Liberation pressures men, too

By Penelope McMillan

• Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES Maybe it was inevitable after so many years of public concentration on the women's movement that men would start thinking more seriously about themselves after what one Los Angeles psychologist, Herb Goldberg, calls the "self-flagellation, mea culpa, we've-got-to-stop-beingchauvinist-pigs' approach."

Whatever the reason, men have started to look at their ritual poses and roles.

The subject has spawned two national men's groups in the past year and over the last several, an estimated men's

5,000

consciousness-raising groups, 40 men's centers and scores of fathers' rights organizations seeking to break the female grip on child custody.

At the heart of the new interest is a recognition of a double bind, no-win situation a man accepts in childhood through his socialization

and then preserves in adulthood when he inherits the power to change.

He is taught to be stoic, brave, to mask pain and fear. He must know where he is going in life, and he must be competitive, aggressive, successful, a "winner" necessarily himself.

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but not

He can have "buddies," but he can only talk of "approved" subjects such as sports, sex, business, politics. He cannot confide self-doubts or discuss the hell of a troubled marriage or job failure for fear of being thought weak or unsuccessful. He cannot seek emotional or physical closeness for fear of being thought homosexual.

Women's liberation has not helped. Ironically, says Michael Diamond, medical school psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, it has added "an incredible amount of pressure. Now the pressure is not only to be the breadwinner but also to be liberated."

Liberated means being all the things men were never socialized to be: emotionally expressive, gentle, less success-driven.

The negative influence of women is central to Goldberg's table-turning on the now almost universally accepted tenet of feminist theory

that men oppress women. "Women want everything," he says. "Men who are successful, powerful, who take charge but who are also soft, warm, loving, qualities almost impossible to have in the same person. The kinds of internal mechanisms that make a man extremely powerful and highly successful are frequently in total contradiction to being a good companion."

"Most women overlook their unconscious commitment to and benefits from the man's self-destructive style," Goldberg says.

Since women's lib has been killing off "earth mother," transforming her into an independent, self-

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sustaining individual who gets a great deal of emotional support from others of her own sex, men can find themselves quite alone and cut off.

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"At this stage, that's threatening to men," Diamond says. "They don't know what to do. Where are they going to get the nurturance?"

Since change for man must be psychological

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not sociological like the women's movement where Congress and the courts can help it has been slow. Goldberg believes "changes are primarily in respect to tremendous pressure. Maybe to hold onto his wife, he baby-sits. Maybe in the evening, he does his own cooking. A lot of guys are doing that not because of a caring response but to survive in a relationship when the woman is changing."

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"We haven't seen a men's revolution," Diamond says. "Men are where women were 10, 15 years ago."