Does Tucker Max promote a "culture of rape"?

[LoZoccolo]

I was reading an article today that had this in it:

Other criticisms are harder to laugh off. In May a speaking engagement by Mr. Max at Ohio State University was picketed by a feminist campus group, Women and Allies Rising in Resistance, which said that his writing promoted a culture of rape. The Women’s Center of North Carolina State University staged a similar demonstration when Mr. Max screened his film there in August.

Mr. Max said he found these protests “weird.”

“It’s like they’re accusing me of a crime, but not really,” he said. He added that if anyone was guilty of sexist behavior, it was his opponents.

“The implication is that women can’t think for themselves,” he said. “ ‘Women shouldn’t be allowed to read my stuff or see my movies.’ I thought women can decide for themselves what they want to do or read or whatever.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/movies/05tucker.html?_r=1

As you can see, the article doesn't really go into detail about the feminists' arguments, and I really don't know much about Tucker Max. I think I read about three of his essays total ever. I know he's got a movie coming out too based on one of his books. Does anybody know what in particular they might be referring to?

[provis99]

1. He seems like a revolting pig

But that's not much different than most rock stars are. I don't see where he's promoting rape; he just hates women.

[Captain Hilts]

2. The Washington Post had an article about him today. Most disturbing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091801147.html

[Odin2005]

13. That definitely proves the point I made about in the other thread about misogynistic memes

:puke:

[seabeyond]

14. totally

night dude.

[Odin2005]

16. Good night!

[Captain Hilts]

62. And women's complicity in advancing them. nt

[Liquorice]

27. He's nothing more than a drunken idiot. It's sad that anyone follows him. nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

32. Things like this make me glad I don't have kids

:puke:

But it also reminds me of.... ROME...

and the fall of an empire.

[Bombtrack]

3. It seems like every person named Tucker is an asshole

Even one of the GOP's 2008 Campaign spokesmen was a young dumb republican named Tucker something.

[Warren DeMontague]

25. Hey!

What about "The Man and his Dream"?

[Malikshah]

4. Not sure about a culture of rape, but rather a culture of destruction.

Lionizing halfwit troglodytes like this has been the bread and butter of reality shows for the last decade or so. The list of vile individuals not fit for society who "win big" by being the rudest, most offensive, aggressive creatures is too long to mention. A few current examples: The Real Housewives cottage industry; are any of these individuals people you would want to talk to? Do they have anything of value to offer society other than a an example of how not to live one's life? The media is now gaga over the "most evil" member of Survivor ever. It is the Jerry Springer-ing of society and the extras from Idiocracy (i.e, much of the American public) are eating it up. People admire Simon Callow for being just that--callow. They eagerly anticipate Gordon Ramsay and his vocabularily-challenged diatribes against an even more egregious groups of archetypes (misogynists, rednecks, feminazis, etc.)

This is what passes for entertainment these days. Record ratings for shows which are a few short steps away from the movie version of Stephen King's "The Running Man"

From movies-- Take the Sascha Baron Cohen movies Borat and Bruno. One was a hit; the other not. The fact that both were made and defended says a lot about the state of humor and/or satire. I ask anyone who saw either and thought that either was anything but offensive and lacking in humor--ask yourselves-- what was funny? Why was it funny? Is creating absurd situations to humiliate people about serious issues funny? What is the psychology behind that?

Now, of course, this has passed into the MSM and political "discourse" (must use quotes for what we've witnessed over the last decade is anything but). Outright lies, half-truths, and sickening leaps of logic pass as "getting both sides" (i.e, false equivalency which passes for journalistic integrity).

I forget who mentioned it-maybe Bill Moyers--who, when speaking of the likes of Tom Delay and Karl Rove said that they should not be accepted into polite society. They should be effectively shunned.

They, alas, are not. They've been replaced in large part by the likes of Glenn Beck (Time cover photo says it all in terms of the depth to which the MSM has fallen) who makes Bill O'Reilly look sane and has become the spokesperson for millions.

