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From the Beat poets' incarnation of the \"white Negro\" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. InTaking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies likeRamboandTwister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Manprovocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

\"Yeah,\" he said, \"but with a mancation you do it somewhere else. You get a little change of scenery. Plus, there's usually some activity involved. Hunting. Racing. Whatever. Something macho.\" \"I think I like this macho idea,\" my friend John said, as he quaffed an amber ale with a large slice of orange floating in it. He then growled \"Mancation! Mancation! Mancation!\" before looking up and smiling. \"Do I sound manly?\" he asked. This notion of reclaiming \"lost\" manhood seems to pop up every decade or so. I first noticed it in the early 1990s, with the publication of two books that became huge bestsellers. One was Robert Bly's \"Iron John: A Book About Men.\" The other was Sam Keen's \"Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man.\"

\"In a world of cults, gurus, and self-help programs, we need to be mindful of how accepted beliefs often get in the way of true understanding,\" he says. As he sees it, real wisdom is born of \"epistemological humility\" of bewilderment in the face of life's enduring mysteries. \"The spiritual craving of our time is triggered by the perennial human need to connect with something that transcends the fragile self, to surrender to something bigger and more lasting than our brief moment in history,\" he writes in his book Hymns to an Unknown God. \"Spirituality is in,\" he writes. \"Millions who have become disillusioned with a secular view of life, but are unmoved by established religion in any of its institutional forms, are setting out on a quest for something -- some missing value, some absent purpose, some new meaning, some presence of the sacred.\"

Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly, uses the term to describe those of us who are searching the regions of inner space, and sees the challenges as vast as those of the astronauts who explore outer space. He also uses the phrase \"shifting tectonic plates of our culture\" to describe some of the massive changes that are occurring around us. The turbulence of adolescence is certainly an indication of major shifts occurring beneath the surface. The adolescent wanders through that no-man's land between childhood and adulthood. He or she is in the midst of an evolutionary process from which an adult identity will begin to emerge, is struggling with the meanings of masculinity and femininity, freedom and responsibility and is also being asked to make decisions about future vocation. We must not define the resulting tremors as the problem, and simply try to eliminate them.

Unless it's forgettable gag cartoons, we're not talking about innocent little drawings. Whether it's the brilliantly rendered mayhem of a Chuck Jones animation, or the subterranean subversion of a Dr. Seuss story, cartoons are the volatile playthings of the Id. In the The Guardian, Steve Bell regularly portrays George W. Bush as a hairy, hooting ape (not that much of a stretch, given Furious George's simian semblance). The Guardian cartoonist has been given a lot of licence; some readers might say too much. As with most things in the public domain, the question is where to draw the line without erasing free speech. Author Sam Keen's 1991 book, Faces of the Enemy, investigates how graphic arts have often served political purposes, by using caricature to dehumanize the Other. Keen isn't just interested in wartime propaganda from the Soviets, Germans and Americans. He casts a skeptical gaze on global political cartoons from the late 20th century, and finds the codification of bigotry and xenophobia in a few cleverly rendered lines. (However, the best political cartoons function to deconstruct propaganda, rather than endorse it.)

Occasionally you might see something on television about the men's movement. When there's not much else going on, some footage of guys sitting around a sweat lodge beating on their tom-toms is good for an 11 o'clock news snicker. White guys playing Indian is the men's movement equivalent of '60s women burning their bras. The men's movement, meanwhile, worries about its innerself and frets about reconnecting with its fathers and sits around in sweat lodges beating on its tom-toms. D.L. STEWART'S column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays in Lifestyle. Address letters to D.L. Stewart, Features Department, Dayton Daily News, 45 S. Ludlow St., Dayton, Ohio 45402.

Sam Keen thinks easy answers need to be tested with hard questions. He thinks it's time to examine the roles women play in wars where it is almost always men who die. He thinks it's time to examine the roles women play in everyday wars in places like Miami and Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio. On the same day U.S. Army pilot Mike Durant of Berlin, N.H., faced a captor's camera in Somalia and described the horrors of war, Sam Keen faced a Sinclair Community College audience and raised disturbing questions about the causes of the wars men fight abroad and at home. As he considers the part that women play in the violence of men, Keen rejects the notion that he is playing the \"blame game.\" Instead of blame, he is more concerned with the roles that make victims of us all. The roles that say men are supposed to be strong and protective while women are expected to be weak and defensive. These, he says, are the roles that send men off to war to fight other men. These are the roles that make possible the violence of men against women.

A contributing editor of Psychology Today and author and co-producer of the award-winning PBS documentary \"Faces of the Enemy,\" his books include \"Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man.\" [LaVerne Gordon], a retired Chevron Corporation Supervisor, began with 25 volunteers in 1996 and \"propelled Tax-Aide Contra Costa into a well-organized team of technicians, instructors, screeners, greeters, tax counselors, file-transmitters and site supervisor personnel,\" according to a news release. \"Wild West Days at Horse Faire 2012,\" featuring equestrian-related activities and other fare with a western theme, takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 7 at Heather Park Farm's equestrian area.