Permanent Bachelorhood Loses One of Its Leaders

Vince Vaughn, one of America’s most outstanding bachelors, announced this month that is tying the knot with Canadian real estate agent Kyla Webber.  It seems that Vaughn’s movie, Couples Retreat, may have been therapeutic.  What happened to the lovable party animal from Swingers?  What will become of the Frat Pack? 

Interestingly, he told Oprah.com that he decided to get married not in order to find greater fulfillment, but to have kids.  He is actually sprinting towards responsibility.  He isn’t letting out many details about his relationship, but seems excited mostly excited about the new possibilities of a responsible life. 

On the other side, he has expressed ambivalence about whether the relationship is going to change him.  Good luck on that. 

The anthropological observation of importance here is that many men in America today are experiencing a mid-life crisis.  In contradistinction from a generation ago, however, these men are making moves towards resposibility, not irresponsibility.  Men today get married and have a child, where the boomer escapees were running from their wives and kids.  The midlife crisis today is not a new adolescence.  It is the late departure from it.

The political right – as in Kay S. Hymowitz’s recent article - continues the drumbeat for earlier marriages.  Certainly a wife and child and mortgage will force men to grow up.  Maybe.  But in a world where marriages are dissolvable as aspirin tablets, will this really do this trick?  Besides, men like Vaughn are going into marriage these days with the caveat that they don’t have to change their immature ways.  The a-woman-will-whip-me-into-shape days are over.  Which is why bearing children has become the real test of maturity.  Offspring are so, well, concrete.

In the end, maybe the only weapon the cause of maturity can wield is the promise of a better life.  Being a man is better than being a boy.  Attending a city council meeting is better than watching Southpark.  Wooing a woman is far superior to beating off to Maxim magazine.  Raising a child is more satisfying than being one.  If Vince Vaughn can come to that realization, why not others?

Rumpelstilskin, as Interpretated by a ManKind Project I-Group

For those of you who don’t know, I am part of a ManKind Project (MKP) I-Group, which seeks to pursue healthy manhood in a small group format.  Besides some more modern therapeutic techniques, the I-Group utilizes “non-linear” methods like ritual, poetry and working out emotions through kinetic activities. 

Last month I brought to the group a classic fairy tale which, to no surprise, none of them had heard in years: Rumpelstilskin.  I used the later version from Grimms’ compilation, one you can read here if you’re also having a hard time recalling the story.  I had rediscovered the story in a German textbook (the story was originally named Rumpelstilzchen) and was struck by its multifaceted presentation of important life themes.  Although (or maybe because) the story features a girl as the protagonist of the story, I wanted to see how a men’s group would respond to it. 

After telling the story with as much flair as I could muster, I launched a basic question: “With whom did you resonate most?”  Most of the men immediately said, “The girl.”  “Why?,” I asked.  “Because she was exploited again and again, and she did what she had to.” 

But upon my pushing for more details it seemed that, while they liked the story and felt it to be somehow important, they couldn’t put a finger on why they resonated with the girl, or anyone in the story for that matter.  We spent a chunk of time picking apart the significance of each character.  All of them are men, and most of them seem like evil bastards.  But did they have to be interpreted that way?

My own conclusion, one I had come to earlier, was that this story had pretty thick social meanings attached to it.  I suggested to the men that any girl who heard the story would be learning about what it is like to be a woman in the world of men.  Though people would expect her to have magical powers (even turning straw into gold), she would have to hope for resources beyond her, powers to deceive, manipulate and, through them, to survive in an androcentric world.  Maybe it helped us peer into the world of women and the demands we as men make upon them.

This seemed to make sense to the men, but it didn’t make sense of it for a men’s group.  Where was the value in it for us?

Still, I stayed with this tack.  I wondered aloud if there might be a way to understand the story as an address to (or at) homosexuals.  Could it be that both girls and boys alike in old Germany were being warned about strangers, in particular “strange little men” who had their own magic at work, but were, at best, strange, at worst, conniving paedophiles?  The I-Group could agree to this hypothesis, at least cognitively.  Or, I mused on, we could queer the story by telling it a little differently, that this strange manling, Rumpelstilskin, was trying to deliver the girl-queen’s son from the world of oppressive men; that the reason he wanted to take the boy away in order to initiate him into a different kind of manhood, one not based on the patriarchal tyrrany exhibited by the girl’s father and king. 

