The Masculinist Revolt Read online

  The Masculinist Revolt

  William Tenn

  Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novelette in 1966.

  The Masculinist Revolt

  by William Tenn

  I

  The Coming of the Codpiece

  Historians of the period between 1990 and 2015 disagree violently on the causes of the Masculinist Revolt. Some see it as a sexual earthquake of nationwide proportions that was long overdue. Others contend that an elderly bachelor founded the Movement only to save himself from bankruptcy and saw it turn into a terrifying monster that swallowed him alive.

  This P. Edward Pollyglow—fondly nicknamed “Old Pep” by his followers—was the last of a family distinguished for generations in the men’s wear manufacturing line. Pollyglow’s factory produced only one item, men’s all-purpose jumpers, and had always operated at full capacity—up to the moment the Interchangeable Style came in. Then, abruptly, overnight it seemed, there was no longer a market for purely male apparel.

  He refused to admit that he and all of his machinery had become obsolete as the result of a simple change in fashion. What if the Interchangeable Style ruled out all sexual differentiation? “Try to make us swallow that!” he cackled at first. “Just try!”

  But the red ink on his ledgers proved that his countrymen, however unhappily, were swallowing it.

  Pollyglow began to spend long hours brooding at home instead of sitting nervously in his idle office. Chiefly he brooded on the pushing-around men had taken from women all through the twentieth century. Men had once been proud creatures; they had asserted themselves; they had enjoyed a high rank in human society. What had happened?

  Most of their troubles could be traced to a development that occurred shortly before World War I, he decided. “Man-tailoring,” the first identifiable villain.

  When used in connection with women’s clothes, “man-tailoring” implied that certain tweed skirts and cloth coats featured unusually meticulous workmanship. Its vogue was followed by the imitative patterns: slacks for trousers, blouses for shirts, essentially male garments which had been frilled here and furbelowed there and given new, feminine names. The “his-and-hers” fashions came next; they were universal by 1991.

  Meanwhile, women kept gaining prestige and political power. The F.E.P.C. started policing discriminatory employment practices in any way based upon sex. A Supreme Court decision (Mrs. Staub’s Employment Agency for Lady Athletes v. The New York State Boxing Commission) enunciated the law in Justice Emmeline Craggly’s historic words: “Sex is a private, internal matter and ends at the individual’s skin. From the skin outwards, in family chores, job opportunities, or even clothing, the sexes must be considered legally interchangeable in all respects save one. That one is the traditional duty of the male to support his family to the limit of his physical powers—the fixed cornerstone of all civilized existence.”

  Two months later, the Interchangeable Style appeared at the Paris openings.

  It appeared, of course, as a version of the all-purpose jumper, a kind of short-sleeved tunic worn everywhere at that time. But the men’s type and the women’s type were now fused into a single Interchangeable garment.

  That fusion was wrecking Pollyglow’s business. Without some degree of maleness in dress, the workshop that had descended to him through a long line of manufacturing ancestors unquestionably had to go on the auctioneer’s block.

  He became increasingly desperate, increasingly bitter.

  One night, he sat down to study the costumes of bygone eras. Which were intrinsically and flatteringly virile—so virile that no woman would dare force her way into them?

  Men’s styles in the late nineteenth century, for example. They were certainly masculine in that you never saw a picture of women wearing them, but what was to prevent the modern female from doing so if she chose? And they were far too heavy and clumsy for the gentle, made-to-order climates of today’s world.

  Back went Pollyglow, century by century, shaking his head and straining his eyes over ancient, fuzzy woodcuts. Not this, no, nor that. He was morosely examining pictures of knights in armor and trying to imagine a mailed shirt with a zipper up the back, when he leaned away wearily and noticed a fifteenth-century portrait lying among the pile of rejects at his feet.

  This was the moment when Masculinism began.

  Several of the other drawings had slid across the portrait, obscuring most of it. The tight-fitting hose over which Pollyglow had bitten his dry old lips negatively—these were barely visible. But between them, in emphatic, distinctive bulge, between them—

  The codpiece!

