CHAPTER 21

Objects in Mirror Are Tinier Than They Appear

Since emerging from the wilderness of the 1970s, the American male has endured his share of growing pains—the acting out, the boorish backlash, the protracted adolescence. But no matter how wayward he has seemed over the past few decades, no matter how voluminous his disorders, he has managed to evolve, not devolve.

American men have become better fathers through more active engagement in childrearing. They have been forced to confront the dire consequences of domestic violence. They have become more conscious of sexual discrimination and harassment as a result of a social awakening and a slate of progressive laws. Their attitudes have been recalibrated by empowered women (who’ve been transforming society and their place in it) and by exemplary male peers. The “sensitive ’90s guy,” which quickly calcified into a type, was beginning to gain traction as he tried to get a grip.

Historically, American society has asked men to honor a set of principles for upholding the common good. Among them were loyalty and sacrifice, courage and team spirit, hard work and fair play. But the mass of men, especially in the ’90s and onward, embraced an expanded set of values that also incorporated concern and sympathy, identification and understanding, justice and love. As a result they became more grounded individuals, more empathetic souls.

Whatever the case, the net effect has been an American male who is better connected to himself, to his fellow men, to women, to his children, coworkers, and community—to what matters in life and in the world at large. But the path has been a sometimes tortured one. And for much of the decade, many men felt that they were being run off the road.

At first it was adopted gingerly, miserly. On greeting or departing, straight men would often lean in, wrap arms around each other, and… hug.

Starting around the mid-’90s, there was a split second of apprehension that hung above the hug. The social hiccup sprang from two questions: Do both of us feel comfortable expressing camaraderie so physically? And does the hug imply a transition to a new level of trust?

After a time, that hesitancy dropped away. The gesture became second nature among acquaintances who were becoming friends. For many American males it was part of a new-macho repertoire, as routine as the handshake or the high five. Men, it turned out, needed a hug—from other men.

It wasn’t until 1998 that I processed how widely accepted the male embrace was becoming—after I heard a story from a longtime family friend, Scott Turow, the novelist and lawyer. Turow described how he’d recently spent a sociable evening in the company of a new acquaintance, Steve Javie, a pro basketball referee known for his no-nonsense style on court. “We’d just met for the second time, had dinner, shaken hands, and said good-bye,” Turow recounted. “But that was not enough.” A moment later, he recalled, the hulking figure, in a dark parking lot, “stooped far to reach me [because] a hug was required to establish that we had crossed the borderland to sincere friendship.”

The man hug. Turow and I had each shared in the double clutch ourselves, with schoolmates and family members, or witnessed it among open and expressive associates. Our gay or bi relatives and friends had led the way, as did the actors, fashionistas, and artists we knew, many comfortable with the demonstrative squeeze. The man hug, often accompanied by a special grip or handshake, had also become de rigueur in team sports, where athletes took to grabbing and patting in the heat of the game. Turow and I, as Chicago Bulls fans, remarked on the classic 1997 NBA Finals game in which superstar Michael Jordan, battling the flu and a hundred-plus-degree fever, scored 38 points and then fell into the arms of his main man, Scottie Pippen, who escorted him off the court in a tender B-ball tango.1

But what was it that had set off this flurry of Arms and the Man? Turow agreed to write a column for Vanity Fair exploring just that.

He canvassed producer Norman Lear. The creator of All in the Family, the most popular prime-time sitcom of the 1970s attributed the ritual to the fact that as more individuals of diverse backgrounds climbed the social ladder, the establishment had begun to adopt their modes of displaying affection, which were sometimes more overt. Lear, according to Turow, believed that “male hugging was characteristic of many American immigrant communities—groups that generally abandoned the gesture as part of their Americanization but chose to perpetuate it in certain enclaves, such as Hollywood. There, it gradually grew into an almost rote greeting, manifest most notably on late-night talk shows, whose example many TV viewers freely emulate.”

Turow also observed that in the ’80s and ’90s “young African-American males began to engage in a stylized hug as a form of personal greeting.” And Margot Magowan, cofounder of the feminist Woodhull Institute, told Turow that she saw the loose, close hug (among both young men and women) as a sign of the more relaxed and casual styles of Generation X: “As Gen Xers become more economically dominant, they become more comfortable in using their private gestures in the workplace.”

American men seemed less reserved in general—but also more needy. “Bill Clinton,” Turow concluded, “seems to crave a hug from everybody.”

