Category Archives: Action

Action Adventure and Feminism 4

In previous posts on this blog, we’ve documented some examples of the amazon superninja in pop culture. This is most blatant in action adventures, in every medium (the worse being film and comics).

To be an action hero in pop culture a character either has to undergo intense, extensive combat training for years in seclusion…or they need to be born with a vagina. This was bad enough 30 years ago, but since then it’s become obligatory. It doesn’t matter the story being told or who it’s about–some excuse will be found to show a male-female fight scene, and the womyn will win every time.

A recent incident on a big city subway inspired me to see if there was any more video from the real world, and I found some. A lot of time can be wasted watching all the stuff out there, so I chose just a couple selections.

When a dude treats a belligerent broad like a true equal, this is what happens.

And below, even when the female is bigger and more experienced…

It’s no mistake that males and females don’t compete against each other in professional sports…because it wouldn’t be competition, unless it’s an exhibition match in which a womyn in peak condition is pitted against some wimpy couch potato.

Feminists had a collective orgasm around the globe when Billie-Jean King beat some old senior citizen at tennis. But even in that sport, the 203rd-ranked men’s tennis player, a decade and a half older, while smoking and drinking, spanked the two best female tennis champions in history.

But of course, the same people supposedly for equality, and buying into the female supremacy memes, scream bloody murder when men actually treat women as they would treat other men.

Because the results are predictable.

Race Riot Nation

After Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, plus having my finger on the pulse of the Official Victim Class where I live and work, I’m removing my rose-tinted Ray-Bans: There will never be a post-racial America. Those who truly desire harmony (and I believe there’s not many who actually do) don’t have the power or influence to compete with those who are inflaming racial tensions in America.

The present occupant of the White House promised a “post-racial America.” But then he also promised you could keep your doctor and health plan if you liked it, and that he would cut the national debt in half or he wouldn’t run for a second term. Obviously he does exactly the opposite of what he promises…with one glaring exception: his mission statement of “fundamentally transforming” America.

Got a whole lotta’ that going on.

The Official Victim Class never cared how or why the fatal shooting in Ferguson occurred. All they needed to know was who is black, who is white, and their minds were made up, permanently.

Exactly their same attitude in the last two presidential elections, come to think of it. Ironic that they accuse whites of racism so often.

So anyway, Radical Times is about the first “race war” in America–the South during Reconstruction, when blacks truly were oppressed. The original cover was okay, but nothing special. I like this new one much better.

The novella is a quick read with action, lost history, and my first attempt at a romantic sub-plot.

And hopefully it’s much less depressing than what’s going on, now.

Captain Gringo #1: Renegade

Lucky for us, many of the men’s adventure series of yesteryear are being re-released as E-Books. Renegade is one of those shoo-in canditates, I thought…and somebody at Piccadilly Publishing evidently agreed with me.

I only read a few paperbacks from later in the series, so this was an opportunity for me to go back and see how it all started without breaking the bank or straining my already-overloaded bookshelves.


Lou Cameron originally wrote these men’s adventures under the pseudonym “Ramsay Thorne.” They are being advertised as westerns now, but that’s not exactly accurate, as they take place in Central and South America during the 1890s. I guess I’d call them “jungle mercenary” adventures.

In this one we meet Dick Walker AKA Captain Gringo as he’s awaiting execution by the US Army. As a commissioned officer, he allowed some prisoners to escape because he thought they were getting a raw deal. That earned Richards himself a raw deal. I found it interesting that he had been assigned to the “Buffalo Soldiers”: the 10th Cavalry–a unit I once researched extensively for a project I may or may not ever undertake.

The Renegade escapes, and almost immediately runs afoul of crooked authorities in Mexico. He also makes acquaintance with Gaston Verrier–a middle aged soldier of Fortune who originally came to Mexico as part of the Foreign Legion. In almost-believable fashion, the two of them team up to survive against bleak odds, and raise a lot of hell along the way. Surprisingly, they part ways before the novel is finished (Gaston is Captain Gringo’s consistent sidekick in the series).

