A clip-out coupon was featured in all the new ads:
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!
The coupons poured in and business boomed. Mibs became head of a large staff. The little two-page newsletter that early applicants received 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!”
There was a ready audience for this sort of thing, as the constantly rising circulation of the Masculinist News attested. From shower to washstand to wall urinal, the word sped that the problems of manhood were at last being recognized, that virility might become a positive term once more. Lodges of the Masculinist Society were established in every state; most large cities soon boasted fifteen or more chapters.
Rank and file enthusiasm shaped the organization from the beginning. A Cleveland chapter originated the secret grip; Houston gave the movement its set of unprintable passwords. The Montana Lodge’s Declaration of Principles became the preamble to the national Masculinist constitution: “…all men are created equal with women…that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of the opposite sex…from each according to his sperm, to each according to her ova…”
The subgroup known as the Shepherd L. Mibs League first appeared in Albany. Those who took the Albany Pledge swore to marry only women who would announce during the ceremony, “I promise to love, to honor and to obey”—with exactly that emphasis. There were many such Masculinst subgroups: The Cigar and Cuspidor Club, the Ancient Order of Love ’Em and Leave ’Em, The I-Owe-None-Of-It-to-the-Little-Woman Society.
Both leaders shared equally in the revenues from the movement, and both grew rich. Mibs alone made a small fortune out of his book, Man: The First Sex, considered the bible of Masculinism. But Pollyglow, Pollyglow’s wealth was heaped up beyond the wildest dreams of his avarice—and his avarice had been no small-time dreamer.
He was no longer in the men’s wear line; he was now in the label-manufacturing business. He made labels to be sewed on to the collars of men’s jumpers and inside the crowns of brown derbies, cigar bands for cigars, and little metal nameplates for swords. One item alone did he continue to manufacture himself. He felt an enduring and warm affection for the little fabric container bearing the legend Genuine Pollyglow Codpiece; it seemed to involve him in the activities of his fellow men everywhere, to give him a share in their successes and their failures.
But everything else was franchised.
His imprimatur came to be needed, needed and paid for, on a vast variety of articles. No manufacturer in his right business mind would dream of coming out with a new model of a sports car, a new office swivel chair or, for that matter, a new type of truss, without having Official Equipment—Masculinist Movement of America printed prominently on his product. The pull of fashion has always been that of the stampeding herd: many men who were not card-carrying Masculinists refused to buy anything that did not bear the magic phrase in the familiar blue isosceles triangle. Despite its regional connotations, all over the world, in Ceylon, in Ecuador, in Sydney, Australia, and Ibadan, Nigeria, men demanded that label and paid premium prices for it.
The much-neglected, often-dreamed-of men’s market had come of age. And P. Edward Pollyglow was its world-wide tax collector.
He ran the business and built wealth. Mibs ran the organization and built power. It took three full years for a clash to develop.
Mibs had spent his early manhood at a banquet of failure: he had learned to munch on suppressed rage, to drink goblets of thwarted fury. The swords he now strapped back on to men’s bodies were always intended for more than decorative purposes.
Swords, he wrote in the Hairy Chest, were as alien to women as beards and mustaches. A full beard, therefore, and a sweeping handlebar mustache, belonged to the guise of Masculinism. And if a man were bearded like the pard and sworded like a bravo, should he still talk in the subdued tones of the eunuch? Should he still walk in the hesitant fashion of a mere family-supporter? He should not! An armed male should act like an armed male, he should walk cockily, he should bellow, he should brawl, he should swagger.
He should also be ready to back up the swagger.
Boxing matches settled disputes at first. Then came fencing lessons and a pistol range in every Masculinist lodge. And inevitably, almost imperceptibly, the full Code Duello was revived.
The first duels were in the style of German university fraternities. Deep in the basement of their lodges, heavily masked and padded men whacked away at each other with sabers. A few scratches about the forehead which were proudly worn to work the next day, a scoring system which penalized defensive swordplay—these were discussed lightly at dinner parties, argued about in supermarkets.
Boys will be boys. Men will be men. Attendance at spectator sports began to drop sharply: didn’t that indicate something healthy was at work? Wasn’t it better for men to experience real conflict themselves than to identify with distant athletes who were only simulating battle?
Then the battles became a bit too real. When a point of true honor was involved, the masks and padding were dropped and a forest clearing at dawn substituted for the whitewashed lodge basement. An ear was chopped off, a face gashed, a chest run through. The winner would strut his victory through the streets; the loser, dying or badly wounded, would insist morosely that he had fallen on the radio aerial of his car.