Welcome to the Club:
The Rise & Fall of the Männerbund in Pre-War American Pop Culture

Words: 6,364 text, 2,753 notes

Jeffrey P. Dennis
We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press

“I, state name here, [but everyone just repeats Stymie’s name], a member of good standing of the He-Man Woman-Haters Club, do solemnly swear to be a he-man and hate women and not play with them or touch them unless I have to and especially never fall in love and, if I do, may I die slowly and painfully and suffer for hours or until I scream bloody murder.” — The Little Rascals[1] 

“Wherever love and sex prevail, women will command sooner or later.” — Julius Evola, L’Arco e la Clava.

“If you let Andy [Hardy] get too crazy about girls, you lose your audience!” — Louie B. Mayer[2]

You know I gotta love any book that not only discusses pre-’60s, or in this case, pre-’40s pop culture, especially the truly popular, beneath critical contempt “B” films or pulp fiction, but also does so with an eye for the archetype of the Wild Boy, who forms the Männerbund from which Aryan culture uniquely derives — an interest that unites such disparate observers as Baron Evola and William Burroughs.[3]

Unfortunately, this isn’t that book; like most things, it turns out to be more interesting in the planning than in the execution. Though well worth reading, or just checking out your favorite old boys’ book or movie serial, the caveats I have about the book itself are relevant to more general issues in the alt-Right area, and thus should be of some interest to Counter-Currents readers.

1. Pop Culture and “The Conservative”

Before addressing these, and the book itself, I may first need to answer the reader who demands to know what all this has to do with the alt-Right; who cares about these old movies, comic strips and penny-dreadfuls anyway?[4] The answer is, to prevent ourselves from falling from the bright light of the alt-Right into the error of “conservatism.”

A “conservative” might be defined as someone who, sensing correctly, but more or less vaguely, that Something is Wrong in modern society, but, lacking Traditional data, as Guénon would say,[5] they look not up to metaphysical principles but back to some favorite period of their own past, which becomes their touchstone for “traditional” values.[6]

A darkly amusing example from current politics can be found amongst those “conservatives” who, lamenting the almost complete negrofication of American society — what Paul Kersey calls BRA (Black Run America)[7] — can find nothing more to oppose to it than laments for “abandoning the blessed ideals of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.”

The “conservative” perversely argues over where precisely the clock should be set back to, while what needs to be done is to smash the clock — the original emblem and engine of cyclical futility itself.[8]

To see the real effect of these blinders, you must realize that an essential part of this mentality is proceeding to read back into the past the assumptions of the not-so-distant past, thus distorting and limiting the availability of the past.[9] Thus, as I noted in The Homo and the Negro,[10] both the “progressive” and the “conservative” assume the same distorted idea of “The Homosexual” (itself a 19th-century construct) and thus, when met with evidence that some historical figure or culture was not entirely straight, imagine them mincing around in pink togas and lisping like Monty Python’s Pontius Pilate. And so the Conservative denies they could possibly be “gay” (and, in that sense, they certainly weren’t) while Liberal thinks it’s wonderful! that they were, and neither can truly break out of the Liberal Mindset.

Now, the great thing about pop culture is that, within certain limits, it lets us in on what people were taking for granted, back in Ye Olden Dayes, or at least what didn’t strike them as absurd or impossible. “B” movies and pulp writing is particularly valuable, since these are made quickly, to please as large a crowd as possible, with location shooting rather than expensive sets (thus documenting the physical past), and above all without the meddling of smarty-pants Hollywood screenwriting “innterlekshuls” seeking to inject some party line, or that Barton Fink Feeling.[11]

2. The Aryan Arcadia of Bromance

The author of the book under review – thought I’d forgotten about that, eh? – describes on his blog exactly this liberating experience of encountering the cultural Wholly Other, while living in a small town so small-time it even had second rate newspaper comics:

When I was a kid in the 1960s, I was jealous of the comics they got across the river in Davenport, Iowa. They got Peanuts, we got Winthrop. They got The Wizard of Id, we got Apartment 3-G. I sort of liked Alley Oop and Prince Valiant, but what was up with the single-panel strip, Out Our Way? […]

Boys in my world were expected to groan with longing over the girls who walked in slow-motion across the schoolyard, their long hair blowing in the wind. They were expected to evaluate the hotness of actresses on tv, discuss breasts and bras, and claim innumerable sexual conquests. But boys in Out Our Way never displayed the slightest heterosexual interest. Instead, they consistently mocked the silliness of heterosexual romance.

What sort of world was this?

Many years later, I found that the comics I read in the 1960s were reruns from the 1930s and 1940s, and even then, many had been nostalgic, evoking the author J. R. Williams’ childhood at the turn of the century.

I was gazing into a time capsule, into an era when heterosexual desire was expected to appear at the end of adolescence, not at the beginning, so teenage boys were free from the “What girl do you like?” chant.[12]

In his subsequent book, We Boys Together, Dennis extends that frisson of cultural weirdness (akin to the effect of Lovecraftian weird fiction) into an exhaustive (and, frankly, exhausting) study of how pop culture from roughly the first half of the 20th century differs radically from what “we all know” today. Here’s a pretty good summary of Dennis’s data and conclusions:

For decades adults and adolescents have assumed that when boys reach puberty their hormones begin to flood their bodies and induce in them a form of insanity that has been called “girl craziness.” . . . American popular culture-television, film, music, advertising, journalism, fiction-continues its portrayals of “girl crazy” teenage boys. Dennis wants us to see that this was not always so.

The author’s central argument is that in American popular culture from about 1900 to the end of World War II, a range of popular culture texts including teen fiction, film, serials, comic books, popular journalism, radio shows, and even high school yearbooks employed formulaic narratives and images for and about teenage boys engaged in “homoromantic,” not “heteroromantic,” relationships. Girl craziness in that period was seen as infantile or effeminate. Instead, boys “were encouraged to form intimate passionate bonds with other boys or with men, romantic friendships, or “homoromances” (p. ix). These relationships were more intense, intimate, and exclusive than “ordinary same-sex friendships,” but the homoerotic gaze in these representations never crossed the line into homosexual acts. Dennis wants to know why these homoromance narratives flourished when they did and why they all but disappeared by the end of World War II. He understands that “hetero-mania” (p. 1) is an ideological construct, and he aims to show the ideological work of that construct.[13]

We’ll have to question that “ideological” bit, but let’s sum up even more. Dennis shows that in pre-War American popular culture, the rules were:

1. All boys are straight
2. At puberty, boys hang out with each other, or adult mentors
3. Other than infants, only four-eyes, fatties and fairies hang out with girls[14]
4. At around 18, boys marry [a girl, we must add today], get a job, and raise a family, ending their period of fun and freedom

Get it?