Frank Miller's V for Vendetta was not far off. Nor was Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd".

The fact that folks are debating the propriety of young men and women, just in college, taking part in a gang bang (consensual) says something about society.

For those who think I'm Ms. Prissy ("ole squarebritches" from Foghorn Leghorn days) back off.

Still waters run deep and I've seen and done more things in private than Tia Tequila and this Tucker Max would care to do. The thing is, I live me life in private. Most polite people do not have the low self esteem issues that have them feel the need to be douchebags and seeyounexttuesdays in public.

Where to stop the cycle? We need another Joseph Welch moment-- something live. Not a commentary by Keith or Rachel. Not something coming from the President. We need folks to wake up.

OK. Got it out of my system. end my paltry little rant...

:)

[Hippo_Tron]

5. Tucker Max causes rape like Marilyn Manson causes school shootings

Rapists are mentally unbalanced. They didn't acquire that from Tucker Max. Now I might buy the argument that Tucker Max has some influence over how society handles rape.

[Odin2005]

15. Most rapists are NOT mentally unbalanced.

Most rapists are "Average Joes" that feel entitled by misogynistic memes to coerce a woman they are hanging out with to have sex. People obsess over the less common "random guy jumps on and rapes girl on the street" incidents because people don't want to see the misogyny that is closer to home.

[WildEyedLiberal]

21. +1 - less than 10% of rapes are "stranger rape"

The vast, vast majority of women are at least casually acquainted with their assailant.

[alittlelark]

26. +2 Stranger rapes are less that 10%.

[Hippo_Tron]

23. No, rapists are mentally unbalanced

And I'm not talking about the random guy who rapes a girl in the street. I'm talking about date rapists, acquaintance rapists, etc. Having known one quite well (he was my friend until he raped another friend of ours) I know that what he did didn't have anything to do with misogyny. It was about his issues (lack of self control among them) that we tried to get him to see a therapist for and he refused to.

Again, I have no doubt that Tucker Max creates a culture of misogyny and a culture of misogyny does create attitudes like "she was asking for it" and such attitudes make life even more difficult for rape victims. But to say it actually causes rape is really a stretch. Rapists are mentally unbalanced whether they realize it or not.

[WildEyedLiberal]

29. It's disingenuous for you to make a sweeping conclusion based on one personal anecdote

I have a friend who was raped at a college party by a guy she kinda/sorta knew - she'd met him before, and at the party, he slipped something in her drink and raped her in his room. (The party was at his frat house.) He wasn't "insane" or mentally unstable or sick. He raped her because he could get away with it. And he did. Most rapists do, because precious few people take the word of some girl who was drunk at a party, as if drinking at a party automatically makes your word suspect.

So, there's my personal anecdote, which cancels out your personal anecdote.

[Hippo_Tron]

33. Again, I think your frat guy had some issues beyond reading Tucker Max

I'm not saying he is "insane" I'm saying he has mental issues. I will agree with you that part of the problem is that Tucker Max does contribute to a culture where being drunk automatically makes the woman's word suspect. And maybe your frat guy would have been sufficiently deterred if it were much harder to get away with rape.

But again, rape is not normal behavior among men and yes not even among frat guys. Those who do commit rape are not well.

[WildEyedLiberal]

41. I know it's not "normal" behavior, but that doesn't de facto make it the result of mental illness

There is a strong tendency among people to correlate criminal behavior with mental illness, and that is what I fundamentally disagree with. Yes, it'd be foolish to deny that there's a big overlap if you drew a Venn diagram of "criminals" and "mentally ill people", but it's not absolute. I just think it's a cop-out for the criminals to claim that they ultimately aren't responsible for their actions, that if they had the right combination of therapy/treatment/medication they could be made "right." Sometimes, people are just asshole fucking jerks, and they hurt others because they can and because they want to.

