Men: It is time to get the feminists off your backs and stand tall again. You are not what they say you are. You, personally, are not to blame for all the sins of your forefathers.
You can begin by dropping that insufferable imitation of Phil Donahue. It doesn`t fool women for a minute, and they despise you for it. They think you`re a wimp.
They know as well as you do that eons ago one of their own, Mother Nature, fitted women and men into the straitjackets they now wear so uncomfortably by equipping women to give birth and men to go hunting.
Men who survived the hunt did so by cooperating. Evolution and sabre-toothed tigers took the rest. The eventual result was what social scientists now call male bonding. It can be observed today in the corridors of power, where everyone dresses like everyone else, and on the football field, where men pat each other on the behind.
At home, women turned to other women for conversation, and for thousands of years they practiced talking about what they knew best–nurturing, keeping the home fires burning and the frustrations that always attend such activities.
And so, at just about any social gathering, you see the women on one side of the room, talking about feelings, and the men on the other side, talking about the point spread.
When the women`s movement took hold, lots of women took off, leaving their emotionally mute boyfriends and husbands behind. But men needed women. What could they do? The answer, it seemed, was right there on television: Phil Donahue. He was even invited to Gloria Steinem`s 40th birthday party. So lots of men started mimicking Donahue, expressing what they thought might pass for sensitivity. But women rejected that, too.
That brings the story right up to the end of 1985, when a 36-year-old San Diego psychologist, Ken Druck, stopped by with some thoughts on the subject that might interest men, and women too.
I didn`t trust Druck at first. He had written a book called ”The Secrets Men Keep: Breaking the Silence Barrier” (Doubleday, $15.95), and the last thing we need, I thought, another pop psychology book. If any of them really worked, there would not be a new one on the market every month. What`s more, the brochures that preceded Druck`s visit included a photo of him: styled wavy hair, clear wide eyes, mustache, straight white teeth, and under his cashmere sweater a white shirt open at the collar. A Cosmo girl`s fantasy come to life. But Druck knew just what to say: ”This is not another what`s-wrong-with-me n book in which we join in with women who are indicting men for the problems that occur in all relationships.” Men genuinely want to open up, Druck went on, and will–if given half a chance.
”But you`re not going to open them up by attacking them,” Druck said.
”They don`t want to hear any more about what`s wrong with them. They won`t read it. They won`t hear it. They`ve had enough.”
Yes, men are angry. The troubles between men and women, men figure, cannot be all men`s fault. If women are what they are and satisfied with themselves, well, men are what they are, too, whether women like it or not. Men, at least, seem willing to adjust, but it gets them nowhere.
”Women resist men`s efforts to open up because it frightens them,”
Druck said. ”They are especially suspicious of the `more-feminist-than- thou men.` These are men competing to see who`s more sensitive. They believe that the way to make women more powerful is to give up their own power and become flaccid. But just as men have not learned how to open up, a lot of women have not learned how to react when men do open up.
”Women are often scared when men become emotional. Often they`re scared that they`ll regress into a mother or nurse role. They say: `What`s wrong with you? You`re acting like a wimp. Why don`t you be a man about it?` That`s the message. I think a lot of what feminism says is, `If I reach out to help you, if I do the work for you, then I`m back on the same track.`
”What women haven`t learned is that when men want to talk to them about a problem, they don`t have to do anything but listen.”
Men, too, have that to learn. Some years ago a friend was going through a painful divorce and also was unhappy with her job. One night, as we talked about it, she exploded: ”Stop giving me advice! I don`t expect you to fix it. I just want you to listen. And you never do!”
”That`s most men,” Druck said. ”We still don`t have the sophistication, the vocabulary, to deal with emotions. A lot of what women call callousness, indifference, insensitivity on men`s parts is simply our lack of experience.
”We`ve developed other kinds of sophistication, such as problem-solving. That`s why a lot of times, when a man hears about a problem, he will immediately go into the fix-it mode: `All right, here`s what you`ve got to do.”`
Druck has made men his professional specialty. His Ph.D. thesis dealt with men`s life cycles. But as he began his clinical practice, most of his patients were women. Then, five years ago, he started holding daylong ”Alive and Male” seminars in which men could get together anonymously and talk about what it was to be a male.
”I`m here,” said one, ”because I`m beginning to feel like one of the girls. All my friends are women, and I want to find out what the hell`s going on in the men`s world and I can`t get guys to talk about anything but the football game.” Another said, ”My wife left me last week.” Others said:
”My wife sent me.” ”My therapist sent me.” ”I`m all clogged up emotionally.” ”I don`t really know why the hell I`m here.”
”The idea,” Druck said, ”was simply to provide a context for men to talk about something other than the Bears or joke about sex or try to impress each other with how they`re doing in their careers. But the seminars are very structured. No one is allowed to tell his occupation. No last names. They have to talk man-to-man.
”One of the biggest surprises to come out of the early seminars was how much men wanted to talk about their fathers. I listened, and what I found was a sense of incompletion, a lingering yearning to hear Dad say: `I`m proud of you. You grew up right as a man. You`re doing it well. I love you. I accept you.`
”But Dad thought it was his job to raise us, not to love us.”
When men talk about their fathers, Druck said, you hear anecdotes: ”I remember the weekend my dad took me fishing.” ”I remember the time he hugged me–it was the only time he ever did that.”
”At one seminar,” Druck said, ”there was a man whose father was one of the biggest industrialists in the state. His father expected him to do the same. But he was not cut from the same stock. He has always felt he was a disappointment to his father, and he resented it.
