MY MASCULINE PROTEST
Mayer, Milton
My Masculine Protest By MILTON MAYER IHAVE this day, Saturday, Sept. 9, 1944, given up my masculine protest. For the benefit of those who always come in late, I should say that my masculine...
...Nobody else had any use for it...
...The funny thing was that the invidious comparisons made me feel good...
...Began On His Birthday You may wish to argue, contrarily, that some very tough customers were thickly wooded—Moses, Socrates, James J. Hill, and Walt Whitman, for example...
...Now you look like his assassin...
...All in all, that particular day, I felt plenty emasculated, and I was not fit company for man or Rubin...
...I do not propose to go into the details of these techniques in a magazine which enjoys second-class mailing privileges...
...24 was my 36th birthday—late presents are still acceptable—and on that memorable day I found myself out fishing with Editor Rubin on Little Mud Lake in Waukesha county, Wisconsin (The "Little" modifies "Lake," not "Mud...
...Editor Rubin on a fishing trip is enough to evoke a masculine protest from anybody, as he never catches any fish and refuses to row the boat...
...While I often considered cutting my throat of a morning, I never failed to cut my chin and my lip...
...So she put her mind to the problem of how to upset it and came up with the formula of emasculation...
...Let low-minded persons, if any there be among The Progressive's subscribers, dwell on the juicy implications of Sigmund's theory...
...A Man's Last Resort There is nothing surgical about emasculation for Peeping Sigmund...
...Emasculation consists simply of an aggregation of techniques by which the female convinces the male that he is not manly...
...Freud, known in the trade as Peeping Sigmund, who invented the doctrine that the mustache, the sideburn, the beard, and the full-blown flowering Samuel F. B. Morse alfalfa were all the product of the male protests against the female...
...You have a weak character and a strong face...
...We ordinary schlehmiehls never even suspect that it is happening to us...
...It is my own impression, gathered from considerable traveling and heavy reading, that the female was not impressed...
...But I hung on, protesting, for three weeks...
...That's good," said Morris, "because when you look terrible you ought to feel terrible, and you sure look terrible...
...True, he wore the pants and the armor, rode off to war and love, hogged the jobs, the headlines, and the family inheritance, and got drunk and beat the little woman to a pulp every Saturday night...
...Editor Rubin, who can detect great events when they are no bigger than a one day's growth, said to me, as we rolled in that night, "How do you feel...
...And what, you ask, did the male have to squawk about...
...Didn't he hold, so to speak, the long end of the stick in the eternal struggle of the sexes...
...I still have my mustache, but I'm not wearing it any more...
...Come back in the Wintertime...
...But Aug...
...Now the woman, since women are never satisfied, was never wholly happy about this arrangement...
...Terrible," I said...
...The male felt called upon to protest that he was manly, and, to make a long story long, he proceeded to assert his masculinity by a trick that only a man can perform, namely, viz, and to wit, by growing fur on his face...
...to a Mississippi card sharper and the man who followed the Union Pacific out west and started a brothel behind every new station...
...If, like me, you enjoy being confused, I will toss in the fact that Prof...
...My upper lip, as of this date, is as bare as a baby's bottom, as red, and, my friends all tell me, as appealing...
...And I might observe that the Hapsburgs, who were no good at all, had colossal mats hanging from their jowls, and that the two most ineffective Presidents I can think of, Chester A. Arthur and William Howard Taft, were the most heavily bearded, while Washington, Jefferson, and Wilson were all cleanshaven, and Lincoln, by his own testimony, grew a small crop of cactus only, because his naked face terrified little children...
...You used to look like Lincoln," said a Mr...
...It was Dr...
...I do not know exactly—though I'll lay you a fin that Sigmund does—why I did not get around to making my masculine protest until three weeks ago...
...For the benefit of those who always come in late, I should say that my masculine protest was mv mustache...
...Not at all, said Peeping Sigmund...
...Now all this began somewhere back in primitive times and persists in the race unconsciousness, which is something that only Peeping Sigmund could see...
...I will admit that you have me and Sigmund over the barrel on that one, and I can only suggest that Moses was a law unto himself, that James J. Hill did not have time for a shave, and that Socrates and Whitman did not have the price of one...
...But I was feeling protestful anyway...
...I have got to face the fact that I am a eunuch, and I am going to take it like a man...
...After all, it was my 36th birthday...
...I will confine myself to Sigmund's conclusion that the female techniques were successful and the male population felt thoroughly spayed, which is a lousy way to feel...
...I had never been any good in my prime, and here I was past my prime...
...But until three weeks ago I never made a masculine protest...
...Don't bother to tell me why I cut it off, Sigmund...
...Knew He Was Licked In the succeeding three weeks, as my masculine protest grew bushier and, of all things, redder, my acquaintances offered me a large variety of opinions, all of them intended to be insulting...
...Hell, I never even peeped...
...You look more like yourself than ever, which is not good...
...Last night it occurred to me that nobody was listening to my protest, and this morning I stood up in front of the mirror and emasculated it...
...Mustaches," said one kind critic, "are for people with strong characters and weak faces...
...I simply knew I was licked as a male, and was ready to admit it...
...I was likened to Stalin, Groucho Marx, and Simon Legree, three of my heroes...
...I, for one, am prepared to "accept the Freudian analysis...
...Masters...
...And so, when I shaved that evening, I began my masculine protest...
...The only thing it does is make you look hot and sticky...
...The only people who liked my mustache were people who themselves had mustaches, fellow-protestants...
...Another and especially kind critic said, "If you think that thing is a disguise, you're crazy...
...Of course, nobody else knew that I was protesting...
...Freud was on the prickly side himself...
...God knows I have been mistreated by women all my life, not to mention by men, children, and dogs...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 39
