The Womanization of America

As a man who has been verbally clubbed and clobbered for talking out vigorously against anything that seems to me wrong with our national life, I see no reason to pull any punches in what follows. I do feel, though, that for Playboy readers, certain cautionary and qualifying words are required. What I am about to describe is a historical process and its current manifestations. In large part, I'll be talking about the men of my generation -- some 15 years older than most of the readers of this magazine. In large part, I'll be talking about what happened to a lot of them -- and a lot of the women in their lives. But not all of either. Gladly I concede that there are millions of my generation, both men and women, for whom what I say is, blessedly, not true. Happily. I note that the kind of alert and vigorous young men who will read me here, and who read this magazine, are largely immunized against much of the social sickness I'll describe -- and so are lots of the girls in their lives.

The facts remain, though. Enough men have abnegated and enough women have won to dominance so that a broad picture of our national life, especially as it's reflected in middle-class marriage (which is the dominant mode of existence in our society) shows it to be in the sad condition I analyze herewith, a deadly distaff encroachment of what started as feminism and matured into wanton womanization.

On some not very distant day I expect to see a farmer riding a pastel tractor and wearing a matching playsuit. And as he ploughs, I'll realize with horror it's not a contour job; he'll be fixing his fields so the crops will match an "over-all design-feeling" incorporated in his home by the little woman. If, anywhere, he runs his furrows straight, it will not be because of level land, but owing to the fact that the drapes on the windows overlooking that area are "busy" and Mrs. Farmer wants a view that will counteract them.

Farfetched? Not so very. Functional reality is so softened and maleness so subdued that the only inanimate object I can think of offhand which still has masculine integrity is the freight car, and even some of these are being glamorized. I would have added the steam roller, but today on the way to my office I passed one which our local Department of Streets -- doubtless bowing to some woman's club -- had transformed from factory yellow to chartreuse and beige.

This calamity has befallen us in a mere quarter century. Before that the male aura dominated a society dreamed up by males, by males pioneered, made free and kept united by males -- a culture still sustained by males in the main, but men whose sweating effort nowadays lops a decade off their lives that the damsels do not sacrifice. The reason man now dies young is evident: what's life without manhood worth to him? He struggles against the taffeta tide -- and, failing, throws in the sponge at 50 or so.

That grievous, gruesome circumstance commenced with industrialization and was completed by feminism. Consider the latter. Our ladies demanded equal rights before the law, including the right to vote. "Equality" was their slogan -- and it sounded just. "Emancipation" was another rallying cry. All men of good conscience felt that if the ladies truly desired to live unfettered, like themselves, everybody would have more fun. The expressed feminist ideal of "free and equal partnership" sounded fine. American men were somewhat hampered even a quarter century ago by Puritanism and Victorianism. It drove them underground. But they assumed the ladies' lust for liberty would restore their proud, male being so they could openly associate with females once again in open pride of their sex, its classic nature, demands, fantasies and lusty amenability.

It didn't work out that way. The ladies won the legal advantages of equality -- and kept the social advantages of their protected position on the pedestal. To them, equality meant the tyrant's throne. Some alert men perceived it even before Prohibition ended.

I myself recall the transition as experienced from that outpost of fad and fashion, Manhattan in the mid-Twenties. Saloons had been abolished; speakeasies had replaced them. The fresh-freed fair sex thereupon switched from nostrums for female complaint (which were laced with grain alcohol) to the honest beverage. But the beverage was not kept honest. Prior to those days, the thirsting male consumed a martini, manhattan or bronx -- if he did not prefer straight whiskey with or without a beer chaser. After a few dozen months of Prohibition, however, speakeasy waiters would hand you an alphabetical list of cocktails beginning with apricot ambrosia and running with through orange blossom and pink lady eventually to zombie.

America thereafter annually consumed enough grenadine and syrup to dye Manhattan pink and flood its streets with sweet stickum. Drink became feminine -- alcoholic substances with the hues and flavors of cake frosting. To say nothing of the fruit that was wasted in it.

Simultaneously, the speakeasies, now femme-thick, lost all resemblance to historic male drinking places. Little Chinesered tables you could tip over with a mere emphatic gesture were placed in front of banquettes upholstered in the hides of African beasts. Illumination was reduced to tearoom level.

If drinks began to taste like perfume, the interior of the speaks began to resemble the inside of jewel boxes. And the floor show was added. Hitherto, a large and candid painted nude above the bar had satisfied male esthetic requirements for drinking establishments. If the man wished to view the form divine itself, he could barge on to burlesque. If he wished for more than the motile vision -- something palpable, for delight designed -- there was always a sumptuous mansion of good, pre-feminized design, usually Victorian, called Gertie's, Miz' Lee's or Polly's.