This time no response from the I-Group. 

The problem, I realize now, was not that these hypotheses were uninteresting to them.  Nor were they unsavory (I would describe most of them as more consistently to the political left).   The problem was that my interpretations were primarily sociological, not psychological.  In a group dedicated to personal health (of five heterosexual men), social ramifications played second fiddle to personal application. 

With the evening coming to a close, one of the older members of the group began a very productive line of thought along Jungian lines.  He suggested that, perhaps, the bizarre character of Rumpelstilzkin could be interpreted as  one’s “shadow,” that part of us which we suppress but comes out anyway as a kind of dangerous but creative alter-ego.  That shadow must be honored in order to deal with crises in life.  One must deal with the devil, so to speak, in order to meet the demands of the “king” (or father), that archetype which would direct us in life directions.  The king’s men who go out through the kingdom to figure out Rumpelstilskin’s name are expressions of the “warrior,” the get-it-done part of the soul (or, externalizing a bit, maybe the king’s men can be our warrior brothers in ManKind Project).  And, lest the shadow dominate our lives too much, at some point the shadow must be “named,” exposed for what it is in the limits of its power. 

Now, you’ve got to admit, this is a pretty dang good interpretation.  Thanks to the last minute personalizing hermeneutic, everybody felt edified by the activity, myself included.

Still, I feel a little uneasy about how the personal so often operates independently of the political.  Can we hear the story of Rumpelstilskin and find in it something that speaks to us and addresses the situation of others? 

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Next session we’re hoping to do some mask-making.  Yes, I know you think that’s weird.  If you find wearing a tie and watching ESPN makes you a whole man, more power to you.  For some of us there are shadows to name – and who’s to say you don’t have one?

Wild… er… Responsible at Heart

When John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart came out in 2001, Evangelical men latched on to the existentialist bad-boy path to Christian manhood.  According to the book, the problem was that men in the churches had become sissified by a sentimental, moralistic, inauthentic environment.  The solution could be found in pursuing the “wild” road of authentic, manly living.  Eldredge’s indebtedness to the mythopoetic men’s movement shows through, albeit in a superficial way: William Wallace and Luke Skywalker replace the ancient fairy tales, Jesus Christ replaces the “I” to some extent.  Wild at Heart struck that perfect marketability for Evangelical men: conservative family values + shame-healing + anti-Victorian backlash + self help group therapy + badass role models. 

Seven years later, men’s ministries are holding Wild at Heart retreats, the latest cropping up in Peoria, IL.  Such men eagerly report that they go on such weekends to buck the system, to get fierce, to prove to themselves that they can be, well, “wild.”  It’s interesting, then, that the primary way these men demonstrate their wildness is by (to quote them) “learning to communicate.”  They admit their failing as husbands and fathers.  They confess their well-hidden wimpiness.  They acquire new skills to speak honestly with God, themselves, and their loved ones.  

Nomenclature aside, let me applaud this wildness.  Truth be told, most men struggle with fear their whole lives, often fears of emotional vulnerability.  Moreover, it seems that in this age young American men struggle with a fear of responsibility (a.k.a. permanent adolescence syndrome).  Christian men are no exception: they don’t cultivate inner strength, they don’t take risks, and so in self-defense insulate themselves from any kind of shame or public accountability.   Let us grant that it takes courage – maybe not the courage of a broadsworded Scot, but courage nonetheless - to put oneself on the line and say, “Yes, I’ve run away from my God-given responsibilities.” 

Masculinities trade in fecund contradictions.  Evangelical men, for this reason and that, spend time being irresponsible to the world around them, if only for a Saturday, in order to recapture the strength to dive back into their world of responsibilities and responsiveness. 

[Keep an eye out for future posts on John Eldredge.]

