The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by Bell Hooks

Researchers found that boys agreed that to be truly manly, they must command respect, be tough, not talk about problems, and dominate females.

Recent studies indicate that it is actually emotionally damaging to young males to be isolated and without emotional care or nurturance. In the past it was assumed that aggression was part of the ritual of separation, a means for the growing boy to assert his autonomy. Yet clearly, just as girls learn how to be autonomous and how to create healthy distance from parents without becoming antisocial, boys can do the same.

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. Patriarchal fathers cannot love their sons because the rules of patriarchy dictate that they stand in competition with their sons, ready to prove that they are the real man, the one in charge.

Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship to ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth, that pulls one neither into “better than” grandiosity nor “less than” shame…. Contempt is why so many men have such trouble staying connected. Since healthy self-esteem—being neither one up nor down—is not yet a real option, and since riding in the one-down position elicits disdain, in oneself and in others, most men learn to hide the chronic shame that dogs them…running from their own humanity and from closeness to anyone else along with it.

Trapped by a world that tells them boys should not express feelings, teenage males have nowhere to go where grief is accepted.” 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.

In Lost Boys therapist James Garbarino testifies that when it comes to boys, “neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.”

Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal mis-behavior, “Boys will be boys.” Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men.

Today small boys and young men are daily inundated with a poisonous pedagogy that supports male violence and male domination, that teaches boys that unchecked violence is acceptable, that teaches them to disrespect and hate women. Given this reality and the concomitant emotional abandonment of boys, it should surprise no one that boys are violent, that they are willing to kill; it should surprise us that the killing is not yet widespread.

The books I have written are aimed at offering boys ways to cope with their emotional selves. The point is to stimulate in boys emotional awareness and to affirm that awareness.

To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.

Their violence is deemed “natural” by the psychology of patriarchy, which insists that there is a biological connection between having a penis and the will to do violence. This thinking continues to shape notions of manhood in our society despite the fact that it has been documented that cultures exist in the world where men are not violent in everyday life, where rape and murder are rare occurrences.

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.

Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.

The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.

Mothers who ally themselves with patriarchy cannot love their sons rightly, for there will always come a moment when patriarchy will ask them to sacrifice their sons. Usually this moment comes in adolescence, when many caring and affectionate mothers stop giving their sons emotional nurturance for fear it will emasculate them. Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

Emotionally self-mutilated, disconnected, many men make overtures of emotional connection only to later undermine these with emotional abuse. They simply do not get that love and abuse cannot go together.

Teaching men to understand that women and children do not feel loved when they are being abused, is one of the primary goals of groups that work to end male violence.

Women who stay in long-term relationships with men who are emotionally abusive or violent usually end up closing the door to their hearts. They stop working to create love. Often they stay in these relationships because a basic cynicism, rooted in their experience, affirms that most men are emotionally withholding, so they do not believe that they can find a loving relationship with any man.

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

It is more difficult for men to do the work of emotional development because this work requires individuals to be emotionally aware—to feel. Patriarchy rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings.

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. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.

Most folks believe we are hardwired biologically to long for sex but they do not believe we are hardwired to long for love.

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.

The assumption that “he’s gotta have it” underlies much of our culture’s acceptance of male sexual violence.

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.”

Lying about sexuality is an accepted part of patriarchal masculinity. Sex is where many men act out because it is the only social arena where the patriarchal promise of dominion can be easily realized. Without these perks, masses of men might have rebelled against patriarchy long ago.

In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon. This is the psychology of a rape culture. Boys learn that they should identify with the penis and the potential pleasure erections will bring, while simultaneously learning to fear the penis as though it were a weapon that could backfire, rendering them powerless, destroying them.

Sexual repression fuels the lust of boys and men.

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.

addictive sexuality is not simply about getting 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. If it is only through sex that he can experience selfhood, then sex has to be constantly foregrounded. Zukav and Francis 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.

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. Patriarchal violence is a mental illness.

Attention to the meaning of the central male slang term for sexual intercourse—“fuck”—is instructive. To fuck a woman is to have sex with her. To fuck someone in another context…means to hurt or cheat a person. And when hurled as a simple insult (“fuck you”) the intent is denigration and the remark is often a prelude to violence or the threat of violence. Sex in patriarchy is fucking.

More often than not, gay males, unless they have consciously decided otherwise, are as patriarchal in their thinking about masculinity, about sexuality, as their heterosexual counterparts. Their investment in patriarchy is an intensely disordered desire, because they are enamored of the very ideology that fosters and promotes homophobia. Now that patriarchal straight men have been compelled through mass media to face the fact that homosexual males are not “chicks with dicks,” that they can and do embody patriarchal masculinity, straight male sexual dominance of biological females has intensified, for it is really the only factor that distinguishes straight from gay. Concurrently, homophobia becomes amplified among heterosexual men because its overt expression is useful as a way to identify, among apparently similar macho men, who is gay and who is straight.

I am afraid of sex because I am afraid of domination, cruelty, violence, and death.

Rather than change, patriarchal males and females have exploited the logic of gender equality in the sexual realm to encourage women to be advocates of patriarchal sex and to pretend, like their male counterparts, that this is sexual freedom.

Sex was, and is, presented as the road to real intimacy, complete closeness, as the arena in which it is okay to openly love, to be tender and vulnerable and yet remain safe, to not feel so deeply alone.

Bearman reminds men that “no matter how much sex you encounter, it will not be enough to fill your enormous need to love and be close and express your passion and delight in your senses and feel life forces coursing through your muscles and skin.”

To recover the power and passion of male sexuality unsullied by patriarchal assault, males of all ages must be allowed to speak openly of their sexual longing. They must be able to be sexual beings in a space where patriarchal thinking can no longer make violation the only means of attaining sexual pleasure. This is a tough job. And until males learn how to do it, they will not be satisfied.

Patriarchal obsession with sex and the pornography it produces are promoted to soothe men subliminally while they perform jobs that are tedious, boring, and oftentimes dehumanizing, jobs where their health and well-being are at risk.

Yet 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. This discontent does not receive the attention that male workers receive when they blame their unhappiness with the world of work on feminist movement.

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.

Male heads of households who give a meager portion of their wages for the needs of their family can still have the illusion that they are providers. Nowadays women’s income can be the backup money that allows many patriarchal men to squander their paycheck on drugs, alcohol, gambling, or sexual adventures even as they lay claim to being the provider.

Working-class and middle-income women I have spoken with talk about the extent to which working outside the home after years of staying home bolstered their self-esteem and provided them with a different perspective on relationships. These women often begin to place greater demands on male spouses and lovers for emotional engagement. Faced with these demands, working men often wish that the little woman would stay home so that he could wield absolute power, no matter the amount of his paycheck.

Most women who work long hours come home and work a second shift taking care of household chores.

Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.

The male who seeks solitude in the workplace, especially during downtimes, is seen as suspect. Yet 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.

Poor and working-class women have always known that the everyday work experience places men in an environment where they feel powerless and where they are unable to articulate that on patriarchal terms; to use Faludi’s words, they feel “less than masculine.”

In actuality, individual men are engaged in the work of emotional recovery every day, but the work is not easy because they have no support systems within patriarchal culture, especially if they are poor and working-class.