The New Dating Game

Late last September a college student who called herself Courtney A. posted a story on the feminist website Lemondrop: “I Slept With Tucker Max, the Internet’s Biggest Asshat.”

Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before; informing a female recruiter at the firm that he was “calling a porn line” when she walked into his office unexpectedly; and getting fall-down drunk at a firm retreat and shouting the F-word at a charity auction attended by the partners and their spouses. His email account of the last escapade made its way to laughs around the country.

Max is famous as a blogger (tuckermax.com), and his website is replete with stories like the ones above, all involving graphically rendered bedroom exploits (if your definition of bedroom includes vans, offices, and the great outdoors), massive quantities of alcohol, and copious vomiting. He is the author of several books, including The Definitive Book of Pickup Lines (2001, out of print but selling for close to $200 on Amazon), the 2006 blockbuster I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, which spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and the forthcoming Assholes Finish First. Beer in Hell, a dramatization of some of his website yarns, became an indie movie hit in college towns last fall (playing to less-than-enthusiastic audiences elsewhere).

Max and Courtney got together because upon reading a friend’s text message late one Monday evening announcing that Max would be at a bar near campus after a screening of Beer in Hell, she jumped up, changed her clothes, and rushed off to await the great man’s arrival. At the bar, she worked her way through a knot of female rivals to meet him.

“32C,” Courtney replied, “but good guess. What, are you trying to touch them or something?”

At the Hampton Inn where Max was staying, he introduced Courtney to his dog: “Say hello to the new slut.” The next morning, after some sessions of “jackhammering a sidewalk,” as she described his sexual technique (although she did concede that he was a “great kisser”), he handed her $20 for the taxi ride of shame back to her apartment. His last words were, “Call me if you’re ever in L.A.”

Many of the commenters to Courtney’s tell-all expressed “disgust” at Max’s manifestly unchivalrous behavior. In a September op-ed for the Washington Post, feminist Jaclyn Friedman, who inexplicably blamed Max’s perverse success with females (half his fans, perhaps the more enthusiastic half, are female) on abstinence-only sex education, sniffed that she found his “antics revolting,” blasted his “unapologetic misogyny,” and accused him of contributing to a campus atmosphere that allows 150,000 young women to be raped every academic year. (Friedman derived that extraordinarily high figure by counting drunken sexual encounters between students as rape.) Amanda Marcotte, the feminist blogger briefly hired by John Edwards during his presidential campaign, chimed in, accusing Max of a “bone-deep hatred of sexual women”—and also of possible “sexual assault” because he had bragged on his website about sleeping with a drunk girl while a friend hidden in a closet filmed the encounter. In May, feminist picketers so disrupted an appearance by Max at Ohio State University that he needed a police escort to get away.

See the thing is they think they are in charge. Make sure they know you are and you don't care. Never be a jerk, be a gentleman but “don't care”.

You remove their power and they work harder at being their real selves. Life is more interesting for everyone that way.

Many ladies think “theirs” is gold plated and the only one. Let me assure you, they are in good supply but if the person is a problem personality then it doesn't matter. Unless you both get drunk. then you have to wake up with them.

Just be a little distant with them, cook them breakfast or take them to breakfast. Talk about what a great time you both had, thank them for the special time, but have an air of aloofness.

Then get the heck out of there. No later than 9:00AM. Just be done with it and make whatever excuse you need.

Gotta do something with the guys ie watch a game, AT A BUDDIE HOUSE. Just a bunch of guys, won't be any girls.

or you can say your cat has diarrhea. She will say you don't have a cat and you can be cute saying something like “does it matter? Any excuse will do” “I had a terrific time last night but I do have some things to do today” Never apologize for your exit.

Be done with it. They actually sit around after that wondering if you will call. If you are inclined to see them again, Never, Ever, Ever call them until three days latter.

LOL, hints from your Uncle Vendome.

What is it with women and bad boys?

I think it is our perverse culture of death and the sexualization of everything. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, CO put his finger on it after the Columbine tragedy:

Testimony delivered by Archbishop Charles Chaput on May 4, 1999, before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation

Ladies and Gentlemen:
Good morning. I know our time is limited, and your work is important, so forgive me if I’m very direct.

Exactly one week ago today, I buried the third of four Catholic teen-agers shot to death at Columbine High School. More than a thousand people turned out for each of the funerals. Other pastors, from other churches, did exactly the same for the other eight students and the teacher who were murdered.

They had exactly the same experience. These killings broke the heart of my community. You may not know Littleton — but I do. It’s a good place, with good people. However terrible the Columbine tragedy seemed on TV, it’s another thing altogether to sit privately with parents as they learn that the child they kissed goodbye yesterday won’t be coming home again — ever. For their sake, I’m grateful to be here.

The discussion today is “marketing violence to children.” I’d like to offer just two observations from a pastor’s point of view.

First, as a nation, we’ve lost our common sense, and we urgently need to recover it. The reasonable person understands that what we eat, drink and breathe will make us healthy or sick. In like manner, what we hear and what we see lifts us up — or drags us down. It forms us inside. Pornography degrades women. It also coarsens men. I don’t need to prove that, because we all know it. It’s common sense.

The weekend after the Columbine killings, I saw a film called The Matrix with a friend. The theater was filled with teen-agers. One scene left me completely stunned: The heroes wear trench coats, and in a violent, elegant, slow-motion bloodbath, they cut down about a dozen people with their guns. It occurred to me that Mr. Harris and Mr. Klebold may have seen that film. If so, it certainly didn’t deter them.

My point is this: People of religious faith have been involved in music, art, literature and architecture for thousands of years because we know — from experience — that these things shape the soul. And through the soul, they shape behavior. The roots of violence in our culture are much more complicated than just bad rock lyrics or brutal screenplays. And it’s clear that the Columbine killings were planned well before The Matrix ever opened. But common sense tells us that the violence of our music, our video games, our films and our television has to go somewhere — and it goes straight into the hearts of our children, to bear fruit in ways we can’t imagine . . . until something like Littleton happens.

My second observation is this: Blaming shock-rock performers like Marilyn Manson for the violence in our culture is easy. It’s also, in a way, probably right. But the problem of violence isn’t out there in bad music and bloody films. The real problem is in here, in us, and it won’t be fixed by v-chips. In the last four decades, we’ve created a culture that markets violence in dozens of different ways, seven days a week. It’s part of our social fabric. When we build our advertising campaigns on consumer selfishness and greed, and when money becomes the universal measure of value, how can we be surprised when our sense of community erodes? When we glorify and multiply guns, why are we shocked when kids use them?

When we answer murder with more violence in the death penalty, we put the state’s seal of approval on revenge. When the most dangerous place in the country is a mother’s womb, and the unborn child can have his or her head crushed in an abortion, even in the process of being born . . . the body language of that message is that life isn’t sacred and may not be worth much at all. In fact, certain kinds of killing no longer even count officially as “killing.” Certain kinds of killing we enshrine as rights — and protect by law. When we live this kind of contradiction, why are we surprised at the results?

The Columbine murders will mark my community for years to come. They’re a wound felt by the entire country — but I don’t think they’ll be the last. We live in the most violent century in history. Nothing makes us immune from that violence except a relentless commitment to respect the sanctity of each human life, from womb to natural death The civility and community we’ve built in this country are fragile. We’re losing them. In examining how and why our culture markets violence, I ask you not to stop with the symptoms. Look deeper. The families in Littleton and throughout the country deserve at least that much.

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