WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE OF MICHAEL ANTONY

This website makes available a number of my literary works, free of charge, for anyone who wants to read them.

These works are copyright, and all rights are reserved. No part of these works may be reproduced in any form or by any means without my prior written consent, except for short quotes used in reviews or critical commentaries (where my authorship must be acknowledged.)

By clicking on the buttons on the left you can read:

The Masculine Century, A Heretical History of Our Time Parts 1, 2, and 3. (This is an older version of the book that has now been published in two parts only.) This work is a polemical view of the art, literature and culture of the 20th century. It starts from the idea of Cambridge professor of psychopathology Simon Baron-Cohen that the male brain tends towards systemizing and the female brain tends towards empathy. At its extreme the male brain ends up in a form of autism: able to make extraordinary mathematical calculations and unable to respond to a smile. The mental derangement of the century that has just ended -- with its extraordinary technological achievements while murdering more human beings than the previous twenty centuries put together -- would seem to point to an overdevelopment of the masculine aspects of the brain. The century may be usefully analysed as witnessing a shift in the psyche of Western man in the direction of extreme masculinity: i.e. an overdevelopment of the characteristics of aggressiveness, violence, competitiveness, the urge to dominate, produce, and technically transform the world, and the eclipse of the feminine side of human nature: emotion, imagination, empathy, and the nurturing, affective and esthetic impulses.  The book argues that the main events and developments of the century -- the world wars, Hiroshima, the death camps, the gulags, communist totalitarianism, the triumph of ruthless Darwinian capitalism, the cult of violence, the growth of pornography, the fashion for abstract and conceptual  art, and the adoption by Western women of the male role and character -- are all an expression of the qualities of aggressiveness, lack of empathy, and the technical-mathematical obsessions now known to be associated with male hormone and a male brain structure. The downgrading of the mother-role and the nurturing impulse by an alliance of feminism and capitalism (which prefers sterile drone workers to breeders) has led the West to the brink of demographic suicide. The masculine aggressive impulse has not only created a cult of work and competition of suicidal intensity, leaving little time for family, but in the intellectual sphere has turned inwards into a cult of Western self-hatred and collective deathwish. It has also demolished the entire European artistic tradition, based on a feminine cult of beauty, and replaced it with a masculine cult of the machine and of abstraction. This whole shift in mentality is traced back to the aggressive, violent  ideologies of Marxism and Darwinism, which hijacked our civilization and have dominated it for the last hundred years. They were not only responsible for tearing the planet apart in the Second World War (Hitlerism was Darwinism in action, just as Stalinism was Marxism in action) but still underlie all left and right-wing thinking today (Darwinism now inspires the cult of global capitalist competition, while Marxism inspires feminism, multi-culturalism and Western self-hatred.) These two rogue ideologies have recently meshed together into a single dominant thought-system which threatens our entire civilization. It recently gave us the financial crash of late 2008 as a hint of what is to come.  

The Overthrow of Salvador Allende, a play about the tragedy and failure of Marxism. It shows how an idealist was dragged down by the extremists on his own side and a fanatical ideology aiming at civil war -- while in the meantime the military pawns of the rich planned the brutal suppression of any movement for social justice.  

Selected Poems (and a few photos.)

Information concerning any of these works may be obtained by emailing  

michael_antony@hotmail.com