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The Masculinist Revolt
William Tenn

I
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