Sex and the High Command

I used to read a lot of science fiction from 12 to 14 (I'll be the first to admit it's mostly for adolescents, which is not an insult), and I've read some pretty awful stuff. One of them was John Boyd's novel, Sex and the High Command, which I've heard described as "cheerful/inane." I guess it was supposed to be a satire, but even now I'm not sure.

It's rather goofy and really not worth reading, but Boyd did illustrate some profound truths about men and women. One of them was that feminism is based on the hate of men, which Boyd knew when he wrote this novel in 1968.

Here's the goofy plot:

One Dr. Henrietta Carey (sound dyke-like to you?) perfects an orgasm-inducing parthenogenesis drug called "Vita-Lerp" and colloquially called a "V-bomb." As a result, women flock to the FEM party — "Freedom, Equality, and Motherhood," supporting Carey for President. Men, not surprisingly, are to be eliminated as superfluous.

As an aside, I had a friend once tell me that if "you couldn't fuck women, and if they couldn't have babies, there would be a bounty on them." Now that would be the plot of a very creepy novel.

I'm not going to go into any detail about Sex and the High Command because it really is a bad novel. I read it one time and never again. For one thing, almost the entire book is dialogue.

Suffice it to say that in the end men are eliminated and the main male character in the book ends up stuffed in a museum - the last man on earth, so he ends up as an exhibit.

There have been a lot of stories in science fiction about the Battle of the Sexes. Some of them point out that when women want "equality" it doesn't stop there but ends up with the rule of women and the destruction of men. But then, as Ezra Pound noted, "The artist is the antennae of the human race." That's the message of Boyd's novel.

There are other, better novels about these problems. One of them is Norman Spinrad's A World Between, which is about the Pink and Blue War. Again, in it, feminism is based on the hatred of men.

What you find, over and over in these novels and short stories, is that feminism is based on the hatred of men. Keith Laumer, in one of his many goofy, funny short stories (such as "The War with the Yukks") pointed out the war (Yukks being men, of course) was started by an "idiotic feminist movement somewhere."

One of the best of the novels is Charles Eric Maine's World without Men. This is a description of it from The Men's Right Initiative:

"Charles Eric Maine’s saw it coming. His 1958 novel World without Men never received the praise and literary fame of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but Maine's book may have been a better indicator of things to come. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) as a dehumanizing and destructive force, that would lead to totalitarianism. Feminism deformed society in unnatural ways. Maine also grasped that feminism – the dogmatic delusion that women are morally and intellectually superior to men – derived its fundamental premises from hatred of men. He grasped that feminism entailed the end of dimorphism (the male and female gender) and also entailed a total rejection of all morality."

I had forgotten about this novel until I read Ex-Army's take on it. Now this one is worth reading and I highly recommend it.