Hey, Mom, Get off My Cloud

San Jose Mercury News/October 20, 1991
By Susan Faludi

It is a massive masculine shadow,
fifty males sitting together
in hall or crowded room,
lifting something indistinct
up into the resonating night.
''Fifty Males Sitting Together," Robert Bly

''ALL OF YOU MEN WHO ARE GOING TO THE men's weekend tomorrow, remember to bring a large stone." Shepherd Bliss, a stern- faced man with rounded shoulders, is standing in front of the crowded back room at the Black Oak bookstore in Berkeley. So many have showed up for the evening's event that scores must be turned away; they linger out front, listening via wall speakers. Inside, more than a hundred people are elbowing each other for a closer view of the dais, where poet Robert Bly will soon appear, "coming out of hibernation," as Bliss puts it, to read his latest works.

Bliss, whose recent transformation includes changing his first name from Walter to Shepherd and his profession from army officer to psychologist, is one of Bly's chief spokesmen in the New Age masculinist community. But at the moment, he is being a bit closemouthed about the stones. They will be using them to build a "monument to Hermes," but that's all he'll say. He doesn't want to get too specific because there are ladies in the room tonight.

Suddenly, the men on stage begin to beat on conga drums. The hibernating bear himself, roused from his great sleep in the "far north" -- Moose Lake, Minn., to be exact -- lumbers down the aisle. Just turned 60, Bly, with his tangled white mane and rounded belly, looks a little like Father Christmas. His heritage, as he will tell listeners several times that evening, is Norse, and something in his pose -- perhaps the way he plants his feet as if manning a storm-swept deck -- suggests that he intends his audience take him for a Viking.

We no longer have images of "real men," Bly says, as the men continue the drum beat. Stereotypical sissies have replaced macho men. "Woody Allen is just as bad -- a negative John Wayne," he says, raising his voice to a nasal squeak in imitation. "Men used to make models for what a man is from the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' and places like that." On the all-male weekend, he promises, he will bring back these role models for male edification: "One of the things we do is go back to the very old stories, 5,000 years ago, where the view of a man, what a man is, is more healthy."

TWO DECADES EARLIER, BLY was a Berkeley hero for another reason: A '60s peace activist, the poet gained fame for his literary stand against the Vietnam War. When he won the National Book Award in 1967 for his poetry collection "The Light Around the Body," he gave the money to a draft- resistance group and blasted American literary smugness at the awards ceremony: "Since we are murdering a culture in Vietnam at least as fine as our own, have we the right to congratulate ourselves on our cultural magnificence?"

Back then, Bly lauded women who encouraged draft-age young men to resist the war and flee to Canada. To bring peace into the world, Bly argued, men and women both should embrace their feminine principle; the life-preserving nature, he maintained, resided in both sexes but was unhealthily repressed in men. In the "Great Mother" conferences he conducted in the '70s, gatherings open to both sexes, Bly tried to foster that "feminine" peace-loving spirit.

But as the peace movement sputtered and the years passed, Bly was no longer commanding crowds -- nor receiving national awards he could reject. By the early '80s, he was even, he confessed, starting to feel less than manly. "I began to feel diminished," Bly writes, "by my lack of embodiment of the fruitful male -- or the moist male." It wasn't his loss of early prominence, however, that he identified as the problem. It was his "missing contact with men" and his overexposure to strong and angry women, including his own mother, who were speaking out about the mistreatment they had endured from men in their lives. (In his family's case, as Bly recalls, his mother was reacting to his father, a remote and chilly alcoholic.) He feared that he and men like him had allied themselves too closely with such women, and consequently taken "a female view" of their fathers and their own masculinity. He decided he'd made a mistake with his earlier recommendation: "If someone says to me now, 'There is something missing on your feminine side,' I say, 'No, what is missing is the masculine,' " Bly told Whole Earth magazine in 1988. He worried that he was only "superficially" manly. Men had awakened their feminine principle only to be consumed by it. They had gone "soft."

