Robert Bly (1926–2021)

I wanted to like Bly so much. He's a good poet, and (in contrast to his cartoonish reputation as a drum-circle men's advocacy godfather) seems to have a good handle on the mysterious power of age-old gender stereotypes over the human psyche. (Jungians call these stereotypes archetypes.) Unfortunately, this book is blather and twaddle. Blather: he frequently interrupts his arguments to quote approvingly and at length from his own poetry, which he clearly sees as God's primary gift to the modern world. Twaddle: well, consider this: "Thousands, even millions of men projected their internal feminine on to Marilyn Monroe. If a million men do that, and leave it there, it's likely she will die. She died. Projections without personal contact can damage the person receiving them....We have to say also that Marilyn Monroe called for these projections as part of her power longing...In the economy of the psyche her death was inevitable and even right. No single human being can carry so many projections—that is, so much unconsciousness—and survive." If you can read such stuff without projecting the book, quite consciously, into the nearest trash can, hats off to you.… (mere)

Los roles y valores que nuestra cultura ha venido convencionalmente asignando a la mujer y al hombre ya no son válidos. Y si bien desde la aparición del movimiento feminista se han escrito gran cantidad de obras cuestionando la imagen tradicional femenina y aportando muy válidas vislumbres de la nueva mujer -la mujer del siglo XXI-, poco o nada relevante se había aportado respecto a la correspondiente nueva masculinidad. Robert Bly llena por fin ese vacío con esta obra largamente esperada y que fue número uno de las listas de bestseller del New York Times.… (mere)