America's New Man
Ferguson, Andrew
America's New Man Introducing the men's movement—or how to turn a bunch of patheticos into a loving and hugging band of drum-bangers, poem-shouters, and Dad-haters. by Andrew Ferguson Austin,...
...Men wiped their eyes...
...I've always got this stuff: 'I gotta do it.' " "Ho...
...There's some pain," Chuck told me...
...He carried, I mean to say, a good deal of moral authority...
...He bends his knees, rises and falls on the balls of his feet, pushing himself downward, lower and lower onto the indoor-outdoor carpeting, past the cigarette burns and the flattened wads of gum, deeper and deeper into his body...
...It's going to take some time, you better be in it for the long haul...
...In your twenties you buy into the American Dream, that if you get married and buy the station wagon ancriet a job, everything will be okay," Marvin Allen says...
...There had been some healing here...
...If you had a Dad who just wasn't fuckin' there, just a disappearing Dad, you all get here in the center...
...All of which led him inexorably to the First International Men's Conference: A Journey Toward Conscious Manhood in the basement exhibition hall of the Stouffer Arboretum Hotel in Austin, but none of which he's thinking about at the moment, for the moment is the place where he is now, it's all there is in fact, and Chuck is trying to experience just this moment by listening to his body...
...Spectator January 1992 ting...
...Take it from Robert Bly, a poet who once won an award, and from Bill Moyers, his PBS flack whose "A Gathering of Men" runs like a tape loop on public television stations...
...It's liberating to have that honored...
...It provides them with a new gimmick, yet another excuse for thinking about, studying, exploring, investigating, dwelling on . . . me...
...Bliss insisted Bly's letter be read...
...And the notion, however implausible, is an undoubted moneymaker...
...Let the fullness of your bellies relax," says Dr...
...We'll let you run the country, but in the meantime, stop feeling, stop talking and continue swallowing your pain and your hurt and keep dying younger than you need to be dying...
...All 700 of the New Men gathered in the ballroom just off the lobby for a particularly frenetic session of drumming, a bit of bodywork, and a reading from D. H. Lawrence...
...But I must ask you this—make your comments short and succinct, so we can all talk...
...I've gotten better at getting in touch with my feelings," one New Man actually said one afternoon, "which is important to me, because I'm a people person...
...Feel the weight of your hands," Dr...
...It is the means whereby your tiny simpering grievances—the sarcasms of a co-worker, the smirks of an ex-wife—are refined into a narrative with twists and turns and climaxes and delicious denouements...
...Larry looked modestly at the ground, from which he had just torn up several square inches of turf...
...How many of you are in a place where you can never, ever please a woman, sexually or otherwise...
...The American Spectator January 1992 27 enue in Berkeley and you'll fmd the Hare Krishna temple across the street from the Rolling Center, around the corner from the Yogananda Society and down the block from the Institute for Spiritual Rebirth, which is in the old est headquarters...
...I put a fuckin' roof over your—" "Head...
...A number of the men had questions about what kind of Dad they had, and they inquired at great length...
...Goodbye, Dad...
...In a word...
...What do I feel now while I think about what I was feeling then...
...Leaders of the movement—the seminar-holders, book writers, newsletter publishers, videotape lecturers, drum makers, and mail-order cataloguers—are getting a little annoyed...
...All the affected civility, the weak-kneed you-betcha-boss, sorry-honey-I-didn't-mean-it deference, the subservience and subjugation of true selfhood, the sucking up, that has been so fastidiously pressed upon us by . . . by them . . . well, drumming strips it away, sends it streaming out into the world with the great sonic thunder-strike of those $400 drums...
...But then who could doubt the good faith, the thereness, of Marvin Allen, originator of the Wildman weekend, founder of Austin Men's Center, not to mention the revered Texas Men's Institute, the self-effacing leader featured in Fortune and Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine...
...Bly demanded moreover that the letter be read to a plenary session of the New Men at the Austin gathering...
...Bliss says softly, and Chuck swings his arms gorilla-fashion, Andrew Ferguson is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service...
...t is vital that people who talk as much as the New Men I never be embarrassed by anything they say...
...He'd say, look son, it wasn't that bad...
...Tell your Dad goodbye...
