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:

5. Conan

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.