Young guys try to read society's road map for behavior

I find it hard to believe men still have a probelm with treating women as "equals."

What Do Men Want? A Reading List For the Male Identity Crisis
By RICHARD A. SHWEDER

THE finger of feminist accusation has been pointed at many different parts of the male anatomy, but the favorite objects of scorn are man's robotic brain, his granite heart and that thing between his legs. Men are defective: brutal, competitive, exploitative, insensitive, disconnected from meaningful social relationships, out of touch with their feelings and oblivious to things they do not want to hear. It is impossible to get them to do housework, even when they are unemployed. Why not simply replace the unit? They just lie around and make noise. Feeding them is an act of charity. Or so the indictment goes.

Recently some oblivious insensitive men have begun to notice that feminists don't like them. A few have even made New Year's resolutions to reinvent themselves into new males. A crisis literature on male identity has burst onto the scene, featuring titles like "The End of Manhood," "Myths of Masculinity," "Not Guilty" and "Why Men Hate Women." Men, largely white, middle-class, middle-aged men, M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s, storytellers and drumbeaters, camp counselors and boys' school teachers, members of "Hairy-Chested Men's Groups" and former gang members, fire walkers and holistic healers are writing earnest, heartfelt, even sentimental books about what it means to be a man, with all sorts of heroic recommendations about how to become one. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but when it comes to male-bashing (or defending) it is words that sell.

I have just read a dozen books from the male identity crisis literature. The genre emerged in the late 1980's, a long-delayed response to 20 years of feminist critique. It gained some notoriety in 1990 with the publication of "Iron John: A Book About Men," Robert Bly's antidote to masculine soul loss. The success of Mr. Bly's book of Wild Man writings (62 weeks on the New York Times hard-cover best-seller list) virtually guaranteed that bass and tenor voices would soon appear on the gender studies stage. Oblivious males generally become alert when there is a chance to profit from a crisis.

Unlike much of the feminist literature, which is unified by its sense of moral outrage over the historical subordination and exploitation of women by men, the men's crisis literature is unified by a sense of ontological anxiety: in a post-modern world lacking clear-cut borders and distinctions, it has become hard to know what it means to be a man and even harder to feel good about being one.

The unity in both literatures is more apparent than real. After a couple of exciting decades of internecine warfare, the women's movement has lost its ruby slippers. Feminist discourse is now fractured in so many ways that the specific implications of being a feminist are far from clear. There are ideological fault lines dividing liberal feminists (who argue that men and women are essentially alike), ecological feminists and goddess worshipers (who argue that men and women are essentially different and that women should be free to cultivate and take advantage of their femininity) and deconstructive feminists (who argue that nothing is essentially anything and everything is essentially accidental). Not to be outdone, the men's crisis literature has promoted so many different kinds of voices in only three years that the barbaric phrase "speaking as a 'masculist' " has in record time lost any determinate meaning.

There are writers who embrace one version or another of feminist critique. Men are incomplete. Self-sufficiency is not tenable. Forget the Marlboro man. Let's get in touch with our feelings and get reconnected in dense relationships. Having gone to school on feminist denunciations of patriarchy, writers like William G. Doty, a professor of humanities at the University of Alabama, in MYTHS OF MASCULINITY (Crossroad, $24.95), and R. William Betcher and William S. Pollack, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, respectively, at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School and co-authors of IN A TIME OF FALLEN HEROES: The Re-Creation of Masculinity (Atheneum, $22.50), offer us nuanced views about ways, as Mr. Doty puts it, to change the "shapes of masculinity" for the better.

THE END OF MANHOOD: A Book for Men of Conscience (Dutton, $21) actually recommends we bring manhood to an end. Its author, John Stoltenberg, a writer in New York and a co-founder of Men Against Pornography, argues that the essential self, the authentic self, the really real self has no genitals. The alternative view, argued in BOYS WILL BE MEN: Masculinity in Troubled Times (Paul S. Eriksson, $19.95), by Richard A. Hawley, headmaster of University School in Cleveland, is that gender cuts very deep into the soul. That, one might suspect, is why even the gods have males and females.

Other writers huff and puff and posture defiantly at the perilous feminist horde. One such is David Thomas, the former editor of Punch magazine in England, in NOT GUILTY: The Case in Defense of Men (Morrow, $20). Another is Warren Farrell, a former board member of the National Organization for Women who has had a change of heart, in THE MYTH OF MALE POWER: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex (Simon & Schuster, $23). They defend the flag of manhood, arguing from example that it is women who freeload on society and men who should be complaining. Have you heard, as Mr. Thomas asserts, that male models are underpaid, and that (according to Mr. Farrell) more men may be raped each year than women (it happens a lot in prisons)? And why should men be the ones who register for the draft? These authors want to stand toe to toe with their rivals, eager to trade indignation for indignation, injustice for injustice, and are desperate to keep score. They seem convinced that feminists and other high-status women will only be turned on by men who can beat them in arguments.

SOME writers respond to the feminist finger of accusation by suggesting that there really are things of value in men but they are all hidden from view. Robert Moore, a professor of psychology and religion at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Douglas Gillette, a "mythologist" and leader of men's therapy groups, suggest in THE LOVER WITHIN: Accessing the Lover in the Male Psyche (Morrow, $25) that the really good things have been locked up in some Jungian archetype (a sensitive lover, a spiritual warrior) but that they can be released by pressing the right buttons. According to Michael Sky, a holistic healer, teacher and fire-walking instructor who leads workshops in the United States and Japan and is the author of SEXUAL PEACE: Beyond the Dominator Virus (Bear & Company, paper, $10.95), certain deep breathing exercises are highly recommended.

Others suggest that men are closely related to the divinities. If men gather together in a pride, honor their ancestral spirits, tell the right stories, beat the right drums and expose the right scars -- their bruised egos and symbolic wounds -- there will spring from the brow some godlet or hero, a Dionysus, an Odysseus, a King David, to lift the modern male out of gender confusion and into ontological certainty. Three hundred years into the Enlightenment, "neo-antiquarianism," mythopoetic narrative and ceremonial initiation are in vogue again: Michael Meade, storyteller, drummer, "festival maker," collaborator of Robert Bly and author of MEN AND THE WATER OF LIFE: Initiation and the Tempering of Men (HarperSanFrancisco, $22), is a master of the mode.

I put the word equals in quotation marks intentionally.

Perhaps as these dinosaurs die
out boys will truly be raised to treat women equally.