What is “dude-lit” you ask? It’s a term I coined even before becoming the Two-Fisted Blogger. It’s been hijacked somewhat by homoerotic hacks and delta or gamma males getting in touch with their feelings, writing (allegedly) masculine counterparts to the womyn’s fiction on the bookshelf.
That is not dude-lit. I thought of the term first, so I’m gonna continue using it to describe fiction written for red-blooded heterosexual men. I guess you could call it red pill in the post-Matrix period.
It’s not the highbrow stuff you see touted on some manosphere blogs, though. Dude-lit isn’t for the wine-sipping, chess-playing side of your personality. It’s for the beer-slamming, ball-playing , trash-talking side.
So I thought I’d highlight some of the he-men of literature. I ranked them partly by their place in the socio-sexual hierarchy, and partly by how fun it is to read them.
Here’s the start of my short list of dude-lit heroes from over the years–the kind who are in short supply anymore in the pop culture of our feminized society:
Yup–a classic is in the Top Five. I know there’ve been Conan stories written since the death of his creator, but I’m including only the character as written by the delightfully un-PC Robert E. Howard. He’d never get this fantasy series published by the New York Publishing Cartel today–not without watering the barbarian down, adding some amazon superninjas and slipping an approved left-wing message into the Hyborian Age.
Conan is an alpha living in the ultimate habitat for alphas. His age and region is swarming with musclebound cutthroats, but the Cimmerian stands out above them all. He is perfectly at home in anarchy, yet you can also put him in a society with structure and he’ll rise quickly toward the top. In the movie he began adulthood as a slave, was promoted to gladiator, then gained his freedom and graduated to brigandry. In the books his self-improvement continues all the way to kingship.
Tarzan is a classic who didn’t make my Top Five for a couple reasons. While the ape-man is nobody to mess with, either with bare hands or primitive weapons, he is more of a beta male or arguably a sigma. He keeps to himself and has no ambition to leadership–even among the ape tribe that raised him. He also falls quickly into wunitus (1/”one”-itus) after meeting Jane.
Despite being raised in the jungle by apes, Tarzan is far more civilized than Conan…hence, not quite as much fun.
I’ve called Hollywood out on their creative parasitism before. This is just a brief follow-up to the last one.
I’ve been working on a video project lately, and since I’m responsible for the soundtrack, I’m listening to a lot of classical music these days.
Shame on me, but I don’t pay much attention to what orchestra plays which symphony. It’s not like music composed post-Phonograph Age where you’ll get wildly different versions of the same song from different artists. If I like the symphony (or opera, or whatever), I’m confident I’ll like it no matter who the artists are.
But as I was listening yesterday, I noticed there are some subtle differences in how different orchestras play the same symphonies. Nothing major, because the notes are still the same ones written by some long dead guy with funny looking hair. But sometimes the pacing will vary, or certain instruments will be louder. I guess that’s the individual conductor doing what they can to put their own “stamp” on a fixed work of art.
While mulling this over, it dawned on me: the composers of Hollywood have mostly died off; only conductors remain.
I’m not talking about musical scores, here. I’m analyzing film as if movies were symphonies.
Once upon a time, Hollywood screenwriters/directors didn’t just artistically regurgitate; they created. In fact, their livelihood depended on it. Sure, there were remakes as early as the 1930s, but if you wanted to make a name for yourself, you couldn’t rely solely on the plundering of other men’s ideas.
The great film makers (called “auteurs” by the snobs) are often accused of making the same film over and over again.
Horsefeathers.
You’ll find the same themes running through most of their films; and many of them preferred to use the same cast and crew repeatedly…but that’s because those movies came from the same respective artist’s own arsenal of experience, world view and imagination. They didn’t come out of the DNC-approved cookie cutter.
Not for a few decades, anyway. Sure, there were socialist messages in plenty of the old movies. But they weren’t the only message allowed back then.
Directors and screenwriters of today are simply syphoning creative energy from the hard work of those who’ve gone before them; waving a stick at their assembled creative teams, tweaking a costume here and a set design there, while turning what were once original ideas into overused cliche`s.
To borrow a phrase from the publishing biz of yesteryear, they’re a bunch of hacks.
I’ve been kvetching about the sad state of entertainment for some time, so of course when this post showed up on my news feed, it caught my eye.
The lack of original thought in our arts and culture would make anyone think the western world is truly in decline. The movie industry no longer invests in such frivolous things as plot, script, and original ideas.
