Iron John (Robert Bly, 1990)

This book made the rounds when it came out about 30 years ago, and I don’t think any comparable book since has been able to catch the public attention on men’s issues quite like it. These past ten years have seen the rise of a new mode of male behavior, often in connection with intensive computer use and ideological echo chambers – which is why I found it instructive to consult past thinking on the topic to see how the discourse has changed.

In the mid 00’s there was a raging public debate about feminism and what was called equalism, in my native Sweden. Two pundits criticized the ideology of feminism and insisted that it should be more focused on equality, and be called “equalism”. This was deemed laughable and was ridiculed by most feminist figures at the time. Another book notable in Sweden was a few years later when economist K-A Nordström wrote a treatise on how the future was going to be female, and traditionally male traits and behaviors would not be as valuable in the economy of the future. Our leading Polytechnic, KTH, started a campaign handing out tote bags about the future being “too important to be left to men” – implying it needs a female perspective as well.

This is the environment I grew up in. As soon as questions about being a man came up, it was always from a very soft-spoken perspective, often mentioning men’s violence against women, or the wage pay-gap and other similar issues. Also during this time, a documentary about ROKS, the national organization of Women’s shelters, featured their president unwittingly confiding to the camera that she thought that “men are animals”. There was something wrong with this atmosphere, was my feeling, but I didn’t think much more about it.

Until now, that is. Reading Iron John brings these thoughts back to my mind, and I see similarities with Bly’s thoughts in the US of the late 80’s and my own from mid-noughties Sweden. Bly’s thesis in a nutshell is that American men feel lost, because they have lost their connection to their manhood. A feminized version of being male had come up during the 1960’s and continued up through the 70’s and 80’s. Bly uses a lot of examples from mythology and various spiritual traditions, which he argues we have lost in our mechanized age. He insists that men could save thousands of dollars by skipping therapy and instead reconnecting with their “wild man”. Rites of passage are important in becoming a man, he argues. Taking his cues from German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich and his book “A Society without fathers” he goes into sociological arguments about the effects of an increasingly fragmented male population. I wonder what he would have said about the notion of the incel, or how he would have viewed what is today called the “manosphere”? He himself started the “Minnesota Men’s Gathering” in the 1980s in which men of all stripes could meet and discuss various ideas about manhood. There they sat drumming and told folk stories about warriors and kings to get at the unarticulated issues a lot of men struggle with.

Bly is never negative about women’s liberation, he enthusiastically celebrates it, but he means that the tenacious focus on women have led men to lose confidence. I think there is something to this line of thinking, even though the focus on introducing male bonding rituals from other cultures seems problematizable in our current time. It is my opinion that most women have an easier time talking about and thinking about their lives, their feelings and their interior life, whereas the ideal for men is to be the silent type. And those men that encourage emotional honesty and reflection always come across as feminine. To me, Bly finds a good balance of broaching these subjects in a masculine way, that I think appeals to a lot of men who feel they are missing an element in ther lives.

Two modern counterparts to Bly in this respect are radio host Joe Rogan and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who both seem to want to encourage young men to be responsible in their manhood, from a male perspective. They strike me as wanting to reverse certain aspects of the idea of the soft male (which was called “velour men” in Sweden), as it to their thinking had thrown out parts of the baby with the proverbial bath water. It’s a big sociological question, and Bly’s book invites you to think about what it means.