"Robert Bly, Poet Who Gave Rise to a Men’s Movement, Dies at 94/His most famous, and most controversial, work was 'Iron John: A Book About Men'..."

That's the headline for the NYT obituary.

[The 1990 book "Iron John: A Book About Men"] drew on myths, legends, poetry and science of a sort to make the case that American men had grown soft and feminized and needed to rediscover their primitive virtues of ferocity and audacity and thus regain the self-confidence to be nurturing fathers and mentors.... He held men-only seminars and weekend retreats, gatherings often in the woods with men around campfires thumping drums, making masks, hugging, dancing and reading poetry aloud.

He said his “mythopoetic men’s movement” was not intended to turn men against women. But many women called it a put-down, an atavistic reaction to the feminist movement. Cartoonists and talk-show hosts ridiculed it, dismissing it as tree-hugging self-indulgence by middle-class baby boomers. Mr. Bly, a shambling white-haired guru who strummed a bouzouki and wore colorful vests, was easily mocked as Iron John himself, a hairy wild man who, in the German myth, helped aimless princes in their quests....

Click my "Robert Bly" tag. I've written about him quite a few times, most recently 3 weeks ago, with "This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging." 

And I wrote about him in my second year of blogging, 2005: "Remember the men's movement?" 

There's this from a post in 2010: "And what are the burdens of manliness? Ironically — ironjohnically — men are made to feel unmanly for developing their set of grievances and whining and moaning about the unfairness of it."

This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging.

1. This morning, before going out for my sunrise run, where I planned to continue listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Crossroads," I opened up the NYT review, "Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." I wanted to read a review, and I selected that one, just because it's in the NYT (and written by Dwight Garner, a reviewer I like).

2. After the sunrise, with that tab sitting open on my browser, I sat down for my usual morning blogging session, and what caught my eye and set the tone for the morning was Donald Trump's participation in the tomahawk chop at the World Series game in Atlanta last night.

3. As I wrote in the previous post, that "jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?" That led me into a 1991 WaPo article about the men's movement 30 years ago, which entailed drumming and other "Native American" inspired rituals, much of which came from the musings of the poet Robert Bly. 

4. I click various windows out of my way and uncover that "Crossroads" review. It begins:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

5. And don't even get me started on Joseph Campbell. That was so last week.

"American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost, in some personal wasteland..."

"... of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. There's a lot of hurtin' cowboys out there." 

Said Ed Honnold, "the mild-mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Greater Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals of dancing and roaring, hugging and weeping," quoted in "MEN'S MOVEMENT STALKS THE WILD SIDE," a WaPo column by Phil McCombs, published on February 3, 1991 — 30 years ago. 

I'm reading that this morning because the news about Trump at the Atlanta baseball game doing the tomahawk chop — blogged here — jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?

Here's the part about drum circles from that 1991 article:

"When I was about 10 years old, my mother became interested in the idea of the divine feminine, specifically centering spirituality on women..."

"...rather than the patriarchal notion of a male god.... Judging from the attendees of the goddess fairs in hotel ballrooms I was also taken to, this was a fairly White, progressive and privileged group of women. It served as a kind of spiritual extension of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, parallel to feminism. Men soon started to realize that they, too, had a gender to consider, and the men’s movement took off in the ’70s and ’80s. It manifested in three expressions, says Cliff Leek, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Northern Colorado and vice president of the American Men’s Studies Association: 'You get pro-feminist [men’s] groups that do work around reproductive health and sexual violence; and, on the other end of the spectrum, men’s rights groups that say, "We are gendered and the system is out to get us." The middle way is the mythopoetic: tying masculinity back to the sacred and mythological.' The prevailing figure in the mythopoetic movement is the poet Robert Bly. In 1990, Bly, who was in his 60s (he’s now 94), published 'Iron John: A Book About Men,' which includes lines like, 'Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.' Bly’s idea, told through Jung-influenced archetypes and fairy tales, was that men had been robbed of true masculinity via emotionally withholding fathers who raised soft sons. With some reflection — and maybe some banging on drums with other dudes in the forest — they could reclaim their inner Zeuses and thrive."

