No Poetry, No Gender War, No Bullshit

Tom Matlack discusses the popular men’s movements

and why the Good Men Project stands apart.
The first and only time I saw Robert Bly, author of Iron John, the touchstone
of the modern “mythopoetic” men’s movement, I was in college—and I
wasn’t sure I was impressed. Although I found the man captivating in many
ways, I wasn’t convinced that the manhood he was talking about in poetic
terms (and accompanied by a lute, no less) was something I aspired to
recapture. Beating drums in the woods never seemed to come naturally to
me; to me it sounded more like feminism for guys than the stuff of
manhood.

At the time, I was immersed in the sport of rowing—a male bonding

experience that had little to do with poetry and a lot to do with the testing of
physical limits. I suppose the fistfight I had with my best friend during a
training session in a cemetery was related to something Bly was getting at,
but it sure wasn’t poetic. It had to do with my questioning my friend’s
manhood and his retaliating in kind. We both emerged stronger from the
exchange.
Our coach, Will Scoggins, had watched our fight from a distance, grinning.
He told me that the process of developing underlying trust as a team
involved spilling your guts along the way, even showing raw emotion. He
had made clear from the very beginning that this was about rowing, but it
was also about growing up and learning, the hard way, how to avoid making
excuses. The payoff was that we could use this wisdom in any situation later
on in life. To his way of thinking, the fight was a sign of progress—a sign of
growing faith in one another.

The fight on a cemetery hill with my rowing buddy summarized the kind of
men’s movement that I respected a heck of a lot more than what I heard
accompanied by a lute.

♦◊♦

In many ways, the Good Men Project was born not out of the men’s
movement—or men’s rights movement, masculism, anti-misandry, or
MGTOW (men going their own way)—but out of the brutal facts of our own
lives as fathers, husbands, and guys trying to make a living. In fact, I had
never even heard of any of these philosophies until I started writing about
my own life and publishing the stories of other men. In the process I
somehow got myself in the middle of a political issue that to me completely
misses the fundamental challenge for men in 2011. There are plenty of ways
the law (particularly family law) and popular culture, as represented by the
media, have limited men. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We
made the laws. We control the media. We have, in the end, suffered too long
in silence. Too many of us have knuckled under and become absentee
fathers.

Mothers have more rights than fathers, more women are going to college,
and Oprah rules the gender discourse. So what? Do
 we allow ourselves to be emasculated by
feminism, by divorce law, by women who, God forbid, want to break the
glass ceiling once and for all? Or do we embrace their successes while
developing our own powerful voice for good in the world, most particularly
when it comes to be being fathers and husbands? To me, having guys beat
drums or set up some grand zero-sum gender war ignores the opportunity—
an opportunity that’s right in front of our faces—that we might figure out a
way to get out of the cave of our own suffering.

To me this opportunity has always been about the power of completely

unfiltered communication between men once they stopped thinking about
what they were “supposed” to be saying and started speaking from the heart
about their own lives. In fact, it saved my own life. I realized that I could
learn a lot more from men—damn good men—with no formal education but
a lot more street smarts than I had. No poetry, no gender warfare, no
bullshit. Just the truth.

♦◊♦

I was surrounded by 30 other men at a grade school classroom in South

Boston, many of whom had been sober barely 30 days. They looked pretty
tough, and I imagined I must have been the only one in the room without a
gang affiliation. The leader at the front of the room began to speak about his
structured approach to sobriety. “You miss a session and you are out,”
explained Frank, a blond guy in his 40s. “You are required to do each
assignment and come prepared to every meeting.” Frank asked us to stand
up and pledge our commitment to this course of action, posing a series of
questions to which the group responded in unison, “Yes I will.”
Frank began to tell his story. He’d been to prison for breaking and entering,
but now worked as a mechanic for the MBTA. He talked about family
members who were dead from overdoses or had been shot in drug deals gone
wrong. “I gotta admit to you guys,” he said, “I was driving over here and I
stopped at a light in a neighborhood I had no real reason to be in. A couple
of hookers who I know better than I’d like to admit from the old days came
to my window. The thought crossed my mind. But then I thought of this
room full of guys. Always remember that a thought and an action are two
different things.”

