Bert: I described your book Knights Without Armor (order on-line) as one of the best and most comprehensive books on Men’s Work. There, a group of men in recovery put down their poker cards and started talking about, then feeling, men’s issues. Now you and Elizabeth have teamed up with Gender War, Gender Peace, describing a week-long retreat into the Sierra wilderness with a group of men and women. How did the one evolve into the other?

Elizabeth: We actually started thinking about this book while Aaron was working on Knights, really, from the time we started being in a relationship. We had ideas for this work and actually started holding workshops and councils together while Aaron was writing that book.

Aaron: Often I felt I wanted to focus my energy just on men because a lot has been said about women. For every title dealing with men’s issues there are about 50 titles that deal with women’s issues. But Elizabeth and I had been having this dialog for a while, even while I was writing Knights.

This book is like Knights Without Armor meets Women Who Run with the Wolves. At some point, as men, we must come back into the world which is co-inhabited by women. It’s not sufficient for the men’s movement, for us just to meet alone in our own council. Any more so than it is for women, any more, to just meet alone. Ultimately, without giving up any of the gains, psychological, emotional and spiritual, that we get from the solidarity of being with our same-sex group, we also need to forge better relationships so we can have better families, communities, romantic relationships, and work relationships with the other sex.

Elizabeth and I saw there was a pressing need, not just for a new book, but for some people out there planting the stake and saying, "Let’s have peace talks." Bringing groups of men together, into open dialog with each other. It’s a very different thing than what's been happening for the most part. So far it’s been about men and women standing at opposite sides of the gender gap and shooting missiles at each other. There are certainly gains from warfare. Certain issues get communicated. Territory gets claimed. But war is not the only solution to our problems. We’re trying to move more into a language of diplomacy between women and men, so we can move to a new stage, what we’re beginning to call "gender justice." This is a very different idea than "men’s rights" or "women’s rights."

Bernetta: What I was curious about, after reading your book, was what impact the week-long wilderness retreat you described had on the participants?

Elizabeth: Everybody, to differing degrees, was able to use the material when they went back into their lives. They got the opportunity because they had the experience, the felt sense, of what it feels like to sit together with the other sex, feel safe, and feel they can speak the truth. This is something that needs to be brought into power in our culture, in our personal relationships, at work, or wherever. They all walked away with a rekindled sense of hope. Now they’re all struggling over how to keep this sense from going away.

Aaron: We found that the issues that the characters in the book faced, in their small group, are the same issues that we hear over and over again in our larger groups. We’re meeting with 200, or later this month, a thousand women and men at a marriage and therapists association conference. We’re working with government agencies and big businesses, applying the same principles that we did for the gender council in the woods. We find that the techniques for gender diplomacy and gender reconciliation, and the kinds of stories and issues that came up in small groups, are the same issues that we’re grappling with in society as a whole. The lasting impacts we hear about from the participants we wrote about in the book, are the same impacts that we hear from people who come to a one-day training. We deal with a large number of counselors and human resource specialists. They say, "We’ve been through ten or twelve years of university training, and have worked in our field for ten or 25 years, but this is the first time we have ever sat down in a room, women and men, faced one another, talked about our real issues, and talked the truth."

That’s amazing to us. It’s such a simple thing, just to get together and talk.

Bernetta: Everything gets so confused between women and men.

Elizabeth: Mostly what we hear first is anger. It’s the quickest reaction to come up, when women and men get together. It explodes. There’s a lot of hurt, and continued wounding. The skill of learning how to be vulnerable with each other seems to be one of the most significant things that we’ve discovered through this work. If we bring together people who are angry with each other, and get them to talk about how they’ve been hurt, how difficult it is to be a man or a woman in this culture, and have the other sex just listen to that, all of a sudden a lot of the anger, the walls, the issues, begin to melt. Women begin to see how men are hurt.

Aaron: They being to see their humanity, underneath the armor.

Elizabeth: They begin by seeing the caricature that gets built up in the media, the powerful corporate man who has all this power and privilege, and who’s oppressing his secretary and his wife. Then they begin to hear about a man who’s struggling with his job, and whose children have gone with his ex-wife and he doesn’t get to see them anymore. He doesn’t know how to communicate with women. He’s confused. He feels blamed. Then you have humans talking to one another.

Aaron: Women are astonished. They say, "We didn’t know this. We’ve never heard men talk like this before." By the same token, it’s a lot easier for men to hear about women’s issues, and be responsive to women’s legitimate requests for equality and parity with men. It’s happening in a way that their issues are also being heard. I hear Elizabeth say that for women to move further, they need to move out of this martial, warrior stance with men. That may have been an appropriate strategy in the past. But for them to figure out a way to work in partnership, collaboration and community with men, they both have to listen to one another. We all need to recognize that women and men have equally valid points of view on all these issues, and equally distressful injustices particular to their own gender ground. Gender reconciliation councils help bring these issues to light.

Bert: You talk in your book about "gender justice." What do you mean by that?

Aaron: In any given circumstance, take any issue that’s of consequence to women or men, what we find is that there’s always another side to the story. It may not be exactly parallel, but it’s in the same arena in which there’s injustice to the other sex. If injustice is the foundation of the relationship, the organization, the institution or the society, we are going to see that injustice everywhere. For example, in the workplace women make 70 cents on the dollar, and that’s not fair. Any reasonable man, even some of the most radical men’s rights activists, have to admit that’s not just. Women should get the same pay form the same work that men do. One of the reasons that feminism has many gains as it has, is that a lot of reasonable men have agreed that that’s not fair.

But we also see that men are getting killed on the job, twenty-to-one over women. Because we as a society expect them to do the more dangerous work. We have lower standards of health, safety and care for men. So they’re also injured or disabled at a much higher rate. Twice ass many women as men have health insurance. That’s not fair. That’s not justice, either.

If we’re going to talk about unfairness in the workplace, instead of just focusing on women’s rights, to make more for the same work, or men’s rights, to have the same level of safety, care and protection that women do, let’s talk about gender justice. How can we make the workplace fair for both sexes?

Instead of a "mommy track," that just tries to look at the special needs of women to have opportunities to care for their children, let’s talk about a "parent track" that acknowledges that men would also like to be able to get time off to take care of a sick kid, or attend their wife’s birth. Instead of dichotomizing all these issues, as "men’s rights" or "women’s rights" issues, we try to figure out how we can bring it together and see what’s fair for both sexes.