...The drums began again, uniting them in an unbreakable bond of 32 The American Spectator January 1992 fuckedupness, and there was chanting, and Shepherd Bliss told the men to telescope their necks like turtles and feel the fullness of their bellies, letting go of all the stuff that sometimes comes up when you do menswork...
...Chuck pushes his skinny bottom outward behind him...
...cross-legged in the attitude American kindergarteners once called Indian style...
...And it's undeniable...
...Momentarily...
...My father ain't here," Lee began in his...
...This is the great bow of a male pelvis," Dr...
...of us "would discover selfempowerment, joy and hope...
...MAN: Thank you...
...Washington, D.C...
...I'm fucked up...
...I know Robert Bly," said the minister, "and I know Marvin Allen, and I tell you that what they think of each other is beside the point...
...His bio describes him succinctly as "director of the Texas Men's Institute, founder and creator of the Texas Wildman Gatherings, psychotherapist, writer and national lecturer on men's issues...
...The speaker is Shepherd Bliss, a pioneer in the men's movement and an acknowledged expert in bodywork...
...Step to Re-birthing to est to Holistic Healing...
...Dad wanted to watch football or read the paper or, worse, go to work...
...The sniffles began in the darkened room, and then the keening, and the mewling, and then a loud "Daddy...
...Some people took charge, other people just laid back," said Larry from Dayton...
...This conference was more than his idea: it was his monument...
...I want to thank you for that...
...LEADER: No, thank you...
...He is worried there might be more...
...Good answer...
...said the New Men...
...A businessman from Dayton, near tears, quotes a line from "Have You Never Been Mellow," by Olivia Newton-John, and more than a dozen men answer with the Indian word for "Right on...
...We use wilderness as a modality for bringing up issues and processing through them," he explained...
...Members of the rapidly growing men's movement, a phenomenon already totaling more than 100,000 predominantly professional men, are searching for and finding the courage—in the company of other men—to look deep within themselves for answers to difficult questions about their manhood...
...Talking about yourself (What was I feeling at that moment...
...Coyote is "a ceremonialist in private practice in New Mexico," presumably uncertified...
...It grounds me...
...Ho...
...It clears a space for my healing...
...Not every press account has shown the same respect as Newsweek and Moyers and "20/20": some have focused on the "externalities" of their movement, the drums, the chanting, the feathered headdresses, the American Indian affectations, the pseudo-orgiastic dancing, to the exclusion of the substantive issue, which is, let's face it, to explore a deep masculinity that does not oppress women, children, or other men...
...31 This Alphonse-and-Gaston deference can get a bit suffocating, so I'm happy to report that among the Big Dogs themselves the relationship is more Tom and Jerry...
...the conference brochures offered brief bios of each...
...It was too early in the movement's growth, Bly wrote, to coalesce, much less to do so in a Stouffer hotel in full view of the press...
...Regardless of the advertised subject matter, all movement workshops center on a common activity, which is talk...
...All that's missing in this carefully orchestrated sequence is for an elderly woman to pass around cookies and milk before naptime...
...A large industry has long been in place to proffer salves to these unhappy people...
...Bly's fucked up and"—he pointed to Marvin trembling on the podium—"he's fucked up...
...Marvin demurred...
...He is also, let it be stressed, an operator of great gifts...
...If the men's movement didn't exist, the purveyors of all these goods would have to invent it—Say's law applies to self-empowerment, too...
...How could Robert Bly, who had told the world of the Wildman within, himself an Adult Child of an Alcoholic, the poet who had won an award, a man who was so . . . so there, how could he be wrong about Allen...
...Why can't I just let someone else be strong...
...Drumming and bodywork and chanting and storytelling and then each morning the men dispersed to workshops...
...Paul, Taos—with a sufficient supply of men in ponytails and women in wraparound skirts to sustain any trend, no matter how preposterous, until Newsweek can get around to putting it on its cover...
...A mountain, a MatterWhen the lights came back up the workshop was over...
...Too, he's a drunk, as he told me last night, or rather a recovering alcoholic, also a sex addict...
...And basically what I have to say to my Dad is: Fuck you...
...One of the movement leaders put that question to an assembly of the New Men one evening...
...So we all unlocked and sat down and talked about what we had just done several seconds before...
...Bly still has a lot of work to do, so does Marvin Allen...
