/ 5 May 2006

Men behaving badly … get their own literary genre

A new word was coined in the United States in April: fratire. It refers to a spate of testosterone-fuelled books about belligerence and debauchery, leglessness and legovers, which publishers hope will spawn the male equivalent of chick-lit.

Examples of the genre, according to The New York Times, include Frank Kelly Rich’s The Modern Drunkard: A Handbook for Drinking in the 21st Century; ucker Max’s TI Hope They Serve Beer in Hell; Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists; and The Alphabet of Manliness by a person known only as Maddox. The New York Times hesitantly hailed these books as ”a fraternity-house celebration of masculinity” combined with ”a mocking attitude toward traditional male roles and aspirations of power and authority”.

The editor who ”discovered” blogs by Max and Maddox, and has been credited with inventing a genre by putting their work between soft covers, is Jeremie Ruby-Strauss from Kensington, a small New York publisher.

Ruby-Strauss explains what this new trend represents. It is ”a search for a new masculine model”, he said. ”Something more heroic — however misguided — and by that I mean willing to take risks and fall on your face, to live life passionately and fearlessly, and not necessarily to look around for the approval of others.”

The books appeal not just to sex-starved sophomores, but to the authors’ contemporaries: those 30somethings, or even 40somethings, afflicted with what New York magazine recently called the ”Peter Pan syndrome”. The fratire writers are cyber-characters who hold themselves up as a paragon of backlash — cocksure in the discovery that the more misogynistic they are, the more attractive women seem to find them.

Yet how new is this genre? And is it just an attempt to make publishing dollars out of the baser elements of masculinity? It seems to hark back to an era well before lad mags were conceived. Many of the fratire books are infused with a nostalgia for 1950s archetypes of a rudely authentic masculinity.

Ruby-Strauss says the current fratire books are unlikely to have literary pretensions. Even so, Max cites Thucydides’s The History of the Peloponnesian War as a key influence, and publishes a guide to good writing on his website.

In a chapter entitled The Blowjob Follies (a homage to Paul Auster’s recent novel The Brooklyn Follies), he offers a sentiment that could sum up the new genre: ”The problem with oral sex is that it’s like writing. When it’s done right it’s amazing, and when it goes wrong, it’s just not worth it.” — Â