Tucker Max offered to donate $500,000 to Planned Parenthood if they’d name a clinic after him. Planned Parenthood turned him down. Whereupon, Max Max’s publicist had a meltdown in the pages of Forbes.com. Jill Filipovic has an excellent point-by-point rubuttal of Max’s own indignant, quasi-incoherent blog rant against the nation’s oldest family planning organization.
Max is a self-described “fratirist” (fratboy humorist) whose trademark is over-the-top misogyny. Here are some quotes from his latest book, Hilarity Ensues. Lest you think I’m cherry picking, these are among the quotes he chose to showcase on his own website:
-“There is a girl lying next to me on the bed, shaking me, saying something. She is not happy. She is also not skinny. Or attractive. She may not even be human.”
-“I know this really sexy move you can do with your mouth. It’s called ‘shutting the fuck up.’”
Irin Carmon of Salon found some Tucker Max tweets about Planned Parenthood, which have since been deleted. The second one was from last month:
-“Planned Parenthood would be cooler if it was a giant flight of stairs, w/someone pushing girls down, like a water park slide #FF @PPact”
-“In South Florida. This place is awful. Shitty design, slutty whores & no culture, like a giant Planned Parenthood waiting room.”
As you might expect, Max is trying to blame Planned Parenthood for spurning him. Uptight feminist bitches too good to take his money, eh? Well, he’ll show them!
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If Max just wanted to give a $500,000, no-strings attached donation, Planned Parenthood might have been smart to take the money. Instead, Max wanted to buy the naming of a women’s health center.
Trying to buy the naming rights to an abortion clinic was yet another bid to degrade women. For Max, the “joke” was dangling money he made degrading women in front of a cash-strapped women’s organization to see if they’d abase themselves by slapping his name on their clinic.
It’s the same charming lose-lose dynamic that Max writes about with women. If you say yes, you’re a disgusting desperate slag with no self-respect and therefore beneath contempt. If you say no, you’re an uptight bitch and therefore beneath contempt.
If Max really cared about Planned Parenthood, or its mission, he would have quietly withdrawn the offer. If he cared about women, he wouldn’t dream of making anyone seek reproductive health care at a clinic named after a professional slut-shamer.
Big donations with unrealistic conditions attached get turned down all the time by non-profits. Usually the would-be donors have the good grace to quietly let the matter drop, rather than attacking the organization they claim to care about.