My initial feeling of not belonging vanished as Frank spoke. He talked with

a level of honesty that I’d never heard before—one that made me reconsider
my own life. Hearing Frank’s unvarnished story of addiction and the
struggle for sobriety was a great relief.

I’d grown tired of listening to men talk about alcoholism as though they
were delivering some kind of political stump speech. These were working-
class drunks, mostly Irish Catholics, with equally strong doses of blind faith
and bad behavior. Many had done time and had experienced lows well
below mine. Listening to them talk made me stop feeling sorry for myself in
a hurry. I had a penthouse apartment and two healthy children. I had endured
a bad marriage, an inferiority complex, and a vicious drinking problem. I
had lied to myself and others and had gotten caught cheating, but at least I
had a roof over my head and plenty to be grateful for.

To get to the root causes of our alcoholism, Frank asked each of us to get a
notebook and start writing. This was the fourth step: to take a fearless moral
inventory. Frank handed out pieces of paper with the guidelines, “One for
resentments, one for sexual misconduct, one for fears, and one for harms
other than sexual. Dig deep. Write it all down. Once you’ve identified the
facts, start thinking about how it affected you. What part did you play? I
don’t care if some fucker punched you in the face, you had some role in that
happening. Write it down.”

Several weeks later, I still hadn’t written a thing. I asked Frank to meet me
for a quick dinner before class. We ordered fish and chips at a fry joint on L
Street and sat at a scratched Formica booth, with graffiti scrawled across the
table. Our food arrived just as I started complaining about my ex. He cut me
short. “I thought you told me you cheated on her, Tom.”
“Yeah, so what? She is still being a complete bitch, never giving me an inch,
accusing me of being a bad father,” I snapped back.

“Well, what you did was not right, plain and simple.”

“Yeah, but …”

“No fucking buts about it, pal. Let that sink into your fucking brain.”

I thought to myself, Why the hell am I taking advice from an ex-con who
was just last week talking about cruising hookers, but pushed that thought
away because I trusted that, despite our apparent differences, Frank was the
first person willing to tell me the truth. I tried to listen to what he was
saying.

“The only way you are going to get over fucking up is to admit that you did.
Stop denying it,” Frank continued. “You made a mistake. A big one.”

I realized that the whole point of what we were doing in Frank’s sessions
was to actually change behavior, not just talk about it. In the past, not taking
full responsibility for the impact of my actions—even if I’d apologized,
which I did frequently—got me nowhere. Writing down column after
column of times I had committed the same sin, however, made it hard to
refute my defects of character. If drinking to excess was insane, this shit was
even more self-destructive. It was the reason I drank.

“Maybe you are right,” I admitted. “I can’t seem to get over feeling shitty
about being a cheat, which causes me to do all kinds of insanely stupid
things to cover up the past. I just keep making the same mistake over again
in the present.”

“Bingo!” Frank said. “Let’s go help some sick motherfuckers who have a
hell of a lot more to worry about than you do.” With that, Frank got up and
paid our bill. We walked over to the classroom. Our group was down to 12
guys; everyone else had decided that drinking was a better option. Not that
they hadn’t wanted to be good men at some point, but somewhere along the
road they had fallen away—again.

♦◊♦
As a man aspiring to be good, I’ve gotten into a heap of trouble with women.
I realize that the current men right’s movement is based on how men get
screwed by divorce laws. Like so many other dads, I’ve stood outside my
ex-wife’s house after dropping off our kids—Seamus, who was 1 year old,
and Kerry, who was 3, when we separated—and cried in agony. I was
tempted to spend my time in the years after my divorce railing against the
laws and, frankly, the whole female sex. But at the same time, I wanted to
find love and believe that I could be a good man to some woman—and to do
that I had to rediscover some long-lost innocence that would allow me to
shed all the bad behavior insulating me from being hurt again. I had to find
the balls that I had lost along the way, and stop being a cheating bastard like
so many other men these days.

