If the 1980s will be remembered as the "Me Decade," the 1990s are shaping up as an odd sequel--the "Me Too Decade." Whereas the goal of the 1980s was to amass the greatest amount of cookies in one's jar, the 1990s recognizes those who whine the loudest. The fact that white males (surely not the first group one thinks of as being "victimized") are beginning to suffer in public suggests how far we've come in such a short time. Much of the credit belongs to the acknowledged father of the men's movement, poet cum warrior guru Robert Bly (Iron John). In Bly & Goodman On Men & Women, he teams up with Jungian analyst Marion Woodman to conduct a workshop edited down to just six agonizingly slow hours on video. The leaders act out a Russian fairy tale about a guy named Ivan who has to decisively triumph over a series of obstacles (absent father, bad stepmother, false tutor, and a witch woman) to win his true love. Not only do Bly and Woodman deliver their lines as if they're running on marijuana time (really s-l-o-w) rather than real time, they redundantly reprise the story "so far," at the beginning of each successive tape. After each narrative segment, they launch into a jargon-ridden exegesis about a man's inner feminine running up against a woman's inner masculine and about a zillion different permutations involving the warrior, the witch, the twisted father, the incestuous mother, and other "power heads" which require a little St. George sword-wielding action. It's easy to see why near the end of the series a young man raises his hand and says what the others are afraid to ("I'm lost.") For his part, Bly is often funny, but his projection of his own unhappy childhood as the son of an alcoholic father onto the male psyche en masse is misguided. Although they certainly should, neither Bly nor Woodman ever say "some" men or "some" women to qualify their remarks. So, when Woodman speaks such inanities as "in dreams, the little child is always being raped," we understand that a) she's referring to our psychic experiences as a whole, and b) she's out there where the buses don't run. The two hosts rarely seem to be on the same wavelength and the participants spend a lot of time in smile-and-nod mode--no doubt looking forward to the end of the session when they're asked to color with crayons, or do "voice work" (primal scream), or free-form dance, or role-play. For the viewing audience who is not there, of course, all of this only looks silly. Although people may clamor for this series, most will be either confused or bored (or both).Save the Males is more along the lines of a point and shoot documentary flitting from interviewee to interviewee with bland commentary along the way. Filmed in Texas, the program purportedly follows "three men as they search for answers," but I couldn't figure out which three guys they meant. a lot of men are interviewed, including Marvin Allen, a businessman turned psychologist who hosts "wild man weekends," where men gather to hunt and cry and play tom-tom drums that they're welcome to keep for an additional $200 over the $250 fee for the retreat. Again, as in the Bly & Woodman On Men & Women series, there is the tendency to generalize male experience (the program asserts that 75% of all men don't have healthy relationships with their parents without, of course, backing up the assertion.) Just as many women would say that the Andrea Dworkin's of this world are not speaking for them when they say "women," many men would also argue that the Robert Bly's are not speaking for them when they say "men." In either case, neither of these programs holds a candle to the much superior a Gathering of Men (reviewed in our May 1990 issue) with Robert Bly, in which Bill Moyers is able, through probing questions, to focus on some of the very real concerns underlying the men's movement and speak about them in a comprehensible way. Neither Save the Males nor Bly & Woodman On Men & Women are necessary purchases--unless demand warrants. (R. Pitman)
Bly & Woodman On Men & Women; Save the Males: an Endangered Species
(1992) 6 videocassettes, approx. 60 min. each. $29.95 each ($149.95 for the entire series). Applewood Communications. Color cover. Vol. 9, Issue 1
Bly & Woodman On Men & Women; Save the Males: an Endangered Species
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