...20003 Isn't it about time somebody printed how you feel...
...another signature sound of the movement, an ancient Indian phrase, the men have been advised, that translates roughly as "Right on...
...take it from Fortune and USA Today: The men's movement is "sweeping the country," scooping up bricklayers and accountants, lumberjacks and corporate attorneys as it rolls through every village and hamlet, leaving sobbing men transformed in its wake, more sensitive, more in touch with the inner child, more resistant to the oppression of a heartless culture...
...When you go back to that real world—you know, the one that isn't really real, where you can't be yourself—I hope you can take some of this with you...
...Take it from Victoria Rich Communications, the public relations firm wisely hired by the sponsors of the conference in Austin: All across the country, men are coming together to explore the meaning of being a man in the '90s...
...A speaker with a microphone at the front of the hall is guiding the experience...
...The men were led to perform other tasks, most of them involving similarly close body contact, from which I demurred...
...Of course Dad figured prominently aswell in his workshop, held in one of the larger meeting rooms of the Stouffer, in deference to his superstar status...
...You know...
...Bliss...
...Hollers rose from the floor, say-it-ain't-so protests, the rumble of drums—war drums!—began to build, until a man popped up from the front row and grabbed the microphone from Allen...
...John put him with the disappearing Dads...
...All, clearly, have waytoo much time on their hands...
...And the New Men are not only middle-aged but white...
...The men let their heads fall as the lights in the room went down and they were told to envision Dad in their mind's eye...
...We were all sitting in a big circle—a pow-wow!out in the forested office park that abuts the Austin Stouffer...
...Ho...
...It was an impossible request...
...Chuck's sniffle descends from his nasal passages into his throat and as his throat chokes up the sniffle is squeezed deeper, into his chest cavity and then down into his pelvis, and then suddenly it shoots back up, opening his throat, and his face contorts and turns upward and from deep in his body comes a yowl: "Yeeeeiiii...
...A forest of hands shot up...
...He looked more fretful than usual...
...When Maurer tried to defend his co-chairman, Bliss turned on him...
...Someone in the exhibition hall calls out for his Dad...
...After chanting a movement leader will take the microphone and recite poetry in the emphatic, hyper-dramatic sonorities made famous by Bly...
...by Andrew Ferguson Austin, Texas t's early Saturday morning and Chuck is getting down in his body...
...All across the country . . . rapidly growing . . . a phenomenon...
...Rich Armington is a The American Spectator January 1992 "Certified Bioenergetic Therapist...
...And: "It's naughty...
...I saw two blacks attending the conference, but a gathering of men's leaders is snowier than David Duke's campaign staff...
...Now you leave him...
...Bly had of course been invited, but had declined...
...Our guide was Steve, who told me he was a "certified wilderness therapeutic counselor...
...The following colloquy, which I witnessed during one of the workshops, is exemplary of the decorum that obtains among the New Men: WORKSHOP LEADER: You mentioned your gayness...
...So thanks for that...
...Many of the men I spoke with had been divorced twice or more...
...Unfortunately, in John Lee's most famous book—The Flying Boy, which launched him into men's movement superstardom and engendered a mini-industry of videotapes ("Grieving: A Key to Healing") and follow-up books and audio tapes ("Saying Goodbye to Mom and Dad") and lecture tours that fly the boy from Eugene to Chapel Hill and all points in between—he does indeed blame Dad for everything, and damn the endless regression...
...I blame it on this fuckin' culture...
...MAN: No, no...
...Bliss, "feel the pride in your belly...
...I think I was taking charge too much, and this is a problem for me, one of the things I have to honor and work through...
...Is yours...
...Chuck / is overweight...
...But soon the hilarity was over...
...LEADER: You're welcome...
...MAN: Thank you...
...Whimpers, sobs, shuddering grunts from the solar plexus, high-pitched beseeching whines for the mom and dad who did you dirt—these are the sounds of men today, drowning out the beer-belly belching and ulcerated gurgling and hapless farting and midnight snorting and locker-room scratch-scratch that have been the signature noises of men in the past...
...Really...