…Modern movies reek of cronyism, group thought, and investment in profitable ideas rather than original ones. The movies are created to garner the most income with the least amount of investment, targeting the unthinking masses to maximize profits. Popularity trumps quality.
In this dichotomy, political leanings often play a role.
Yeah, no kidding.
Those are the two forces dominating Tinseltown, (and the publishing industry, etc.), but the priority is reversed from what is suggested by the article.
The political agenda is supreme to the entertainment gatekeepers. Of course they’d prefer to make colossal profits while brainwashing you; but they’ll lose money to herd you into the approved groupthink corral when that’s what it takes.
But calling out the mass media svengalis on their propaganda with chapter and verse is something I won’t spend the energy to do in this post. You’re either aware of it; you deny it/whine that there’s not enough of it; or you only recognize little tinges of “liberal bias” now and then. (The latter group has been partially absorbed into the hive already, becoming less and less aware of the conditioning as they are conditioned.) It’s doubtful there’s anything I could write in a blog post to reverse 20+ years of cognitive manipulation undergone by the last two groups.
It is amusing to consider the multiple personality disorder of the entertainment industry: the corporate beancounter completely devoid of original thought and the arrogant Marxist artfag who pretends to have a monopoly on original thought.
During the red state/blue state meme of 2004, one of the aforementioned arrogant Marxist artfags crowed on national TV about how all the creative genius in the nation was concentrated in the major population centers represented as the blue splotches on the political map. She had in mind, primarily, the Left Coast and the Rotten Apple.
All that creative genius and original thought in Homowood, Commiefornia must be why they can’t produce anything but remakes, adaptations of old TV shows or video games, and oppressively formulaic romantic comedies.
Even when they mine their material from the comic books, with thousands of plots to plagiarize from, they keep rebooting the same old origin tales. Take away Kryptonite and those “creative geniuses” couldn’t pool enough imagination between them to conceive a single story idea for Superman.
I enjoyed the first couple Expendables flicks as much as the next guy. But when you think about it, it’s pretty sad that such movies stand out in a given year for drawing men to theaters without the coercion of a wife or girlfriend.
The solution is simple; demote both those megalomaniac hive minds (the Marxists and beancounters) from their gatekeeper position. Allow some cognitive variety. Allow some entertainment that offends…even when it offends (insert the Victim Class of the Month here) and tips over their sacred cows.
You know–offend somebody besides your favorite scapegoats in Flyover Country/the Bible Belt. You’ve already stacked up enough offense against them to last a few lifetimes.
Been the cause a trouble ever since the world began.
Any man who’s had any significant interaction with women has suffered intense frustration at one time or another. And probably on a regular basis. But despite what the feminists claim, the way the male and female brains process data is radically different.
I put together an impromptu list to help demystify the female of the species and hopefully save you some aggravation.
Men tend to assume that thoughts in this list will occur to women.
As a rule, they do not. Especially the feministas.
(A feminista, as I’m using the term, is a woman who doesn’t necessarily consider herself a feminist, but she’s been thoroughly conditioned by feminist dogma nonetheless.)
You may find this list descriptive of some males today, too. With all the gender chaos in our culture, I wouldn’t doubt it.
Any woman who DOES have thoughts like these is probably a keeper.
I’m heading east-southeast. I need to head south-southeast. I can always look at the map to be sure.
Maybe I should understand how something works before I offer advice on how to fix it.
To be honest, he does work harder than I do…
Uh-oh, I’m contradicting what I just said five minutes ago.
I never heard of this thing/person/ideology until just now, so maybe I’m not the world’s leading expert on it.
Our one-year anniversary is coming up, and I have no desire to change my husband/boyfriend.
The human race survived for thousands of years without cell phones and social networks. So can I for a few hours.
Hmm…if it’s wrong when they do it, it’s probably wrong when I do it, too.
Oh, I get it! He’s operating in accordance with what I told him that I want, in that conversation we had. I should give him credit for that.
Maybe I should carry my argument to its logical conclusion.
Wait a minute…I’m judging him by what I felt at the time; not by what he actually said/did.
Lashing out with this remark might score some points in this argument, but it’s not true, therefore I just won’t say it.
When I honestly add up all the qualities of my imagined perfect man, I come up with a skitzophrenic transgender Jeckle/Hyde. Maybe I should reevaluate.
Preposterous, right? We’ve already had two Bushes. Ain’t that enough?
