and we need to keep that. I said, “It’s easier to socialize a young man into being a
warrior than to be a father.” You can do that in the marine corp. And men are geared
for that in some way, but to socialize them into being fathers is a different matter. We
should be honoring fathers instead of attacking them. I think all of the older men have to
be one of the reasons we like young men to come. This weekend if we say if you want to
bring your son, he comes free. Because it’s important for the son to hear the fathers say
how important fathering has been to them. How important it is in their life. How it’s
twice as important as anything they thought they were doing in business. Young men need to
learn that. So I say it’s as hard to socialize a young man into being a decent and
responsible father as to socialize them into being a decent and responsible artist. In the
sibling society you’re supposed to have no training and become an artist in fifteen
minutes, be a father in fifteen minutes. No, so we have to decide, do we want to allow the
military to keep deciding what masculinity is. Or would we like to take some part in it
ourselves? And I understand the amount of anger that women feel over the patriarchies
demeaning of women, my wife and my mother feel tremendous anger about that. And yet all
men are lumped together and we say all men are rapists or all men are patriarchal, that’s
not socializing men to be responsible fathers. It’s shaming them again.
Q: Why are women and the feminine so feared by men?
Well, I’ve already mentioned, I’ll just mention it again. They are afraid of being
shamed. Why are men afraid of women? The answer that’s being given now is a very strange
one. That all fetuses in the womb are originally female, we know that. And when the baby’s
marked to be a boy at about the age of six weeks, changes begin to occur, two hundred
fifty of them. This eventually changes the body from a female into male, changes the
brain, changes all these things. So, when the boy comes out he’s really not sure that he’s
a man. Men are an experimental species. And the boy’s afraid he’s going to slide back.
This takes place below the level of consciousness. But you can still feel it in
seventeen-year-old boys. That’s why they go to military school. Because there will be no
one around there that will be feminine male. And they see a feminine male, they feel
terrified that somehow they will slip back again. That’s the terror.
Male terror of homosexuality. They’re afraid they are going to slip back again into the
place in which they came. Now that was the purpose of initiation in the old days. That
when the boy comes out of the womb his body is masculine but he isn’t finished. The
journey isn’t finished at all, and the older men then would come in at the age of 8 or 10
or 12 and say, we’ll finish this journey. We are going to try to teach you what adult
masculinity really is like. And in places what they would do is take the boy away from the
mother, bring him out in the woods and then the old men would dance for a night and a
day-and-a-half, tell incredible stories and the boy’s eyes get big — is this what being
male is. And that is very beautiful. And then they’d tell him stories and all of that.
Women should not oppose the initiation processes of the boy, because the attempt is not
to brutalize the boy, but to lead him forward into a kind of responsible and gentle
masculinity that he’ll never pick up out of television. So there are many initiatory
practices that are cruel and brutal, but that doesn’t mean that you throw away the
possibility of initiation.
The thing that I have said that’s had the most effect is that both men and women need
mentors. They need older women and older men as mentors. And the other day I was at a
funeral in a New Hampshire and a woman came up to me and said she wanted to thank me
because she had three sons and her father and husband died and she read my book and
understood about the male mentor. And she said she wanted to show me a picture of her
youngest son. She wanted me to know he’s got a mentor now in school, a coach, and the
coach is very sweet to him and to see how the boy looks when he has a mentor. You
understand what I’m saying? And women have to understand that about their sons. And you
have to be careful in picking a mentor. There are a lot of wicked old men out there. Can’t
be sentimental about that. You have to check them out. But there are certain things that
only a male mentor can do that the mother, no matter how great she is, won’t be able to
do. And I think it’s true of women too. That no matter if the father is raising the
daughter alone, no matter how good he is, they would still need an older women as a mentor
for her. In Minneapolis there is a wonderful old woman, MaryDella Sir, who’s an old
commie. She’s about 88 years old now and they have women’s meetings in Minneapolis so the
young women can come and just look at her.
Q: You’ve said that masculinity is denied in our culture. Some feminists have
responded to your work saying that a men’s movement encourages rigid gender roles and
creates a sort of masculinist nationalism that further consolidates male power. What’s
your response?
The purpose of having men’s groups to which you invite younger men is that the younger
men need teachers as to how to go into a gentle and responsible masculinity. And the
mothers try to teach them, but the fathers and the older men need to also. They’re never
going to learn gentle responsible masculinity from the mass media or the television. So we
have to say that.
Q: If the mass media and popular culture condone or encourage violence, how can
we curb violence when good parenting isn’t present to counteract those pervasive forces?
You’ve talked a lot about the importance of mentoring. Isn’t that a solution?
As for decreasing violence. If you have an unparented child, something will happen.
When you’re looking at gangs of young men, you’re looking at young men who have no older
man in their life at all. And when a young man feels unparented, he will try to burn your
city down for you. When a young woman feels unparented, she may become depressed or have a
teenage baby, but a boy will become violent. And we have to realize that the greatest
danger to the culture is coming from these young unparented males all over the world. And
if we want to do something about that, instead of pouring money in from Washington, one
thing you would do is you would go to South Los Angeles and you would ask in the black
communities who is a responsible older male here. And they would know. They only know that
at the block level. Then you’d go to that older man and you’d say to him, “Listen,
I’m gonna give you eighteen thousand dollars and I want you to keep two young men out of
prison in that time.. It costs thirty-five thousand to keep a young man in prison. It
costs more to keep a young man in prison than to send him to college.” And the older
man then has something to do and the younger man has someone to talk to and be with. And
it’s astonishing the changes that come in young men when that happens. We do a lot of work
in this group now with gangs. Sometimes we have fifty-percent black men and sometimes
thirty-five percent of those are gang members. There was one in Los Angeles in which two
young men came in who’d already killed over eight men and were there. And it’s astonishing
how they will change when they realize there’s older men who are interested in them.
Online Source: http://www.pbs.org/kued/nosafeplace/interv/bly.html