Dennis divides his pop culture Boys into three types, inspired not by Caesar but by the usual academic Marxism – the first strike against the book, in our view. These are:

1. Boys Next Door
2. Lost Boys
3. Adventure Boys

Like a good pinko, Dennis distinguishes these along the lines of class and race:

Boys Next Door (e.g., Andy Hardy, Henry Aldrich, Jack Armstrong) are small-town WASPs who need an older male to toughen them up — although White Culture is the summit of evolution, it has an ironic feminizing effect; hence the need for Boy Scouts, “muscular Christianity,” etc.

Lost Boys, by contrast, are immigrants or sons of immigrants, living in big city slums (e.g., The Dead End Kids, The Bowery Boys). Unlike BND’s, these boys need some civilizing, and hence are the targets of kindly priests, kids from the neighborhood who made good, juvenile delinquency specialists and the ubiquitous Boy Scouts.

Adventure Boys (e.g., Sabu, or Tarzan’s son, simply called “Boy”[15]) move these scenarios abroad to enact an imperialist narrative, policing and otherwise bringing the White Man’s civilization to the exotic Others.

What he has in mind here, of course, is the kind of analysis put forward quite seriously at the time by writers familiar to our readers here, such as Madison Grant or Lothrop Stoddard, dealing with the enervating nature of modern civilization, mass immigration, or the “rising tide of color” abroad, which we alt-Rightist can choose to give a more favorable interpretation.[16]

Moreover, I would suggest that the more interesting way to interpret these tropes is as instances of Indo-European male bonding, in either its pedagogic (Boy Next Door) or band of warriors[17] (Lost Boys) moments, with Adventure Boys simply taking it on the road.

3. Ideology vs. Ideology

And this kind of clichéd Leftist analysis is where Dennis disappoints more generally. Right in Chapter 1, he tells us that:

Of course, it [teenage homoromance] does not reflect real life. . . . it is an ideological construct . . . And as with all ideologies, we must ask who desires it or who profits from it. (p. 15)

Dennis has half the story right; today’s “girl-crazy” teen is indeed an ideological construct, and we’ll soon look at his analysis of “who profits from it.” But that teenage homoromance is equally ideological is just another Leftist knee-jerk, like “race is a social construct.”[18]

Rather, as James Neill has shown, traditional (and, we would say, Traditional) societies have used the fact of human “ambisexuality” (as he calls it) to ingeniously craft various successful strategies for controlling male, and especially what we would call “teenage,” sexuality.[19] In the main, they resemble the pre-War “homoromantic Arcadia” Dennis describes.

Discussing traditional Muslim society, Neill points out that

Arguing that homosexuality among individuals in sexually segregated societies [such as prisons or sailors at sea] is due to the unnaturalness of these same-sex environment displays a profound ignorance of the way sexual and reproductive patterns have manifested in nature.

The sexually segregated Muslim society in fact, seems a nearly perfect example of the sort of natural sexual regulation that appears among many animal species, where heterosexual couplings are restricted primarily to mature individuals capable of providing the parenting necessary for the healthy growth of the offspring. . . . The ambisexuality of Islamic societies, therefore . . . is not only consistent with sexual patterns found among many other societies around the world, but seems an inevitable product of human sexual nature. (loc. 6217-23)

This traditional Muslim society still exists on what Western diplomats sneeringly call “the Arab street,” and has been described by journalist John R. Bradley as one in which pubescent boys, rigidly keep apart from girls, are naturally expected to get up to some mischief amongst themselves, forming intense relationships with mentors and peers, that will structure their adult lives, but as long as they don’t make a public spectacle of it, and obediently marry and settle down when old enough, there is no “problem.”[20]

This is exactly the homoromance model Dennis illustrates in We Boys Together. The pre-War pop culture trope, in which, and thus by which, pubescent boys are safely steered away from women until old enough to marry and support a family, is both sanctioned by Tradition and rooted firmly in biological reality.[21] The notion of boys going “girl crazy”– and hey, whatcha gonna do about it? — is by contrast the real ideological construct.[22]

4. What Happened and How?

Well then, what happened, and why? How did girl-craziness “invade and ultimately conquer Arcadia”?[23] Amusingly, Dennis offers the exact date, if not time:

On March 12, 1937, the character of the Boy Next Door changed forever. In a minor subplot in MGM’s A Family Affair, small town Judge Hardy orders his sixteen-year-old son Andy to escort a girl to a party. . . . “Holy jumping Jerusalem, a party with girls!” Andy yelps. Suddenly the universe had changed . . .

Andy’s girl-craziness was problematic to the studio (see the Mayer quote above) but ultimately, it would prove to be “the first portent of the adolescent hetero-erotic mania that would invade and ultimately conquer Arcadia” (p. 94).

Dennis doesn’t notice, though, that “A family affair” and especially “Holy jumping Jerusalem!” are the clues. What soon followed A Family Affair was WWII, which would usher in a wholesale reordering of American society along Judaic family-values lines. That’s where we need to look for those profiteering from imposing an ideology, the shift to today’s hetero-craziness. The clue is the time frame: just before, during and after WWII. Cui bono?

In the space of a decade, measured by the Andy Hardy series, “girl-craziness” went from being the mark of immature, infantile, effeminate sissies to being the sine qua non of red-blooded American youth. Why did it happen?

Dennis identifies two factors, though he doesn’t see their ramifications or even their connection.

