Iron John: A Book about Men—25th
Anniversary Edition. By Robert Bly. Da Capo. $15.99.
UnSlut: A Diary and a Memoir.
By Emily Lindin. Zest Books. $14.99.
From the oldest days of oral
history within small groups to the most recent ones of instant communication
with the world, the difficulty of knowing just what it means to be a man or
woman has persisted. This has provided fertile ground for authors of all sorts
to meditate upon manliness and womanliness, how the sexes interact or can
better interact, and just what it means in our time (or any time) to be a
member of one gender or the other. Poet and translator Robert Bly tackled a
number of these issues 25 years ago in an extended meditation called Iron John, which is now available in a
new edition that includes a brief and rather puzzling afterword but is
otherwise the same as the 1990 book. Bly’s focus is one of the Grimm Märchen, a German word usually
translated, not entirely accurately, as “fairy tales.” What the Grimm brothers
actually did was to collect age-old stories about how the world works, both
naturally and supernaturally, many of them drawing on what Jung would later
call "archetypes” and some, but by no means all, containing fairies and
other supernatural beings. The tales fall so neatly into categories that they
have in fact been academically categorized; but even without knowing precisely
where the story of Iron John fits, it is easy to see which of its elements have
longstanding resonance and which have an implied meaning beyond the literal.
This is the story of a Wild Man, captured by a king and brought to the palace
from a deep, dark forest, then freed from his cage by the king’s son. The son soon
bonds with the Wild Man (who calls himself Iron John), then is sent away from
the forest, and then makes his own way in the world after overcoming several
trials – eventually marrying the daughter of the king of a neighboring land.
The plot is filled with traditional oral-history elements, such as the number
three: Iron John sets the boy a task three times (the boy fails all three,
which is why he must set out on his own); when grown and in the other kingdom,
the boy wins a competition three days in a row; and in fact there are three
kings in the story – the boy’s father, the father of his eventual bride, and
Iron John himself, who at the end reveals himself as “a baronial King” who had
been enchanted. Implied sexuality permeates the story, too, in the boy’s
repeatedly dipping parts of himself into a forbidden stream, with the result
that his hair becomes bright gold and he does not wish anyone to see it – but
the princess insists on removing his cap (a metaphor for foreskin) and at the
end says that of course she will marry him, since she knew from his hair
(revealed when she took the cap off) that he was no peasant. There is much more
that can be interpreted in the story on its own terms, or nearly its own (the
psychoanalytic approach does go beyond the words themselves). But Bly uses the
tale for a different purpose: to show what he believes it means to be a man in
our modern age.
Bly sees the story as
tracing men through eight stages of growth, and he regards its characters as
archetypes of a kind of male-only vigor that is forceful, outgoing, even
warlike, but at the same time protective and emotionally centered. Bly is
verbose and philosophical; his Iron John
meanders through the personal (the book partly reflects his view of his own
manhood) as well as the philosophical (he relies heavily, rather too heavily,
on those Jungian archetypes). Bly basically argues that men have become
alienated from their essential maleness (which is not the same as “manliness”),
largely because of the absence of father figures akin to Iron John. Men need
rites of passage, Bly argues, and the Iron John story metaphorically offers and
explains them, while modern society has abandoned them and thus has separated
men from their essential maleness – which only other men, not women, can teach
them (Bly is not anti-woman, but he considers women’s ways inherently incapable
of relating meaningfully to men’s deepest needs). Although he stops short of
affirming the “noble savage” ideal or proclaiming everything ancient good and
everything modern bad, Bly does suggest that long-ago human societies were
deeply in touch with aspects of manhood that modern First World societies no
longer recognize – with the result that many men, including Bly himself, are
cut off from their own deserved heritage and feel constantly uncertain, adrift
and vaguely (sometimes not so vaguely) discontented. Bly’s purpose in his Iron John seems to be to lead men to be
the best men they can be. But what a winding path he takes readers on! The new
edition’s short afterword (barely two pages long) shows in a single difficult-to-parse
sentence what Bly thought, and still thinks, being male – indeed, being human –
is all about: “As the search for the Sacred King continues, the themes this
book talks about – the descent into ashes, the love of the ‘God-Woman,’ and the
developmental stages of red, white, and black – resonate deeply for both men
and women.” It would have been fairer and more honest for Bly to have said “for
some men and women,” because his elaborate
writing and frequently abstruse references can make his Iron John an uncomfortable slog for many readers. That is as true
now as when the book was first published. In seeking a kind of holistic
masculinity, Bly again and again becomes long-winded and descends into a
mixture of generalization (in his descriptions of traditional cultures) and
psychobabble (in his use of Jungian and Freudian terms and insights). The
anecdotes, the personal elements, are strong in Bly’s Iron John, but the analyses are less trenchant, the explanations
are often rather far-fetched, and some of Bly’s writing is flat-out difficult
to follow. Iron John inspired (if
that is the right word) some very silly behavior after its initial publication
– men’s drum circles in the woods and all that – and now itself seems a trifle
sillier, or at least more self-indulgent, than it originally did. It remains a
thoughtful and frequently interesting book, but one whose author’s sense of how
profound his revelations are frequently interferes with their actual
profundity.
