The Political Psyche by Samuels Andrew Samuels Andrew

Author:Samuels, Andrew,Samuels, Andrew. [Andrew Samuels]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317497912
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The men’s movement

I want to move on now to discuss the contemporary men’s movement and I am going to carry out a dissection of it. I am conscious of the limitations of such an approach because the various subdivisions ultimately overlap. However, unless we try to clarify what is meant by the ‘men’s movement’, it will be difficult to proceed, and we may not realize how multifaceted the men’s movement is, or has become. I have been able to identify at least four overlapping aspects of the men’s movement. We can call these the experiential, the sociopolitical, the mythopoetic, and the gay men’s movements. Readers who are familiar with the field are unlikely to find this a particularly radical or disturbing division; I hope such readers will appreciate my intention to begin from diversity rather than from a false and repressive unity.

The experiential subdivision of the men’s movement operates in an overtly therapeutic mode. Advertisements of groups for men offer the chance to experience feelings and the opportunity for participants to connect up with the small boy-child within themselves. The group offers a chance to cry, a chance to hug, a chance to confess, and so forth. The missing baby boy – big boys don’t cry – is often a part of a man’s experience of conventional psychotherapy. So, although sometimes the experiential men’s movement does not formally operate as therapy, it certainly operates in a therapeutic style. The weakness of the therapeutically- and experientially-oriented aspect of the men’s movement is that it may rest content with superficial persona changes. It is significant that, these days, one encounters mockery about hugging. Hugging not long ago became the symbol of a certain kind of man-to-man relating, and, in its true form, it was once very threatening because it upset our ideas about what heterosexual masculinity is. Nowadays, the practice of indiscriminate hugging has degenerated into a ritual cliché, suggesting that experiential work on male issues can operate only on a behavioral level, so that participants end up merely by producing a different form of socially approved behavior. The remaining virtue of the experiential men’s movement has to do with the re-evaluation of relations to women and to the mother and a good deal of work on new and more nurturing models of fathering may also be considered as part of the experiential men’s movement.

The second subdivision of the men’s movement that I want to discuss, the sociopolitical men’s movement, is informed by the notion that men are sexist and oppressive. The overt aim of this particular aspect of the men’s movement is to make an alliance with feminism. Men can learn from feminism, and should work toward the betterment of social and economic conditions for women, based on an attempt to achieve cooperative and non-hierarchical ways of relating and believing. The sociopolitical men’s movement is growing in size in nearly all the Western countries, most dramatically in the United States where there are now over four hundred men’s studies courses. But that field is also growing in Europe with extraordinary rapidity.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.