(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant has just spent a truly dreadful evening that began with his hovering over 179 articles about the ''men's movement'' -- this figure being the total number of articles referring to the movement that had been published in 1991 and resided in the Nexis database as of November 4. The evening then got a whole lot worse when we decided it was obligatory to also do some hovering over Iron John, by Robert Bly. The best-seller in question -- it has been on the New York Times hardcover list for 51 weeks -- endeavors to justify and explain the movement, or at least Bly's ''mythopoetic'' version of it (to cite another term that was all over Nexis). We have to say it: The men's movement is dumber than the women's movement. The latter at least has coherent grievances and an ideology purporting to explain their source. The grievances -- lower pay for librarians than truck drivers, the dearth of female CEOs, low female scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the requirement that wives make the bed in the morning -- are all attributed to patriarchal oppression sustained over the millennia by social conditioning that causes femmes to think of their diminished status as normal. The men's movement has no real ideas. At least the main men's movement has none. There are, unfortunately, a dizzying array of organized men. Some of them, including a fringe group called Real Men, look like feminist fellow- travelers, mainly concerned with promoting ideas that seem indistinguishable from those of the National Organization for Women. Another fringe group is the National Coalition of Free Men, which seems mainly interested in doing some counterpunching against antimale sentiments emanating from feminists. The Boston Globe reported last summer on the efforts of this coalition to get Hallmark to stop distributing a greeting card that said on the cover, ''Men Are Scum.'' When you opened up the card, it said ''Excuse me. For a second there, I was feeling generous.'' Hallmark seems to have caved in fast when the Free Men called. But the mainstream men's movement, frequently spoken for by Bly and a few other best-selling authors (the movement sells a lot of books), is programmatically hollow. It has no agenda. It is all New Age pop psychology and self-expression, targeted at men who are lonely and fearful and looking for something more meaningful than Monday Night Football. Instead of trying Masterpiece Theatre, many of them are joining groups that go off into the woods and beat drums to help them regain a sense of masculinity. In other groups, the men stand around in circles tearfully telling stories about their invariably inadequate relationships with their fathers. There seems to be a lot of crying in the men's movement. Bly's effort to explain the movement is especially incoherent, since so much of what he has to say comes at you in the form of fairy tales and involved metaphors, e.g., about the importance of every man getting in touch with the Wild Man said to be lurking somewhere inside him. And who exactly is this interior character? ''When we hear the phrase,'' Bly explains in a characteristically murky passage, ''our fantasies move toward a monster, or savage, but it is clear now that the Wild Man is closer to a meditation instructor than to a savage. In part he resembles a rabbi teaching the Kabala; in part, he resembles a holder of a mystery tradition; in part, he resembles a hunting god.'' Whether his mate is a Wild Woman is not made clear.