TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110890/1108580.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14.5 KB | 278 lines

                                                                                THE CHANGING FAMILY, Page 80

ESSAY

What Do Men Really Want?


Stoic and sensitive have been cast aside, leaving postfeminist
males confused, angry and desperately seeking manhood

By SAM ALLIS


    Freud, like everyone else, forgot to ask the second
question: What do men really want? His omission may reflect the
male fascination with the enigma of woman over the mystery of
man. She owns the center of his imagination, while the fate of
man works the margins. Perhaps this is why so many men have
taken the Mafia oath of silence about their hopes and fears.
Strong and silent remain de rigueur.

    But in the wake of the feminist movement, some men are
beginning to pipe up. In the intimacy of locker rooms and the
glare of large men's groups, they are spilling their bile at the
incessant criticism, much of it justified, from women about
their inadequacies as husbands, lovers, fathers. They are airing
their frustration with the limited roles they face today,
compared with the multiple options that women seem to have won.
Above all, they are groping to redefine themselves on their own
terms instead of on the performance standards set by their wives
or bosses or family ghosts. "We've heard all the criticism,"
says New York City-based television producer Tom Seligson. "Now
we'll make our own decisions."

    In many quarters there is anger. "The American man wants his
manhood back. Period," snaps John Wheeler, a Washington
environmentalist and former chairman of the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund. "New York feminists [a generic term in his
lexicon] have been busy castrating American males. They poured
this country's testosterone out the window in the 1960s. The men
in this country have lost their boldness. To raise your voice
these days is a worse offense than urinating in the subway."

    Even more prevalent is exhaustion. "The American man wants
to stop running; he wants a few moments of peace," says poet
Robert Bly, one of the gurus of the nascent men's movement in
the U.S. "He has a tremendous longing to get down to his own
depths. Beneath the turbulence of his daily life is a beautiful
crystalline infrastructure" -- a kind of male bedrock.

    Finally, there is profound confusion over what it means to
be a man today. Men have faced warping changes in role models
since the women's movement drove the strong, stoic John
Wayne-type into the sunset. Replacing him was a new hero: the
hollow-chested, sensitive, New Age man who bawls at Kodak
commercials and handles a diaper the way Magic Johnson does a
basketball. Enter Alan Alda.

    But he, too, is quickly becoming outdated. As we begin the
'90s, the zeitgeist has changed again. Now the sensitive male
is a wimp and an object of derision to boot. In her song
Sensitive New Age Guys, singer Christine Lavin lampoons, "Who
carries the baby on his back? Who thinks Shirley MacLaine is on
the inside track?" Now it's goodbye, Alan Alda; hello, Mel
Gibson, with your sensitive eyes and your lethal weapon. Hi
there, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the devoted family man with
terrific triceps. The new surge of tempered macho is everywhere.
Even the male dummies in store windows are getting tougher.
Pucci Manikins is producing a more muscular model for the new
decade that stands 6 ft. 2 in. instead of 6 ft. and has a
42-in. chest instead of its previous 40.

    What's going on here? Are we looking at a backlash against
the pounding men have taken? To some degree, yes. But it's more
complicated than that. "The sensitive man was overplayed,"
explains Seattle-based lecturer Michael Meade, a colleague of
Bly's in the men's movement. "There is no one quality intriguing
enough to make a person interesting for a long time." More
important, argues Warren Farrell, author of the 1986 best seller
Why Men Are the Way They Are, women liked Alan Alda not because
he epitomized the sensitive man but because he was a
multimillionaire superstar success who also happened to be
sensitive. In short, he met all their performance needs before
sensitivity ever entered the picture. "We have never worshiped
the soft man," says Farrell. "If Mel Gibson were a nursery
school teacher, women wouldn't want him. Can you imagine a cover
of TIME featuring a sensitive musician who drives a cab on the
side?"

    The women's movement sensitized many men to the problems
women face in society and made them examine their own feelings
in new ways. But it did not substantially alter what society
expects of men. "Nothing fundamental has changed," says Farrell.
Except that both John Wayne and Alan Alda have been discarded
on the same cultural garbage heap. "First I learned that an
erect cock was politically incorrect," complains producer
Seligson. "Now it's wrong not to have one."

