The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

This discontent does not receive the attention that male workers receive when they blame their unhappiness with the w...

Work stands in the way of love for most men then because the long hours they work often drain their energies; there is little or no time left for emotional labor, for doing the work of love. The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation. It is simply assumed in patriarchal culture that men should be willing to sacrifice meaningful emotional connections to get the job done.

No one has really tried to examine what men feel about the loss of time with children, partners, loved ones, and the loss of time for self-development.

These women often begin to place greater demands on male spouses and lovers for emotional engagement. Faced with these demands, working men often wish that the little woman would stay home so that he could wield absolute power, no matter the amount of his paycheck.

In many cases when a woman’s paycheck is more than that of her male partner, he acts out to restore his sense of dominance.

Most women who work long hours come home and work a second shift taking care of household chores.

Sexist men and women believe that the way to solve this dilemma is not to encourage men to share the work of emotional caretaking but rather to return to more sexist gender roles.

Of course they do not critique the economy that makes it necessary for all adults to work outside the home; instead they pretend that feminism keeps women in the workforce.

Most women work because they want to leave the house and because their families need the income to survive, not because they are feminists who believe t...

Rather than being viewed as doing what they should do as people in relationships, homemaking men are seen as especially chivalrous, as sacrificing the power and privileges they could have as privileged male workers outside the home in order to do woman’s work inside the home.

Not really.

Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor.

Unemployment feels so emotionally threatening because it means that there would be time to fill, and most men in patriarchal culture do not want time on their hands.

Victor Seidler expresses his fear of having downtime in Rediscovering Masculinity, confessing, “I have learned how hard it is to give myself time, even an hour for myself a day. There are always things I am supposed to be doing. A feeling of panic and anxiety emerges at the very thought of spending more time with myself.”

He argues that most men have such a limited sense of self that they are uncertain that they possess “selv...

We feel trapped, though we do not know how we are constantly remaking this trap for ourselves.”

when men gather together at work, they rarely have meaningful conversations. They jeer, they grandstand, they joke, but they do not share feelings. They relate in a scripted, limited way, careful to remain within the emotional boundaries set by patriarchal thinking about masculinity.

The rules of patriarchal manhood remind them that it is their duty as men to refuse relatedness.

Although women with class privilege such as Susan Faludi or Susan Bordo who write about men express surprise that most men do not see themselves as powerful, women who have been raised in poor and working-class homes have always been acutely aware of the emotional pain of the men in their lives and of their work dissatisfactions.

Had Susan Faludi read the work of feminist women of color writing about the poor and working-class men whom we know most intimately, she would not have been “surprised” to find masses of men troubled and discontent.