The Silence Must End (a manifesto)

So I’m a guy, a 40ish so-called journalist and wanna-be writer, burning-out/banking on the hope that I might have a book or screenplay in my future that will land me poolside before I crash out at 50. I’ve been trying for months to sell a more or less genuine (though probably not-as-good-as-I-think) account of my decade of living and working in Italy. No one’s biting. Yeah, they like the writing, sure, my riff as a father to two Italian kids is original enough, but…well…it’s not….you know: Under the Tuscan Sun. Or what we’re really looking for, sir, is the next Elizabeth Gilbert. Well FUCK me.

So I’m reading yet-another review of the latest offering from Ms. (or is it Mrs?) Gilbert after she sold like 14 billion copies of Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, the 2006 epic story of an overeducated Betty finding fulfillment by dumping her husband and heading off to distant countries starting with the letter ‘I’ to shack up in breezy Third World hilltop villas with just enough of a view of the peasants below to make it feel authentic. (I’m guessing that’s what it’s about, because I’d never come close to actually reading such crap).

So now she’s back on the literary scene (with the movie version of Eat Pray Love set to come out this summer) with a new book of how…well, wouldn’t you know, she’s returned to civilization to marry some dude who, wouldn’t you know, is a whole lot richer than the one she dumped in order to go out and write a vapid bestseller about how fulfilling it is to dump your husband and travel the world to gather material to write a vapid bestseller about countries that start with ‘I’….. Ok, easy. Breathe. It’s just a book. Eat. Pray. Love…Fuck that. DRINK….CURSE….HATE.  That’s a goddamn book title.

But a book deal isn’t enough anymore. (Ok, depends on the advance..) No, it’s time to take a stand, to build a fucking movement. For that, though, I needed some brothers-in-arms. First call was to Josh, a former colleague in California, probably angrier than me, definitely a better writer, and also aching to hit it big in publishing without actually having to write too much. We were a good team – two snarky Jews, married, privileged, full of bitterness toward those more privileged than us. But something was missing. There was plenty of hate, but we needed a bit more drink and curse, and comedy. We needed a Brit. We needed Mike.

DrinkCurseHate is the three-man self-appointed opposition to the culture of chick lit and flicks, and all that it represents and feeds into in our twisted, post-feminist modern psyche. We are not opposed to women. We love women, and we (also) mean that in a non-lechy way. We, instead, are opposed to the merchandizing of the modern female psyche, by and to women. And the men who love them...? It is the flipside, or maybe the middle-aged sequel, to popular culture’s objectifying women and their bodies. In chick lit and chick films, and the Oprah p.r. movement that feeds it, what is objectified are women’s souls. And what’s worse, from where we sit, is that men end up paying the price!

What we are after here is nothing less than to challenge mass culture in the West, undermine the status quo of the three-decade-long gender standoff, and get ourselves a big fat movie deal. If we can pull off any one of these three (preferably the third), without getting dumped by our own wives, we’ll consider this a success. And ourselves, not just guys, but real fucking men.

-JEFF