What Are Myths For?
by William G. Doty
[Images: ]

In 1986, when I published the first edition of Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, a number of my academic colleagues in the humanities were surprised at my emphasis upon socio-functional analysis — the What For? of my title — that I had borrowed mostly from my studies in anthropology. When Myth: A Handbook appeared in 2004, some readers were surprised that I had included so many items from popular culture that I consider to have mythic status: among them baseball, following Deeanne Westbrook's excellent Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth; Harry Potter; Madonna; Elvis; and films such as The Lion King; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Lord of the Rings; and The Matrix trilogy.

A couple of commentators on Amazon's book service are still pissed that I didn't write a more stuffy book when revising and expanding Mythography, although I am happy to say that they did not drive away many purchasers. And the Handbook volume, even priced at $56 for the cloth volume, also sold well, and its licensed-paperback version brought out by the University of Alabama Press is having a strong first year of sales.

In this column I follow up on the functionalist approach, although it could as well be called non-essentialist, or practical-pragmatic: I'm simply extending the traditional formalist approach by insisting upon a morality of interpretation that asks to what ends or influences a myth leads as well as how it is to be defined. Or to put it another way, I continue to stress socio-historical origins and contexts at the beginning of analysis of a mythic account or image, as well as in interpretations or projected applications at the conclusion.

Susan Mackey-Kallis's approach is similar to mine: "Myths [...], neither true nor false, are instead more or less functional for interpreting the 'truth' of human experience and giving life shape, substance, and meaning" (15; she also has a subsection on the various functions myths serve — "What Purposes Do Myths Serve?", 17-18). I am in concord with Samuel Collins's observation that "Functionalism, insofar as the term has any appellative use, describes a general turn from diachronic [across-time], evolutionary models in social and cultural anthropology to a synchronic [at a given particular time] understanding of culture" (183). The focus upon the specific cultural contexts and reflections keeps us clear of the universalizing of, say, Mircea Eliade's or Joseph Campbell's essentialism found anywhere across eons. Both tend to ignore specific historical and cultural contexts.

While I have not the slightest interest in theological results, I readily admit that the medieval model of interpretation continues to guide my work. Accordingly, I begin with exegesis, or close textual, linguistic, and social-context reading: From where do the terms, figures, and concepts or images derive? What do they signify in everyday life of the time? Then I continue with what I think are possible or probable contemporary interpretations in terms of the whole corpus of mythology in which the myth appears: Do mythic narratives represent standard social significances, or meanings unique to unusual mythical concepts, figures, and representations? What symbolic dimensions or connections to typical themes and patterns in the society's mythological corpus as a whole appear? What would contemporary audience reception be like?

And then I find an initial ending point with respect to an application, which in this context I take to be the specific function of the myth in a particular society — "function" in its etymological sense of being affixed or "folded together with" the core mythologem or story, not just in the more mechanical sense according to which "the function of the drive shaft is to propel the car." This third element, application, is not always part of hermeneutical analysis or contemporary literary criticism, although it regularly is in religious contexts where a preacher derives a moral from a passage or story, or when a philosopher uses part of The Matrix to explicate a Socratic dialogue.

But I think responsible scholarship ought to be able to indicate why the Nazi mythos was harmful; how the current "shake a big stick" policies of our National Administration have left us looking like brutal and insensitive tyrants to the rest of the world. And if you need to be reminded that many of our standard hero myths need refurbishing, I hope you'll read two volumes by John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett: The Myth of the American Superhero (the main text in my Heroic Model seminar) and Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism. (See also Doty [September 2003]), "Myth and Religion: The Same or Different? Evaluating the Good and the Bad", and on questions to address to myths, see Mythography 76-77 and App. II, 466-67; Lincoln 150-51; and Plate 5 — he names components involved in recognizing the field of vision of a cultural product.)

