Counterculture

Mention of the term counterculture often invokes an image of youthful men and women in colorful tie-dyed shirts, sandals, beads, flowers, and jeans; smoking marijuana or taking LSD; and either dancing to rock music in a city park or living in a rural commune. Because the men in this image, with their long, flowing hair, so clearly departed from the male stereo-type of the 1950s, it is often assumed that they were less committed to notions of masculinity than their fathers. However, the revitalization of masculinity formed an important dimension of countercultural practice.

As a result of the post–World War II “crisis of masculinity” debate, many men sought to adapt manhood to the companionate marriages and corporate employment patterns of postwar society. Counterculturalists, however, questioned the very legitimacy of such institutions, identifying them as the source of masculine malaise. Hippies (as members of the 1960s counterculture came to be called) sought to reclaim an “authentic” and “natural” masculinity by escaping the constraining, repressive consciousness they perceived as integral to industrial society. Their efforts generated a diverse range of nonconformist masculinities that still exert significant influence on American culture.

Overwhelmingly white and middle class in composition, the counterculture emphasized human consciousness as the key to self-determination. Whereas contemporary New Leftists stressed the material basis of power and organized mass movements of protest, the counterculture prioritized “mind-expansion” to recover what they considered to be the liberating psychic possibilities discarded along the road to civilization. Despite that common objective, hippies never reached consensus on the ways and means by which to achieve their goals. Hippie men's approaches to the revitalization of masculinity mirrored their commitment to one of the two principal approaches to cultural radicalism: anarchism and mysticism.

Anarchist hippies regarded the main social institutions of “straight” (conformist) society as alienating. They contended that schools, churches, and mass media (among others) programmed men to submit to the demands of breadwinning, a hypocritical double standard of sexual conduct, a spiritually [Page 113]barren religious life that demanded belief in the absence of ecstatic experience, and an emotionally constricted life in isolated nuclear families. Workplace relations rewarded unmanly deference to arbitrary authority and the projection of false facades to gain favor. With money as the defining value of society and thus of human consciousness, the true necessities of life seemed scarce despite American abundance, blinding men to the brotherly, communal sharing of “tribal” societies as an alternative. To hippie anarchists, it seemed absurd that a man's income could be considered a measure of his manliness when economically privileged men relied on the police, rather than themselves, to defend their unjust accumulations of property.

The Diggers, a loose collective formed in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1966, brought this hippieanarchist analysis to its first full development. Through their provocative street theater, they sought to demonstrate egalitarian options to straight society. They distributed free food, opened “free stores” in which one could experience the moneyless exchange of goods, and designed street pageants to encourage direct, popular, and spontaneous participation in the creation of a new culture. Like their bohemian predecessors, the Beats, the Diggers romanticized the propertyless men of the urban streets and ghettoes as those who preserved the spirit of anarchy amid a bourgeois culture. The Diggers therefore cultivated an outlaw masculine ideal that valorized brotherly generosity, visionary artistry, candor, indifference to authority and social conventions, and trust in the legitimacy of one's own impulses. The Diggers drew significant inspiration from the manly swagger of the Black Panther Party, and for a time maintained relations with the San Francisco chapter of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang.

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