To do that, I needed to hang out with some good men in a faraway country.
♦◊♦

Next: Tuscany, a crush, and jammie-joes

About Tom Matlack

Tom Matlack is just foolish enough to believe he is a decent man. He has a 16-year-old daughter and 14-
and 5-year-old sons. His wife, Elena, is the love of his life.

Comments

1. thehermit says:

March 14, 2011 at 9:11 am

Some intellectual honesty, at least.

Basically what you say is everyone should clean up his own mess, and mind his own business.
It’s a honorable observation, and i respect it regardless of i’m an MRA or not.
But.
The biased laws still exist all over the so called “western world”,
and it has nothing to do with what vanished from your heart. Do you think they will just fade
away? Do you dare to say us to shut up and take it like a man? Everything is our own fault
anyway, is not it?

I’m not angry at feminists. I’m not angry at all, but i want justice, and i’m not alone. Enough is
enough. Men are not perfect,nor as fathers nor as husbands, but that’s not a reason to treat them as
 secondary citizens. What i miss from feminist discourse- don’t forget they have power and
trillions of dollars in their hands- is exatly the honesty. As i see it, if they have to choose between
justice and power, they will choose power.

I’m sorry but good or not, you’re still a nitwit.

Reply

2. Amber says:

March 14, 2011 at 10:37 am

He’s not saying to just take the abuses of the system. He’s saying that if you want want to end the
injustice, then you, as an individual, have to end the injustice yourself. He’s also basically saying
to stop blaming others. A lot of the injustices prevalent today have been brewing well before
feminism. The thought that women are more nurturing than men has been around since the
practical beginning of human history because women for most of human history have been the
primary caretakers of children, whether they were nurses or nannies or mothers or what have you.
So it was always assumed that because of this, women were more nurturing. I’m not saying it’s
right at all. I’m just saying this because feminism had nothing to do with it. The case of Rostker V.
Goldberg concluded that because women were excluded from combat (and remember, feminists
are fighting to get women in combat), they would not be needed in the draft, and that thought still
continues to this day and has nothing to do with feminism. So to blame men’s problems on
feminism is completely forgetting that most of the issues today have been brewing well before
feminism. Men of the past punished present-day men with these issues, not feminism.

Reply

o Jacobtk says:

March 14, 2011 at 12:56 pm

Yet in a way he is telling men to just take the abuse from the system and women. The
injustice that divorced fathers go through does not start with them. It is done to them. As
much as Tom is right that men should not wallow in their sorrow and settled into hating
women, he is wrong in suggesting that fathers ought not rallying against biased laws that
strip their children away from them. I cannot imagine any decent father would settle for
never seeing his kids unless he jumps through every ridiculous hoop his ex puts up. The
right thing to do would be to fight for his kids, and even if that means changing the law.

No one should blame feminists for all men’s problems. However, there is a correlation
between feminist policies and the treatment of men in today’s society. It is obvious in
family and criminal courts, in the treatment of male victims of abuse, and how men’s
grievances are treated by society. Skirting around that would be akin to skirting around
the impact of religion on people’s view of homosexuality.
 Like Tom, I do not think the solution is for men to drum around a campfire. However, I
also do not think the solution is to blame men for their own problems. Yes, I understand
that from a social and feminist standpoint any bad things–from getting divorce to losing a
job to getting abused–that happen to men are their own faults. That said, it is quite easy to
guilt men into self-blame. It is more difficult to look at the situation honestly and
acknowledge that there is no one-size fits all explanation. It is not just one person’s or
one group’s fault.

So I do not think the tacit “man up” statement helps. That sentiment is the very reason
men suffer silence. Yes, there are plenty of men who do not take responsibility for their
actions. There are also plenty of men who take responsibility for other people’s actions.
They do that because as men that is what is expected of them. If the goal is to get men to
come forward and talk about their problems, then people need to stop with the “it’s men’s
own fault” refrain.