A couple years ago I conversed with a beltway insider. Neither of us were happy with any of the “choices” we’d been given for president for a few election cycles. Also, neither of us subscribe to Coincidence Theory. We had at least that much in common.
At the time I was still trying to believe that national elections are still determined by the will of living US citizens (however messed-up their will may be) casting one vote apiece. Well, this guy claimed to know who the behind-the-scenes power brokers picked to win elections years in advance. He was absolutely convinced Jeb Bush would be the next one.
The more I thought about this, the more sick I became.
It makes a certain degree of sense, if you’re not a Coincidence Theorist.
As much as I hate seeing my country destroyed, I almost wish the consequences of Obama’s rapine would manifest while he’s still in office. That way it would be a little harder for his cheerleaders (the press, Hollywood, academia, etc.) to blame his political opponents for what happens.
It would work out much better for the haters of America if disaster doesn’t set in until Bad Cop takes over.
The Bush family has enjoyed uncanny success pretending to be “right wing” or “conservative” (whatever that means) while continuing the attack on personal liberty, the free market, our national sovereignty, etc., that their “opponents” perpetrate.
Still, I had no way of verifying the beltway insider’s track record on previous predictions, and so was able to shelve that prophecy as just another know-it-all spouting off opinion as fact.
Then while driving home earlier this week, I heard a brief news item on the radio. Evidently GOP bigwigs are playing with the idea of Jeb Bush for 2016, and Jeb said something to the effect that he hadn’t really considered it before, but might now.
The plot thickens. And I do not lisp.
But really, so what? We already knew whoever the GOP picks for 2016 is going to be abysmal. They will differ from Clinton/Obama only by degrees; not in principle. And if they win, it will only be to fulfil the Judas Goat role once again (all while being adamantly defended by NeoCon apologists).
That gives you an idea of the type of humor to be found in this short political satire The Greater Good. But it’s not from the typical/obligatory left-wing perspective–quite the opposite.
Well, hmm. It’s written as if it is, in fact, from the typical/obligatory leftist/feminist/homophile slant, but with razor sarcasm that lampoons the typical Marxist (usually called “liberal”), feminist and white knight memes, tropes and so-called logic.
The Fight Card series is a growing collection of retro-pulp boxing novellas–deliberate throwbacks to the sports fiction of yesteryear by some of today’s most talented authors (writing under the house name “Jack Tunney”). Fight Card has spun off into MMA, romance and such, but Tomato Can Comeback is from the original hardboiled series.
Set in Detroit, 1954, it’s the story of a young man fighting to redeem himself, both physically and psychologically. It’s free for a couple days on Amazon.
Once upon a time, during one of my battalion’s “field problems” (exercises/wargames) out in Camp Mackall, we captured a prisoner from the opfor. He became a minor novelty because he had a Ranger tab (and not every officer and NCO in Division had been to Ranger School yet). We dropped a 60 pound rucksack on his back, tied his hands behind him and blindfolded him, then just took him along with us.
There was an E-7 in my company I’ll simply refer to as “the Weenie.” He was a walking stereotype–some pogue who originally had a supply M.O.S. who volunteered for Drill Sergeant duty, then went Infantry, then Airborne, as a way to more rapidly accumulate rank. There’s a lot I could say about the Weenie, but for now I’ll limit it to this: He could never have met the physical demands and standards of the Airborne had he entered as lower enlisted.
Back to the story. Our “P.O.W.” tried to escape. The Weenie happened to be right next to him. Blindfolded and trying to run through Carolina bush is nothing to try at home, kids. The prisoner tripped on something, and, off-balance, was wrestled to the ground by the Weenie (who, I must make clear, had both hands free, was not blindfolded, nor did he have a rucksack on at the time).
Having witnessed the incident with my own eyes, I was dumbfounded to hear the stories about it in following weeks–often from other eye-witnesses. “Did you see (the Weenie) body-slam that Ranger?” “No kidding?” “Yeah man, he put his _________ in the dirt!”
I should add the fact that everybody hated the Weenie. Including those who made these kind of comments. But evidently the only thing that mattered was that the Weenie had bested a Ranger.
It was years before I put this in the psychological context of American culture.
Americans love the underdog, and we always have. Heck, we WERE the underdog, when we won our independence–and for the rematch with Great Britain in 1812.
There’s still a lot of sympathy for the Confederacy during the Civil War from people who abhor slavery. Why? Because they were smaller, lacked the resources of the North, but fought a better fight and came close to winning despite their disadvantages.