The Renegade series reads almost like a Foreign Legion adventure, only with a XXX rating. And the sex scenes in this book are much raunchier than I remember them being in the later ones I read years ago. Cameron seems to have been more of an “anything goes” perv than I took him for back in the day. I now wonder if he didn’t spend some time in Hollywood adapting screenplays, or some other moral cesspool (Greenwich Village, maybe?) that erased any notion of taboos. But I’m getting ahead of myself here and reacting perhaps as much to #2 in the series as to this one.

The ethnic stereotyping is also much more pronounced than I remember, and occasionally grates.

Based on the typos in the new E-book, I would guess they put the original into digital format by running a scanner over one of the paperbacks, then trusting software to sort out the spelling and punctuation. It’s plenty readable, just annoying if you have OCD concerning syntax…like somebody I know. Ahem.

One asset to reading any of Cameron’s work is the nice little historical and cultural tidbits he mixes in with the plot, whether it be Latin customs or mindset; unexplained natural phenomenon; obscure historical events; or the function and employment of a water cooled machinegun. Though pulpy to the extreme, it can’t fairly be called “mindless entertainment.”

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Two

2. Breeder

This is the only stand-alone novel in the Top Five. And thankfully it is now also available as an E-Book.

You can read my review of Breeder on the old blog, but I’ll summarize in manosphere terms here.

Jeff Clendenning is the ultimate alpha-dog…and not by chance. He was bred to be. Not only is he a perfect physical specimen and a savant for combat, but also has bulletproof game that makes him irresistible to women.

Any women.

In fact, he was born with an absolutely unique superpower: an innate ability to visually clock a woman’s menstrual cycle. Wouldn’t we all like to have that one? We could avoid a whole lot of aggravation, for one thing. But alas, he uses this menstro-vision for a purpose not all of us would: impregnating every single woman he meets, who is capable of reproduction.

He can’t help it. It’s an instinct that was bred (or designed) into his DNA.

See, Jeff is unknowingly part of a clandestine Russian operation. He’s been raised in a “Potempkin Village” believing he’s really an American in the USA, attending college ROTC so he can go fight the Geebees (Patriot militias, basically). But after graduation he gets away from his handlers and finds himself in the actual USA…and that’s where the fun really begins.


Things are a lot different in the bona fide USA. For one example, the Breeder’s “extremely rapid seductions” are considered rape. And that’s just one way this speculative novel written in the 1970s, published in 1988, can be considered prophetic of our present and near-future cultural condition.

Breeder is an action-adventure with a military flavor and some dystopian (or prophetic) elements, but it could be fun for red pill readers simply because of what it implies about hypergamy and the aplha fux/beta bux phenomenon.

Frankly, it’s a lot of fun with or without that.

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Three

3. The Renegade

Possibly inspired by 19th Century mercenary William Walker, the Renegade AKA Captain Gringo AKA Richard (Dick) Walker, raises hell in Latin America over the course of 36 novels. Writing as “Ramsay Thorne,” prolific pulp prose-peddler Lou Cameron undoubtedly had loads of fun (and passed it on to us) writing a character used to “winning in battles and bedrooms!”

I’m delighted to discover that these are being released as E-books now, under Cameron’s own name. I only bought a few of the paperbacks while they were in print (wasn’t on a historical kick at the time), but now I should be able to read the whole series.

Captain Gringo is a definite alpha dog. In a setting rife with treachery, teeming with tyrants, revolutionaries, and German agents, the only man of integrity to be found is the lecherous Frenchman Gaston, his loyal sidekick. The Renegade seduces more women in each novel than some men will in their entire life (women who shout lines like “Oh Deek, my great bull!” during the throes of passion), and Gaston feeds on his scraps without complaint.


In his tactics and instincts, Captain Gringo is seemingly flawless as written. But there’s more than enough wild cards thrown at him to keep the pages turning…and the rounds feeding through his Maxim machinegun.

