BOOK REVIEW/ESSAY/CHRISTIAN APPRAISAL: Steve Biddulph,
‘Manhood: An Action Plan for Changing Men’s Lives’, Sydney: Finch
Publishing (PO Box 120, Lane Cove 2066), 2nd edition, 1995.

For ten years the Men’s Movement has gathered momentum,
like an unstoppable tidal wave, throughout the Western (industrialised)
world. My library now has a whole row of bestsellers about men,
with titles like ‘The Real Man Inside’,’Brain Sex: the Real Difference
Between Men and Women’, ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’,
‘Point Man: How a Man Can Lead His Family’, ‘The Intimate Connection:
Male Sexuality, Masculine Spirituality’. And so on. But the seminal
book is still Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John: A Book About Men’.

There are now thousands of men’s groups in America,
where Promisekeepers is booming. Canadian therapist-turned-activist
Guy Corneau has single-handedly founded 300 groups in Canada.
Australia has hundreds of men’s groups, and many are forming in
the U.K., Germany, South America, N.Z. and elsewhere…

I spent the International Year of the Family writing
a book about women and men and children (The Family: At Home in
a Heartless World, HarperCollins), and I get more feedback from
the chapters on men and fathering than all the others combined.
In my seminars for men, I have a throwaway introductory line:
‘Men are the second most confused group in our culture…’ (pause,
punctuated by male chuckles, and a few guffaws) ‘… after teenagers!’
For three decades women have been getting their act together,
following millennia of patriarchy. Men are just beginning their
movement, after five generations of confusion (since the Industrial
Revolution). Exciting.

The best Australian book is psychologist Steve Biddulph’s
‘Manhood’. It’s Robert Bly popularised, and more readable. Short
assessment: after the Gospels, it ought to be the next most important
book men read. And re-read. And re-read. And study with other
men. And talk about with their wives/ partners.

Now Biddulph wouldn’t put it like that. Religion
is important – very important – for him, but not necessarily the
classical church-type Christian variety. As a consultant to churches
I have some sympathy with that, but would not necessarily espouse
his mild new age-ishness. (That’s another subject, for another
time). And evangelical Christians aren’t (yet) used to earthy
language, though that’s changing too. (Best-known Australian evangelist/
prophet John Smith doesn’t get invited back to some middle-class
churches because he’s too shocking, talks too long and uses some
naughty words). Oh, and another warning for Christians: Biddulph
has a more liberal approach to the benefits of masturbation and
Playboy than most of us would encourage…

Biddulph’s opening, encouraging (!) line: ‘Most men
don’t have a life. Instead, we have just learned to pretend.’
A paragraph later: ‘So he spends his life pretending to be happy.’
It’s uphill from there. James Michener put it memorably: ‘For
this is the journey that men make. To find themselves. If they
fail in this, it doesn’t matter what else they find.’ If the male
infant doesn’t move from mother to father to mentor, says Biddulph,
he’ll stay a kid pretending to be an adult, an empty, phony caricature
of the man he could have been.

Because men haven’t grown up properly, they don’t
know how to relate to women as friends; they don’t know how to
be mentoring fathers; they’re in bondage to male stereotypes (burn
your ties or use them to stake up garden trees says Biddulph).
Most of us couldn’t cope with the mandatory three to four days
of complete solitude every birthday (all the great men in history
spent time in the wilderness).

Society is disintegrating primarily because men are
not initiating boys into manhood: women can’t do that, however
hard they try in the absence of their men. So fatherless boys
form gangs (see the New Zealand movie ‘Once Were Warriors’), or
else become wimpish loners (for some of these ‘nerds’, their best
friend is a computer), destroying others and themselves. Nowadays,
in America, half of all children will spend time in a fatherless
home.

And, says Biddulph, we’ve inherited a marriage-ideal
that is sweet and harmonious: ‘the passionate heated European-style
marriage has more going for it. Jung said, "American marriages
are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all the
fighting at the office".’

Some interesting/representative quotes:

* ‘Boys in our society are horrendously under-fathered…
they grow into phony men, who act out a role… In today’s world,
little boys often just grow into _bigger_ little boys.’

* ‘Women had to overcome oppression, but men’s difficulties
are with isolation… The loneliness of men is something women
rarely understand.’

* ‘The leading cause of death amongst men between
twelve and sixty is self-inflicted death… Monday [is] the most
common day for men to suicide.’

* The seven steps to manhood: fixing it with your
father, finding sacredness in your sexuality, meeting your partner
on equal terms, engaging actively with your kids, learning to
have real male friends, finding your heart in your work, freeing
your wild spirit.

* ‘The Xervante people of the Brazilian rainforest
have eight stages of manhood and spend forty years learning them.
They produce perhaps the most balanced men on earth, straddling
the qualities we seek – strong _and_ tender, brave _and_ compassionate.
They are lovers of beauty and active in preserving it.’

* ‘Less than ten percent of men are friends with
their father.’

* ‘Until you can feel love and respect for your father
and also _receive_ the love and respect of older men, you will
remain a boy.’

* ‘Many men need to become orgasmic – as opposed
to just ejaculatory… Sex education teaches us the plumbing –
it’s necessary, but drab. Love education might be a little more
challenging.’

* ‘A creep [has] abandoned the difficult path of
intimacy for the safer one of exploitation.’

That’s enough – and from just the first eighty pages
(of 260).

Again, if you’re conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist
you won’t get very good theology here. But you just might learn
enough about how to grow from a boy into a man to become more
like Jesus, who I reckon was the best put-together man who ever
lived. Not a bad ideal.

(For more on this subject, see under ‘Fathers’ and
‘Men’ on our homepage).

Rowland Croucher