The new Tucker stocks a new fridge.Grant me chastity and continence, only not yet.
Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.
St. Augustine
How’s this for narcissism? Yesterday Tucker Max told Forbes he’s getting out of the casual sex biz, and I think it was my recent post on narcissism that inspired him. 
Forbes published a fascinating interview yesterday: Tucker Gives Up the Game. What I find most interesting is that he couldn’t just go quietly into the land of the monogamous – he needed to share his conversion with the world. I’m so glad he did – I know I’ll be sleeping better now.
The two parts of the interview I found most compelling were Max’s description of the women who are drawn to him, and journalist Michael Ellsberg’s surprise ending.
I. The Deal With Tucker Max
First, Ellsberg gives us a short bio:
“The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.”
Then Max assesses his own influence as a writer:
I’m so far up the power law curve of book sales, dude…I’m not in the Bible tier. I’m on the tier below that. But still, on the power curve, I’m all the way at the tip. I’m on the same tier as Tim Ferriss or Chelsea Handler or Jeanette Walls—we’re in the 2, 3, 4 million range.
Max’s first book, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, sold 1.6 million copies. His second, Assholes Finish First, sold 400,000. Now he’s got his third book, Hilarity Ensues, coming out in a few weeks. And he’s announcing it will be his last in the “fratire” genre.
Hmmm, do I smell a marketing strategy here? Better get it while you can, suckers!
Nothing is forever. So why would the lifestyle I led in my twenties be forever? I never thought it would be forever. It was what it was when it was. That’s why I’m retiring from writing more of these stories… I publicly, explicitly retire.
Ellsberg:
“Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties…He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.”
So what does this mea culpa look like? It follows the generic formula.
1. Blame your parents.
My parents got divorced when I was around a year old. My dad was essentially a nonentity in my life until I got to be about 16 or so. My mom was a flight attendant for PanAm so I moved all over the world. London, Rio de Janeiro. I didn’t go to the same school for more that one year in a row until fourth grade. I was raised by a father who wasn’t there and a mother who wasn’t there.
And beyond that, my mother, God bless her, she tried but she’s got her own issues to work with. My mom’s mom was a drunk, like, an evil drunk. I mean, wake up, starting at 10 A.M., a fifth of bourbon a day—that kind of drunk. There’s consequences to that, and my mom suffered them. She never dealt with any of those emotional issues. She was a much better mom to me than her mom was to her, but…
2. Cite a lack of maturity.
I know some of the stuff I did is, um, beyond the pale or f***-up sometimes, or mean to other people or destructive to myself. But I still did it anyway. I understood intellectually in my twenties that this had something to do with unresolved parental, emotional issues. But I didn’t process it. I could look at other people and see these kinds of issues playing out in them, but I didn’t apply it to myself, because that’s the hardest thing to do for anybody. I couldn’t do that then.
Ellsberg:
“If there is an absolute zero freezing for immaturity, beyond which it is not possible for a grown human being to be more immature, then Tucker Max as self-described in his books surely reached that point in his twenties: an ego the size of Everest, matched with responsibility, self-insight, and empathy the size of pebbles, a drunken jackass, mean, nasty, and rude to nearly everyone around him, particularly the very many women who chose to fling themselves at him (and they did choose—which is its own statement about their maturity level.)”
3. Describe your epiphany.
I was a star. I went farther than I’d ever thought I’d go, and I thought that would be more than enough to make me happy, and it wasn’t.
So I had to kind of take a step back and realize, ‘I have everything I thought I’d ever wanted and I’m not happy, so that means, maybe I need to look at myself.’ Maybe I need to figure some of this stuff out. If everything external is great, and there’s still internal problems, then you have to think then there must be an internal cause.
…There’s an emptiness and a loneliness to hooking up so much. You don’t notice it or care, when you’re below a certain age, or a narcissist. But once you develop empathy, once you develop a soul, the loneliness and the emptiness become too much. The negatives start to outweigh the positives.
4. Feign humility.
I’m a human. Every human is flawed. I might be flawed in different ways than some people, or worse ways than some people, or better ways than some people. But I mean, I’m flawed just like everyone else, dude.