There was a larger gravitational force, of course. Many men were realizing how distant they’d become from trustworthy figures in their lives, from their partners, even from themselves. An embrace was a sort of welcome grounding, a shorthand for receiving warmth and showing affinity. With more fatherhood responsibilities, less free time, and fewer opportunities allotted for all-male activities at work, in the neighborhood, or at the club (“fraternal orders” were on the outs and new laws doomed many single-sex, members-only bastions), men at every age and stage in life were looking for rituals to promote male bonding: the tailgate; the weekly game of hoops or poker; the fishing trip; the guys’ weekend of golf, cigars, and surf-and-turf. Two Bros Embracing was an outward expression of that bond.2

Bud Light capitalized on the sentiment with a series of beer commercials. The debut spot featured a middle-aged guy on a fishing pier, choking back tears and telling his father, “I love you, man.” The catchphrase had its meme moment in 1995.

It was during this same period that the word “bromance” came into favor, denoting a nonsexual friendship between males who shared a special devotion. “Apparently the term was coined in the late 1990s by Davie Carnie, editor of Big Brother, an American skateboarding magazine,” according to journalist Tim Elliott, writing for the Australian paper The Age. “Bromance specifically described the relationship between skate-buddies who spent lots of time together and/or shared hotel rooms on road trips.” (Of more recent coinage: the phrase “man crush,” which scholars at the Oxford English Dictionary’s New York branch can trace to 1998.)

More important, guys were actually sitting around and talking out their problems—with a choice group of guys. And in between the barbs, the trash talk, and the guy talk, they began to share their anxieties, trade self-deprecating tales, admit a few faults. They allowed themselves to be, in a word, vulnerable.

The front door swings wide. His eyes are narrow. It is late morning and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whom I appear to have awakened, greets me in a white T-shirt. He has heavy lids and graying temples. He ushers me in with a clipped “Good morning.”

“How are you?” I ask.

“I’m the last to know.”

Jackson parks me alone for a while in the parlor of his Washington, D.C., town house—a place he has maintained, so an aide later tells me, since his early days as a “shadow senator.” I notice that this sitting room, the front hall, and the kitchen entryway are lovingly cluttered, as if by a woman’s hand. There are doll collections in glass cases, quilts and throw pillows, ornate lamps, and sashes with fringes. One wall is lined with African masks. There are flowering plants and Christmas decorations, smack in the middle of July.

We are here to discuss men’s roles in the ’90s. We are here, specifically, to explore Jackson’s take on the Million Man March of 1995, that enormous ingathering of African American males to the nation’s capital.

The march had been meant as a clarion call. The individual black man, in community with his peers and exhibiting unity and self-sufficiency, had vowed to redouble his personal commitments as a responsible father and partner, as a member of society, as a man of spiritual backbone. By standing with other men of color—indeed, hand in hand, as men did throughout the vast assembly—he sought to show the country and the world his strength in numbers and character. Organized by the Reverend Louis Farrakhan and his followers from the Nation of Islam, in consort with clergy and civil rights activists, the conclave appealed to members of all denominations, ages, and social classes. Among the participants: a thirty-four-year-old former law professor (and a soon-to-be legislator in the Illinois Senate) named Barack Hussein Obama.3

Reverend Jackson returns in a lavender open-collared shirt. I bring out a pocket-sized digital tape recorder and suggest it might make sense for him to hold it while we speak. He grabs it, and without a word, drops the device, swoomph, into his breast pocket, close to his heart and his vocal cords. It is clear who is in command of the conversation.

I characterize the Million Man March as a civil rights march, one that was politically motivated. He corrects me. “It was not really a political march,” he says. “It was a gathering. Farrakhan’s basic theme, contrary to the image of it, was a conservative one. Atonement. Self-analysis. Being a better, stronger person. Politically, it was not a very public-policy-oriented march.… We marched on personal issues.… Private, flesh-and-blood issues.”

What distinguished it from Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington, he elaborates, was that the former protest “was a march for public accommodations, workers’ rights, and the right to vote—and a very integrated march because [of that]. The march of ’95 had to do with ethnic pride and solidarity.… We were saying that the gains that we had made were being eroded. EOC [equality opportunity] contract compliance. Affirmative action. Issues of equality. We were free, but not equal.

“Among other things, we experienced this extreme alienation because of the impact in ’94 of [House Speaker Newt] Gingrich. All the gains that we’d made were being rolled back.… The same week of the Million Man March, Gingrich [and the House of Representatives] passed two or three pieces of utterly right-wing legislation—and there was no response to it, there was no preparation for it.”

What Jackson remembers best was the sheer size of the crowd (estimates ranged from four hundred thousand to just under a million), adding that “the idea of blacks coming together, displaying the strength of our numbers, was an exciting idea.” But the event had another takeaway. Many attendees, he says, returned home with a new perspective. They understood that no man could get his due unless he could see the benefits just beyond his grasp and until he had the means to do so. The march had been a way to publicly assert the dignity and consequence of those assembled, while acknowledging that many individual setbacks were not self-inflicted but often imposed by society and by policy.

