The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

We’d called a rescue squad, and they were trying to bring him back to life, but couldn’t. I was half-lying on the ground next to him, with my arms around his body. I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had felt able to really touch my father’s body. I was holding hard to it—with my love—and with my grief. And my grief was partly that my father, whom I loved, was dying. But it was also that I knew already that his death would allow me to feel freer. I was mourning that this had to be so. It’s a grief that is hard for me to speak of. That the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead—it’s unbearable to me. And I think there can hardly be a woman who hasn’t felt a comparable grief.

As her children left home, leaving her alone with her husband, her hope that they might find their way to love was soon dashed. She was left face-to-face with the emotionally shut down cold patriarch she had married. After fifty years of marriage she would not be leaving him, but she would no longer believe in love. Only her bitterness found a voice; she now speaks the absence of love, a lifetime of heartache. She is not alone. All over the world women live with men in states of lovelessness. They live and they mourn.

“Something missing within” was a self-description I heard from many men as I went around our nation talking about love. Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men.

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.

Clearly we cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on our lives. Patriarchy requires male dominance by any means necessary, hence it supports, promotes, and condones sexist violence. We hear the most about sexist violence in public discourses about rape and abuse by domestic partners. But 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.

The two men I chose as partners, like all the men I have loved, were victims of various degrees of emotional neglect and abandonment in their childhoods. They did not love their fathers or truly know them intimately. Growing from young adulthood into manhood they simply passively accepted the lack of communication with their fathers. They both felt that all attempts at reconciliation should have come from the father to the son. And yet as they matured into manhood, both these men began to behave not unlike the fathers whose actions they had condemned and hated. Observing them through time, I found that both of them had been rebellious and antipatriarchal in their twenties and early thirties, but as they moved more into the work world, they began to assume more of the patriarchal manners that identify one as a powerful and successful man. Though they had not been living with their fathers when it came time to be “men,” the early models of their lives were unconsciously reenacted. They could have protected themselves from this intimate repetition only by consciously working to be different, only by being disloyal to the dominator model.

No man who does not actively choose to work to change and challenge patriarchy escapes its impact. The most passive, kind, quiet man can come to violence if the seeds of patriarchal thinking have been embedded in his psyche. Much of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior women describe in men who are alternately caring, then abusive has its root in this fundamental allegiance to patriarchal thinking. Indoctrination into the mind-set begun in childhood includes a psychological initiation that requires boys to accept that their willingness to do violent acts makes them patriarchal men. A distinction can and must be made between the willingness to do violent acts and actually doing them. When researchers looking at date rape interviewed a range of college men and found that many of them saw nothing wrong with forcing a woman sexually, they were astounded. Their findings seemed to challenge the previously accepted notion that raping was aberrant male behavior. While it may be unlikely that any of the men in this study were or became rapists, it was evident that given what they conceived as the appropriate circumstance, they could see themselves being sexually violent. Unconsciously they engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it.

Researching boyhood, Olga Silverstein observed: “In single-parent families, it’s common to see boys who have become their mother’s ‘little man.’ Often these boys are very bossy children who patronize their mothers, who in fact do uncanny imitations of a certain kind of husband, being alternately possessive, protective, and seductive.” Whether in single-parent or two-parent households, boys who are allowed to assume the role of “mini patriarch” are often violent toward their mothers. They hit and kick when their wishes are not satisfied. Obviously, as small boys they do not have the strength to overpower their mothers, but it is clear that they see the use of violence to get their needs met as acceptable. And while mothers of boys who hit them may feel that hitting is wrong, they may simultaneously feel that it is their job to meet the needs of any male, especially one who is coercive.

To some extent the reformist feminist thinkers who have focused on women as the more ethical, kinder, gentler sex have stood in the way of an in-depth study of maternal sadism, of the ways women in patriarchal society act out violently with boys.

Feminist movement was able to challenge and change notions of female inequality on many fronts, particularly in such arenas as work, education, and religion. However, sexism continues to shape the ways most people think about sexual relations. No matter how many men in our nation are celibate or have only occasional sexual experiences, people still believe that sex is something men have to have. Underlying this assumption is the belief that if men are not sexually active, they will act out or go crazy. This is why male-on-male sexual violence is accepted in our nation’s prisons. This is why rape—whether date rape, marital rape, or stranger rape—is still not deemed a serious crime. This is why the rape of children, especially when conducted by mild-mannered, nice men, is allowed. If this were not so, celebrities accused of sexually abusing children would no longer be cultural icons. The assumption that “he’s gotta have it” underlies much of our culture’s acceptance of male sexual violence. It is why many people continue to believe that anyone who is raped may have “asked for it” by “seductive” dress or behavior, no matter how many television programs have aired the facts about sexual violence.

Children today learn more about sex from mass media than from any other source. Whether watching daytime soap operas, a porn channel, or X-rated movies, children in our nation are more aware of the body and of sexuality than ever before. 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 in the world of sexual relations there is always a dominant party and a submissive party. They learn that males should dominate females, that strong men should dominate weaker men. They learn that whether he is homosexual or heterosexual, a man deprived of sexual access will ultimately be sexual with any body. If deprived long enough, even if he is straight he will have sex with another man; if he’s gay, deprivation will lead him to engage in desperate sexual acts with women. Again and again children hear the message from mass media that when it comes to sex, “he’s gotta have it.” Adults may know better, from their own experience, but children become true believers. They think that men will go mad if they cannot act sexually. This is the logic that produces what feminist thinkers call “a rape culture.”

Within a culture of domination struggles for power are enacted daily in human relationships, often assuming their worst forms in situations of intimacy. The patriarchal man who would never respond to demands from his boss with overt rage and abuse will respond with fury when intimates want him to change his behavior. Men who do not daily lie and cheat at their jobs do so in their intimate bonds.

For boys this issue of control begins with the mother’s response to his penis; usually she does not like it and she does not know what to do with it.

Umm so is this section backed up by actual science or...

when men gather together at work, they rarely have meaningful conversations. They jeer, they grandstand, they joke, but they do not share feelings. They relate in a scripted, limited way, careful to remain within the emotional boundaries set by patriarchal thinking about masculinity. The rules of patriarchal manhood remind them that it is their duty as men to refuse relatedness.

Reformist feminist women could not make this call because they were the group of women (mostly white women with class privilege) who had pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place. These were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power. Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism.

When a sociologist asked young male viewers what they would do if they had the power of the Hulk, they said that they would smash their mommies. The Hulk was the precursor for the Power Ranger toys that are still popular along with more recent video games which allow boys to engage in violent ritualized play.

The Incredible Hulk linked sexism and racism. The cool, level-headed, rational white-male scientist turned into a colored beast whenever his passions were aroused. Tormented by the knowledge of this transformation, he searches for a cure, a way to disassociate himself from the beast within. Writing about the connection between racism and the construction of masculinity in White Hero, Black Beast, Paul Hoch contends, “There is indeed a close interaction between the predominant Western conception of manhood and that of racial (and species) domination. The notion, originally from myth and fable, is that the summit of masculinity—the ‘white hero’—achieves his manhood, first and foremost, by winning victory over the ‘dark beast’ or over the barbarian beasts of other—in some sense, ‘darker’—races, nations and social castes.” Recent movies like Men in Black, Independence Day, and The Matrix rely on these racialized narratives of dark versus light to valorize patriarchal white masculinity in the realm of fantasy. In our actual lives the imperialist white-supremacist policies of our government lead to enactments of rituals of white-male violent domination of a darker universe, as in both the Gulf War and the most recent war against Iraq. By making it appear that the threatening masculinity—the rapist, the terrorist, the murderer—is really a dark other, white male patriarchs are able to deflect attention away from their own misogyny, from their violence against women and children.

