William Tenn - The Masculinist Revolt

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 masculin ist? ’ ” the specialist suggested. “It kind 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:

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.”