[Hippo_Tron]

44. Mental illness does not negate responsibility

And I agree with you that not all criminals have mental issues. White collar criminals and petty thieves, for example, are probably pretty mentally balanced for the most part.

[seabeyond]

45. i am glad to hear that rape is so abhorrent for you that you feel it has to be a mental illness

that is the upside.

the downside

your refusal to even consider it is the guy next door is part of the problem.

i could explain it to you clearly, but i dont feel like it. but having experienced stuff.... i know better.

it would be nice, if once when women are talking to a male about female issue, a man might actually say you know, maybe.... just maybe, she knows something i dont. just a thought

i am off to bed

wasnt being harsh. just tired. you seem to be a cool dude

[Odin2005]

64. It's exactly the denial I am talking about.

People WANT to think all rapists are crazy people, it helps soothe their conscious instead of dealing with the cause of the problem. Saying a rapist is mentally ill is like saying all the people that gathered to watch lynchings of black people 100 years ago were mentally ill, it is dismissing how our culture can lead ordinary people to do evil things.

[seabeyond]

67. point on. nt

[paulsby]

57. so are most rapists

i've interrogated scores of them and i've read the literature.

[Liquorice]

30. Why were you encouraging him to see a therapist, when he should have been in jail for rape? nt

[Hippo_Tron]

34. We were encouraging him to before he committed the rape

[Liquorice]

36. Oh I see. Well I hope he went to jail for his crime and is a registered sex offender. nt

[Hippo_Tron]

38. Unfortunately no...

I won't go into the details but there wasn't sufficient evidence to prosecute.

[seabeyond]

39. so you know he raped the girl/woman. did he go to jail?

a study showed 35% college males would rape if they thought they could get away with it.

does that sound like 35% of our college male population is unbalanced?

[Hippo_Tron]

42. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if 35% of the college male population had un-addressed mental issues

Especially with the stigma associated with going to therapy or counseling.

[paulsby]

59. with the ever broadening nature of "mental issues"

it seems nearly everybody has SOME sort of "mental issue"

it's called being an imperfect human being.

regardless, ime (extensive) rapists are pretty average type people

i have interrogated MANY people who are very mentally unbalanced, fwiw. but in general, the rapists were not

[Odin2005]

63. THERAPIST? That person should be IN JAIL.

And you are simply wrong, and insulting mentally ill people to boot.

A study posted here on DU a while back said that 35% of college age men said they would rape somebody if they could get away with it. That's not mental illness, that's misogyny.

[paulsby]

56. i agree. i've investigated scores of rapes

and interrogated scores of rapists.

in brief, they are average guys, usually.

[Hannah Bell]

19. bull.

[Liquorice]

28. A culture that accepts misogyny and approves of sexism is at the root of rape. nt

[blondeatlast]

70. Self-delete. nt

[WildEyedLiberal]

6. Absolutely

I made the mistake of reading a bit of his book a while back at Barnes and Noble - way before they planned on making a movie :puke: of it - and was completely disgusted by his horribly misogynistic abusive attitude towards women. I'm not easily offended or disgusted, either. I find the fact that his egregious behavior is being marketed as "humor" as appalling as if blackface were to make a comeback. It's THAT offensive and hateful.

[LoZoccolo]

7. Yeah but rape?

I'm not saying it's not there, because as I said, I don't know, but from what I've seen in the commercials for the movie, he seems to disregard women more than anything, which would kinda be the opposite of rape, even if it was out of misogyny.

[WildEyedLiberal]

10. I think that encouraging young men to think of women as throwaway objects of contempt ultimately

leads to encouraging rape. If women aren't actually people but just holes for you to put your dick in - which is absolutely the mentality that Tucker Max espouses - then really, it's not such a huge leap to go from what he does to rape. I'm not saying that he personally has or will ever rape someone, but I can see some young dumbass reading his book thinking it would be awesome to "score" with some "ho" by getting her so drunk she passes out, or putting a roofie in her drink. Both of which are absolutely, without a doubt rape.

