Iron John: A Book about Men

by Robert Bly

Among the Hopis and other native Americans of the Southwest, the old men take the boy away at the age of twelve and bring him down into the all-male area of the kiva. He stays down there for six weeks, and does not see his mother again for a year and a half. The fault of the nuclear family today isn’t so much that it’s crazy and full of double binds (that’s true in communes and corporate offices too—in fact, in any group). The fault is that the old men outside the nuclear family no longer offer an effective way for the son to break his link with his parents without doing harm to himself. The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort—only through the “active intervention of the older men.”