    As always, men are defined by their performance in the
workplace. If women don't like their jobs, they can, at least
in theory, maintain legitimacy by going home and raising
children. Men have no such alternative. "The options are
dismal," says Meade. "You can drop out, which is an abdication
of power, or take the whole cloth and lose your soul." If women
have suffered from being sex objects, men have suffered as
success objects, judged by the amount of money they bring home.
As one young career woman in Boston puts it, "I don't want a
Type A. I want an A-plus." Chilling words that make Farrell
wonder, "Why do we need to earn more than you to be considered
worthy of you?"

    This imbalance can be brutal for a man whose wife tries life
in the corporate world, discovers as men did decades ago that
it is no day at the beach, and heads for home, leaving him the
sole breadwinner. "We're seeing more of this `You guys can have
it back. It's been real,'" observes Kyle Pruett, a psychiatrist
at the Yale Child Studies Center. "I have never seen a case
where it has not increased anxiety for the man."

    There has been a lot of cocktail-party talk about the need
for a brave, sensitive man who will stand up to the corporate
barons and take time off to watch his son play Peter Pan in his
school play, the fast track be damned. This sentiment showed up
in a 1989 poll, conducted by Robert Half International, in which
about 45% of men surveyed said they would refuse a promotion
rather than miss time at home. But when it comes to trading
income for "quality time," how many fathers will actually be
there at the grade-school curtain call?

    "Is there a Daddy Track? No," says Edward Zigler, a Yale
psychologist. "The message is that if a man takes paternity
leave, he's a very strange person who is not committed to the
corporation. It's very bleak." Says Felice Schwartz, who
explored the notion of a Mommy Track in a 1989 article in the
Harvard Business Review: "There isn't any forgiveness yet of a
man who doesn't really give his all." So today's working stiff
really enjoys no more meaningful options than did his father,
the pathetic guy in the gray flannel suit who was pilloried as
a professional hamster and an emotional cripple. You're still
either a master of the universe or a wimp. It is the cognitive
dissonance between the desire for change and the absence of
ways to achieve it that has reduced most men who even think
about the subject to tapioca.

    Robert Rackleff, 47, is one of the rare men who have stepped
off the corporate treadmill. Five years ago, after the birth of
their third child, Rackleff and his wife Jo Ellen fled New York
City, where he was a well-paid corporate speechwriter and she
a radio-show producer. They moved to his native Florida, where
Rackleff earns a less lavish living as a free-lance writer and
helps his wife raise the kids. The drop in income, he
acknowledges, "was scary. It put more pressure on me, but I
wanted to spend more time with my children." Rackleff feels
happy with his choice, but isolated. "I know only one other guy
who left the fast track to be with his kids," he says. "Men just
aren't doing it. I can still call up most of them at 8 p.m. and
know they will be in the office."

    Men have been bombarded with recipes to ripen their personal
lives, if not their professional ones. They are now Lamaze-class
regulars and can be found in the delivery room for the cosmic
event instead of pacing the waiting-room floor. They have been
instructed to bond with children, wives, colleagues and anyone
else they can find. Exactly how remains unclear. Self-help
books, like Twinkies, give brief highs and do not begin to
address the uneven changes in their lives over the past 20
years. "Men aren't any happier in the '90s than they were in the
'50s," observes Yale psychiatrist Pruett, "but their inner lives
tend to be more complex. They are interested in feeling less
isolated. They are stunned to find out how rich human
relationships are."

    Unfortunately, the men who attempt to explore those riches
with the women in their lives often discover that their efforts
are not entirely welcome. The same women who complain about male
reticence can grow uncomfortable when male secrets and
insecurities spill out. Says Rackleff: "I think a lot of women
who want a husband to be a typical hardworking breadwinner are
scared when he talks about being a sensitive father. I get
cynical about that."

    One might be equally cynical about men opening up to other
men. Atlanta psychologist Augustus Napier tells of two doctors
whose lockers were next to each other in the surgical dressing
room of a hospital. For years they talked about sports, money
and other safe "male" subjects. Then one of them learned that
the other had tried to commit suicide -- and had never so much
as mentioned the attempt to him. So much for male bonding.