First, the rise of “scientific” psychology, in particular the “psychoanalysis” of Freud and the “sexology” of Magnus Hirschfeld. Building on the late 19th-century notion of the “homosexual” (and “heterosexual”) as a fixed identity (rather than the more accurate “ambisexuality” Neill documents), Freud then asserted that children could “fail to mature” and wind up in this dreadful state of “inversion”; while Hirshfeld offered the contrary idea, that these were born as freaks of nature, a “third sex” possessing a feminine soul.

Either theory was bad news when the second factor came along: World War II. The last thing the Army needed was a bunch of what Colonel “Bat” Guano would deem “deviated preverts” or woman-souled men when there was a war to fight!

Thus, while beforehand the occasional homosexual characters were “tolerated as harmless eccentrics”[24] like Clifton Webb[25] or at worst “as jokes” like Franklin Pangborn (p. 89), now “The Homosexual” became a deadly threat to the war effort, not only incapable of fighting like a real man[26] but apt to spread the infection by deviating youth. He was a menace that needed to be faced up to and defeated.[27]

The American answer was, as always, propaganda; we can adapt here Francis Parker Yockey’s description of the war-propaganda machine that operated at the same time — and was, I argue, “girl-craziness” writ large:

Europeans are [not] familiar with [America’s] internal propaganda. This propaganda utterly dwarfs, in its scale as well as its effect, anything Europeans can readily imagine. . . . . [A notion like “Girl craziness“] is glorified on all public occasions, by all public officials, is taught in the schools and preached in the churches. . . . Newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, films — all vomit for the same [idea, such as “girl craziness“] . . .[28]

So great was the need for propaganda that even the Hollywood movie machine was not adequate. Soon, minor companies, like Jam Handy (yes, Jam Handy) to produce so-called “educational” films, to teach boys skills that, although supposedly “natural” were apparently beyond their ken, such as What to Do on a Date (1950).

These are easily available today on YouTube, but I would suggest also taking a look at the versions that have been produced by Mystery Science Theater 3000 (such as here). Mike and the ’bots — over-educated Midwestern Whites — are always a good index of SWPL instincts; witness their constant quipping “Look how White everyone is” when viewing almost any pre-’60s film, and referencing Hitler whenever someone noticeably blond appears.

When these films are viewed today even the Counter-Currents reader will find them positively surreal, due precisely to their seeming to still have an odd, quasi-“homoerotic” atmosphere today, thus illustrating the historical change in the very process of happening. What to do on a Date, for example, still retains the Männerbund traces of the older best pal who provides guidance (“Are these two on a date?” asks the MST3k crew) and the advice to attend group activities and double date.

Another example of the Männerbund in transition to girl-craziness is Mr. B Natural (subtle, isn’t it?) in which the problem is how to get the hollow-chested slacker “Buzz” accepted by the Group. The answer, of course, is: buy a genuine Conn brand trumpet and join the band! What’s interesting here, and would provide fodder for a memorable MST3k episode, is that “Mr” B Natural is played, in the Peter Pan tradition,[29] by an androgynous female.

Here we see how the Traditional Aryan solution — find a gang of boys and obtain a mentor — is displaced by the empty “individualism” of consumerism and social conformity, but re-emerges in the almost surrealistically distorted form (literally, as the ’bots point out, “coming out of the closet“). It’s an especially harrowing experience from our contemporary perspective — an androgynous figure in spangled jacket and tights visits the bedrooms of 12-year-old boys to dance about and instruct them in how to blow into instruments — the trauma of which Joel and the ’bots had to deal with by staging a mock debate over whether “Mr.” B was a man or woman — with Tom as William F. Buckley, Mr. Post-War Conservative, taking the pro-female side:

Joel: Mr. T. Robot, you have twenty minutes to rebut.
Crow: Mr. Servo, you’ve GOT to be kidding me! Let’s assume for the moment that Mr. B Natural IS a man. My heavens! What a confusing message to send to little kids! Already, there’s the painful feeling of isolation,[30] the horrible, scarring acne. And Mr. Servo here would have us place a cross-dressing man with a clarinet slap dab in their bedrooms! Why not men in Little Bo Peep costumes with stinky cigars explaining the facts of life to our unsuspecting daughters? I, for one–
Joel: Mr. Servo, your rebuttal!
Tom: Yes! Yes! Mr. Crow! I don’t think we should stop there! Let’s break down ALL the barriers. Hairy men in Spartan costumes holding bake sales on shady boulevards! Naked jock-strap wrestling! Big–
Joel (interrupting): Gentlemen, I have Commercial Sign, I’m sorry.

Appropriately, many of these “educational” films were au fond thinly veiled commercials, for one product of another (such as Mr. B’s Conn Band Instruments), since the inculcation of “family values” was intimately tied up with consumerism. A remarkable example, not discussed by Dennis, is A Young Man’s Fancy.

Perhaps because the Edison Institute was too focused on selling people on electrical appliances (again, inculcating post-War consumerism), or some personal predilection of the filmmakers, but although produced in 1952 the story, though superficially conforming to the What to do on a Date model, operates entirely on the pre-’40s Boy Next Door assumptions.

Judy’s brother Bob enjoys a clean healthy relationship with Alex. (The first thing they do on arrival is shower together.) Alex is praised by him to his family as both a scholar and “quite a girl hater.” Otherwise, his “outside interests” are restricted to consumer appliances and . . . time management.[31]

Eventually, Judy wins his affection through her (electrically enhanced) cookery skills. This is not so much “look how enslaved women were” as an example of the old-paradigm idea of male bonds of friendship versus the inevitable reversal of interest and creation of a family unit. (That Judy’s brother will still be around no doubt softens the blow).[32]

Good clean ’50s entertainment![33] The reaction of the MST3k group to the film (shown on the episode with Ed Woodian teen delinquent epic The Violent Years in 1994), borders on sheer dumbfoundedness. Surely, you can almost hear them say, surely everyone involved could SEE that Alexander Phipps is gay, gay, gay, and probably Judy’s brother is too.

Another example, feature length this time, is their take on The Girl in Lover’s Lane, where the older hobo (they dub him “Big Stupid” due to the muddy audio) takes a young runaway, Danny, under his wing, sleeping together, getting into pointless alley brawls, and, above all, constantly “rescuing” him from any chance of getting laid. How this was filmed as late as 1960 can, again, only be explained by its status as a “B” film no one was paying attention to. “It’s perfectly normal that Big Stupid would shy away from the pretty girl who works at the diner in order to go shack up with Danny and his parents. Perfectly normal. Nothing odd about it. What are you staring at??”

