By now I know when an article is becoming a book. I shall endeavor to complete this book this month, with every word published for free in the Man Cave. Then I will print a copy to kick back and read after the feds get around to shutting this site down. I never set out to write about masculinity, and if asked at any time prior to 2011, I would have declined, stating that writing about being a man ‘was gay’ and that to the extent it should be engaged in, it should be done exclusively in fiction.

Oddly enough, through the vehement rejection of my fiction by liberal gay male editors and liberal female editors, on the grounds that masculine characters are ‘adolescent’ and inappropriate for adult fiction I came fully in contact with the emasculatory agenda of our society, and only now attempt to confront it from the root.

Indeed, if you go onto my Amazon page and look up the listing for the horror anthology Sacrafix you will find a criticism by a female reviewer [my sister!] that the story “Little Feet Going Nowhere,” was excessively adolescent in its depiction of a male escort and amounted to a fantasy. The fact is that character’s career was modeled on an actual male escort who I interviewed! The man’s lot is depicted as wretched. He does not like selling his body. He is in love with one of his clients [which incidentally was based on my brief time trying my hand at his profession, for which I was emotionally unsuited] and serves as an example of a socially emasculated man, though he remains physically whole.

This inability to connect with other female writers in terms of the spiritual subtext is not exclusive to my sister—who is now surely horrified that I was briefly a whore—but extends to my conversations with a fellow sci-fi writer as well as a female scientist who I have coached in knife and stick fighting.

As 19th Century philosophers once noted that women are incapable of experiencing honor due to their material grounding. I am not in absolute agreement with that indictment. However, it is my experience that the vast majority of women, and now all of the feminized men, remain incapable of comprehending materialism itself: matter, material, maternal. My scientist friend believes she is not materialistic when she claims that we would best opt for tyranny to feed the poor. Her belief that feeding the poor at the point of a gun is not materialistic suggests that materialism as a faith—which it is—is primarily concerned with the matter of the human body not so much the goods and baubles of our material economy.

Those who have wed themselves to purely secular ideology deny the spiritual realm, deny the Platonic, Aristotlean, Newtonian, Deistic, Darwinian, Jungian concepts of ‘God’, and where their ignorant theistic antidescendents once vested God with the aspects of Man, they now vest Man with the aspects of God. With Man and Woman now serving as the foundation for the latest interpretation of our dualistic construct as God Woman and Devil Man, one cannot argue against materialism as it was formally defined by many of our great thinkers. The fragment of the anti-materialist definition of materialism that remains is now utterly corrupted and divorced from its own meaning by its very absolute usurpation of ethics from their former basis in the life of the mind. So where materialism used to be an obsession with things of the body and that which feeds, affects and serves the body, it is now diluted to mean an obsession with property.

So, for those atheists who might read this, please note that my outmoded definition of materialism includes your sacred rotting body, and that my heretical notion of God is essentially deistic, and merely means the life of the mind, and the consideration of a possible universal mind—perhaps a mere set of cosmic rules that underpin our existence—and that I am not referring to the number of cars in your driveway. It might comfort some and trouble others that the most functionally intelligent man in Maryland, Ben Carson—a black brain surgeon—has just thrown away any chance at a political career by stating that our current social ills are caused by feminism. For a more in depth discussion of materialism see M.

In 1998 I began researching The Broken Dance, which was intended to be the history of boxing from prehistory until the present. 1152 books into the initial reading by 2000 I had reduced the outline 27 times until it ended at 323 B.C., as my editor at Paladin Press, Jon Ford, kept saying, “Cut the head off!”

Finally, by 2005, with a 740 page book on my hands, he said, “I’m thrilled that you have taught yourself how to read Greek. But you are a high school dropout who has been getting punched in the head for 30 years—get an academic opinion!”

I got two opinions and had my translations checked by an ancient philosophy professor. Finally, by 2010 I had rewritten the thing into 3 books, which turned out not to be an instructional on how to punch other assholes in the face like an ancient Greek, but a history of masculine culture as seen through manhood rituals such as boxing, from prehistory to the death of Alexander the Great.

As much as my editor loved the book the publisher turned it down. I can’t blame him. I’ve only sold 3 copies in 3 years! It now occurs to me that my increasingly rabid ‘manhood’ rants on this site in response to the ongoing emasculation of my kind are heavily informed by my research into ancient boxing, wrestling, MMA, dueling and warfare encompassed in that work, as well as the ongoing Harm City oral history project.

Incubus of Your Sacred Emasculation by the priesthood of your omnivorous God of Things is an attempt to rectify and synthesize the 18 years of urban violence research with the reading on and participation in the manly arts that has obsessed me since 1976.

If you are a liberal I hope you hate this book.

I am dedicating this book to Jack Donovan whose book The Way of Men was one of the sparks that set a fire under my hairy ass and convinced me to discuss manhood with someone other than the fighters I coach.

The chapters below will be published variously on the pages listed in brackets but will all be tagged for the Man Cave.

1. The Plight of Men [blog]

2. A Dept of Honor [blog]

3. The Patron Saint of Whores [Harm City]

4. The Women We Left Behind [Harm City]

5. Tao of A Black Cracker [Harm City]

6. The Logic of Honor [Modern Combat]

7. Honor versus Hierarchy: Past [Ancient Combat]

8. Honor versus Hierarchy: Present [blog]

9. Your Masters’ Plan [blog]

10. Edward Dietz’s Slave Mistress [Harm City]

11. On the Altar of The God of Things [blog]

12. A Chink in the Machine [blog]

Appendices: [existing articles] M, The Extinction of Men, To Step on God's Toe, Beyond the Garden of Ishtar, Behavior That's Admired, The Fall of the Garden of Ishtar, Getting Hammered in the Hood