...It connects them to the Old Men, not the workadaddy drones the New Men once were but the primal men of the forest, for the old men too chanted, locked man to man and arm in arm in thatched huts or under the great wide sky in that ideal world before . . . they invented the lathe and the division of labor and Caterpillar tractors and spreadsheets and the machine-shop torture devices to which . . . they strapped men in order to divorce them from feeling...
...His jeans have been ironed...
...The chanting is perfectly okay...
...Could this rock on which American prosperity has been built, this hard-working, selfdenying model of rectitude and enterprise at last succumb to the siren song of self-flattery and indulgence, and come to believe that he too is oppressed and wounded and desperately needful of expensive healing...
...By your late thirties, you learn that the Dream is a fraud...
...Unembarrassable...
...New Men cannot talk enough...
...Steve said...
...But all is not well...
...My dad never taught me'how to be intimate with a woman," one man said...
...It's amazing what ten minutes of crying can do...
...Is that old male...
...There is the drumming, first and foremost (and I'll try to mention it only this once...
...Chuck thrusts the arc of his stomach outward, straining the buttons on his oxford cloth shirt...
...I tell you, the passive father is one of the most abusive kinds of father there is...
...I want to honor Larry," Steve said, as everyone applauded...
...MAN: Well, thank you...
...For the purposes of this account, then, let's stipulate that the drums are fine...
...hollered one...
...You probably noticed what I did with my arms," said 30 The American Spectator January 1992 my acquaintance Chuck...
...The claim isn't true, but we should remember that less outlandish propositions have sometimes proved self-fulfilling...
...The sales success of such movement bibles as Bly's Iron John and Sam Keen's Fire in the Belly (reviewed by Yale Kramer on page 64) is an ominous sign...
...You can see how I stood back there for a while, let somebody else take over," he said...
...Innuendo, betrayal, secrets among men for whom there can be no secrets...
...We began to resemble a team on "Family Feud," with lots of clapping and commenting and hopping up and down...
...It's far tidier to blame the culture...
...All around him are other men, more than 700 of them, dressed in Dockers and Izod shirts, some in T-shirts and running shorts, each trying to listen to his own body, too, while at the same time listening to the speaker at the podium...
...Stroll down Sixth Street in Austin or Telegraph AvThe leader falls silent while the mewling and yowling and keening fill the room...
...We had signed up, and paid $12, for a "ropes course," in which all fifteen Nobody's Dad would talk the way the New Man wanted him to talk...
...The Men's Conference in Austin was, as its title suggests, the world's first, "an important next step in the further development of the men's movement"—the words of the conference chairman, Marvin Allen...
...And fuckin' clothes on your—" "Back...
...Take it from "20/20" and Newsweek and the New York Times...
...Listen...
...Of necessity no word is too hackneyed, no sentiment too overdone, to be employed in the task of further expressing as precisely and affectionately as possible how the men's movement man might be feeling about himself at any given moment...
...Another revelation, a peak experience...
...It is one of the ironies in a movement that disparages the nine-to-five grind that all this delicious self-absorption is called "work" (but still delicious...
...We've got some work to do...
...Each exercise was followed by glowing self-appraisals, startling in their detail...
...Nobody's Dad would talk the way the New Men wanted him to talk...
...A rift...
...I guess there's a lot of work ahead of me," Chuck admitted glumly...
...A few minutes before, unknown to most of the men, in the empty exhibition hall one floor below, Marvin and his conference co-chair Allen Maurer had got in a shouting match with Shepherd Bliss, the bodywork expert...
...They dissolved and poured out in tears and sometimes in gut-wrenching field hollers...
...For three mornings straight Chuck and several hundred other men gathered in the Stouffer's basement exhibition hall for a heaving hair-raising session, the boom-boom shaking through the walls and ceiling and up into the hotel's nine-story atrium while the tourists and the businessmen hurried through...
...shouted the men...
...CJ The American Spectator January 1992 33...
...You don't have to ask...
...28 The American...
...I'm not blamin' anything on my Dad...
...shouted the men...
...Chuck rolls his head loosely on his shoulders...
...It's just a matter of organizing it in such a way that it speaks to what a relationship can be rather than what it is"—Judith asked a question...
...p 6 6 eople say I'm blaming it all on my Dad," said John Lee, during his workshop "At My Father's Wedding...
...New Men tend to be paunchy, with much facial hair to compensate for the diminishing crop up top...
...said the other men...
