five spiders per spider

Man Ray Attempt at a Self Portrait, Paris 1934

La Mode illustrée, no. 23, 4 juin 1882, Paris. Toilettes de la Mon. Fladry, Mme Coussinet Succr. 43, rue Richer. Collection of the Rijksmuseum, Netherlands

Entwining fish. Kunst en samenleving. 1903. Chapter header.

This activity was at first close to feminism, at least to liberal feminism. Early therapeutic groups for men were called ‘consciousness-raising groups’. A critical attitude was taken to the ‘traditional male role’. The rationale for therapy was that men needed therapists’ help in breaking out of the male role and becoming more sensitive and emotionally expressive. The psychiatrist Kenneth Solomon, for instance, explicitly formulated the goal of ‘gender-role therapy’ as moving the client towards androgyny.

This was not necessarily easy for therapists. In a perceptive paper in 1979, Sheryl Bear and her colleagues observed that psychotherapists tended to ignore social contexts, to be conservative themselves about gender, and to demand stereotypical behaviour from their clients. Consciousness-raising for therapists was going to be important.

But such warnings were set aside as a fundamental change came over the field. A paper by Jack Kaufman and Richard Timmers published only four years later marks the shift. This described a group of American male therapists, initially pro-feminist but feeling that they lacked something, who went in search of the masculine. They used familiar group-therapy techniques, and unfamiliar images from the poet Robert Bly, to overcome their resistances to encountering ‘the hairy man’, the deep masculine. Once the deep masculine was found, they helped initiate each other into it.

The main direction taken by masculinity therapy in the 1980s was this attempt to restore a masculinity thought to have been lost or damaged in recent social change. It proved remarkably popular in the United States. Bly’s own book Iron John was a runaway best-seller in 1990–1 and there has been a rush of publications in its wake. The range of ideas about restoration, and the common ground, can be seen by comparing four recent popular Books About Men based on masculinity therapy.

Warren Farrell’s Why Men Are the Way They Are is particularly poignant as Farrell wrote one of the original Books About Men, The Liberated Man. In the early 1970s he organized a men’s support network for NOW, the largest feminist organization in the United States. He helped set up a number of consciousness-raising groups for men, and encouraged public demonstrations in support of feminist causes. He offered a vigorous critique of ‘the masculine value system’ and the way men were trapped by the male role. In an early paper Farrell did not hesitate to call men ‘a dominant class’ who needed to renounce their position of privilege.

A decade later, things were greatly changed. Farrell now argued that too much attention had been given to women’s experience of powerlessness and it was time to give attention to men’s experience of powerlessness. As this might seem to contradict the facts he had noticed in the early 1970s, Farrell carefully redefined power by shifting from the public world to the inner world of emotion. Men did not feel emotionally in control of their lives, therefore they lacked power. Men should not feel guilty about what is wrong with the world since women were equally to blame. If women wanted men to change, women had to make that happen by changing their emotional expectations of men. But Farrell held out little hope for this. He now saw men’s and women’s psychologies as starkly different, revealed in their ‘primary fantasies’ (men: sex with lots of beautiful women; women: a secure home).

(Since this chapter was written, Farrell has published another book on the subject, The Myth of Male Power. It repeats these arguments with greater vehemence, increased bitterness against feminism, more emphasis on the biological base of sex difference, and a new respect for — guess what? — Robert Bly and male rituals.)

A woman using sign language. Coloured aquatint by W.T. Annis, 1819.