To remedy this latest imbalance, Bly began running all-male workshops to reintroduce men to "the deep masculine." Soon he was leading wilderness weekend retreats where men dressed in tribal masks and wild-animal costumes, beat drums and rediscovered "the beast within."

By the mid-'80s, Bly was drawing crowds again; hundreds of men were paying $55 for a single lecture, $300 for a two-day retreat. By the end of the decade, Bly was back in the media throne, too, meriting a 90-minute TV special with Bill Moyers, feature treatment in the New York Times Magazine, and tributes from traditional men's magazines and New Age periodicals. He was lionized in both Gentlemen's Quarterly and Yoga Journal. By 1990, his self-published pamphlets on the masculinity crisis had been compiled and reissued in hard cover by a leading publisher -- and the book, "Iron John," quickly scaled the New York Times best-seller list.

Bly's success inspired scores of imitators: By the late '80s, the men's movement had turned into a cottage industry complete with lecture series ("Moist Earthy Masculinity, for Men Only"), books ("Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine"), newsletters (New Warrior News), tapes ("The Naive Male"), radio shows ("Man-to-Man with Jerry Johnson"), and even board games ("A Game of Insights for Men Only"). This new men's movement wasn't just another California curiosity. "Brotherhood lodges" sprang up in Tulsa, Okla.; Washington, D.C., supported six men's organizations offering "wild-man" rituals; "The Talking Stick: A Newsletter About Men" issued from Frederick, Md.; the Austin, Texas "Wildman Gatherings" got booked months in advance; and the Men's Center in Minneapolis drew enough men to keep up a daily schedule of "playshops." In New York City and Oakland, the Sterling Institute of Relationship's $400 "Men, Sex and Power" weekends taught "wimps" to become "real men." These seminars enrolled more than 10,000 men in the latter half of the '80s. Nor were attendants marginalized drifters. On Bly's retreat roster were lawyers, judges, doctors, accountants and corporate executives; at one wilderness experience, the group included several vice presidents of Fortune 500 companies.

THE NEW AGE MASCULINISTS claimed to bear no ill will toward the women's movement. The two movements were running on "parallel tracks," as Bly's disciples liked to emphasize. When a woman asked Bly at the Black Oak poetry reading for his view of feminism, the poet assured her, "I support tremendously the work of that movement." The only reason he doesn't invite women to most of the events, he explained, is that men "can be more honest when women aren't around." But Bly's writings and speeches suggest other reasons, too, for the poet's ban on women.

''I remember a bumper sticker advocating draft-dodging during the '60s that read WOMEN SAY YES TO MEN WHO SAY NO," he writes in "The Pillow & the Key," his 1987 manifesto of New Age masculinism. " . . . The women were definitely saying that they preferred the softer receptive male, and they would reward him for being soft: 'We will sleep with you if you are not too aggressive and macho.' " That, Bly suggests, was the first of many female jabs that would deflate the male psyche. "The development of men was disturbed a little there," he writes, "interfered with."

The arrival of the women's movement in the early '70s increased the interference. "What Men Really Want," a written "dialogue" between Bly and fellow New Age masculinist Keith Thompson, outlines the problem:

BLY: I see the phenomenon of what I would call the "soft male" all over the country today. Sometimes when I look out at my audiences, perhaps half the young males are what I'd call soft. . . . Many of these men are unhappy. There's not much energy in them. They are life-preserving but not exactly life- giving. And why is it you often see these men with strong women who positively radiate energy?

THOMPSON: Perhaps it's because back in the '60s, when we looked to the women's movement for leads as how we should be, the message we got was that the new strong women wanted soft men.

BLY: I agree. That's how it felt.

In short, the Great Mother's authority has become too great. "Men's societies are disappearing, partly under pressure from women with hurt feelings," he writes. Too many women are "raising boys with no man in the house." The single mother's son has become "a nice boy who now not only pleases his mother but also the young woman he is living with."

