Vol. 13 No. 23 · 5 December 1991
pages 3-5 | 2547 words
Return of the Male
Martin Amis
- Iron John: A Book about Men by Robert Bly
Element, 268 pp, £12.95, September 1991, ISBN 1 85230 233 X
- The way men think: Intellect, Intimacy and the Erotic Imagination by Liam Hudson and Bernadine Jacot
Yale, 219 pp, £16.95, November 1991, ISBN 0 300 04997 8
- Utne Reader. Men, it’s time to pull together: The Politics of Masculinity
Lens, 144 pp, $4.00, May 1991, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
In 1919, after prolonged study, the Harvard ethologist William Morton Wheeler pronounced the male wasp ‘an etiological nonentity’. An animal behaviourist had scrutinised the male wasp and found – no behaviour. We can well imagine the male wasp’s response to such a verdict: his initial shock and hurt; his descent into a period of depressed introspection; his eventual decision to improve his act. For nowadays, according to a recent Scientific American, ‘interest in the long-neglected male is flourishing, a tribute to the animal’s broad array of activities.’ Male humans will surely feel for their brothers in the wasp kingdom. After a phase of relative obscurity, we too have rallied. In fact, we seem to have bounced back pretty well immediately, with all kinds of fresh claims on everyone’s attention. Male wounds. Male rights. Male grandeur. Male whimpers of neglect.
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 1 · 9 January 1992
From Philip Raby
With regard to Martin Amis’s review of Iron John (LRB, 5 December), I wonder why it is that so many reviewers of the book find it easier to be snide rather than perceptive. I have read the book, and have even attended a workshop run by Robert Bly and Michael Mead in Dorset recently. Bly is addressing a real problem which Amis’s flippancy does its best to overlook. Maybe Martin Amis feels that the role of men in society is satisfactorily settled, that men cause no problems, that there are enlightened role models for boys and young men to emulate, but I don’t. I don’t find traditional images of men as suit-wearing, money-controlling patriarchs very helpful, but neither do I think that feminism, for all its achievements, has provided any very appropriate position for men, except as apologetic hangers-on. The women I know do not want men to apologise for being male. What they would like, and so would I, is for men to find out what being male entails and develop their own strength and integrity so that they can live alongside strong women in equality, balance and co-operation, with healthy conflict as it occurs.
There are very few men out in the world whom I can look to and say: yes, that’s what I would like to be, or would like my son to be. In fact, I can’t think of one, Robert Bly included. But give the guy credit for addressing the issue and trying to look at it in a way that gets people’s attention. Yes, it’s true that he uses fairy-tales, and talks in terms of myths and archetypes. Would it have been better if he had written an academic treatise, or a step-by-step ‘how to be a man’ book? Amis is distorting the book to present it as about male domination; it is not aimed at women, so it does not address them, any more than The Female Eunuch was written for men. In fact, Germaine Greer’s book received a similarly hostile reception when it was first published over here. Perhaps I should be grateful that Martin Amis did not descend to the level of a woman critic in the Observer who managed to blame Bly for the Gulf War. Bly is not a messiah or a guru, but he does seem to have touched a nerve somewhere. On the one hand, he has won a tremendous audience in the States – and judging by the attendance at the workshop, there is a similar enthusiasm here – and on the other hand, he has inspired the hatred, derision and contempt of every media person in this country for daring to write such a book. For that reason if no other, he must be doing something right.
Philip Raby
Bath
