Essay What Do Men Really Want?

By Sam Allis

Freud, like everyone else, forgot to ask the second question: What do men really want? His omission may reflect the male fascination with the enigma of woman over the mystery of man. She owns the center of his imagination, while the fate of man works the margins. Perhaps this is why so many men have taken the Mafia oath of silence about their hopes and fears. Strong and silent remain de rigueur.

But in the wake of the feminist movement, some men are beginning to pipe up. In the intimacy of locker rooms and the glare of large men's groups, they are spilling their bile at the incessant criticism, much of it justified, from women about their inadequacies as husbands, lovers, fathers. They are airing their frustration with the limited roles they face today, compared with the multiple options that women seem to have won. Above all, they are groping to redefine themselves on their own terms instead of on the performance standards set by their wives or bosses or family ghosts. "We've heard all the ! criticism," says New York City-based television producer Tom Seligson. "Now we'll make our own decisions."

In many quarters there is anger. "The American man wants his manhood back. Period," snaps John Wheeler, a Washington environmentalist and former chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. "New York feminists ((a generic term in his lexicon)) have been busy castrating American males. They poured this country's testosterone out the window in the 1960s. The men in this country have lost their boldness. To raise your voice these days is a worse offense than urinating in the subway."

Even more prevalent is exhaustion. "The American man wants to stop running; he wants a few moments of peace," says poet Robert Bly, one of the gurus of the nascent men's movement in the U.S. "He has a tremendous longing to get down to his own depths. Beneath the turbulence of his daily life is a beautiful crystalline infrastructure" -- a kind of male bedrock.

Finally, there is profound confusion over what it means to be a man today. Men have faced warping changes in role models since the women's movement drove the strong, stoic John Wayne-type into the sunset. Replacing him was a new hero: the hollow-chested, sensitive, New Age man who bawls at Kodak commercials and handles a diaper the way Magic Johnson does a basketball. Enter Alan Alda.

But he, too, is quickly becoming outdated. As we begin the '90s, the zeitgeist has changed again. Now the sensitive male is a wimp and an object of derision to boot. In her song Sensitive New Age Guys, singer Christine Lavin lampoons, "Who carries the baby on his back? Who thinks Shirley MacLaine is on the inside track?" Now it's goodbye, Alan Alda; hello, Mel Gibson, with your sensitive eyes and your lethal weapon. Hi there, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the devoted family man with terrific triceps. The new surge of tempered macho is everywhere. Even the male dummies in store windows are getting tougher. Pucci Manikins is producing a more muscular model for the new decade that stands 6 ft. 2 in. instead of 6 ft. and has a 42-in. chest instead of its previous 40.

What's going on here? Are we looking at a backlash against the pounding men have taken? To some degree, yes. But it's more complicated than that. "The sensitive man was overplayed," explains Seattle-based lecturer Michael Meade, a colleague of Bly's in the men's movement. "There is no one quality intriguing enough to make a person interesting for a long time." More , important, argues Warren Farrell, author of the 1986 best seller Why Men Are the Way They Are, women liked Alan Alda not because he epitomized the sensitive man but because he was a multimillionaire superstar success who also happened to be sensitive. In short, he met all their performance needs before sensitivity ever entered the picture. "We have never worshiped the soft man," says Farrell. "If Mel Gibson were a nursery school teacher, women wouldn't want him. Can you imagine a cover of TIME featuring a sensitive musician who drives a cab on the side?"

The women's movement sensitized many men to the problems women face in society and made them examine their own feelings in new ways. But it did not substantially alter what society expects of men. "Nothing fundamental has changed," says Farrell. Except that both John Wayne and Alan Alda have been discarded on the same cultural garbage heap. "First I learned that an erect cock was politically incorrect," complains producer Seligson. "Now it's wrong not to have one."

As always, men are defined by their performance in the workplace. If women don't like their jobs, they can, at least in theory, maintain legitimacy by going home and raising children. Men have no such alternative. "The options are dismal," says Meade. "You can drop out, which is an abdication of power, or take the whole cloth and lose your soul." If women have suffered from being sex objects, men have suffered as success objects, judged by the amount of money they bring home. As one young career woman in Boston puts it, "I don't want a Type A. I want an A-plus." Chilling words that make Farrell wonder, "Why do we need to earn more than you to be considered worthy of you?"

This imbalance can be brutal for a man whose wife tries life in the corporate world, discovers as men did decades ago that it is no day at the beach, and heads for home, leaving him the sole breadwinner. "We're seeing more of this 'You guys can have it back. It's been real,' " observes Kyle Pruett, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Studies Center. "I have never seen a case where it has not increased anxiety for the man."

There has been a lot of cocktail-party talk about the need for a brave, sensitive man who will stand up to the corporate barons and take time off to watch his son play Peter Pan in his school play, the fast track be damned. This sentiment showed up in a 1989 poll, conducted by Robert Half International, in which about 45% of men surveyed said they would refuse a promotion rather than miss time at home. But when it comes to trading income for "quality time," how many fathers will actually be there at the grade- school curtain call?

"Is there a Daddy Track? No," says Edward Zigler, a Yale psychologist. "The message is that if a man takes paternity leave, he's a very strange person who is not committed to the corporation. It's very bleak." Says Felice Schwartz, who explored the notion of a Mommy Track in a 1989 article in the Harvard Business Review: "There isn't any forgiveness yet of a man who doesn't really give his all." So today's working stiff really enjoys no more meaningful options than did his father, the pathetic guy in the gray flannel suit who was pilloried as a professional hamster and an emotional cripple. You're still either a master of the universe or a wimp. It is the cognitive dissonance between the desire for change and the absence of ways to achieve it that has reduced most men who even think about the subject to tapioca.

