Where Are We Going with the Men's Movement?

From Menletter April 2002

By Tim Baehr

[Note: This is the first Menletter, sent to about twenty men via e-mail before the website was established.]

Where are we going with the "men's movement"? After some excitement in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seems to have gotten pretty slow and quiet. Sometimes I hope that it was just my inattention, the busy-ness of life, and so on. Maybe there were lively men's events and gatherings that had just slipped off my radar screen. But other men have told me that the movement had gone either underground or away. One even told me that a certain amount of media ridicule had decimated the membership in men's groups and organizations.

Like many men, I had started out with Bly (the public TV documentary "A Gathering of Men" with Bill Moyers) and gone on to become immersed in Bly, Hillman, and Meade. I couldn't travel to see them, but when any one of them came to the Boston area, I was there. The visits were far too few.

I was in a couple of men's groups, one fairly short-lived and one very short-lived.

My re-entry was sudden: at a weekend seminar with Meade, one of the participants told me about the Men's Wisdom Council, an annual five-day retreat in the mountains of western Massachusetts. I went mostly to get away from the tensions of my job and marriage, hoping for a quiet week in the woods.

I was blown away by the fellowship and nurturing of the 35 men, and the deep work we were able to do in just a few days. As a direct result of that week, I kept my marriage, changed my job, and began to wait impatiently for the next Wisdom Council.

This went on for two more years: a week of renewal and amazing insights followed by 51 weeks of yearning to go back. Finally, I ran into one of the leaders (he lives in my town) and mentioned this yearning. He said, Let's do something about it.

Last January, we (and several other guys) hosted Mending the Web: Building a Community of Men. We explored, with a couple dozen men, the needs of men and men's groups in the Boston area. From that Saturday we spun off some new projects, including a Web site, a drumming and poetry circle, an anti-violence committee, and others. Slowly, we're on our way.

This newsletter is both independent (I thought of it before the Mending the Web project) and a part of the community effort.

So, I guess I haven't answered the question. Where are we going? The short answer is "forward, slowly." My inner sense tells me that the down time in the past decade will turn out to have been good for us - a time to reflect, a time to gather our energies. It was also a time for men - as men - to be out of the public eye. About the only media attention I've noticed about men in the past ten years has been ridicule. Just look at the sitcoms, advertising, and daily comics pages. We can be (super)heroes, jerks, or "sensitive" males.

What needs to happen? Here's my vision: We need to talk and work and play together. It's that simple. No underlying theorizing, no "movement," no ideology. Fly under the radar and avoid any media or mass-market attention or attempts to co-opt us ("Collect all six REALMAN figurines at Burger King!").

One of the things society has done to people in general in the past twenty years is to isolate them: family from family, worker from worker, community from community. We compete with each other for jobs, we hole up in the den in front of the TV or game console, we barely know our neighbors. For even longer than that, men have had - or made - few opportunities to just be with each other.

We need to be together more. Let's start there and see where it takes us.