The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by Bell Hooks

the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy.

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.

“Lots of women fear men. And fear can lay the foundation for contempt and hatred. It can be a cover-up for repressed, killing rage.” Fear keeps us away from love. And yet women rarely talk to men about how much we fear them.

Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together—the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture.

In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.

what will motivate males in a patriarchal culture who have been taught that to love emasculates them to change, to choose love, when the choice means that they must stand against patriarchy, against the tyranny of the familiar. We cannot change men but we can encourage, implore, and affirm their will to change.

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.

“imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.

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.

I was always more interested in challenging patriarchy than my brother was because it was the system that was always leaving me out of things that I wanted to be part of.

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

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.

Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain.

If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.

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

If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail.

Indeed the feminist rhetoric that insisted on identifying males as the enemy often closed down the space where boys could be considered, where they could be deemed as worthy of rescue from patriarchal exploitation and oppression as were their female counterparts.

patriarchal culture requires that boys deny, suppress, and if all goes well, shut down their emotional awareness and their capacity to feel.

Anger can be, and usually is, the hiding place for fear and pain.

To truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions.

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 belittled and shamed.

“while most of us want to be loved, controllers are willing to forego love if that is what it takes to be the boss.”

“In our culture, boys and men are not, nor have they ever been, raised to be intimate.”

Every day women explain away male violence and cruelty by insisting on gender differences that normalize abuse.

it was much easier for him to accept equal pay for equal work, sharing housework, and reproductive rights than it was for him to accept the need for shared emotional development.

men are better able to fulfill the demands of patriarchy if they do not feel.

Poor and working-class male children and grown men often embody the worst strains of patriarchal masculinity, acting out violently because it is the easiest, cheapest way to declare one’s “manhood.” If you cannot prove that you are “much of a man” by becoming president, or becoming rich, or becoming a public leader, or becoming a boss, then violence is your ticket in to the patriarchal manhood contest, and your ability to do violence levels the playing field.

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.

addictive sexuality is fundamentally about the need to constantly affirm and reaffirm one’s selfhood.

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.

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.

Sex in patriarchy is fucking. That we live in a world in which people continue to use the same word for sex and violence, and then resist the notion that sex is routinely violent and claim to be outraged when sex becomes overtly violent, is testament to the power of patriarchy.

Socializing women to conform more to patriarchal male sexual norms is one way patriarchy hopes to address male rage.

Male despair, often initially expressed as anger, is a far greater threat to the patriarchal sexual order than feminist movement.

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. Sex is the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves our overflowing passion. This is why men are so obsessed with sex…. But in no way can sex completely fulfill these needs.

One of the antifeminist patriarchal sentiments that has gained ground in recent years is the notion that masses of men used to be content to slave away at meaningless labor to fulfill their role as providers and that it is feminist insistence on gender equality in the workforce that has created male discontent.

The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation.

Women with class privilege have been the only group who have perpetuated the notion that men are all-powerful, because often the men in their families were powerful.

When we love someone and feel loved by them, somehow along the way our suffering subsides, our deepest wounds begin healing, our hearts start to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and to open a little wider.

“Don’t wait until your life is near its end to find your feeling, to follow your heart. Don’t wait until it’s too late.”

Even though not all men are misogynists, feminist thinkers were accurate when we stated that patriarchy in its most basic, unmediated form promotes fear and hatred of females. A man who is unabashedly and unequivocally committed to patriarchal masculinity will both fear and hate all that the culture deems feminine and womanly.

As the movement progressed, as feminist thinking advanced, enlightened feminist activists saw that men were not the problem, that the problem was patriarchy, sexism, and male domination.”

Men were expected to hold on to the ideas about strength and providing for others that were a part of patriarchal thought, while dropping their investment in domination and adding an investment in emotional growth. This vision of feminist masculinity was so fraught with contradictions, it was impossible to realize. No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity

Patriarchal culture continues to control the hearts of men precisely because it socializes males to believe that without their role as patriarchs they will have no reason for being.

Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females.

imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal culture continues to insist that domination must be the organizing principle of today’s civilization.

we must first replace the dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings.

Patriarchal masculinity teaches males to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent for self-definition on the privileges (however relative) that they receive from having been born male. Hence many males feel that their very existence is threatened if these privileges are taken away.

Rather than assuming that males are born with the will to aggress, the culture would assume that males are born with the inherent will to connect.