Robert Rackleff, 47, is one of the rare men who have stepped off the corporate treadmill. Five years ago, after the birth of their third child, Rackleff and his wife JoEllen fled New York City, where he was a well-paid corporate speechwriter and she a radio-show producer. They moved to his native Florida, where Rackleff earns a less lavish living as a free-lance writer and helps his wife raise the kids. The drop in income, he acknowledges, "was scary. It put more pressure on me, but I wanted to spend more time with my children." Rackleff feels happy with his choice, but isolated. "I know only one other guy who left the fast track to be with his kids," he says. "Men just aren't doing it. I can still call up most of them at 8 p.m. and know they will be in the office."

Men have been bombarded with recipes to ripen their personal lives, if not their professional ones. They are now Lamaze-class regulars and can be found in the delivery room for the cosmic event instead of pacing the waiting-room floor. They have been instructed to bond with children, wives, colleagues and anyone else they can find. Exactly how remains unclear. Self-help books, like Twinkies, give brief highs and do not begin to address the uneven changes in their lives over the past 20 years. "Men aren't any happier in the '90s than they were in the '50s," observes Yale psychiatrist Pruett, "but their inner lives tend to be more complex. They are interested in feeling less isolated. They are stunned to find out how rich human relationships are."

Unfortunately, the men who attempt to explore those riches with the women in their lives often discover that their efforts are not entirely welcome. The same women who complain about male reticence can grow uncomfortable when male secrets and insecurities spill out. Says Rackleff: "I think a lot of women who want a husband to be a typical hardworking breadwinner are scared when he talks about being a sensitive father. I get cynical about that."

One might be equally cynical about men opening up to other men. Atlanta psychologist Augustus Napier tells of two doctors whose lockers were next to each other in the surgical dressing room of a hospital. For years they talked about sports, money and other safe "male" subjects. Then one of them learned that the other had tried to commit suicide -- and had never so much as mentioned the attempt to him. So much for male bonding.

How can men break out of the gender stereotypes? Clearly, there is a need for some male conciousness raising, yet men have nothing to rival the giant grass-roots movement that began razing female stereotypes 25 years ago. There is no male equivalent for the National Organization for Women or Ms. magazine. No role models, other than the usual megabillionaire success objects.

A minute percentage of American males are involved in the handful of organizations whose membership ranges from men who support the feminist movement to angry divorces meeting to swap gripes about alimony and child- custody battles. There is also a group of mostly well-educated, middle- class men who sporadically participate in a kind of male spiritual quest. Anywhere from Maine to Minnesota, at male-only weekend retreats, they earnestly search for some shard of ancient masculinity culled from their souls by the Industrial Revolution. At these so-called warrior weekends, participants wrestle, beat drums and hold workshops on everything from ecology to divorce and incest. They embrace, and yes, they do cry and confide things they would never dream of saying to their wives and girlfriends. They act out emotions in a safe haven where no one will laugh at them.

At one drumming session in the municipal-arts center of a Boston suburb, about 50 men sit in a huge circle beating on everything from tom-toms to cowbells and sticks. Their ages range from the 20s to the 60s. A participant has brought his young son with him. Drummers nod as newcomers appear, sit down and start pounding away. Before long, a strong primal beat emerges that somehow transcends the weirdness of it all. Some men close their eyes and play in a trance. Others rise and dance around the middle of the group, chanting as they move.

One shudders to think what Saturday Night Live would do with these scenes. But there is no smirking among the participants. "When is the last time you danced with another man?" asks Paul, a family man who drove two hours from Connecticut to be there. "It tells you how many walls there are still out there for us." Los Angeles writer Michael Ventura, who has written extensively about men's issues, acknowledges the obvious: much of this seems pretty bizarre. "Some of it may look silly," he says. "But if you're afraid of looking silly, everything stops right there. In our society, men have to be contained and sure of themselves. Well, f that. That's not the way we feel." The goal, continues Ventura, is to rediscover the mystery of man, a creature capable of strength, spontaneity and adventure. "The male mystery is the part of us that wants to explore, that isn't afraid of the dark, that lights a fire and dances around it."

One thing is clear: men need the support of other men to change, which is why activities like drumming aren't as dumb as they may look. Even though no words are exchanged, the men at these sessions get something from other men that they earnestly need: understanding and acceptance. "The solitude of men is the most difficult single thing to change," says Napier. These retreats provide cover for some spiritual reconnaissance too risky to attempt in the company of women. "It's like crying," says Michael Meade. "Men are afraid that if they start, they'll cry forever."

Does the search for a lineal sense of masculinity have any relevance to such thorny modern dilemmas as how to balance work and family or how to talk to women? Perhaps. Men have to feel comfortable with themselves before they can successfully confront such issues. This grounding is also critical for riding out the changes in pop culture and ideals. John Wayne and Alan Alda, like violence and passivity, reflect holes in a core that needs fixing. But men can get grounded in many ways, and male retreats provide just one stylized option, though not one necessarily destined to attract most American men.

What do men really want? To define themselves on their own terms, just as women began to do a couple of decades ago. "Would a women's group ask men if it was O.K. to feel a certain way?" asks Jerry Johnson, host of the San Francisco-based KCBS radio talk show Man to Man. "No way. We're still looking for approval from women for changes, and we need to get it from the male camp."

That's the point. And it does not have to come at women's expense. "It is stupid to conclude that the empowerment of women means the disempowerment of men," says Robert Moore, a psychoanalyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Chicago. "Men must also feel good about being male." Men would do well, in fact, to invite women into their lives to participate in these changes. It's no fun to face them alone. But if women can't or won't, men must act on their own and damn the torpedoes. No pain, no gain.