Robert Bly On Male Violence Essay, Research Paper
[Note: The following is a transcript of an interview with Bly from the PBS program
"No Safe Place: Violence Against Women" which aired March 27, 1998. Click here to visit
PBS's companion web site for the program]
Q: What are the roots of male violence? Is it just a part of men’s nature? A
desire to maintain control? The absence of the father role model? Is it rooted in the
patriarchy?
The roots of male violence. I’ll give you three answers that almost any sensible person
gives, and I’ll give another one that we’ve learned lately. The roots of male violence
obviously go back to maybe four hundred thousand years of killing animals. And, so i
the beginning, men were asked to be violent. And after that, as you know, after the
hunter time, then people went int agriculture and the cities began to form. Then
there was a surplus of grain and then neighboring people come to steal their grain. And
they think there was no real warfare in the hunter-gatherer groups. But once the cities
were formed, there was violence. So we have that in our bodies.
Another reason I would give as to the roots of male violence is the amount of shame
that men take in. Women take in tremendous amount of shame too, but women have talked
about that for a long time. They discuss it, even in high school, that they went out on a
date and they felt ashamed of this and the men simply say they, they lie — "Buddy, I
scored this, and I did… — you understand what I’m saying. So it takes a long time
for men to learn to be able to talk about their shame. And sometimes what happens in the
family is that a woman will say a criticism to a man, perfectly ordinary criticism, and it
goes into some shame place in the heart, and he can’t get it back out. And the only thing
then he’ll do, you understand me.
So when people talk to me about violence, I say we have to think about shame. We have
to think about the man being able to say at that moment, “I feel ashamed here by what
you just said.” And the woman says, “Well, I didn’t intend that. I was just
trying to point out that you said you were going be, but you weren’t.” So we do a lot
of work with that. To try to, there’s a great book called Shame by Gershin
Caufman that talks about that. And I’m a shamed person, so I know something about that
Violence is not in the way that I went and my father didn’t go that way, but I
think he treated his shame with alcohol.
The third thing and a fourth is this: you know the movement that we do (no matter what
is said in television) about running naked in the woods and beating drums and all that
stuff is really an effort to make men more expressive. This would be expressive. Many men
numb themselves so they’re not expressive. If you’re too expressive in IBM, you get fired.
And, so th e reason we tell stories and when we have groups we recite poetry, read poetry
to them for an hour before we go on to anything, that’s expressiveness being able to do
that. So I want to now relate that to violence, shall we?
A John Lee is here and he is the one whose done the most work in the country on anger.
So one of the things he’s worked out is that there’s three stages in this violence. First
of all, there’s the experiencing of anger which is felt inside, then there’s the
expression of anger verbally, and then there’s the attempt to expel the anger from the
body. They’re quite different. What happens is that we find that when we get many men,
younger or older, they will experience the anger that they have and the when you ask
them to express it, they can’t do it. They’re not expressive in poetry or in anger. So
he’ll put two people together and he’ll say to one man, “I want you to be this man’s
father.” Then you’ll have them hold their finger so they can’t hit it or anything and
say, “Now I want you to tell your father exactly how you feel about what he
did.” and then the second man encourages him more. “Oh, you sound like a
wimp.” And suddenly you have 40 men shouting at the top of their voice and expressing
anger that they never expressed in their life, and then when that’s over, John says,
“Now were you hurt by what he said?” “No.” Because it was played. And
he turns to the audience, where you hurt? No. You must learn how to express anger in a way
that no one will be hurt by it. And you practice doing this with your friends, you do not
do this at home. The purpose of a man’s group is that they can express this anger and get
wild, they and men. No one’s hurt by it, and then they’ll say, "You are not to do
this at home."
So another way we can say that is until they learn this expressiveness being able to
verbally do it with metaphors and so on. What happens is that we have men who go from the
experience of the violence to the attempt to expel it — wham — in 20 seconds. Expelling
it means you want to hit something or somebody, do you hear me? It’s as if the anger is in
your body and you think you can get it out by doing that. And John say never expel the
anger with the same person with whom you express it. If you express your anger to men in a
men’s group and after you’ve done it fifteen times, as to how you’re angry with your wife
because she looks like your mother or whatever all that is, then condense it and go to
your wife and say, “By the way, I want to say this to you, without the anger.”
