Everyone knew that the young Congressman’s body had been so painstakingly measured and photographed before the duel that prosthesis for the three or four molars destroyed by the bullet was a relatively simple matter. But was prosthesis possible for a tongue? And could plastic surgery ever restore those round, sunny cheeks or that heartwarming adolescent grin?
According to a now-firm tradition, the last television debate of the campaign had to be held the night before Election Day. Mrs. Strunt gallantly offered to call it off. The Borax headquarters rejected her offer; tradition must not be set aside; the show must go on.
That night, every single television set in the United States was in operation, including even the old black-and-white collectors’ items. Children were called from their beds, nurses from their hospital rounds, military sentries from their outlying posts.
Clarissima Strunt spoke first. She summarized the issues of the campaign in a friendly, ingratiating manner and put the case for Masculinism before the electorate in her best homespun style.
Then the cameras swung to Congressman Borax. He did not say a word, staring at the audience sadly out of eloquent, misty eyes. He pointed at the half-inch circular hole in his right cheek. Slowly, he turned the other cheek.
There was a similar hole there. He shook his head and picked up a large photograph of his mother in a rich silver frame. One tremendous tear rolled down and splashed upon the picture.
That was all.
One did not have to be a professional pollster or politician to predict the result. Mrs. Strunt conceded by noon of Election Day. In every state, Masculinism and its protagonists were swept from office overwhelmingly defeated. Streets were littered with discarded derbies and abandoned bustles. It was suicide to be seen smoking a cigar.
Like Aaron Burr before him, Shepherd L. Mibs fled to England. He published his memoirs, married an earl’s daughter, and had five children by her. His oldest son, a biologist, became moderately famous as the discoverer of a cure for athlete’s foot in frogs—a disease that once threatened to wipe out the entire French frozen-frogs-legs industry.
Pollyglow carefully stayed out of the public eye until the day of his death. He was buried, as his will requested, in a giant codpiece. His funeral was the occasion for long, illustrated newspaper articles reviewing the rise and fall of the movement he had founded.
And Henry Dorselblad disappeared before a veritable avalanche of infuriated women which screamed down upon Masculinist headquarters. His body was not found in the debris, thus giving rise to many legends. Some said that he was impaled on the points of countless umbrellas wielded by outraged American motherhood. Some said that he escaped in the disguise of a scrubwoman and would return one day to lead resurgent hordes of derby and cigar. To this date, however, he has not.
Elvis P. Borax, as everyone knows, served two terms as the most silent President since Calvin Coolidge and retired to go into the wholesale flower business in Miami.
It was almost as if Masculinism had never been. If we discount the beery groups of men who, at the end of a party, nostalgically sing the old songs and call out the old heroic rallying cries to each other, we have today very few mementos of the great convulsion.
One of them is the codpiece.
The codpiece has survived as a part of modern male costume. In motion, it has a rhythmic wave that reminds many women of a sternly shaken forefinger, warning them that men, at the last, can only be pushed so far and no farther. For men, the codpiece is still a flag, now a flag of truce perhaps, but it flutters in a war that goes on and on.
Afterword
This is what I wrote about “The Masculinist Revolt” when it was published in my collection, The Wooden Star (1968):
I have lost one agent and several friends over this story. A woman I had up to then respected told me, “This castration-nightmare is for a psychiatrist, not an editor”; and a male friend of many years put the story down with tears in his eyes, saying, “You’ve written the manifesto. The statement of principles for all the guys in the world.” My intention was neither castration-nightmare nor ringing manifesto; it was satiric, very gently but encompassingly satiric. I may have failed.
1961, the year in which the story was written, was well before the hippies created a blur between the sexes on matters of clothing and hair styles. The first few editors who saw the piece felt that 1990 was a bit too early for such major changes as I described. My own feeling now is that I was subliminally aware of rapidly shifting attitudes toward sexual differentiation in our society, but that what I noticed as an anticipatory tremor was actually the first rock-slide of the total cataclysm.
I would like to add now (2001) these observations: Apparently I picked the wrong sex, but I was right about the nuttiness either of the two could develop as it wriggled in the throes of gender-political militancy. I further thought that I clearly portrayed in my male leads, Old Pep, Old Shep, and Hellfire Henry, three different kinds of utter failures as men, but I have been assured—by the equivalents of Germaine Greers and Catherine MacKinnons in my own circle—that these characters are to most women the most typically typical of men. So what do I know.
I was between agents at the time I wrote this—because my then agent, among the top ones in New York at the time, told me she’d rather not represent me if I insisted on writing such vicious trash. So I sent it on my own to A.C. Spectorsky (he was, I had discovered, called Old Spec by his subordinates!), the editorial director of Playboy to whom I had been introduced by the minstrel-cartoonist Shel Silverstein. Spectorsky was kind enough to tell me at the time of the introduction that he had so much enjoyed my story “Down Among the Dead Men,” that he had memorized whole passages of it. He kept “The Masculinist Revolt” on his desk for a year and a half, calling me up from time to time to tell me that he was thinking of asking me to have it expanded so that he could devote an entire issue to it, a la The New Yorker and John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
I almost went mad during this time; I priced Mercedes-Benzes up and down the island of Manhattan.
Finally, some assistant editor or other (or, possibly Hugh Hefner himself) happened to read the story and went in to Spectorsky with the comment that the piece was a ringing satire on the Playboy empire. The story was bounced back at me by the next post.
All right, maybe it’s not the stuff of immortality, but I still think it’s pretty good and pretty funny. And, for readers who are generous and will tell me they liked it, I have this to say:
Blame it on E.B. White. His short piece, “The Supremacy of Uruguay,” is ultimately responsible for most of my stories of this type. It showed me that you didn’t need individual characters prancing about if you saw a story as a kind of pseudo-history—something told at a remove by a reasonably objective historian. It occurred to me, immediately upon reading “The Supremacy of Uruguay,” that the pseudo-history belonged above all in the literature of science fiction. And then, later, of course, I encountered Olaf Stapledon’s novels and was privileged to see how a really great science-fiction writer managed the form.
These have been a bunch of miscellaneous remarks. But just one more. Henry W. Sams, the great English Department head at Penn State, gave me a job, a teaching job, the only job I’ve ever liked better than writing. He actually hired me as a professor, after he read two stories of mine, “My Mother Was a Witch” and “The Masculinist Revolt,” despite the fact that I didn’t have the necessary doctorate.