The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

Work can and should be life-enhancing for all men. When daring men come to work loved and loving, the nature of work will be transformed and the workplace will no longer demand that the hearts of men be broken to get the job done.

consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.

man who is unabashedly and unequivocally committed to patriarchal masculinity will both fear and hate all that the culture deems feminine and womanly.

fraught

tacit

Mass media, especially television talk shows, focused on male violence without linking that focus to ending patriarchy. Male domination of women simply became a new form of mass entertainment (hence the money-making spectacle of the O. J. Simpson trial).

One of the most popular children’s shows with a subtext about masculinity was The Incredible Hulk. A favorite of boys from diverse class and racial backgrounds, this show was instrumental in

teaching the notion that for a male, the exertion of physical force (brutal and monstrous) was a viable response to all situations of crisis.

“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.”

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.

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.

One of the ways patriarchal white males used mass media to wage the war against feminism was to consistently portray the violent woman-hating man as aberrant and abnormal.

popular culture offers both negative and positive models of the masculine. Woman-hating dominator men are consistently depicted as loners, who may have been abused as children and who were not able to adjust in normal society. Ironically, these “bad” men share the same character traits as the “good” men who hunt them

Intimacy generates too many raw feelings. Contending with them is requisite work for staying close. Yet the stoicism of disconnection, the strategy of avoiding one’s feelings, is precisely the value in which boys are schooled…. Empathy to oneself and others lies in a realm that has remained devalued and unexplored—the domain of women….

No other contemporary film exposes the evil of patriarchy as masterfully as Monster’s Ball.

The path to redemption requires the repudiation of white-male patriarchal rule.

Contemporary books and movies offer clear portraits of the evils of patriarchy without offering any direction for change. Ultimately they send the message that male survival demands holding on to some vestige of patriarchy. In Monster’s Ball the male who is really different, who is humanistic, feeling, antiracist, and longing to move past patriarchal pornographic objectification to genuine intimacy is a victim. He kills himself. Watching this film, no male will be inspired to truly challenge the system.

The vast majority of contemporary films send the message that males cannot escape the beast within. They can pretend. They can dissimulate, but they can never break patriarchy’s hold on their consciousness.

Until we can create a popular culture that affirms and celebrates masculinity without upholding patriarchy, we will never see a change in the way that masses of males think about the nature of their identity.

Mass media are a powerful vehicle for teaching the art of the possible. Enlightened men must claim it as the space of their public voice and create a progressive popular culture that will teach men how to connect with others, how to communicate, how to love.

It is highly ironic that we are now living in a time when we are told to question whether mothers can raise sons, when so many patriarchal men have been taught the beliefs and values of patriarchy by mothers, firsthand. Many mothers in patriarchal culture express their rage at adult men by directing anger at their sons.

Many mothers in patriarchal culture silence the wild spirit in their sons, the spirit of wonder and playful tenderness, for fear their sons will be weak, will not be prepared to be macho men, real men, men other men will envy and look up to.

Much of the anger men direct at mothers is a response to the maternal failure to protect the spirit of the boy from patriarchal harm.

acquiescence.

Every day mothers are ruthlessly and brutally terminating their emotional connection with male children in order to turn them over to patriarchy, whether to an actual unfeeling father or to a symbolic father. Boys feel the pain. And they have no place to lay it down; they carry it within. They take it to the place where it is converted into rage.

To always wear a mask as a way of asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and well-being. This falseness causes males to experience intense emotional pain.

“if we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as ‘manly,’ men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is the deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.”

Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity.

“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.”

There needs to be more feminist work that specifically addresses males. They need feminist blueprints for change.

To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain.

women are fearful of hearing men voice feelings.

I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?

Men of all ages who want to talk about feelings usually learn not to go to other men. And if they are heterosexual, they are far more likely to try sharing with women they have been sexually intimate with. Women talk about the fact that intimate conversation with males often takes place in the brief moments before and after sex. And of course our mass media provide the image again and again of the man who goes to a sex worker to share his feelings because there is no intimacy in that relationship and therefore no real emotional risk.

Being “vulnerable” is an emotional state many men seek to avoid. Some men spend a lifetime in a state of avoidance and therefore never experience intimacy.

we all collude with patriarchal culture to make men feel they can have it all, that they can embrace patriarchal manhood and still hold their loved ones dear. In reality, the more patriarchal a man is, the more disconnected he must be from feeling. If he cannot feel, he cannot connect. If he cannot connect, he cannot be intimate.

“when they speak of fearing intimacy, what they really mean is that they fear subjugation.” This fear of subjugation is often triggered by the reality that boys parented by patriarchal women are controlled via their longing for maternal closeness. In maternal sadism, the manipulative woman exploits the boy’s emotional vulnerability to bind him to her will, to subjugate him. This early experience resides at the heart of many a man’s fear of being intimate with a grown woman. And it may explain why so many men in patriarchal culture seek intimacy with girls or women young enough to be their daughters.

In the near future we may hope to have more data to show us the ways boys fare better when they have loving parents, whether together or apart, who teach them how to be intimate. Meanwhile let us create the space where males who lack relational skills can learn them.

Before most men can be intimate with others, they have to be intimate with themselves. They have to learn to feel and to be aware of their feelings. Men who mask feelings or suppress them simply do not want to feel the pain. Since emotional pain is the feeling that most males have covered up, numbed out, or closed off, the journey back to feeling is frequently through the portal of suffering. Much male rage covers up this place of suffering: this is the well-kept secret. Often when a female gets close to male pain, penetrating the male mask to see the emotional vulnerability beneath, she becomes a target for the rage.

Shame at emotional vulnerability is often what men who are closed down emotionally seek to hide.

many grown men have an internal shaming voice.

With females, especially, the wounded boy inside the man can rage with no fear of reprisals.

The violence of sons, especially adolescent boys, toward mothers is rarely talked about in our culture.

Intimate terrorism in male-female couple relationships is identified as a problem, particularly emotional abuse. Yet very little is said about the intimate terrorism between adult children and parents.

“create intimacy when you shift from the pursuit of external power—the ability to manipulate and control—to the pursuit of authentic power—the alignment of your personality with your soul.”

clarion

Men need to hear that their souls matter and that the care of their souls is the primary task of their being.

hearts of men are transformed by love and compassion.

Healing the crisis in the hearts of men requires of us all a willingness to face the fact that patriarchal culture has required of men that they be divided souls.

Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male.