“Dr. King’s marches changed our legal options—and our behavior options,” Jackson insists. “If you’re going to, in fact, get on the bus, attitudinally you may think, ‘I don’t have the right to sit there.’ [But] because the law changed—‘You can’t make me move’—it affects your behavior. When the cookie cutter changes, the shape of the cookie changes. So, legally, we changed the cookie cutter with the ’64 Civil Rights Acts. [By 1995,] I am convinced that many men assumed our problem was personal when it was structural.”

Many men, he says, thought that they themselves had brought on many of their larger social ills—“plants closing, jobs leaving, drugs and guns coming”—when in fact trade policies, for example, had pushed untold thousands of jobs overseas. And in houses of worship—“you had the megachurches exploding during that period,” Jackson recalls4—men were being asked to face their problems squarely, “to look at yourself in the mirror [but] the mirror is limited to self-analysis.”

Even though Jackson says these words in his home and not in a house of worship, he speaks with the reassuring certainty of a cleric. “I often say, if you have a size-ten foot and a size-eight shoe, you can be a good person, you can be drunk or sober—you’ve got a corn coming your way on your toe. Because of the structure of things. That’s why Paul [Ephesians 6:12] said, ‘This issue is not about flesh and blood. It’s about powers and principalities, and wickedness in high places.’ And [those who blame themselves alone] cannot get beyond flesh-and-blood private behavior. You can have all kinds of high morals. But until the Thirteenth Amendment, you couldn’t walk off that plantation. You were a good person, an intelligent person, a strong person—but the cookie cutter hadn’t changed.

“Change the structure… and out of that comes freedom of expression. You have the right, now, to dance in the end zone. You have the right to express yourself.”

The notion that men in the 1990s were feeling besieged, regardless of their race, class, belief system, or sexual orientation, is hardly an unfamiliar one to introduce all these years later. Men, individually and collectively, were often lost in the woods. But it stands repeating that after the women’s movement had erupted in the ’70s and shook up the social, legal, and political landscape, all manner of American men were merely trying to find their footing on a rocky path. Many were facing the personal turmoil that Jesse Jackson describes. And while men of color were gathering in Washington, large groups were also filing into stadiums in Boulder and Anaheim and Jacksonville.

I telephone Bill McCartney, who had helped turn his University of Colorado Buffaloes into the nation’s top-ranked college football team (a distinction Colorado shared in 1990 with Georgia Tech). That same year, McCartney—who had followed a calling to spread God’s Word—had founded Promise Keepers, which encouraged Christian men to reclaim responsibility for their lives. It would become one of the most influential outreach organizations in the larger sphere of the men’s movement.

Men were asked to make “Seven Promises”: from honoring Jesus Christ, to “practicing spiritual, moral, ethical, and sexual purity,” to “building strong marriages and families through love, protection, and Biblical values.” Participants at McCartney’s conclaves were also urged to adopt this crucial precept: “A Promise Keeper is committed to pursuing vital relationships with a few other men, understanding that he needs brothers to help him keep his promises.” Men needed support, and who better than a small circle of similarly minded men?

What, in fact, had motivated McCartney? “I’m a football coach and I’m a guy spending a lot of time with men—young men,” he answers, describing that first core group of seventy-two men who convened in 1990. “A real man, a man’s man—he’s a godly man. What the culture defines as a man is not a real man. A real man is tenderhearted. He’s loved by the Spirit. So what Promise Keepers was about was bringing guys together.”

In 1991, at Promise Keepers’ first large assembly, held at a Boulder basketball arena, forty-two hundred men showed up. McCartney lit a candle that would be passed from hand to hand among every male in attendance. The next year’s rally pulled in twenty-two thousand at Boulder’s Folsom Field. “These great preachers started coming,” says McCartney (who calls himself a “reacher, not a preacher”). “When they would preach, I would be sitting in the front row and I would be weeping, because I was under conviction. The Lord didn’t use me to start Promise Keepers because I ‘had my act together.’ I was a classic example of a type-A guy that needed to get more balance in his life.” Come the summer of 1996, McCartney’s call to worship and commitment had filled twenty-two stadiums across the nation—on a single Sunday.5 “When we would meet,” he recalls, “women would gather at the gates of the stadiums and they would protest because they thought that we were deemphasizing them, when in fact we were telling these guys, ‘A real man lays down his life for his wife. He serves his wife. He dates his daughters—he takes her out and treats her like a real man treats a woman, and he shows her what to look for in a real man.’”

Today, McCartney, in his seventies, is under no illusions that he has altered the life of every man who attended those gatherings or workshops, or who bought Promise Keepers books or audiotapes. That was never his intention. Figuratively, he was merely trying to get the best out of the players on the field.