  This little bag which had once been worn on the front of the hose or breeches—how easily it could be added to a man’s jumper! It was unquestionably, definitively male: any woman could wear it, of course, but on her clothing it would be merely a useless appendage, nay, worse than that, it would be an empty mockery.

  He worked all night, roughing out drawings for his designers. In bed at last, and exhausted, he was still bubbling with so much enthusiasm that he forgot about sleep and hitched his aching shoulder blades up against the headboard. Visions of codpieces, millions of them, all hanging from Pollyglow Men’s Jumpers, danced and swung and undulated in his head as he stared into the darkness.

  But the wholesalers refused the new garment. The old Pollyglow Jumper—yes: there were still a few conservative, fuddy-duddy men around who preferred familiarity and comfort to style. But who in the world would want this unaesthetic novelty? Why it flew in the very face of the modern doctrine of interchangeable sexes!

  His salesmen learned not to use that as an excuse for failure. “Separateness!” he would urge them as they slumped back into the office. “Differentness! You’ve got to sell them on separateness and differentness! It’s our only hope—it’s the hope of the world!”

  Pollyglow almost forgot the moribund state of his business, suffocating for lack of sales. He wanted to save the world. He shook with the force of his revelation: he had come bearing a codpiece and no one would have it. They must—for their own good.

  He borrowed heavily and embarked upon a modest advertising campaign. Ignoring the more expensive, general-circulation media, he concentrated his budget in areas of entertainment aimed exclusively at men. His ads appeared in high-rated television shows of the day, soap operas like “The Senator’s Husband,” and in the more popular men’s magazines—Cowboy Confession Stories and Scandals of World War I Flying Aces.

  The ads were essentially the same, whether they were one-pagers in color or sixty-second commercials. You saw a hefty, husky man with a go-to-hell expression on his face. He was smoking a big, black cigar and wore a brown derby cocked carelessly on the side of his head. And he was dressed in a Pollyglow Men’s Jumper from the front of which there was suspended a huge codpiece in green or yellow or bright, bright red.

  Originally, the text consisted of five emphatic lines:

  MEN ARE DIFFERENT FROM WOMEN!

  Dress differently!

  Dress masculine!

  Wear Pollyglow Men’s Jumpers

  With the Special Pollyglow Codpiece!

  Early in the campaign, however, a market research specialist employed by Pollyglow’s advertising agency pointed out that the word “masculine” had acquired unfortunate connotations in the last few decades. Tons of literature, sociological and psychological, on the subject of overcompensation, or too-overt maleness, had resulted in “masculine” being equated with “homosexuality” in people’s minds.

  These days, the specialist said, if you told someone he was masculine, you left him with the impression that you had called him a fairy. “How about saying, ‘Dress masculinist?’ ” the specialist suggested. “It k
ind of softens the blow.”

  Dubiously, Pollyglow experimented with the changed wording in a single ad. He found the new expression unsavory and flat. So he added another line in an attempt to give “masculinist” just a little more punch. The final ad read:

  MEN ARE DIFFERENT FROM WOMEN!

  Dress differently!

  Dress masculinist!

  Wear Pollyglow Men’s Jumpers

  With the Special Pollyglow Codpiece!

  (And join the masculinist club!)

  That ad pulled. It pulled beyond Pollyglow’s wildest expectations.

  Thousands upon thousands of queries rolled in from all over the country, from abroad, even from the Soviet Union and Red China, Where can I get a Pollyglow Men’s Jumper with the Special Pollyglow Codpiece? How do I join the masculinist club? What are the rules and regulations of masculinism? How much are the dues?

  Wholesalers, besieged by customers yearning for a jumper with a codpiece in contrasting color, turned to Pollyglow’s astonished salesmen and shrieked out huge orders. Ten gross, fifty gross, a hundred gross. And immediately—if at all possible!

