Drums, Sweat and Tears: What Do Men Really Want?

From Menletter May 2005

By Tim Baehr

Fourteen years ago, Newsweek paraphrased Winston Churchill and Sigmund Freud in the title to its cover story on the men's movement. The cover illustration showed a buff, bare-chested man of 35 or so, wearing a necktie and blue jeans. He was carrying a naked, grinning baby in one arm and an African drum in the other.

The article's catchy subtitle was "Now They Have a Movement of Their Own." I still have the issue (June 24, 1991). Unfortunately, it does not seem to be available on-line.

Jerry Adler (still at Newsweek as a senior editor covering science) and his co-authors capture some of the early excitement over a new men's movement. Robert Bly is there (His Iron John had been on the best-seller list for months), along with Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly) and Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine). In a second article in the same issue, Adler and his co-authors explore drumming ("Heeding the Call of the Drums") and feature Babatunde Olatunji, the great Nigerian drummer who was then teaching in Harlem, and Mickey Hart, drummer for the Grateful Dead.

There's also a sidebar of "New Man Talk" with specialized vocabulary for the uninitiated: Wild Man; Soft Males; Warrior; Drumming; Sweat Lodge; Male Mystique; Talking Stick.

The articles are a combination of analysis, straight reportage, condescension, and Newsweek's sly tongue-in-cheek style that seems to say, "We - and you - don't have to take this too seriously." One of the pictures shows men sitting around a campfire, their drums sitting idly on the ground. The caption reads: "Wild things: Take up your drums, grab an ax and leave your inhibitions behind in the parking lot." Perhaps appropriately for the times, the articles are in the magazine's "Lifestyle" section.

More examples:

· "What teenagers were to the 1960s, what women were to the 1970s, middle-aged men may well be to the 1990s: American culture's sanctioned grievance carriers, diligently rolling their ball of pain from talk show to talk show."

· "These are exciting times: the men's movement is dawning, the first postmodern social movement, meaning one that stems from a deep national malaise that hardly anyone knew existed until they saw it on a PBS special."

· About talking sticks: ". . . it's not hard to imagine how women, to whom the easy exchange of intimacies comes naturally, must view this quaint masculine practice: Aha, men are finally learning to talk about their feelings. But they have to hold a stick to do it."

· About men's retreats: "No wonder one form the rebellion takes is the "Wild Man" retreat, in which men who ordinarily might not know which end of an ax to grasp live out a fantasy of aboriginal frolic, confined to a weekend and purged of any practices that might offend contemporary sensibilities, such as ritual mutilation or chemical intoxication."

· Sweat lodges combined with sage incense ". . . to create a hypernormal state, which is what men have always sought on Saturday nights anyway."

In among the snide asides, the article does cover a lot of ground in describing the state of the men's movement as of the early 1990s. Some themes will be familiar to men who've been involved in men's work for a while: father hunger, as laid out in Bly's classic Iron John; backgrounds among many men of abuse and alcoholism; men's death rates higher than women's; sweat lodges as places where rational thought gives way to emotions; the alienation of modern life; the need for men to learn from, initiate, and bless each other.

In one of the concluding paragraphs, Adler and his team say: "What now? What now is that we need another revolution. In the 18th century, men made the world over in their own image; now they look in the mirror and strain to catch a glimpse of the Wild Man beneath the tie, and they ask: is it too late to start over?"

Did we get our revolution? Hardly. The themes and challenges of men's work haven't changed much. We still die too soon. Many of us are still alienated by work in corporations that care less and less about their workers. Some of us still dull our pain with alcohol, drugs, serial sex, material goods. Some still often find it hard to communicate with our loved ones and especially with other men. Most of us are uninitiated, either in the traditional sense or in claiming initiation from our life's ordeals. We're still both idealized and ridiculed in popular media and advertising (a kind of male version of the madonna-whore complex).

Should we be discouraged? I think it's a mixed situation. Our mass society seems more toxic than ever for men (and everyone else). But the longevity gap has narrowed slightly. More men seem to be more involved in their families, and some studies indicate that young men would forgo extra income for more time at home with the kids. Men's rights in divorce and custody cases seem to be getting more attention. Bly and others are still leading men's retreats, though perhaps not in the quantities of the 1990s.

I'm leery of movements. They often mean gurus and leaders, and giving up our autonomy to a set of ideas or eloquent pronouncements. Leaders and members of movements can become targets. Much of men's work is in exploring our individual responses to the challenges of manhood, and joining a movement compromises that individuality and turns us into caricatures and stereotypes. (Remember that those who attacked the feminist movement often characterized its members as hairy-legged, unattractive, humorless, strident bra-burners.) It may be a good thing that we didn't get a movement of our own, and that a lot of our work goes on quietly and without a lot of media attention.

My experience is that the need for men's work is as strong as ever, and the need is probably not going away anytime soon. For men who recognize the need, the kinds of work that were started a couple decades ago are still effective: retreats, drumming, immersion in mythology, the use of ritual, and the simple fellowship of men's gatherings.

Why is this work effective? Here are a few guesses.

Retreats in general are a good thing. Getting away from work and home is an opportunity for getting perspective on our everyday lives. Vacations serve this function somewhat, but retreats encourage us to look harder, dig deeper.

Drumming is a community activity, usually with no special skills required. It can produce altered states of consciousness, or at least quell the incessant inner chatter of the brain. The underlying beat of most drumming sessions is at about the rate of the heartbeat; this may explain why sometimes a session brings the drummers into a sense of unity: the entire room becomes a single instrument.

The purpose of most myths and traditional stories is to help explain human nature and the stages we experience as we grow into and through adulthood. Listening to myths gives us a shared experience that can bring communities together. But a myth is also typically so rich that each man sees it differently, putting himself into a different aspect of the story. Discussing myths can bring deep insights into our psyches and into our places in society.

A friend of mine has defined ritual as a ceremony that involves change. The sweat lodge, for instance, contains some ritual in the prayers or meditations, and in the entering and exiting four times during the sweat. The sweat lodge cleanses its participants both physically and psychically. There are many other rituals, or activities with ritual elements. These include burning of incense, mask-making, blindfold trust walks, dancing, drumming, poetry, meditation, holotropic breathwork, and emotional release work involving rage or grief. Ritual is a shared, community event. It can follow traditions or be created spontaneously.

Men are afforded few opportunities for fellowship: to simply be with each other. Whatever else may go on at a large gathering or small men's group, the fellowship of just being in each other's presence is very powerful. There may be a lot of talk; there may be none. Emotions may flow, or be held in check. My experience in longer retreats and shorter but regular meetings is that a deep respect and compassion develops as men form a community of mutual trust. Fellowship is an important element in ritual. When men build a community during the course of a weekend or longer retreat, they provide a container in which ritual makes sense and is emotionally safe. We may not want to expose our emotions to a roomful of strange men; it's a different matter entirely if our activities are wrapped in ritual and take place in a group of brothers.

What do men really want? I don't think this is a useful question. It implies that the focus is on all men as a category, not on individual men. And the "really" implies that men don't know what they want, or that there's a huge mystery (a male mystique?) about men. Maybe the best thing we can do is for each of us to look at the external conditions of our lives - work, family, community - and then into ourselves (or even into a mirror) and ask, "What do I want?"