5. Who Benefits?

Dennis suggests three reasons that girl-craziness replaced homoromance due to the war; whatever their contribution, I think the War itself is more important. Hearing that all this is a “post WWII phenomenon” really got my spidey-sense tingling. Was this not the foetor judaicus?[34]

It was indeed no coincidence that the expulsion from the homoromantic Arcadia coincided with the campaign to stampede America into the war in Europe and, indeed, a situation of Permanent War. We can see the hand of the Jew in both.[35] Yockey again:

In Europe it has been impossible for the Jew to annihilate Tradition . . . but in America . . . because of its colonial origins . . . there were no barriers to the Jew. As a result, the success of the Jew has been greatest in America, and in the year 1933, [4 years before Andy Hardy!] the entire continent of America passed into the control of the Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Race-People.

The presence of a Culture-alien generates spiritual, political, economic, and social phenomena of a kind which could never arise from domestic elements and happenings. . . . [W]hen the Culture-alien intervenes in the public, and spiritual affairs of the host . . . he must of his own inner necessity distort the life of the host, warping and frustrating its proper tendencies to make them serviceable to his alien needs. The Jew is the only Culture-alien who at present exercises this Culture-distortion on the life of the Western Civilization.[36]

As Dennis summarizes elsewhere:

Adolescents were singled out for special concern, since their heterosexual desire was still inchoate and developing. Freud and the Freudian pop-psychologists warned that boys could move from latency to “perversion” in any number of ways, through the deliberate or accidental intervention [sic!] of parents, teachers, peers, and strangers on the street. As Benshoff notes (1997: 139), the ongoing worry of adults during the period was “whether the boys would become successful, mature, adult males, and not turn gay along the way” (cf. Grant, 2001). The mandate to promote heterosexual adulthood, plus the need to create a new national character at the end of the era of isolationism, combined to produce a new “all-American boy,” resourceful, industrious, wisecracking yet serious when it counted, cautious yet brave when it counted, smart but not an egghead, sensitive but not a sissy, doting on his mother, obedient to his father, a big brother to the kids and a pal to his peers. . . . And, for perhaps the first time in media history, he was wild about girls.[37]

“When it counted” — when the American Golem needed to be sent abroad to destroy the rising of the European nation — “boys next door must be dragged, willingly or not, out of their homoromantic Arcadia” — just as America was dragged, unwillingly, into War.[38]

6. Who Cares?

Bert Cooper: Even if this were true, who cares? This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you’ve imagined here. . . . the Japanese have a saying: a man is whatever room he is in, and right now Donald Draper is in this room. I assure you, there’s more profit in forgetting this. I’d put your energy into bringing in accounts.[39]

Dennis, the PC academic, takes the same Judaic-influenced line as Bert, the Ayn Rand disciple. It’s just two rival ideologies to him, and having documented the change, the book just peters out, seemingly more interested in detailed biographies of his favorite boy stars, like Jackie Cooper and Johnny Sheffield. So it’s up to me to point out the malignant social effects of “girl-craziness.”

First, what we might call the material effects on boys and society. As we said above, Dennis is aware that, as Neill points out, once The Homosexual is invented as a character type, he becomes a “problem” for society, calling into being his dialectic twin, The Homophobe. Boys are now expected, by society and by each other, to be “girl-crazy” as soon as puberty hits — and perhaps a little sooner, as child-raising fashions progress, just to “be sure.” Play-dates, anyone?

Neill has aptly described the effects on teenagers:

By diverting the sex drive away from inappropriate heterosexual involvement, [homoromance] among adolescents and young adults works to prevent pregnancies among these immature individuals, and helps to insure that the conception of children occurs within stable relationships between psychologically and emotionally mature adults.

[M]odern Western culture places high expectations on teens to demonstrate heterosexual interest, bombarding them with heterosexual images and role models, whether in song lyrics of teen movies, which pound into them that to be normal is to be [having sex with girls]. . . . As a result, adolescents in Western societies and in westernized cultures of the Third World direct their sexual energies for the most part toward the opposite sex [with] a corresponding explosion of extramarital heterosexual permissiveness and its attendant problems [such as] teen pregnancy and single mothers [which are] virtually unknown among those aboriginal societies still unaffected by Western cultural and moral values [sic].[40]

The evidence drives Neill to conclude that:

[T]he involvement with the opposite sex that is the norm among teenagers in Western culture represents a premature heterosexuality at variance with the ambisexual harmony observed among . . . many human societies.

And what is the response of the “conservative”? Repression (abstinence), ignorance (no sex ed.) and above all, a healthy dose of “good old fashioned family entertainment,” the more girl-crazy the better! Goyishe kopf!

In a traditional society, these erotic energies would be recognized, valued, and safely diverted into “homoromances” (along the lines of Nietzschean “sublimation” vs. Judeo-Christian asceticism). This is possible because, contrary to Freud and Hirshfeld, humans are, as Neill documents, an “ambisexual” species, which allows society to shape and prune human sexuality in various ways and into various channels.[41] In this way, male/female relations are reserved for marriage at appropriate ages, and the whole problem of teenage pregnancy, STDs, knife-fights among pubescent Romeos, etc. is avoided.

This leads to our second, more general point. Traditional societies, especially Aryan ones, direct those teenage energies not only away from inappropriate heterosexual relations but also into two main forms of homoeroticism: inter-generational pedagogic relations, and bonds of loyalty and affection between peers; teachers and warriors, in short.[42]

These are the relations that create, and hand down (traditio) the unique cultural institutions of Aryan society — from the priesthood, to private/public schools, to the Boy Scouts. However, once The Homosexual arises as a “threat,” all relations between males, especially between generations, become suspect. To revert to pop culture again, consider that pre-War American audiences reveled in the tales of Bing Crosby’s Fr. O’Malley, and Clifton Webb’s Mr. Scoutmaster, or Robert Donat‘s Mr. Chips; today, in movies or “real life,” such men would be presumed child molesters.