Elizabeth: It’s looking at gender injustice in its fullest sense. It assumes that we’re all involved in the system.

The other thing I wanted to say about "men’s rights" and "women’s rights," that I’ve been seeing more and more clearly lately, is that they’re predicated on the idea that the "other sex" has the power. In order for me to have power, I have to take it away from them. Women need to get power by taking it away from men, because men have the power. I’m seeing more clearly that some of the "men’s rights" advocates have a similar angle, that women have the power, and we need to take it back from women.

The kind of approach that Aaron and I are talking about says that we’re not the issue here. There’s a power dynamic with something outside of us, men and women, and in the system of corporate structure of our culture, or the class system, or the whole educational structure. It’s not something that men or women are doing to each other.

Aaron: It’s something that we co-create. Our idea is a simple idea, but it’s a radical idea. If most, if not all, of the problems are co-created, then the solutions must be co-created. Any time there’s a unilateral solution, women dictating to men or men dictating to women, it may change people’s behavior, but it’s not the ultimate solution.

For example, in sexual harassment in the workplace, what we’re finding is a lot of new rules and guidelines being pinned to the bulletin boards and the federal government coming in saying "this is the new mandate and you’ll have to live by these rules." That will change people’s behaviors, to some degree, but what we’re finding is that it doesn’t change the way people feel about each other. If anything, a lot of the sexual harassment training that’s going on has created more resentment and hostility, rather than less. What we find a lot more helpful is to being men and women together in the workplace and talk about what different signals mean. We look at how different kinds of body language and visual cues mean different things, man to man and woman to woman.

Just a quick example, Bert, let’s say you and are close friends. We work together. When I see you in the morning, I might say, "Hey, how’s it going?" and give you a quick fake-out punch to the stomach, slug you on the arm, slap you on the back or pat you on the butt. I might give you a good-natured insult, like "Where’d you get that awful tie?" Or tell you an off-color joke. Any one of those signals, taken independently, could be interpreted as hostile. But because we’re friends, it’s a man-thing. It’s a culture thing. By exhibiting hostile acts to one another, we’re affirming that we let one another penetrate our boundaries, penetrate each other’s territory. We affirm our collegiality.

When those signals cross the gender gap, they mean a completely different thing. In female cultures those signals are interpreted as rude, hostile, dominating and sexually harassing.

What’s confusing to men is that we’re being told that women want to be the same as us, equal to us in every way, and should never be treated differently than a man, in one breath. In the next breath we’re being told that women are a completely different culture, special creatures that have to be completely differently than we would treat another man.

Now, some men are malicious. Some men want to dominate women. Some men abuse their sexual or physical power. But in our experience, that’s the minority of men. The majority of men are pretty decent guys, who want to get along with women. But we have a different male language.

Elizabeth: The other side of that is that women touch each other more often, make more eye contact, smile more, and stand closer to each other. We certainly talk about different kinds of things. If I were to come up to a man the same way I would another women, he would get very confused by the fact that I might come up to him, touch his arm, look him in the eye, stand close to him and smile at him. He would very likely read that as a sexual come-on. In a different but very similar kind of way, when these signals cross over to the other gender, there’s a lot of confusion. There are a million kinds of examples about how that happens.

Aaron: We find it very helpful to bring women and men together to point out these kinds of differences, and then bilaterially negotiate the kinds of guidelines that they would like to live by. Often what they come up with is exactly the same kinds of guidelines that are being handed down from on high. What’s different is that the resentment isn’t there. Because they have co-solved a co-created problem. When women and men acknowledge that they both contribute to the problem, there can be more open communication and we find that there’s a lot more peace, collegiality and friendship in that kind of atmosphere than the gender warfare atmosphere of "You guys are all screwed up, you’re jerks and now you have to live by these rules," or "You women are all two faced, trying to manipulate us and sending us double messages, so we’ll just shut you out."

Elizabeth: One of the issues that is not being talked about, is what it’s like for the men to have all of these women coming into the workplace. It’s not the same anymore. There are different pressures, different expectations. That breeds resentment, but there’s no opportunity being given for anybody to talk about that. Men aren’t supposed to be panicked by this. It’s not considered "legitimate" for men to be feeling some resistance or fear about women entering into what has traditionally been considered "men’s territory."

Often when I talk to women about this, I will point out that women feel a similar kind of resistance when men come into roles like primary school teachers, which has traditionally been a female domain. He has to be careful how he behaves. He’s looked at with some suspicion. Single fathers who go to P.T.A. meetings are looked at with distrust.

Aaron: Even married fathers. They often feel that their style of patenting is looked at suspiciously. That women hold the high moral ground when it comes to relationships.

Bernetta: It’s hard for a man to be a "househusband," to be a major caregiver. But it would be a wonderful opportunity for children. I would think an ideal grade school would have a good mix of male teachers.

Elizabeth: Yes, and the ideal workplace would have a good mix, so we have the skills of both gender groups. What works best is to realize that we have had these traditional domains, and that we’re crossing the gender lines a lot. That’s part of the nineties. Now can we mentor each other, and facilitate the other gender’s entry? How can women, rather than regarding men with distrust, with judgment and criticism if they don’t parent "correctly," mentor men into women’s traditional domains?

Aaron: And in the same way, a lot of men are mentoring women into the workplace. You raise another gender justice point. What we’ve heard a lot is that women want parity in the House, in the Senate, and as CEOs of corporations. We as a society would benefit from that. But 90% of our primary school educators are female. And education has just as significant an impact on the culture as those economic and political leadership positions. While we’re working for affirmative action for women in the upper echelons, we have the same assertions for affirmative action for young men to get involved in the teaching and other helping professions, where they often feel shut out.

Men are now a declining minority of college students. They’re also the minority of students planning to go on to graduate school. There are increasingly higher high-school dropout rates for boys. Boys are generally getting lower grades, overall, than girls. They have higher suicide rates and more behavioral problems, more attention-deficit disorders. They’re getting lock into institutions ten to one over girls. But in all the emphasis in the schools, when they say "Let’s have gender equity," they say "Let’s have gender equity by helping girls with math and science." It’s a great idea. Female-only classrooms, female teachers, the boys don't interrupt, and the girls get better grades in math and science. But the boys are just as far behind in reading and writing as the girls are in math and science. Isn’t it just as important to read well? Isn’t it just as important to stay in school? Doesn’t the suicide rate for boys, five times higher than for girls, indicate that boys have a self-esteem problem?

