The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

We were the feminists who did not believe in female superiority any more than we believed in male superiority.

Hating men was just another way to not take men and masculinity seriously.

Despite the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see men as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.

if I dare to challenge patriarchy openly, I risk not being taken seriously.

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.

Conservative antifeminist women and men insist that feminism is destroying family life. They argue that working women leave households bereft of homemakers and children without a mother’s care. Yet they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.

Feminism makes it possible for women and men to know love.