Call of the Wild

This is about a revolution in male self-perception. Women have had their opportunity to create their cultural revolution. Now it is our turn. After too many years of allowing other people to define us, we are going to define ourselves.

Just for openers, do you remember when you first realized that men had their own problems in this culture? Was there a moment when you saw that sexism was as frequently targeted against men as against women?

When did you recognize that the formation of a solid male identity was not always easy to achieve in this society, that there were as many obstacles to growth and maturity and equality for men as there were for women?

And, finally, how long have you yearned to turn this feminized and prejudiced culture on its ear and assert your own identity and worth as a man?

Stick around; the next revolution is happening. Men--the average guy, not the GQ dandy, not the teacher's pet--are taking back the culture. It is a great time to be alive.

The seeds of my own revolution were planted early. The year was 1973. The place was Honolulu. At the time, I was losing custody of my two sons, Jim and Brendan, ages eight and five.

The sexism against men that I found in divorce court and its attendant provinces was overwhelming. In law offices, in courtrooms, in counseling sessions with the so-called experts who staffed the system, in classroom meetings with teachers and administrators, I was learning that the sexist bias against men in child-custody matters was intense and all-encompassing. The male in the divorce process was considered an irrelevant appendage to the nuclear family.

I fought hard for it, but I knew in my heart that I didn't have much of a chance of winning custody of Jim and Brendan. In those days, something like 95 percent of contested child custody cases were resolved in favor of the mother. (The figures are a little better today, but the system is still stacked against the father's rights.)

I had been a good father, a very involved father, a man who had spent at least as much time with his children as their mother had. But I lost custody of my sons, and the weight of that decision shattered me. I was losing the two most important people in my life, young sons who had taught me how to love, how to nurture, how to pare down my aggressive ego and place other human beings ahead of myself.

After the divorce, I went through several years of feeling unmanly and useless. Cut off from my sons--communications between us often obstructed, visitation frequently under threat of change and postponement--I had no pride in myself as a male.

All of these difficulties and failures were important things for me to experience, however. Without any preconceived plan, I started writing about the subject of men and the sexist prejudices they endure. At first, I wrote for myself, to explain things to myself. And then I got lucky. Playboy published an article of mine in December 1978 titled Who Gets Screwed in a Divorce? I Do! In that article, I talked about the difficult problems that men face in divorce and child-custody cases. I discussed the need for divorce reform. I also considered a larger subject (and one that is central to the next revolution): "How can we find identity and pride and self-worth as men?"

It was a simple but important question, and not many people were asking it publicly in those days. "Men must begin making a case for themselves," I wrote. "Manhood is an honorable condition.... It seems clear that men need help today perceiving themselves as men, and such help can come only from themselves." I outlined certain qualities that American males have in abundance but do not always advertise, including qualities such as courage, generosity, sensitivity, intellect, wit and humor. "Men have a job to do redefining our roles and reaching out for health and identity," I wrote.

My 1978 prediction about male resourcefulness turned out to be accurate. It took us a while, but here at the beginning of the Nineties, we are redefining our roles as men. That is what the next revolution is about: the establishment of a tough and loving male identity that cannot be obliterated by the sexism and prejudice under which we live.

We are aiming for the very best qualities of manhood. In pursuit of this goal, groups of men across the country are starting to meet on evenings and weekends to attend workshops, to think and explore and write and examine their roles as men. True, their efforts are occasionally awkward and improvisational and, yes, there are times when their methods could easily be mocked and misunderstood. But that does not discourage them. "For this is the journey that men make," wrote James Michener in The Fires of Spring. "To find themselves. If they fail in this, it doesn't matter what else they find."

•

In April 1982, I published my first Men column, "Role Models." In it, I talked about the way men learn and work and grow: "Men are by nature collegiate. We are convivial scavengers, patching our personalities together with chewing gum and baling wire. We collect traits from a million different sources."