The anger should be done with the men, you understand what I’m saying? And then if you
still have anger in your body, you go out and take a stick and start hitting the ground
because the ground doesn’t mind receiving the anger. The Indians in India say all anger
comes in the vegetable world and it doesn’t mind, the earth doesn’t mind to receive it
again. You know, incredible idea. But that’s very, very helpful.
Q: Why should a man’s anger be shared with other men?
It’s good, because men have to learn to express those emotions over and over quietly, a
little bit every day, not wait until suddenly the wife throws something at them and –
wham — it all comes out. Women are very different that way and one of the things you
notice is that a woman will wake up in the morning and this will happen, and then she’ll
call her friends and she’ll say, “You know, I kicked the garbage can this morning. I
think maybe I must be angry about something.” And they’ll talk for a half-an-hour and
she’ll figure out what she’s angry about. You understand? Men don’t do that. They don’t
kick the garbage can. They don’t even think of it until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon when
they get home and suddenly — bam — it comes out, towards the wife, or towards the son,
or something like that. You understand me? Expressiveness means that you continue to do
it, you don’t wait until 2:00 in the afternoon.
Q: You’ve talked a lot about the looming cultural crisis, in which society is
absent of authority and adolescene rules. How is violence tied into that?
So you’re asking about the amount of disrespect that’s happening in the book I’m doing
called The Sibling Society. I say it’s one of the worst qualities of the sibling
society that the disrespect towards women, towards adults, towards parents, toward
teachers and it’s increasing. There are third graders now that say to their
teachers, “You’re nothing but a teacher and I don’t have to obey you.” I met, or
I’ve heard of a man recently, his name was Ryke, it isn’t one of the well-known ones who
says that a culture is defined by what it says no to. Not by what it says yes to. So,
what’s happening in the sibling society is we say no to almost nothing. We say yes to
pre-teen sexuality, we say yes to watching television forty hours a day, we day yes to pot
and smoking and drinking and spending your life, and we say yes to all those things. What
do we say no to? So, one of the important things would be to learn to say no to
disrespect. And when your child says something disrespectful you say, “Sorry, but
that’s not allowed.” We can’t do that. It has got to start early. I don’t know if
that’s an answer to you but…It’s amazing tha we as parents, who lost some kind of
integrity in the 60s, started becoming perils of their children instead of someone who
says no.
Well, the question is from whom does the child receive its knowledge of what’s proper
to do? In talking with the parents. The old tradition is that you cannot change a child
into a grown up without a lot of conversation with adults. In America, the typical time a
man spends in conversation with the son or daughter is ten minutes a day. In Russia, the
old Russia, it was two hours a day. Now the saddest thing the New York Times reported
is that with women their time of conversation with the children is falling rapidly. It’s
approaching that of men now. And the women who stay home do not spend any more time in
conversation with their children than the women who work. That’s incredible. They’ll talk
with a daughter or the son a few minutes and then they’d all sit down and watch
television. So the question then is, who teaches the child how things get done in the
world? Well, the answer is the television. And a capitalism has come in between the parent
and the child. And for capitalism and action movies, the violence is obviously the way you
make money. And they’re understanding it more and more. So, therefore, this poison is
coming in all the time. It’s a pro-violence poison. And the idea of making someone like a
Schwarzneger the head of the fitness movement in the United States — I mean Reagan did
that and it was a totally insane idea. He stands for that kind of violence and, you know,
it’s getting worse now because the video games withing six months are going to have such
clean definition that you can hardly tell the difference between a living person, and so
far they’re just cartoons. But what if it looks like it’s actually a person there, and
then you kill that person in the same way you kill little puppets.
I think that it’s a primary job of parents now to realize what Neal Postman says that
television is making childhood disappear. It’s giving children too much knowledge too
quickly of all the corrupt sides of adult material. No one wants to become an adult, and
it’s tying all that behavior into violence. So in my book, I’m going to say something
like, if parents allow their children to watch television of that sort before they can
read, they go to jail. I feel that it’s a real crisis. And that to allow that, if a person
came into your house and started killing your cats and your dogs and throwing things
against the way, you tell them to get out. But we allow the television to remain. It’s as
if we’re in a trance. We don’t understand. It’s an invader in the livingroom.
Q: How should we deal with male batterers?
