Now It’s the Men’s Turn

Cynical female tongues may well wag in wonderment. The men’s movement? Exactly what is going on here? What makes these guys think they need a movement when they already run the world?

But Sam Keen, author of “Fire in the Belly,” a best seller from Bantam that has become a Bible for movementized men, dismisses that kind of reaction as “psychologically naive.” From his home in the California wine country, Keen cautioned, “Don’t pay any attention to that voice”--the voice that makes women wonder, to borrow from Sigmund Freud, what do men really want? Rather, Keen advised, women should celebrate the fact that “sensitive men have finally, after 25 years, begun to hear what the women’s movement is all about.”

What is taking place, Keen contends, is “a gender revolution.” This “very amorphous, loosely defined” men’s movement, as John Lee, another Bantam author, whose “At My Father’s Wedding” comes out this fall, describes it, has spawned a genuine publishing phenomenon. The demand for books about this evolving species of homo reconsideratus has spurred a flurry of new titles that together make up a genre known as men’s books. As Michael Kimmel, editor of a line of books on “men and masculinity” from Beacon Press, put it, “right now every publisher is struggling to get a book out on men.”

Part of the surprise for publishers is that men and women seem to be buying these books in equal numbers. Women traditionally buy more books than men, and earlier books that touched on male consciousness, such as Warren Farrell’s “Why Men Are the Way They Are,” were often purchased by women for men--as in, “read this book, dear, if you know what’s good for you.”

But that has now changed, John Lee said, since a broad estimate of men involved in the men’s movement over the last 10 to 12 years would range from 2 to 10 million. By anyone’s reckoning, that makes for an impressive potential force of book-buyers. While Bantam has no official statistics, Lee said that “our guess is that at least 50 to 60% of all the readers of my book are men.”

Keen said the response to his book took even his own publisher by surprise. “They only gave me a $30,000 advance,” Keen said. “Fire in the Belly” was to have had a modest initial printing, Keen said, nothing extraordinary. But after “the salesmen started stealing the bound galleys,” Bantam upped the first-run printing to 70,000.

Keen’s book challenges “the whole warrior mentality that is at the back of masculinity” and recommends that “that isn’t going to change if we don’t change it.” The book’s appeal apparently stretches from men who want to understand themselves to women who want to understand the men in their lives. “Men are buying it and giving it to women,” Keen said. “Women are buying it and giving it to their sons.”

From his country home in the mountains of North Carolina, John Lee recalled the genesis of his earlier men’s movement best seller. “The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man” was published three years ago by Health Communications. He said the seeds for that book were sown “six or seven years ago,” after he read Linda Leonard’s book, “The Wounded Woman”: “I thought, gee, there needs to be a book like that for men.”

Writers such as Lee and Keen have also benefitted from the burgeoning of men’s groups and men’s consciousness-raising weekend retreats, where grown-up males go out into the woods, listen to drums and talk about the experience of being male in 20th-Century America. In turn, much of the impetus for these support programs can be traced to the poet-philosopher Robert Bly, and to television commentator Bill Moyers, who featured Bly and the men’s movement in a widely viewed special on public television.

Bly’s most recent book, the huge best seller, “Iron John” (Addison Wesley), uses myth, fairy tales and images from C. J. Jung to explore the passage to manhood in America. Urging men to get in touch with their “inner warrior,” Bly blames much of men’s problems today on the absence of older male mentors, and on fractured relationships with their fathers.

Though this theme recurs in many of the new men’s books, Beacon Press Michael Kimmel, for one, disputes the notion that men’s pain is or should be the focus of the men’s movement.

Kimmel, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook, has made a speciality of gender studies. Kimmel readily agrees that a changing perception of men and their roles in society is “something that’s in the air,” and that publishers have properly grabbed on to it. But his own series from Beacon Press, Kimmel said, “in a funny way won’t tap into that same nerve” as many of the other new books about men.

“One of the things we won’t speak to is men’s pain,” Kimmel said, because “I’m more interested in men’s privilege than in men’s pain.”

Books by authors such as Robert Bly, Sam Keen and John Lee “basically make the argument that in three words ‘it’s our turn,’ ” Kimmel said. “Women have had the center stage for 20 years--and now it’s our turn. They say that men are hurting, and that is really hitting a responsive chord. They’re tired of hearing about women’s pain. They’re tired of male-bashing in books by women.”

The new spate of books that spins largely out of men’s groups “are kind of like permission for men to feel bad,” Kimmel said. “Men have been trashed in the media for years. Women have been telling them for more than 20 years to clean up their acts. And here’s these guys saying you don’t have to.”

By contrast, Kimmel calls his series for Beacon Press “more pro-feminist.” It begins this fall with a book edited by Kimmel, “Pro-Feminist Men in American History,” as well as a book about sports and masculinity, “Power at Play,” written by Michael Messner. (Kimmel also calls his series “more academic” than most current men’s books.)

“We’re more interested in the history of men’s lives in a social context,” Kimmel said. “We’re asking ‘what does it mean to be a man in the world today, in which men feel powerless, and yet have all the power?’ ”

This fall’s men’s books probably only presage an ongoing flood of popular and more scholarly literature that will look at men in modern America. Men who are probing their own masculinity “are kind of taking baby steps right now,” John Lee said. Keen, agreeing with this assessment, said, “Right now where we are in the men’s thing is where women were when ‘The Feminine Mystique’ was released.’ ”

If women are eager to find out what makes men tick in these final years of this century, men are no less starved for information, Michael Kimmel said. “They really are bereft,” Kimmel said. “They don’t know what to do, or where to look. The old role models don’t work any more.”

In any case, Sam Keen said, there’s no turning back, no stopping what he and others see as a tide of masculine rediscovery.

“The genie,” Keen said, “is out of the bottle.”