Badasses of Dude-Lit: Number Four

The countdown continues…

4. The Last Ranger

Here’s another hero that’s probably a beta male, but he ranks this high mostly because I enjoy the post-apocalyptic genre.

Whoever wrote under the name “Craig Sargent” was probably a peacenik from the Vietnam era, because that’s how Martin Stone comes off–despite being raised and trained by a Special Forces officer. The series was published toward the end of the Cold War and left-leaning nuclear disarmament sentiments permeate.

Yet despite the political proclivities and the beta nature of Martin Stone, he’s forced to act decisively and heroically due to the environment and the characters who inhabit it. He also gets his wick dipped on a regular basis, because there’s an average of one damsel-in-distress in every novel.

Major Clayton Stone wasn’t a Ranger, and his son was never even a soldier, so I’m not sure how the series title was justified.

I own all 10 paperbacks in the series. The plotting really goes downhill toward the end, like the author(s?) lost interest and were just typing words for a paycheck. But it’s a lot of fun prior to that. If I have to face a post-nuke future, I’d want to start from a secret mountain bunker full of automatic weapons, with a Harley and a loyal fighting dog to scout with.


I just found out these books are being released for the Kindle. And with the original covers! It looks like they started with the series finale and are working their way back to the first one for some reason. It’s great news for readers in any case.

Top Five Count Down: Badasses of Dude-Lit

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.

Despite being raised in the jungle by apes, Tarzan is far more civilized than Conan…hence, not quite as much fun.

Browse by next time for my #4 pick.

Fight Card Novella for the Kindle Goes Free

The Fight Card series is a growing collection of retro-pulp boxing novellas–deliberate throwbacks to the sports fiction of yesteryear by some of today’s most talented authors (writing under the house name “Jack Tunney”). Fight Card has spun off into MMA, romance and such, but Tomato Can Comeback is from the original hardboiled series.

Set in Detroit, 1954, it’s the story of a young man fighting to redeem himself, both physically and psychologically. It’s free for a couple days on Amazon.

Action Adventure and Feminism Part 3

So now we know how it started, pretty much. But the amazon superninja didn’t immigrate from comic books to movies right away. And when she did, it was a gradual incursion.

The idea of a  120 pound woman physically dominating a 180 pound man in any kind of combat is laughable. So it’s fitting that the first cultural conditioning began in comedies.

(Even male couch potatoes are easily stronger than the average female. Yes, martial arts can make up for some physiological advantages, and according to action movies, every woman is a master; but I’d wager there are still a lot more men studying martial arts than women…in the real world, anyway.)

(You might want to skip forward to 6:40 or so in the clip below.)

The gender role reversals were very subtle in, say, the Howard Hawks comedies. But the more zany the comedy, the more masculine the women and effeminate the men. One would think people watching a comedy would know better than to take anything in it seriously, but when watching a movie, a person’s defenses are significantly weakened due to their suspension of disbelief, and ideas can infest directly into the subconscious. Hollywood knows this, of course, and has used this technique to influence the thinking of Joe Public regarding nearly every subject–especially politics.

By the 1970s amazon superninjas began showing up in non-comedy genres to a noticeable extent. By the 1990s it was obligatory in action movies, and becoming so in adventure fiction. Of course comic books were way ahead of the curve, having started down this road in the early 1940s.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Action-Adventure and Feminism Part 2

We are currently inundated with Amazon superninjas in action-adventure, whether it be on the big screen, small screen, printed page or videogame. And not just action-adventure anymore, either. As mentioned in Part One, this feminist myth has obviously become a de facto requirement for any form of entertainment aimed at an ostensibly male audience.

Where did it all start?

 

It’s no mistake that I refer to these characters as “Amazon superninjas.” You can trace this fetish back to the Amazon stories in Greek mythology. A lot can be analyzed on this subject, but one aspect I’ll point out before moving on is that this mythical race of women warriors lived in an all-female civilization. The only men they allowed into their culture were male slaves, for breeding purposes.