...On Friday morning, he faxed to many movement leaders a letter denouncing Marvin Allen as a media hound, a sensationalizer, who was using the conference to further his own career...
...Because let me tell you," John said, full of pity, "this Dad—this one who did a pretty good job—this Dad is the toughest of all...
...It creates the healing space, the place for safety...
...Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot are fighting back– and it's giving the liberals fits...
...He just won't do it...
...Then Marvin Allen climbed the stage...
...Nobody should deny the effect such concentrated drumming can have deep in a listener's body, especially at 8:30 a.m...
...There was work to do, stuff to process through...
...But really, thank you...
...The last half-hour was given over to a guided meditation...
...And this was the beginning of our coming together...
...Be careful not to go up into your head too often," said the counselor...
...After one exercise, as we sat in a circle on the ground, Larry from Dayton told us that he was feeling better...
...Chuck is getting a divorce, his third...
...The men's movement will teach you," John reassured him...
...This brought John up short...
...Coyote, the ceremonialist, lit a peace pipe in closing, and smoked it right there at the podium, honoring all the fathers who have gone before, back to the earliest days, long before the invention of fire regulations and the posting of no-smoking signs in hotel ballrooms...
...Critical fathers—really abusive—you all come up here...
...It got ugly...
...Here are just a few subjects covered: • Our Mother Who Art In New Haven: The feminist campaign to rewrite the Bible • Other Gender-Benders On The Road To Disaster: Same-sex couples, openly homosexual priests, "inclusive" language liturgies that exclude God the Father...
...In such close contact you realize again, with considerable force, that men are hairy creatures, often neglectful of the rudiments of hygiene, and as I felt legs rolling over the back of my neck and heads bobbing next to my thighs I wondered, not for the first time that weekend, why anyone would strive to come into closer contact with this gender...
...Lee said it was about 80 percent of the participants...
...Now let go...
...Talk unlocks the treasure chest of self-dramatization...
...They gave white men the semblance of power," another movement leader, John Lee, told Newsweek...
...What about if your father was passive until he drank...
...One fellow's Dad refused to go out to brunch with him...
...But I honor themboth...
...movement led by specialists in "co-dependency...
...The leader falls silent while the mewling and yowling and keening fill the room...
...Tell me about your fathers, you all know about my father," Lee said, and they did—The Flying Boy is in its fifteenth printing (and soon to be a major motion picture, according to the publisher...
...What the hell are you doing spending all this money doing this for...
...leave an unearthly silence...
...And so they trudged out of the ballroom, through the vast hotel atrium, hugging and sobbing, taking, by the look of it, much with them: a new drum from Drums for Modern Man, Inc., perhaps, or an extra copy, this one autographed, of The Flying Boy, maybe a smudge stick of sage ($4.00) or several audio tapes from Sounds True cassettes ($12.95), the new edition of Is It Love or Is It Addiction?, meditation cushions for bottoms made weary from hours of self-exploration, packets of incense, bongers for self-massage, thuribles painted in sacred Aztec symbols, Indian feathers...
...One morning I attended a workshop, "The Healing Power of Relationships," led by an affable husband-and-wife team from Southern California, Jim Sniechowski and Judith Sherven, who have become the Regis and Kathie Lee of the movement...
...I had my own peak experience during one of the conference's plenary sessions, when John Lee asked how many of the 700-plus New Men gathered before him had been in a Twelve Step program—AA, for example, or Cocaine Abusers Anonymous...
...John announced, as an afterthought, that he would be happy to see everyone that afternoon—at a "booksigning thing" for himself...
...This conference was a chance to create a space of safety, of healing...
...The methods for overcoming dysfunction—the conveyances for a return to that faraway ideal community ofmen—were also on display in Austin...
...Spearheading The Recovery Of Traditional Values If you think mindless radicalism has made a mess of society, schools, the economy, and our political institutions, you should see what it's doing to our churches...
...I gotta do it, I gotta earn the money, I gotta succeed, I gotta pay the bills.' We're getting rid of that...
...horn, an Everest of grievances...
...Austin is one of those American cities—like Eugene, Santa Fe, Boulder, St...
...This fellow, plump and balding, had spoken earlier in the conference, identifying himself as a "recovering Presbyterian minister," and had apologized to the men "for all the ministers in the world and the damage they've done to you...
