It's a man's world

"Maddox," the Web programmer turned pop-culture hero whose book "The Alphabet of Manliness" recently leapt to the top of Amazon's sales list, talks about obedient wives, the craze for all things manly, and whether the next generation is going to be "totally puss-onified"

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Feminism, Men, Pop Culture, Rebecca Traister, Life

Photo by AP/Steve C. Wilson

George Ouzounian, also known as "Maddox."

June 2, 2006 | George Ouzounian, aka "Maddox," creator of "The Best Page in the Universe" and author of the forthcoming "Alphabet of Manliness," is making more hay on testosterone than a bull breeder. His Web site, which he started in 1997 while a programmer at a telemarketing company and which trumpets his disregard for authority and political correctness, gets 1 million unique visitors a month. "The Alphabet of Manliness," a letter-by-letter guide to all things male, macho and masculine, is pumped full of aggression toward the weak, the flabby, the girly men of the world. The book, and its author, have become this season's publishing phenomenon: When it became available by preorder, Maddox sent a note to his mailing list and, overnight, "Alphabet" shot to the No. 1 spot on Amazon. "Alphabet" is a triumph of word-of-mouth publicity: The book's publisher, Citadel Press, has done very little to promote it, and Maddox himself has given only a few brief interviews, but it has hovered in the top 70, often in the top 20, for the two months since its initial ascent. All this, and it doesn't hit shelves until Tuesday, June 6.

Others besides Maddox have discovered there's money to be made in the XY genotype: A manliness assault has been carpet-bombing bookstores and television stations for some months. Along with Tucker Max's "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell," Maddox was dubbed part of a new genre of "Fratire" by the New York Times last month. There's been Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield's much derided homage to potency, "Manliness." Also on my desk is "Manthology: Poems on the Male Experience," from the University of Iowa Press. Turn on a television and you'll find one of the summer's phallustastic ad campaigns: Burt Reynolds and company sell Miller Lite with man laws forged by the "Men of the Square Table"; Burger King boys sing a nonsensical "Manthem" ("I am hungry! I am incorrigible! I am man!") about their refusal to eat "chick food" like quiche; TGI Friday's even has a campaign in which dudes bang their utensils on a table and shout about the meat products they are about to consume. Pork! Beef! Sausage! You get the picture!

"The Alphabet of Manliness" is very much in this masculinity-as-sketch-comedy mold, and some of it is pretty funny. Take the entry for "N," which is "Norris, Chuck." "Chuck Norris eats rocks and shits lightning bolts," the chapter begins. "One time Chuck Norris was walking around in the forest, looking for hippies to use as firewood, when a wild boar suddenly crossed his path. Big mistake. Chuck lifted the boar into the air with his mind, spun him around, and digested him telekinetically. And Chuck wasn't even hungry." The "Alphabet's" illustrations (by eight artists, two of them women) are a varied affair, depicting pirates ejaculating leprechauns, physically combative sperm, a wide variety of boners, and Xanthippe's frozen tundra of a vagina inhabited by some penguins and a polar bear.

Intentionally outrageous, Maddox's humor waves its anti-p.c. flag high. Women, naturally, are the main foils. Again from the Norris chapter: "Chuck Norris has no mother, as crawling out of a vagina is unbecoming of a man of his stature."

Some of Maddox's over-the-top riffs are funny, but others are tone-deaf and dumb. Warning his readers to be wary when picking up women at bars, he writes: "Listen for a faint whistling noise coming from between her legs, as if wind were passing through a large, hollow cavern. If you hear this sound, your prospective woman may have a condition commonly referred to as 'whore.'"

Still, it's tough to get too worked up about even such retro-grody passages. Maddox's brand of humor -- in which pirates, lumberjacks, farting, quickies and beef jerky are good, and babies, vegetarians, hippies and Mozart are bad -- is typical of a certain species of amiable, clueless 20-to-30ish males, who may take cathartic pleasure in rhetorically rampaging around like big swinging dicks but who probably eat quiche and are nice to their girlfriends at home.

When Salon spoke to the 28-year-old Salt Lake City native and his publicist by phone, it was his first extensive conversation with the press. Maddox -- the nickname comes from an old anime cartoon called "Maddox 01" -- turned out to be a soft-spoken young man, short on media training and practiced answers, who seemed slightly stunned by his own success. He couldn't help but snigger at references to some of his own jokes, like the one about committing suicide by "licking a hooker's ass."

You run an extremely popular Web site with a cult following. What is it that readers get from you?

When you're trying to send a message to someone, if you wrap it in humor it sticks a lot better. It's like the sugar with the medicine. People remember things when they laugh. I've never studied marketing, but I'm guessing that that's why lots of commercials try to be funny. And if "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" did dry political shows they wouldn't get nearly as many people watching. So hopefully people can take away something more from my site than just the humor, but the No. 1 reason people come is to laugh.

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