Perhaps the term "refurbishing" is too mild a gerund for what I want to suggest, which is that while the traditional view in mythography has been that myth refers almost exclusively to traditional materials from the past, I think it is crucial that we recognize that mythmaking clearly is still flourishing in our own day — and I don't necessarily mean Disneyfication, which I find trivializing and abhorrent. I do mean regarding myths as providing reservoirs of the possible and new imaginings of the everyday. I will say more about Neil Gaiman's work shortly, but I think his novels American Gods and Anansi Boys (and presumably a projected third volume) illustrate vigorous mythmaking in contemporary fiction, likewise the speculative fiction of Greg Bear and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Traditionally seen as an oppressive part of the dead hand of the past, we ought to realize how many myths and mythic figures or images actually represent change-transformation agents. French Socialist George Sorel remarked that myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. We might speak of the active performativity of myth or their theatrical quality (Gourgouris xvi).

One need look only at the history of religions to see, for instance, how relatively frequently new redefinitions and systems of institutional belief and practice have come from new interpretations of canonical works, the Protestant Reformation being perhaps the most representative example. The leading Reformers were unfailingly inspired by their detailed exegesis and interpretation of scripture, and like the later Puritans, considered themselves to be restructuring according to what they took to be the real and original divine revelations. This was also true when Mohammed purified the pre-Islamic religious traditions of his people.

Michal Perrin cleverly captures the dual nature of mythology: "On the one hand it imposes an unconscious but constraining coherence; on the other hand, it is a source of new images and associations through continuous transformations, a constant stimulus for imagination" (317-18); precisely what I understand as mythopoesis. Of course I mean mythopoesis in a fundamental sense, adopting one mythical figure or theme and transforming or revivifying it in a new guise. Several reference volumes detail instances in the arts.

In fact we are quite familiar with the process, since in important ways ancient Greek and a few Roman mythic figures have given Western literature a characteristic tone over the ages (see for instance Kossman's Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths). I have discussed previously the insightful manner in which Sena Jeter Naslund transforms materials appearing in Moby Dick in her Ahab's Wife (Doty [May] 2007) and Neil Gaiman's mythopoetic work in novels (see Doty essays on him in the Works Cited) and Gaiman's delightful remix of comics superheroes in his graphic novels entitled Marvel 1602 and Eternals ([August] 2007).

The Renaissance rediscovery of Greek and Roman mythology and art was a cultural mythopoesis, quite world-constructing and full of reinvigorating interpretive powers. European imagining was infused with new light and life thanks to the collective opening toward the imaginative, symbolic, and emotional-creative aspects of the mythological world (see especially the classic study by Seznec).

I sense a similar opening today, as more and more of us recognize the restrictions on creativity of the overly rational emphasis of the Enlightenment values so determinative of our sciences and our economics. James Hillman ("The Bad Seed," on Nazi myth) and Mark Taylor, John Gowdy, and David Loy are spot-on in identifying how the international stock market system is now our most really-experienced deity, whereas a previous generation degraded financial capital as "filthy lucre."

Of course some of this opening I mention happened in the sixties and seventies New Age phenomena. The superficial silliness of those days is pretty well behind us, and there seem to me to be much more substantial attention to non-EuroAmerican cultures and to disciplines such as yoga, martial arts, and world music (see Beres). Every year I still get a number of requests for information about completing doctorates in mythological studies; many of my doctoral students at Pacifica Graduate Institute near Santa Barbara are mid-career individuals who are seeking a wholeness to their knowledge and lives they have not found in more scientifically-oriented studies. While handiness in teaching mythology may not enrich an academic job application, nonetheless employers are usually favorably impressed by teachers who recognize widespread student interest in the field since the seventies.

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While here I am not following strict socio-functionalist strictures, which have been criticized for their reactionary politics by Samuel Collins (188 — his description of functionalism cited above is still useful). For my limited purposes, I set out here, simply in a randomly-numbered list, some of the communicative functions I consider mythology (and to some extent ritual, when related to mythology) to be exercising in our culture:

1. Providing a semiotics; a system of assigning meanings to cultural products, be they films or poems or essays. This includes hermeneutics, understanding that term as providing a system or code of usual meanings for expressions in human communication. One might also include genre analysis, literary criticism, or even philosophical deconstruction, to disclose what deeper meanings are conveyed by mythic constructions. We "rape" or "foster" Mother Earth because such a concept provides a personalized code for our innate regard or disregard for our planet. Our gender presuppositions encourage little girls to play with kitchen implements as toys, boys with baseball mitts or toy guns. The Rambo and Rocky movies fantasized for thousands how real Americans, real men, could become savior figures.
2. Myths importantly model possible projections of a human personality, career, or position in one's community. In today's electronic world, one thinks of the construction of avatars in chatrooms and interactive online games. The child may want to be a Herakles or an Aphrodite, perhaps a 9/11 firefighter. Part of the structured imagination, such projective models help one to determine just what sorts of personality types one wants to emulate, or to understand how it is that "Men are from Mars, but Women are from Venus" (Gray 1992). The myths prevalent in a society create that group's social identity.
3. They reflect and model social propriety, which can include a cultural mindset or worldview, life-cycle issues (where ritual is much implicated), gendering, and stages of life. The ultimate propriety is the socially-established ideology that determines how a society's monetary wealth is to be paid out to general-practice physicians, school teachers, or financial giants, or to purchase monstrously-large Humvees. And in figures like Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg, or Hunter S. Thompson — all of them impious in their own fashion — we can be moved to look twice at what seemed frozen banalities of literature. Indeed William Burroughs' wild drug-spaced lucubrations can still make one wonder if literature as such is at an end — or heralding a new beginning. (I think of J. G. Ballard, Thomas Pynchon, Carson McCormack, Chuck Palahniuk....)
4. Myths can often provide the individual with a personal sense of relationship to the community by fulfilling certain statuses, roles, or professions. Films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Fight Club can open doors to imagining new ways for women and men to challenge and change the social status quo.
5. Likewise the local can be made sense of in terms of conformity or contrast to universals. Usually what is defined as myth includes materials that are treated as other than our own — in some important ways we are still not yet post-colonialist. Mythological perspectives provide important insights on the dysfunction of jingoism, imperialism, racism, and outdated versions of healthy gender roles.
6. Social organization and identity are often determined by which brand of religion, i.e., mythologically-based spirituality, one adheres to. An older American Legion male will not likely be a fan of Oprah's book club, a dude in the hood will probably not know how to waltz or tango. Income levels may lead to inequalities in education as well as in Katrina-disaster non-relief two years later. On my own campus it is well known that membership in particular sororities or fraternities will definitely influence political appointments and social networks after graduation.
7. One important mythic function is providing templates/archetypes for creative expression in the arts (such as dance, drama, literature, music, and crafts). It is always amusing to me how students discover how frequently literary figures represent one or another archetypal figure: the Trickster, the Wise old man/woman, the female or male Hero, the Detective or the Healer, the Rube or the Sophisticate. The Great Gatsby is so effective because the one aspires to be the other.
8. Behaviors are appropriate or not according to repeated mythic patterns, although it seems harder and harder to find models from antiquity that still have great relevance in the contemporary world. Nonetheless Jungians still account for contemporary personality types on the basis of ancient models and archetypes (see the two volumes by Bolen mentioned in the Works Cited), and conservative Christians still recommend two-thousand-year-old models: WWJD, i.e., "What Would Jesus Do?" Conservatives always authenticate their credentials on the basis that only their reconstruction of certain original moments can re-establish what The Founding Fathers intended.
9. Certainly mythic perspectives manipulate and massage social and individual affect and emotion, especially through their contributions to ritual, including entertainment and story-telling. Analyst of popular culture Peter Chumo praised the mythic aspects of the movie Forrest Gump functioning as a ritual of national reconciliation, and politician Robert Dole considered it "as an appropriate picture for American audiences" — both cited by Jane Caputi, who lays out strong parallels between Forest Gump and Natural Born Killers, suggesting that "they are complementary morally bankrupt visions" (159).
   
