The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by Bell Hooks

Only a father capable of being whole can have the integrity to acknowledge ignorance to his son without feeling diminished.

If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved.

Time and time again we have been told that civilization cannot survive men’s loving, for if men love, they will not be able to kill on command. However, if men were natural-born killers, hardwired by biology and destiny to take life, then there would be no need for patriarchal socialization to turn them into killers.

I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits—like courage, teamwork, loyalty—but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters,

We must be willing to see boyhood differently, not as a time when boys are indoctrinated into a manhood that is about violence and death but rather as a time when boys learn to glory in the connection with others, in the revelry and joy of intimacy that is the essential human longing.

If boys are raised to be empathic and strong; autonomous and connected; responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society; able to make community rooted in a recognition of interbeing, then the solid foundation is present and they will be able to love.

Because sexist roles have always given women support for emotional development, it has been easier for women to find our way to love. We do not love better or more than men, but we do find it easier to get in touch with feelings because even patriarchal society supports this trait in us. Men will never receive support from patriarchal culture for their emotional development.

As men work to be whole, sex assumes its rightful place as one pleasure among many pleasures. Unlike addictive patriarchal sex, passion rooted in a life-affirming erotic ethos deepens emotional connection.

More than ever before in our nation’s history, females are encouraged to assume the patriarchal mask and bury their emotional selves as deeply as their male counterparts do. Females embrace this paradigm because they feel it is better to be a dominator than to be dominated. However, this is a perverse vision of gender equality that offers women equal access to the house of the dead.