The manly (and less so) men of the Texas Testosterone Festival
Stereotypes are a real time saver
Training for The Spartan 300 Challenge. (Not pictured: puke bucket.)
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Talking about abstract concepts like "manhood" and "masculinity" is an easy way to find yourself dealing in stereotypes. Usually, you're either talking about how guys who are really into touting those words are meatheads and misogynists, or you're using them to justify your own meatheaded misogyny. "Being a man" is usually equated with being a dopey, incompetent bungler in the former case, or with reading Maxim and having your after-work drinks at Hooters, in the latter.
It's probably not a huge shock, then, that here in progressive Austin, Texas Testosterone Festival creator Paul Phelps found himself turned down by sponsors that he assumed would be an easy sell. Apparently, not everyone wanted to be associated with an event that—based on the title alone—sounds like it may have squirmed its way into existence from one of Joe Francis' wet dreams. Those sponsors who didn't put rubber gloves on and hand him back his offer, however, can rest easy: The Testosterone Festival involves far fewer strippers and fart jokes and way more video games and homebrewing. While some of the fears that the event might be a bit frattish are valid—there is a bikini contest, after all—Phelps delights in tweaking the image of the Testosterone Festival as one pandering to the base stereotypes of manhood. "I wanted to do a wet T-shirt contest," he explains, "where we'd get a bunch of wet T-shirts in a bucket, and have a contest to see who could throw them the farthest." Phelps filled The A.V. Club in on the various types of dudes he hopes to attract with those sorts of calculated strategies.
Sports-obsessed dudes
Paul Phelps: ESPN has made a mint on broadcasting semi-sports. We've got a competitive-eating event called "Come See Grown Men Cry"—five minutes to see who can eat the most raw onions. We've got poker all day on Sunday. For real sports, we've got a fantasy football mock draft. We were putting it together, and I thought we'd get a couple of experts on the panel. All of the sudden, all of these experts wanted to be involved. And the fact is that all of these guys live in Texas—you wouldn't know it, because fantasy football is an online world, but the center of the fantasy-football world is in Texas. We're also doing something called the Central Texas Pro Sports Roundtable. I'm a huge fan of local pro sports—the Round Rock Express, the Austin Toros, the Austin Turfcats, the Austin Aztex. All of these teams have some really high-quality athletes, but local media barely gives them a murmur. It's hard to get emotionally involved in players who come and go like that. I understand it, but I think they deserve more attention. We're bringing in the owners and GMs of all these teams to sit and talk. I don't think they've ever had that chance before.
Comic-book and sci-fi dudes
PP: We're doing a thing with the movie 300 called The Spartan 300 Challenge. Twenty-five pull-ups, 50 box-jumps, 50 push-ups, 50 floor sweeps, 50 clean-and-press, 50 kettle bell lifts, and then 25 more pull-ups, and you've gotta do it in 20 minutes. When the festival started, I had two priorities: girls in bikinis and to see people puke. We're gonna have buckets. It's going to be great.
Gaming dudes
PP: We've got tournaments all day. Video games are almost exclusively a guy thing. We're doing Halo 3, Call Of Duty 4, Soul Caliber 4, Madden 10... It's one thing to play for fun, but we're giving people the chance to play against people who might be playing for the first time, and they can win prizes.
Indie-rock dudes
PP: No music! There will be no music at this event. I know that indie rockers hate music, because I'm part of it. We stand at shows. We just stand around moping, and we'll take that out of the way here. I love SXSW, but you wouldn't know it, because I just stand around like everybody else. I posted a thing on Twitter the other day: "Why is the Testosterone Festival better than SXSW? We have 3,000 fewer bands who suck." Music fans are a particular crowd. They hate to be advertised to. They hate to be marketed to. I'm not pushing it on them.
Dudes who are actually kind of sexist
PP: I thought getting girls in bikinis to come to the festival was going to be impossible. I've never been able to convince a good-looking woman to do anything in my life. But it turns out that beautiful women actually really like to be in bikinis. We're holding the [bikini contest], and we're also holding the Texas Fit Model Search, which is men and women competing. We'll have girls from Cindie's Lingerie. The list of girls who are going to be on the floor is too long to begin to mention them all. The event's family-friendly, but parental guidance is suggested.
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