Tough Guys Don't Dance is a provocative variation of Mailer's earlier novels.

Like Mikey Lovett in Barbary Shore (1951), Madden is an amnesiac trying to reconstruct his life and to remember an important event. Like Stephen Rojack in An American Dream (1965), Madden is beset by an ambivalent relationship with his wife. Both are wealthy women who dominate their men; both are women who express Mailer's concern with the fragility of the masculine ego. The women seem secure in their identities whereas the men struggle to find and maintain an identity, lacking the biological tie to life that makes women superior to men in this respect.

Mailer has made this point in many interviews and in The Prisoner of Sex (1971), suggesting there is a willed, almost contrived quality to the male identity.