The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

I was half-lying on the ground next to him, with my arms around his body. I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had felt able to really touch my father’s body. I was holding hard to it—with my love—and with my grief. And my grief was partly that my father, whom I loved, was dying.

But it was also that I knew already that his death would allow me to feel freer. I was mourning that this had to be so. It’s a grief that is hard for me to speak of. That the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead—it’s unbearable to me. And I think there can hardly be a woman who hasn’t felt a comparable grief.

So it’s an oversimplification to speak the truth that we sometimes wish men dead—unless we also speak the truth which is perhaps even harder to face (as we try to find our own powers, to be our own women): the...

Death was the way out of the fear evoked by the proclamation “Wait until your father comes home.” The threat of punishment was so intense, his power over us so real.

I used to think, “If only he would die, we could live.”

Later as a grown woman waiting for the man in my life to come home, the man who was more often than not a caring partner but who sometimes erupted into violent fits of rage, I used to think, “Maybe he will have an accident and die, maybe he will not come home, and I will be free and able to live.”

Women and female and male children, dominated by men, have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change. They believe that men who are not dominators will not protect them. They believe that men are hopeless.

We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives, that men are in our lives whether we want them to be or not, that we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.

My reconciliation with my father began with my recognition that I wanted and needed his love—and that if I could not have his love, then at least I needed to heal the wound in my heart his violence had created.

I needed to talk with him, to tell him my truth, to hold him close and let him know he mattered.

Nowadays when I call home, I revel in the sound of my father’s voice, his southern speech familiar and broken in all the right places. I want to hear his voice forever. I do not want him to die, this dad whom I ca...

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is about our need to live in a world where women and men can belong together. Looking at the reasons patriarchy has maintained its power over men and their lives, I urge us to reclaim feminism for men, showing why feminist thinking and practice are the only way we can truly address the crisis of masculinity today.

Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving.

By claiming that they wanted the power men had, man-hating feminists (who were by no means the majority) covertly proclaimed that they too wanted to be rewarded for being out of touch with their feelings, for being unable to love.

So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain,

that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire.

We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture the...

Dad. It does not have the utilitarian effect of Mum or Ma. It’s still spoken as a ballad refrain. It’s a pledge that originates in the heart and fights for life amid the carnage of persistent, obvious history to the contrary and excruciatingly scant follow-through.

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.

Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. It did not tell us the terrible terror that gnaws at the soul when one cannot love.

Barbara Deming hinted at those truths:

I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting out a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught up in the lie. But they don’t know how to break it.… They’re in a rage because they are acting out a lie—which means that in some deep part of themselves they want to be delivered from it, are homesick for the truth.

In part, I began to write books about love because of the constant fighting between my ex-boyfriend Anthony and myself.

Like so many men who know that the women in their lives want to hear them declare love, Anthony made those declarations. 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.

When females are in emotional pain, the sexist thinking that says that emotions should and can matter to women makes it possible for most of us to at least voice our heart, to speak it to someone, whether a close friend, a therapist, or the stranger sitting next to us on a plane or bus.

Patriarchal mores teach a form of emotional stoicism to men that says they are more manly if they do not feel, but if by chance they should feel and the feelings hurt, the manly response is to stuff them down, to forget about them, to hope they go away.

George Weinberg explains in Why Men Won’t Commit: “Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can’t be worked out. When the slightes...

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please d...

We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire.

Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.

When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out.

He was right.

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...

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

It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what ...

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 struggle then, in patriarchal culture, all of us, to love men. We may care about males deeply. We may cherish our connections with the men in our lives. And we may desperately feel that we cannot live without their presence, their company. We can feel all these passions in the face of maleness and yet stand removed, keeping the distance patriarchy has created,

After writing a general book about love, then one specifically about black people and love, then another focusing on the female search for love, I wanted to go further and talk about men and love.

Women and men alike in our culture spend very little time encouraging males to learn to love. Even the women who are pissed off at men, women most of whom are not and maybe never will be feminist, use their anger to avoid being truly committed to helping to create a world where males of all ages can know love.

Only a revolution of values in our nation will end male violence, and that revolution will necessarily be based on a love ethic.

To create loving men, we must love males.

Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-define...

Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving ...

When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be w...

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 ...

Much of my thinking about maleness began in childhood when I witnessed the differences in the ways my brother and I were treated. The standards used to judge his behavior were much harsher.

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

Like so many females, she had been seduced by myths of romantic love to dream of a strong, domineering, take-control, dashing, and daring man as a suitable mate. She married her ideal only to find herself trapped in a bond with a punishing, cruel, unloving patriarchal man.

“Something missing within” was a self-description I heard from many men as I went around our nation talking about love.

Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone.