The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is about our need to live in a world where women and men can belong together.

Boys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture.

In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men toward the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females.

Mothers who ally themselves with patriarchy cannot love their sons rightly, for there will always come a moment when patriarchy will ask them to sacrifice their sons. Usually this moment comes in adolescence, when many caring and affectionate mothers stop giving their sons emotional nurturance for fear it will emasculate them. Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love.

In Man Enough Frank Pittman says of men that “while most of us want to be loved, controllers are willing to forego love if that is what it takes to be the boss.” Being the boss does not require any man to be emotionally healthy, able to give and receive love.

In actuality, men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all the emotional satisfaction that would come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.

If women have been taught through sexist socialization that a journey through the difficult terrain of sex will lead us to our heart’s desire, men have been taught that their heart’s desire should be for sex and more sex.

Although women with class privilege such as Susan Faludi or Susan Bordo who write about men express surprise that most men do not see themselves as powerful, women who have been raised in poor and working-class homes have always been acutely aware of the emotional pain of the men in their lives and of their work dissatisfactions.

extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.

“Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents—‘avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality’—we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.” The core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender equality and mutuality as crucial to interbeing and partnership in the creating and sustaining of life. Such a commitment always privileges nonviolent action over violence, peace over war, life over death.

The hero of The Incredible Hulk, like the many television and movie heroes that have come in his wake, is the perfect candidate for inclusion in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. He is a man always on the run, unable to develop lasting ties or intimacy. A scientist by training (the ultimate personification of rational man), when he experiences anger, he turns into a creature of color and commits violent acts. After committing violence, he changes back to his normal white-male rational self. He has no memory of his actions and therefore cannot assume responsibility for them. Since he is (like the hero of a popular adult drama, The Fugitive) unable to form sustained emotional bonds with friends or family, he cannot love. He thrives on disconnection and disassociation. Like the men of the Beat generation, like the more recent men of Generation X, he is the symbol of the ultimate patriarchal man—alone, on the road, forever drifting, driven by the beast within.

To create the culture that will enable boys to love, we must see the family as having as its primary function the giving of love (providing food and shelter are loving acts).

The notion that lesbian women are antimale always proves false when groups of women gather and talk about men. The most vicious man-hating comments are always made by women who are with men and who plan to be with them for the rest of their lives.

For both men and women, Good Men can be somewhat disturbing to be around because they usually do not act in ways associated with typical men;