The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

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.

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 slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.” The masculine pretense is that real men feel no pain. The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two

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. There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural—a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity. Anger is the best hiding place for anybody seeking to conceal pain or anguish of spirit. My father was an angry man. At times he

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.

all ages can know love. And there remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.

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.

Marc key

No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal. In his boyhood my brother, like so many boys, just longed to express himself. He did not want to conform to a rigid script of appropriate maleness. As a consequence he was scorned and ridiculed by our patriarchal dad. In his younger years our brother was a loving presence in our household, capable of expressing emotions of wonder and delight. As patriarchal thinking and action claimed him in adolescence, he learned to mask his loving feelings. He entered that space of alienation and antisocial behavior deemed “natural” for adolescent boys. His six sisters witnessed the change in him and mourned the loss of our connection. The damage done to his self-esteem in boyhood has lingered throughout his life, for he continues to grapple with the issue of whether he will define himself or allow himself to be defined by patriarchal standards.

Ray

of the boys,” rejecting the company of his sisters for fear that enjoying us made him less male, my mother’s father, Daddy Gus, found it easier to be disloyal to patriarchy in old age. He

in his life begins to see him differently. She may begin to interrogate her own allegiance to patriarchal thinking. She may wake up and recognize that she is

Marc key

be grateful for his presence, his material provision, his discipline. A fifties woman, she was willing to cling to the fantasy of the patriarchal ideal even as she confronted the brutal reality of patriarchal domination daily. As her children left home, leaving her alone with her husband, her hope that they might find their way to love was soon dashed. She was left face-to-face with the emotionally shut down cold patriarch she had married. After fifty years of marriage she would not be leaving him, but she would no longer believe in love. Only her bitterness found a voice; she now speaks the absence of love, a lifetime of heartache. She is not alone. All over the world women live with men in states of lovelessness. They live and they mourn. My mother and father were the source figures who shaped my patterns of love and longing. I spent most of the years between twenty and forty seeking to know love with intellectually brilliant men who were simply emotionally

Ray

Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men.

The lie

that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence. When my older brother and I were born with a year separating us in age, patriarchy determined how we would each be regarded by our parents. Both our parents

The lie

“The dictionary defines ‘patriarchy’ as a ‘social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family in both domestic and religious functions.…’ Patriarchy is characterized by male domination and power.” He states further that “patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school systems, and family systems.” Describing the most damaging of these rules, Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.”

Clearly we cannot dismantle a system as long as we engage in collective denial about its impact on our lives.

men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”… Both perspectives accurately describe our predicament. Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns. These two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.

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man who has been my primary bond for more than twelve years was traumatized by the patriarchal dynamics in his

Until we can collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. We cannot demand for men the right to be whole, to be givers and sustainers of life. Obviously some patriarchal men are reliable and even benevolent caretakers and providers, but still they are imprisoned by a system that undermines their mental health.

perception that to be a man means to be at the controls and at all times to feel yourself in control. Faludi never interrogates the notion of control. She never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist

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Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” 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. 3 Being a Boy Boys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture. Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved. Patriarchal assault on the emotional life of boys begins at the moment of their birth. Contrary to sexist mythology, in the real world of male and female

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. We cannot teach boys that “real men”

ways of thinking about maleness, not only boyhood. Without ever using the word “patriarchy” (he uses the phrase “traditional masculinity”), psychologist James Garbarino does suggest in Lost Boys that the cultivation

and practice is the answer. It has been hard for many male thinkers about the emotional life of boys to see feminism as a helpful theory because to a grave extent antimale sentiments among some feminists have led the movement to focus very little attention on the development of boys. One of the tremendous failings of feminist theory and practice has been the lack of a concentrated study of boyhood, one that offers guidelines and strategies for alternative masculinity

In my first children’s book with male characters, Be Boy Buzz, I wanted to celebrate boyhood without reinscribing patriarchal norms.

In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets.

people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand

When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a by-product of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families, I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization.

ago the television show The Incredible Hulk was the favorite of many boys. It featured a mild-mannered scientist who turned into an angry green monster whenever he felt intense emotions. A sociologist interviewing boys about their passion for this show asked them what they would do if they had the power of the Hulk. They replied that they would “smash their mommies.” In her groundbreaking work The Mermaid and the Minotaur

too disconnected. They simply could not give more emotionally or even grasp the problem without first reconnecting, reuniting the severed parts. Describing a couple in family therapy, Real recalls the qualities the wife wanted from her husband: “Sensitivity to others, the

As it is for many men today, 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.

