Your favorite male authors ranked by their likelihood to be a huge fuckboy

tips

IRL  • 

Your favorite male authors ranked by their likelihood to be a huge fuckboy

Hello, allow me to ruin The Great Gatsby for you forever

The only good thing about fuckboys is how translatable the concept is in itself.

It’s easy to make them funny and ridiculous, which makes it easier to stomach when you accidentally stumble across one and inadvertently ruin your life until coming to your senses again. This is why we have so many bizarre, ridiculous sub-categories of fuckboys, from softboys and cuckboys to litboys. It’s why we can imagine them as astrological signs or Game of Thrones characters or highly decorated but ultimately misogynistic, in hindsight, male authors.

With that in mind, allow me to ruin all your favorite books for you by telling you how likely the authors were to be a complete fuckboy, and if that wasn’t fun enough! what kind of fuckboy they would be.

Hey, you’re welcome.

F Scott Fitzgerald

You know that guy you meet who tells you: “Oh my god my ex-girlfriend is so crazy man! She’s like, completely mental. No, she’s like, nuts dude, nuts.”

Yeah, that’s Fitzgerald.

Side note: The calling-women-crazy symptom is not just a fuckboy red flag, it’s like, the factory where they make the red flags. It’s huge. So yeah, don’t trust guys who say that, even if they wrote The Great Gatsby.

Richard Dawkins

The guy who, after a bizarre and stifling religious childhood, discovered atheism through Reddit and will not stop telling you about how enlightened he is now he’s finally taken The Red Pill. AVOID.

Edgar Allen Poe

This guy dresses in all black and has never truly got over his teenage emo phase. He still has a Bullet For My Valentine poster hidden in his closet and he probably harbors a not-so-secret crush on that girl with the pigtails from NCIS.

Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov is the guy you know who wears horn rimmed glasses is very pale and tall and calls himself “stoic” even though he cries when he gets in an argument. He always has a girlfriend who’s a year or two shy of being “acceptably” younger than him. She wears baby doll dresses and listens to Lana Del Rey. You accept a date with him and he makes you watch a Woody Allen film so you leave.

JD Salinger

Has an actually very simplistic personality but will maintain until his last breath that nobody understands him.

Ernest Hemingway

Some fuckboys are defined by their clever ability to mask their disrespect (and, at base level, dislike, really) for women: see litboy, softboy. Others just can’t be bothered hiding this, and they embrace being incorrigible like it’s a badge of honor.

It’s the guy at a frat party calling girls sluts and then telling you to calm down if you complain. It’s the guy you hide from your friends because there’s no way — absolutely no way — that you can explain why you keep responding to his 3am “u up?” texts and fucking him before feeling bad about yourself. He has deep seated mommy issues. He’s Jon Hamm in Bridesmaids. He’s Hemingway.

Before you listen to some asshole telling you how beautiful the writing in The Old Man And The Sea is, read this snippet from a letter Hemingway wrote, just casually talking about how he hates women, which could easily be in a gross frat groupchat, tbh: “If you leave a woman you probably ought to shoot her. It would save enough trouble in the end even if they hanged you.”

Jack Kerouac

Chainsmokes menthols and posts poetry like this on Instagram:

RL Stein

Nah he’s alright. He wrote Goosebumps. C’mon.

Hunter S Thompson

Hunter S Thompson is the guy who tried a bit of acid at Lollapalooza in 2015, and literally has not stopped talking about it since, despite the fact he didn’t even really get high, and he thinks it was either sugar paper or, idk, really old PCP.

Over summer, he and his buddies will  hire a Cadillac Eldorado convertible and drive it “across America” (read: they go to the nearest coast and get very obviously wasted and pick up younger, also obviously-wasted women, and later they’ll write a stream of consciousness retelling of these two weeks for their lit class, calling it their Lost Weekend).

Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski built a career on hating women so just avoid at all costs. His fuckboy equivalent might actually murder you or something.

BONUS ROUND:

Honorable mentions of male authors who were in reality huge fuckboys, because, like that great John Waters saying, if you go home with a guy and he has these authors on his shelf, don’t fuck him:

Norman Mailer: Stabbed one wife with a pen-knife, punched another in the stomach when she was six months pregnant, told a class at Berkeley “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul.”

TS Eliot: Was so spooked by the fact that Virginia Woolf was better than him that he complained to Ezra Pound: “There are only a half dozen men of letters (and no women) worth printing.”

Nietzsche: In addition to being the go-to of every pseudo-intellectual guy you’ll meet at shit house parties, we can also blame Nietzsche for starting that grim “women are so mysterious and difficult to understand” myth. He literally wrote: “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy.”

@rosielanners