“Back then in the ’90s,” he continues, “the churches were predominantly being filled with women. There would be men in church, but it was the women that were singing the loudest and who were filling the pews. So this became the rage. For a pastor, it was a way to rally the men. It was a way to challenge the men. In many churches, men’s groups surfaced.… It was a bonanza. It became acceptable to get into one of these stadiums and attend something like that. The pastors in these churches would rent buses and airplanes.… In 1997, we had 1.4 million men in Washington, D.C. [on the National Mall]”—news accounts estimated the crowd to be half that size. “We all got down on our knees and our faces, and cried out to God. As I look back on that, on the whole Promise Keepers time frame, [I realize that] there is something in the heart of men that longs to be right with God.” Being with other men was energizing, surely, but the drive, McCartney is convinced, came from men’s need to feed a deeper, spiritual hunger.

And yet, he says, “the reality of it is: most of [the men] have fallen off the wayside.” Quoting Matthew 13:3–9, McCartney describes a farmer planting seeds, some of which take root, but most of which are scattered on the footpath or the rocky soil. He discusses committed Christians the way the disciples discussed those seedlings: “The last group, the good soil—thirty-, sixty-, a hundredfold—they hear and obey the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. They wholeheartedly embrace the truth of Gospel. See, we had over six million men attend our events. But in my opinion, after all this time—as the Lord has kept me up and about and traveling and everything—just a percentage of those guys have a good soil.”

However grateful he is for that renewal of faith among the Promise Keepers, McCartney knows that that first flush has long since dimmed. “If you don’t take anything away from this conversation, [let it be nothing] other than this: That was a season that came and gone. It didn’t sustain. It didn’t take hold. The only ones it took hold with were the ones that stayed in the Word. The rest of them got picked off.… The stark raving reality is they’re getting picked off.

“If you’re not in the Word every day, you’re in the world, [and] if you’re not in the Word every day, the world has got a piece of you.”

What made the ’90s male a different breed? Some context might help.

The modern American man had been trying to find his bearings since he’d come back from the battlefronts of World War II. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman saw the social animal of the Eisenhower era as largely conformist, a member of a “lonely crowd.” His colleague C. Wright Mills in 1951 wrote of society’s “New Little Men,” the white-collar slaves of bureaucracy who resembled “political eunuchs.” Ralph Ellison in 1952 had labeled the African American male The Invisible Man. Britain’s 1950s brood of writers who spoke for the disaffected working class became known as the “Angry Young Men.” Sloan Wilson in 1955 designated the disillusioned businessman as The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. William H. Whyte in 1956 called the work-world masses The Organization Man. In the 1960s, James Baldwin wrote of a “New Lost Generation,” referring to many alienated Americans, some of whom would seek acceptance as expats after the war. Herbert Marcuse described the One-Dimensional Man as being oppressed by the forces of technologized society. And authority itself was given a two-word indictment: The Man. Long before the men’s movement, then, many saw the established social hierarchy as a suppressive, dehumanizing, and emasculating system that needed to be overhauled or at least taken down a couple of Oedipal notches.

The ’60s, as discussed elsewhere in these pages, saw the flowering of the civil rights movement, individual empowerment, the counterculture, and popular culture, even as it rewrote the dynamics of sex and power, sex and commitment, sex and procreation. By the 1970s, the feminist movement was helping to secure long-sought legal guarantees for American women. Most auspiciously, the Equal Rights Amendment established, once and for all, the constitutional promise that equal treatment under the law, for any woman, could never be rescinded or whittled away because of her sex.

In ways large and small, the New Woman was gaining the high ground. She asserted newfound sexual freedom. She discovered new avenues for cultural expression and social acceptance. She was more often a healer and consensus-forger, more community- and family-oriented than her male counterpart. She also had the means to control pregnancy: she could bear children through new fertilization procedures, none of which required a consenting male.

From a purely psychosocial point of view, then, many men were wondering: who exactly wears the loincloth in this family? “Our species seems to be leaping back in time to the more basic mammalian system that was the core of our evolutionary history,” anthropologist Lionel Tiger would note in his ’90s treatise The Decline of Males. “More and more we appear to resemble the other primate species whose communities are focused on females and their young, with males scuffling for reproductive access to females and a place in the political sun.” In 1991, Camille Paglia would pose an even more emasculating proposition, noting that young men had only a “brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives. The agon [struggle] of male identity springs from men’s humiliating sense of dependence upon women. It is women who control the emotional and sexual realms, and men know it.”

To top it off, women were encroaching on—and in some professions dominating—the workplace. From the 1970s onward, women entered the job market in droves. And by the ’90s nearly half of all working Americans were female, a fact that seemed to validate the job-displacement fears that many men had voiced in the early days of “women’s lib.”6

Many men, of course, got the blowback. Many began to feel like social collateral. Many saw their jobs evaporate or their parenting responsibilities made more murky or demanding (even if their lives were, in countless cases, more rewarding). A caveat here. Many men welcomed women’s progress and, in their own households, a second revenue stream. Many took the opportunity, the “flex time,” and the convenience of new technologies (PCs, fax machines, cell phones) to become work-at-home or full-time dads. Yet males in growing numbers felt their manly duties challenged, their traditional roles upended.