[Odin2005]

18. Exactly.

And there are many posters here, sadly, that are just fine with raping a passed-out drunk woman. :puke:

[WildEyedLiberal]

20. I went to a really frat-heavy university so I saw this mentality too often

And I know several people who've been sexually assaulted, and most of the assaults were "date rapes" (which is a misnomer, because none of the victims were on a "date" with their assailant. They just happened to be at the same party or wherever). The perp is invariably some douche who thinks shit like Tucker Max is hysterical. It's not a stretch, people - if you think it's hilarious to read about an asshole who treats women worse than shit, then you probably think it's actually hilarious to treat women worse than shit.

It's like Republicans and racism. Not every Republican is a racist, but nearly every racist is a Republican. Similarly, not everyone who thinks Tucker Max is hilarious is a rapist, but I bet every rapist out there thinks he's a fucking laugh riot.

[Odin2005]

65. +1

[alittlelark]

22. You think 'disregarding women' is the opposite of rape?

OMG - I don't even know what to say.

[LoZoccolo]

46. How about asking "what do you mean by that"?

disregard: dismiss, ignore
rape: actively attack

Are you seeing something that I am not seeing?

[armyowalgreens]

8. He's a self-declared douchebag and his writings are hysterical...

Disturbing and crude, but none the less hysterical.

[seabeyond]

9. i hear ya. having a girl open her mouth so men can spit their chewed tabacco in her mouth

had me rofl

vommitting on a girl and they video tape her without her knowing. a hoot.

[armyowalgreens]

12. I must have missed those.

Most of the stories I read involved him getting smashed and doing stupid shit that didn't involve what you describe.

[seabeyond]

17. read post 2. read the article she has. the guy is worse than duche bag. how to humiliate

women and the women that love it.

[WildEyedLiberal]

24. The only story I've ever read of his involved him coercing his girlfriend into having anal sex

He then proceeded to tape it without her consent, but the camera setup he'd rigged in his closet collapsed in the middle of the act and she ran out of his apartment covered in "shit and vomit" (she had apparently puked upon realizing his deception).

Maybe none of that is legally "rape," but it's damn fucking close. I don't know if taping someone against their will is legal or not. Even if everything he did was "legal", that hardly changes the fact that anyone finding any of the above "hilarious" is probably a psychopath just like Tucker.

[imdjh]

37. The only thing I have read of him was drunk in Palm Beach, lose his pants, pass out in a planter...

and drive drunk. I stumbled across his blog years and years ago, probably before they were called blogs. I remember asking the computer screen, "What the fuck is this?" I always wondered what happened to him. I guess he proved everyone wrong.

[girl gone mad]

35. he's ugly..

and waaay past his prime to be messing around with college chics.

[imdjh]

40. He looks Irish to me. I don't think it started as "frat boy"

When I read his blog years ago, it was more like Palm Beach gigolo-slacker-wannabe. I think maybe Joe Francis inspired him to find his market.

BTW, I don't know if you watch all the Spring Break garbage on TV, especially MTV, but a whole lot of those guys in Panama City (who the fuck goes to Panama City?) are way over age and most of them aren't on Spring Break.

[girl gone mad]

43. I'm part Irish..

Most of the Irish guys I know are much better looking than this guy.

There's nothing wrong with being ugly, but usually ugly men try to at least have a good personality to make up for it. An ugly guy with an ugly personality is just a waste of space, in my opinion. Of course he goes for the young, dumb, drunk ones. Any girl with an ounce of self-esteem wouldn't give him ten seconds.

[Odin2005]

11. Thus guy sounds like a total asshole!

:puke:

[Dorian Gray]

58. He is

I find him completely repellent.

[girl gone mad]

31. Shit like this..

makes me glad I don't have a daughter.