If we’re going to talk about gender justice, instead of "girls’ rights," or "boys’ rights," we need to ask how we can make the school more responsive to the sometimes-different needs of boys and girls in these different areas?

Part of that is our problem as men. We don’t speak out on behalf of our own gender as women have. We can’t blame women for that. But certainly we need to redress these imbalances in then gender dialog.

Bernetta: I sometimes think that kids as a whole don’t seem to have any advocates. If they're treated as if they don't have any feelings, the kids treat each other that way, too. I think we have to have to encourage both men and women to nurture children. It’s like the children don't have anybody anymore. They used to have mom, and now they don’t have mom or dad.

Elizabeth: That’s actually why we dedicated our book to the children. The bottom-line fallout of the gender war is that the children are falling through the cracks. Our incapacity to be in healthy long-term committed relationships and alliances with one another as men and women is resulting in an increasing lack of capacity to parent our children.

Bernetta: The children are alone so much. I’m glad I grew up in a traditional home and the mother was there. But it doesn’t have to be the mother. I would love to see more job-sharing, where both parents could parent. In some couples, one parent or the other is the one that’s more comfortable with the kids. We need more choices, but now people seem to think that the only choice is for both parents to work. There’s no value given to the nurturing of children. I think you can live on a lot less, and be with your children.

Elizabeth: I think we need to look at what our values are, as a culture.

Aaron: This speaks to one of the needs for us to be doing this gender work. Instead of it being a battle about women getting more or men getting more, when we get together and start talking like this, we automatically start asking how we can help one another lead more balances lives. I’m getting the idea from our conversation that both men and women are heavily impacted by the expectations and economic demands of society. We’re both often doing as much as we can. How can we rescue one another? Forge partnerships, alliances, and a sense of kinship with one another. We need to look at the whole system, instead of what we have identified as our piece. As long as we’re seeing only the one piece, we’re never going to solve our problems as a culture. Because the problems are systemic, and we need to be looking at the system.

Bernetta: When we look at the children, we see that they are mirroring what we need to work on.

Aaron: That’s right. Children are our canaries in the mining cave.

Bert: What you’re talking about now picks up on what Elizabeth was saying earlier, about power. You say in your book, ""What is needed is a more compassionate culture that recognizes and supports the unique values of each gender. By clearly communicating with one another, men and women can become equally empowered to create a culture that is more concerned with what we call ‘gender justice.’"

As we were discussing this interview the other night, an issue came up. I just finished an editorial urging men and women to write their Congresspersons to support national Men’s Health Week. Almost as many men die from prostate cancer as women from breast cancer, yet breast cancer research gets ten times the funding. How can we get women to support us and why can’t we work together to promote health, instead of getting into an "us versus them" struggle over the research dollars?

Aaron: That’s a great question. I’ve been criticized by some of the men’s movement people for doing this gender reconciliation work. They say that I’m abandoning men. We don't even have a men’s health week yet. And certainly, as Warren Farrell states and I stated in Knights Without Armor, men haven't been heard. But what I’m finding is that now that I’m talking with women, and bringing men into conversation with women, I’m educating about men's issues ten times more than I was when I was just talking about Knights Without Armor. Because I have ten times as many forums. Now I have to share those forums with Elizabeth. I only get to talk half the time. (Laughter.) But I get to talk ten times as often. Universities are open. Schools are open. Government agencies are open. Businesses are open. The television, radio and print media are open. Because this is a much more interesting conversation.

More importantly, not only do I get to talk ten times as much, but women are listening. Before, four or five years ago, men talking about these issues were talking only to men. That was wonderful and supportive, and healing for men, but most women weren't getting the message. They didn’t want to hear it.

But when women know that men are coming to the table, willing to listen to them, they have no choice, out of sheer interest and fairness, to listen to the men’s side of the story. An "I’ll show you mine if you show me yours" kind of game, like little children play. I’ll look at your wounds, if you'll look at mine. I’ll tend your wounds, if you’ll tend mine.

Instead, we’re stuck in fighting over crumbs, which is what a lot of the battles between women and men are. The crumbs are left over from the oligarchy, which has enormously concentrated the wealth and power of this nation into the hands of a few. When feminism says men have all the power, maybe 80,000 or 40,000 men have a lot of power. But the other hundred million plus males in America don’t have that much power, compared with women. If we start reaching out to one another, and figuring out how to help one another out of the mess, when we move into a whole different dynamic, and there’s some hope for us.

Elizabeth: I think the same thing is true for women’s issues and concerns. At this point it’s a better strategy to try and form an alliance with men to change the workplace. The fear is, and I think this is true for both the women's movement and the men's movement, is that we’re going to lose the piece that we’ve found. The piece that women have found by meeting alone and getting together. In coming into conversation, they fear, they will fall back into old roles and end up just taking care of men, not taking care of themselves. And I think men have same fears. In the men’s movement it’s "Wow! I can pay attention to me!" They can delight in the discovery of masculinity, and not having to respond to women’s pressures and all the things we put on one another. That’s why we have really encouraged, in our book and in our work, for women and men to continue to meet in same-sex groups. Coming into conversation with each other does not mean abandoning that connection with your own affinity group, your own gender culture. That’s actually essential. We’re not saying to abandon the men’s movement or gender ground. That is the strength from which we need to expand in order to have these conversations.

Aaron: It’s a pillar we can anchor our bridge to.

Elizabeth: It’s about "both/and," not "either/or."

Bernetta How can a man and a woman work together on these issues in their own lives, on a one-to-one basis with your partner? In a large group you’re sort of monitoring things and there’s the safety of making sure that everyone gets their say. When you've got two people, it’s easier to get out of hand, because there’s no third person. That’s where it first begins, first with yourself, and then with the people closest to you?