   As Roland Barthes explicates in his influential Mythologies, the natural gets mythologized into the historical, precisely at those ideological points where the national group is most concerned with merchandizing its own peculiar brand of patriotism; or the physical-natural is opposed to the spiritual-transcendental by religionists. There is very strong irony in that an incarnationist religion came to reject the fleshly (the letters ... carn ... in incarnation are from the Latin carno, flesh; cf. Spanish carne). Whatever may have been the physical, bodily needs of their adherents are usually ignored in historians' reconstruction of early Christianity; but actually there are theological reflections already in the Kainê Diathêkê/New Testament that ignores them by representing a purely spiritual Christ figure. In the Gospel of John, for instance, the feet of the historical Jesus seem hardly to touch the ground.
10. A traditional point, but it remains important: some myths provide the textual contents of rituals, especially secular and religious ceremonials and rituals like singing the alma mater at university graduations. Here emotional and patriotic fulfillment and commitment to the values of a community are often generated. Hence, I suppose, the fervid passions exhibited by townspeople on the one side, and college students in Tuscaloosa on the other, when the city council sought to cut back on operating hours in bars near the university.
11. And I will end this list with one that I think is especially vital. Paula Gunn Allen relates how differently the term "sacred" can be applied. In traditional Native American materials, she writes:

    the word sacred, like the words power and medicine, has a very different meaning to tribal people than to members of technological societies. It does not signify something of religious significance and therefore believed in with emotional fervor — "venerable, consecrated, or sacrosanct," as the Random House dictionary has it — but something that is filled with an intangible but very real power or force, for good or bad. (72)

    
    Allen notes that "For the American Indian, the ability of all creatures to share in the process of ongoing creation makes all things sacred" (57). Hers is but one of the voices (cf. Lynda Sexson and Crispin Sartwell) who comprehend that all things can have "sacred" power, and that this affecting, playful spirit — which I think of as characteristic of what I term "mythicity" — can bubble up anywhere in the everyday.

For that reason I do not follow those such as the mythologist Alan Dundes, who define the mythic as necessarily bearing the typical traits of what the West defines as religious (the sacred as such being defined as removed, remote, occurring at a special time/place, within a certain mystical feeling, or involving otherworldly beings, etc.) The operative point here involves the possibility that there can be something sacred about the chairs you are sitting on, or in the chef's triumph at the best restaurant in town, or — and this is based upon my own recently-acquired use of films in classes — experienced when the room lights are dimmed... and I see the audience spacing out into the worlds of Crouching Tiger or The Matrix, Fight Club, or The Children of Men.

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You'll note that my focus here has been incrementally broadening out, no doubt due to the fact that one of the caps I have worn within academia has been research and activity in interdisciplinary studies (IDS), a field that incorporates perspectives from many theoretical and practiced disciplines rather than just one, such as English literature or physics. Since most people entering the work world will collaborate with colleagues bringing to the workbench a range of useful methodologies, I and others have pressed for undergraduate training to include a healthy dose of IDS. All of my teaching has had such a slant, and, post-retirement, I am delighted to teach upper-level IDS seminars in our premier undergraduate enrichment program at Alabama. Refreshingly, Alabama's New College program, also located in the College of Arts and Sciences, now begins its student-designed-major program with an introductory freshman course on IDS.

