Crossing into Manhood: A Men’s Studies Curriculum By Christopher ...

During the 1990s the men’s rights movement split into various factions. One group became explicitly a backlash movement that attacked feminism and adamantly stated that men are the victims in today’s society. This wing of the movement publishes The Backlash! and the Liberator. The “gender reconciliation” wing of the men’s rights movement and its organization known as the Movement for the Establishment of Real Gender Equality (MERGE) publishes Balance, whose mission is “to promote the vision of full equality and understanding between the ‘sexes’” (Clatterbaugh, p. 73).

The men’s rights perspective appeals to many men and women because it refuses to blame men for the problems of patriarchy, recognizing instead that gender role stereotypes harm both sexes. The modern masculine ideal is “not internally consistent and [it] often demands the impossible of men” (Clatterbaugh, p. 94).

The mythopoetic men’s movement was first given its name by the mythologist Shepherd Bliss (Baber, 1992), who was dissatisfied with the then current term being applied and renamed it the New Age men’s movement (See interview with Shepherd Bliss found in May 1995 M.E.N. Magazine [electronic version]). This perspective is based on the neo-Jungian understanding that masculinity arises from archetypal patterns hard-wired in the deep unconscious. Traditional stories, myths, and rituals of the ages reveal these patterns and proclaim that men and women are “essentially different kinds of beings who respond to different kinds of deep needs” (Clatterbaugh, p. 12). Robert Bly, author of Iron John (1992) and a widely acknowledged central figure in the mythopoetic men’s movement, asserted that modern men are overly feminized and “soft,” and that they need to tap into the deep resources in the chthonic story tradition in order to enliven and strengthen their gender (Bly, pp. 4–5). Bly and others, such as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1990, 1992a, 1992b, 1993a, 1993b), Sam Keen (1992), and Michael Meade (1993), advocated for the rediscovery of deep masculine initiation processes.