There’s a friend, a black man from New Jersey, who has been working with the largest
program for male batterers in the United States in Rhode Island. It’s been going on ten or
twenty years. But he was profoundly disturbed by what he found there. He was the only male
on the staff, all of the patients were males who had been sent there by the courts, and
the way they wer treated was by shaming them, to make the men feel ashamed that they
were batterers. And that makes sense on the surface and yet the reason they are batterers
is because they are already ashamed in the way we were talking about. And what’s more,
this kind of shaming people out of things does not have any resonance psychologically. The
Russians tried to do that with alcoholism. They would get the people in and shame them and
say you’re a terrible person, you’re an alcoholic, you should never be so bad. They go
back out and drink immediately. So, what is necessary I think is for many more men to be
allowed to talk to the men or to discuss with them. One day the video broke down, and so
it didn’t work, and so he asked a certain man why why are you here? And the man said his
wife four years ago was going out to get some cigarettes and she was killed by random
gunfire: "So my girl friend last week started out of the house, and I took her arm
like this, and I was put in prison for that act of violence…" But no one had asked
him why he took her arm. He was terrified that the same thing would happen to her. No one
had asked him this question because they thought they could solve this just by shaming
him.
We know now you can’t get children to behave by shaming them. You have to ask them,
"Why did you actually steal that money? Did you want, were you really stealing love?
Is that what you were doing?" So what I’m saying is that the women who are dealing
with batterers, my suggestion is first of all that they listen much more to the story and
don’t make up their mind immediately that the person was always a batterer by nature. And
secondly, we need men in there to do a lot more.
Q: Is prison a solution?
Well, I’ll just mention this to you and I know it isn’t an answer, but it came through
my wife’s work. She worked for a long time with battered and abused children in Northern
Minnesota and with sexually abused children. One of the things that happened there is that
when they would charge a man with sexual abuse of a child, what would usually happen is
that the sheriff would go to see him and say things like, you know, "You gotta
straighten up, John." They found out that the only way to have any permanent affect
in the child abuse was to send the man to prison would make him realize what he is and
they’d have various names for him. And so therefore, the social workers in Northern
Minnesota a few years ago were going around to the district attorneys and saying,
"Please put these men in jail, even for six months." Because when a man tells a
man something, they often hear it, I say anything to you, and there is that decency
quality in men. We mustn’t suppose it’s gone and even those men in prison when they see a
man come who has abused children. They will make it clear to him that man’s a dog as far
as they’re concerned. It’s not quite an answer to your question, but prison is a perfectly
good solution for a lot of those men and for the rest I think we should set up programs
where men have a lot to do with it.
Q: Some people feel your book Iron John encourages antipathy and anger
toward women, that Iron John is the archetype of antagonistic masculinity. What’s your
response?
Well, that depends on if they’ve gotten the idea from the media or if they read the
book. Those who have read the book, I mean my daughter was at Yale at the time Iron
John came up and she had a lot of trouble there. People would come up and say,
“Your father is sexist," and Mary would say, "Well, have you read the
book?" "No." And so the other day she said, "It’s changed a lot now
because a lot of the women have read your book now and they know that isn’t so." But
what happens also is that there’s a story here and we’re not very good in taking in
mythological stories, and so some people don’t hear that they hear only the word, like
Iron John, means a man who has been under the water so long he has gotten rusty. But
people would pick up the word iron and I was accused of wanting men to pump iron. There
was a book called a parody of the book called Pumping Iron. In which we’re not and I’m not
an antagonistic to men, to women, or to men. I taught women for ten years before I began
teaching men, and the media doesn’t even pay any attention to that, because they’d like to
put you in the category. The most dangerous thing is to imagine that if a man likes and
admires men that he thereby dislikes women. And that is elementary. Dualist thinking. And
we have to say no. That’s not where I am. That’s not where Iron John is at all.
Q: Margaret Mead has talked about the role of fathers. How can fathers play a
more important role in modeling a more nurturing masculinity?
You mentioned Margaret Mead. I admire her tremendously. One of the things that she said
in her book is that a fatherhood somewhere in the past of the human race, they got the
idea that men could be nurturing fathers. It doesn’t happen among the primates often. With
chimpanzees they don’t do that. So, fatherhood for men is a learned behavior. And we need
to realize that learned behavior is passing now. We have to say that’s a precious behavior