Initiating Men: ManKind Project

 

In the mythopoetic wing of the men’s movement liminal spaces were intentionally constructed.  My favorite account is of a Robert Bly gathering of men in Los Angeles in which the men were asked to line up around the back of the building and funnel through dark corridors.  They walked slowly through the inky blackness, hearing throbbing drums in the distance, then, with the beat louder and louder as the men progress, an opening is reached, and someone tells each of the men to crawl through the folds of a thick curtain and “come out the other side dancing.”  They get pushed through the door to find themselves on a stage with dozens of men drumming and dancing, chanting, “Go back back back, go back back back.”  If that doesn’t change your frame of mind, I don’t know what will.

 

The ManKind Project (MKP) has also found ways to brew up heady states of altered consciousness.  I was tremendously impressed with how men of all walks of life could come together for a weekend or a training session and be quickly transitioned into a place in which they might express emotion, honesty, grief and longing.  On one hand, MKP uses ancient methods to accomplish this: smudging, sweats, storytelling, song and dance.  But it ultimately relies on modern psychotherapeutic exercises to draw men into a place of “primal” feeling and reflection.  There is a heavy dose of boot camp in some of their activities, something I’m told comes courtesy of Rich Tosi, a former Marines captain.  Whether old or new in origin, the activities of MKP help men get away from the normal world in order to see their lives clearly, even, in their words, “take part in the initiation weekend.”  The New Warriors Training Adventure Weekend itself struck me as a Christian retreat on amphetamines – which, in my opinion, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

 

Still, the liminal (or liminoid) spaces of MKP deviate somewhat from the traditional idea of initiation in that men are called upon, ultimately, to be self-initiators.  The men have to name their own issues.  They give themselves their own name.  They dance their own dance and talk about their own unique life mission.  Contrary to those who would see MKP as a cult, there is no head-honcho who calls out the shots – indeed, neither are there elders.  After some initial commandeering on the weekend, the group of men is astoundingly equalitarian.  It’s all about you, about your needs, about your quest in the modern world.  And nobody is going to initiate you but yourself. 

 

Let’s acknowledge that initiation has to (and always has had) an element of self in it.  It pays for any society to have specialized men, after all.  But in the past initiation has meant bringing a male to the next stage of life (usually at pubescence, but there might be later initiations, say, into leadership).  These initiations have been a matter of conforming him to the societal standards, training him in the standard ways of the culture.  The major was on uniformity, the minor on individuality. 

 

ManKind Project has a different mode of operation.  A man has to find his own way.  His sages, at best, are therapists helping him on his soul journey.  The event in which he participates is an egalitarian initiation, surrounded by brothers, not fathers.  Of course, it still feels like liminal space because it is just that.  Change is in the air.  MKP tones down the sense of authority – and ratchets up the peer pressure.  It actually sounds funny from a distance: “Look, we’re all getting dangerously honest with ourselves.  You should do the same.  Unless you’re a coward, in which case you’ll have to [cue the ominous music] suffer the self-consequences.”  So the game plan is Rogerian more than paleo-Jungian; self-styled gestalt therapy rather than a calling upon the “gods in the blood.”  (Does anyone know if Bill Kauth was drawing off of James Hillman’s acorn theory?)  In the end, it’s an exercise in self-help and self-making. 

 

Isn’t there a certain irony in calling MKP’s ongoing support teams “I-Groups”?  The jury is still out for me as to what extent men’s events should be “egocentric” events with fraternal initiation.  There are benefits, no doubt.  It can work.  But such an initiationo smacks of the sibling society against which Bly warned so fervently.

 

I suppose that MKP is internally consistent.  They are new warriors indeed: discontinuity from the old rules the day.  There is a sense in which MKP men never give themselves over to the past, to the archetypal stew, to the legends and wisdom of yore.  They commodify their religion.  But for that reason they are also able to keep things safe – and safely modern.  The old ways have shriveled, and appear hopelessly impotent.   Have not these men been initiated to meet the demand of a complicated, contemporary existence in their own skin?

 

 

Initiating Men: Promise Keepers

With only 50,000 men in attendance last annum, Promise Keepers rallies are soon to be extinct.  But how can we forget that, only a decade ago, that many men were present at each event?  I joined in on a San Diego rally in 1996 and was deeply impressed by the sight of men streaming down the aisles of Padres stadium to confess their sins, be prayed over, and trained in the ways of godly manhood.  Men – Christian and would-be Christian, of all ethnicities, ages five to 95 – longed for and received an initiation of sorts. 

