New Tucker Max Project: The Mating Grounds
07-16-2014, 02:17 PM
Matt's account of the old message board's final days is correct. Tucker Max had a lot of initial success, then fell apart when he encountered setbacks.
Prior to 2008, Tucker Max was doing some pretty incredible stuff:
- He was one of the first writers to effectively connect with his audience directly, bypassing the gatekeepers of mainstream publishing. None of the publishing houses would touch him, so he started publishing his stories on his website in the late 90s. He published a best-seller driven entirely through his personal following. Today in 2014 you're thinking, well duh, it's all about your list! But in 1998, this was revolutionary. His book was so successful, he started a publishing company and recruited a bunch of talented writers, with the goal of starting an online publishing empire that would destroy print media and mainstream publishing and replace them with a system in which writers connected directly with their audience.
- He was the first writer to tap into the utterly neglected literary market of male readers. He wrote from an apologetically masculine perspective, even if it was just the flawed, grasping-at-straws masculinity of alcoholic college party culture.
- He was very intelligent and articulate. His success was not just due to being in the right place at the right time, and accidentally riding the cultural waves of masculinist renaissance and decentralized content distribution. Well before almost everyone else, Tucker Max understood how the internet was going to affect the literary marketplace. He was also very consciously pro-masculinity, anti-feminist, and anti-PC. He saw his own writing as a conscious reaction against the anti-masculine nature of progressive western culture.
For a while, it looked like Tucker Max was going to lead a cultural revolution. He thought he was going to completely disrupt the publishing industry. He thought his movie was going to blow Hollywood away. As of ~2004-2007, Tucker Max thought that he was on track to make billions of dollars; turn the American entertainment industry on it's head; and lead a generation of men towards the masculine self-actualization which they had been denied by a repressive, anti-masculine, feminazied culture.
And you know what? It wasn't entirely crazy. He had momentum, and a purpose.
But then it all came crashing down. The publishing company, Rudius Media, collapsed and the movie tanked, both around the same time.
It's hard to explain just how much hype Tucker Max brought to these projects. Rudius Media was going to change the face of publishing forever. His movie came out right after Hangover, which made something like a half billion, but Max was convinced that his movie was going to be in a whole other league. One day, Max Inc. was building an empire. The next, he was a guy with a book of funny stories and not much else.
I have a ton of respect for people who are willing to fail. That was, ironically, a big part of the old Tucker Max catechism: Failure is good. Failure means you tried, and put yourself out there. But the key to failure is to own your mistakes and learn from them. Instead of doing that, Max shut down every channel through which his long-time fans could criticize him and stuck his fingers in his ears. He took the forum offline with zero warning, and destroyed what had become an incredibly valuable community - comparable to the RVF, I would even say.
Try to imagine how you would feel if you tried to log in to the RVF tomorrow, and there was nothing here but a nice note from Roosh announcing that the forum was gone, along with all the posts, PMs, and contacts, and he wishes you the best of luck in all your future endeavours. And he did it all because forum members were writing negative reviews of Poosy Paradise.
Tucker Max had the potential to be great, but his tragic flaw was his narcissistic inability to admit failure and accept a temporary setback. He could have written openly and honestly about his failure, shown his readers that it really is OK to fail sometimes, that it's not just something he wrote, it's something he lived. If he had had the courage and self-awareness to do that, all of us today would probably call ourselves members of the Tucker Max-o-sphere.
But instead, he hid from his failures for five years. Then he got a therapist. I guess they don't discuss the great failures of his late twenties, and the depressive episode that they brought on, because Max never seems to bring it up in his present writing.
Throughout my adult life, I've always been cheering for Tucker Max to get back on his horse and create something worthwhile. He was a hero of mine, and he was incredibly prescient regarding the internet's effect on media and the necessity of a masculinist renaissance in the western world. But, his narcissism was his great tragic flaw. The ironies are Shakespearean:
- Tucker Max will fail with his watered-down new site, because the reader is now king, not the politically correct gatekeepers... just as he predicted.
- Tucker Max taught a generation of young writers that the most important aspect of quality art is honesty and vulnerability... and now he is demonstrating it by churning out timid, artificial content. His muse is crushed under the psychic energy he must continually exert, to pretend that he hasn't just spent the past five years in hiding
- Tucker returns to the scene with a big interview about his therapeutic journey of self-awareness... while assiduously avoiding the subject of his five-year-and-running meltdown and denial
- Tucker Max writes a book about increasing testosterone, then lends it to his girlfriend
So what's next? I don't think it will take long for Max and Miller to grow disillusioned with The Mating Grounds. They have shut down comments and refuse to link to their opponents, because they know they are on the wrong side of history; they know they have become the politically correct cowards they once hated. They are cockroaches, scurrying from daylight, while we are anti-fragile. Any conflict between the Manosphere and The Mating Grounds will benefit us. Men will read both sides, and they will know in their guts that we are honest, we are in pursuit of truth, and we have a much larger purpose than earning a few Amazon affiliate commissions on Vitamin D pills while trying to salvage what's left of a broken, deluded ego.
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