Tiffany Haddish's New Memoir Was Co-Written By Brotastic 'Dick Lit' Author Tucker Max
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One of the only joys of 2017 has been watching the rise of Tiffany Haddish, an ebullient, hilarious, risqué comedian and possibly the best guest on any late-night talk show. Haddish, who talks frequently about growing up in foster care and stints spent living in her car, had a breakout role in the comedy Girls Trip and recently published a memoir, The Last Black Unicorn. But the book’s press materials don’t mention its very surprising co-author: Tucker Max, the one-time king of “dick lit.”
When Jezebel reached him by phone in Austin on Thursday, Max chuckled that Gallery Books, the division of Simon and Schuster that put out Haddish’s book, was in a tizzy about our questions regarding his co-authorship.
It was the faddish, literary offshoot of the pickup artist movement, and like ultra low-rise jeans you had to shave to get into, it’s come to seem embarrassingly dated just a few short years later.
“They’ve been freaking out all day,” he said, laughing. “They’re a corporation. They don’t have any idea how to deal with media or controversy.”
“Why do you think this would be controversial?” I asked.
“You tell me,” he said.
Let’s do that now. If Max’s name is ringing some faint, unpleasant mid-aughts bells for you, it should. Earlier this century, he was best known as the biggest name in what we could also call “fratire,” a genre of ostensibly trueish stories about banging chicks and drinking a lot, authored by gleefully vulgar, barely post-college white men. It was the faddish, literary offshoot of the pickup artist movement, and like ultra low-rise jeans you had to shave to get into, it’s come to seem embarrassingly dated just a few short years later.
Open, uncreative misogyny isn’t as hip as it used to be. Max once joyously wrote that some women are “hardwired for whoredom.” (He has said that he was quoting someone else, and that person was being facetious.) He came up with a “female rating system” where the low end was “common stock pig.” He thought a good Twitter joke was suggesting that Planned Parenthood “would be cooler if it was a giant flight of stairs, w/someone pushing girls down, like a water park slide.” In front of a New York Times journalist, he told two women, “I’m trying to get you drunk so you can’t consent to sex anymore.” By 2014, even he seemed kind of sick of his own shit.
He thought a good Twitter joke was suggesting that Planned Parenthood “would be cooler if it was a giant flight of stairs, w/someone pushing girls down, like a water park slide.”
The road away from career pickup artistry has taken different forms for different bros. Men’s rights activists–cum-sexperts Roosh V and Mike Cernovich have both moved on to careers as openly bigoted members of the alt-right, with Cernovich also working as a self-proclaimed journalist. Meanwhile, Tucker Max and pickup artist author Neil Strauss both wrote relationship books in 2015 that were meant to signal that they’d turned over a new leaf: They were mature now. Thoughtful. Considerate of women’s needs. Less convinced of our innate whoredom.
In a 2015 Maxim interview, Max pontificated on the ways that his raging sexism helped conceal deep-seated emotional distress.
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