 

As demonstrated in L. Dean Allen’s book, Rise Up O Men of God, Promise Keepers bore much in common with the Men and Religion Forward Movement, which, as the crowning expression of muscular Christianity in America sought to bring men to a place of social responsibility.  Allen also points out key differences in the movements, and I add one more: Promise Keepers depended on rituals for a sense of initiation. 

 

The PK rally was in many ways a production of modern liminal space.  How does one take men (who are used to TV dragging them away from their normal lives) and transport them into a generative, altered state of consciousness?  Promise Keepers capitalized on the two strongest emotional forces they knew: the revival tent meeting and the football game.  As for the first, the Evangelical men’s movement almost always warmed up their events with gospel music, and included an altar call as day turned to night.  I remember being taken aback at the hellfire preacher recruited for the San Diego rally, but his message had its effect.  A good portion of the men, maybe ten percent of the group, poured out onto the field to either “receive Christ” or re-commit their lives to him.  The organ wailed as the penitents gathered around the preacher and wept over their shortcomings as males.  There was the recitation of the sinners’ prayer and the laying on of hands.  As for the second factor, I can only point out that there is nothing so deeply religious as team sports.  Any pastor will tell you that Sundays are a battleground for souls, viz., whether people will worship with the Christian fold or before the television.  (For an iconoclastic presentation of this, see Higgs’ God in the Stadium.)  But PK fused these two forces.  Speakers James Dobson and Tony Evans on one side.  Coaches Bill McCartney and Tony Dungy on the other.  The religio-athletic mood had been set.  And its initiating elders were in place.

 

Yet, for all its direct and indirect ritual, Promise Keepers had a hard time manufacturing a modern initiation.  Critics pointed out that the great majority of the men who reformed their lives were already committed Christians, husbands and fathers.  The in-between liminal space of the revival-tent-turned-football-field was, in reality, already doubly familiar.  It reflected the normal modus operandi of their church life and the typical arousal of sporting events.  In other words, Promise Keepers was successful because it played out a script with which Evangelicals were already familiar, and called them to a life they already knew they were supposed to live.  I do not doubt that many of these men were inspired to be better men and uphold their “promises” to wife, children, churches and Christ.  I too was encouraged.  But were we initiated that night?  Was there a radical self-rearrangement, a moving from one stage to another, a journey into death and back into life? 

 

Perhaps the Christian men’s movement could not hope to achieve so much.  That kind of initiation can only be had in baptism.

 

Male Initiation, Rant Casey Style

 

 

 

Palahniuk

 

 

 

(Over the next week I will be posting several entries on ritual and initiation.  This is the first installment.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Men have a peculiar need for ritual.  Of this I have become convinced.

It came home to me yet again while reading Chuck Palahniuk’s absorbing new book, Rant.  The novel, written in a kind of documentary/oral-story format, follows the larger-than-life story of Rant Casey, a troubled Midwest male who intentionally contracts rabies, again and again, by sticking his arms down rodent boroughs.  In the process he seems to develop unnatural abilities to “smell” people’s lives, concoct bizarre anti-social pranks, and, if the legends be true, figures out how to time travel.  In his adult years he helps popularize a new form of entertainment called “party crashing,” where young adults dress up in alter-ego garb (wedding apparel, student drivers, etc.) and crash into other participants at low speeds in mock dramas.  Bizarre circumstances surround Rant Casey’s life, including the poisoning of many of his family members and, ultimately, his disappearance in a supposedly-fatal crash.  Most of the story is told from his colleagues, who report him to have achieved immortality – or have they just immortalized him in their minds?  What is for sure is that Casey managed to spread his case of rabies far and wide, starting up a kind of rabies cult in the youth culture.

Palahniuk bombards the reader with a host of themes, but let me hone in on his outstanding presentation of initiation rituals in the late-modern world.  Rant can be read as a necessary pairing to Fight Club in this respect.