Patriarchy rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings. Whether engaged in acts of violence against women and children or weaker men, or in the socially sanctioned violence of war, men are better able to fulfill the demands of patriarchy if they do not feel. Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men. This fear of isolation often acts as the mechanism to prevent males from becoming more emotionally aware.

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. On that field, the field of violence, any man can win.

Men who win on patriarchal terms end up losing in terms of their substantive quality of life. They choose patriarchal manhood over loving connection, first foregoing self-love and then the love they could give and receive that would connect them to others.

For jalyn

Male violence in general has intensified not because feminist gains offer women greater freedom but rather because men who endorse patriarchy discovered along the way that the patriarchal promise of power and dominion is not easy to fulfill, and in those rare cases where it is fulfilled, men find themselves emotionally bereft. The patriarchal manhood that was supposed to satisfy does not. And by the time this awareness emerges, most patriarchal men are isolated and alienated; they cannot go back and reclaim a past happiness or joy, nor can they go forward. To go forward they would need to repudiate the patriarchal thinking that their identity has been based on. Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling. It can serve as the perfect cover, masking feelings of fear and failure.

Ultimately the men who choose against violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These are men who are true heroes, the men whose lives we need to know about, honor, and remember.

We have all heard the notion that men come to relationships looking for sex and not love and that women come to relationships looking for love and not sex. In actuality, men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all the emotional satisfaction that would come from love.

Males, whether gay or straight, learn early on in life that one of the primary rewards offered to them for obedience to patriarchal thought and practice is the right to dominate females sexually.

by their abusers. This same logic has usually shaped the thinking about sexuality embraced by adult abusers. Ed writes of his older brother’s sexual abuse of him: “I learned about sex when I was nine years

a ‘woman.’ My brother liked to act out fantasies in which he was the ‘man’ and I was the ‘woman.’ ” This older brother married and took with him into marriage the notion that it was his right to have sex with anyone he desired, whether they wanted to or not. His need to dominate was the salient feature in all his sexual relationships. Within a culture of domination struggles for power are enacted daily in human relationships, often assuming

proving ground where their patriarchal masculinity will be tested. They learn early that sexual desire should not be freely expressed and that females will try to control male sexuality. For boys this issue of control begins with the mother’s response to his penis; usually she does not like it and she does not know what to do with it. Her discomfort with his penis communicates that there is something inherently wrong with it. She does not communicate to the boy child that his penis is wonderful, special, marvelous. This

commonly expressed by fathers who simply do not concern themselves with educating boys about their bodies. Sadly, unenlightened approaches to child abuse lead many parents to fear celebration of their child’s body, especially the boy body, which may respond

For jalyn

often intense, he learns that patriarchal culture expects him to covertly cultivate that lust and the will to satisfy it while engaging in overt acts of sexual repression. This splitting is part of the initiation into patriarchal masculinity; it is a rite of passage. The boy learns as well that females are the enemy when it comes to the satisfaction of sexual desire. They are the group that will impose on the boy the need to repress his sexual longings, and yet to prove his manhood, he must dare to move past repression and engage in sexual acts. Sexual repression fuels the lust of boys and men. Shedding light on the negative impact of this socialization in the essay “Fuel for Fantasy: The Ideological Construction of Male Lust,” Michael S. Kimmel demonstrates that sexual repression

be he straight or gay, addictive sexuality is fundamentally about the need to constantly affirm and reaffirm one’s selfhood. If it is only through sex that he can experience selfhood, then sex has to be constantly foregrounded. Zukav and Francis

fears being inadequate and he fears rejection: “The stronger these emotions are, when there is no willingness to feel them, the stronger becomes the obsession with sex.” Male sexual obsession tends to be seen as normal. Thus the culture as a whole colludes in requiring of men

no satisfaction.” Patriarchal pornography has become an inescapable part of everyday life because the need to create a pretend culture where male sexual desire is endlessly satisfied keeps males

men are weary of numbing and are trying to find a way to reclaim selfhood.

Domestic households certainly suffer when sexism decrees that all emotional care and love should come from women, in the face of the reality that working women, like their male counterparts, often come home too tired to deliver the emotional goods. 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. They want more women, especially those with small children, to stay home. 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.

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.