Dennis notes at one point the similar effect on adult peer relations as well: “Men can be chummy ‘pals‘, but they can never fully trust each other. Every masculine smile hides the potential for backstabbing and malice” (p. 232).

This makes it almost impossible to create a true Männerbund in modern society. Consider — as we so often do — the advertising world depicted in Mad Men.

Mad Men’s ’60s setting is about halfway between us and Andy Hardy, and this triumphalist Judaic take on the last days of WASP hegemony can be usefully seen in the light of Dennis‘s analysis. Don, whatever his title, is clearly the creative leader of a shifting collection of Männerbünde, sometimes a small staff working on a project, sometimes reconfiguring the whole set of partners on the spur of the moment — leading a Christmas Eve mutiny to start a new firm, then sabotaging their IPO by merging with a hated rival. His selfishness renders these “bad” or “fake Männerbünde” like those of Capt. Ahab or Al Capone, which I have analyzed elsewhere.[43]

Moving from the Gang Leader mode to the Pedagogic, Pete and Peggy (note the similar names, as well as Peggy/PEdaGoGY) both seek Don as a mentor, but Don, his womanizing establishing his hetero cred from the start, takes on the rather mannish Peggy and treats Pete as a rival to be stymied at every turn. That the “chauvinist” Don mentors Peggy is treated as surprising — another legacy of the previous paradigm — but it only makes sense; anything else would be “crypto-homo.”[44]

In Peggy’s rise in the industry we see how this “premature heterosexuality” as Neill calls it, inculcated by popular culture, as Dennis shows, has led not only to the decay of the Männerbund but also to the parallel, only superficially paradoxical, result of a feminized culture. As Yockey observed:

The true American People is a unit based upon matriarchy. . . . The soul of this People is too oriented to the feminine pole of existence, and it therefore cherishes peace, comfort, security, in short, the values of individual life. War, conquest, adventure, the creation of form and order in the world — these do not interest the American People. Empire-building demands sacrifice; yet, for sacrifices to be made . . . there must be an Idea.[45]

War, conquest, adventure, the creation of form and order in the world through sacrifice for an idea — these are the values created by the Männerbund.

The Masculine Principle is to realize higher ideas through art, warfare, Politics. Nothing could be further from the American ideal than that.[46]

We can see here a phenomenon similar to what Andy Nowicki has noted in his critique of the “Game” culture of the man-o-sphere:

There is, I think, something essentially degraded about a mindset which takes it as self-evident that sex in itself is a thing to be prized and sought after and salivated over, simply because cultural forces scream to us that indulging our appetite is some kind of biological imperative. It is, of course, no revelation to admit that the male libido is a potent, often growlingly insistent force, but this does not mean that it must be placated, or that it defines who we are as men.

In fact, is there not something appalling in the prospect of being led by the nose to do the bidding of our loins? Think of how easy it is for this drive to be harnessed and manipulated by those who, for one reason or another, seek control over us! I am in fact astounded that fewer manosphere-scribes and readers haven’t wised up . . .[47]

How could they “wise up” as long as everything from “orthodox” Christianity to Hollywood Nihilists have drummed the same message for three score and ten years?[48]

One could, perhaps, see in this another turn of the cycle of the regression of the castes,[49] from the aristocratic priestly and military, arising from and structured as Männerbünde,[50] to the purely bourgeois or even plebian merchant, organized purely as selfish individuals pursuing material advantage for their private families — the ideal of the modern “conservative,” epitomized by Margaret Thatcher (beloved by conservatives as “The Iron Lady”) snapping “There is no such thing as society.”[51]

The post-war, crypto-Judaic transformation of bromance into family values could not be better shown than in Dennis’s analysis of Isaac Asimov’s 1948 Second Foundation (pp. 192-94). Unlike the earlier, wartime Foundation stories, bromance is non-existent, “pals” turn on, betray and torture each other at the drop of a hat, and the asexual Mule is replaced by the leaders of the newly discovered Second Foundation — Pappa and Mamma. It’s hard to type it without cringing, but the new, Judaic or Judaic-friendly writers like Asimov could churn it out endlessly. Sci-Fi, once home to Aryan bromance, was now occupied territory; it’s no surprise that the State of Israel was FOUNDED in the same year.

The results of “girl-craziness” have been out-of-control teen sex and the decline of all culture-forming institutions, now tainted with “gayness.”[52] As Yockey was analyzing the American character in the early ’50s, the deleterious results for White America were already plain.

The tragic fact is that the attenuation of the national instinct has proceeded so far that one cannot envisage how a Nationalist Revolution would be even possible in America. For practical political purposes, the “White America” which still existed in its strength in the 1920s has today ceased to exist. Whether that submerged spirit will rise again in some remote future is unforeseeable . . .[53]

By the time of the ironically named, Judaically led “Summer of Love,” the transformation was complete.

Every teenage boy in mass culture, whether he was drawn for children, teenagers or adults, whether he was a star, sidekick or villain, would be portrayed as aggressively and unequivocally girl-crazy. The homoromantic Arcadia had vanished. (p. 242)

The results were a disaster for white culture, from the uprising of Charlie Manson’s appropriately named Family to the epidemics of teenage pregnancy and STDs that are now simply taken for granted.

Today, any boy expressing the kind of emotional intensity expected of pre-1940 boys would be labeled a fag, to be curb stomped by some skinhead as “conservatives” cheer on the negroidally bald, reggae-loving champion of white values; while any adult male showing an interest in boys — priest, teacher, scoutmaster, etc. — is presumed a pervert until proven otherwise; Bing Crosby’s Fr. O’Malley and Clifton Webb’s Mr. Scoutmaster would soon find themselves in the crowbar hotel, where “conservatives” would cheerfully look forward to their rape and murder by those other well-known champions of white values, negro convicts who have proven their real-manliness by raping white girls and fathering dozens of offspring with innumerable “baby mamas.”

In response, the “conservative” has his usual panoply of useless and irrelevant fixes — no sex ed., chastity rings, etc. — and above all “censor that Hollywood dreck” — little realizing that the “traditional family values” entertainment he proposes instead is just another brand of Hollywood dreck, and is itself the root of the problem!