I suppose the floor show (a scaleddown version of burlesque) entered the speakeasy with the lady customers because, at first, they wanted to show they were "equal" to men. And the ladies thought "equal" meant "identical" in the days before they decided "equal" meant "in full charge." And I further suppose that stripping, the close-cozy chorus, and other once-solely-male enjoyments, are now accepted as America's most popular coeducational entertainment because the ladies, now in charge, can sit there with a sharp eye on their husbands, heartmates and other slaves.

At any rate, by the time Prohibition ended, the American male had lost his authority as symbolized by the places where he drank. Sawdust vanished and the stand-up bar was rare; the new saloons were like tea shoppes, with modernistic decor. The jukebox made this change possible even in the sleaziest gin mill, where it was often the only light-source as well as the continual fount of ultra-sentimental, she-oriented song. By then, the one remaining masculine redoubt was a man's club.

For this, American males struggled earnestly. There even are, still, here and there, men's clubs for men and only men -- places where the hunted, haunted masculine sex can actually be sure that no woman can get nearer than a phone call. There are even a few men's clubs where stewards will tell women, telephoning as if their very voices were warrants for arrest, that Mr. So-and-so is not at the Dragon Club -- when he's sitting right there sipping a bourbon and water.

But those clubs are under siege. One by one the last guerilla strongholds fall. I've watched it happen to my clubs. In some, we began to have Ladies Nights. We had previously foregathered to drink, eat, lie, trade stories, play poker and bridge -- and, not incidentally, be enough alone among ourselves to renew and give zest to our joy in the opposite sex. Often, we entered a club to establish a rock-solid alibi for an evening. An importunate female would be stalled for hours by any member who picked up the phone: "He's around here somewhere -- just saw him." But we now hold dances instead of Stag Nights. This the women have done, unaware (or uncaring) that compulsory consorting daunts the ardor of even the most concupiscent male.

The sacred male purlieu was also compromised by the addition of a Ladies' Dining Room. Pretty soon, the ladies had got a door cut through from there, somehow -- and were wandering about the billiard rooms, the bars, the steam baths. Nor were these interlopers panting beauties in search of mates, you may be sure. The beauties -- ageless adepts at pleasuring man, stayed away; the battle axes moved in. In all such luckless clubs, the traditional decor soon vanished -- the big stone fireplaces, the vast, dim, peaceful libraries and the heavy, wonderful chairs. Those chairs furnished not merely comfort but proof of man's inner sense of male importance, male dignity, majestic function and peculiar prowess. All that was soon replaced by bright chintzes and magazine racks. The oil paintings of the founders went, too. The inspiration of their cupmanship and florid philandering went with the canvases. In their places, the invading ladies hung the pastel works of whatever nitwitted, flimsy painter held their awe, in Indianapolis or Birmingham, that year. The men paid, of course, for this redecoration of their clubs.

Women had always been allowed their sanctuaries. A wife whose husband could afford it provided her with a boudoir. Even the Moguls invaded but one or two apartments of the hundreds in their harems, on a given evening. Men have never tried, so far as I am aware, to crash sewing circles or any of the myriad federated cultural clubs of American women. But it never occurred to America's females that they were outrageously abusing their new "equality" as they probed, cajoled, pushed and heckled their way into every private male domain -- while keeping their own sundry privacies inviolate.

They had said they wanted to be partners (continued on page 77) Womanization (continued from page 52) with their males, and to "share everything." That turned out to mean that the ladies wanted to invade everything masculine, emasculate it, cover it with dimity, occupy it forever -- and police it.

I suppose the broaching of the saloon and the men's club truly meant that everything was in jeopardy. For -- in his favorite places for retreat, solitude or drinking and converse -- the American male gave expression to that aspect of his true self which, elsewhere, was culturally taboo. Current taboo had already driven him to cover, as I've said; but while he had abundant cover, he and his fellow men could mutually revive that integrity which Victorian prissiness, superimposed on Puritanism, elsewhere sabotaged. He could talk and think of himself as a sportsman, a lover, an adventurer, a being of intellect, passion, erudition, philosophical wisdom, valor and sensitivity. In sanctuary he could openly acknowledge that his true, male feelings did not, in his opinion, make of him the beast that 19th Century Western Society claimed he was. He could, furthermore, discuss females as other than the virginal, virtuous, timid, pure, passionless images that constituted the going female ideal. Indeed, if he was tied to such a saintly acting, sex-terrified spouse (as millions were, and are), he could obtain in his redoubts the telephone numbers of certain young ladies who had not been emotionally mouse-trapped by current "morality" -- ladies who were especially joyous over their femininity when aided in its proper celebration by male ardor.

Alas! It is not so possible or easy to obtain and employ such telephone numbers now. The little woman sits at the clubman's elbow, bending hers in chummy unison. She sits, also, on his coattails.

