Tucker Max thinks that “all women are whores” and that “fat girls aren’t real people” — and those are some of his family-friendlier observations. So why do so many women love him?

Max and his growing audience share an unabashed focus on three basic adolescent obsessions: bodily functions, drinking toxic amounts of booze, and “scoring.” The women in his stories are insulted, tricked, coerced, traded, and discarded. One conquest is vomited on and videotaped without her consent.

Max is now on a 31-city film tour, attracting sold-out crowds at every location, as he does on college campuses nationwide. And according to Max, his audiences are nearly always at least half female.

This is Max’s magic trick: The Amazing Max Mistreats Women and Makes Them Love Him For It. It’s also his ultimate defense against critics: “I am still waiting for a protester to answer the question, ‘If Tucker hates women, why does he have so many female fans? Why is half of each screening women?’”

It’s a good question. I’m a woman who likes both sex and a good laugh, and I find Max’s antics revolting. But I’m hardly his target demographic. Max girls, mostly college age, are a generation raised on abstinence-only education in schools and unlimited free porn online. They are the legacy of federal initiatives in the last decade that poured more than a billion dollars into programs willing to teach girls only to “just say no.”

Girls of this generation understand that their “no means no,” but they’ve received little guidance on what to expect if they say yes. At the same time, up to 90 percent of today’s 8- to 16-year-old kids have viewed pornography online. As a result, once they’ve rejected virginity as a lifestyle, many behave as if the only other option is to act like a porn star. Max and his male fans are happy to direct the show.

Meanwhile, on the college campuses where many of Max’s fans live, rape has reached the level of a full-on crisis. Conservative estimates predict that more than 150,000 young women will be raped on American campuses this academic year, and university sexual-assault prevention efforts are losing funding nationwide.

His female fans feel rebellious because he shocks their parents and preachers. In that way, the Max phenomenon is no different from any other generation’s rebellion: Every generation thinks it invented sex. What’s disturbing about this version is its unapologetic misogyny, bolstered by a twisted, victim-blaming tautology. Max is fond of telling women that “men will treat you the way you let them” — in other words, if you’ve been used or assaulted, you must have done something to invite that behavior.

More troubling than that, though, is that Max’s media empire is built on the enthusiastic participation of thousands of swooning fangirls, all competing for the title of Most Thoroughly Objectified and imagining that the crown brings with it some kind of liberation.

Friedman is the editor of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. A version of this commentary originally appeared in the Washington Post.