The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

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.