...It doesn't work so well when you do it alone," Chuck told me regretfully...
...The movement's Eden, in which fathers nurtured sons and taught them intimacy and emotional resilience through a community of tribal elders, was shattered by the Industrial Revolution, which dragged men away from their sons into the workplace...
...he says...
...that all publicity is good publicity...
...Mom just stood there, while Dad—don't even ask...
...Alabama drawl...
...The Social Gospel...
...is the most delirious of intoxicants, and for the New Men it is the one addiction that dare not speak its name...
...almost blew out the windows...
...Then you can start the processing through...
...I run a small construction company, and one of the guys at work is always telling me...
...Marvin regained the microphone for a final word...
...Marvin is a slight, bearded man with an understated Texas accent, if such a thing is possible, and an uncertain manner that suggests he might at any moment have to break off conversation and dive into a foxhole...
...Formerly dignified and beautiful, America's major religious bodies are being run into the ground by middle-aged hippies who don't care what their vanishing parishioners think...
...And fuckin' food on yer fuckin'—" "Table...
...From what I can see," Bliss said, "you are acting as a co-dependent protector for Marvin...
...All you with passive fathers, leave your seats and come up to the front of the room...
...By any measure the Biggest of the Big Dogs in the men's movement is Robert Bly, and for many participants his absence from the conference was puzzling and hurtful, although not, as one leader told me, "fully negating": Like a gathering of Trekkies without William Shatner, or even George Takei, the men at the conference soldiered through, vaguely aware that their experience lacked the validation of a hero's presence...
...said a couple of men...
...A very important point, a bow to logic—after all, if you blame Dad for everything you embark on an endless regression, since Dad can blame his Dad, who was in turn screwed up by his Dad, and so on, stretching backward into the primordial soup of victimization...
...But it is not for nothing that John Lee is a superstar, a workshop sultan...
...Then the New Men might chant the ancient ancestor chants—"Grandfathers we are calling come come...
...I gotta letcha go...
...If the New Man is the Luke Skywalker of the epic, Dad is the Darth Vader, always, his heavy bronchial breathing rumbling beneath every tale a New Man tells...
...One fellow had to sit all by himself, because he said his Dad was okay...
...These are the two addictions he has so far been able to acknowledge and process through...
...I do honor it...
...But we did it...
...And stories are told, primal stories of dragons slain and treasures found, while the men ease themselves onto the indoor-outdoor carpeting, sitEvery Jay Leno wisecrack and smartass piece in Esquire reinforces the notion that the men's movement actually exists...
...The point is, we're;11 flicked up...
...The crescendo and then the final whump...
...That bitch of a wife...
...Men's movement leaders can get annoyed if they want, but they're getting annoyed all the way to the bank...
...Bliss says...
...I think he's up in Canada someplace...
...Gotta letcha go...
...Ah," sighed the man next to me as we gathered our things to go...
...All weekend he walked around the hotel, clutching at it like Linus's blanket...
...Yes," said Steve, interrupting, aware that we only had three hours to complete our ropes course...
...See what I mean...
...Ignoring the wise counsel of his PR advisers, Allen decided not to read the letter to his fellow men, but word of it spread, from workshop to workshop, in hushed tones between chants and drum-banging, throughout the weekend...
...the men shouted...
...Good luck, fellows...
...That's what this conference is all about...
...The siting of the conference was auspicious, not to say inevitable...
...The choices were daunting: Does one forgo "Manhood in the Making" in favor of "Incorporating Gestalt Therapy and the Men's Movement in Working with Men...
...We started by forming a tight knot of men, a New Age scrum, with arms crisscrossed and interlaced, and then tried to untie ourselves and expand into a large circle without letting go of one another's arms...
...It's beginning to dawn on me what's so odd here," a woman journalist told me one evening...
...earthbound, not heaven-bound...
...What if your Dad wasn't exactly invisible, it was that you were just sort of invisible, he wouldn't notice you unless sometimes—like there was once...
...Gaya Erlandson is a "Certified Imago Relationship Therapist...
...Each poem is greeted with a cry of "Ho...
