‘Positive Patriarchy’ Is Still Domination : ‘Iron John’: Robert Bly’s devoted followers seem not to grasp what his message really means to women.

Robert Bly’s “Iron John: A Book About Men” has been on national bestseller lists since last fall. Women have been buying it for the men in their lives, and men for themselves and each other. The author’s message has taken life in dozens of male-only retreats all over the country, and been spread in long TV interviews--even on the cover of Newsweek.

Bly has been applauded for bringing men together, for helping them reveal their most intimate and painful feelings, for teaching them how to cry, to connect with each other and their fathers.

But there is another side to the poet’s message that is deeply disturbing to many women because of its implicit and sometimes explicit anti-female attitudes. (Women are excluded from the weekend retreats and workshops that Bly and his proteges are running, and can only judge the poet by his words.) Bly’s barely veiled misogyny, his celebration of aggression and hierarchy in the masculine universe and his call for a reconsideration of the virtues of male domination are worrisome at best and frightening at worst.

Bly insists he is neither anti-feminine nor anti-feminist. But his depiction of women contradicts this claim. Rarely in his work can one find a positive image of what he seems to consider the second and dangerous sex. In the mytho-poetic world of “Iron John,” women compete with fathers for “the affection of their sons” and maternal affection is little more than “indoctrination” or, as Bly so caustically puts it, a “baptism in shame.” Thus, in the late 20th Century, women are trying to turn their lovers and colleagues into soft, ineffectual wimps.

To counter both maternal manipulation and feminist badgering, Bly wants men to reconnect with their “positive images” of masculinity. Those qualities, however, are all cast in the most aggressive tones. Men are urged to recapture their “fierce,” “harsh,” “wild,” and Dionysian energy--to become Zeus-like warriors and kings. Zeus, of course, was not known for his light touch in dealing with errant mortals, male or female. And in the era of “wilding,” a call for more “wild men” certainly provides reason for concern.

But what is most unsettling is Bly’s plea for a “positive patriarchy.” Whether its his yearning for or the 19th-Century father who was “revered and respected “ or for pre-industrial male-bonding rituals as practiced by Indians or Vikings, the author seems unwilling to come to grips with what patriarchy means for women. As Gerda Lerner pointedly explains in her feminist classic, “The Creation of Patriarchy,” patriarchy “means the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general.” Or, as Webster’s states it, patriarchy is “government by men.”

Some men in the movement that has grown up around Bly have voiced concern about this nostalgia for a society in which, as Lerner puts it, “men hold power in all the important institutions” and “women are deprived of access to such power.” But overall, Bly’s most devoted followers--well-intentioned, liberal, enlightened men--do not seem to grasp the gravity of this call for a return to a golden age of masculinity.

Here’s the truth: The search for a “positive patriarchy” is as insulting and threatening to women as a nostalgic celebration of life in the Jim Crow South would be to blacks.

Bly and his many followers, of course, assure us that our new masters will be kinder and gentler because they have learned to cry and to bare their souls. But this confuses surface manifestations of touchy-feeliness with substantive and systemic change in a patriarchal system of domination. After all, men in Greece hold hands and dance together, Arab fundamentalists embrace when they meet and Italian men are ebullient and often self-revealing. Men who hug in a positive patriarchy will still be on top of us.

If men really want to construct a positive new vision of masculinity, they will have to move beyond hugs, tears and self-revelation. The men’s movement could, in fact, represent a positive force for change for men and women. But that will only happen if the men in it take the responsibility to reject formulas that do little more than declare a war on all that women--and many men --have fought for, for centuries.

If men challenge the legacy of patriarchy and their absent fathers in their workplaces and the political arena as well as in men’s groups and at home, then perhaps both sexes can finally move forward.