Wildmen
Do we need this? Sydney's media have found a lost tribe of "wildmen" in deepest inner-suburban Balmain after one was spotted by the Sydney Morning Herald's Richard Glover and exposed in print on May 25.
Allan Tegg, of the Men's Development Centre, is 35 and grew up in Newcastle in a "world of football and competitiveness", but found his life "changing under the impact of feminism". Now he and others, Glover informs us, "want to find ways of being proud of their gender again".
The MDC intends to hold a "Man Honouring Night" in Rozelle this month, and a "Warrior Workshop" is planned for August. Central to these workshops, it appears, are some lessons in the lost art of spear-making.
The trend started, as it seems these things must, in California, where bands of "wildmen" go jogging with their spears and attend ceremonies in giant teepees where they stand around in the nude and chant, in imitation of ancient native American customs.
The wildmen complain that their sex has been tamed, not just by the women's movement but by industrial society; in the words of US wildman author Robert Bly, men are no longer called on to "pierce the dangerous places, carry handfuls of courage to the waterfalls, dust the tails of the wild boars".
No. There's not much call for that around home or office. Modern man, they insist, has become a wimp. Soft.
But where were all these men between mid-January and late February, when the US was being made a man again by bombing Iraq back to the stone age? In their teepees? And hasn't male violence against women continued to rise? After the initial giggle, the idea that the cultural traditions of the male warrior need propping up strikes one as a bit off, to say the least.
The women's movement has had an enormous impact on the lives of millions of men and women throughout the West and in parts of the Third World. But a quick look at the statistics — on who holds down what jobs, who looks after the kids, who gets paid more and enjoys higher status at work — reveals the extent of the change. Not enough.
Women need more changes, not less, and any men disoriented by that are going to have to find ways to deal with it.
Robert Bly and Allan Tegg would probably insist that that is all they are doing — giving men a way of dealing with that disorientation. If that's so, and if they keep the ends of their spears blunt and away from eye-level when jogging, then what's the harm?
The harm is in the repetition of the reactionary ideas that have kept women down all these years. Sex role stereotypes ppress women.
Bly names some "male" qualities: resolve, the ability to take forceful action, activity. Does that mean "real" women are innately irresolute, non-forceful and passive?
The "cave man" story is not mystical, interesting or ancient. It's straight 1950s bourgeois suburbia: over the millennia, goes the tale, man has transmuted his natural instinct to roam, fight and bring home the bacon by working outside the home, getting involved in politics and wars and generally running things. Woman has had her "cave" refitted with modern labour-saving devices, and she's basically happy to stay in it.
No, I don't think we need this.
By Tracy Sorensen