The Second Stage

Is it the new American frontier for men, this exploration of inner space, of the "messy feelings" that are the core of personhood for us all but that for too long were awesome, mysterious, forbidden territory for men? When women share the work burden and relieve men of the need to pretend to false strengths, men can open up to feelings that give them a real sense of inner strength, especially when they share the daily chores of living and child-rearing that wives used to shield them from.

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"I like the relief from always thinking about money, my job, feeling like a machine or a disembodied head -- chained to a calculator."

Or as an Oakland architect named Lars expresses it: "It makes me feel alive. I exist. I don't feel phony any more. I don't have to pretend to be so strong because I feel good. I feel centered. The silence that most men live with isolates us, not only from women but from other men. My wife's assault on my silence was, at first, extremely painful. She made me share my feelings with her. It brought an incredible sense of liberation, and maybe for the first time in my adult life a sense of reality, that I can feel my feelings and share them with her.

"But there'll still be a loneliness, for me and other men, until we can share our feelings with each other. That's what I envy most about the women's movement -- the way women share their feelings and the support they get from each other. Do you know how isolated and lonely and weak a man really feels in that silence, never really making contact, never really touching another man?"

Some or all of these changes are threatening to men in ways that women find hard to understand. That Marine colonel in The Great Santini could deal with his engine's failure alone in the sky and go down with his plane more easily than he could deal with his own feelings of love and envy toward his son. And great numbers of American men clearly identify. The lashing out against women and the backlash against the women's movement are a way for men to avoid confronting these changes in their own lives.

A swarm of books by threatened men (George Gilder's Sexual Suicide, Steven Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy, Lionel Tiger's The Imperial Animal, etc.) keep up an insistent drone. They say that in demanding equality, women are destroying the natural, inexorable, predestined superiority of the male. These "wicked" women are dooming male sexual potency as well as the reproduction of the human race and the aggressive thrust of civilization itself -- all of which rest solely on female submissiveness.

Of course, such books are based on faulty or outright false use of pseudoscientific evidence; their lies can be dismissed simply as "enemy propaganda."

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It seems strange to suggest that there is a new American frontier, a new adventure for men, in this new struggle for wholeness, for openness to feeling, for living and sharing life on equal terms with women, taking equal responsibility for children -- the human liberation that began with the women's movement. Unlike the American hero of the past, the new frontier liberates men from the isolating silence of that lonely cowboy. "I'm not just my work now, not just a breadwinner, I can do something just for myself," says Avery.

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I suggested that men might even be envious that women can have soft feelings and let them show, especially at a male stronghold like West Point. I talked about Kramer vs. Kramer and the possibility of a new model of what it is to be a man, a new kind of male hero in America, as men begin to share the care of the children and home with their wives, as women share the burdens and responsibilities of earning -- even the hardships and dangers and glories of military careers. I suggested that the entrance of women to the world of work and power, on terms of equality, and the related changes that might be happening among men would lead to even more profound restructuring of all our institutions -- and maybe that was already beginning to happen at West Point?

Afterward, an officer stopped me. "It's already happening more than you realize," he said. "The women cadets are only the tip of the iceberg; almost every officer here has a wife working. It's a necessity with the pay we get. That's changed all our lives."

I thought I had been very mild, but the major warned me to expect a lot of hostility from the cadets in the classes the next morning.

The next morning, all the men wanted to talk about was "pull-ups" and "upper body strength." How could they accept the idea of equality of women at West Point when it was a known fact that women couldn't do those six pull-ups, and some couldn't even do one? How could weaklings defend the nation? They insisted that the admission of women was "dangerously" lowering the standards at West Point. And they didn't like it at all that I misinterpreted their reaction as "sexist." They were not threatened, as men, by women at West Point -- the nation was threatened! And it had nothing to do with machismo.

The big question, of course, was women and the draft. How could I talk about equality for women, if women would not be drafted? I suggested that if a real draft is reinstated, from necessity of national defense -- and not just as a political gesture to win an election -- it is hardly conceivable that women would not be included. Most of the cadets nodded in agreement. But did I believe that women should go into combat?

"If I was going into battle and I had to take someone with me, well, ma'am, personally I wouldn't want a woman anywhere around," said a male cadet.

Another conjured the image of an officer having to order his girlfriend out of the trenches into hand-to-hand combat with a grenade-bearing enemy, breaching the front line. "Even if he pretended he didn't care if she got killed, any more than one of the men, how could he trust her to kill the enemy and defend him?" The major, sitting next to me, muttered something like, "Damn fools, don't they know there won't even be a front line like that in the next war?"

It was as if the whole scene was from some old movie. "They're all scared to death, because they know they don't know, we don't know, what the next war will be like," one of the officers told me later.

The male cadet insisted that I answer the questions: Did I think women really wanted to go into combat, and did I think women should want to go into combat?

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Improbable as it may seem, we could bridge the old conservative-liberal chasm, if we realize the true potential of that elusive new male-female, second-stage mode.

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Nazi totalitarianism that declared the very idea of individual rights to be dangerous was based on the patriarchal family as the basic cell of the state. But the fascist movement to return women to Kinder, Kuche, Kirche and thus to restore the male-dominated family as the model of authoritarianism and male supremacy -- and as metaphor for the vanished superiority of "the Fatherland" --- had arisen earlier in Germany, and is rising again, in the resurgent religious fundamentalism of Moslem nations -- and in the United States.

In America today, equal rights for women -- and our independent personhood, our control of our own bodies -- are profoundly threatening to those who seek to escape from freedom and choice through rigid authoritarian direction from above.

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The ordeal of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (or Catholic, or Jewish) American male -- facing and resisting the necessity to break through old definitions of masculinity and release these new "feminine" strengths in himself -- is described in a dog-eared, unknown tome lent to me by the major, written by a West Point graduate and former ranger-paratrooper army officer. Tenderness Is Strength: From Machismo to Manhood, by Harold C. Lyon, Jr., is evidently a kind of primer for the growing underground of military leaders who are breaking out of machismo. Lyon writes:

"Men have become isolated inside the barren barricades of machismo, afraid to let anyone in and afraid to let themselves out. They live in constant fear that someone will see, behind the loud posturing, a lonely person locked inside himself. The rage and helpless feelings which result are hard to share. To those who can read it, the language of machismo is a distinct plea for someone to finally break through the rigid postures in which so many men have become trapped .... In the last few years, I have begun to discover that the toughness that I developed as a protective shell in order to survive in society's hostile environment is not really my strength as I thought it to be. Rather, it is my tenderness that leads me to strength -- toughness is not strength; tenderness is not weakness."

I leave West Point, as the first female cadets are about to graduate, feeling safer somehow because these powerful nuclear weapons that can destroy the world and the new human strategies therefore needed to defend this nation will hence-forward be in the hands of women and men who are, with agony, breaking through to a new strength, strong enough to be sensitive and tender to the evolving needs and values of human life -- if only the last gasps of threatened machismo do not stop this evolution. As the exWest Pointer concluded: "We do not need to revolt. We need to evolve."

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If we eliminate the false polarities and appreciate the limits and true potential of women's power, we will be able to join with men -- follow or lead -- in the new human politics that must emerge beyond reaction. And this new human liberation ....