Elizabeth: To begin with, men and women need to accept the idea that there are these different cultures. These different cultures have different expectations, needs and taboos. We need to educate women and men about these cultures. For example, over and over again in our workshops we hear that women want men to talk more. They’re really frustrated that men don’t talk. Men feel that women bug them too much to talk. They want to be left alone, to retreat and have more space.

This is a very common theme, although it’s not true for every couple. What happens most of the time is that the woman thinks there’s something wrong with the guy ...

Aaron: That he doesn’t love her.

Elizabeth: Or he’s screwed up. The man thinks she’s a nag ...

Aaron: Needy.

Elizabeth: There are all sorts of judgments that get bandied back and forth. We need to recognize that these are themes that go on, that men by their very nature like to have more space than women, and need to heal themselves by drawing into themselves on a fairly regular basis. Women need connection. It’s part of being a woman. There’s nothing wrong with us that we need that. And there’s nothing wrong with men for needing what they need. Recognizing that takes away the whole blame thing.

Aaron: We’ve begun to realize that a lot of the conflicts that go on in one-to-one, personal relationships are not personal. That’s the importance of learning about these gender differences and gender values. Then we begin to see, "Oh, that’s not something she’s doing against me personally. She’s behaving in a way that’s very consistent in our culture." That’s why we keep coming back to groups, to get at the larger issues. Couples in our groups gain more understanding about the differences, and that tends to raise less blame. Then there’s more opportunity to negotiate.

We aren’t suggesting that guys are just the way they are, love them or leave them, or that women are just like that and you just have to live through it. We are saying that a woman’s whole training in life is to develop her sense of identity through her relationship with others. A man’s whole training in life is to develop his whole sense of identity through separating from others, through being the lone hero, the independent guy who can solve the problem on his own. That’s how he gets his sense of accomplishment. A woman gets her sense of accomplishment by having created a collaboration with the children, women, the church and their social network. Women weave the social fabric together. They get their sense of satisfaction from having done that. When we understand this, then we say that neither men nor women are wrong for being like that.

Historically, from the beginning of time, we’ve had different mandates. Men had to go out and hunt. That’s a solitary sort of thing. It’s done with just a few other men, traveling far from camp for long periods of time. Moving in silence and stealth. Women had millions of years of evolution as gatherers, where they talked to one another. Plants wouldn’t run away when you talked. Women did child care. There was a lot of face-to-face contact, a lot of socializing. Of course we have a different society, but those old tunes are still being hummed by the DNA. A part of us still dances to those old tunes.

A part of us also has the social conditioning, when men are encouraged to make the touchdown, to be the hero. They’ve got to be on top of it, whether it’s in the bedroom, the board room, or the playing field. It’s through their performance that they’re going to be loved. That comes back to the one-to-one relationship. The woman says, "Why don't you tell me you love me?" The man says, "Well, I mowed the lawn. I fixed the screen door. I worked 10 hours of overtime this week, so we could take a vacation this summer. You didn’t say anything about those things I did, you just took them for granted." What he was doing in all those things, from a male point of view, was saying, "I love you. I’m doing those things because I care about you, I care about us having enough money to do the things we want to do." That may be the way a man expresses his live, instead of with flowers and verse.

But a woman may say, "The way I know I’m loved is through verbal acknowledgments, touch, or something like that." Men need to understand that. They need to cross over the cultural gulf, and let her know in language that she can understand, that she’s loved.

One of the things we hear a lot of in our councils is that both women and men feel that the important things that they bring to the relationship are not seen.

Elizabeth: The theme of invisibility comes up a lot. Women feel invisible in different arenas. In the workplace. We hear the theme over and over again that women don’t feel that men respond to their opinions or give them value and merit for what they contribute. One story we hear a lot is of the woman who suggests an idea and is ignored. Ten minutes later a man says the same thing, and everyone says, "Great idea!"

At the same time, men feel invisible at home, that their contribution to the relationship is not recognized or valued, or even seen.

In our councils we have enough time to work a lot and get down into this stuff, and we can actually begin to negotiate back and forth. That’s the real core of the work. The guy says, "I really have to retreat when we have an argument." The woman says, "We really need to talk about it." How do you reconcile the seemingly opposing currents between women and men? I think that’s the trickiest part of the work, and where the diplomacy comes in. Basically you negotiate compromise and taking turns. One of the things that we’ve worked out is that women give men the opportunity to go into retreat, but men make an agreement that they will come back after an agreed-upon length of time and respond with the woman’s need to deal with the issue and come to some resolution.

Aaron: Then women will respect that when a man says he can’t deal with it right now, that he really means that. Maybe he’s just too overwhelmed with the other stresses of his life. Maybe he doesn’t feel as secure in relationship and emotional issues as the woman does. It often takes a man longer to get in touch with what he feels, because we’ve been trained for a lifetime to disassociate from our emotional bodies. It’s like our feelings are at the bottom of a dark well. When a woman asks him how he feels about something, she drops a bucket into that deep well and starts cranking it back up. It may be Tuesday before he knows what it was that he was feeling in that argument on Sunday. When women say "you’re avoiding," or "you never deal with the issues," that’s pathologizing a normal feeling. When a man says that a woman is a nag, a shrew, or a process junkie, he is pathologizing the female mode of feeling.

When we can understand one another’s differences, a woman can say, "OK, go to your cave. But the deal is, when you’ve regrouped, you don’t go out of your cave and slip out to have one with the boys. You’ll come and talk to me." He says, "OK." Her feeling is that she will not follow him into the cave. It’s very dangerous for a woman to follow a man into the cave. What’s when a lot of the domestic violence happens. When a man feels up against the wall.

Bert: Part of the gender conflict may arise from our myths about gender. You talk about Aphrodite as a goddess of the sun. "Solar fire infuses a woman's being and enable her to bring herself forth into the world, while retaining her femininity, her sensuality, and her grace." You discuss male gods of the earth. In our culture, we are so used to "Mother Earth, Father Sky." You say "It is possible to extend our world view and see both genders expressed in all elemental and natural forces. This style of imagination breeds partnership. The alternative is to continue to divide the universe, allocating one domain to the female gender, and the other to the male. This now-outmoded style of imagination breeds war." Can you elaborate?

