WINGSPAN: Inside the Men’s Movement edited...

WINGSPAN: Inside the Men’s Movement edited by Christopher Harding, photographs by Roger Kose (St. Martin’s Press: $16.95; 265 pp., paperback original). Many of the articles, poems and reminiscences in this silly book first appeared in Wingspan magazine, which Harding also edits. Although he notes that the so-called “men’s movement” includes “many diverse, even opposing contingents,” this anthology suggests the movement’s philosophy is the cultural equivalent of a crazy quilt, composed of snippets borrowed from Karl Jung, world mythology, 12 Steps programs, the gay liberation movement et al. Many of the anachronistic “ritual” experiences the authors describe recall Marie Antoinette’s predilection for playing milkmaid in the peasant village she had built at Versailles. (Several of the “rituals” irreverently reduce Native American religious ceremonies, to games of dress-up.) Pretending to be a primitive warrior or a shaman might help fill an empty weekend, but it’s difficult to see how it prepares men for life in contemporary America.