And it’s not just Texans who get misty-eyed about the Alamo.
Our love of the underdog explains all the Rocky movies. It explains why we cheered when the US hockey team (amateurs) stunned the professional USSR team at Lake Placid, but booed when the US finally fielded professional athletes to compete against the professional athletes of other nations in the Olympics. It explains why a movie was made about Billie-Jean King winning a tennis match against some old geriatric fart.
I suspect our subconscious attraction to the underdog has had an effect on American culture in far deeper ways.
Take the involvement of the United States in Vietnam–the first “war” the USA ever lost. It was lost by design. Commanders were strategically and tactically hogtied by the very administration that insisted on embroiling our military there. That same administration sold the quagmire as a “police action”, like Korea, which is why I often refuse to call it a war. Nevertheless, even people who know all this often characterize the conflict as a great upset: the big, mean American bully with helicopters and jets and all kinds of expensive, sophisticated doodads, trying to oppress the poor downtrodden proletariat, was heroically defeated by the fighting spirit of the Viet Cong/NVA underdogs because we just couldn’t fight in the jungle (tell the Japanese that). It just makes for a better story that way, despite the facts.
SInce WWII America’s been a superpower, so we don’t have the underdog thang workin’ for us. That plays into the prevailing attitude about our history, as well as foreign policy and so much else. The haters of America know how to tap into this tendency, crafting news stories, school curriculum, and entertainment to take advantage.
Some of the “poor children” you’ve been hearing about.
It plays into the invasion of our southern border and why our elected officials choose to neglect their duty. But those same politicians are just fine with treating Americans like criminals at airports and random roadside checkpoints, with unwarranted searches, wiretaps, assassinating or indefinitely detaining American citizens without trial. Because we’re the home team and illegal aliens are the poor underdogs, see? That’s also why there’s no outrage about them collecting welfare and stealing our elections, and why it would be the most horrific crime since the Inquisition if Americans did the same thing to any other country.
What should we do about the situation on our border with Mexico? I know! Force full cavity searches on US citizens at every airport. And send the First Family on some more multimillion dollar vacations.
This syndrome plays into why there’s no outrage about our government arming, equipping and funding anti-American terrorist organizations while waging a perpetual undeclared war against terror that requires the stripping of rights from US taxpayers (who are the past and potentially future victims of said terrorists). We’re Americans. We don’t deserve all the freedom and prosperity we still have. Those poor downtrodden souls who follow the Religion of Peace have the odds stacked against them and deserve a piece of our pie.
We borrow billions from China then give it back to them as foreign aid, then pay them interest on the money we gave them. Our handouts and investments have built them into a superpower. The Teflon Traitor (and others) let them raid our patent office and steal the intellectual property of US citizens, and gave them military secrets they plan on using against us. But it’s all good, ’cause they’re the underdog. They’ve only murdered about 80 million (not counting what they’ve done in Tibet and elsewhere) and treat their own people worse than beasts of burden; but Americans are the real villains because what businesses still exist here don’t pay for enough birth control for female employees. They’re the underdogs; we’re the mean old home team.
It plays into why the government, in such a fanatical hurry to assume powers not delegated to it, and to violate our rights for “homeland security,” refuses to consider shutting down travel between the US and the areas of the Ebola epidemic. Better to bring Ebola into the USA than to inconvenience the poor Third World underdogs who want to fly here, shake hands, make friends and infect influence people. If it becomes an epidemic here, blame the nurses. But Americans deserve Ebola anyway ’cause we’re the hometown bullies and it’s about time we had to suffer like other people do. Check your privilege, America. And keep bringing infected folks here.
This underdogphilia plays out in just about every aspect of our society, but perhaps it’s most blatant in the gender wars. Regardless of the facts about who did what, females are the ironclad underdogs in divorce court; to the police (and, well, everybody else, too) on domestic disturbance calls; to the leftist media on every topic from the Hugo Awards to #gamergate. The victim card is always women’s to play, even as pop culture so desperately tries to convince us they are tougher than men. They’re not expected to meet the same standards as men in the military, or work as hard as men in civilian occupations, yet they’re lionized like triumphant overcomers because they rode their special treatment to a hero’s finish line, and the official story we keep hearing is that they work harder than men and they’re held to higher standards. They’re legends in their own minds, and in the minds of white knights all across the fruited plain.
There’s no way to avoid spoilers in this post, so if you plan on watching Gone Girl but haven’t yet, read no further.