The American home rapidly followed the nihilist trend. It was, I agree, improved -- in some ways. But those domestic improvements which reduce labor -- machines that do dishes, dispose of refuse, cook automatically, ventilate, heat, vacuum-clean, air-condition, mow lawns, harrow gardens, preserve food and so on -- were, all of them, invented, perfected, manufactured and distributed by males.

The rest of home design fell into the hands of women and decorators who were women or, when not, usually males in form only -- males emotionally so identified with the opposite sex they could rout reluctant husbands because their very travesty made men uncomfortable. Sundry special magazines took up the cause. They were edited by women and by women-identified males (also, in a few cases, by normal men trying to make an honest living but unaware they were betraying their sex). These homemaking magazines brought forth a welter of counsel on how to convert normal residences into she-warrens. Special jargon was invented for the new, all-distaff decor. Special articles were published which disclosed in the simplest terms every form of psychological treachery whereby a woman could force a man to assent in the emasculation of his home -- if not himself.

Where once man had had a den, maybe a library, a cellar poolroom, his own dressing room -- and good, substantial floors and walls to protect his privacy -- he now found himself in a split-level pastel creation with "rooms" often "created" by screens his wife moved about as often as she changed her flower arrangements. He thereafter hardly ever knew where he was, in his own home.

All he knew was that the beloved old place now looked like a candy box. Every indirect-lighted square foot was now vaguely identifiable as part kitchen, boudoir and nursery -- with not even an attic for his skis, and his humidor gone with the hunting prints. Indeed, the cost of the new abode prohibited his previous indoor and outdoor pleasures: overtime work, required to meet the mortgage on the remodeled house, kept him at the office till the late train brought him home in darkness -- too weary for fun.

What "his" woman sought in this modernistic, kaleidoscope-hued domain was definitely not convenience, or comfort, from his point of view, but adulation from other women. Yet -- the male found -- other women, though invariably at first ecstatic over the "Japanesie" (a common decorator's word) effect of the new home, invariably also had additional suggestions. "How utterly dreamy, darling!" they would murmur, eyeing the undersized, overstuffed, unsittable furnishings and feeling the turquoise drapes (because of which the old rug had to be thrown out and the new one re-dyed to match exactly). "How divine!" they'd cry -- and then add, "But -- you must get one of those giant poufs for your love-seat-coffee-table corner! I saw one at Winkle and Waterhouse today! Eight feet in diameter -- and only three hundred and ninety-five dollars! Uncovered, of course! But they also have some really celestial mauve Italian silk that would go with your swags! Only eighteen dollars a yard! ..."

The American home, in short, is becoming a boudoir-kitchen-nursery, dreamed up by women, for women, and as if males did not exist as males. Some homes, like some women, may be predominately cute -- even "cuddly," others may reflect their she-owners' softness and vagueness; a house may be the gingham type -- spic and span, with painted aluminum furniture; it may also be a home with a gaudy living room bar, brilliant drapes, poufs big enough to lie on and ankle-deep rugs -- resembling the parlor of a lavish brothel. But, always, it is female. It seldom says, "A man and woman live here," or, "A man occupies half this place." Not any more.

And here a yet more somber word is indicated. Time was when most of the world's beauty in all the arts was the work and the joy of men. Indeed, that authority once vested in our sex rested finally upon the fact that men -- when they were men -- were expected to know and appreciate art, to admire and comprehend science, to revere, seek and achieve learning, and wisdom, also. The intellectual and esthetic attainments of genus homo historically have been male endeavors and triumphs. In the days of Egypt, Rome, Greece, Carthage, Alexandria -- and in Europe down to modern times -- these were regarded as masculine concerns, as evidence of maleness equal to or surpassing man's deeds in sports, war, merchandising and business. Philosophy and its branches -- along with the arts -- had the highest regard of most men. Poets were as renowned as politicians, generals or discus-throwers. Merchants usually fell far below in the classic list of public esteem. Education was esteemed above riches. "Authority" was male because the male used his brain to become the "author" of art, music, literature, science, government, philosophy, military campaigns.

Behold now, the average contemporary American male, turning on his own kind as he squirms in the female net. Too often, to him, the arts are sissy. A serious discussion of color values and form relationships would be beyond his compass -- something he deemed for the birds, for eggheads, for women. As for literature, he does not read, on the average, one good, new book a year. That is one area in which "male authority" perished.

Masculine authority is vested in the male brain, intellect, mind, spirit, soul and gonads -- and in his esthetic, intense emotions. When all those aspects of maleness are defaulted or ridiculed by the captive male majority -- their sex has lost its meaning. So America's current anti-intellectualism, together with its antisexuality, is evidence of a general male emasculation both of function and mind.