Much less portentous and
much less pretentious, Emily Lindin’s UnSlut
is intended as a female manifesto, just as Bly’s book is intended as one for
males. UnSlut is an expansion of
material Lindin originally posted online, and has the same worthy purpose: to
help girls get beyond sexual bullying, which Lindin herself suffered through in
middle school. On the face of it, the book’s format is intriguing: it purports
to be the actual diary that Lindin kept from ages 11 (when she was first
labeled a “slut”) through 13, with marginal commentary on her experiences. Whether
the material is quite as authentic as Lindin asserts is difficult to determine,
however. For an 11-to-13-year-old diarist, she seems to be a mighty fine
writer, using full sentences (often complex ones), avoiding grammatical errors,
and being a spelling whiz (she even gets “millennium” right). So perhaps the
diary entries have been a bit cleaned up – but that does not make the
underlying material any less important. Lindin picked up her own “slut” label
after allowing a boyfriend to “get to third base” (feeling within her underwear
below the waist) under what she sees, from her current age of 29, as duress.
She, not he, was labeled the sexual aggressor, and given the fact that she was
also early in sexual development (there are many references, by Lindin herself
and others, to the size of her “boobs”), the “slut” label just seemed to stick.
Lindin’s own reaction to it ranged at the time from being mortified to finding
it, if not cool, at least a useful identification for a preteen trying
desperately to figure out who and what she was and would become – scarcely an
earthshaking element of her story, since it is essentially the purpose of the teenage years, but nevertheless one that every
preteen and teen feels acutely. Lindin flirted not only with boys but also with
real danger at times: her descriptions of cutting herself seem, in retrospect,
to be clearer calls for help than she thought they were when they occurred or
thinks they are as she looks back at them. But by and large, her account of the
“slut” label and its consequences does not go much beyond the creation of
groups of BFFs who shortly become frenemies and then re-blend into new groups
of BFFs, sometimes several times a week, if not daily. There is, in short,
nothing very surprising about the social circumstances in which Lindin endured
the “slut” label.
But back in 1997, when
Lindin was 11, the entire world was very different, and not just for preteens
and teenagers. To make her diary entries understandable, Lindin has to spend
considerable time explaining AOL Instant Messenger, disposable cameras and the
“seconds” of prints that could be made from them, Total Request Live and similar former bastions of superficial pop
culture, and much else. All this makes UnSlut
seem more of a historical document than, ideally, it should be, since “slut
shaming” definitely still exists and has become, if anything, more complicated
now that sexting (which did not exist at the time of Lindin’s diaries:
cellphones were far from ubiquitous) has become commonplace, and even adults
have become aware of it (hyper-aware, with the usual ridiculous overreactions
to adolescent sex crowding out the sensible responses). The problem is that
Lindin has progressed, if that is the word, from crowdsourced humiliation to
painful political correctness – which undercuts her thoughtful ideas and even
her outrage. For example, one boy says to Zach, Lindin’s then-boyfriend, that
he should “slap Emily’s ass when she stands up,” and Lindin says in her diary
entry that Zach says “not in school,” after which Lindin wonders “if he would
have slapped my ass when I stood up if we weren’t in school.” The marginal
gloss on this passage says, “A better answer would have been, ‘No, Emily’s body
is not an object that exists for my entertainment as her boyfriend, let alone
for your entertainment as a
bystander.’” That is as ridiculous a response as the one that Zach actually
made. Realistically, and age-appropriately, a better remark would have been,
“Don’t be silly.”
There are real questions
about just how much Lindin has learned since her middle-school days, and every
once in a while, a marginal note seems to indicate: not very much. For example,
she offers a diary entry about liking guys “who seem out of my reach…but once
they come within my reach and start liking me back…I lose interest in them
because they seem boring.” The marginal note here says, “Unfortunately, the
same thing would continue to happen for the next decade or so. It’s resulted in
a lot of off-and-on relationships with rather aloof men.” So there seems to be
some truth to Wordsworth’s assertion, “The child is father of the man” – or mother
of the woman, in this case. Lindin takes some of what happened to her in middle
school very seriously – that is what UnSlut
is primarily about, after all – but some of the events entirely too casually,
notably the self-harm, about which her marginal note blandly comments that “I’m
a bit disappointed that I didn’t sort through all the emotions behind it here
in my diary.” Readers will likely be more than “a bit” concerned, but Lindin’s
focus on “slut shaming” means she tends to wear blinders about other elements
of middle-school life. Actually, she sometimes wears them about the “slut” issue,
too, as when she notes in her diary that she wore tight pants at a dance and
“the type of dancing my friends and I were doing wasn’t exactly prude,” then
says in her marginal note that her clothing should have been irrelevant,
because “there’s nothing I could have done that would be an excuse” for boys to
approach her sexually. That is a statement that is either hopelessly naïve or
hopelessly politically correct: even in middle school, Lindin realized that
some things she did could be interpreted as come-ons, but as an
almost-30-year-old, she seems to think that the way girls and women dress and
behave has zero effect on boys and men (or perhaps ought to have zero effect in some ideal world). UnSlut contains interesting elements and
certainly pursues a worthy cause, but it is something of a mishmash in doing so.
Lindin’s afterword is a lot more coherent, focused and usefully explanatory
than her marginal notes throughout the book: her determination comes through
more clearly after a reader goes through 250 pages of diary-and-commentary that
are, in many ways (albeit different ones), just as much of a slog as are the
almost-300 pages of Iron John.
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