Reply

o wavevector says:

March 14, 2011 at 3:44 pm

You have a myopic understanding of both history and feminism. Before the late 19th
century, children were considered the property of the father, and he would retain full
custody in a divorce or separation. The current day preference for maternal custody is a
direct consequence of the first-wave feminism of the 19th century:

“The pioneering feminists of the nineteenth century fought hard to establish custody
rights for mothers in the face of a common law tradition that gave fathers paramount
rights of custody and control. At the very first women’s rights gathering in 1848, the
newly drafted Declaration of Rights and Sentiments presented custodial rights for
mothers as one of the primary demands”

http://www.law.berkeley.edu/3158.htm

So yes indeed, feminism is very much to blame for the discrimination against fathers in
family courts today. Modern feminist organizations such as NOW have fought against
laws for the “rebuttable presumption of shared parenting” that would equalize the post-
divorce parental involvement of fathers and mothers.

Reply

3. Henry Vandenburgh says:

March 14, 2011 at 10:50 am

 I’m a bit taken with Bly, I’ll admit. I don’t think gender is a tabula rasa situation, so mechanical
feminism where “men learn from women” or some such only produces angry, passive-aggressive
“feminist” men much of the time (who all too often dominate women.)

Reply

4. thehermit says:

March 14, 2011 at 10:51 am

“So to blame men’s problems on feminism is completely forgetting that most of the issues today
have been brewing well before feminism. Men of the past punished present-day men with these
issues, not feminism.”

This is exactly what i had in mind when i said no honesty, no self criticism on the feminist part.
Amazing.
You still believe you exist in a vacuum.

Stop blaming others? What are you doing with this post?

Yes,you blame men of the past, men of the present, everyone excluding yourself.

As i said, feminists have power what MRM don’t have. Even in the law making process. Realize
it.

Reply

5. Wolf Pascoe says:

March 14, 2011 at 11:45 am

Tom,

Yours is a powerful story.

Just to clarify about Robert Bly, his significant contributions to men were twofold, and didn’t
involve either lutes or drums.

First, he said that men needed to learn about being men from other men. This was not obvious
when he said it–during a time when many men were receiving instruction about being men from
women. Although this is axiomatic today and reflected in your story, it did not go over well at the
time. Bly was both vilified and ridiculed for it, in particular by feminists.

Second, Bly said that some problems of individual men were deeper than personal. If one man has
 a problem, it may be a matter of psychology. If many men have the same problem, something else
is going on. Bly, who was a disciple of Jung, speculated about the “something else” in terms of
myth and story. He was also ridiculed for this, although these concepts have since proven useful to
many.

As to poetry, I believe it was William Carlos Williams who said,

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

Reply

o Boysen Hodgson says:

March 14, 2011 at 1:31 pm

LIKE. Thanks for this wolf. Well captured.

Reply

6. Keyster says:

March 14, 2011 at 12:56 pm

Ah yes, yet another “Men need to MAN UP” diatribe.

The Men’s Movement, the REAL movement, not the one you’re trying to promote here, is not
about Men vs. Women. It’s about the damage feminism has, and continues to do, to society and
our future generations. Are your kids better off in DayCare or at home with their mother? And
that’s just for starters…

As a society we need to stop exalting “grrl power” at the expense of boys and making people
PRETEND, (for fear of offending thier delicate political correctness sensibilities), that women are
simply fantastic at everything they do vis a vis men. It’s wearing very thin.

Reply

7. Mervyn Kaufman says:

 March 14, 2011 at 1:22 pm

I always thought Robert Bly was a pompous son of a bitch, but since no one else was openly
asserting the rights of men at the time, I kept quiet. Somebody had to hoist the banner.