The popularization of gangsta rap, spearheaded by white male executives in the music industry, gave a public voice to patriarchy and woman-hating. However, by promoting the voices of young black males (in the beginning many of whom were coming from the underclass), ruling-class white males could both exploit their clients’ longing for the trappings of patriarchal masculinity (money, power, sex) and simultaneously make their antifeminist messages the lessons that young white males would learn. Just as the conservative white men who control our government use individual black males—for example, Colin Powell—to preach the gospel of war to the American public (affirming the idea that the darker other is the threat that the heroic white male must annihilate), mass media demonization of black males as the epitome of brutal patriarchal masculinity deflects attention away from the patriarchal masculinity of white men and its concomitant woman-hating.

As the trial closes and the white male judge reads his final comments on the case, he tells viewers that the Hillside Strangler was a misogynist, a man who hated women. Yet the judge does not link this misogyny to patriarchy or sexism or male domination. Instead we are told that the man’s mother whipped him to express her anger toward a violent, no-good gambler husband. In the final analysis a woman is blamed for this man’s violence against women—another case of “She made me do it.” Nothing is said of his rationally thought-out strategy of dissimulation or of the way he deceived many women and other people by pretending to be a nice guy, by impersonating the benevolent patriarch.

Any reader of Robert Bly’s Iron John can hear the mother blame in his words. And Bly is right to demand that we all look at the role mothers play in deadening the spirits of boy children, but he fails to acknowledge that such mothers in their acts of maternal sadism are really doing the work of patriarchal caretaking, doing what they were taught a good mother should do.

He shares the powerful insight that “when they speak of fearing intimacy, what they really mean is that they fear subjugation.”

I think this is at least part of the cause of homophobia, too

Studies indicate that patriarchal fathers are rarely killed by their children; mothers are murdered more, for the rage many males feel from father shaming is usually transferred to female authority figures. With females, especially, the wounded boy inside the man can rage with no fear of reprisals. The more intimate the relationship, the more likely she is to be both the target of the rage and the secret keeper, telling no one that he is addicted to rage. This is especially the case where the acting-out male is a son who is physically hitting a mother or weaker siblings. The violence of sons, especially adolescent boys, toward mothers is rarely talked about in our culture. Now that so many adult single men return home to live with female parents or never even leave, there is a growing problem of domestic discord, both emotional and physical, that is covered up.

All too often we are led to believe that men gain more power through lying and compartmentalization. It just simply is not so. The stress of guarding and protecting a false self is harmful to male emotional well-being; it erodes self-esteem. Much of the depression men suffer is directly related to their inability to be whole. Even though they have been socialized to create and maintain false selves, most men remember the true self that once existed. And it is that memory of loss—coupled with rage at the world, which encouraged the surrender of the self—that engenders depression. This suffering, the source of which often goes unidentified in adult males, is constant. It leads many men to addiction, whether to workaholism or substance abuse. Workaholism is the most common addiction in men because it is usually rewarded and not taken seriously as detrimental to their emotional well-being. Work is often the space where men detach from feelings. Zukav and Francis describe workaholism as a flight from emotions: “It is a drug that is as effective as the most powerful anesthetic…. Workaholism is a deep sleep. It is a self-induced trance that temporarily keeps painful emotions away from your awareness.”

Responsible men are capable of self-criticism. If more men were doing the work of self-critique, then they would not be wounded, hurt, or chagrined when critiqued by others, especially women with whom they are intimate. Engaging in self-critique empowers responsible males to admit mistakes.

War was in its earliest forms inclusive of women and men. Detailing its history in Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us that “by assigning the triumphant predator status to males alone, humans have helped themselves to ‘forget’ that nightmarish prehistory in which they were, male and female, prey to larger, stronger animals…. Gender, in other words, is an idea that coincidentally obliterates our common past as prey, and states that the predator status is innate and ‘natural’—at least to men.”

After forty-nine years of marriage, my mother is angry with our dad. The perfect subordinated wife, now when they are both over seventy years in age, is upset that he is not more emotionally giving. Since she is not a feminist, she does not see that it is a contradiction to expect this old-time patriarch to suddenly give her love. Her anger surprises and enrages him. Mama’s anger masks her fear that any day now she could die without ever feeling loved by the man she has devoted her entire life to pleasing. Like the men who feel that patriarchy’s promise has not been fulfilled, Mama feels that she is left with broken promises, without the reward for performing the subordinate role she was told a good woman should perform.