If we want to be liberated, we must examine the myriad informal ways our society tells men what is expected of them, and examine the rites that mark the accumulation of the tokens of manhood. As psychologist Bill Layman said to me in conversation, "We live in an age of uninitiated men and we have been bequeathed a sense of loss. We are shaped by what did not pass between the synapses of the generations." But if our fathers and grandfathers failed to initiate us into manhood, we have nevertheless been initiated by substitute fathers, mentors, and authorities. The men's clubhouse and fraternal circle of elders and heroes may have vanished, but other institutions have arisen to take their place. Without our conscious knowledge or consent we have all been molded by the modern myths of war, work, and sex...