And so we see how “conservatives” have concentrated their ire on the relatively piddling “gay agenda” (the Leftist notion that “we’re all the same and probably better parents anyway”) while ignoring, or rather, helping promote, the wide-spread illusion of teenage boys as “just naturally girl-crazy.” Like their unwitting models, the Pharisees, they strain at the gay marriage gnat and swallow the girl-crazy propaganda at a gulp.

Just as Neill’s book, as I show in my Kindle essay, establishes that male-bonding is both rooted in evolutionary biology and culturally productive — as opposed to the unnatural and culture-distorting “family values” of the Semites — so Dennis’s book demonstrates that popular culture, at its origins, reflected these same healthy values, before they were distorted, calumniated, and buried beneath a filthy flood of Judaic pseudo-psychology and war propaganda.

“Conservatives” are right to complain about “Hollywood shoving the gay agenda down our throats” but wrong (again!) to imagine that the answer is “bring back Andy Hardy.” As Dennis shows, Andy Hardy and the rest were culturally foreign ideologies already forced down our throats long ago, first to prepare us for “The Good War” (good for you-know who), and ultimately for “the anti-national impetus of the [post-War] American System, which wars on the forces of history, culture and nature.”[54]

The good news is, if we labor under the delusions of a foreign ideological system, then we can change that, if we set our minds to it. As Christian Larson, a spokesman of the New Thought movement — America’s native-born Neo-Platonism and two-fisted Traditionalism, itself a decades long target of the knife-happy Judaics of the American Medical Association — put it a century ago:

[E]very undesirable inheritance can be removed. Every impression formed in the mind is a seed that will produce some tendency; therefore we should not only remove those impressions that we do not wish to cultivate, but should also prevent inferior and undesired impressions from forming in the mind in the first place. We are therefore not in bondage to what we have inherited, because we can change everything and bring everything in ourselves into harmony with natural law.[55]

As Greg Johnson has said:

[T]his regime was not imposed on our people by a violent revolution. They accepted it because of the transformation of their consciousness. They can be saved the same way.[56]

With Chuck Hagel proposing that the military be cut back to its 1940 level (and being denounced by the Judeo-cons as an “isolationist,” of course), perhaps there is a chance to take out culture back — back to the days of Aryan boyhood. Stop pontificating about “Faustian Man” and bring back Adventure Boy!

Notes

1. Text obtained from here. This 1994 movie recycles plot elements from the original Our Gang/Little Rascals shorts, such as this one.

2. Bosley Crother, Hollywood Raja: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (New York: Henry Holt, 1960), p. 239.

3. See the various True Right cultural figures designated as Wild Boys in The Homo and the Negro (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012) and The Eldritch Evola . . . & Others (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014) as well as my occasional blog, Where the Wild Boys Are. On the Männerbund in general see the work of Wulf Grimsson here, as well as my “A Band Apart: Wulf Grimsson’s Loki’s Way: The Path of the Sorcerer in the Age of Iron,” here and in The Homo and the Negro.

4. Although, as we’ll see, some of the figures to be discussed here, such as Lovecraft and Robert Howard, are already of interest on the Right. See the works cited in note 3 above, as well as Jonathan Bowden, “Robert E. Howard and the Heroic” here, and Kerry Bolton’s Artists of the Right (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2012).

5. Or, failing to rise to the level of “the seriousness of the Concept,” as Hegel would say; see G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Texts and Commentary, trans. & ed. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 8.

6. See Matt Parrott’s “Ten Reasons for White Nationalists to Cheer Up,” here; #7 calls conservatives “yesterday’s liberals.”

7. Defined here by Larry Auster thus: “In my understanding, Paul Kersey’s term ‘Black-Run America’ obviously does not mean that America is literally run by blacks. It means that with regard to issues touching on black interests, black self-esteem, black advancement, the truth about black intelligence, the reporting of black crime and so on, the country is, to a very large extent, run for the benefit of blacks. Not totally, not in every instance, of course not. But the bias favoring blacks is systematic and overwhelming. Thus, to take one example out of thousands, when McCain in 2008 prohibited Republican criticism of Obama over his twenty year membership in Rev. Wright’s anti-white anti-American church that was Black-Run America at work.”

8. “Indeed, setting the clock back is never something to be desired – it would merely cause us to repeat events and end up back where we are now. The idea held by some that we can ‘return to a Christian Europe/America/Canada/West’ is unlikely even those few times when it is correctly understood and not born of a fundamentalism that takes as its standard the crassest and most base forms of the religion, many of which do not remotely resemble the faith which animated the old world.” “Eyes Fixed on Eternity: The True Right,” here. This inability to rise above history to new levels, but instead only repeat the same cycle over and over, is a product of the same metaphysical blindness – a defining characteristic of modernity – that leads to such absurd ideas as literal reincarnation, offered as a “superior” concept to the admittedly historicist idea of Christian one-time salvation.

9. A related case, the need for Bible-thumping Christians to find some differences between the Talmud and the Old Testament, so as to privilege the latter over the former, and continue their judeophilia. See, most recently, Michael Hoffman’s “Is the Talmud the Direct Descendent of the Old Testament?,” here; “One of the most virulent hoaxes of history is the one put forth by Douglas Reed, and before him, the Nazi leadership, that rabbinic Judaism is an Old Testament religion. It is in fact the quintessential anti-Old Testament religion.” Here anti-Talmudist Hoffman joins hands with the ADL and denounces those crazy, irrational, other Jew-haters. It’s like SNL’s shyster Nathan Thurm; “not just different, but so different, it’s funny to me that you would think. . . . Is it me, or is it him? It’s him, right?”

10. See note 2 above.

11. As the screenwriter of Kiss Me Deadly put it, “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it. It was automatic writing. Things were in the air and I put them in it.” On the far from intended results, see my “Mike Hammer, Occult Dick” here and in The Eldritch Evola.

12. “Out Our Way: Teenagers Before Girl-Craziness” at the author’s blog Boomer Beefcake and Bonding, January 11, 2013.

13. Review by Jay Mechling in Thymos, vol. 2, no. 1, available here. Speaking of summaries, Dennis provides a quashed-down version of the book here: “Love Laughs at Andy Hardy: The Rise of the Heterosexual Male Teenager” (GendersOnline, issue 41, 2005).