To restore the nice boy's male identity, Bly proposes, he must quit taking cues from Mother and "go down into the psyche and accept what's dark down there." As a key guide to the journey, Bly offers "The Story of Iron John," borrowed from the Grimm's fairy tale. In the story, a hairy "wild man" is locked up in an iron cage near the royal castle; the key to the cage is under the queen's pillow. One day the young prince loses his prized "golden ball" when it rolls into an abandoned pond, and he can only retrieve it by stealing the key from mother and freeing the wild man. The young man, in the words of Bly's sidekick Keith Thompson, "has to take back the power he has given to his mother to get away from the force field to her bed. He must direct his energies away from pleasing Mommy."

At Bly's all-male "mythopoetic" weekends, the not-so-young princes reclaim their golden balls, with a few adjustments for modern times. At one such weekend -- located at a Bible camp in Mound, Minn. -- the "wild men" build their lairs with plastic lounge chairs. Journalist Jon Tevlin, who attended the event, recalls a typical wild-man encounter that weekend, led by Shepherd Bliss:

As he Bliss spoke of recovering the "wild man within" that first night, Shepherd slowly dropped to his knees. "Some of you may want to temporarily leave the world of the two- legged, and join me in the world of the four-legged," he said. One by one, we slid from our orange Naugahyde chairs onto the orange shag carpet ripped straight out of the 1960s. "You may find yourself behaving like these four-leggeds; you may be scratching the earth, getting in contact with the dirt and the world around you."

As he spoke, people began pawing at the ground. . . . "You may find yourself behaving like the most masculine of all animals -- the ram," Shepherd said in a coaxing voice. . . . "You may find unfamiliar noises emerging from your throats!" . . . There were gurgles and bleats, a few wolf calls. . . . Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Shepherd coming toward me, head down, tufts of white hair ringing a bald spot. . . . Meanwhile, I felt a slight presence at my rear, and turned to see a man beginning to sniff my buttocks.

''Woof!" he said.

The question of how to improve relations with women, in or out of bed, gets remarkably short shrift on these weekends. "In two full days women were hardly mentioned," Trip Gabriel writes of a "Wild-Man Gathering" in Texas. Writers Steve Chapple and David Talbot, who attended Bly's "Love, Sex and Intimate Relationships" weekend in California, report that none of these three billed topics were on the agenda:

Men young and old are beating drums and wailing about the fathers they never knew. They are laying bare their deepest shame and, more than a little bit, heaping scorn on the dominating women in their lives. Surprisingly, through, sex is not at all a hot topic at these gatherings. The New Man seems infinitely more fascinated with himself than with the ladies."

When one of the men is asked to draw his "ideal mate," Chapple and Talbot note, he draws himself in bed alone, "whacking off," as he puts it.

But maybe the lack of relationship-talk shouldn't have been so surprising. The true subject of Bly's weekends, after all, is not love and sex, but power -- how to wrest it from women and how to mobilize it for men. Indeed, the Bly retreat that Chapple and Talbot attended opened with a display of "power objects," which each man was instructed to bring from home. On this weekend, the trophies included a .380-caliber automatic pistol. Bly may be an advocate of world peace, but as a general of the men's movement, he is overseeing a battle on the domestic front -- and he withholds his dovish sentiments from the family-circle conflict. At a 1987 seminar, attended by 1,000 men, a man in the audience told Bly, "Robert, when we tell women our desires, they tell us we're wrong." Bly instructed, "So, then you bust them in the mouth." After someone pointed out that this statement seemed to advocate violence against women, Bly amended it, "Yes. I meant, hit those women verbally!"

''WHAT'S THE MATTER? Too much yogurt?" Bly is shouting. He is midway through a two-day lecture at the Jung Center in San Francisco -- one of the rare events to which he will admit women. He is back in his sea captain's pose, hands on hips, scowling at this audience of more than 400. "There's too much passivity and naivete in American men today," he says, as he begins to pace the stage. "There's a disease going around, and women have been spreading it. Starting in the '60s, the women have really invaded men's areas and treated them like boys."

