Common Ground: Boys Club

April 2008 | Life, the Universe and Everything

Boys Club

by Andy Isaacson

The American man is twice screwed. The first hit occurs early, when X and Y codes us into thinkers, rather than feelers. The second we might blame on society, which encourages us to keep the feelings to ourselves. Repression begets therapy bills. Relationships falter — plagued, in part, because we’re never taught how to communicate.

Five years ago, a coworker of my girlfriend at the time asked if I wanted to join his “men’s group.” The idea conjured the few, popular images I had for men gathering with other men: Greek acronyms, gang hand signals, potato chips. But this was to be a postmodern sort of men’s group — male bonding in the guise of group therapy, with herbal tea and hummus dip.

I seemed to be yearning for this. The closest friend around me at the time was my girlfriend. The most troubling thing in my life was, also, my girlfriend. I clearly needed to work shit out. I needed a band of brothers.

The “men’s group” — a gathering of men in this modern form, anyway — emerged as a corollary to 1970s feminism. Patriarchy, some men felt at the time, is a bitch. Chauvinism oppresses women, locking them into traditional gender roles — but what of its effect on men? As their wives and girlfriends became liberated, these men, hoping to reprogram themselves for a new era of male sensitivity, sought the support of each other. A 1971 Time magazine article counted 30 such “consciousness-raising rap sessions” in the Bay Area alone.

The group I joined included a massage therapist, a transpersonal psychologist and a meditation instructor. It also included a computer programmer and a juice bar worker. We met monthly in a San Francisco loft apartment. Each person had a turn facilitating, though we often deferred to the psychologist. Intimate emotional baggage about people’s lives surfaced during those three-hour sessions, and for a time, strangers became brothers. But our gatherings also suffered from what seemed a perpetual discussion about the group itself. Some felt it wasn’t serving their needs. Others began drifting away, drawn to other priorities. We eventually disbanded, and I never saw any of them again.

It would be two years before I was approached by a new friend about joining his men’s group. Much had changed in my life: My girlfriend and I had long since broken up; I had switched careers, and moved cities. This group had already been meeting for a year, and in joining I felt like the new bassist in a band that had been recycling bass players. We soon jelled.

The group more resembles a ritual gathering of tribesmen than band practice. The six of us sit arranged around candlelight. Smoke from wood of the South American Palo Santo tree permeates a space we’ve rendered distinct from the banalities of everyday life. There are scattered glasses of red wine sometimes, which serve less of a sacramental function as they are, perhaps, just evidence of a group of guys hanging out. And like any such gathering, however intentional, we might veer into discussion of sports — if Acro Yoga could be considered one.

But our circle is no coffee klatch, and telling too much “story” is viewed as gratuitous window dressing (“We’re not your fucking diary,” I was once chided, affectionately). We are encouraged to pare down our sharing to the essential truth, and resist our inclination to give advice and fix another’s problems. Rather, we act as mirrors, offering reflections that challenge one another to solve our own problems, help us see answers where there may be questions, or questions where we may think we have answers. From a place of care and nonjudgment, we dig, exposing the patterns we perceive in each other’s personality styles and behaviors.

The guys share their aggravations around chronic back pain; the self-doubt and personal triumphs of work; reconciliations with estranged siblings and challenges with difficult in-laws. If one’s life resembles a collection of snapshots over time, then our monthly meetings are like scheduled photo shoots, an occasion where our present experience is captured by a group of witnesses who can reference — perhaps better than we can ourselves — how the picture looked two months, or even two years, earlier.

And yes, the ladies get airtime. We listen to the anxieties of a newlywed. We witness one man’s transition from bachelorhood to finding, and then moving in with, the love of his life. We support another man as he calls off an engagement, only to find his life open up to more meaningful romantic possibilities. We sit there as two of us share the emotional ebb and flow of dating. And we try to support one of our own as he becomes a father for the first and later second time, and then questions the relevance of being in a men’s group comprised of men without children.

In the midst of our fluctuating lives, the group offers a stable base camp, but in a deeper way resembles something timelessly human: a group of kin, sitting around a fire.

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