Stephen Wicks' 1996 volume entitled Warriors and Wildmen: Men, Masculinity, and Gender may be small in size but it makes an, er, man-sized contribution to masculist literature, packing a powerful punch with its deft, mellifluous summaries of most pertinent aspects of the men's movement. Wicks has evidently combed through a pile of men's movement books - leading authorities and unsung authors alike - and collected and polished the jewels hidden in each of his sources.
He has also done some hard thinking of his own and come up with rapid-fire sequences of trenchant, original insights.
The author pinpoints the core of the male dilemma, noting rnen's dependence on external definition (subject to outside appraisal) and our consequent, seemingly paradoxical vulnerability. Wicks suggests that a good part of women's confusion and frustration regarding men stems from their own ability to take their sexual identity for granted and their failure to grasp that men cannot do the same. Men's need to create things hooks up neatly with our need for sex-affirming activities and our (generally speaking) far greater devastation when we are unable to affirm our procreative abilities. Thus our familiar Achilles' heels - avoiding intimacy and discomfort with emotion - are wounds we absorbed as a result of the underlying male predicament.
Wicks cultivates a mild authorial tone but has no patience for feminists' attempts to have things both ways, as with their attributions of the violence of a Jack the Ripper to male moral inferiority while at the same time suggesting that hordes of female Edisons and DaVincis may have been prevented from flourishing due to "male domination of the cultural realm." While genetic explanations have some relevance, Wicks sees men's lack of natural grounding and connection as the primary factor compelling us to persevere against considerable odds in the drive to define ourselves through achievement. When things go well, we get Beethoven. When they don't go so well, we get Attila the Hun.
The author's brief section on initiation is particularly enlightening, as is his slightly provocative suggestion of the importance to men and society of the reservation of specifically male roles. Where such special male functions are not present, Wicks writes, men are much more likely to leave the social web or disrupt it with violence and other sociopathic behavior. I was also intrigued by his speculation that men may have as much difficulty linking sexuality and intimacy as women have delinking the two. I appreciated his discussion of problematic aspects of the father's role as well as a suggestion of directions in which we can strive as Dads.
The flaws here are relatively minor. Wicks implies a couple of times that men commit the overwhelming percentage of domestic violence, though later in the book he corrects this misimpression by citing authors who have proven women's parity in this department. An appendix containing a number of engaging if dated statistics suggests (without offering any definition of the term) that 350 colleges and universities offer "men's studies" courses; if this figure were applicable (as of course it is not) to masculist courses, it would undercut the thrust of good sections of the book. Finally, the author's suggestions for improvement of men's legal rights are too faint-hearted and are phrased too generally to be of any real help, suggesting a rare moment of slapdash superficiality.
My only substantial complaint lies within the province of the publisher rather than the writer. Not counting the generally useful appendices and preface, this slim volume amounts to only 124 pages, meaning that it lists for almost exactly half an American dollar per small page. Sure, the library binding is nice, but how can a publisher dare to charge this much for such a modest product? Nevertheless, if you can save up some spare bucks and get a used copy on amazon or elsewhere, you will be remembering the wealth of wisdom offered by Wicks long after you have forgotten about the thirty bucks.
J Steven Svoboda
