Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical and resonant....
Review: The poet Robert Bly published what is still the Men's Movement's central text in 1990. It's abstract and discursive, but one can discern a lot of real feeling in Bly's pleas for warm fathering and meaningful male rites of passage.Essentially, Bly uses a Grimm's fairy tale called "Iron John" and extrapolates from it sentence by sentence. The book was a bestseller, but the Men's Movement it spawned sputtered out in only a few years, resurfacing in Christian form by the mid-1990s as Promise Keepers and then fading almost entirely. Unlike second wave feminism, whose radical ambitions brought about change we're still reeling from 40 years later, the Men's Movement was hampered and compromised by a time of Anglo-American political centrism. "Iron John" was not the radical text it needed to be to launch a sustained and meaningful social movement. One would not need to read deep in between the lines of the Iron John fairy tale to see it as a man-boy romance, but Bly's beautiful observations seem blind to this subtext. First of all, wilderness is a very erotic symbol in Grimms' stories as in the wolfishly sexual "Little Red Riding Hood." The kidnapping of a boy by a man is a charged event when it's reported on the six o'clock news. We expect to hear the word "sodomized" in the next sentence. But in Bly's Disneyworld universe the man-boy romance of the "Iron John" story remains utterly chaste. Even back in 1960 the literary critic Leslie Fiedler complained about the Puritan American tendency to expurgate homosex from its male love stories (such as "Huckleberry Finn," "Moby Dick," "Of Mice and Men," and "On the Road"). Rather than a radical break from this tradition, Bly writes firmly within it. He doesn't see the wild man's outcast status as a hint at pederasty. His doesn't see the wild man's causing the boy to view his young body parts as golden as the result of admiring or even desiring glances. Even when the lovers run off to the privacy of the wilderness' dark heart, Bly suspects nothing untoward. The Wild Man lavishes his chosen boy with gifts, a commonplace generosity in Greek and samurai pederasty. In fact, many cultures all over the world have linked male rites of passage to man/boy erotic bonds. Police were raiding Michael Jackson's woodsy Neverland compound in the early 1990s as Bly was promoting "Iron John." By the year 2001, stories of priestly pedophilia would be splashed all over the media; some of these tales involved adult mentors taking adolescent boys to wilderness locations for bonding which included sex. Through it all, Bly never mentioned the parallels to the story he analyzed in "Iron John." Bly's "father hunger" parallels that of Christ, who imagined a Father in the sky to ease his heartache over failing to find a father here on earth. These are beautiful fantasies. As a poet myself, I love them. But a radical Men's Movement that actually takes off and matters wouldn't dodge the fact that it's up against a powerful taboo called homophobia.
Rating:
Summary: Beyond John Wayne...
Review: While the Man's erudition is mighty, I have a few concerns about Robert's portrayal of women. If there is a flaw in his thinking, it is that he seems to suggest that strength and femininity are mutually exclusive qualities. Tell that to victorious War leaders Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. Tell that to Queen Boadicea, who fought to the death against the Roman invaders. Tell that to Queen Elizabeth I, who defied the oncoming Spanish Armada, as she told her assembled troops - "I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field...". Tell that to French Resistance leader Lucie Aubrac, who planned and led a successful assault on the Nazi convoy that was taking her husband to his place of execution - even though she was five months pregnant at the time. She gave birth to her daughter within days of landing at a covert operations base in England, after the Aubracs had hidden for three months, waiting to escape. Tell that to the female US fighter and bomber crews, who have been flying combat missions since the nineties. Perhaps Robert's most worrying suggestion is that mothers cannot give boys the "hardness" they need while growing up without sacrificing their femininity, and the idea that a mother's influence can be undermining to a young male's development in the absence of a strong father figure. Yet mythology (Perseus, Parsifal etc.) and real life are full of male figures who became the epitome of virile masculinity, despite being brought up by a single mother or a group of women. One notable modern example being ultra-macho Rocker John Kay of Steppenwolf, who made a daring escape from Communist-held East Germany with his single mother, Elsbeth, in 1948. In his autobiography "Magic Carpet Ride", Kay is quick to honour her and women in general, precisely because they CAN simultaneously provide nurturing and strength. Robert Bly is not alone in falling into these gender bias traps. Many male (and female) authors do. For this reason, I have always worked with a female editor. However, I would still recommend the book very highly, despite this one blind spot. After all, we don't have Battered Women's Shelters because of men like Robert Bly and Alan Alda.
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