Attacking Patriarchy, Redeeming Masculinity
David J. Tacey - Excerpt - A Review of Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men and Robert Bly. "What Men Really Want'.
Hello everyone, I am sending this excerpt, not necessarily because I agree with all of it, but mainly because of it’s idea that whilst the Patriarchy is crumbling, masculinity might need to be redeemed(or as Eugene Monick put it, unless masculinity is differentiated from patriarchy, both will go down the drain together). And this article is a good survey of the field. And it seems to me Robert Bly has made an intriguing contribution to all of this in his book Iron John(and it is almost like he intuited the need to redeem masculinity).
THE NEW "ANTI-MASCULINIST" MEN'S STUDIES
Can we live without the concept of masculinity? Can masculinity be redeemed by separating it from its rigid patriarchal definitions? These and related questions are keenly debated today in North America, and increasingly more men and women in Australia are posing these vital questions in relation to their personal and cultural lives. Forty )'ears ago most "thinking" men did not ask these questions, since they were by and large comfortably and unselfconsciously ensconced in the conventional images of masculinity that had been passed on to them by society. Fifteen or even ten years ago, the idea of "redeeming" masculinity would have been considered unsound, inappropriate, or even irrelevant to the marc urgent social task of reclaiming and enlpowering femininity. About twenty years ago some works appeared which seemed to want to defend or reinstate masculinity, but a reactionary defense of masculinity is not what I mean mean by redeeming it. (See Karl Bednarick. The Male in Crisis. New York, Knopf, 1970; and Norman Mailer. An American Dream. New York, Dial Press, 1965.)
Over the last five to eight years there have been numerous essays and books by post-Jungian conlmentators who suggest that redeeming or rediscovering masculinity is now an urgent cultural task. This theme has not arisen frotn the "new men's studies" which is currently burgeoning in the United States or Canada, but has eInerged as a separate discourse in response to it. The new men's studies in North Atnerica derives from an intellectual movement influenced by feminism which is attempting to organize itsel and to promote discussion of men’s issues(especially male violence, sport, sexism, homosexuality) in both graduate and undergraduate programs in universities and colleges. (Some recent texts in the new men's studies are: Michael Kaufnlan, ed., Beyond Patriarchy, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1987; JeffHearn, The Gender of Oppression, Brighton, England, Wheatsheaf, 1987; Harry Brod, ed., The Making of Masculinities, Boston, Allen & Unwin, 1987; Michael S. Kimmel, ed. Changing Men, Beverly Hills, Sage Publications, 1987.) Many of us look forward to the introduction of men's studies in Australian universities, and already a number of teachers are moving to have these new courses implemented. I have some misgivings about the title "men's studies"; it has an indulgent sense to it which invites comments like "haven't we had two thousand years and more of men's studies?" and it appears academically political in the sense that it follows hard upon the instiutional implementation of women's studies. But despite initial impressions, the new men's studies is not reactionary but is a basically radical movement which is anti-patriarchal as well as anti-masculinist, and which operates in part within a politics of guilt.
Indeed, one of the indulgences of the new men's studies is a profound, sometimes obsessive, hatred for masculinity, which I will explore later. There is a desire not so much to redeem or revision masculinity in view of the excesses and problems of the past, but a desire to smash masculinity altogether. This, it must be admitted, is an especial preoccupation ofthe radical wing of the movement, but it can also be found in more diluted forms in the work of less extreme authors. Theoretically and abstractly, the idea of abolishing the concept of masculinity may seem desirable, since "masculinity" appears to many to be a construct of patriarchy and is therefore felt to be something that must fall as patriarchy falls. But psychotherapists in particular are disturbed by what the radical wing of the new men's studies are proposing for men. Over recent years James Hillman ("Wars, Arms, Rams, Mars," in Robert Bosnak, ed., Facing Apocalypse, Dallas, Spring Publications, 1987), Edward C. Whitmont (Return ofthe Goddess, New York, Crossroad, 1982), Eugene Monick (Phallos, Toronto, Inner City Books, 1989),James Wyly (The Phallic Q}test, Toronto, Inner City Books, 1989), Andrew Samuels (Samuels, ed., The Father., New York, University Press, 1986) and other post-Jungian writers, have published writings which directly or indirectly criticize the attitudes upheld by the new men's studies and argue that simplistic, reductive, or negatively defined notions of masculinity may lead to a future society in which a vital part of the human psyche is repressed.
THE SOFT MALE AND THE UPRISING FEMININE
These psychotherapists report that more and more men are presenting for therapy with opposite problems to those which beset the conventional patriarchal males of a generation ago. "Analysts are beginning to meet a new kind of man," wrote Andrew Samuels in 1985. He is a loving and attentive father to his children and committed marital partner, concerned with world peace and the state of the environment; he may be a vegetarian. Often, he will announce himself as a feminist. He is, in fact a wholly laudable person. But he is not happy ... this man [is a] casualty of a basically positive and fruitful shift in consciousness [and] will stay a mother's boy. He is a mother's boy because he is doing what he does to please Woman. (Samuels, The Father, p. 3) The "basically positive shift in consciousness" is the powerful resurgence of the feminine in our time, a resurgence which post-Jungians see as a necessary compensatory response to the dangerously one-sided and oppressive domination of consciousness by masculine archetypes. For post-Jungians however, the feminine is not wholly identified with women, any more than the masculine is felt to be synonymous with men. (See John Beebe, ed., in C. G. Tung, Aspects of the Masculine, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989; and James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis, New York, Harper Colophon, 1978.) Instead, these are archetypal principles or potencies discovered in the psyches of both men and women, which are engineered and manipulated by society (as gender roles and stereotypes) and which are identified with maleness and femaleness (biological sex) only with resultant lin1itation, harm, and restriction to both sexes.