The Masculinist Revolt

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.

(Of course, I also didn’t have—and Henry knew it at the time he put me in front of a university classroom—either a Master’s degree or a Bachelor’s. I did have, as my brother Morton, a real professor, is quick to point out, a high-school graduation certificate and an honorable discharge from the Army.)

Henry Sams, bless him, was the only member of the Establishment I have known who was in permanent revolt against the Establishment.

Written 1961/Published 1965