Like Tyler Durden, Rant Casey is western society’s wake-up call.  In his own diabolical way he challenges the status quo by plunging headlong into antisocial behavior.  Rabies serves as the centerpoint for his anarchistic philosophy.  He not only disturbs his own psychosomatic processes, but intentionally spreads the disease, as if to converts.  It is unclear what kind of metaphysical powers are imparted by rabies, but at the very least it becomes the symbol for everything antiestablishment.  Casey is contrasted with Wallace Boyer, a car salesman who, along with telling about his interaction with Casey, informs the reader about how a good salesman learns the art of mimicry.  Selling cars means leading a potential buyer into thinking he or she is the warm, glowing center of the bourgeois universe.  It means reinforcing his or her insulation from the hard reality of mediocrity-and-then-you-die.  Not so with Casey.  The good life means disrupting every system possible.  Again, like Durden of Fight Club

, Casey is the paragon of “freedom,” secured through the most anti-corporate, anti-family, anti-society actions possible.  Palahniuk clearly despises the bland religion of Martha Stewart living, and so manufactures another villain in service of the necessary shock therapy.  We need to get out of our civilized malaise.

I’m interested in how Casey serves as the initiator of men in this disturbing existential quest.  He seems to inspire men to emulate him in all sorts of ways.  He spreads his thinking as a disease, and his disease as a new way of thinking.  In an altogether unsexual way, he is willing to kiss men to give them rabies.  His total willingness to play the role of the societal Other inspires men to do the same, to forfeit their comfortable lives in pursuit of a more authentic mode.  In this sense Casey strikes me as a kind of pathological version of the Wild Man.  Bly’s Iron John introduced us to this neo-archetype (I say “neo-” because it didn’t come into play until late in the psychology conversations; not even Jung attended to it), the hairy man who is able to initiate men precisely because he doesn’t play by any of the rules of civil society.  Casey exists as a kind of enfleshed shadow hell-bent on pulling sissified boys from their (maternal?) worlds of pleasure and fear.  He infects them.  He reorients their patterns.  He encourages them to pull pranks, to risk everything, even life and limb through vehicular collisions (again, the final initiatory rite in Fight Club

).  He teaches men to stare straight into the face of death – and thus find themselves. 

Like all Palahniuk’s novels, liminality plays an ambiguous role.  By liminality I mean the kind of semi-conscious psychological “space” of rituals.  This kind of detachment from the normal world provides an opportunity to liberate oneself and be rewired.  In a ironic, self-critical way, Palahniuk finishes the novel by bringing out a host of fictional scholars to discuss the anthropological phenomenon of party crashing, even going so far as to quote Victor Turner’s definition of communitas.  It isn’t real community.  It’s a momentary sacred space powered by mutual participation.  Party crashers engage in this behavior for the complex phenomenon of self-making in a temporary “liminoid” environment.  While searching for someone to slam into, participants dress up and play roles, even unholy and unsavory roles, as an outlet for personal expression (think Halloween, Mardi Gras, masquerade balls).  But the act ends there.  They go back to their jobs and quiet little lives.  I love how Palahniuk gets us wondering about how much antisocial behavior actually serves to uphold society.  Party crashing is a release valve.  Moreover, after Casey’s death, endless numbers of teenagers try to contract rabies, or at least fake having it.  They want to be initiated into it, whatever it is.  They want to challenge their identity and re-make themselves.  But in this bizarre disease-embodying are they really “free” from society, from peer expectations, from death?  This kind of ritualistic sublimation of oneself may be nothing more than a veneer.  It all funnels back into society in a healthy way.  That is, unless one is “really free,” like the immortal psychopath, Rant Casey.    

In the days ahead I’ll explore how masculine rituals have been deployed in two rather different groups: the ManKind Project and evangelical Christian churches.  

How does one initiate the guy in his cubicle existence?

Let me stop here and pose the questions for men’s studies.  What kind of rituals do modern boys and men need in order to break free?  From what are they breaking free?  And why do they need them?  Likewise, this novel raises huge questions for the issue of initiation.  Who is supposed to be initiating boys and men?  Into what are they being initiated?  And how do they achieve liberation in a way that is generative, not destructive?