A woman in the audience asks if he's saying that the women's movement is to blame. "The men's movement is not a response to the women's movement," he says. A few moments later, though, he is back warning men in the audience to beware of "the force-field of women." When another woman in the crowd points out the contradiction, he gets mad. He picks up the microphone and marches over to the troublemaker, a frail elderly woman clutching a flowered tote bag. He sticks his face in hers and yells into the microphone, "It's women like you who are turning men into yogurt-eaters." Embarrassed, the woman tries to appease the fuming poet: In a quavery voice, she asks if he has "any suggestions" about how she can improve her relationship with her emotionally distant husband. "Why don't you stop making demands and leave him alone," Bly shouts. "Just leave him alone." On the second day of the Jung Center weekend, Bly announces that he will tell a fairy tale. He explains that he often relies on old myths because they are more "advanced" than rational or psychological analysis. "No one's being blamed," he says. "In mythological thinking, rather than saying, 'I'm mad at you,' you are saying, 'There's a witch in the room who is doing this to us.' The witch is a third party in the relationship." Yet the invoking of a third party "witch" turns out to be a dodge -- a way to represent the feminist monster in a form men can revile without apology. As Bly puts it, "You can't make generalizations about men and women anymore" without offending someone. "So it must be mythologically stated."

Today's story is another Grimm brothers tale, "The Raven," in which a hero, enfeebled by a witch and a variety of overbearing women, must rediscover his manhood by battling giants before he can claim the princess. When the story is over, Bly asks his listeners to identify which part of the story most fits their personal situation. When hardly any of the men choose the part in which the hero storms the glass mountain, Bly is disgusted. "You are all in the 'feminine waiting' part," he grumbles. "I want to see action. I want to see anger. You've got to get out there and kill the giants." Bly entreats the men to "growl," and throws up his hands at the tepid response. "C'mon, c'mon. Show your teeth. Show some anger."

A young man raises his hand. "But Robert, Gandhi didn't resort to violence to achieve his ends." Bly stomps his foot. "You're all so naive. You're full of all kinds of weak ideas that soupy philosophers, including Gandhi, have encouraged."

IT'S TIME FOR A LUNCH BREAK. AS THE AUDIence streams out, the woman with the flower tote bag approaches Bly and hands him a note. He jams it into his shirt pocket, then stalks off without speaking -- to a back room, where two gray-haired women from the Jung Center are setting out his meal.

For months Bly has refused requests for an interview -- his media interviews are largely with men -- but today he accedes to a brief conversation over lunch. Between man-size bites of a sandwich, the poet says he bars women from most of his events because men need a sanctuary from a female-dominated world. "There's no place for the warrior in this country. The feminists have taken over from the Catholic priests." And this is only the start of the female incursion. "I just see it getting worse and worse. Men will become more and more insecure, farther from their own manhood. Men will become more like women, women will try to be more like men. It's not a good prospect."

What evidence does he have that all this is happening, or that feminism is actually turning men "soft"? The venerable poet flies into a sudden rage. "I don't need evidence. I have brains, that's how I know. I use my brains." He refuses to answer any more questions and swivels his chair until he's facing the side wall. An uncomfortable silence falls over the room; the two women from the Jung Center try to coax him back to good spirits with murmured compliments about his "brilliance" and offers of more apple juice. He says nothing for a while, then, apparently remembering the other woman who made him mad earlier, he dips inside his shirt pocket and fishes out the note. He shakes his head, snorts, then starts to read it out loud: " 'I was very hurt and angry at the way you simply dismissed my comments and made fun of me.' " What hurt most of all, she wrote, was the way he attacked her when she said she wanted more emotional support from her husband. She needs that support, she wrote, because she is battling ovarian cancer. Bly says sarcastically, "Oh, so I can't understand ovarian cancer unless I've gone through it?" He stuffs the note back in his pocket and polishes off his sandwich.

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