Fast forward to the 20th Century, and along comes a psychologist in the early 1940s, by the name of William Moulton Marston. Though no state allowed such arrangements to be called “marriage” back during his time, he lived in a menage a trois with two women–one his legal wife; the other a former student.

The late ’30s and early ’40s are known as the Golden Age of comic books. Superman came on the scene in 1938, and inspired a boom in comic book heroes. Another cultural phenomenon had infested society during the Depression years, evidently (though far more surreptitiously): bondage and female domination.

Here’s something Marston wrote:

“The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound… Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society… Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

Because he chose the word “people” instead of “men,” it’s probable that he didn’t just enjoy getting tied up by his live-in mistresses, but enjoyed watching them tie each other up, too.

Like many pied pipers before and since, Marston recognized pop culture as a potential tool for mass indoctrination. He published a couple articles, one of which was titled: “Don’t Laugh at the Comics,” and shortly thereafter was hired by the company which later became DC.

In a 1943 issue of “The American Scholar”, Marston would write:

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power.”

Mistress Elizabeth Marston (his legal wife) told Bill to invent a female superhero.

“Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Whatever else you can call a guy like William Moulton Marston, he was a mangina in his private life and a white knight in his public one. He obediently set forth, with all his psychological weaponry, to advance the cause of Team Womyn.

During the Depression and War years, superhero comic books were read by (and marketed to) primarily pre-adolescent boys. This was the target demographic for Marston’s psycho-cultural conditioning. Here’s a summary of his strategy, from Marston’s own typewriter:

“Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!”

 

After all, Bill was obviously proud of his arrangement with Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne.

Marston developed a character he called “Suprema.” He dipped into mythology and pulled out the Amazons. Suprema was from an advanced Amazon civilization, but would become an agent of FDR’s federal government and fight it’s enemies. The name of the Amazon colony would be “Paradise Island.”

If you’ve ever been around a bunch of women living together for any length of time, then you know it’s anything BUT paradise.

Ahem.

Suprema was given a skimpy costume that was scandalous for its time. Though a corset/push-up bra, short-shorts (or a tiny-miniskirt) and tall boots would become fashion for some women half a century later, the only women who wore such an outfit in those days either performed in kinky stag films or posed for kinky stag mags. Bondage toys were added to Suprema’s utilities: slave shackles on her wrists that could deflect bullets, and a magic golden lasso that forced confessions from the person bound by it.

William Moulton Marston adopted the pseudonym Charles Moulton, and changed Suprema’s name, too. The same month that Imperial Japan surprised and devastated the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Wonder Woman was unleashed on the young boys of America.

(Actually, comic books were routinely distributed months before the publication date on the cover, but the significance of that date was too much to go unmentioned.)

There were obvious lesbian/bisexual implications from the beginning, and bondage was a consistent motif. Wonder Woman was regularly either a victim or perpetrator–sometimes both in the same story. Had people in the WWII generation been half as aware of kinky sexual fetishes as they are now, DC could never have gotten away with printing such material for minors.

Early on, a pilot (Steve Trevor) crashed on Paradise Island, and became an ostensible love interest for the butch super-babe. This presented opportunities for gender-role reversal in several comic stories. Trevor often played the part of dude-in-distress, in need of rescue from his dame-in-shining-girdle.

And, of course, each issue with the Amazon princess depicted her physically overpowering men. Even Roman gods were no match for her in combat.wonderwoman

There was an explosion of four-color Amazons during that time (though unlike WW, most weren’t literally Amazons). Writers and artists rushed to bring out Sun Girl, Miss Masque, the Black Cat, the Blonde Phantom, Phantom Lady and Miss America, to name a few. Heroines like Sheena  and Rulah brought female domination fantasy to the jungle. Gender-role-reversal and female dominance were common themes with them, too.

But the impact of this character (and the ideology that spawned her) pushed far beyond her short-lived Golden Age comic book imitations.  The baby boomers didn’t just embrace the conditioning from New Deal socialist writers in Hollywood and New York; they would grow to take this female supremacy concept to new levels.

TO BE CONTINUED…