14. Four-eyed, fat, and girl-crazy; sounds like the average denizen of the Man-o-sphere!

15. Or even Conan the Barbarian, at least in the one, early story set in his adolescence, “The Tower of the Elephant.” In light of what we’ll be discussing, it’s interesting that the supposedly “complete” Kindle collection I had omits the story, and it took quite a while to locate a collection that did include it: Conan The barbarian [sic] Twenty Stories (Seng Book [sic]), which also includes Kipling’s The Jungle Book, featuring his own Adventure Boy, Mowgli.

16. See, for example, the recently republished The Revolt Against Civilization by Lothrop Stoddard, Introduction by Kevin MacDonald (Abergele, UK: Wermod & Wermod, 2011); and The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, Introduction by Jared Taylor (Abergele, UK: The Palingenesis Project, 2012).

17. Unlike the generational relations of the Boy Next Door, in gangs “only peers can experience homoromance” [46]. These are the peer-relations among warriors such as Achilles and Patroclus.

18. The idea that only ideologies manipulating us for Someone’s profit can explain things is the sort of idea that could only explain, or occur to, modern man. Cut off from the Principles of Tradition, he is on the one hand literally formless of personality, subject to the whims of politicians or merchants, and on the other hand concerned solely with not merely his own benefit, but that only conceived in its lowest terms: money and copulation. See “Homo Modernus, Evolian-Gomezian Portrait of Modern Man” by Mark Rostkowski in Aristokratia II, 23-39.

19. See James Neill’s The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies
(McFarland, 2011) and my A Review of James Neill’s “The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies,”, Amazon.com Kindle Single, 2013.

20. See Behind the Veil of Vice: The Business and Culture of Sex in the Middle East (New York: Palgrave, 2010).

21. Michael Davidson was quite prescient to use the Persian term “purdah” to describe the fact (not, pace Dennis, the “ideological construct”) that “most boys, during the two or three years after puberty, don’t want to have girls.” See his memoir Some Boys (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1988).

22. See our own discussion of homosexuality in Traditional societies, using the work of Alain Daniélou, John R. Bradley, and others, in “Tradition, ‘Traditionalism’ and Really Existing Homosexuality” reprinted in The Homo and the Negro.

23. See Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945), chapter 1, “Et in Arcadia Ego.”

24. “[Men who] used to be considered merely a little “odd” by his contemporaries, and avoided or tolerantly humored (unless, that is, he incurred the righteous wrath of the Church, in which case things could be made very hot for him) he is today declared by modern Freudianism to be mentally ill and unfit for the ancient protections of law; and this is surely indicative of the ‘progress’ we have made in a thousand years.” — “Introduction” by Revilo Oliver to Yockey’s Imperium, available online here.

25. See my “The Babysitting Bachelor as Aryan Avatar: Clifton Webb in Sitting Pretty” here.

26. The persistence of the myth that “fags can’t/won’t fight” shows the remarkable hold of ideology in the face of overwhelming evidence, from Alcibiades to Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Putin wishes he had Duke Sergei at his side today, and Americans, who haven’t won a real war since 1945, might consider the career of English couturier, war hero, and dandy Bunny Roger, the inventor of Capri pants who, replying to a sergeant’s question regarding approaching Germans, advised “When in doubt, powder heavily.” See Trevelyan, Raleigh, “Obituary: Bunny Roger,” The Independent (14 May 1997); and for more of Bunny’s wartime bon mots, see “Wild Boys vs. ‘Hard men’” in The Homo and the Negro.

27. As Dennis correctly points out, homophobia only exists once “The Homosexual” has been identified; as my own philosophy mentor would say, they are a “dialectic couplet,” each requiring and implying the other – “The two terms of an opposition have no meaning apart from one another” (Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World [Ghent, NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001], p. 9). Thus, as Bradley observes, in the Arab world an occasional male might continue his youthful habits but, as long as he is discrete and married, this is seen as a harmless foible; homophobia only arises where the Western world has introduced its Freudian fallacies, so that the secular regard him as “sick” and the fundamentalists as “Western.” This accounts for the shock, outrage and amusement directed by PC Liberals against Pres. Imadinnerjacket for his naively honest remark that “There are no homosexuals in Iran” and hence, no problem with “oppression.” And yes, I know Iranians are Persians.

28. The Enemy of Europe by Francis Parker Yockey, “Introductory Note,” online here.

29. Another notable instance of the Männerbund in supposedly “popular” media, of course.

30. As we’ve seen, it’s all about ending the “isolation” of boys, and of the nation at large.

31. The latter reminds me of that other epic girl-hater, Clifton Webb, who played the time-managing father in Cheaper by the Dozen; we analyzed his today-inexplicable box office appeal in “The Babysitting Bachelor as Aryan Avatar” in note 24 above.

32. According to IMDB, the plot keywords are: “male in shower,” “jealousy,” “coming home,” “brother,” and “sister.” What is this, Tennessee Williams?

33. Oddly enough, the 1963 Twilight Zone episode of the same title, by Richard Matheson, reverses the process: a newlywed husband visits his late mother‘s house which he is reluctant to get rid of; she reappears and he becomes a child again, telling his wife to “Go away, lady — we don’t need you anymore.”

34. “How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it?” says General Ripper, who seems to be having a bit of a bromance with Group Capt. Mandrake; see my “From Odd John to Strange Love” here.

35. “But since the Second World War, the Jewish element of subversion has become hegemonic.”

Greg Johnson, New Right vs. Old Right & Other Essays (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013), p. 43.

36. The Proclamation of London of the European Liberation Front, 3rd ed. (Nordland Press, 1972), II.2. Available online here.

