I am honestly embarrassed to have read this book. I guess I must just have some kind of Catholic self-flagellation problem, because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt within 10 pages that I would hate every minute of this book, yet I still finished it. Why? I will never, ever, ever get those hours of my life back.
How can I even summarize this stupid book? I’m extremely late to the party with hating this book, it came out years ago and seems to have been well-known. Apparently Tucker Max is now a happily married man with a kid.
Okay sure.
So I guess I’ll refrain from saying anything too harsh about him, because although I’ve never in my life been a jackass of this caliber, I’d kind of hate for people to be reviewing my idiotic thoughts years after the fact. Then again, I didn’t publish them in a book, so.
Basically, he spends the entire book sleeping with an improbable number of women, shit talking everything about them, getting drunk, acting like a douche with his friends who sound at least as bad as him, driving drunk, being an insufferable prick, and proclaiming “I’m Tucker Max! I’m fucking awesome!” Ugh. No. Saying it doesn’t make it true.
Toward the end there was kind of an odd shift in tone that honestly to me did feel kind of like maturing. Not much, mind you. Kind of like a nasty unpleasant brat of a 13 year old boy turning into a nasty unpleasant brat of a 14 year old boy. Not much. But something, I guess, maybe. And because of that I could maybe – maybe – buy that there’s been some degree of change in him since, because in some way it kind of unfolded during the book. I felt weirdly kind of maternal toward this moron (he’s older than I am). I think there’s a human being under there, but my God is it ever buried.
Please, friends, don’t make the mistake I did and think “I could go for some offensive humor right now! It’ll be great!” No. It just isn’t funny. At best, it’s sad. This is a man-child who obviously didn’t have the structure he needed as a child and grew into something terrible. I hope he’s really changed since then.
As discussed here, I am going to be adding a content warning at the end of my reviews so that anyone who wants to be aware of certain content can look for that. I will place it at the end so you can skip it if you’d rather, and place it lower if it could be considered spoilery. If there is anything you’d like me to add to the “Things to Warn About” list, no matter how obscure or irrational, please feel more than free to either leave it in a comment or e-mail me privately at blengle@comcast.net, and I will be more than happy to add it.
Content warning for Assholes Finish First: Abortion, dead baby jokes, alcoholism/unhealthy drinking, anti-semitism, BDSM scenarios, bullying, consensual sex, descriptions of violence, partner emotional/verbal abuse, pornography, profanity, ableism, rape culture, riots, significant financial stress, vomit.
Have never read any of his books but apparently they’re all the same and he has quite huge dudebro following and has made it onto bestseller lists repeatedly.
as someone who was raised by my mother to treat women with the utmost of dignity and respect, I can say, without question, women were a lot more accommodating once I became an a-hole and started treating them poorly.
Do you think your mom, who taught you to treat women with dignity and respect, secretly wanted you to treat her poorly? Just curious.
I’ll tell you, I think that it’s women who lack self-esteem that don’t respond to men who treat them with respect and do respond to men who treat them in accord with how they see themselves. So the question is, why do you attract women with low self-esteem?
I read his first and second books and they were terrible in my opinion because they were just a privileged white guy acting terrible and being aggravated if called out on it.