…I was a ridiculous narcissist in my twenties. It’s not even that I didn’t care about other people. It’s way beyond that. I just didn’t even understand that other people even existed or mattered.
…This is something I’ve never really said before in public or admitted on the record, and I’ll admit it now: I didn’t realize this when I was writing it, but I think if you read between the lines a little bit, in between all the bravado, you can see a lot of self-loathing.
5. Describe your journey.
I knew it was inevitable that I would have to look into this stuff eventually. In some vague sense, I understood the whole time that a lot of my extreme acting out came from unresolved emotional issues. And I knew deep down at some point I was going to have to face them.
The point of psychoanalysis is to really understand the roots of your behavior. Understand why you are doing the things you’re doing—and connect your unconscious to your conscious.
The woman that I want to marry, up until maybe a year ago, probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with me. There were still a lot of unresolved issues and problems, and the woman that’s so amazing that I want to marry her, probably wouldn’t have wanted to marry me. That’s what analysis is changing. It’s helping me try to turn into the man I want to be.
6. Take full responsibility.
Uh-oh! Not there yet!
Ellsberg:
“I decided to bring up the point about what I perceive as his lack of self-awareness around how some of his non-fans could be hurt by his words and actions: “When I talk to you, I notice a very admirable and profound willingness to look into your own pain and how you were hurting yourself. Yet, I sense more resistance to the idea of ‘I really caused some women pain.’ I think a lot of women around you have experienced pain in various ways, through your words and actions. Have you ever considered: ‘I was the source of some of that. They are hurting, not just because of them and their own issues, but also because I contributed to their pain’? I sense far more resistance in you around really feeling that.”
Max:
My first instinct is to argue with you. My immediate instinct after that is—I know that if my immediate instinct is attack a position, I need to think about why I am feeling that. Maybe there is a reason why. I can just think you are wrong about something—non-defensively—which just means I think you are wrong. Which is different from having a defensive reaction to something.
If I have a defensive reaction, maybe it means there is something there, or something close, or something in that area. Maybe, dude. I mean, I know I didn’t do this shit on purpose. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t done. That is not a pleasant thing to think about.
Max sees himself as a victim, and the women he’s been with as fellow victims – not of his, but of similarly dysfunctional childhoods. Ellsberg asks, “What could a self-respecting woman possibly see in Tucker Max or his writing?”
In my case—and generally speaking in men and women—when there is extreme promiscuity, you are looking at a person with malformed or unformed emotional attachments and traumas, usually from youth. Parents who weren’t there, parents who were cold, parents who were neglectful, things like that. That’s definitely the case with me, no doubt.
You are looking at a loneliness that derives from that, a sadness that derives from that. The person then tries to fill that hole with something else. Some people use alcohol, some people use pussy, some people use heroin.
I started this whole thing, thinking, ‘How cool would it be to be famous and to have an unlimited supply of sex?’ Then, I realized, the girls coming to me are self-selecting to come to me based on their own dysfunction. If the girl is looking to unconsciously model some sort of trauma, and she thinks that she sees that in my books, then she is going to come to me for that. This is all unconscious for her, of course. And it was unconscious for me, too.
When I was 27, I was trying to get ass. When you’re a wild, crazy, trying-to-get-ass dude, the type of girls who are broken in that way are going to be attracted to you. Those girls would go out looking for that guy, and I was that guy. I went out looking for those girls. And we paired up.
It was no longer rewarding to me, because I realized I was surrounded by so much misery and pain. Once you start to see this, then you see it everywhere. It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t be in this bar scene and this drinking culture without being around a bunch of miserable people.’
Of course, I had no concept of it then. I was much more narcissistic then. I had very little empathy. If I understood it, I had compassion, but I just had no empathy to get to compassion. I wasn’t in touch with my own emotions, so it wasn’t possible for me to understand other people’s emotions.
After his movie came out (a box-office dud), Max moved to Austin. He says he chose that city because it’s where he’s gotten the least email from women looking to hook up. Still, he met his “for now” girlfriend Scarlett there at a reading, after which they hooked up. She’s 22, and a fellow head case; he has found her a psychoanalyst of her own. The couple reports that they now enjoy outings to Target and Costco rather than bars. They also love spending quiet evenings at home with Max’s dog Murphy.
