How the godfather of “fratire” went from chronicling his drunken sexual conquests to ghostwriting Tiffany Haddish’s memoir.

By LAURA BENNETT

MAY 17, 20181:14 PM

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“I fucking love #MeToo,” said Tucker Max, slamming a palm on his kitchen table with so much force that a bowl of sautéed mushrooms shuddered. “These are awful, evil men who have been exploiting women for decades, and that shit going public was the greatest fucking thing.”

If you’ve read even a few pages of Max’s writing, it is deeply weird to hear that distinctive voice—the wrecking-ball bravado, the profanity and brashness—applied to a dinnertime discussion about the systemic abuse of male power. And yet here we are in his house just outside Austin, Texas, talking about Harvey Weinstein (“that motherfucker should be in jail”), Louis C.K. (a “creepy” guy who “should definitely be ostracized”), and Matt Lauer (“locking women in your office is called kidnapping, that’s a fucking crime”). Max speared his steak with a fork and shook his head in disgust.

“Telling the truth,” he said, “is the quickest way to get absolutely destroyed in our culture.”

He’s now 42 years old, married, with two young children. He also happens to have co-written The Last Black Unicorn, the best-selling memoir published in December by Tiffany Haddish, breakout star of Girls Trip and beloved comedian known for her confident raunch. News of this collaboration was met with reliable surprise, given Max’s previous work. It’s been more than a decade since he published I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, the first in a string of books chronicling countless drunken hookups and blackout nights with his bros. Here are a few things he describes in Beer in Hell and its sequels: having anal sex with a woman while his friend videotapes it without her knowledge through slats in a closet door; “getting smashed and goin’ hoggin’,” otherwise known as “fucking a fat girl”; encountering women he classifies as “Land Beast,” “Elephant Legs,” “cow-whore,” “common-stock pig,” and “wildebeest”; and attending a convention for little people explicitly to, in his words, “fuck a midget.” (He succeeds.)

The success of these books got Max anointed as the face of a new literary genre, dubbed “fratire” in the press. Now that genre has petered out; in 2018, you’d surely be hard-pressed to find a major publisher for a book that demeaned and objectified womankind in the name of low-stakes LOLs, with zero interest in addressing the broader social context. What Max once represented—the horny id of a certain species of privileged American male, held up without shame or filter—has never been more publicly reviled. Byrd Leavell, who has been Max’s literary agent since his Beer in Hell days, thinks it would be hard to take those books to market now. “Jokes can’t be offensive anymore,” he said. “They can’t be misogynist. You can’t do humor from a place of privilege because the world doesn’t want that and the kids are woke now.” One recent comment on Max’s Facebook page muses: “Didn’t realize I still followed you. Doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of room for Tucker Max in a 2018 world.”

Max knows his reputation and resents it. The mere suggestion that he might personally have anything to reckon with during this widespread cultural accounting about sexual misconduct makes him very mad. For the common perception that he is a woman-hating brute, he blames, in part, the journalists who “created a straw man and used that to virtue signal against.” For his failure to get taken seriously as a literary figure, he blasts the publishing snobs who trivialized him even as he cranked out best-seller after best-seller. He’s full of recrimination, but none of it is directed at himself. As for the women he called wildebeests or the one he sneak-filmed in the act of butt sex: “None of what I did was sexual harassment,” he said. “It was about sleeping with a lot of women, maybe being a dick to them, but not using power to rape them.” Though he’s sworn off fratire, he still detests those who judged his actions back when he dared to write stories about his life and continue to judge him today. “Telling the truth,” he said, “is the quickest way to get absolutely destroyed in our culture.”

Given this claim to alienation, it does make a strange kind of sense that his highest-profile gig in years is one in which he got paid to tell someone else’s truth. To Max, his partnership with Haddish was self-evidently a natural one. Never mind that he once tweeted, “Any hot African-American girls around? Trying to knock out Valentines Day and Black History Month all at once”—“That tweet is FUNNY!” he said. “That’s a joke SHE would make!” Like him, he said, “Tiffany is hilarious, and she tells the fucking truth.” Of media outlets that were shocked at the news Haddish had chosen to collaborate with him, he said: “Tucker Max doesn’t fit the intersectional feminist party line. Shut the fuck up! Is the book amazing or not?”

This feels like it gets at the crux of his general aggrievement: a frustration that, even now that he has a wife and kids and impassioned opinions about the monsters of #MeToo, he’s still facing down a world that is suspicious of his voice. “The only people who can tell offensive jokes now are people like Tiffany,” he said, “because a black woman can tell almost any joke she wants.” So where does he think that leaves guys like him, who dare to say the things he says while looking the way he does? “A 27-year-old me in 2018,” he said, “would have to be Tiffany Haddish.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3983443&forum_id=2#36102074)