Certainly that part of my work is reflected in one final characteristic emphasis among my suggestions for mythographic practice, and that has been a resistance to the traditional monopolar emphasis that nearly every traditional school of myth interpretation has featured. Robert Segal's Myth: A Very Short Introduction efficiently charts some of these: myth considered as primitive science, or as the antithesis of science; myth and ritual as attempts to control nature; myth as ultimately a rational means of overcoming existential contradictions; myth as pre-philosophical or primitive; myth as fostering modern social legislation; demythologized into personal existentialist terms; myth and ritual both primarily concerned with primordial creation stories that can lead ritually to experience of the divine; myth as only secondary to ritual; myth as psychological projection, often of sexuality; myth as helping one move through developmental stages of life; myth as ideology pure and simple; myth as a make-believe transitional object in the play of childhood growth — as, I suppose, "mythological baby blankie".

Several others could be mentioned and are in my Mythography, where I attempt to argue the opposite to the monopolar approaches; what I refer to as polyphasic, polysemic, and polyfunctional models that recognize just how many impulses a myth may be broadcasting (see Index, sub "Polyphasic, polyfunctional mythology," 575-adding 86 and 413; and Handbook on polysemy, 27, 103). I find most gratifying analysis of myths that looks through various spectacles: What psychological aspects are relevant? What formal literary qualities are present, and how do they shape the content? How is the material grounded in its socio-historical contexts? And I could go on and on, but I remind you of philosopher Suzanne Langer, who suggested that what is most important about a society is not the number of answers and solutions it establishes, but the questions it learns to ask.

My ideal study group would take one myth and approach it from several disciplinary directions. It would then conclude with the important final step in IDS procedural methodology, namely seeing how the various analyses comport with one another to disclose patterns of meaning and significance in the narrative, and whether the work group should begin another phase of analysis based upon the comparative conclusions of the initial analysis.

Princeton history professor Jeffery Stout notes that some analysts fear that such a method would fail to attain that essential Meaning that many studies claim to locate in one or another part, precisely the monopolar perspectives I have challenged above. Give up that search! Stout suggests, and focus instead on what sort of creative readings can be discovered — acknowledging that other such readings may well be worth serious consideration at the same time.

[I]f there are many things that might in principle prove interesting about a text, we shall probably need many readings to disclose them. The more interesting the text, the more readings we shall be able to give without simply repeating ourselves and our predecessors, and the more readings we shall want to give. Classics will be the limiting cases. We say that such texts possess inexhaustible meaning. ... let us then celebrate the diversity of interpretations as a sign that our texts are interesting in more ways than one. The only alternative would be to have texts that weren't. (8)

Well, there is, of course, the alternative of the fundamentalist reading of given texts, as can be seen in many treatments of canonical religious and legal texts such as the Bible or the US Constitution. What I find much more satisfying is expressed well in Chairman Mao Zedong's "Let a hundred flowers bloom! Let a hundred schools of thought contend." This is cited from a corrective entry on a website, The Phrase Finder (accessed 08.31.07), where the author, apparently Gary Martin, notes that the 1957 speech may have been a ploy to draw out critics of Mao's regime, many of whom were subsequently exterminated.

A cautionary tale, perhaps, if Martin is correct, but at face value, precisely what I have been urging. "Such texts possess inexhaustible meaning," Stout emphasizes. Let us approach them from as many analytical directions as possible, so that their hundreds of flowers continue to bloom in a full counterpoint of mythological energies.

