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After writing a general book about love, then one specifically about black people and love, then another focusing on the female search for love, I wanted to go further and talk about men and love.
Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity.
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.
often use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.
Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.
We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.
the most common forms of patriarchal violence are those that take place in the home between patriarchal parents and children. The point of such violence is usually to reinforce a dominator model, in which the authority figure is deemed ruler over those without power and given the right to maintain that rule through practices of subjugation, subordination, and submission.
Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh.
imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health. Patriarchy promotes insanity. It is at the root of the psychological ills troubling men in our nation. Nevertheless there is no mass concern for the plight of men.
Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others.
Usually acting out means aggression directed outward. Kicking, screaming, and hitting get attention. Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode.
most gay men in our culture are as embracing of sexist thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behavior that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men. Hence many gay men are as angry as their straight counterparts.
Most patriarchal fathers in our nation do not use physical violence to keep their sons in check; they use various techniques of psychological terrorism, the primary one being the practice of shaming.
They can mask these feelings because they are allowed to isolate themselves, to turn away from the world and escape into music, television, video games, etc.
when it comes to boys, “neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.”
In the wake of feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial critiques of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the backlash that aims to reinscribe patriarchy is fierce.
Harry as our modern-day hero is the supersmart, gifted, blessed, white boy genius (a mini patriarch) who “rules” over the equally smart kids, including an occasional girl and an occasional male of color. But these books also glorify war, depicted as killing on behalf of the “good.”
Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism, and sexism of Rowling’s books.
United Nations report says that ‘violence against women is the world’s most pervasive form of human rights abuse.’
emotional abuse is “an ongoing process in which one individual systematically diminishes and destroys the inner self of another.
They did not love their fathers or truly know them intimately.
Ever since I started writing about love, I have defined it in a way that blends M. Scott Peck’s notion of love as the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth, with Eric Fromm’s insight that love is action and not solely feeling. Working with men who wanted to know love, I have advised them to think of it as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Most of our relationships have one or two of these aspects.
He concludes: “In our culture, boys and men are not, nor have they ever been, raised to be intimate.” Women seeking intimacy from men often find their expressions of longing belittled.
In the past ten years mass media have produced a number of movies aimed at boys that glorify war (Saving Private Ryan, Independence Day, Men in Black, Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbor, to name a few) that once again make it appear heroic to die alone, away from home, fighting for a cause you may or may not understand. These movies are part of patriarchal antifeminist backlash. They
Poor and working-class male children and grown men often embody the worst strains of patriarchal masculinity, acting out violently because it is the easiest, cheapest way to declare one’s “manhood.” If you cannot prove that you are “much of a man” by becoming president, or becoming rich, or becoming a public leader, or becoming a boss, then violence is your ticket in to the patriarchal manhood contest, and your ability to do violence levels the playing field. On that field, the field of violence, any man can win.
is almost a journalistic cliché that women despise Sensitive New Age Guys. They will not necessarily get warm support from feminist women.
Most men and women are not having satisfying and fulfilling sex.
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.
The assumption that “he’s gotta have it” underlies much of our culture’s acceptance of male sexual violence. It
Yet much of what they are learning about sexuality conforms to outmoded patriarchal scripts about the sexual nature of men and women, of masculine and feminine.
They learn that whether he is homosexual or heterosexual, a man deprived of sexual access will ultimately be sexual with any body.
This is the logic that produces what feminist thinkers call “a rape culture.”
Exploring the link between sexual repression and sexism, he explains: Sexual pleasure is rarely the goal in a sexual encounter, something far more important than mere pleasure is on the line, our sense of ourselves as men. Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair. And it makes men furious at women for doing what women are taught to do in our society: saying no. Despair and rage are the feelings men bring to sex, whether with women or with other men.
sex. For the patriarchal male, be he straight or gay, addictive sexuality is fundamentally about the need to constantly affirm and reaffirm one’s selfhood.
explain: “The more intense the pain of fear, unworthiness, and feeling unlovable becomes, the more obsessive becomes the need to have a sexual interaction.”
Sex, then, becomes for most men a way of self-solacing. It is not about connecting to someone else but rather about releasing their own pain.
Pornography can sexualize that rage, and it can make sex look like revenge…. Everywhere, men are in power, controlling virtually all the economic, political, and social institutions of society. Yet individual men do not feel powerful—far from it. Most men feel powerless and are often angry at women, whom they perceive as having sexual power over them: the power to arouse them and to give or withhold sex. This fuels both sexual fantasies and the desire for revenge.
Many men are angry at women, but more profoundly, women are the targets for displaced male rage at the failure of patriarchy to make good on its promise of fulfillment, especially endless sexual fulfillment.
Rather than seeing the violence men do as an expression of power, we would need to call it by its true name—pathology.
gay males, unless they have consciously decided otherwise, are as patriarchal in their thinking about masculinity, about sexuality, as their heterosexual counterparts.
they perform jobs that are tedious, boring, and oftentimes dehumanizing, jobs where their health and well-being are at risk. Most male workers in our America, like their female counterparts, work in exploitative circumstances; the work they do and the way they are treated by superiors more often than not undermine self-esteem.
many sociological studies of men at work done prior to feminist movement indicate that males were already expressing grave discontent and depression about the nature and meaning of work in their lives.
Feminist theorists, myself included, have for some time now called attention to the fact that the behavior of men who make money yet refuse to pay alimony or child support, or their peers who head households yet squander their paycheck on individual pleasures, challenges the patriarchal insistence that men are eager to be caretakers and providers. Barbara Ehrenreich’s The Hearts of Men was one of the first books highlighting the reality that many men are not eager to be providers, that the very idea of the “playboy” was rooted in the longing to escape this role and to have another means of
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No one has really tried to examine what men feel about the loss of time with children, partners, loved ones, and the loss of time for self-development.
The movement of masses of women into the workforce has not undermined male workers economically; they still receive the lion’s share of both jobs and wages. It has made women who work feel more entitled to resist domination than women who stay home dependent on a man’s wages to survive.
when men gather together at work, they rarely have meaningful conversations.
Many working men in our culture can barely read or write. Imagine if time away from work could be spent in exciting literacy programs for poor and working-class men.
choosing their emotional well-being over the paycheck, over the image of themselves as a provider.
learn to honor their inner selves rightly in a world that tells them every day that their inner selves do not matter.
at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine
