Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Politics In General Sanford back Wednesday, his office says

man/burro bonding sort of thing.

The “new” men’s movement, signaled by the popularity of works by Robert Bly and Sam Keen, and the hundreds of weekend “mythopoetic” retreats, indicates a growing restlessness among American men. This essay examines the assumptions and political implications of the mythopoetic men’s movement and presents a feminist-inspired critique. First, we describe the movement’s essentialist assumptions about gender, stressing the ways these assumptions reproduce power inequalities between women and men. Second, we explore the psychoanalytic diagnosis of male malaise and argue that feminist psychoanalysis provides a more compelling case. Third, we explicate the celebration of anthropological initiation rituals and place these rituals within larger cultural contexts of male-female relationships. Fourth, we describe the historical antecedents for the current mythopoetic retreats, suggesting the structural conditions under which fears of feminization of manhood are likely to be expressed. Finally, we discuss the sociology of developmental regression contained within the mythopoetic vision, arguing that what is to be retrieved is not “deep manhood,” but “deep boyhood,” a playfully innocent and romanticized view of masculinity without adult responsibility of work and family. We claim that only by developing an explicitly pro-feminist politics can men’s lives be meaningfully changed.


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