William Tenn - The Masculinist Revolt

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The Masculinist Revolt

William Tenn

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 propor-tions 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 Su-preme 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 manufactur-ing 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 intrin-sically 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 mas-culine in that you

never saw a picture of women wearing them, but what was to pre-vent 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 famil-iarity and comfort to style. But who in the

world would want this unaesthetic nov-elty? 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. Ignor-ing 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:

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