Manhood and Its Discontents

...Allen offers a taxonomy of dysfunctional parents—all familiar and credible—that explains why some boys ultimately turn verbally and/or physically abusive, while others roll up into an impenetrable ball when their wives vent some anger or their children seek attention...

...Gerson's questions concentrated on the economic and social structures of the households where the men grew up?did their mothers work...

...Allen's theories flow logically from the clinical experiences he describes...

...Gerson's answer, a vague combination of legislation and workplace adjustments, seems only barely relevant...

...She says her "aim is to explain how social arrangements shape men's choices and worldviews, not to pass judgment on individual men...

...If his discussions sound a little too generic, he nevertheless makes many astute observations and the book's easygoing style (the contribution, one assumes, of coauthor Jo Robinson) does not devalue the utility of his insights...

...She is so bent on drawing up blueprints for her superman, however, that she has overlooked the richness of her material...

...Very few boys stand up to the teasing, shame and ridicule that follow violating the code...

...Almost from the beginning, though, it is clear that her ultimate objective is to legitimize her own kind of social engineering...

...Unfortunately, the realities Gerson found cannot be classified neatly enough to draw the lessons she would like...

...Men, he insists, are so emotionally at sea that they make far faster progress when they actually can see their peers struggling with the same issues...

...In the past the man who supported his family, didn't drink too much, didn't yell at or hit his kids, came home every night, and spent half an hour playing ball with his kids on the weekends was regarded as a 'good enough' father...

...The interviews themselves, offered in countless snippets throughout the book, would make a good PBS special...

...Despite their similar backgrounds, some men are fleeing responsibility and others can't get enough...

...The lengthy interviews uncover a great deal about Gerson's subjects...

...What she is trying to do is uncover the social situations that have produced what she would call today's supermen—those who carry their share of all financial and emotional family burdens...

...Because women are generally in close touch with their emotional core, he notes, they feel at ease in typical one-on-one talking cures and quickly begin the healing process...

...His method involves his own brand of extended group therapy...

...No Man 's Land is based on interviews with 138 New York-area men, mostly white, 36 years old on average, holding a mix of white- and blue-collar jobs...

...But her prescription for these and other male maladies is political, not psychological...

...The common heritage for all the walking wounded is what Allen terms the "masculine code," a Ten Commandments of behavior that encourages American boys "to be competitive, focus on external success, rely on their intellect, withstand physical pain, and repress their vulnerable emotions...

...Its flaws not withstanding, No Man's Land does put on display the "raw material" at society's disposal to create a new manhood and new fatherhood...

...Most grew up with detached, uninvolved fathers and many are repeating the pattern with their kids—others have become strongly nurturing fathers...

...In her Preface, the New York University sociologist declares, "Men have entered a no man's land, a territory of undefined and shifting allegiances, in which they must negotiate difficult choices between freedom and commitment, privilege and sharing, and dominance and equality...

...Some who came from homes with a traditional breadwinning father are choosing to play that role themselves—others are not...

...368 pp...

...Kathleen Gerson and Marvin Allen both attempt to address the same question: How do we make better men so that women, children and men themselves can enjoy a world that is more economically fair, more compassionate and in general healthier...

...On the side, he shuttled between episodes of sexual indulgence and despair, punctuated by bouts of therapy that failed to provide either relief or refuge...

...These are men who manage to keep their fists to themselves, yet wander aimlessly through the same unfeeling desert as the abusers with an emotional gauge that registers only passivity and rage...

...what role did their fathers play beyond bringing home a paycheck?—and the way the choices they are making as adults reflect or reject their backgrounds...

...The ensuing repression and confusion leaves most men's rage—an expression of their hopelessness and helplessness—as the single emotion they can tap...

...In his early 30s he tried college, earning his BA at 35 and going on to complete a Master's program in psychology and counseling...

...As her own statistics show, there are numerous disparate trends under way simultaneously at the moment, even among the member of her overly homogeneous study group...

...A 48-year-old Texan and an apostle of the men's movement that gained notoriety a few years ago through the efforts of the poet Robert Bly (who has worked with him), Allen uses his own life as his primary case study...

...Allen's remedy calls for the numbed American male to rediscover and express his normal, day-to-day anger (very different from rage) and the grief accumulated over years of unacknowledged losses...

...The result is often someone who is distant from his wife, unable to enjoy his children, and undermines his health by working excessively...

...He left home at 16 to escape a physically and verbally abusive father...

...The two would also agree that the decline of middle-class wages, the women's movement and various pieces of civil rights legislation have combined to undermine the notion of manhood in America that took hold in the post-World War II boom years...

...New definitions of manhood and fatherhood are the concern as well of Kathleen Gerson's No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work...

...Next came a youthful and loveless marriage that he checked out of emotionally by devoting himself to building a seemingly successful painting business...

...The men are a whining chorus of anger, resentment and apathy, yet little of this is acknowledged or commented upon by the author...

...The author recognizes that getting men past their pain is merely the starting point today...

...No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work By Kathleen Gerson Basic...

...Hanging out on the fringes won't fly anymore...

...More disturbing, though, is Allen's convincing argument that the machine-kickers' emotional short circuit is shared by a hefty chunk of the population we don't think twice about, since it includes many of our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors...

...Allen would no doubt concur...

...Over the last decade or so, while men weren't paying much attention, a variety of forces were drafting them into the heart of the family...

...Gerson finally concedes that "a minority of men do fit the stereotype of the distant father, the patriarchal husband, and the work-obsessed breadwinner...

...Allen, by contrast, focuses on the heart of the matter...

...If we want men to behave responsibly," she contends, "then we must build social policies that support and encourage such an outcome...

...Tragicomic memories of those poor souls are invoked to illustrate the explosive, misdirected rage too many men carry around...

...The ugly side is that their brutality is usually aimed at their wives, girlfriends or children, who rarely wage as good a fight as a soda machine...

...The interviews reveal that many men today are like hostages who have been blindfolded and spun around to the point where they have lost any sense of direction...

...Although she is right that the economic unraveling of the middle class over the past 20 years has profoundly influenced the opportunities men face and the choices they can make about work and family, her analysis is unnecessarily repetitive and, in the end, too narrow...

...25.00 Reviewed by Ken Sonenclar Freelance writer The most arresting image in psychotherapist Marvin Allen's In the Company of Men is conjured up when he reports that during a recent year 14 men were crushed to death by soft drink machines...

...As Allen puts it, "We've drastically raised our fathering standards in recent years...

...Every man reading this book will recall hazings from his own childhood and adolescence that fit theauthor's descriptions...