On the political side, we're battling the anti-choice, anti-women rhetoric coming from extremist politicians which blasts from our cable TV screens, touting laws that would strip of our rights as individuals with agency and morality.

So it's  disappointing, but not shocking, when the two elements come together and we get misogyny of the worst kind seeping right into our mainstream pop culture--lowest-common-denominator frat boy sexism that makes no attempt to hide its super-disrespectful, dehumanizing view of women. It's a kind of stereotypical high school football-team locker room (no offense to the feminist football players out there) attitude, except it's being exhibited by grown men with huge public forums. In this case, it's doubtful that anyone who espouses such misogyny will grow out of it.

The first recent perpetrator is one of the most loathsome personas to enter the American pop-cultural scene, Tucker Max, who has a new movie based on his blog coming out this week. "Amurph11" a blogger on feministing's community blog succinctly sums up Max's M.O:

The Boston premiere of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell happened in Cambridge last night. For those of you that haven't been following, (and I hope this applies to most of you), it is the film adaptation of a book, which was a based on a blog. The blog, in turn, is largely based around the exploits of Tucker Max (and here "exploits" is exactly the right word): getting women drunk, performing sex acts on them, and then writing about it. Many of the encounters detailed in the blog, book, and now the film, meet the legal definition of rape (this should come as no surprise). It is almost unbelievably predatory, so it should also come as no surprise that it was, for a time, very popular.

To make it worse, Max has recently lashed out viciously at scattered protesters who have claimed that his brand promotes rape culture (uh, you think?). Sady Doyle at Broadsheet says we should really ignore Max, because protesting him will give him the attention and notoriety he craves more than anything. At pandagon, Amanda Marcotte counters that the aim of protesting shouldn't be to change the minds of Max's women-hating acolytes, but rather to give support and encouragement to young women who are offended by his nasty shtick. She suggests some funny ways to strike back. She's 100% right--as anyone who had nascent feminist leanings as a young woman can recall, it's a lonely world out there and organizing is an effective way to build lifelong feminist resistors.

And there's a further reason to keep combating this stuff: Max isn't the last vestige of mega-misogynists who haven't gotten the message that they should at least pretend like they respect women. Nope, he and his coterie of rape apologists are far from alone out there calling women skanks and whores with impunity.

In fact, this week has been a particularly bad one for that. Among male commentators reaction to the Tila Tequila/Shawn Merriman allegations (she said he hit her, he said he was trying to restrain her from driving drunk, both sides are sticking to their story) has been one of immediate slut-shaming, as though Tequila's raunchy TV personality automatically disqualifies her from all credibility or ability to be hurt. Bachelor creator Mike Fleiss--who arguably kicked off the entirely reprehensible dating show reality TV genre-- wrote the following, which was actually published in a major San Diego forum:

Of course, I deplore violence against women. But this particular girl is typical of the random skanks who populate most reality TV shows (not mine, of course).

Ms. Tequila has no discernable talent, no Juliard schooling, and, ultimately, no legitimate reason to be a star. What she does have is an ability to chase down the spotlight like Merriman hunts down a quarterback. 

Trust me. A girl like Tila Tequila will do just about anything for publicity. 

HBO talk show host Bill Maher added his two cents on the subject with a vile joke: “Stop acting surprised that someone choked Tila Tequila. The surprise is that someone hasn’t choked this bitch sooner.”

Sigh. This kind of talk from Fleiss and Maher comes right out of the old-school sexist playbook that says women who act a certain way should not have rights--and yes, it sounds suspiciously like anti-choice talk: "If you choose a lifestyle we disapprove of, you should lose the right to agency over your body. " That playbook also feeds into a very real, very dire problem:the campus rape epidemic, which Jaclyn Friedman discusses here.

And this is why it's important to pay attention to hatefully, "out-there" rhetoric: it's not all that out there, but permeates our culture. Max may be a fringe figure, but Maher and Fleiss are not, nor are their audiences. In fact, Fleiss's franchise has a major influence on the entertainment world and Maher has one of the most important and edgy forums around--one which even feminists like this one watch regularly.

Instead, we should use extremely hateful sexism as references--when we see less blatantly obscene examples of sexism around us, we can note the way it echoes Max's brand of uber sexism as a way to hammer home the point. Promote entertainment that is fun and humorous or and sexy without being offensive (everyone should be going to see female-directed Bright Star and Jennifer's Body this weekend, for instance) as an alternative. Point out the way comments like Maher's feed into public policies that he himself hates and are bad for the kind of open, sexual society many sexists would like to see. After all, misogynists like Maher and Fleiss must recognize that birth control and abortion rights are good for the kind of Hugh Hefner lifestyle they envision for American men--realizing that their careless rhetoric undermines those rights might be sobering.  Or do like Gawker has done, and just relentlessly mock Max as unfunny.

It's still tempting to ignore this crap. Indeed, as Amanda said, vigorously and self-righteously attempting to get hard-core misogynists to change their minds is indeed a losing battle, and it's exhausting to repeat the same feminism 101 analysis over and over again (nope, even if she enjoys having sex she can still get raped, isn't it shocking?). But pretending they don't exist isn't an option either.

More around the web:

Tucker Max Fans: The Lowest Form Of Life [Douche Du Jour] from Jezebel
Douchebag Decree: Marketing Tucker Max from Bitch Magazine Blogs
Tucker Max hates fun from pandagon.net -
Tucker Max must die! (Or not.) from Salon: Broadsheet
If They Do Serve Beer in Hell, I Hope it's Warm from Feministing Community