The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal father not to come home.

I had no words to communicate to the dad who did not listen, who did not seem to care, who did not speak words of tenderness or love. I had no need for the patriarchal dad.

In turning away from my dad, I turned away from a part of myself. It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men. We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives, that men are in our lives whether we want them to be or not, that we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.

My reconciliation with my father began with my recognition that I wanted and needed his love—and that if I could not have his love, then at least I needed to heal the wound in my heart his violence had created. I needed to talk with him, to tell him my truth, to hold him close and let him know he mattered. Nowadays when I call home, I revel in the sound of my father’s voice,

To speak our hunger for male love would demand that we name the intensity of our lack and our loss.

All around our nation a billboard carries this message: “Each night millions of kids go to sleep starving—for attention from their dads.”

If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness.

Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

Bombarded by news about male violence, we hear no news about men and love.

To create loving men, we must love males.

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.

We cannot change men but we can encourage, implore, and affirm their will to change.

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.

In service to patriarchy her task was to reinforce that Dad had done the right thing by putting me in my place, by restoring the natural social order.

patriarchal ideology brainwashes men to believe that their domination of women is beneficial

As long as men are brainwashed to equate violent domination and abuse of women with privilege, they will have no understanding of the damage done to themselves or to others, and no motivation to change.

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples.

Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.

Many feminist women who birthed boys found themselves reluctant to challenge conventional aspects of patriarchal masculinity when their boys wanted to embrace those values.

Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode.

As much as grown-ups complain about adolescent male anger, most adults are more comfortable confronting a raging teenager than one who is overwhelmed by sorrow and cannot stop weeping. Boys learn to cover up grief with anger; the more troubled the boy, the more intense the mask of indifference. Shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.

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.

in a loving relationship, abuse is unacceptable. You should not have to tolerate any abuse to be loved.’ ”

If only one party in a relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.

Leaving him was a gesture of self-love and self-reliance that I have not regretted.

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.

Domestic households certainly suffer when sexism decrees that all emotional care and love should come from women, in the face of the reality that working women, like their male counterparts, often come home too tired to deliver the emotional goods.

Of course they do not critique the economy that makes it necessary for all adults to work outside the home; instead they pretend that feminism keeps women in the workforce. Most women work because they want to leave the house and because their families need the income to survive, not because they are feminists who believe that their working is a sign of liberation.

American Beauty finally tells audiences that there is no hope for depressed men who are willing to critically reflect on their lives. It tells us that even when men are willing to change, there is no place for them in patriarchal culture.

Say that you are feminist to most men, and automatically you are seen as the enemy.

To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings.

Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.

Barbara Deming explains: “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious. You can’t be happy living a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught in the lie. But they don’t know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.” For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released.

Many women despair of men because they believe that ultimately men care more about being dominators than they do about being loving partners.

Many men fear learning to love because they cannot imagine a sexuality beyond the patriarchal model.

No man who reclaims passion for his life fears the passion in another man. He is not homophobic, for to be so would be a rejection of the self-acceptance and acceptance of others that is essential to the formation and maintenance of self-esteem. If all men were in touch with primal positive passion, the categories of gay and straight would lose their charged significance.

We cannot turn our hearts away from boys and men, then ponder why the politics of war continues to shape our national policy and our intimate romantic lives.