Cherry-picked right from the center of "QAnon’s Unexpected Roots in New Age Spirituality/Masculinity, faith and the strange convergence of counterculture and hate" by Marisa Meltzer (WaPo).

I'm trying to write up one wolf story, and another wolf story pops ups. I'm beset by wolves this morning.

I express my frustration out loud like this: "Remember 'Women who Run with the Wolves'? What the hell was that?"

"I also remember Naomi Wolf," says Meade.

"May I quote you?"

"Yes," he answers, adding "I also remember Wolf Blitzer."

So the first story I'm trying very hard to process for this blog is: "A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Question/What do copyright and authorship mean in the crowdsourced realm known as the Omegaverse?" That's in the NYT. I've had the tag open since yesterday, and this morning Meade sent me the link to it, so my blogging it is overdetermined and seemingly mandatory and pressing.

Wolf-kink erotica sounds interesting, and here it is tangled up in law — "a deep legal question." When is law deep? How about erotica? Is erotica deep? How deep is your erotica?

[A]ll Omegaverse couples engage in wolflike behavior. Alphas “rut” and Omegas go through heat cycles, releasing pheromones that drive Alphas into a lusty frenzy. One particular physiological quirk that’s ubiquitous in Omegaverse stories, called knotting, comes from a real feature of wolves’ penises, which swell during intercourse, causing the mating pair to remain physically bound to increase the chance of insemination.... In the past decade, more than 70,000 stories set in the Omegaverse have been published on the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own.... On Amazon, there are hundreds of novels for sale, including titles like “Pregnant Rock Star Omega,” “Wolf Spirit: A Reverse Harem Omegaverse Romance” and “Some Bunny to Love: An M/M MPreg Shifter Romance,” an improbable tale involving an Alpha male who can transform into a rabbit....

I'm trying to get my brain around that — my brain, which swells during blogging — and this story pops up: "Bolivian orchestra stranded at ‘haunted’ German castle surrounded by wolves" (NY Post). Come on, now.

A Bolivian pan flute orchestra has been stuck in quarantine on the grounds of a grand 15th century palace outside of Berlin for two months. Over 20 members of the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos have been stuck on the grounds and buildings of Rheinsberg Palace, a castle, complete with moat....

Not just an orchestra — a pan flute orchestra. Not just a castle — a castle with a moat. So many elements. It's like the internet is toying with me. How can it be an "orchestra" if it's all pan flutes?

Maybe it would all make more sense to me if I were more of a woman who runs with the wolves. Here's Wikipedia on the 1992 book "Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype" by "Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D" — a book I saw and shunned hundreds of times back in those days when I used to go to bookstores all the time. The book looks at "myths, fairy tales, folk tales and stories" and extracts a "Wild Woman archetype of the feminine psyche" and purports to demonstrate that "wolves and women are relational by nature."

You never hear about that anymore — wild women and the way we're like wolves. Or, no, wait, here's a NYT piece from 2018, "The Wild Woman Awakens/The 1992 feminist sensation 'Women Who Run With the Wolves' has returned, as a new generation of artists embrace women’s bodies in all their hormonal, bloody glory." That's by Amanda Hess, who's found a copy of the old book:

"My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart."

"For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night. After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced. For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t...."

The prose of the poet Donald Hall, published in 2016 by the New Yorker, highlighted now because he died on Saturday. He was 89. Here's the NYT obituary — "Mr. Hall was one of the leading poets of his generation, frequently mentioned in the company of Robert Bly, James Wright and Galway Kinnell. In evoking a bucolic New England past and expressing a deep veneration of nature, he used simple and direct language, though often to surreal effect."

"[M]en, like women, are bound by stereotypes, perpetuated in society and legitimized by law..."

"... that preclude opportunities for self-definition and coerce men into stifling identities. The Equal Protection Clause should not...  presumptively tolerate such burdens on a man’s right of self-definition."

