Iron John: A Book about Men

by Robert Bly

In our families, we can rise above the shame of having an alcoholic father by adding fuel secretly to our grandiose rocket, pulling away from the family, riding upward on that fuel. Or we can sink down into the shamed child, become him, be no one else, live in our secret unworthiness, lose our king, and become a slave. There is a pleasure in becoming a slave. Then we can turn into an addict, and never be in charge of our own life, and shame ourselves further.

During the last thirty years men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, how to follow rather than lead, how to live in a nonhierarchical way, how to be vulnerable, how to adopt consensus decision-making. Some women want a passive man if they want a man at all; the church wants a tamed man—they are called priests; the university wants a domesticated man—they are called tenure-track people; the corporation wants a team-worker, and so on.

Some women feel hurt when a man will not “express his feelings,” and they conclude that he is holding back, or “telling them something” by such withholding; but it’s more likely that when such a man asks a question of his chest, he gets no answer at all.

A man whose King is gone doesn’t know if he has the right to decide even how to spend the day. When my King is weak, I ask my wife or children what is the right thing to do. I’ve had strange adventures in buying sweaters. For example, I can’t decide which is better, the green sweater or the purple. My wife says, “The purple one is beautiful.” The green sweater actually fades in my eyes, the color changes, becomes ugly. I can’t believe that I ever found that sweater attractive.

The process of bringing the inner King back to life, when looked at inwardly, begins with attention to tiny desires—catching hints of what one really likes. William Stafford describes that as taking in our fingers the end of the golden thread. We notice the turns of thought, or language, that please us. One remembers at forty or fifty what sort of woman or man we really like. What were the delights we felt in childhood before we gave our life over to pleasing other people, or being nurses to them, or doing what they wanted done?

Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5 A.M. and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work. A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that his life belongs to his work, his children, and his marriage. Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying all our time.