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The various movements of the 1980s and early 1990s that have come to be called the "men's movement," but especially the "mythopoetic" branch of the movement represented by poet Robert Bly's best-selling book, Iron John (1990), present the paradox of some of society's seemingly most powerful members' complaining about their victimage. To be white, male, and upper-middle-class hardly seems a disadvantage to most Americans. Some culture critics are tempted to see the "men's movement" as a fleeting fad to be ridiculed, as the creature of mass media and of the "therapeutic society" gone wild. Literally. The phenomenon of men's groups gathering at wooded retreats for weekends of drumming, storytelling, crying, and hugging, goes this argument, will soon be behind us and we will look back at the early 1990s fad as cute and quaint, but of no lasting social importance. Other critics, predominantly feminist women and profeminist men, see the men's movement as something more sinister, as part of the backlash against women, their social movements, and their putative accomplishments (Faludi, 1991, esp. pp. 300-312). But even these critics tend to assume that the mythopoetic men's movement, lacking a political action agenda, is of no real threat as a social movement, except as it signals a growing public attitude willing to blame women for men's troubles (Hagan, 1992).
Both views of the mythopoetic men's movement, we believe, seriously misread its significance. We see the movement as the latest in a line of "New Class social movements" arising since World War II.(1) The emerging "New Class," a professional middle class centering around information rather than the commerce or the production of the older, entrepreneurial middle class, holds an enormous amount of power over the public narratives by which Americans understand themselves as individuals and as collectivities. This relatively privileged "knowledge class" paradoxically has felt the need to form social movements aimed at revitalizing the culture they inhabit, changing some fundamental values in the very social order that is the source of their privilege. Thus, beginning in the 1950s the New Class has played a significant role in peace movements, in the women's movement, in anti-nuclear movements, in the environmental movement, and in the animal rights movement. The men's movement, in all its variants, strikes us...