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by this sensibility's standard, "real women").
It is as easy to poke fun at Bly and the New American Masculinity's
silliness about the
oppression
facing American men as it is to ridicule fem–
inists who worship witches and believe that war would be a thing of the
past if only we could bring back the great mother goddess (an idea
matched by Bly's view of the Vietnam War - which, to his credit, he
vigorously opposed - as a mere exercise in macho). It is easy but simplis–
tic. American culture seems about to be swamped by gender. Yet never
have men and women talked less to and more at each other. Even cock–
tail
party conversation takes on the rhetorical trappings of Puritan primers.
We are probably the first nation to succeed in making sex and gender
equal-opportunity bores.
Admittedly, poets are notorious for creating systems whose function is
to service the intellectual foundations of their poetry. Just reread Eliot's
The Idea of a Christian Society
or Yeats ' s metaphysics or what Pound
thought of as "revolutionary" economics. But poets, too, should answer
for their theories. When they write nonsense, they are no more Shelley's
"unacknowledged legislators of the universe" than are taxi drivers or
cooks. And Jungian nonsense merits as much scorn as any other kind.
In itself, gender can never be at the heart of either politics or culture.
That agenda which constitutes a demand for social and political equality
for
all
men and women, that agenda which insists individuals have the
right to seek dignity as well as the right to define purpose for themselves -
whether political or cultural, that agenda is worth fighting for. But this
strident cacophony of voices seeking to fuse the domain of imagination
and history to either a male or a female sensibility simply lies. It lies to us,
and it lies to itself As ideology, gender is deficient as well as dangerous,
for it equates the idea of the self with the accident of sex. A man's ability
to
cry
does not make him a man, any more than his refusal to cry does. A
grown man tearfully telling stories around a campfire to other grown men
may be many other things, but he is also a horse's ass. Courage and dig–
nity
exist, for men as well as for women, but they are not going to be
learned by squeezing the primitive child out from the soul.
For the past two decades, feminists have been telling us that the per–
sonal is political. If that is so - and I believe it is - then it is high time to
call
it quits on both witches and warlocks. Politics - and this includes the
politics of gender - remains a commonplace calling. Myths and fairy tales
are all very well and good. But they work both ways. When Clarence
Thomas decided to "go black" and talk not about how he had behaved
toward Anita Hill nor about his views on abortion but about how he was
being "lynched" because he was a black man, he assumed the oppression
rhetoric of the New American Masculinity. In the process, he also unin-