II. Michael Ellsberg’s Deal
Ellsberg’s tale in juxtaposition to Max’s is the stuff of movies – specifically the kind of rom com where Michael Cera gets the cute girl.
For most of my youth and teens, I was [a] 97-pound weakling. If not literally, then at least inside. Picked last in sports, picked on, laughed at by girls—you name it, I was that guy in school.
I’ll spare you all the intervening details, but by my twenties, all this had developed into a complex of symptoms. I was absolutely obsessed with sex (and usually frustrated in the attainment of it.) That in itself was not so unusual for a twenty-something beta-male. But what happens when an intellectual, not very athletic Jewish guy, with high verbal ability, who had experimented with a fair amount of psychedelics by that time, collects and expresses all that sexual frustration and self-angst into one container? It ends up as a manuscript of autobiographical comedic nonfiction intended for publication, entitled Rock Star Envy.
It was a mess of a thing, filled with ruminations on the sexual inequality of the world (some men have thousands of women flinging themselves at them, other men, like me, can’t even get a date), rue and lament for my inability to be or do anything that would even remotely categorize myself as a “stud” in the eyes of women, and desire (almost always dashed) for erotic scenarios which would somehow prove to myself and the world that I was not the scrawny Jewish dork of my worst self-suspicions.
Ellsberg peddles the manuscript, and it is rejected by 22 publishers. Max’s first book comes out, and Ellsberg is consumed with envy.
I tried to deal with my problems by getting into the scene called “pickup.” …I thought, maybe if I could just learn how to pick up women in bars and clubs, my angst and sense of “less than” would go away. I spent around $15,000 in my twenties (much of it on credit card) on various pickup workshops and weekend “bootcamps,” at $2,500-$5,000 a pop, to try to become more confident and successful with women.
Not a great deal of progress. At one point, though, I did have the brilliant idea to marry my new interest in pickup with my longstanding interest in becoming a published author. I had the idea, along with a fellow pickup student, to do a book of interviews with master pickup artists.
Ellsberg reaches out to Max to request an interview and gets this reply:
Calling me a pickup artist, or grouping me in with these pickup artists, is a major insult. “Very good company?” My f***ing ass. The last f***ing thing I want on earth is to be grouped in with those tools.
Explain to me would I want to lend my pr cred to these f*cking losers, most of whom couldn’t command the attention of a group of people they paid to watch them? If you can come up with a reason that I am not seeing, please feel free to explain it to me.
Today, Ellsberg is happily married, and says his envy of men like Max is almost entirely muted. “I didn’t go into psychoanalysis or psychotherapy. But in 2007, at the turn of thirty, I did finally commit to doing the same kind of introspection which, I believe, Tucker is now grappling with as well. I committed to growing up. And eventually, I did.
Only months after I made this commitment to myself to clean up my act, I met Jena, the woman who is now my wife. We’ve been married for a year and a half, and my loving, stable, three-and-a-half year relationship with her has been the most fulfilling, meaningful thing I could ever imagine experiencing.”
Ellsberg notes the irony in Max’s wanting to bring into his life what Ellsberg already has. He shares his story with Max, and explains how he has found happiness and peace. Max’s response:
You’re not resolving it, right. Some sort of analysis or some sort of therapy for this might be really helpful for you. If this is a major issue in your life, then you need to deal with it head-on…
You have to deal with those feelings directly. You can’t deal with them in a bar. I wish you could man! Because, if it was possible to cure your problems with p***y and drinking and book sales, I would have done it! I would have f***in’ done it, dude! I wish, man! I wish! But I couldn’t. And neither can you.
Looks like that empathy development effort isn’t exactly kicking in yet. I can’t say I’m surprised. Tucker Max has acknowledged his unhappiness, and has made the connection to his own behavior. That’s a start. But he’s still starring in his own movie, and other human beings remain bit players, circling him, serving him, giving him the attention he craves. Some things just can’t be fixed.
