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Why Men Have Been Abandoned by Their Own Movement
True progress demands progress for all; reconfiguration of a rigged game will only invite the next rebellion.
In 1990, Robert Bly took the New York Times bestseller list by storm with Iron John. An underdog hit that promptly took up a 62-week residence on the coveted list and effectively brought the modern men’s movement to the mainstream.
The timing was ripe — and its tenets promising, hopeful, and necessary.
Bly, and his fellow bear-chested torchbearers, tapped into an unquenched thirst for a new, more expansive and embracing paradigm of modern masculinity. It called out and put a name to a DNA-deep longing that had been simmering beneath the surface for decades.
It handed millions of men the script for an urgent rallying cry. One that offered to help him regain his wildness. His sense of mission and purpose. It was an escape plan from the quickly metastasizing malaise of the straight and narrow.
The sanitized.
The inescapable labyrinth of family, career, and community that had finally cornered him and cut off his oxygen supply. Man was gasping for air. For life. And mercifully, this movement offered it.