The author/screenwriter (same person, as I understand it) had fun messing with the audience’s mind. There is a series of revelations which has you, at first, liking the Ben Affleck character (Nick Dunne), then despising him, then sympathizing with him again. Feelings toward the character of his wife (Amy Dunne, played by Rosamund Pike) will be mirror-opposite at each stage.
So first of all, Nick uses alpha game to woo and seduce Amy. My damaged old ears didn’t catch all their witty banter, but apparently Nick taylored his game just right for her. He fell into the wonitus (“1-itus”) trap that so many men do, and after dating her for a couple years, married her.
Here’s where it gets kinda muddy from the red pill perspective, because she had the money, not him, which makes her the provider I guess. They do wind up living on her money; she makes him sign a pre-nup; and she buys a bar for Nick and his sister to run. What you learn about Amy over the course of the flick is, on top of being a diabolical psychotic mastermind, she’s also a domineering skank who likes to keep her man on a leash. This isn’t always obvious because the plot unfolds partially from her point of view…and she’s an accomplished, remorseless liar.
It seems Nick becomes a lot more beta once he’s married to Amy and, predictably, she grows to despise him because of it. There are other complications too, like losing jobs, a sick mother, and a relocation from New York to Missouri. After finding work as a teacher, Nick begins an affair with a former student. This is what kicks Amy’s twisted psyche into high gear.
Amy masterminds the faking of her own murder and framing Nick for the crime. And it works pretty well for most of the movie–both on the police and the audience. But Nick catches wise and there’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse dynamic for a while.
There are a couple especially noteworthy scenes for the manosphere.
In one, Amy admits privately to Nick that she became disgusted with him when he stopped using game; and when he demonstrated a form of game again (during a television interview), she just had to get him back, and so came out of hiding.
In another scene, we see that another woman (a detective) is the only one in law enforcement who sees right through Amy. But Amy’s got the white knight federal agents eating out of the palm of her hand, and they stifle the valid suspicions of the detective because V.
(V for Vagina; victim… take your pick. One equals the other to a white knight.)
I confess that, the way the movie ended, I felt like a rape victim myself. I have no intention of reading the novel it was based on. Nick resigns himself to staying in the clutches of this evil, murderous whore, and confessing on national TV to crimes he never committed (abusing her; money-grubbing; etc.) because, after faking a pregnancy earlier, it turns out she really is pregnant now.
It’s tempting to wonder if the author/screenwriter pulled all these themes right out of the manosphere.
And yet the author/screenwriter is a woman. Is this a warning, or what?
So now we know how it started, pretty much. But the amazon superninja didn’t immigrate from comic books to movies right away. And when she did, it was a gradual incursion.
The idea of a 120 pound woman physically dominating a 180 pound man in any kind of combat is laughable. So it’s fitting that the first cultural conditioning began in comedies.
(Even male couch potatoes are easily stronger than the average female. Yes, martial arts can make up for some physiological advantages, and according to action movies, every woman is a master; but I’d wager there are still a lot more men studying martial arts than women…in the real world, anyway.)
(You might want to skip forward to 6:40 or so in the clip below.)
The gender role reversals were very subtle in, say, the Howard Hawks comedies. But the more zany the comedy, the more masculine the women and effeminate the men. One would think people watching a comedy would know better than to take anything in it seriously, but when watching a movie, a person’s defenses are significantly weakened due to their suspension of disbelief, and ideas can infest directly into the subconscious. Hollywood knows this, of course, and has used this technique to influence the thinking of Joe Public regarding nearly every subject–especially politics.
By the 1970s amazon superninjas began showing up in non-comedy genres to a noticeable extent. By the 1990s it was obligatory in action movies, and becoming so in adventure fiction. Of course comic books were way ahead of the curve, having started down this road in the early 1940s.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
Anybody remember 
The Fight Card series is a growing collection of retro-pulp boxing novellas–deliberate throwbacks to the sports fiction of yesteryear by some of today’s most talented authors (writing under the house name “Jack Tunney”). Fight Card has spun off into MMA, romance and such, but 
Americans love the underdog, and we always have. Heck, we WERE the underdog, when we won our independence–and for the rematch with Great Britain in 1812.
it’s all good, ’cause they’re the underdog. They’ve only murdered about 80 million (not counting what they’ve done in Tibet and elsewhere) and treat their own people worse than beasts of burden; but Americans are the real villains because what businesses still exist here don’t pay for enough birth control for female employees. They’re the underdogs; we’re the mean old home team.
