Manhood in the Age of Aquarius: Masculinity in Two Countercultural Communities (review)

In this monograph, Timothy Hodgdon analyzes articulations of masculinity in two countercultural communities: the Diggers, a community that evolved from a theater group in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in 1966, and the Farmies, a collective that formed around guru Stephen Gaskin, who later founded The Farm, a commune in Tennessee. Using historical materials, including published interviews with community members and several memoirs, he paints a captivating picture of passionately committed people attempting to transform the world by crafting a deliberately countercultural life.

Arguing that there is no "generic hippie manhood," Hodgdon traces the development of two contrasting forms of masculinity in the 1960s counterculture. In the Diggers, he finds masculinity organized around an anarchist philosophy and an intense valorization of the Native American warrior. In the Farmies, he finds masculinity organized around Buddhist philosophy and mysticism. Neither group fits our usual image of the Flower Child, a peace-loving, drug-taking, and possibly shiftless long-haired man whose diffident demeanor and slight build might lead us to mistake him for a woman.

The book begins with a close look at the Diggers; however, in my view, the chapters on the Farmies are the most compelling. Hodgdon shows greater sympathy toward their efforts and is more careful in his appraisals of success. For example, Hodgdon gives readers a good biography of Gaskin, carefully tracing both the missteps and accomplishments of his work as an "acid preacher" (giving free spirituality classes to audiences of hundreds in the Haight) and as leader of The Farm. Gaskin's views on sexuality are also carefully treated in the chapter titled "Like a good horse follows a rider: Shaping tantric manhood in marriage, sexuality, and childbirth." Gaskin's teaching on sexuality may seem curiously conservative to twenty-first-century readers—members of The Farm were asked to commit to monogamous marriages and to practice abstinence if unmarried; additionally, contraception and abortion were prohibited—but they were also curiously timeless. Gaskin interpreted tantric mysticism in sexual terms and taught his followers to experience sex and sexuality as a mystic joining of man and woman that transcended any notion of free love.

Although Hodgdon's examination of both groups is engaging, some readers may be disconcerted by the way the first part of the book follows the Diggers, the second part follows the Farmies, and then the book terminates without a summing up or drawing of conclusions. Taking a "glass half-full" approach, one could say such even-handed treatment without conclusion reflects the uniqueness of this study. Few scholars have explored the construction of masculinity so closely, and none that I am aware of have produced a comparison of masculinity across countercultural communities. The "glass half-empty" approach would leave us wondering what Hodgdon himself makes of the Diggers and the Farmies. What can we learn from their histories? What lessons for contemporary masculinities? In either case, Hodgdon presents his study without explicitly stated conclusions, leaving the responsibility for analysis to the reader.

Gender scholars will find Manhood in the Age of Aquarius a valuable test of sociologist Robert Connell's relational framework for understanding gender.¹ Applying Connell's insight that masculinity becomes intelligible not only in relation to femininity but also in the dynamics of relations among men, Hodgdon shows that countercultural masculinity involved competition not only between hip men and the conventional masculinity they challenged, but also competition between cliques of hip men. Furthermore, Hodgdon profitably uses John Stoltenberg's concept of "manhood acts," interactions in which men challenge other men to demonstrate their manliness in order to demonstrate their own success in expressing the dominant masculinity of that social context.² Especially in exploring the outlaw manliness of Diggers, Hodgdon's analysis of manhood acts clearly shows how the Diggers scorned the pacific Flower Child image and frequently disparaged hippie efforts in the Haight to sell consciousness. (Business owners...