But there are still a few American women -- some of them young and not yet married -- who have the innate respect for manhood shown whenever they meet an example worthy of respect. That lovely quality, complimented by a proper appreciation of femininity by the male, alone gives to relations of the two sexes their intended meanings, their glamor, their excitements, their love. Most American women, by now, however, are as confused about masculinity as the addled men. Why not? Most of the men they see are -- first of all -- security-seekers, in a world where security doesn't exist and would not be desirable if it could be created. Most American husbands are, or soon become, flabby parodies of the physical male. Nearly all lack -- even sneer at -- those qualities of body and spirit wherein true masculinity has its being. This, too, women have done to them.

Even in the appreciation of masculine sports, the women get ahead. They go to the prize fights now. Many a woman, like one I know who irritably began to accompany her husband to the ball games has, in her greater leisure, become more of an "authority" than he on his favorite sport. (And, of course, whenever he talks baseball now -- even with male friends at home -- his wife's chief delight is to correct his misstatements or to amplify his claims. She sits on her chair-edge -- in fact -- waiting to surpass him.)

I know some women of the other sort -- the ever-scarcer kind of woman who respects men as males. To her, "independence" does not mean freedom to invade any part of a man's life he might wish to keep to himself. "Partnership" is not, from her viewpoint, a license and even a compulsion to deprive him of his male prerogatives. "Equality" doesn't mean identity to her. She has no desire to become a pseudo-male by phonily engaging in male concerns.

The confusion of women about their sex and ours is most evident in the changing character of the entertainment hero. A quarter of a century ago he was either virile or the embodiment of male passion -- as Valentino, for instance. There was no law against the possession of authority by a hero. The ladies still look for stimulus, for excitement, for that vanished "something" that once gave males an arousing authority. But -- having befemaled all America -- they no longer know what to look for. Their hero, now, has either to be plainly woman-dominated, like Liberace, or else (because all they remember of the male image is its excitement) that new sort of juvenile who seems mama's-boy-sweet, much of the time, but is also a misfit, unhappy delinquent, or -- now and then -- a dope fiend, killer or degenerate.

There is also, in rock and roll, a newer note on the horizon. Perhaps, in time, whole choruses of young men will step onto stages in theatres filled by women. These males will then begin to grind and bump. From the wings a mop-haired cowboy will step forward -- oscillating lasciviously. And as he undoes the bull's-head clasp of his scarf, the femmes will set up a scream: "Take it off!"

The men, by then, will be doing all the housework; and women biologists will be furiously experimenting to find out how males can be caused to gestate and bear human young.

Freud, looking at his day, pronounced men aggressive in sex matters and women passive. The women have thrown the book in the sage's face. But the great she-tyranny and pink-sequin shambles that is Sex in America today is not only the fault of women. For, when it became evident that technology could provide myriads of families with luxuries and comforts always hitherto restricted to the few, America's leading men, more than males elsewhere, abandoned the arts, sciences and so on -- for business enterprise. And when the ladies saw what goodies even a middle-income husband could furnish -- they put the heat on men for more, and the men accepted the burden.

Simultaneously, the fair sex had won long-needed rights -- and then used its gains unfairly. How? When pop went all-out in business, he defaulted as a father. His sons grew up without paternal guidance and adult male companionship. Pop also largely abandoned another principal previous concern: the teaching of the young. Our ladies had to fill that gap. And -- heady with their social gains -- they moved into a realm where male authority had previously been exhibited and engendered in the only way possible: by men. Most American men, as a result, have now been indoctrinated in the authority, absoluteness, wonder, marvel, miracle, superiority, dominance and will power of females. They are thus made she-pawns by age 12. For the ladies who took over father's home job -- and the male schoolteacher's -- chose to regard themselves in the Victorian, Puritan way -- and so they taught the boys. Mom, for most boys, was pop. And her schoolteacher conspirator, whom mom carefully kept underpaid, was a spinster, a virgin -- with the result that American boys became men who believed there was more virago than Venus in women.

Some of those robbed males rebelled. Others believed that in adulthood they could regain a sense of masculinity they knew to be lost, by a ceaseless string of female "conquests." That idea's now pretty widespread, in fact. But women were by nature designed not for conquest, but cooperation. Every man still male enough to be able to regard the other sex with love will know exactly what I mean by that. He'll know how many more lovely ladies will cooperate, with how much more mutual satisfaction -- than that admittedly large number who can be finally out-maneuvered against their inclination, or bribed by jewelry, furs and sports cars. Such a man may even find one woman who is woman enough to bring permanent love into his life -- woman enough to accept the fact that the most endowed and doting husband -- if truly male -- will once in a while observe and even celebrate the appeal of other women. She will understand that in men, brain, libido and authority act as one and absolute fetters destroy their harmony -- hence all harmony.