  P. Edward Pollyglow was back in business. He produced and produced and produced, he sold and sold and sold. He shrugged off all the queries about the masculinist club as an amusing sidelight on the advertising business. It had only been mentioned as a fashion inducement—that there was some sort of in-group which you joined upon donning a codpiece.

  Two factors conspired to make him think more closely about it: the competition and Shepherd L. Mibs.

  After one startled glance at Pollyglow’s new clothing empire, every other manufacturer began making jumpers equipped with codpieces. They admitted that Pollyglow had single-handedly reversed a fundamental trend in the men’s wear field, that the codpiece was back with a vengeance and back to stay—but why did it have to be only the Pollyglow Codpiece? Why not the Ramsbottom Codpiece or the Hercules Codpiece or the Bangaclang Codpiece?

  And since many of them had larger production facilities and bigger advertising budgets, the answer to their question made Pollyglow reflect sadly on the woeful rewards of a Columbus. His one chance was to emphasize the unique nature of the Pollyglow Codpiece.

  It was at this crucial period that he met Shepherd Leonidas Mibs.

  Mibs—“Old Shep” he was called by those who came to follow his philosophical leadership—was the second of the great triumvirs of Masculinism. He was a peculiar, restless man who had wandered about the country and from occupation to occupation, searching for a place in society. All-around college athlete, sometime unsuccessful prizefighter and starving hobo, big-game hunter and coffee-shop poet, occasional short-order cook, occasional gigolo—he had been everything but a photographer’s model. And that he became when his fierce, crooked face—knocked permanently out of line by the nightstick of a Pittsburgh policeman—attracted the attention of Pollyglow’s advertising agency.

  His picture was used in one of the ads. It was not any more conspicuously successful than the others; and he was dropped at the request of the photographer who had been annoyed by Mibs’s insistence that a sword should be added to the costume of derby, codpiece, and cigar.

  Mibs knew he was right. He became a pest, returning to the agency day after day and attempting to persuade anyone at all that a sword should be worn in the Pollyglow ads, a long, long sword, the bigger and heavier the better. “Sword man is here,” the receptionist would flash inside, and “My God, tell him I’m not back from lunch yet,” the Art Director would whisper over the intercom.

  Having nothing else to do, Mibs spent long hours on the heavily upholstered couch in the outer office. He studied the ads in the Pollyglow campaign, examining each one over and over again. He scribbled pages of comments in a little black notebook. He came to be accepted and ignored as so much reception-room furniture.

  But Pollyglow gave him full attention. Arriving one day to discuss a new campaign with his account executive—a campaign to stress the very special qualities of the Pollyglow Codpiece, for which, under no circumstances, should a substitute ever be accepted—he began a conversation with the strange, ugly, earnest young man. “You can tell that account executive to go to hell,” Pollyglow told the receptionist as they went off to a restaurant. “I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.”

  The sword was a good idea, he felt, a damn good idea. Put it in the ad. But he was much more interested in certain of the thoughts developed at such elaborate length in Mibs’s little black notebook.

  If one phrase about a masculinist club had made the ad so effective, Mibs asked, why not exploit that phrase? A great and crying need had evidently been touched. “It’s like this. When the old-time saloon disappeared, men had no place to get away from women but the barber shop. Now, with the goddamn Interchangeable Haircut, even that out’s been taken away. All a guy’s got left is the men’s room, and they’re working on that, I’ll bet they’re working on that!”

  Pollyglow sipped at his glass of hot milk and nodded. “You think a masculinist club would fill a gap in their lives? An element of exclusiveness, say, like the English private club for gentlemen?”

  “Hell, no! They want something exclusive, all right—something that will exclude women—but not like a private club one damn bit. Everything these days is telling them that they’re nobody special, they’re just people. There are men people and women people—and what’s the difference anyway? They want something that does what the codpiece does, that tells them they’re not people, they’re men! Straight down-the-line, two-fisted, let’s-stand-up-and-be-counted men! A place where they can get away from the crap that’s being thrown at them all the time: the women-maybe-are-the-superior-sex crap, the women-outlive-them-and-outown-them crap, the a-real-man-has-no-need-to-act-masculine crap—all that crap.”

