The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

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 learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability.

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.

Many feminist women who birthed boys found themselves reluctant to challenge conventional aspects of patriarchal masculinity when their boys wanted to embrace those values.

Our sons learn the code early and well, don’t cry, don’t be vulnerable; don’t show weakness—ultimately, don’t show that you care. As a society, we may have some notion that raising whole boys and girls is a good idea, but that doesn’t mean that we actually do. Even though you or I might be committed to raising less straitjacketed kids, the culture at large, while perhaps changing, is still far from changed. Try as we might, in movie theaters, classrooms, playgrounds our sons and daughters are bombarded with traditional messages about masculinity and femininity, hour by hour, day by day.

The Heart of the Soul authors Gary Zukav and Linda Francis

Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood. It is a wall that separates you from others as effectively as if it were concrete, thick, and very high. There is no way through it, under it, or over it.

Olga Silverstein tackles head-on in The Courage to Raise Good Men.

The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers, edited by Bruce Shenitz,

Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship to ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth, that pulls one neither into “better than” grandiosity nor “less than” shame…. Contempt is why so many men have such trouble staying connected. Since healthy self-esteem—being neither one up nor down—is not yet a real option, and since riding in the one-down position elicits disdain, in oneself and in others, most men learn to hide the chronic shame that dogs them…running from their own humanity and from closeness to anyone else along with it.

Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity, Frank Pittman

And the crisis of this longing seems most deeply felt by boys with absent fathers. Without a positive connection to a real adult man, they are far more likely to invest in a hypermasculine patriarchal ideal.

Dodged a fucking bullet

Donald Dutton’s study of abusive men, The Batterer,

This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.

While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist patriarchal men do not.

Writing a series of children’s book for boys, I was initially amazed by how difficult it was for me, a visionary feminist theorist, to imagine new images and texts for boys.

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. To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.

we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like.

Emotional Abuse Marti Tamm Loring

No man who does not actively choose to work to change and challenge patriarchy escapes its impact. The most passive, kind, quiet man can come to violence if the seeds of patriarchal thinking have been embedded in his psyche. Much of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior women describe in men who are alternately caring, then abusive has its root in this fundamental allegiance to patriarchal thinking.

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. The way we “turn boys into men” is through injury: We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.

Clearly, 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. These acts of patriarchal violence serve to reinforce in the mind of boy children that their violence toward females is appropriate. It simply feels like justifiable vengeance.

whether it is a consequence of power dynamics in dominator culture or simply a reflection of rage, women are shockingly violent toward children. This fact should lead everyone to question any theory of gender differences that suggests that women are less violent than men.

While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother’s love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love.

Man Enough Frank Pittman

Working with men who wanted to know love, I have advised them to think of it as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.

Women demanded of men that they give more emotionally, but most men really could not understand what was being asked of them. Having cut away the parts of themselves that could feel a wide rage of emotional response, they were too disconnected. They simply could not give more emotionally or even grasp the problem without first reconnecting, reuniting the severed parts.

Kay Leigh Hagan’s autobiographical essay “A Good Man Is Hard to Bash”

the man I was with was better than most men, that I was lucky. Leaving him was a gesture of self-love and self-reliance that I have not regretted. Yet I found that the observations of the women who cautioned me about what most men were like were fairly accurate.

“Gender Politics of Men,” R. W. Connell

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. This fuels both sexual fantasies and the desire for revenge.

To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body, a crime that masses of men have yet to possess the strength to report.

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.

Victor Seidler expresses his fear of having downtime in Rediscovering Masculinity,

“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.”

Rediscovering Masculinity Victor Seidler

Love and Survival Dean Ornish,

If the intention behind the work is to seek recognition and power—“hey, look at me, I’m special, I’m important, I’m worthy of your love and respect”—then you are setting yourself apart from others as a way of trying to feel connected to them. Setting yourself apart from others as a way of trying to feel connected to them: It seems so clear why this is self-defeating, and yet it is often the norm in our culture…. When my self-worth was defined by what I did, then I had to take every important opportunity that came along, even if relationships suffered.

Gail Sheehy’s Understanding Men’s Passages

Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable.

When daring men come to work loved and loving, the nature of work will be transformed and the workplace will no longer demand that the hearts of men be broken to get the job done.

Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism.

The Heart of the Soul Gary Zukav and Linda Francis

Feminist masculinity presupposes that it is enough for males to be to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. Rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others. This strength is a trait males and females need to possess.

seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents—‘avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality’—we

Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.”

men who are “empathic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.”

A Masai wise man, when asked by Terrence Real to name the traits of a good warrior, replied, “I refuse to tell you what makes a good morani [warrior]. But I will tell you what makes a great morani. When the moment calls for fierceness, a good morani is very ferocious. And when the moment calls for kindness, a good morani is utterly tender. Now, what makes a great morani is knowing which moment is which.”

How many men have lost this bond of love via acts of relational violence, acting out the notion embedded in patriarchal masculinity that in every male there is a predator, a hunter hungry and ready for the kill? Silverstein argues that men suffer by the patriarchal insistence that they enact rituals of alienation that lead to “estrangement from women.” She states, “As anybody who works with the elderly will tell you, when octogenarians utter their dying words, it’s ‘Mama’ the men call for, never ‘Daddy.’

As long as men dominate women, we cannot have love between us.

essay “Healing from Manhood”