Elizabeth: What we have come to believe is that the earth is female and the sky is male. We’ve completely divided up our natural world into these gender qualities. What happens from that is that men can’t identify with Mother Earth. They can't feel that sense of connection with all of what we associate with Mother Earth, which is generativity, nurturing, home, a sense of connection of the body. All of those things are interpreted as being female. For a man to identify with those qualities, he’s always faced with coming to imagine them as feminine. That presents a problem for men, because they’re not given a way to discover what might be a male mode of generativity, a male mode of nurturance, a male way of being embodied.

By the same token, we have imagined the sky as being male. When women imagine themselves as becoming assertive, aggressive, fierce and powerful in the daylight world, powerful with a lot of physical vitality, even the kind of spiritual consciousness that is associated with the sun and the swirl of energy, then in order for women to get in touch with those qualities they have to imagine themselves as being in touch with their masculinity. We think it’s much healthier for women to discover what is the feminine form, the feminine quality, of the sun. How can women come into the workplace, get in touch with their focused and goal-oriented power in the world, manifesting power, power to make money, power to be successful, in a way that is not necessarily getting in touch with their masculine? We think of this as being part of how men and women are intrinsically different, that women will have a different style of coming into the world and into the workplace. It’s much healthier for women to discover the feminine sword of power. This is something we don’t really know a lot about.

And by the same token, there might be a particular, masculine mode of creating a home, parenting, getting in touch with your spirituality and self-reflective mode of being.

Aaron: We’ve divorced ourselves from a lot of the old myths, in which we imagine the world and consciousness as a much more rich and variegated, polytheistic world. This has been one of the shadow sides of monotheism. The foundational myths of Western culture are also the foundational myths for gender war. Women divorced from their power in the world, and men divorced from their bodies and their capacity to nurture. Old man God is in the sky and looks over the earth. Sometimes he’s a nice guy and takes care of his people, and at other times he’s really pissed off and he creates war. He doesn’t have a relationship with the feminine. She’s down there on the earth somewhere, under his dominion.

The point I’m trying to make here is that when we talk about myths, we’re not just talking about fantasy. We’re talking about the foundational metaphors that literally organize human behavior and give us our psychology and philosophy, and the way in which we imagine ourselves as women and men. If we’re going to change our gender roles, and change the dynamic between women and men, we have to look at the foundation. That’s why we come back to mythology.

So when men imagine themselves as like this sky god, which is the primary image of sacred masculinity in our culture, we think, "Gee, I have to be like the sun. Always the same."As we talk about in the book, in many ancient cultures men were not imagined as the sun but as the moon. Osiris. Thoth. Chandra and Soma from East India. The Sumerian Inanna. Osiris was the Nile river. He was cyclical, like the moon, ebbing and flowing every year, re-greening the earth. As I think of myself as a man, as a moon, which in our Western culture is the domain of women, I can say to myself, "Gee, I don’t have to be the same all the time." Now we think it’s not masculine if I can’t "get it up." I always have to be positive and optimistic and get the job done and be the same every day, like the sun. If I see that I ebb and flow, some days I’m ready for that activities, but on other days I’m on the wane, going into myself. Some days I’m completely dark. I just want to be alone, away from the world. Then I shift again, and I come back into being in the world. My sexuality is like that. Male sexuality is much more like the moon than the sun. It rises and falls, If we think that it can only rise, when it falls we feel lesser than a man.

That’s why working with the metaphors and the mythologies, our deeper imagination, is really very important. We’re sometimes ridiculed for that, by the concrete, literal-thinking world. But it deeply affects how we think about ourselves. Now that I’ve embraced this idea of inner masculinity, I don’t think I’m a wimp, a geek, a sissy or a jerk, somehow lesser than a man, when I feel vulnerable or soft, or dark. I see that I’m cyclical. I’m on and I’m off.

By the same token, as Liz was starting to say, when women imagine themselves as only being connected with the earth, it’s lovely in certain ways but in other ways it’s a trap. Camille Paglia talks in her book Sexual Personae about the Dionysian swamp of nature that women are sucked down into. She doesn’t understand that the solar value is also a feminine value. She’s still in a dichotomous place. But she’s got this right, that women can be drawn down into this swamp. Claiming your achievement in the world is not through claiming your masculinity per se, but through claiming the solar goddess.

Elizabeth: The solar goddess. I like the idea of feminine fire, this fierce femininity. It’s difficult to talk about because we have so little idea of what this could mean. What could it mean for a woman to come into the workplace with a strong femininity, and still being in her power? Most of us have come to see these as mutually exclusive. Women have thought they have had to divorce themselves from their femininity and become more like men in order to be more powerful in the world. They have to put on the same kind of male coat of armor that men have had to wear. I’m suggesting another possibility, that we could be forcefully feminine, that we could be feminine but direct that energy outward, rather than just keeping in inward in an earthy way. The solar gives us something that is almost like mythological permission or inspiration to imagine ourselves as shining light. We have a lot to discover about what, exactly, that would look like.

Bert: You’re bringing up something that Bernetta and I have been looking for for over a year, and we haven’t found it yet. We have an image of the masculine archetype of the king. What is the queen? The queen is not must a feminine king, like Elizabeth I chopping off a lot of heads. What is queen energy?

Aaron: I think it involves the feminine fire that Liz has been talking about. And feminine authority.

Elizabeth: Yes, female authority, but I think we’re changing our notions of both male and female authority. I’m not sure exactly what you mean when you say we know what king energy is. My understanding is that we’re beginning to change our notions of what authority is, altogether. It incorporates, for example, for both men and women, the capacity to undertake the underworld journey. In our culture, this is not considered to be strong. The capacity to express emotion is considered weak. To fall apart. To allow yourself to descend into feeling, and then to come back up again.

I think a female queen and a male king would have the capacity to express many different people, many different forms. That’s why I’m particularly fond of the goddess Inanna from the Sumerian culture. She’s the queen of heaven and earth. She descends into the underworld, so that her power is not restrictive. I think that’s what we need in this time. What is demanded of us as men and women, to have the freedom to be multidimensional.

The queen and the king have a partnership. There’s room for both. We have the opportunity to go down into the underworld, meet death, meet grief, meet vulnerability, and then come back and bring the gifts of those things back into the world. So the qualities of the cyclical nature, that Aaron was talking about for men, and the cyclical nature of the menstrual cycle, that those powers, which we don’t think of as "power" in our culture, can be brought into our concept of authority.