Thus, I found Tom’s confessions, if that’s what they were, refreshingly honest and reassuring. If
anyone’s truly serious about self-changing, it’s clear you’ve got to bring up all the ugly shit and
then deal with it openly. It’s almost like a surgical experience: peeling away and cutting open. No
wonder so many guys chicken out and back away. In writing this, Tom didn’t opt for melodrama,
but the subtext suggests that to get where he is today has been a truly wrenching experience.

Reply

o Tom Matlack says:

March 14, 2011 at 6:34 pm

Thanks Mervyn I appreciate the kind words.

Reply

8. Boysen Hodgson says:

March 14, 2011 at 1:53 pm

My MKP men’s group meets in an urban warehouse next to Charlie’s Diner … in a moving
company that is quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks. There’s not a drum in sight. And yet
… there is magic and raw poetry in the voice of a man telling the whole truth. Poetry, stories,
songs, narratives, prose … all the same. Mythopoesis … the recreation of reality through story.

You ended up in a circle of men because of your addiction. I ended up there because I wanted to
live up to my own expectations for what I could be. Same thing.

Maybe there is no separation? Maybe you’re still standing apart because that’s the story you really
like to believe about yourself. And from where I’m standing … that is indeed bullshit.

In 2500 year old Tantric philosophy there is a concept that goes “I am not you, I am nothing like
you, I am nothing but you.” And so it seems.

Reply
9. zjsimon says:

March 14, 2011 at 2:03 pm

Just saw a great speech on 21st century feminism for the TED talks and this article is the perfect
match. They both leave out some things, but that’s the point of progress over dogma, right? I’ll be
forwarding this to all the same people who got the TED video.

Reply

10. Female Feedback says:

March 14, 2011 at 2:04 pm

Nice essay.

I think one place where I think we may see change in coming years is that as more men participate
in family life and share the good earner, good parent, good partner role that many of us women are
trying to do as well, it will be easier for boys to reach adulthood. There will be less need for fights
with other boys and men to be the sine qua non of “manhood,” for emotional isolation, for acting
out things rather than articulating them first. More boys will have a compassionate-mentor type
father and mothers who can relate to them, which will make boyhood much easier.

My only suggestions are:

1. To get out of the mindset that this has to be done with other men. Having the strength to discuss
these things with your family is what I would think is the sine qua non of “manhood.” Fearing that
Oprah dominates things is legitimate; many women do try to be dominant rather than a participant
themselves or just leading when necessary. But many of women try hard not to dominate family
life and to be on a peer level with men in the home, and, of course in the marketplace/workplace.

2. You say “how hard it is to try to be a good dad and a good husband and breadwinner, which is
what women still expect of us, all at the same time.” Regarding this word “breadwinner,” many of
us women don’t want men’s careers to be more important than ours. We do want men who have
some means in the political economy but the ability to be an equal participant as a husband and
father is more important to us than the man being the primary provider of money.

Reply

o Female Feedback says:

March 14, 2011 at 2:07 pm

Sorry – I made some confusing typos in the above – corrected here.

Nice essay.

I think one place where I think we may see change in coming years is that as more men
participate in family life and share the good earner, good parent, good partner role that
many of us women are trying to do as well, it will be easier for boys to reach adulthood.
There will be less need for fights with other boys and men to be the sine qua non of
“manhood,” for emotional isolation, for acting out things rather than articulating them
first. More boys will have a compassionate-mentor type father and a mother who can
relate to them, which will make boyhood much easier.

My only suggestions are:

1. To get out of the mindset that this has to be done with other men. Having the strength
to discuss these things with your family is what I would think is the sine qua non of
“manhood.” Fearing that Oprah dominates things is legitimate; many women do try to be
dominant rather than a participant themselves or just leading when necessary. But many
of women try hard not to dominate family life and try to be on a peer level with men in
the home, and, of course, in the marketplace/workplace.

2. You say “how hard it is to try to be a good dad and a good husband and breadwinner,
which is what women still expect of us, all at the same time.” Regarding this word
“breadwinner,” many of us women don’t want men’s careers to be more important than
ours. We do want men who have some means in the political economy but the ability to
be an equal participant as a husband and father is more important to us than the man
being the primary provider of money.

