Tiger Beatdown

If you aspire to be cool and relevant, you really have to control the products you incorporate into your daily life, because you are of course defined by your tastes in media and/or clothing, and liking something that is popular puts you on the same level as the common rabble. Oh, and also the media on your ‘approved’ list will tend to be male-dominated and extremely white, and this has nothing to do with you because you voted for Obama? So, basically, listening to Santogold now that her music has shown up on the teevee is like having condomless sex with a hobo. No reason to dispute that!

In the above-linked post, Carles meditates on all of the above issues and also whether a band is “overrated,” and is kind of right about some things, I think. I also think he is wayyyyyyyyy more interested in whether people might listen to the wrong band for the wrong reasons than he is in whether all the topless chicks of whom he posts photos on his blog are ‘2 young and drunk 2 realize the consequences of their actions’ or ‘being xploited by photographerbros who r older/more sober/male’ or ‘being mocked by blggrs without rlly acknowledging the role of photographerbros in the scenario, which contributes 2/is due 2 a cultural context of misogyny/shaming chicks 4 being “sluts”.’ IS CARLES KINDA LIKE JOE FRANCIS, YALL? Or is he just acknowledging that ‘nothing has meaning’/’we r defined by our personal brands and anyone who doesn’t believe this is creating a personal brand that opposes this reality there4 he wins’/’how weary, flat, stale + unprofitable seem 2 him all the uses of this world’/’bands r the most important things in the universe’?

Actually, tons of people like Tucker Max – we refer to them as “assholes” – but he has been made fun of enough, apparently, that the AV Club felt the need to write a thoughtful defense of his work:

Max isn’t in the league of great storytellers who can make even mundane events entertaining, his prose is spare and usually witty. (He attended Duke Law School on scholarship, so he’s no moron.) His eye for detail is limited to what interests him—what he was drinking, a woman’s breast size, and which friends were there.

Ah, literature! His work, for the record, is found to be “refreshingly low on homophobia” (yes, a low content of the morally indefensible hatred which is responsible for many rapes and murders, and for the widespread denial of basic civil rights to American citizens – I, for one, am wildly refreshed) although he is “much less respectful” of “most women, whom he says he only treats like hos if they deserve it. The logic is flawed, and yet it’s difficult to feel sympathy for a woman who contacts Max via his website.” I’m so glad the AV Club is here to tell me which women deserve sympathy for being, say, videotaped during sex without their knowledge or permission. Aren’t you? Ultimately, the writer (who is not even Scott Tobias, but some heretofore undiscovered ass named “Brett Singer” – WHAT IS THE WORLD AND/OR A.V. CLUB COMING TO?) concludes the following:

Max may be destroying his liver and the egos of many insecure women, but as long as he stays out of politics, his damage to the rest of the world will be limited to anyone who tries to emulate his bad behavior.

Say, speaking of flawed logic, here’s a puzzler: if Tucker Max promotes shaming women, coercing women into sex, and also the emotional abuse and sexual degradation of women, and people emulate Tucker Max, which emulation of course includes doing all of the above, then Tucker Max damages… WHO? Yes, that’s right, the answer is “dudes!” At least, it is if you write for the A.V. Club.