Aaron: I feel that there can be no real kingdom without the queen, and there can be no real queendom without the king. Ultimately that authority and that power becomes balanced. In most of our myths it’s in concert. The one enhances the other. When the powers are separated from one another, we don’t feel very powerful. Men and women in same-sex groups have a sense of empowerment, and certainly that’s important. But I don’t think it comes into its fullness, in any sense of the word, until it comes into partnership. Because sameness does not provoke us in the same way that otherness does. You’ll notice in the book that we don’t use the term "opposite sex" any more. Because we don’t think that the differences are necessarily in opposition to one another. This is another way in which metaphors are powerful. The "other" invokes the sense that because you are "other" you may have some great mystery, some great gift, something deeper. The "other" tends to draw us closer than does the idea of "opposite."

Because the queen is different from the king, her very "otherness" provokes a transformation. That’s why we fear the "other" so much. Because the "other" has the power to transform us. It draws us into the unknown. It draws us into a different kind of journey, where we have less control. We feel less control when we’re with the other sex. There’s a lot of risk involved. There’s a risk of loss. But in order to transform spiritually and psychologically, we need to take that risk.

That’s why the images of the king and queen are used a lot in the old language of alchemy. The alchemists worked together as husband and wife to make the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. It seems to Elizabeth and me that the reason it’s so ultimately challenging for men and women to come together is that out of strife, out of fire of conflict, out of the fire of working through our differences and staying with our face in the fire, staying connected with one another and dealing with these issues, that the soul-making process is accelerated and deepened. It becomes more rich and complete.

When we come incapacitated, when we can't stay the course of the male-female journey, it falls apart, something gets lost along the way. That’s why we see so much malice and squabbling in the women's movement and the men’s movement. There’s a failure to develop the full king and queen. A failure to develop the adult, mature power. Kings and queens don’t squabble. They have a parental sort of wisdom, a leadership, a compassion, a capacity to hod the fabric of the entire community. That comes from moving out of this adolescent phase of rights and trying to dominate one another, shout at one another, and into a more mature phase of dialectic and interchange, a soul-making process where we can deepen one another and support one another. Then we’ll have a healthier kingdom.

Elizabeth: I’m still thinking about your question, about what the female queen is. It’s an intriguing question that’s provoking a lot of thought in me. I think it’s a hard question for women, because we’re searching for that right now. What would it be like to be completely empowered as a woman? Uniquely feminine and standing in a female body, and being a vehicle for generations of what [Jungian therapist] Naomi Lowinsky calls in Stories of the Motherline that inherited body of wisdom that comes down from generations of women. [Ms. Lowinsky describes the "motherline" as the "embodied experience of the female mysteries" -ed.] The king holds and transmits the fatherline to the kingdom. The queen holds the motherline and transmits the motherline and her queenly wisdom it down to her queendom.

Bernetta: It seems like her role would be in empowering other people, and giving them her blessing.

Aaron: That’s one of the main criteria when you look at a person who’s in a position of leadership. Are they blessing and empowering everyone around them? If the leaders of the men’s movement or the women’s movement are not doing that, then we can see they’re not really manifesting their king or queen energy.

Bert: Our ability to manifest king or queen energy depends on our own sense of beauty and power. Elizabeth suggested in your book that our need to control the person of the other gender comes from our loss of our sense of deep beauty and power as men and women. She said, "The challenge in the coming days of the seminar was to learn how to access their own beauty and power in the presence of other people." This led to mutual empowerment. Can you elaborate on that?

Elizabeth: It’s much easier for women to feel powerful when they’re with other women. If you remember the week-long wilderness retreat we write about in our book, after the women went off by themselves there was an argument about coming back, because we had this wonderful experience about feeling good about our bodies, feeling empowered, strong and vital. There’s this fear that we can’t bring that beauty and power into our relationships with men, that somehow it will get lost. That’s the challenge, to be able to hold that in the presence of the other sex. Can we bring our sense of authenticity, our wildness, our being-ness, our sense of self-esteem, can we bring the gift of what we discover in our same-sex group back into our dialog with men and bless each other?

Aaron: Often in men’s groups I hear men say, when they’re in the middle of a conversation and talking about the truth of their experience, "God, I could never tell this in front of a woman. I could never speak the truth of my experience to a woman." That’s a very poignant point when that comes up. They’re not saying, "Get the women,", or "let’s have power over women." He’s just talking about how he’s been hurt, how he’s confused, the struggles he’s having in his life and how misunderstood he feels. We find it helpful when that starts to happen in same-sex groups. It feels safe, and we never want to abandon that.

In addition to that, we encourage some women and some men, when they start to feel strong enough on their own gender ground, to meet with one another.

It’s important to recognize one caution we throw in. They should not try to do it when they’re not ready for it. Some women really need to just be with women. A lot of men just need to be with men. This was especially true in the early days of the men’s movement. Women had been gathering for the last 20 or 30 years to talk about these issues, and it’s only been 5 or 7 years that men have been gathering together to reexamine their roles. The dialog isn’t balanced yet. Just as there are 50 women’s books for every men’s book, we know a lot more about women's issues than we know about men’s issues. A lot of men need more time to be with their brothers and get a sense of where they stand as men, and what their feelings really are, so they can articulate them to women. They shouldn’t come into these mixed-gender conferences naively.

That’s why we think it’s also important for these conferences to be facilitated. We’ve talked to a lot of people around the country who had good will, and tried to get together and do it, some with good results and others with pretty poor results.

Elizabeth and I have had the opportunity to do hundreds of these gatherings, for as little as an hour or for a week, with thousands of women and men. We carry some of that collective experience in our bodies and in our psyches, and we can host that conversation. There are others who are doing this kind of work and have this experience. One of the things we try to do is train a lot of other people. We offer trainings a couple times a year where people who want to host this kind of work can come and get more than they can just get in the book.

Certainly these groups can happen without facilitators, and people can get a lot of good guidelines from the book on how to host the group. But we think that people shouldn’t do this naively. People really have to come together step by step. There has to be a real sense of justice and balance.