37. Dennis, “Love Laughs at Andy Hardy,” p. 7, here.

38. Dennis notes but makes nothing of the way “inversion” is coded to the “bad” half of various polarities — White/dark, West/East, etc., including Allied/Axis. To this day the PC Left delights in imagining National Socialists as fags, while the notion reached its post-War peak in The Pink Swastika, a delirious work whose authors (an Evangelical Christian and a Jew) imagine every German of note from the Teutonic Knights to Krautrock as a bunch of what Sgt. Bat Guano would call “deviated preverts.” Perhaps it reached bottom when the creators of Bottom, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, guested on the “Private Plane” episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, which anachronistically projects the trope onto the Great War. Mayall portrays Squadron Commander the Lord Flashheart, whose name alone suggests boys’ books like Biggles, but who is portrayed in proper WWII fashion as a maniacal skirt-chaser; Edmondson is his equally blond but rather epicene rival, Baron von Richthoven. When they meet in Richthoven’s castle dungeon, and Richthoven begins bloviating about honor, combat, brotherhood of arms, etc., Flashheart blithely shoots him dead, with a disgusted “What a poof!” As Blackadder sums it up, “Dress it up in any amount of pompous verbal diarrhea, and the message is ‘Squareheads down for the big Boche gang-bang.’” See script here and video here (at 2:19).

39. Mad Men, Season 1, “Nixon vs. Kennedy.”

40. Neill, op. cit., loc. 1199-1208.

41. This was the insight of Hans Blüher, Hirschfeld’s rival and, appropriately enough, the chief modern theoretician of the Männerbund and its contemporary appearances such as the Wandervogel movement and the Boy Scouts. Contrary to Freud, Blüher posited Eros as an undifferentiated prior energy, which when manifested is always already culturally differentiated. “Whenever sexuality makes itself noticed in man it has already been taken up into the workings of Eros and thereby acquired a meaning.” One sees here yet another way the War proved useful to Judaic interests, burying the work of Blüher and the other Stirnerite “Masculinists” and spreading the pseudo-sciences of such “exiles” as Freud and the Frankfurt School. See Alisdair Clarke: “Hans Blüher and the Wandervogel, talk from sixth New Right meeting in London, February 2006,” here; and generally, Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: The Youth Movement, the Gay Movement, and Male Bonding before Hitler’s Rise, ed. Hubert Kennedy (New York: Routledge, 1992). As Clarke notes, one implication of Blüher’s work is to render the whole issue of whether homosexuality is “natural” otiose; as I point out in my review of Neill, it is merely a Judaic misunderstanding of Stoic cosmology along the lines of monotheistic “laws.”

42. The failure to recognized this dichotomy, as if all sexual relations were between unequals, leads to such smugly ignorant attitudes as “proud, free and virile Aryan men would never has sex with each other,” rendering the widespread evidence of elite warrior cults and blood-brotherhood inexplicable.

43. See my review of De Palma’s The Untouchables in The Homo and the Negro.

44. Dennis illustrates the point by looking at the peculiar relationship of Superman and Jimmy Olsen, who is less an object of romance or sidekick than a sad sack and fall guy in one of the Man of Steel’s plans, often near death while Superman chuckles nearby, waiting to “save the day“ at the last minute. I immediately thought of Superdickery, the website devoted entirely to illustrating, with vintage DC covers, the thesis that Superman is, in fact, a smug dick.

45. The Enemy of Europe, here.

46. Op. cit.

47. See Andy Nowicki’s “Manning Down” as well as his Counter-Currents article “In Defense of ‘Squares’” which prompted a reply from Ferdinand Bardamu, “Can You See the Real Me?” as well as Greg Johnson’s “Be Yourself?”

48. Neill notes with some wry amusement that William Davenport, who studied the sexual practices of the Santa Cruz Islanders in the 1960s, discovered 20 years later that “both government and church had worked hard” to replace traditional sanctions against heterosexual permissiveness, resulting in an explosion of same (Loc. 1038).

49. See Evola, Men Among the Ruins, p. 164.

50. It is within the Männerbund that spiritual initiation is conducted; this is what creates the true aristocracy, not mere blood, race, or ethnicity. In Evola’s political theory, the aristocrat is the differentiated man, that is, the man who has differentiated himself from the mass, whatever his supposed race or genetics. See Gwendolyn von Taunton, “The Once and Future King: The Political Philosophy of Julius Evola” in Aristokratia II, esp. pp. 82-85. The idea of a nation or ruling class defined by mere biology is a Judaic notion, despite its popularity in European racist circles from Gobineau to Hitler to today.

51. By contrast, in aristocratic Rome, the patrician family was more than a group of related genes: “the rite . . . enjoyed primacy over all other elements . . . that were related to nature . . . ‘The cult shaped the family into a united body . . . the ancient family was more a religious than a natural association’ [de Coulanges].” Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 39.

52. Evola, as usual, seems to be unique on “the Right” for understanding that the modern “population crisis” is both quantitative — too many Untermenschen — as well as qualitative — too few of the elite. The answer to the first is abortion and birth control, to the second, homoromantic Männerbund (Evola calls them “celibate”). (See Paul Furlong, Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola [New York: Routledge, 2011], p. 84, and Gwendolyn von Taunton, op. cit., p. 112). Needless to say, both are anathema to the “conservative” who counsels instead: more girl-craziness!

53. The Enemy of Europe by Francis Parker Yockey, “Introductory Note” online here. “White” America is the key here. Just as America has been feminized, it has also been Negrofied. The Negro manifests hysterical hyper-heterosexuality in both his out-of-control sexuality and his inability to form true Männerbünde and hence create and sustain culture. As a commenter at Stuff Black People Don’t Like observes: “I have often heard that negros gestate faster, mature faster and die faster, but this is really an eye-opener. PDK often opines on the fast reproductive strategy but here it is out in the open. While Whites and their minds are still growing (and will continue to grow till 25) negros seem to be completely “done” by 18. After that, they get coarser and uglier till 35 and then they begin to die off. The average life span of a negroid is 69 years. Probably the natural life span of a groid is 35, but their lives are extended by White man’s medicine, White man’s laws and White man’s technology, like Water Purification and food tech. Astonishingly, negros lives are extended by prison (!) due to their large amount of leisure time, [the basis of culture, as Josef Pieper observed] while you stupid Whites are out there slaving away to pay your taxes [like good family-valuers].” Comment here.

54. Michael O’Meara, “2009: Crisis or Opportunity?” in Towards the White Republic (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2010).

55. How to Stay Well (Los Angeles: The New Literature Publishing Co., 1912), pp. 85-86.

56. Greg Johnson, New Right vs. Old Right, p. 29.