Moore is making a claim that cuts against the therapeutic consensus of his moment — and it still cuts. The dominant reading, drawn from anima theory, said that men in crisis lacked access to feeling, relationship, the receptive. Moore watched men in his consulting room and saw something different: not men cut off from the feminine but men already drowning in it, without any adequate structure of masculine selfhood to hold them upright. The wound was not suppression but formlessness.

What he names as the blocking agent is double, and the doubleness matters. Patriarchy damages masculinity not only by violence or dominance but by withholding what it claims to protect — genuine initiation, the transmission of mature masculine energy across generations. The feminist critique arrives into that vacuum and strikes what little remains. Moore is not blaming feminism; he is diagnosing a situation in which men have been left uncontained by a tradition that failed its own boys long before any external critique arrived.

The initiatory process he invokes is not ritual nostalgia. It is the claim that a man does not simply grow into mature masculine energy by accumulating years or achievements. Something must break the adolescent grandiosity and install in its place something harder and more durable — a center that can hold when the ground gives way.