[Kitty Herder]

47. Shit like this makes me wish I wasn't a woman. n/t

[Kitty Herder]

48. This was written about Eminem, but I think it applies here:

From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jackson-katz/eminem-misogyny-and-the-s_b_211677.html

Many of the same people who defend Eminem and dismiss his feminist and gay rights critics are white people - including good liberals and progressives -- who long ago accepted the idea that racist depictions in media play an important ideological role in perpetuating racism, not because whites will go out and imitate the behavior of fictional racist characters, but because the institutional structures of racism require ideological and cultural apparati to sustain them.

It takes no great leap of logic to see that sexism works in the same way. One need not argue that boys and men who listen to Eminem will become rapist-murderers in order to maintain that misogynous music and lyrics play an important role in legitimating men's mistreatment of women by making it culturally acceptable and even "cool" for men to express sexist rage against women and then hide behind the pretense that "it's only a joke" if anyone takes it too seriously. That argument has long been discredited when it comes to racism. What's the difference when the oppression in question is sexism, or heterosexism?
....
But those of us who take seriously the feminist idea that rapists teach us something about the society that produced them have no choice but to pay attention to Eminem -- both the content and context of his art, and how critics and others describe and make sense of it. With rare exceptions, men who rape are not anomalous monsters. They are products of their socialization and the deeply misogynist norms that prevail in their societies. In the long term, the only way to reduce dramatically the incidence of men's violence against women is to change the social norms that help to produce abusive men - which includes critically examining what sort of art we choose to celebrate, and why.

[Liquorice]

49. I've argued for a while now that sexism and misogyny are the cause of the horrendous

sexual assault rate in this country. People usually argue very strenuously against this idea, even women... I believe many people are opposed to the idea that rape is caused by sexism and misogyny in our culture because if it's true, they are contributing to violence against women by using sexist language, like bitch, and slut, etc. Their behavior has to change to help stop the violence, and they want none of that. I've even had a discussion about this idea here, with men and women both attacking the premise. Thanks for posting the article.

[seabeyond]

53. and i agree absolutely. nt

[omega minimo]

54. Meaning people don't want to take responsibility for their own actions and "being the change."

[Odin2005]

66. Yep, it's denial, though and through.

That's why people, and the media itself, obsesses over cases of stranger rape, when acquaintance rape is far, far more common.

[seabeyond]

68. ha. as you know, the acquaintance rape is mass entertainment. it is out there

and used to entertain all of our society.

what does that say about us that we use rape of women as an entertainment in our every day life. women across the nation is turning off tv cause of the overabundance of crap directed at women for male viewership and we just dont find it entertaining.

has been a couple years since i even bothered to find something to watch

and the guy movies..... all out about degrading, abusing, using female and we laugh and laugh

[Odin2005]

69. And rape victims are constantly running into this shit, getting their PTSD triggered.

:puke:

[autorank]

50. This guy is sick

From the article: "After midnight Mr. Max was holding court at a back table at Dalton’s, a nearby bar, surrounded by newfound friends. To his left he was passing drinks to Vanessa Volpe and Tressa VanTassell, who had traveled from Meriden, Conn., to attend the screening. ('I’m trying to get you drunk so you can’t consent to sex anymore,' Mr. Max told the women.)"

The statement quoted by this guy in parens is really a sick comment which most likely reflects
a vulgar (or worse) approach to women and life in general. His educational pedigree shows that
you can be a lout even attending the best colleges.

[LoZoccolo]

52. Do you think there's a chance that it might have been sarcasm? n/t

[autorank]

71. Sick sarcasm

We'd have to assume he was joking about the implication that he'd have sex with the two without
their consent. We'd probably be correct. It's sick sarcasm. If not, well ...

[omega minimo]

51. How does a bonehead like this get a law degree?

[paulsby]

60. apparently, you haven't met many lawyers nt

[seabeyond]

61. that was funny. i have scores of lawyers in family, lol

mostly in laws side though.

[ccharles000]

55. yes