Many believed that it wasn’t society that was shifting. It was them. Some became morose, despondent. The most damaged among them felt unworthy and burdensome. Many took refuge in a state of suspended adolescence.7 Many turned inward, turned desperate, turned violent. Many feared they were broken beyond repair.

Displays of male rage, often of a criminal nature, were becoming all too common. Incidents of domestic violence and spousal or partner abuse rose to epidemic levels. And increasingly, men of otherwise upstanding repute in their professions and their communities were out there jostling the crockery. Courts were ordering “anger management” classes in domestic disputes. Counselors were recommending cognitive therapy programs.

Steven Gillon, who has studied the Baby Boom extensively, has discussed how the “Angry White Male” became a trope. “By the 1990s,” he contends, “Boomer men, especially white heterosexual men, found themselves under assault from assertive women, gay men who openly mocked traditional notions of masculinity, and African Americans who benefited from affirmative action policies that threatened their dominance in the workplace.” African American men, of course, did not comprise the nation’s only marginalized community. Nor had Caucasian Dude cornered the market on anger, as Jesse Jackson herein has made abundantly clear.

Lucia Brawley, an activist, communications strategist, and woman of mixed heritage, makes the point that the societal pressures contributing to black male anger in the ’90s were for the most part qualitatively different than the forces affecting most white men. “Shared parenting roles, constrictive notions of masculinity, and the emerging role of women in the workplace took a similar toll on men, across racial lines. But anger among men of color in general was often a result of oppression, while white anger often emerged from losing a modicum of privilege in a persistently oppressive hierarchy. It’s not to say that white men didn’t have valid reasons for their rage and outrage, but to compare the two is to set up a false equivalency. Think Michael Douglas in Falling Down, from 1993, versus John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, from 1991. Douglas’s marginalized California defense-industry worker is violent because he’s losing his favored place in society. Singleton’s marginalized characters from South Central L.A. are violent because they are the scapegoats of a society they perceive to be set up to keep them down.”

There was also the anger of young Americans, male and female, who resented being sidelined by material culture, outmoded values, and stereotypes that were based on race, faith, gender, class, or social affiliation. The grunge icon of ’90s youth, Kurt Cobain, Nirvana’s frontman, was a figure whose beliefs synced up with many of those in his generation. Cobain was angsty and intense and defiantly uncommitted. He felt angry—about his sense of alienation and about his confusion when confronting the human condition. He was withdrawn and often suicidal. (He would take his own life in 1994.) Cobain rejected social artifice, conformity, and “commercial shit,” as he put it, contrasting Nirvana’s ethos with that of Pearl Jam, a band he slighted (unfairly, many said) as being part of the “corporate, alternative and cock-rock fusion” machine. And he tended to dispense with standard sex roles altogether. “I definitely have a problem with the average macho man—the strong-oxen, working-class type,” he told Michael Azerrad in Rolling Stone, “because they have always been a threat to me. [I’ve been] taunted and beaten up by them… I definitely feel closer to the feminine side of the human being than I do the male—or the American idea of what a male is supposed to be.’”8

Modern man first got his back up in 1970, writer Nick Tosches has noted, with the kickoff of Men’s Liberation, Inc. At a conference in New York City, this small contingent expressed the desire to escape the strain of “having to prove our masculinity 24 hours a day.” If the name—Men’s Liberation—reeked of irony, it was hardly lost on members of the nascent women’s movement. Just as feminists felt the need to make a radical break with society’s male power structure, Men’s Libbers were arguing that society had unfairly victimized men too, who deserved to be emancipated from the bonds imposed upon them by the state, their employers, and centuries of rigid patriarchy.

Males joined forces. Farewell, fraternal orders. Hel-lo, men’s support groups.

Several organizations took their cues from “fathers’ rights” associations (first formed in the ’60s): small bands of legal advocates in Maryland, California, and the Midwest that were trying to counsel men caught in the middle of divorce trials and who felt mired in a court system that greatly favored wives over husbands. Some coalitions cribbed directly from feminists; others from evangelical outreach, civil rights groups, the Stonewall-energized gay rights movement, and twelve-step programs. Still others accused the women’s movement of applying a sort of female affirmative action to the gender equation. Many were defiantly antifeminist.

At the time, according to sociologist Michael A. Messner in his book Politics of Masculinities, “Men’s liberation was especially focused on the ways in which socialization oriented boys and men toward competition and public success, while stunting their emotional and relational capacities. Thus, [one of the movement’s] major attraction[s] was the permission it gave to men to expand their definitions of manhood to include the emotional expression, ‘It’s okay to cry.’”