”We`re not always consciously aware of it, but as soon as men start telling these stories, it becomes clear that they`ve either made a decision to be the spittin` image of their father or to be in defiant rebellion, not to be anything like the s.o.b. because they hate his guts.”
Either way, such men are stuck in what Druck calls a ”reactive phase,”
unable to define their own values, unable to decide for themselves what they want to be, how they`re going to approach their own kids–and how they`re going to relate to women: ”I`m not going to let you do to me what my mother did to my father.”
”The mother has the active role,” Druck said. ”So there`s lots of evidence that if something goes wrong, you can blame the mother. But the passive influence of the father is nonetheless very powerful in men`s lives. The need to reconcile with Dad–to get the resentments out in the open–became a primary issue in the seminars.”
Many of the secrets men keep–including the very fact that they keep them –can thus be traced to the father who was doing the best he could while laboring under the same constraints that now burden his sons. It drives women up the wall, but it is a difficult pattern to break.
”The workplace,” Druck said, ”is a great burial place for secrets.”
Men can at once hide from the rest of their lives by throwing themselves into their work, whether they like the work or not, and reinforce their emotional armor at work so as not to appear vulnerable to rivals and enemies. Druck pointed out that when Edmund Muskie shed tears over a New Hampshire newspaper`s attack on his wife during the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries, his campaign was as good as dead. Muskie`s enemies were quick to suggest that he was not ”man enough for the job.”
Myths about manliness, Druck said, infect men`s relationships not only with women but also with their own best friends.
”We continually find out at the seminars that men have golf buddies, work buddies, beer buddies. We have friends we love dearly, friends we`re bonded to. We have lunch with them, play poker with them, hang around with them for years. But there always has to be a purpose for us to get together. To say, `I just want to be with you`–that`s still unacceptable for most men.”
Again, Druck says, it is a matter of men`s lacking experience in discerning and expressing the emotions they feel for other men. The technical term is homophobia–fear of homosexuality. Even homosexuals, Druck said, are homophobic. They fear that any expression of affection for another man might be mistaken for a homosexual advance.
”At age 12 or 13, we giggle when we see two people touching because we assume it`s sexual,” Druck said, ”and if the world were perfect, we would learn to differentiate–that`s what human growth is about, to make new categories of experience so that you`re more discriminating. At 15 or 16 we should be developing a discrimination that says: `I can touch you and we don`t have to giggle. I can just say thank you for the time we spent today and touch you on the shoulder.”`
”It`s funny,” Druck added, ”Short of having sex together, two men may do just about anything so long as there`s a beer present. `Let`s go for a beer` is male code for `Let`s spend some time together.` Beer and masculinity go hand in hand. Beer not only provides a reason for two men to sit together without public suspicion, but it also furnishes a safe means for letting our guard down and showing some emotion. Later, if we`re embarrassed, we can always claim that we`ve had `one too many.”`
But men can learn to understand their own feelings, Druck says, to be themselves, to lower their guard, and to learn how rewarding real friendship can be–with women as well as men–friendship that distinguishes between what`s manly and what`s merely macho.
”At the seminars, they go through a lot of exercises that show them how they feel, and they have a good time doing it. One exercise is what I call the homophobic lunch-date experience. They pick a partner and go out to lunch with him. I tell them to touch each other at some point in the lunch break, to walk arm in arm or something, just for a minute, and see what happens. They are always surprised by their own homophobic reactions, and they come back with stories about other men whistling at them.”
At the end of the seminar, a day in which the participants have come to know one another as humans, with no status symbols to get in the way, Druck asks each participant to divulge his occupation.
”There`s a deathly silence,” he says. ”They don`t want to do it. I`ve had people angry as hell with me. I had a state supreme court justice, and after he identified himself, everybody started making little jokes: `Hey, ask the judge.`
”After about 20 minutes, the guy exploded. He said: `Listen, goddammit, if anybody else calls me a judge, I`m leaving. I am not a judge. I do the work of a judge. The one thing I`ve enjoyed about today is that I`ve been anonymous –you`ve been talking to me like a human being. Somebody over here told me I was full of crap. I loved hearing that!”`
As women take their rightful places in what traditionally has been a man`s world, it may be that they, too, will learn to hide their emotions. To an extent, Druck says, they do that now.
”Women have incredible secrets,” he said. ”It comes out as mistrust and anger, but what`s behind it is that women are scared. They don`t want to go back to playing Nancy Nurse, fixing him up, putting a Band-Aid on him, being his mother.
”But they also don`t want to blame themselves, as women have done for so long. If something goes wrong, they think: `Oh, it was my fault. What didn`t I do? I should have had thinner thighs in 30 days.` So they don`t know how to respond.
”It`s no secret that women are angry at men, but the extent of that anger is a secret–how deeply wounded women feel about the men in their lives. And it`s not just the feminists who feel that anger. I think some of the antifeminist women are protecting men from their own (women`s) anger by being so sweet and wonderful. Under all that syrup is a lady who has been very badly hurt and will cut your throat in a second.
”In that respect, they`re like the more-feminist-than-thou men, who are going to protect women: `Let`s blame all those s.o.b. men out there. I`m going to protect you from those bastards.` But they are really identifying with
`those bastards.` They are really protecting women from themselves, from their own anger and frustration.”
Perhaps Druck has the answer to why women don`t call Phil Donahue a wimp. He can be pretty tough, but he`s not afraid to show his emotions. He doesn`t pretend to be perfect. On a recent David Letterman show, he was man enough to confess that his wife, Marlo Thomas, is sometimes amused by all the talk about how sensitive he is.
Druck will hold seminars in Chicago next spring. For a schedule, write Alive and Male Seminars, Box 3333, Suite 160, Encinitas, Calif. 92024.
