The Hero With A Thousand Faces remains as popular with high school English classes as it is with men in Reddit forums who think the fall of Rome is somehow illustrative of why women won’t sleep with them. All hero myths, claimed Campbell, are really the same hero myth, across time and cultures. In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book that popularized the idea of the monomyth, which says that all great stories - the large narratives by which cultures understand their origins and their heroes, from our small everyday lives to way civilizations are founded - map onto the same basic, repetitive plot. As Magic Mike XXL is the greatest journey story of our time, it would then be fair to assume that it must, too, be a retelling of this same myth. But there is a beloved idea that most stories can be distilled down to a few underlying plots, and that maybe all great, important narratives are ultimately each just a retelling of a single myth. Also, technically, Tolstoy may not have said any of this, even the first part it’s one of those quotes so widely attributed to so many different authors by people trying to make generalizations about literature that it might as well be attributed to Marilyn Monroe. Ok, so one of those is actually a secondary plotline of the greatest work of art of the 21st century, Magic Mike XXL. Tolstoy once said there are only three stories in the world: A man goes on a journey, a stranger comes to town, and Big Dick Richie’s dick is too big. This article was adapted from a talk presented at Drunk Education: A Tribute to Magic Mike XXL. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.