Robert Bly and the cult of men’s inner work

There are plenty of podcasts for young men feeling lost. Perhaps too many – but those young men could do worse than listening to Diary of a CEO and Modern Wisdom or their many copycats. A comfortable blend of science and more vibes-based ‘Bro-Science’, they have the chatty tone of Joe Rogan with less of the conspiratorial nuttery. These men are often charming, if slightly over-obsessed with self-optimisation, the ‘science of attraction’ and meditation retreats. They have an anti-woke tinge, but, unlike their equivalents in the manosphere, these podcasters actually like women. As long as they don’t reveal their listening hours, a bit of ‘inner work’ might not hurt the chances of young men in their search for a specimen of the opposite sex. Steven Bartlett and Chris Williamson are not, however, the first gurus to gain a following from promising to solve the crisis of masculinity.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the poet Robert Bly argued that the decisive juncture in the history of masculinity was the Industrial Revolution. Fathers moved out of the home to take up their new jobs at the factories and sons ceased to have the chance to work alongside them. Sons spent more time with their mothers and, over time, came to identify unduly with them, taking ‘the female view of his own father and of his own masculinity’. Men had lost access to the male-only spaces that had provided the necessary initiation which made boys into men. He traced the crisis of masculinity which he saw in his own times back to the dawn of modernity.

Bly told this story in his 1990 book Iron John: A Book About Men, which was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 62 weeks. In it, he encouraged men to get in touch with their ‘deep masculine’ with the help of the archetypal ‘Wild Man’ – whose defining feature was unruly hair, and lots of it. This narrative animated the men’s conferences and weekend retreats which sprang up in the 1980s and 1990s, where men could spend time surrounded by other men, soft drums and heady talk of poetic archetypes. After a 90-minute segment with Bill Moyers in 1990, Bly became a household name, and a movement which had otherwise flown under the radar went from being a miscellany of men’s gatherings and centres to the men’s movement in America. Iron John was its spiritual manual.

If the rot set in at the Industrial Revolution, the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was the obvious catalyst. When Norman Mailer was asked in 1991 what he thought of Bly’s work, he replied that ‘men have been lost for two decades’ and that any attempt to reconcile man’s relationship to his masculinity was welcome. Bly’s warm demeanour, deep voice, musicality and confident story-telling had a disarming effect, although sceptical voices made themselves heard. His ‘New Age masculinist movement’, as it was termed in Susan Faludi’s Backlash (1991), began to attract criticism from feminists who were suspicious of the exclusion of women from his events, and their obsessive focus on the innate and mythical masculine.

Bly defined his ideal masculinity against two other male archetypes – ‘fifties man’ and ‘seventies man’. The problems of the modern world and the problems of modern masculinity went hand in hand. The ‘fifties man’ was to blame for the Vietnam war. The ‘fifties man’ was the general in Vietnam who had misled the younger soldiers ‘having asked the young men to be warriors and then in effect sending them out to be ordinary murderers’. ‘The chief executives in America’, Bly continued, ‘move from company to company lightly, vote themselves bonuses just before bankruptcy, sell out the retirement fund…’ These men, the ‘fifties men’, are ‘certainly not building Jerusalem’. Once again, Bly’s complaint was that William Blake’s satanic mills had not been reckoned with. The ‘seventies man’, meanwhile, was that young soldier in Vietnam, and he grew up in protest against ‘fifties man’ by embracing his soft and feminine side. This was also the type of man apparently favoured by the modern woman.

By and large, feminism was considered an interpersonal rather than political problem. The ‘seventies man’ was not happy; there was something flat about him, which Bly thought harmed women as much as men: ‘In every relationship something fierce is needed once in a while: both the man and the woman need to have it.’ The world’s problems as well as those of men and women were best solved by inner work rather than political change. The removal of fathers from the home during the Industrial Revolution, and the sapping away of ‘Wild Man’ energy, explained other problems, too. Politics, from the Vietnam War to women’s rights, was conceived of in purely psychological terms – Reagan was insufficiently sympathetic to the poor because of ‘the lack of what we might call “garden” space’ inside his head, and women’s ‘rage’ at the patriarchy ‘stems from a vast disappointment over this lack of teaching from their own fathers’. Bly was a master and pioneer in Bro-Science. Like Jordan Peterson’s ‘make your bed’, there was no need to change the world until your own house was in order.

The story of Iron John, adapted from a fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, has a young prince choose to leave the bosom of his overbearing mother in order to be initiated by the ‘Wild Man’ in the nearby woods. It was Bly’s model for rectifying the situation. Men could find inside themselves ‘an ancient hairy man’ and, from him, they would learn the true ideal of manhood. For the modern man, this meant conferences and retreats in the woods. Bly would be on stage, acting out the Wild Man for other men. On his guidance, they could find ‘true radiant energy’, not ‘in the feminine realm, nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine’. The ethos was defined by one of Bly’s followers, Michael Meade, with an ‘old Celtic motto’: ‘Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.’ They railed against ‘fifties man’ and pitied ‘seventies man’, and traded only in pre-industrial wisdom.

Michael Schwalbe, a sociologist who conducted a field study of the men of the mythopoetic men’s movement, noted that despite the popularity of Iron John, only a very particular segment of society was drawn to the groups and retreats. Even though the vast majority of the American public supported the Gulf War, among these men, most opposed it. They had been shaped by the social movements of the 1960s, and they still largely espoused the views they had then. They often worked in female-dominated workplaces. They had grown up angry with their fathers, surrounded by mostly female friends, and married the feminist women they knew in their youth. The men’s work itself was ‘apolitical’ and open to everyone, but many of the men involved would still attend rallies for abortion rights and anti-war protests. These men saw themselves in Bly’s soft ‘seventies man’ archetype. The seventies man had been most harmed by the fallout of the feminist revolution – they were ‘uniquely vulnerable’ to accusations of sexism because of their interpersonal closeness with feminist women. They may not have heard of the ‘great feminisation’, but the forest retreats provided an escape from the ‘overwhelming female energy’ of everyday life. Here, they could be themselves, they thought.

Bly himself had been on a personal journey which matched that of his movement. The men’s conferences were not his first foray into public poetry. In the 1960s, he had encouraged men to ‘embrace their feminine principle’ and ‘life-preserving nature’ which had been long suppressed in men and oppose war. He held ‘great mother’ conferences in the 1970s to foster a ‘feminine’ peace-loving spirit among men and women alike. He retained his soft spot for soft men even when he traded one ancient energy for another: ‘They’re lovely, valuable people – I like them – they’re not interested in harming the earth or starting wars.’ Bly might have longed for pre-industrial times, but his was a distinctly modern movement. Even as Bly’s followers incurred their wrath, they hoped that so long as they opposed war, hummed and danced, and built Jerusalem in their inner citadels, the feminists would forgive them for being men.