The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

It is the will to change that motivates us to seek help. It is the fear of change that motivates us to resist the very help we seek.

Mother love is aplenty and apparent: we complain because we have too much of it. The love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity.

Wow. The truth of this is undeniable.

The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love.

The issues we fought about most had to do with the practice of love.

When asked to link the “I love you” words with definition and practice, he found that he did not really have the words, that he was fundamentally uncomfortable being asked to talk about emotions.

It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability.

It’s crazy to me that many women are like this. I’ve never understood why a woman would ask her man to be emotionally open and available to her, only to shy away from it when he shows his vulnerability.

Anger is the best hiding place for anybody seeking to conceal pain or anguish of spirit.

Yet when I began to talk with men about love, time and time again I heard stories of male fear of other males. Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed.

We cannot love what we fear.

Is this true though? Because there are many a people in abusive relationships that still love the abusive one they’re with.

Reflecting the experience of many of us, the individual telling his story talked about wanting the love of this hard man but then learning not to want it, learning to silence his heart, to make it not matter.

that being simply reactive is always to risk allowing that shadowy past to overtake the present.

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

Yes we need a balance especially in JA.

Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not.

When I think about maleness and all that encompasses, I can’t help but smile.

In his younger years our brother was a loving presence in our household, capable of expressing emotions of wonder and delight. As patriarchal thinking and action claimed him in adolescence, he learned to mask his loving feelings.

And if somehow this doesn’t happen in adolescence, it happens in his first romantic relationship where he is wronged. And then he is lost forever among the already tall stack of men unable or unwilling to be emotionally vulnerable in their romantic relationships.

Dad took Mama’s admiration for her dad, for his capacity to love, and made it appear that what was precious to her was really worthless.

Back then Mama did not know how lucky she was to have a loving father.

She may wake up and recognize that she is wedded to abuse, that she is not loved.

Everyone who tries to create love with an emotionally unaware partner suffers.

As their daughter I was taught that it was my role to serve, to be weak, to be free from the burden of thinking,

To be free from the burden of thinking….how insulting! To be told that it is burdensome to think your own thoughts is beyond treacherous.

when he grew up, he was taught that rage was permitted and that allowing rage to provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.

It was clear to us that our behavior had to follow a predetermined, gendered script.

we learned that the script that had determined what we should be, the identities we should make, was based on patriarchal values and beliefs about gender.

I announced my desire to play and was told by my brother that “girls did not play with marbles,” that it was a boy’s game. This made no sense to my four- or five-year-old mind, and I insisted on my right to play by picking up marbles and shooting them. Dad intervened to tell me to stop. I did not listen. His voice grew louder and louder. Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen door, and began to beat me with it, telling me, “You’re just a little girl. When I tell you to do something, I mean for you to do it.”

“…and that allowing rage to provoke him to violence would help him protect home and nation.” This is definitely an example of that. To believe in patriarchal rules so strongly as to enforce it with violence on a five year old and using the same belief to justify your rage. Never mind that the belief benefits him and enforces his natural inclination to rage while it stifles his daughters natural inclination to be playful and competitive. This is the burden of thought they want to keep from us, in order to continue to benefit from a society structured to empower men.

the use of violence to reinforce our indoctrination and acceptance of patriarchy.

three, Alexander was learning the rules. A ten-second wordless transaction was powerful enough to dissuade my son from that instant forward from what had been a favorite activity. I call such moments of induction the “normal traumatization” of boys.

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

“blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands;

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.

Donning the mantle of patriarch, he gained greater respect and visibility.

Boys brutalized and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal, embodying the abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly recognized as evil.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity.

In recent years it has become clear to researchers working on promoting the emotional life of boys that patriarchal culture influences parents to devalue the emotional development of boys.

It is patriarchy, in its denial of the full humanity of boys, that threatens the emotional lives of boys, not feminist thinking.

Yet she feels sad for him, sad that conformity to patriarchal standards interfered with his longings.

Teenagers are the most unloved group in our nation. Teenagers are often feared precisely because they are often exposing the hypocrisy of parents and of the world around them.

Many teenage boys have violent contempt and rage for a patriarchal mom because they understand that in the world outside the home, sexism renders her powerless; he is pissed that she has power over him at home.

patriarchal mothers who have rage at grown men act out with sons.

They may either force the son to enter into an inappropriate relationship in which he must provide for her the emotional connection grown men deny her or engage

in emotional abuse in which the son is constantly bel...

It is more difficult for men to do the work of emotional development because this work requires individuals to be emotionally aware—to feel.

We have all heard the notion that men come to relationships looking for sex and not love and that women come to relationships looking for love and not sex. In actuality, men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all the emotional satisfaction that would come from love.

They learn that whether he is homosexual or heterosexual, a man deprived of sexual access will ultimately be sexual with any body.

In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon.

“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. It is not about connecting to someone else but rather about releasing their own pain.

Everywhere, men are in power, controlling virtually all the economic, political, and social institutions of society. Yet individual men do not feel powerful—far from it. Most men feel powerless and are often angry at women, whom they perceive as having sexual power over them: the power to arouse them and to give or withhold sex.

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.

And herein lies the “justification” for so many resentful and violent male incels to act as they do.

Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their selfhood has meaning only in relation to the pursuit of external power;

The psychologist David Winter found that women living in countries or periods of extreme male dominance tend to be very controlling of their sons, who are the only males it is safe for them to vent against.