    How can men break out of the gender stereotypes? Clearly,
there is a need for some male conciousness raising, yet men have
nothing to rival the giant grass-roots movement that began
razing female stereotypes 25 years ago. There is no male
equivalent for the National Organization for Women or Ms.
magazine. No role models, other than the usual megabillionaire
success objects.

    A minute percentage of American males are involved in the
handful of organizations whose membership ranges from men who
support the feminist movement to angry divorces meeting to swap
gripes about alimony and child-custody battles. There is also
a group of mostly well-educated, middle-class men who
sporadically participate in a kind of male spiritual quest.
Anywhere from Maine to Minnesota, at male-only weekend retreats,
they earnestly search for some shard of ancient masculinity
culled from their souls by the Industrial Revolution. At these
so-called warrior weekends, participants wrestle, beat drums and
hold workshops on everything from ecology to divorce and incest.
They embrace, and yes, they do cry and confide things they would
never dream of saying to their wives and girlfriends. They act
out emotions in a safe haven where no one will laugh at them.

    At one drumming session in the municipal-arts center of a
Boston suburb, about 50 men sit in a huge circle beating on
everything from tom-toms to cowbells and sticks. Their ages
range from the 20s to the 60s. A participant has brought his
young son with him. Drummers nod as newcomers appear, sit down
and start pounding away. Before long, a strong primal beat
emerges that somehow transcends the weirdness of it all. Some
men close their eyes and play in a trance. Others rise and dance
around the middle of the group, chanting as they move.

    One shudders to think what Saturday Night Live would do with
these scenes. But there is no smirking among the participants.
"When is the last time you danced with another man?" asks Paul,
a family man who drove two hours from Connecticut to be there.
"It tells you how many walls there are still out there for us."
Los Angeles writer Michael Ventura, who has written extensively
about men's issues, acknowledges the obvious: much of this seems
pretty bizarre. "Some of it may look silly," he says. "But if
you're afraid of looking silly, everything stops right there.
In our society, men have to be contained and sure of themselves.
Well, f--- that. That's not the way we feel." The goal,
continues Ventura, is to rediscover the mystery of man, a
creature capable of strength, spontaneity and adventure. "The
male mystery is the part of us that wants to explore, that
isn't afraid of the dark, that lights a fire and dances around
it."

    One thing is clear: men need the support of other men to
change, which is why activities like drumming aren't as dumb as
they may look. Even though no words are exchanged, the men at
these sessions get something from other men that they earnestly
need: understanding and acceptance. "The solitude of men is the
most difficult single thing to change," says Napier. These
retreats provide cover for some spiritual reconnaissance too
risky to attempt in the company of women. "It's like crying,"
says Michael Meade. "Men are afraid that if they start, they'll
cry forever."

    Does the search for a lineal sense of masculinity have any
relevance to such thorny modern dilemmas as how to balance work
and family or how to talk to women? Perhaps. Men have to feel
comfortable with themselves before they can successfully
confront such issues. This grounding is also critical for riding
out the changes in pop culture and ideals. John Wayne and Alan
Alda, like violence and passivity, reflect holes in a core that
needs fixing. But men can get grounded in many ways, and male
retreats provide just one stylized option, though not one
necessarily destined to attract most American men.

    What do men really want? To define themselves on their own
terms, just as women began to do a couple of decades ago. "Would
a women's group ask men if it was O.K. to feel a certain way?"
asks Jerry Johnson, host of the San Francisco-based KCBS radio
talk show Man to Man. "No way. We're still looking for approval
from women for changes, and we need to get it from the male
camp."

    That's the point. And it does not have to come at women's
expense. "It is stupid to conclude that the empowerment of women
means the disempowerment of men," says Robert Moore, a
psychoanalyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago. "Men must
also feel good about being male." Men would do well, in fact,
to invite women into their lives to participate in these
changes. It's no fun to face them alone. But if women can't or
won't, men must act on their own and damn the torpedoes. No
pain, no gain.