Becoming a Man - Part 1

Robert Bly

In the 1970s and 1980s, men’s consciousness raising groups that I was in often seemed to split, soon after their formation, into two groups. One group would be introspective, focussing on how men experience being stifled by conventional sex roles, and seeking men’s liberation from the confines of masculinity. The other group would focus more on confronting our/men’s oppression of women and children, and would be keener to be involved in actions to challenge that oppression (to oppose pornography or to promote vasectomy, for example).

In 1989/90 two books appeared in the US, that aimed, in very different ways, to bridge the gap between exploring how it feels to be a man and acting as a man to challenge sex-based oppression. UK editions appeared a year later. Of all the books by men responding to the challenge of feminism, Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John’ (1990) has probably been the most widely read, and John Stoltenberg’s ‘Refusing to Be a Man” (1989) was, at least until Robert Jensen’s ’The End of Patriarchy’ (2017), probably the most radical. These books by Stoltenberg and Bly included valuable insights, but each contained profound flaws - flaws which have become more apparent with the passage of time.

Iron John

Iron John is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, which Robert Bly used, in his workshops and in his book with that title, as a guide to encourage men to make the changes he believed they needed to recover a potential they had lost. Healing the split between sons and fathers, and between boys and older men, he suggested, would help men become more effective in building healthier relationships with women and more constructive ways of bringing up children.

Bly welcomed the emergence in the 1970s of what he called the “soft male”. But he lamented that those young men lacked vitality. I recognise some of my 1970s self in his characterisation:

“They’re not interested in harming the earth or starting wars. There’s a gentle attitude toward life in their whole being and style of living.. But many of these men are not happy. You quickly notice the lack of energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving.”

I can imagine that participating in one of Bly’s workshops would have enabled some of these men to re-connect with positive aspects of becoming a man that have long been lost. But those men would have absorbed, as well, aspects that are far from positive.

Bly later regretted  his use of the term “soft male”, with its implication that what was needed was a return to the stereotypical hard male of the 1950s. Interviewed at the turn of the century, he said that he had come to prefer the term “adolescent man”, as this made it clear that the problem was one of incomplete or flawed transition to adulthood (Reuniting Women and Men, Kindred Spirit, Spring 2000).

Whether it was softness or perennial adolescence that Bly sought to rectify, his solution remained the same:

“Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man…A clean break from the mother is crucial, and it’s simply not happening.”

Some sort of break is, of course, needed to transition from childhood to adulthood, but how this is done, by whom, and to what ends, all have profound political (and psychological) consequences. As Shulamith Firestone noted in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), in the patriarchal nuclear family a boy “is asked to make a transition from the state of the powerless, women and children, to the state of the potentially powerful, son (ego extension) of his father….The male child, in order to save his own hide, has had to abandon and betray his mother and join ranks with her oppressor.”

Bly acknowledges this power dimension in families, but downplays how oppressive it is to women and children. He believes that what has become problematic is that boys are being discouraged from breaking with their mother and seizing the power that should be theirs. He is careful not to explicitly blame feminists for this, but he ignores the fact that a clean break with the mother is at the very heart of patriarchy as a political system that oppresses women and children. And that, at an individual level under patriarchy, the lessons that boys learn from that break are critical in ensuring that, as men, they will play their part in maintaining that oppression.

Angela Hamblin, in a paper presented at a 1980 conference on The Women’s Liberation Movement and Men,  suggested that there is nothing inevitable about this:

“Patriarchy depends, for its continuation, on our sons. It needs them to become the next generation of adult male oppressors of women in order to continue to reproduce this system of male supremacy. But what would happen to the patriarchal system if our sons did not carry out this allotted task?….How can we subvert the male identification process so that our sons grow up to identify their own interests with ours, instead of defining them, as at present, in opposition to us? This I believe to be a much greater threat to patriarchy than handing over male children to their fathers; a prospect which would seem to make their subsequent adult oppressiveness inevitable.”

(Angela Hamblin - What Can One Do with a Son , in Scarlet Friedman & Elizabeth Sarah, eds, On the Problem of Men,1982)

The implication is that patriarchy ensures that relationships between men and women are oppressive, but that one of the ways this can be undermined is if mothers and sons can preserve and develop their bond.

Initiation rites

Patriarchy as male supremacy does not feature in Bly’s book. Instead it appears only as a mythical belief system, grounding the energy of the sun, that complements a mythical belief system of matriarchy, grounding the energy of the moon. Both these belief systems, Bly suggests, were beneficial. Both were destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, and both need to be restored.

But patriarchy as a structure of domination, of women and children by men, is all too real. Nowhere is Bly’s denial of the politics of oppression more apparent than in his praise of male initiation rites in Papua New Guinea. He describes how boys are forcibly removed from their mothers by older men, and initiated by them into what it means to be a man. It is this initiation into manhood by older men that Bly believes is what modern men are lacking. But he neglects to mention that misogyny, torture, and sexual abuse are at the heart of the rituals he wants to emulate.

Maurice Godelier has studied the initiation practices of the Baruya, a Papua New Guinea tribe.  He found that young boys were forced to fellate older men, because of tribal beliefs that women are a source of cosmic disorder and that swallowing the semen of older men will protect boys from losing their strength when they later have sexual intercourse with women. Godelier was in no doubt that this belief system helped to cement male domination within the tribe.

Bly will not have been aware of Godelier’s research, which was only published (in French) in 2004 and reviewed in English in 2005. But Godelier had already published, in English in 1981, an article where he mentioned the Baruya belief that women are more creative than men (inventing the bow and the flute), but that social order requires their violent subordination  (women are prevented from using a bow or a flute, to avoid their ‘misuse’ of them).

Bly certainly knew of Gilbert Herdt’s research into initiation rites in another Papua New Guinea tribe, the Sambia (Rituals of Manhood, 1982), as this is the source that he references. It would be impossible to read Herdt’s book and not be aware that, as with the Baruya, boys were tortured into fellating older men, and swallowing their semen.  According to Sambia belief, if this did not happen the boys would be unable to make sperm, and they would be emasculated when they later had sexual intercourse with a woman.

Rites of passage, and guidance from a wise elder, are important in indigenous cultures, and perhaps should become important again in the West.  But if the elder is not wise, the outcome will be problematic. And if the elder is an abuser, it will certainly be negative.

Bly does not attempt to explain how healing the grief of men can be squared with practices involving the sexual abuse of children. Instead, he just ignores the sexual abuse.

Another writer who draws positive lessons from Sambia initiation rites is Peter Tatchell, whose Foundation gives advice on the content of Sex and Relationships Education in schools. In a letter to the Guardian on 26 June 1997, Tatchell objected  to a critical review by Ros Coward of a book which included a contribution by Herdt which described the Sambia initiation rites. Tatchell used Herdt’s account as evidence to support his claim that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”.

The  routine forced sexual abuse of boy children in a Papua New Guinea tribe is at the root of both Bly’s prescription for healing the grief of men and Tatchell’s arguments for lowering the age of consent. For each man, the safeguarding of children is not an issue that needs to be mentioned, let alone addressed.

In the next post I’ll look at John Stoltenberg’s ‘Refusing to be a Man’. As one might expect from a gay man who was the life partner of Andrea Dworkin, Stoltenberg is much more attuned than Bly to men’s oppression of women. But his book is flawed by over-reliance on the dubious ‘gender identity’ theories of John Money.