The sources we are using to patch together our male revolution are likewise numerous and eclectic. They include the writings of Carl Jung, the poems, stories and interviews of Robert Bly, Bruno Bettelheim's theories about the uses of enchantment, fragments of fairy tales from the brothers Grimm, the work of Joseph Campbell, medieval legends about King Arthur's court, the perceptions and storytelling of the contemporary mythologist Michael Meade, the novels of D. H. Lawrence, the writings of William James, American Indian practices and rituals, segments of classical Greek myths, the writings and lectures of John Bradshaw on the origins and functions of shame in our culture, the insights of Jungian psychoanalyst Robert Moore and a host of other influences and properties.

Let's take a quick look at two men from the roster just listed: Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly.

A fundamental source for our next revolution is the work of the late scholar Joseph Campbell. His writings, including such books as The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Myths to Live By, and his interviews with Bill Moyers on PBS (published under the title The Power of Myth), have shown men how to take myths and stories from different ages and different cultures and make them useful in their own lives.

Myths are "models for understanding your own life," Campbell says. "Anybody going on a journey, inward or outward, to find values, will be on a journey that has been described many times in the myths of mankind."

It is this idea of the journey inward, every man an explorer and hero as he faces his inner self, that suits us as men today. Our fathers and their fathers before them faced great hazards and overcame them with courage and persistence. And although their journeys were generally outward bound, not inner directed, the heroes of those ancient myths serve as examples as we confront our own difficulties and scrutinize the dynamics of our own male identity. Granted, it takes some grandiosity for the contemporary American male to see himself as an explorer embarking on a difficult expedition, but he is just that.

Under the fire of contemporary feminist scolding and sexism, the average man has been forced to question his identity and sexuality, and he has usually done so in isolation. But if he examines the myths of the past, he will learn that he is not as sequestered as he thought, that other men have traveled into treacherous territory before, experienced certain risks and come out of the labyrinth alive and well.

Take the tale of Aeneas. Wandering the world after the fall of Troy, Aeneas ventures into the underworld in search of his father, Anchises. Aeneas fords the dreadful river Styx, braves his way past Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed watchdog of Hades and finally manages to converse with the ghost of Anchises, who teaches Aeneas things he needs to know to continue his journey. Like most sons encountering a long-absent father, Aeneas tries to embrace his father, but his efforts are in vain; his father is a spirit and physically unavailable. However, Aeneas leaves Hades with his father's advice clear in his mind, bolstered by this visit into the unknown.

Most men can identify with the journey of Aeneas (which is recounted in Virgil's Aeneid). First, we understand the demands of the physical risks that Aeneas ran. Our lives, too, begin with boyhood quarrels and athletic competition that continue into vigorous adulthood (yes, boys are raised differently from girls). Second, we identify with Aeneas' loneliness, because our lives are frequently unsupported and isolated, in our homes as well as in the (continued on page 142)Call of the Wild(continued from page 100) culture. Third, we understand the story of a man's going on a hazardous search for his father's spirit. We have all been there. Our fathers baffle us, intrigue us, haunt us. We never get away from them, and yet we are often fearful of confronting them, even after they have left us. The quest of Aeneas is our quest.

This search for our fathers is at the heart of male identity, and you will find no more emotional or difficult subject on the male agenda. We know we will travel where Aeneas has traveled. He is our brother, our contemporary, and he reminds us of how direct our link is to our forefathers.

No discussion of men and the next revolution can take place without consideration of Robert Bly, a major resource for men today. A highly respected poet, writer and lecturer, Bly is the foremost popularizer of the mythic approach to the male journey. In a recent issue of New Age magazine, he is saying much the same thing that he said there nine years ago in a pioneering interview with Keith Thompson. The subject centers on contemporary men and their struggles toward masculinity.

In that 1982 interview, Bly begins by citing the men of the past three decades who mark some kind of break in historical traditions of masculinity: "The waste and anguish of the Vietnam war made men [of the Sixties and Seventies] question what an adult male really is.... As men began to look at women and at their concerns, some men began to see their own feminine side and pay attention to it. That process continues to this day, and I would say that most young males are now involved in it to some extent."

