From the Introduction of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, published in 1990 by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette:
Patriarchy is an attack on masculinity inits fullness as well as femininity in its fullness. Those caught up in the structures and dynamics of patriarchy seek to dominate not only women but men as well. Patriarchy is based on fear — he boy’s fear, the immature masculine’s fear — of women, to be sure, but also fear of men. Boys fear women. They also fear real men.
The patriarchal male does not welcome the full masculine development of his sons or his male subordinates any more than he welcomes the full development of his daughters, or his female employees.
How often we are envied, hated, and attacked in direct and passive-aggressive ways even as we seek to unfold who we really are in all our beauty, maturity, creativity, and generativity! The more beautiful, competent, and creative we become, the more we seem to invite the hostility of our superiors, or even of our peers. What we are really being attacked by is the immaturity in human beings who are terrified of our advances on the road to ward masculine or feminine fullness of being.
Patriarchy expresses what we call Boy psychology. It is not an expression of mature masculine potentials in their essence, in the fullness of their being. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Introduction, xvii.
And from Fire in the Belly, by Sam Keen:
The historical challenge for modern men is clear — to discover a peaceful form of virility and to create an ecological commonwealth, to become fierce gentlemen.
How we can accomplish these monumental changes is unclear. As modern men we have little experience to guide us in the task of becoming earth-stewards and husbandmen. We do not yet know how to take the fierce warrior energies, the drive to conquest and control, the men have honed for centuries, and turn them toward the creation of a more hopeful and careful future. We do not yet know how to restrain our technological compulsion, limit economic growth, or keep population within an ecological balance. We do not yet know how to act purposively and rationally on the natural world in a kindly way. We have not yet developed technological wisdom, technological discipline, technological stewardship. Ecological destruction is not the result of science and technology, but of social decisions that allow scientific and technological institutions to grow in undisciplined ways. We do not yet know how to distinguish progress from growth, development from frantic activity. We have not yet found the courage to calculate the true profit and loss to all species that results form trade, business, and industry. We have not yet created a form of government in which the nonhuman constituency of the land are given an equal voice in decision that determine the fate of all members of the commonwealth of living beings.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 