...The commonest figure cited by movement leaders is that 96 percent of American families are dysfunctional, providing an almost bottomless pool of potential subscribers to newsletters, purchasers of audio tapes, buyers of drums, and attendees of men's conferences...
...They wanted to talk about their feelings...
...An even lower blow...
...Beautiful Pointed Arrow "is following a vision of creating sound chambers around the world used in chanting for world peace...
...We couldn't fmd him...
...It connects me to something primal...
...And you can read all about it in the liveliest, most outspoken journal of religious news, commentary, and criticism ever published...
...The key is to become conscious of oppression, which can take time...
...He vacuumed the fog of logorrhea that was gathering in the center of the room The American Spectator January 1992 29 by cutting the fellow off...
...We're the healthiest group of men on this planet, but that doesn't mean we aren't still fucked up...
...The result, says the movement, is plain to see: grief, rage, disorientation, dysfunction, this last a portmanteau borrowed from a sister (brother...
...Try to stay down in your body more...
...The day Dad missed your football game becomes a hero's tale, and the hero is—Yes...
...Could "Healing Each Other's Wounds: Straight Men & Gay Men in Dialogue" possibly be more enlightening than "Warrior's Journey Home: Healing Men's Codependency and Addictions...
...It is only in the last year or so that he has learned to cry...
...Honor it," said Steve, consolingly...
...But the referent for they is of course left unidentified...
...Hear the sounds of men...
...There are no—I mean no—good-looking men here...
...But the men's movement doesn't exist in any definable sense, and certainly not as we have been led to believe...
...To learn what's really going on in the Church, send your name and address with a check for $20 for a year to: THEhristian Challenge The Only Worldwide Voice Of Traditional Anglicanism Department A 1215 Independence Ave., S.E...
...The room is as silent as eternity...
...A gathering of New Men is more than a gabfest, more than a talkathon, it is a flood of words, confessions, preachments of pain and explications of anger, tales of villainous victimization told not just in workshops but in the hotel atrium, at the urinals in the men's rooms, over Diet Cokes in the hotel bar, while having a smoke on the verandah overlooking the Arboretum...
...Any such movement must take its life from a story, not a metaphysics exactly but a shared belief accounting for how things are...
...It's like that song," Larry said, stretching out the exquisite moment as long as possible...
...That scumbag of a boss...
...I feel supergreat...
...my own informal polling put the figure at closer to 90 percent...
...Ho...
...John himself admitted that he and his girlfriend "had been working our asses off' with a Gestalt therapist to process through some of the "stuff' that was threatening their relationship...
...Fortunately, the spiritual heirs of C.S...
...Passing two men in a hallway you might hear: "Getting fired was the first chance I had to create a space for my grieving...
...There were many movement leaders at the conference...
...Meaning: Let's talk...
...the Big Dogs of the New Age, PoohBahs among men...
...A cynic less advanced in the grieving process might suggest that it's easy for Bly to disparage Marvin as a press hound, now that PBS and countless fawning profiles in the slick magazines have made him a millionaire, but for the New Men the breach was hard to fathom...
...The feathers—they look fabulous...
...We were a group of men, relying on one another, as men, with great enthusiasm and encouragement...
...This was Sunday morning, right before the closing session...
...Is it possible that the men's movement can swell outward from the ranks of the balding and sodden and pudgy and sexually inept, to overtake the well-coiffed, employed, and reasonably fit middle-class American male...
...Anyone else...
...Cheers...
...The drama, the little revelations, the climax, the delicious denouement—all for Larry...
...Over here," said John authoritatively...
...John's voice was quiet...
...Inside the exhibition hall the noise was deafening...
...But the practical limits of his leadership were painfully evident, too...
...One lucky guy from Lubbock jumped in first: "My dad—I feel a real need to reconnect with the other men here because it was just like his hyperreligiosity that I just couldn't work through when he'd come to me and . . ." Good luck John...
...says Dr...
...I've known Robert Bly for four years," Marvin said...
...Sure...
...Dad devoted himself to the daily grind, neglected the kids, and often resorted to the bottle and such vulgar pursuits as Sunday afternoon NFL games...
...It goes boom...
...The unanimous "Ho...
...embarrassment would cramp the enthusiasm for talk, especially the talk about the subject of the day (week, year, lifetime...
...Listen...
...Plus his life is littered with co-dependencies...