  His eloquence was so impressive and compelling that Pollyglow had let his hot milk grow cold. He ordered a refill and another cup of coffee for Mibs. “A club,” he mused, “where the only requirement for membership would be manhood.”

  “You still don’t get it.” Mibs picked up the steaming coffee and drank it down in one tremendous swallow. He leaned forward, his eyes glittering. “Not just a club—a movement. A movement righting for men’s rights, carrying on propaganda against the way our divorce laws are set up, publishing books that build up all the good things about being a man. A movement with newspapers and songs and slogans. Slogans like ’The Only Fatherland for a Man is Masculinity.’ And ’Male Men of the World Unite—You Have Nothing to Gain but Your Balls!’ See? A movement.”

  “Yes, a movement!” Pollyglow babbled, seeing indeed. “A movement with an official uniform—the Pollyglow Codpiece! And perhaps different codpieces for different—for different, well—”

  “For different ranks in the movement,” Mibs finished. “That’s a hell of a good idea! Say green for Initiate. Red for Full-Blooded Male. Blue for First-Class Man. And white, we’d keep white for the highest rank of all—Superman. And, listen, here’s another idea.”

  But Pollyglow listened no longer. He sat back in his chair, a pure and pious light suffusing his gray, sunken face. “None genuine unless it’s official,” he whispered. “None official unless stamped Genuine Pollyglow Codpiece, copyright and pat. pending.”

  Masculinist annals were to describe this luncheon as the Longchamps Entente. Later that historic day, Pollyglow’s lawyer drew up a contract making Shepherd L. Mibs Director of Public Relations for the Pollyglow Enterprises.

  A clip-out coupon was featured in all the new ads:

  WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MASCULINISM?

  WANT TO JOIN THE MASCULINIST CLUB?

  Just fill out this coupon and mail it to the address below. Absolutely no charge and no obligation—just lots of free literature and information on this exciting new movement!

  FOR MEN ONLY!

  The coupons poured in and business boomed. Mibs became head of a large staff. The little two-page newsletter that early applicants rec
eived quickly became a twenty-page weekly, the Masculinist News. In turn, it spawned a monthly full-color magazine, the Hairy Chest, and a wildly popular television program, “The Bull Session.”

  In every issue of the Masculinist News, Pollyglow’s slogan, “Men Are Different from Women,” shared the top of the front page with Mibs’s “Men Are as Good as Women.” The upper left-hand corner displayed a cut of Pollyglow, “Our Founding Father—Old Pep,” and under that ran the front-page editorial, “Straight Talk from Old Shep.”

  A cartoon might accompany the editorial. A truculent man wearing a rooster comb marched into cowering masses of hippy, busty women. Caption: “The Cock of the Walk.” Or, more didactically, hundreds of tiny children around a man who was naked except for a huge codpiece. Across the codpiece, in execrable but highly patriotic Latin, the words E Unus Pluribum—and a translation for those who needed it, “Out of the one, many.”

  Frequently, a contemporary note was struck. A man executed for murdering his sweetheart would be depicted, a bloody axe in his hands, between drawings of Nathan Hale being hanged and Lincoln striking off the chains of slavery. There was a true tabloid’s contempt for the rights or wrongs of a case. If a man was involved, the motto ran, he was automatically on the side of the angels.

  “Straight Talk from Old Shep” exhorted and called to action in a style reminiscent of a football dressing room between halves. “Men are a lost sex in America,” it would intone, “because men are being lost, lost and mislaid, in the country as a whole. Everything nowadays is designed to sap their confidence and lessen their stature. Who wouldn’t rather be strong than limp, hard than soft? Stand up for yourselves, men of America, stand up high!”