Soon, the ’80s and ’90s guy was finding drums to pound and sweat lodges in which to shvitz out rivulets of shame. He was diving down to meet his deeper self, asleep in the mangroves. “All across the country in the first few years of the 1990s,” Michael Kimmel would write in his groundbreaking 1996 book Manhood in America, “men have been in full-scale retreat, heading off to the woods to rediscover their wild, hairy, deep manhood.… [Many men have felt the] need to be rescued from the clutches of overprotective mothers, absent fathers, and an enervating workplace and need to rediscover themselves through a manly quest against a pitiless environment.”9

Initially the men’s empowerment wave had predominantly been the province of white, straight, and rather irate guys, who were generally well-off or middle-class.¹⁰ But it blew up by the late ’80s across class and ethnicity. Come the early ’90s many bookstores kept a well-stocked larder of men’s self-help volumes. Newt Gingrich would tell the Washington Post that for a stretch in 1988 he found himself crying about three or four times a week. “I spent a fair length of time trying to come to grips with who I was and the habits I had,” he disclosed. “I read Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them and I found frightening pieces that related to… my own life.”

Men’s handbooks and manifestos were rife. Sam Keen’s Fire in the Belly offered “an alternate vision of virtue and virility.” In Against the Wall, Marshall Hardy and John Hough outlined “men’s reality in a co-dependent culture.” Aaron Kipnis synthesized the different strands of the “masculine soul” in Knights Without Armor. There was Cool Pose (about “the dilemmas of black manhood”) as well as Manhood in the Making, What Men Really Want, Naked at the Gender Gap, and The Prince and the King: Healing the Father-Son Wound. Even the well-regarded memoir of Howell Raines (later the executive editor of the New York Times) bore the prescriptive title Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis. Men were evidently in crisis while casting for smallmouth bass in pristine Ontario.

“Daddy, daddy, daddy. Wounds, wounds, wounds,” Nick Tosches opined—in Penthouse, in 1992. “From John Lee, a founder of the Austin Men’s Center, came The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man”—which, in Tosches’s view, at least, espoused that “nothing short of spiritual patricide would do. ‘Each man,’ wrote Lee, ‘must find the manner that suits him to kill off the father who lives in his muscles, brain, soul, and dreams.’”11

One book that dogged the bestseller lists week after week was Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The guide, by psychotherapist John Gray, counseled the sexes on how to better interact by appreciating their elemental differences. “Martians tend to pull away and silently think about what’s bothering them,” read one rule of thumb. “Venusians feel an instinctive need to talk.” Gray’s postulates on Mars and Venus were clearly intended for mass-market Earthlings.

Finally, there was the intellectual granddaddy of them all: Iron John: A Book About Men. Written by Robert Bly, the poet, lecturer, and men’s movement guru, Iron John generated its own force field, clinging for sixty-two weeks to the New York Times list. Many men lived by the book. They tapped into their subterranean Wild Man by divining wisdom from Bly’s parable about a hirsute Yoda who mentors a boy. The youngster, after swiping a magical “key” from Mother, goes to the forest and springs the Wild Man from his cage. Not the worst idea, actually.

“The Wild Man encourages and amounts to a trust in what is below,” Bly states, “the lower half of our body, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies… the animal ancestors, the earth itself [and] the dead long buried there.” Bly is not explaining the noble savage, the contemporary Caliban. Instead, he is talking about a man who has reached out to a father figure, found and bound his own psychic wounds, and mingled with other men, ultimately to have been initiated into a “second birth.” (Being wounded, Bly notes, has been interpreted as akin to receiving a male vulva.) Bly is talking about a man who has made a separate peace with his instinctual self and at middle age has become more spiritual, even mystical, a man attuned to the dark, wet forest of the soul.

In his writings and workshops, Bly preached the profound power of myth. Since humans first rubbed two words together, compelling narratives have provided guidelines for heroic behavior, the framework for the dreams we dream collectively. Bly’s stories of hunters and kings and men in bogs have roots in tribal and Bible tales, in Homer and Sophocles, in the Brothers Grimm and Star Wars. The main fable of Iron John was meant to instruct what Bly calls “father-hungry” men, whether gay, bi, straight, or undeclared. The story, Bly notes, “could be ten or twenty thousand years old.” And yet he wrote the book directly for his audience—for ’90s men who were searching, often with low self-esteem, to find a connection with men who might have lessons to impart.

In Bly’s telling, men had been softening since the end of agrarian times. With the coming of the factory, the machine, the skyscraper, the office park, and the sprawling bureaucracies of modern industry and government, they had had to leave their homes in order to labor. As a result, their daughters and sons had been cheated out of the chance to witness the workaday activities of their most direct and trustworthy role models.

