AG:

Went to a 'Post-Iron John' talk by Robert Bly in 1992.: the importance of older men initiating boys into their manhood.

His point was driven by the number of single parent feminists who once thought they didn't need men but were now asking him and other men for help raising their sons.

Feminism, he intoned, got that wrong. Boys need male mentors and his book Iron John tried to explain that to mothers, hell to all of us.

He continued with this statement which brought an angry reaction from the feminists in the crowd:

It's time that feminists defined their dark side.

One strident standing up and loud response?

"We don 't need no misoginist Sigmund Freud telling us what's wrong with women!!!"

Bly's cogent reply?

"Like many Feminists you didn't listen. I said it was time that Feminists defined their dark side."

"Shame and blame does not work. Removing boys from positive male role models doesn't work. To do so will only invite boys to work out their own initiations: which will involve great risk, senseless violence and greater fear of peer-sexualized young men."

Damn if he wasn't right.

Lamentably, successive waves of non-egalitarian feminism have failed to define their 'dark side' and so find themselves trapped within their own dogma, paralyzed by intractability and lost in a maze of absolutism, with no shades of grey, which purports that women are not fully human.

And if they are human and express their dark sides, it is because of the evil patriarchy, the amoral equivalent tenet of 'the devil made me do it. "

Thanks, another good shout out for dialogue instead of diatribe.