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What's going on here? Are we looking at a backlash against the pounding men have taken? To some degree, yes. But it's more complicated than that. "The sensitive man was overplayed," explains Seattle-based lecturer Michael Meade, a colleague of Bly's in the men's movement. "There is no one quality intriguing enough to make a person interesting for a long time." More , important, argues Warren Farrell, author of the 1986 best seller Why Men Are the Way They Are, women liked Alan Alda not because he epitomized the sensitive man but because he was a multimillionaire superstar success who also happened to be sensitive. In short, he met all their performance needs before sensitivity ever entered the picture. "We have never worshiped the soft man," says Farrell. "If Mel Gibson were a nursery school teacher, women wouldn't want him. Can you imagine a cover of TIME featuring a sensitive musician who drives a cab on the side?"
The women's movement sensitized many men to the problems women face in society and made them examine their own feelings in new ways. But it did not substantially alter what society expects of men. "Nothing fundamental has changed," says Farrell. Except that both John Wayne and Alan Alda have been discarded on the same cultural garbage heap. "First I learned that an erect cock was politically incorrect," complains producer Seligson. "Now it's wrong not to have one."
As always, men are defined by their performance in the workplace. If women don't like their jobs, they can, at least in theory, maintain legitimacy by going home and raising children. Men have no such alternative. "The options are dismal," says Meade. "You can drop out, which is an abdication of power, or take the whole cloth and lose your soul." If women have suffered from being sex objects, men have suffered as success objects, judged by the amount of money they bring home. As one young career woman in Boston puts it, "I don't want a Type A. I want an A-plus." Chilling words that make Farrell wonder, "Why do we need to earn more than you to be considered worthy of you?"
This imbalance can be brutal for a man whose wife tries life in the corporate world, discovers as men did decades ago that it is no day at the beach, and heads for home, leaving him the sole breadwinner. "We're seeing more of this 'You guys can have it back. It's been real,' " observes Kyle Pruett, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Studies Center. "I have never seen a case where it has not increased anxiety for the man."
There has been a lot of cocktail-party talk about the need for a brave, sensitive man who will stand up to the corporate barons and take time off to watch his son play Peter Pan in his school play, the fast track be damned. This sentiment showed up in a 1989 poll, conducted by Robert Half International, in which about 45% of men surveyed said they would refuse a promotion rather than miss time at home. But when it comes to trading income for "quality time," how many fathers will actually be there at the grade- school curtain call?