Somebody is buying millions of booksabout men and their
pain.
WHATEVER MEN DO these days, they don't feel masculine enough. They
try to feel more masculine by competing harder over practically anything
from pecker size to watch price to long-distance spitting. They try to
control whatever is within their realm, whether it be their own emotions
or other people's sexuality.
Those who aren't out to prove their masculinity by sleeping around
are hoping they'll find a woman who knows how to make them feel manly
enough. But those who try to get their sense of themselves from women are
in deep trouble. Why? Because women are pissed. They've been deserted by
fathers, betrayed by husbands, assaulted by strangers, and exploited by
bosses, all of whom were just doing what a man's gotta do to feel like a
man. We all saw Thelma and Louise and heard the cheers from the audience:
Women are through being cheerleaders for the games men play.
Men are getting confused. We do what we've been taught was
masculine and no longer get applause for our successes or sympathy for
our failures.
A lot of guys out there are complaining that women aren't doing a
good job of loving them and tolerating them. They used to blame their
mothers, then they blamed their wives, and now they blame their ex-wives
for giving imperfect love and expecting something back. "How dare women
try to give meaning to their own life rather than to mine?"
It ought to be obvious that men should look to other men for
reassurance and direction, but men don't have friends anymore. We don't
dare expose our shortcomings to other guys--they would get uncomfortable
and ridicule us just as they did in adolescence. And if they were kind
and loving, our own homophobia would cause us to recoil. Most of us
haven't really felt close to another guy since we started growing
up.
We need a men's movement, not to protect us from women, but to
bring us together and help us figure out what to do with our masculinity,
to keep us from wasting our lives and destroying the world around us. Do
we have a men's movement yet?
We read in all the magazines about otherwise normal men going out
into the woods, beating drums and crying together about how their fathers
and their ex-wives didn't love them as much as their mothers did. And
somebody is buying millions of books about men and their pain.
At the center stands the strong, reassuring figure of Robert Bly,
who chants and beats a dram and tells fairy tales about growing up male.
His benign countenance has been on the cover of various magazines, and
everyone has decided he is important enough to write about, but they
don't seem to know whether to take him seriously or not. He dresses funny
and sounds more like a poet than the leader of a psychosociopolitical
movement. Unfortunately, the whole men's movement has been viewed in
terms of Bly and dismissed as silly.
For example, Esquire---"the magazine for men"--put out a special
issue about the men's movement entitled "Wild Men and Wimps." Its savage
mocking of a Wild Man weekend concludes that "the men's movement seems
mostly a therapeutic circus of monied fellows" who "lost their souls on
Wall Street or during a feminist march"--a bunch of white, educated
American men "spending money to make themselves feel good." To the young
Esquire writer, the pain of monied white men is beneath contempt. The
magazine declares, in effect, that it is unstylish for the male
mainstream to be concerned with their masculinity yet.
For Esquire, Time, and even the Utne Reader, which offers the best
of the alternative press, it's all a skit fight out of Lord of the
Flies.
But there's more to the men's movement than fairy tales and drums.
Sam Keen has written a book, Fire in the Belly, which no one can dismiss
as infantile. He holds that men cannot find themselves until they first
separate from the world of women. That's not really as antifeminist as it
sounds. Keen grasps : what I see as the central issue: We have not been
raised by our fathers and so we don't know how to be men and don't know
how much masculinity is enough. Thus we are forever at the mercy of women
to define us and evaluate our masculinity. Keen says, "If we spawn
children and do not care for them, our virility is reduced to a
cock-spasm."
Keen sees fathering as not only necessary for the children, but
also for the fathers: "A man who takes no care of and is not involved in
the process of caring for and initiating the young remains a boy no
matter what his achievements."
I can't speak now to what men want, but it is clear that what men
need is fathers to raise them to be men. If men were made aware of what
their lives had become they'd rebel against the world they've created.
The job is to get fatherless fathers to give up their desperate love
affair with their masculinity long enough to do the only thing that a man
can do: be a father.
Tags:
applause,
cheerleaders,
cheers,
deep trouble,
father,
games men play,
good job,
Long Distance,
masculinity,
men,
men's movement,
play men,
reassurance,
recoil,
shortcomings,
sleeping around,
successes,
thelma and louise