Lawprof John M. Kang argues that the law of gender discrimination should not protect men merely as "collateral beneficiaries of the protection afforded women, but in their own right." The article is called "The Burdens of Manliness."

Kang denies that he's a throwback to the "the sensitive troglodyte yearnings of the 1980s Men’s Movement," and I hear echoes of criticisms he must have received on drafts of this article. I was already a law professor back then, and my school (Wisconsin) was a hotbed of feminism theory. My own orientation at that the time — and now — was to see gender roles as limiting freedom for everyone. I remember suggesting to one of the most prominent feminist lawprofs that I thought feminism would be better if it expanded more generally into concern about the burdens of gender roles, which men felt too, in interestingly different ways. Individual freedom for all could be the overarching goal.

The response was not, as I'd naively anticipated at the time, that I had a great idea or that it was at least an intriguing proposal that we could casually converse about for a minute or 2. No, not at all. I mean, I'm still alive. But there was pushback. Swift, sharp snapback. Men get nothing from feminism. They must give ground. Much ground. For all that they have taken from us, for all the crushing and raping. Never give them the hint of a glimmer of hope that there is anything more that they can get. This is for us.

But —I tried to defend my humble, untenured self — wouldn't more freedom for everyone be better? No! My elder laid down what was, she assured me, the lesson of long political experience: If men think there's anything in it for them, they will use their superior power to take more and more, and the subordination of women will worsen. We must all follow the same strategy: to demand that men give up power and wealth for the benefit of women.

As for the Men's Movement... remember "Iron John: A Book About Men"? Remember thinking it was important to hate Robert Bly?

And what are the burdens of manliness? Ironically — ironjohnically — men are made to feel unmanly for developing their set of grievances and whining and moaning about the unfairness of it. But please don't let that stop you from expressing yourself in the comments.

ADDED: By the way, during the same period, you'd get similar sharp pushback from lefties if you said you thought gay people had the right to marry each other.  That was viewed as a conservative position that would undermine the feminist critique of marriage as patriarchy. I also got an instant, angry response from a lefty feminist law professor when I said that the cause of gay rights might be advanced by scientific findings that homosexuality may have a biological cause. Back then, you see, homosexuality was supposed to be a choice, and scientists were condemned even for researching the matter. Today, of course, lefty lawprofs will get mad at you if you don't endorse gay marriage and the biological origin of homosexuality. Oh, how I wish I'd had a blog circa 1990! And I hope this post gives you a glimpse of why there is so much emotional energy behind my blogging.

Remember the men's movement?

With the drumming circles and everything? The Boston Globe seeks out the present-day remnants (via A&L Daily):

So what happened to [Robert "Iron John"] Bly's mythopoetic movement? The negative media coverage, such as Esquire's ''Wild Men and Wimps" spoof issue in 1992, didn't exactly help. But there were other factors, too. For one thing, even many of the men not inclined to dismiss Bly-style gatherings as silly found themselves mystified by the rarefied Jungian concepts tossed around the campfires like so many marshmallows. ''Many of the men I saw worked really hard at trying to figure out the mythology, but they just weren't getting it in the belly," says Byers, echoing the title of Sam Keen's bestselling book.... Part of the problem ... was the mythopoetic movement's complex relationship to feminism. On the one hand, some feminists construed Bly's attack on feminized males as reactionary. ''I'd hoped by now that men were strong enough to accept their vulnerability and to be authentic without aping Neanderthal cavemen," Betty Friedan told The Washington Post back in 1991. (Bly denied that there was anything anti-woman about his ideas.) What's more, the movement itself could never get beyond the fact that unlike the feminist movement - which itself had lost steam by the 1990s, as women achieved more economic and financial power - Bly and his followers never had any clear political agenda to drive them forward.

According to the article, these days, men actually want to be more involved in family life. And the men's groups of today tend to be centered on traditional religion, not Bly's "mythopoetic" antics.