Boomers, especially, were at a disadvantage. Come the 1960s, Bly posits, “men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, how to follow rather than lead… how to be vulnerable.” In American households, Bly says, many women began to telegraph the message that it is mothers who place more value on “feeling and relationships” than fathers do, and therefore mothers sustain more reliable emotional bonds with their kids. “Whereas the father,” insists Bly, “stands for and embodies what is stiff, maybe brutal, what is unfeeling, obsessed, rationalistic: money-mad, uncompassionate. ‘Your father can’t help it.’ So the son often grows up with a wounded image of his father.”

Much of this assessment might seem alarmist. But Bly backs it up by examining the men in his seminars and retreats,12 many of whom had been dealing with the sobering issues tearing at the family and social fabric: economic strain, office stress, divorce, domestic violence, and sexual abuse, along with what Bly calls “the workaholism of fathers, their alcoholism, wife-beating, and abandonment.” As the 1990s commenced, Bly predicted, “We can expect [modern man’s] demons of suspicion to cause more and more damage to men’s vision of what a man is, or what the masculine is. Between twenty and thirty percent of American boys now live in a house with no father present, and the demons there have full permission to rage.…

“Making contact with this Wild Man [inside of us] is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to make,” wrote Bly. And in that tangled forest the truly evolved creature was the man who, in plumbing his depths, also recognized his proper limits and his manly potential. He was a man, in short, “open to new visions of what a man could be.” Where there was open-mindedness, there was promise—the promise of renewal, vitality, and strength.

I admit it. In my efforts to come to grips with my Deeper Male, I’ve never marched or assembled or broken a sweat in a sweat lodge. But in the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I have made my own modest contribution to the subspecies of the put-upon American man.

In 1988, my wife and I became the parents of boy-and-girl twins. With their jubilant arrival came several years of sleep deprivation and tag-team childrearing. (We both held down full-time jobs in New York publishing—my wife in children’s books, myself in magazines.) We were shocked at first by our sudden, irreversible domesticity. How could we party all night, we wondered, when there were two of them, count ’em, partying at daybreak? We had new and cryptic parental responsibilities. We had financial pressures. We would eventually have the weekly trials of the kids’ soccer games and dance recitals, experienced through a three-aspirin hangover. The finishing touch was the need to schedule or steal every act of shared intimacy, a.k.a. Saturday morning.

One morning, when a man in our neighborhood, also a father of twins, was said to have been taken away by paramedics—in a straitjacket—I could heartily identify. I was beginning to feel my life shrink-wrap around me. On some nights, I’d burst from the membrane of a dream, gasping for breath. I needed a release. To this day, I have no idea what set me off.

One night in 1990, I couldn’t take it any longer. I felt compelled—propelled, actually, with an almost blinding clarity—to smash my fist into the dining room wall of our New York City apartment. Three or four times. I remember all of my attention focused on that fist and on that wall, the rest of the world having gone white and silent.

Luckily, the wall, and not my hand, registered the crack.

Some time passed. Until one night I did the same, at our new house in suburban Westchester. This time, angered by what I viewed as my wife’s laissez-faire attitude toward our daughter’s behavior, I chose to pound the less forgiving doorjamb of the upstairs bathroom. More than a few times. For good measure, I also opened and slammed the door four or five slams, back and forth on its sorry hinges, whacking it against an abutting chest of drawers, until I was satisfied that I’d splintered the blasted door and vented sufficient steam. A couple of my knuckles took the brunt and I iced them. I considered an X-ray, then thought better of it. My reasoning: better to let the ache nestle into the old bones. My hand, in time, healed.

Twice I’d come to the edge. Twice I’d reached a breaking point. My kids were uncontrollable. My life and world were too. My warped logic, in hindsight, was that I felt hedged in by circumstance and by my loving, if frustrating, family. And instead of purging myself by directly hurting my person or my cherished loved ones, I would strike out at a convenient signifier of the intractable world, knowing, masochistically, that the wall would impart a louder message: it’s your fault, you clod.

Coiled within my anger, of course, I had a secret wish: perhaps my wife and kids would now see how damaged I was inside. And maybe, somehow, they’d empathize or, at the very least, pity me for punishing myself so. “Something there is,” wrote Robert Frost one hundred years ago, “that doesn’t love a wall.” He had a point. But my pummeling the wall (or, more accurately, pummeling my clenched fist) had a point too: something there is that doesn’t love me.

In August 1992, I read an “About Men” column in the New York Times Magazine. In it, the writer recounted a recent trip to the emergency room after he’d punched a wall, breaking his fifth metacarpal. “On the way to the hospital, gloriously revved on adrenaline,” he wrote, “I thought I must have done something terribly original. It turned out I hadn’t—practically every man in my circle of friends had done the same thing. One shattered his hand against a concrete block after missing a shot in a volleyball game; another brutalized a bathroom door for 15 minutes until his knuckles were blue.”