Elizabeth: We were here at a humanistic psychology conference up here, on Olympia, a couple of years ago. We were working with a gender community, and there was a lot of bad feeling. If the leaders have a lot of prejudice against the other sex, that will come out. If the leaders are not balanced, and not equally giving concern, care and voice to both sides, then what happens is that that manifests in the group.

Aaron: This happened at that particular conference. A couple of angry women were leading it. It was supposed to be a gender conference, but in fact it was a "let’s get angry at the men" conference. The men were very conciliatory. It was not very beneficial to men or women, and it did not feel very good.

It’s really important that the facilitators have worked through some of the material, and can stand in this place that you might call between the king and the queen. Holding court and making sure that both sides have an equal opportunity to speak, and being considerate, recognizing that everybody at the council has intrinsic worth. That men and women are equally brilliant, often in differently ways.

But to the degree that it’s even possible to quantify our pain, men and women are equally suffering, and are equally powerful in creating change. Whenever we come to the table with that premise, there’s a real hope for movement. But whenever we come to the table with the attitude that whet we’re really going to do is get the men to come around to our feminist position, then it’s just another gender battle.

Bert: In the group you wrote about in your book, Gloria needed to hear the men state their accountability for the ways in which they have wounded women. The men had a similar need. Thus far, both sides had avoided taking much responsibility for their parts in the war. At that point you asked each group to ponder the question, "What do you contribute to the war between women and men and, furthermore, what weapons are you willing to lay down in order to make peace?"

Elizabeth: That’s a good question. That’s a place we hope to get to in our conferences and seminars. It’s a process to get there, because if one group is willing to do this but the other isn’t, there’s the possibility of taking too much on, and being shamed. It’s really something that has to be done bilaterally. We encourage men and women to walk into this together. One of the most human things that happens is when men and women are willing to admit how it is that they have created the gender war, and to take responsibility. For a woman, that’s a very big step, because women have been locked into the role of the innocent victim. We’ve been told that this has been done to us by the patriarchy, that the culture has done this to women, that women are the oppressed class. So it’s difficult for women to take that step.

It’s also getting very difficult for men, because they're getting blamed for everything. It’s hard for men to take some responsibility, without thinking that they’re going to have to take it all.

Aaron: In any situation, whether it’s a violence situation, a custody dispute, a conflict in interpersonal relationships, or a work-related conflict, whenever one gender is being held accountable, that situation is always shaming, always detrimental. That’s why we have such resistance to being held accountable. Because most of the demands for accountability are unilateral. It’s women demanding that men apologize for destroying the earth, or men demanding that women be held accountable for the way in which they steal children away in unfair divorce hearings, or the way in which they manipulate men with their sexuality.

Any time those demands are made, it’s shaming. When we acquiesce to those demands, which many men do, it breaks our spirit. There are a lot of feminist men, and although I respect their chivalry and their desire to care for women, in our councils we find that a lot of them are really ashamed of being a man. They’re very ashamed of their masculinity and apologetic to women. They can’t stand on their masculine ground and say it’s beautiful and wondrous, that it’s a mystical, magical, spiritual, incredible thing to be a male.

A lot of women acquiesce to a dominating man. We call them co-dependent. Or their whole concern is about how to keep the man from being angry and making sure that his needs are being taken care of. A lot of these women are meek and depressed, not standing on their ground. It’s fantastic, erotic and powerful to be a woman. The dynamism, the great intrinsic beauty and potency of the feminine; they cannot stand on that ground.

But when we come together and are equally accountable for what we’ve done to one another, enormous healing comes out of that kind of conversation. We hear women stand up and say "Yes, I’ve manipulated men with my sexuality." "Yes, I’ve ripped men off financially because my feminist principles told me that men have all the power, and I should get it any way I can." "Yes, I slept my way into a job." "Yes, I lied in a court hearing, my ex-husband is actually a great father. I said he had abused the child when he hadn’t."

The men get up and say, "Yes, I’ve said I loved women when all I really wanted to do is get into their pants." "I've battered my ex-wife." "I undercut a woman in the workplace, who was completely qualified, because I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman being my equal."

These kinds of things come out. When they do, a lot of the people in the room are weeping. Not because they’re ashamed, but because there’s so much relief in the atmosphere when they finally hear one another admit that they’ve been perpetrating this war on one another. Out of that we just find hearts open up. The room fills with love. Community seems to flow from it. But you can’t get there until you’ve told what Elizabeth and I call the "whole truth." You can’t get to this accountability until you’ve worked through all the other aggregations of feelings we’re talking about.

Elizabeth: It’s the last step of the process. You have to have an opportunity to express your anger and your hurt, and spend some time with your own gender group. Those are all necessary steps to take, so you can have enough self-esteem to hold onto your self-esteem and admit that you’ve screwed up sometimes.

It's a very interesting thing to notice that women’s weapons are very different from men’s. That’s another aspect of the difference between male and female cultures. The ways that women and men make gender war are quite different. They have different styles of expressing cruelty, manipulation or dominance. That’s something it’s important for men and women to have an opportunity to talk about separately. To discover these things, and see how we do them. Discovering what the secret, the shadow is, that we hold inside of us. Cleaning out our own houses.

Bert: You had another quote in your book. "The wellspring of renewal and nurturance that runs through an intact community is relatively dry in our current culture. Driven by thirst, women and men jostle for position at the few available waterholes rather than cooperate in digging deeper wells, capable of sustaining everyone."

Elizabeth: That’s the conflict we’ve been talking about in our gender justice conferences, in really beginning to work together as women and men. If we were to go into the workplace and work together, the changes that could be made would be far more extensive than anything we’ve seen so far. And that’s true for our family systems, our educational systems, our political systems, every aspect of our society.

In our book we quote from Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth, that if we we're to stop being divided by gender conflict, the enormous political power and the spiritual force that would come out would be enormous. We don't even have a glimmer of what would happen if we stopped the gender way.

Aaron: We should not be naive about the forces that are trying to perpetuate the gender conflict. Advertising, The role of the media. The power structure is run by the producers of products. What advertisers have realized is that the best way to get people to buy products is to get them to feel that they lack something. To create a sense of insuifficiency.

Feminists have done a pretty good job of analyzing what’s happened to women, that the media has made women feel insufficient around their beauty. The other message is that if you consume these products, you will become beautiful enough, and you’ll feel good about yourself as a person.