Bly then sounds a note of caution. "The step of the male bringing forth his feminine consciousness is an important one--and yet I have the sense that there is something wrong. The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process, he has not become more free. He's a nice boy who now pleases not only his mother but also the young woman he is living with.

"I see the phenomenon," Bly continues, "of what I would call the 'soft male' all over the country today.... But something's wrong. Many of these men are unhappy. There's not much energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life-giving."

For me, Bly presents a precise summation of what has happened to many men over the past three decades--when the feminist revolution has taken over the culture and told us how terrible we were as men and how much we needed to change. To be macho in any manner has been unfashionable. And yet, every man has an element of the macho in his genetic structure. To deny it and suppress it can be deadly to men (and to the culture). Such denial can leave us depressed, without energy or passion or identity.

As men, we have special gifts. One of those is the ability to be in touch with the Cro-Magnon man who lives somewhere deep inside our hearts and minds and calls to us. It is vital to remember that this man is not a savage. In no way is he an uncontrolled killer or evil oppressor. He is primordial but not barbaric, aboriginal but not vicious. He represents what is best in the spirit of manhood. Indomitable and invincible and wild, ready to protect and defend and compete, his instinct and perceptions necessary to ensure the survival of the human race, this primitive man at the center of our psyches must be allowed room to live and breathe and express himself. If this rudimentary part of us dies, male identity dies.

Bly, borrowing a term from Iron John, a tale written by the Grimm brothers in 1820, calls this primitive man "the wildman." It is not a bad name for him.

In Iron John, a young man on a difficult journey sees a large, hairy creature--the wildman--at the bottom of a pond that the young man is emptying, bucket by bucket. This discovery is frightening and intriguing. "What I'm proposing," says Bly, "is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive man covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this wildman...is the process that still hasn't taken place in contemporary culture.... Freud, Jung and Wilhelm Reich are three men who had the courage to go down into the pond and accept what's there.... The job of modern males is to follow them down."

Accepting what is dark down there--what he calls "the shadow"--is another task that Bly assigns to any man who would discover his true male self and become an initiated male. Under Bly's urging, men are beginning to explore this shadow side of their personalities. Anger, aggression, grief, feelings of abandonment and rejection, rage, confusion--all the varied dark and shadowy forces that whirl around like demons in the male psyche--these are things that we have tried to deny or ignore in order to be acceptable and admired.

But we have tried much too hard to be nice and we have essentially handed over the job of self-definition to others. This turns out to have been self-destructive. We emasculate and feminize ourselves to gain female approval--and then we hope against all available evidence that our powerful masculine energies will leave us alone. But is that likely?

Face it: For most men, the hope that our energy will fade away is vain. Witness the fact that our sexuality emerges at a very early age--usually much earlier than the emergence of female sexuality--and carries with it a beautiful immediacy, from spontaneous erections to wet dreams to vivid fantasies. This immediacy of male sexuality lasts well into our adulthood, even into old age for many men. Are we really going to be able to suppress all of that energy? And why should we repudiate such a unique and wonderful drive?

To use a Bly analogy, "The Widow Douglas wanted Huck Finn to be nice. And after he has floated down the river with a black man, Aunt Sally wants to adopt him and 'civilize' him. Huck says, 'I can't stand it. I been there before.'"

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

The wildman lives in every man. He is beautiful and divine. He has enormous, fundamental energy and a great love for the world. He is just as much a nurturer and protector and creator as any female figure, but he will do that nurturing and protecting in his own masculine way. It is time for the wildman in us to be celebrated without shame. That celebration is part of what our revolution is about. It is our job as men to know ourselves better so that we can contribute more to this world and be more honest with ourselves. We have a right to our revolution, in other words. An absolute right.

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Cut to a damp and cold weekend in November 1988 at a lodge somewhere in Wisconsin. I am attending The New Warrior Training Adventure, one of the only programs in the country that emphasize male initiation as a necessary rite of passage. It is late at night, I have been here for a day and a half already and I am surrounded by a group of men who are asking me with focused energy to look deeply into my life. Who am I? What is my mission in life as a man? What is it that holds me back from completing my mission? What is my shadow, and how does it haunt me?