...Each of these outward signs has by now been used for target practice by every freelance satirist and cheap-shot artist in the country...
...which is of course me...
...But there comes a point when talking must cease and another kind of work be done...
...He just made himself very vulnerable here...
...Did everybody hear Larry...
...They share certain characteristics...
...And then another: "Bastard...
...That's a Marine Corps thing, I can't get that monkey off my back...
...Dad wanted to watch football or read the paper or, worse, go to work...
...My acquaintance Chuck bought his drum for $400, an octagonal affair based on a design borrowed, the drum maker told him, from the Indian tribes of the Great Plains...
...asked one of the men...
...Most of the New Men are middle-aged...
...26 The American Spectator January 1992 palms facing backward...
...t is of course in the interests of Newsweek, with fifty-two covers to fill a year, and of Bill Moyers, constantly polishing his reputation as America's chronicler, and of Bly and Marvin Allen and Shepherd Bliss and the rest of the workshop-holders and marketers of grief to persuade us that the movement really is rolling through every city and suburb, even where men stay married and like their kids and tolerate their jobs and have pleasant conversations, once in a while, with their parents...
...This is the new church...
...Dad left you...
...Among the rank-and-file, the spiritually centered brotherhood seems to be coming along quite nicely...
...John knows...
...Every progressive town has one...
...This requires some heavy unblocking, and of course lots of talk...
...But with hundreds of other men...
...Hear the sounds of men...
...Stephen Johnson's "public work is in the areas of co-creativity and the development of an integrated,spiritually centered brotherhood of men who serve in planetary stewardship...
...The coming together grew tighter...
...It was a question that would not be resolved until conference's end...
...You're fucked up...
...Laughs...
...He instead suggested the men break up into little groups, according to what kind of Dad they had...
...Newsweek followed this sobering thought with a recitation of mortality rates for American men...
...Ho...
...To see this bickering between two men we all love and respect . . . obviously, there are some wounds there...
...Bliss...
...We'll talk about this Dad later...
...And the dancing is no fruitier than what you'd find at a Tri Delt Oktoberfest in Champaign-Urbana...
...after a couple of cups of coffee...
...The crease brushes the top of his Nikes, which look brand new...
...Why drum...
...B ut under the skin, of course, all men are, well, men, equally capable of grasping the insidious dynamics of oppression...
...I want to celebrate that...
...Root your body to the ground with your proud serpent's tail," says Dr...
...Devastated, the chairmen offered Bliss the podium to read the letter to the men in the ballroom, after which poor Marvin, his reedy voice faltering, took the microphone...
...His voice is a thunderous whisper over the PA, and from the back of the silent swaying group comes a high keening sound, then a sob from somewhere else, and Chuck begins to sniffle...
...Dad,' you say, 'I want to talk about masturbation,' and it's like `Argh, I ain't gonna listen to ya.' Like that...
...Dad always said that...
...Every Jay Leno wisecrack and smartass piece in Esquire reinforces the notion that the men's movement actually exists...
...LEADER: And I think that for us as men, it's important for us to celebrate it, even...
...We heard of one man of color who did seminars in men's work," Marvin Allen said, explaining the conference's complexion...
...Distilled to its essence by Bly and his colleagues, the men's movement's myth, like so many others, postulates a dreamy ideal world in the faraway past, a long-ago estrangement from paradise, and the possibility of return...
...After drumming there's bodywork, the thrusting outward of bellies and fannies, and the swinging of arms and rolling of heads in utter silence, inevitably inducing the sobs that rise from deep in the body...
...Calling the Austin gathering of men the First International Losers' Conference would have been unkind but more accurate...
...They wanted him to talk about their feelings...
...the men's movement is for those who have gone from one to the next, from Twelve...
...But the movement leaders should honor the showman's cliché Harken to the sounds of men, of men made new...
...And in those years I've learned a lot about Robert Bly that I could share with you right now, but I won't...
...Where, one wondered, was Robert Bly, the movement's Grand Wizard...
...People with aggressive Dads were put over by the windows...
...My father would think this was funny...
...Amid the wisdom—"Most of you already know this stuff," Jim told them...
...His jeans are cinched a good distance below his waist, down where his stomach descends into his pubic bone...
...Add to these now the local Men's Center...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