But what are you becoming beautiful enough for? To attract a certain kind of man, a wealthy and powerful man. Men are being told by the advertisers that they are insufficient as men. You need this Lexus in order to attract a beautiful woman. We’re constantly being bombarded with these messages that say that you are not enough, you don’t have enough, you don’t do enough, who you are is not enough. If you consume these products you will be enough. The way that you know that you are enough is that you will attract someone from the other sex who is enough. You will attract the alpha male or the alpha female. That’s really driving us all nuts.

Bernetta: Right, because there never is enough.

Aaron: The guy with the Lexus also has an ulcer and an alcohol problem. What we want is a man who is totally focused on his work, who works 12 to 14 hours a day and can't be there for his kids. Who doesn’t even have enough energy to make love to his wife. That’s the shadow of the alpha male.

What guy really wants to be with a woman who spends her whole day in front of a mirror, who has to constantly visit the plastic surgeon, and who spends all of her money on clothes. When you get right down to it, there’s this enormous shadow to the beauty thing. But we’re all heavily addicted to the beautiful woman. There’s a part of us that never feels whole unless we have what Warren Farrell calls the "genetic celebrity."

Women are just as addicted to men’s productive power. We hear all the time that women never feel valued as a woman unless the man is producing, making more money than they are. There are all of these social forces that push us into these stereotypes, so we will consume more. Those are powerful influences that we see in every newspaper and magazine, on television and in the movies.

Gloria Steinem and other feminists say they really want men who will be schoolteachers and homemakers, but who are they going for? Multi-millionaire businessmen. Jane Fonda is with Ted Turner, not the kind nurturer down the street who might be a fine schoolteacher or reforesting the planet. Those kinds of men get very little celebration, praise or admiration. Women reinforce men being jerks when they admire how much money a man makes. Men reinforce women to be witches when the only thing they reinforce or admire in women is how well they sharpen their beauty power. We drive one another crazy by reinforcing these stereotypes. To the degree that we can work on ourselves and free ourselves of these stereotypes, we can heal ourselves by looking at the intrinsic worth of people rather than the superficial images.

In our gender diplomacy conferences men can reveal themselves as who they are to women, and women can reveal who they really are to men. We get different mirrorings in the community. We start to get a sense of what it’s like to be living in a community with one another, and helps to break down these stereotypes that we’re conditioned to.

Bernetta: If we don’t heal our personal wounds, then we reflect the wounds of the community. It’s like being a victim. But if we heal our wounds, we have a chance to develop community.

Aaron: Exactly. What we’re addressing is the need for personal growth. If we feel sufficient in ourselves, we don't think we need to claim our wholeness from the other. This is why the men’s movement is so important to women. Women often ask, "What’s in it for us?" What’s in it for women is that if a man is solely dependent on her, and men have been conditioned all their lives to divorce themselves from their emotional body, Women have been conditioned to be intact with their emotional bodies. What draws men to women is to reconnect with soul, with feeling, with mystery. But the woman carries all of that. Our best friend, confidant, mother, sister, our muse. Then, if things don’t go well in the relationship the man resents the woman for not giving him those things.

Bernetta: The man feels the woman is responsible for the relationship.

Aaron: That’s right. But if the guy can make connection with six or eight other guys, that he shares intimacy with, and in the group they have a sense of beauty and magic, mystery and play, those guys can be his confidants, his friends, his allies. That takes a lot of pressure off of the personal relationship. Then he’s not coming to her empty, half a person. He can say, "I’m getting nourished by my relationships with other men. Maybe things aren’t going well in my relationship with my woman. I have someone else to talk to. I’m having trouble in my work. Slipping in my recovery Just having a bad day. I’m afraid." There's someone else to talk to. So it’s a great blessing for women. He comes to the table more full. The relationship is not so much about filling our emptiness, but about sharing our fullness.

Women need to realize that this is also threatening to them. On the one hand, women love to see the man being more emotionally independent. But there’s also a power that women have over men. That power is lost. That’s why there’s such a backlash against the men’s movement. Not because the men are a bunch of Neanderthals running around in the woods, but because men are learning how to get some of their emotional needs met from other men. That diminishes women’s negative power, their hold over men.

The same thing is true of women moving into the workplace. On the one hand, it takes a lot of pressure off of the relationship if women are not so dependent on men economically. They can hold their own in the relationship and make the same amount of money as the man. Fix the car. Fix the roof. Do dangerous work. Learn martial arts, so if a burglar comes in it’s not just the man that’s expected to face him. That’s wonderful for men, for women to claim their assertiveness and their abilities in the world. The men don't have to be heroes and full-time bodyguards and breadwinners. But it’s also threatening. Men think the same thing that women think. If he doesn’t need me so much emotionally, maybe he’ll leave. Maybe if she doesn't need me so much economically, she may leave. So men lose some of their power in the relationship.

But we need to understand that this way of holding relationships together is very dysfunctional. It’s about power. Women’s emotional power over men, and men’s economic power over women. There are definitely risks involved in this healing process. The way people come together is not so much in taking hostages as it is with a sense of mutual respect, shared interests, love, and mutual appreciation, in which men have an equal level of emotional and nurturing power, and women have an equal degree of political and economic power in the relationship. We’re talking about a whole new organization for relationships between women and men. But if we’re going to talk about equality, it’s got to be this kind of conversation. Equality is not just women taking on the privileges that men have, but none of the responsibilities. It’s not just women saying "We want to fly jets and get the big salaries that come with being officers," but not being subject to the draft the way men are. That’s not justice. That’s not equality. That’s just trading one set of privileges for another. But this other idea of gender justice, gender diplomacy, egalitarianism, balance and fairness in relationships brings about another hope.

Aaron: We can't exist in isolation from one another. Ultimately we must come together and forge community together. We want to do this from a position of mutual strength, rather than from weakness.

Bert: Elizabeth sums it up well at the end of the book. "Liz sums up, "We all started with our anger, and then got in touch with the fear of one another that was hiding behind the anger. As we worked our way through the blame and shame, a great deal of grief came up and then, going to an even deeper layer, we experienced the authentic wellspring of love and appreciation we have for one an-other. I think that in every circumstance in life, all those elements are present and that if we fail to tell the whole truth to one another, not much is going to happen that is of value."