In sum, I get the sense you may still be deferring to women as the primary parents and
want the role of primary provider. If you step out of that into peer marriage/peer
parenting/peer earning, a whole new world of liberation can be found.

Reply

 Eoghan says:

March 14, 2011 at 5:28 pm

Most women want to retire or semi-retire 5 to 15 years into their career on the
strength of the family wage.

It all very well saying that women want everything to be measured so that it
reflects equal outcomes (feminist ideology) but thats not how it plays out in the
real world, because men and women generally make different lifestyle choices,
hence differing outcomes, the so called wage gap and glass ceiling, for example.

Reply
11. Eoghan says:

March 14, 2011 at 2:49 pm

“But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We made the laws. We control the media. We have,
in the end, suffered too long in silence. Too many of us have knuckled under and become absentee
fathers”.

This is a total and utter nonsense, the ruling class make the laws, like 99.999 of men that have ever
lived, I have had nothing to do with law making. And the laws that the mens movement rails
against were put in place by legal dominance feminism, NOW and feminist jurisprudence.

You are watching us, learning and picking up little bits and piece trying to encode feminism in a
faux mens movement.

Reply

o Eoghan says:

March 14, 2011 at 2:51 pm

edit

Corporations control the media, not men in general.

Again, only feminists and weak minded men are going to buy this.

Reply

12. Morrisfactor says:

March 14, 2011 at 3:15 pm

“Or do we embrace their successes while developing our own powerful voice for good in the
world, most particularly when it comes to be being fathers and husbands?”

Pretty hard to have a powerful voice as a divorced father when the standard “cookie cutter”
visitation schedule in America is: “every other weekend and two hours on Wednesdays” – and that
possible only if your ex-wife decides not to move to another city or state or obstruct your visits.

Women’s “successes” have come at the expensive of fathers/husbands/children – just ask any man
 and his children who has gone through divorce.

The abduction of my daughters and the actions of corrupt Family Court/Divorce Court is why I am
now part of the MRA. I won’t rest until I see changes.

Reply

13. typhonblue says:

March 14, 2011 at 4:32 pm

Man up, because women can’t.

“But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We made the laws. We control the media. We have,
in the end, suffered too long in silence.”

Maybe you can’t. Maybe the real power is in the negative space that the phrase ‘man up’ carves
out.

You define the laws. We define you.

Reply

14. typhonblue says:

March 14, 2011 at 4:40 pm

This is an amazing portrait of a man who is incapable of acknowledging female agency in his life.

Wow. Just. Wow.

“I feel like a decent guy, and I know that, more importantly, I am raising my sons Cole and
Seamus to be the same and my daughter Kerry to know what a good man looks like. ”

But not raising your sons to know what a decent woman looks like, of course.

Well here I am, safely shielded behind the rampart you’ve erected between woman and person. All
I can say? Thank god I’m not married to you. Or your daughter.

Reply
15. Eoghan says:

March 14, 2011 at 4:51 pm

See how ordinary men are being asked to take on and internalize the nefarious actions of the ruling
class and their propaganda outlets, how convenient for them and unfortunate for any man that does
buy into it, its a recipe for self loathing and mental bondage. Todays original sin.

Reply

16. Tom Bombadil says:

March 14, 2011 at 7:51 pm

Mr. Matlack:

Robert Bly and his “Iron John” had nothing over “Iron Joe Bob”

http://www.amazon.com/Iron-Joe-Bob-Briggs/dp/0871135531

It is the real, although satirized, story of the Mens’ Movement.

As for me, I feel that men are inherently “good,” and further, that they should be able to define
what that means on their own terms, separate from the opinions, values, beliefs, and attitudes of
women.

Reason, accountability, and responsibility is an equal opportunity endeavor and women are just as
culpable as men for the public havoc and private strife that exists in the world.

For men and women both, it is ignorance combined with desire that is the cause of most of our
suffering.

Reply