Understand that a number of things have occurred at this seminar before this moment, things that have pushed me and scared me and enlightened me and softened me up for the interrogation at hand. There have been some games, some questioning, there has been a rendition of Iron John, a discussion of the shadow and what it means to men. I feel on the edge of a breakthrough. I am not sure that I like that feeling. I see myself as a man of containment and self-control, and yet here I am in emotional limbo. I feel like an astronaut on the moon.

I tell the men around me about what I perceive to be my shadow, my tendency toward aggression, my crazy childhood and difficult family life, how tough and defensive I became after early years of violence that seemed endemic in both my home and my neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, how combat-ready I always am, how I think that my turbulent mind-set interferes with my mission in life.

Rich Tosi, a former Marine and one of the founders of the New Warrior Training Adventure program, challenges me on my description of my shadow as that of the ferocious man. "Bullshit, Baber," he says. "I'm not worried about you and your violence. You've explored that. That's not your shadow, because you've faced it. You know the kind of guy who scares me? The man who has never confronted his violence, the passive-aggressive bastard who might freak out and lose control and get violent without any warning at all.

"Take a look. When are you going to admit to the grief you have for the men you've lost in your life? What about your father, for example, or your sons, when you lost custody of them, or the guys from your old neighborhood who never got out of there alive, or the Marines you knew who were killed? You've lost a lot of men, haven't you, Lieutenant? Pick one of the dead ones, any one, and talk to him now. Go on, do it!"

I felt all my defenses crumble and I faced my grief openly for the first time. I mourned, I raged, I pounded the floor, I went down into the dark pond of my psyche and dredged up the forces I had been containing for too many years, I bucketed out my rage and my grief under the guidance of good men.

Tosi and Dr. Ron Hering, another founder of The New Warrior Training Adventure, led me down into the grave of the man I happened to grieve for the most that evening, a Marine named Mike with whom I served and who was killed in a chopper crash in Laos in the mid-Sixties. Mike had been like a younger brother to me. His father had been like a father to me after my own father passed away in 1960. The secret war in Laos would kill Mike first, and Mike's death would kill his father a few years later. Losses? Mine were incalculable, and they had occurred in a very short time. Two fathers and many brothers dead in the space of a few years, and the additional specter of a full-scale war that had never been declared a war? I had not been able to handle the heartache of all that, so I had suppressed it, buried it. The heartache, you see, was my shadow.

Ron Hering and Rich Tosi and the other men working with me gave me room to grieve, let me explore my shadow, did not judge me or exploit me for my sadness, understood the losses that most men endure in self-imposed isolation, the denials we elaborately construct to hide from our grief.

Until then, I had always assumed that my physical survival was living proof of my cowardice and unmanliness. It was a certain kind of twisted male syllogism that is not uncommon: Men had died, I had not; therefore, I was undeserving of life; I should have died before them, possibly thereby saving them. That is a classic case of survivor's guilt, of course, and I had it full-blown.

Hering and Tosi and my peers helped me see that the men who had died wanted me to carry on the best traditions of manhood for them. They--all my fathers and brothers and sons from the beginning of time--were handing me the golden ball of masculinity with all its energy and beauty, and they were asking me to preserve it, protect it and pass it on to the next generation of men. That was my mission in life.

With that realization, the shadow of guilt and grief that had dominated me faded in the light of my self-examination. I faced my shadow, battled it, tapped into my wildman energy and overcame it. Like Aeneas, I visited Hades and came away from the underworld with a little more wisdom.

In a very real sense, I was now an initiated male, a man ready to accept the joys and obligations of maturity.

"We are living at an important and fruitful moment now," Bly writes in his new book, Iron John, "for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them.... [Men are] open to new visions of what a man is or could be."

New visions of masculinity: That is what our revolution is all about.

Welcome aboard.

"The Cro-Magnon man lives deep inside us; if this rudimentary part of us dies, male identity dies."