PM