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”55) 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-Rightists can choose to give a more favorable interpretation.56
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 warriors57 (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 to say that teenage homoromance is equally ideological is just another Leftist knee-jerk, like “race is a social construct.”58
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.59 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 environments 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 kept 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.”60
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.61 The notion of boys going “girl crazy”—and hey, whatcha gonna do about it?—is by contrast the real ideological construct.62
4. WHAT HAPPENED & HOW?
Well then, what happened, and why? How did girl-craziness “invade and ultimately conquer Arcadia”?63 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 Hirschfeld 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”64 like Clifton Webb65 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 man66 but apt to spread the infection by deviating youth. He was a menace that needed to be faced up to and defeated.67
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”] . . .68
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) were 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. 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,69 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 an 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,70 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 or 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 (the first thing they do on arrival is shower together), healthy relationship with Alex, who 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.71
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).72
Good clean ’50s entertainment!73 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 B movie 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?74
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.75 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, [four 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.76
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. 77
“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.78
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.”79
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.
Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture Page 3
