NONFICTION - Oct. 27, 1991

KNIGHTS WITHOUT ARMOR: A Practical Guide for Men in Quest of Masculine Soul by Aaron R. Kipnis (Tarcher: $19.95; 304 pp.). The war of the sexes marches on. While another book published this month--Susan Faludi’s “Backlash”--essentially charges that men continue to exclude women from power, “Knights Without Armor” insists that “We men don’t feel nearly as powerful as you think we do!” Psychologist Aaron Kipnis suggests that men are in many ways weaker both physically (more prone to autism, hyperkinesis and dyslexia) and psychologically (raised in schools that affirm “feminine traits” like orderliness and conformity but punish male drives like aggression and restlessness). Kipnis’ elegant portraits of men who feel confused, inauthentic, lonely, frustrated and disappointed offer poignant support for his claim. But his analysis of how society victimizes men is often simplistic (he even blames circumcision in a section entitled “The Wounded Penis”) and his “New Male Manifesto,” essentially a list of every noble character trait in Roget’s Thesaurus, is as unrealistically Utopian as Robert Bly’s.