The crisis in mature masculinity is very much upon us. Lacking adequate models of mature men, and lacking the societal cohesion and institutional structures for actualizing ritual process, it’s “every man for himself.” And most of us fall by the wayside, with no idea what it was that was the goal of our gender-drive or what went wrong in our strivings. We just know we are anxious, on the verge of feeling impotent, helpless, frustrated, put down, unloved and unappreciated, often ashamed of being masculine. We just know that our creativity was attacked, that our initiative was met with hostility, that we were ignored, belittled, and left holding the empty bag of our lost self-esteem. We cave in to a dog-eat-dog world, trying to keep our work and our relationships afloat, losing energy, or missing the mark. Many of us seek the generative, affirming, and empowering father (though most of us don’t know it), the father who, for most of us, never existed in our actual lives and won’t appear, no matter how hard we try to make him appear.
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore, Doug Gillette