The essayist—described as a Boston-based freelance journalist—suffered a fracture. His first doctor straightened it some twenty degrees. Once the cast came off, a second doctor recommended surgery, remarking, “In my experience, the wall always wins.”

The writer offered his own diagnosis. Unlike women, whom society granted what he called socially acceptable “spillways” for their extreme anxiety—“they cry, they break dishes (or at least my girlfriend does), they yell and then they feel a lot better”—the most macho of men have been conditioned to buck up and hold it all in. “Exploding is risky around someone you love,” he reasoned, “so I hurt myself. It’s the one way a man has of showing anger without harming someone or appearing weak. It communicates clearly that things must change.… Remember that the point of all this isn’t property damage or injury, it’s to show the other person how upset you are.” Yes, and to proclaim to the stone-deaf world the torment of feeling so utterly boxed in.

Five years later, my wife and I would be invited to a book party in an apartment in TriBeCa. The guest of honor was a first-time author we’d never met, a ruggedly handsome young man who was represented by our friend Stuart, his literary agent. The party was crowded and casual. The guests streamed upward into a tiered, exposed-brick kitchen. Stuart had explained that the book was a reconstruction of the events surrounding a deadly Gloucester fishing-boat disaster during the infamous 1991 nor’easter. Six crewmen had died in the shipwreck; a second man had perished when a rescue helicopter went down in rough weather. The book was called The Perfect Storm. I was intrigued by the title, but I was skeptical. How could a self-respecting journalist, I wondered, actually craft a credible account of an incident in which all the main characters were dead?

The author whose book we were celebrating was Sebastian Junger. And he turned out to have been the essayist who’d written about smashing the wall. (We would later become friends and colleagues.) His book, published that week, was one of a rash of true adventure sagas by new young voices in American nonfiction, writers who concentrated on the travails of men-at-risk. Their works would become bestsellers in the 1990s: from Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild (about death in the wilderness) and Into Thin Air (about death on an Everest climb), to Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (about the ill-fated 1993 U.S. military rescue operation in war-torn Somalia).

Junger, Krakauer, and Bowden would be compared to the likes of Conrad, Hemingway, and, at times, Jack London. Their works slaked a common thirst in their audience: the need to read about other men facing death in dire situations; men dwarfed by destiny, the elements, and their sense of their own limits; men who strive to prove their mettle through their need to overcome these obstacles—despite the risks and, in many cases, compelled by those risks.

Thinking back to that long-ago book party (and remembering the sprawling redbrick kitchen walls), I recall the good counsel Junger had offered at the close of his column: “If you’re going to punch a wall, here’s a suggestion: Don’t. It simply takes too long to recover. As a substitute, I recommend using sledgehammers, baseball bats, tire irons, anything unyielding brought down on things that break. It gets the same message across.… If you absolutely have to punch something… [at least] try to hit the wall square-on. That way the impact will be spread across all the knuckles.… If you’re lucky you’ll go through the wallboard and create a handsome testimony to your manhood.”

If there was a five-alarm moment when American males realized that they might need to take a collective time-out, it came on February 8, 1994. On that day, actor Jack Nicholson was stopped at a red light in Studio City, California. He emerged from his car with a trusty two-iron, walked over to a Mercedes that he believed had cut him off in traffic, and took a few well-apportioned whacks at the driver’s windshield. With that bashing, the country became instantly conversant with the terms “anger management” and “road rage.”

Road rage had only recently entered the lexicon. According to Michael Fumento in an essay in the Atlantic Monthly, the phrase was “presumably based on [the term] ’roid rage,” which denoted “sudden violent activity by people on steroids.” The term crept into news stories throughout the mid-’90s. Federal highway records were reporting an “epidemic” of irate drivers, flare-ups in snarled traffic, and deliberately aggressive driving. (Police records at the time actually suggested a decline in such episodes. “There has always been a degree of aggression while driving,” the analyst David Murray, director of research at Washington’s Statistical Assessment Service, told Fumento. “Now that we have a name, we look for things that seem to be similar and build a pathology.”)

If much of this built-up anger and spiritual drought sounds negative and unredeeming, that’s partially the fault of this observer, recounting those whose opinions were offered during the ’90s. The period’s culture critics and sociologists and shrinks made their living from diagnosing woe. They Dopplered the decade by observing it so often that it had shifted a few Pantones, into Hypertension Red. Yours truly, in turn, may have taken on too much of their taint and tone. Which is to say: every male retreat or advance is not merely compensation for some deficiency.

Objects in the mirror may be much less damaged than they appear.