My name is Netti. I’ve attended 5 Movienight screenings thus far.
Taking a seat in this Caucasian Mensch Circle watching movies as opposed to playing poker (as was often the case in the past), I can say that the kernel of maleness is still front and center. Some of us front our junk to achieve a break from our female companions and some of us (with or without a female companion) are breaking away from the female, the x chromosome in all of us so we can see the y in all of its longer-than-is-wide glory.
And Seminal to my enjoyment of any Robert Bly experience is that my being a male with other males is not contingent upon a competition (i.e.: poker). In its place the Movienight cognoscenti have asserted their masculine identity together in competition with the “chick flick,” poor taste, and anything over 130 minutes. I say march on. If there is any privileged territory to be maintained by our sex it is brevity, craftsmanship, and that the quest for a woman's love is about the getting it, not the kitchen sink after the happily-ever-after.
This is not to say that women themselves are not welcome, as I have perceived. Women are invited to celebrate the genetic mutation that is the male of the species. They are invited to watch it promulgate violence, languish in its ability to do so; watch it sacrifice all that it holds dear to pursue childishly the thing that lies over the horizon, and its positively enervating ability to appreciate beauty just before having destroyed it. Yeah, we can watch it together; the feminine, cyclical nature of creation and destruction. We can watch together the dance of opposites integral to every story told around the fire at night for all time. Our fire is a stylus of light projected onto a condensation-moistened Stucco wall in some guy's Back Yard, so after we can look up at the stars (well, two or three of them anyway) and enjoy, or be tormented by the great paradox of our male existence.