Works Cited
• Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986 (1981). "The Sacred Hoop: A Contemporary Perspective." The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon; 54-75.
• Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang.
• Beres, Derek. 2005. Global Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music. New York: iUniverse.
• Bolen, Jean. 1984. Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
• Bolen, Jean. 1989. Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men's Lives and Loves. San Francisco: Harper and Row.
• Caputi, Jane. 1999. "Small Ceremonies: Ritual in Forrest Gump, Natural Born Killers, Seven, and Follow Me Home." Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sherrett; 147-74.
• Collins, Samuel Gerald.2003. "Sail On! Sail On!: Anthropology, Science Fiction, and the Enticing Future." Science Fiction Studies 30/2: 180-98.
• Doty, William G. 2000. Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. 2nd ed. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
• Doty, William G. (September) 2003. "Myth and Religion: The Same or Different? Evaluating the Good and the Bad." Mythic Passages: The Magazine of Imagination. Atlanta: Mythic Imagination Institute; . "Myth and Religion: The Same or Different? Evaluating the Good and the Bad". http://www.mythicjourneys.org/passages/septoct2003/newsletterp9.html
• Doty, William G. 2004. Myth: A Handbook. Greenwood Folklore Handbooks. Westport: Greenwood. (Licensed paperback: Tuscaloosa: University of Albama Press, 2007.)
• Doty, William G. (May) 2006. "The Many Deities of Neil Gaiman's American Gods." Mythic Passages: The Magazine of Imagination. Atlanta: Mythic Imagination Institute; http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_mayjune06.html.
• Doty, William G. (February) 2006. "The Trickster Ananse Redux." (Review of Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys.) Mythic Passages: The Magazine of Imagination. Atlanta: Mythic Imagination Institute; http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_feb06_doty.html.
• Doty, William G. (August) 2007. "The Marvel Universe Transposed into the Seventeenth Century." Mythic Passages: The Magazine of Imagination. Atlanta: Mythic Imagination Institute; http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_aug07_doty.html.
• Dundes, Alan, ed. 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Gaiman, Neil. 2001. American Gods. New York: Harpertorch-HarperCollins.
• Gaiman, Neil. Anansi Boys. New York: William Morrow-HarperCollins.
• Gaiman, Neil. Marvel 1602. New York: Marvel.
• Gaiman, Neil. 2007. Eternals. New York: Marvel.
• Gourgouris, Stathis. 2003. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Gowdy, John. 2004. "Hunter-gatherers and the Mythology of the Market." The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Ed. Richard B. Lee and Richard Daly. New York: Cambridge University Press; 391-98.
• Gray, John. 1992. Men Are from Mars, but Women are from Venus. A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want In Your Relationship. New York: HarperCollins.
• Hillman, James. 1996. The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House.
• Jewett, Robert, and John Shelton Lawrence. 2003. Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
• Kossman, Nina, ed. 2001. Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Lawrence, John Shelton, and Robert Jewett. 2002. The Myth of the American Superhero. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
• Lincoln, Bruce. 1999. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Loy, David. 2000. "The Religion of the Market." Visions of a New Earth: Religious Perspectives on Population, Consumption, and Ecology. Ed. Harold Coward and Daniel C. Maguire. Albany: State University of New York Press; 15-28.
• Mackey-Kallis, Susan. 2001. The Hero and the Perennial Journey Home in American Film. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Naslund, Sena Jeter. 1999. Ahab's Wife or, The Star-Gazer. New York: Harper Perennial-HarperCollins.
• Perrin, Michel. 1985. "The Myth in the Face of Change: An Anthropologist's View." Social Research 52/2 (Myth in Contemporary Life issue): 316-24
• Plate, S. Brent, ed. 2002. Religion, Art, and Visual Culture: A Cross-Cultural Reader. New York: Palgrave-St. Martins.
• Sartwell, Crispin. 1995. The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Segal, Robert A. 2004. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Very Short Intros., 111. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Sexson, Lynda. 1991 (1982). Ordinarily Sacred. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
• Seznec, Jean. 1953. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Trans. Barbara F. Sessions. Bollingen ser., 38. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Stout, Jeffrey. 1982. "What Is the Meaning of a Text?" New Literary History 14/1: 1-12.
• Taylor, Mark C. 2004. Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Westbrook, Deeanne. 1996. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

William Doty, Ph.D. is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Religious Studies at the University of Alabama and former editor of Mythosphere: A Journal for Image, Mythi, and Symbol (Vol. 1 Issue 1). Dr. Doty is a prolific writer, translator, and editor who has published more than twenty books and seventy essays in a wide range of journals on topics including religious studies, anthropology, psychology, classics, and art criticism. His best known books include Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, Myths of Masculinity, and Myth: A Handbook.

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