The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

by bell hooks

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. We cannot love what we fear.

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.

For many enlightened, single-parent feminist mothers with limited economic resources, the effort to consistently map for their sons alternatives to patriarchal masculinity simply takes too much time.

Homophobia underlies the fear that allowing boys to feel will turn them gay; this fear is often most intense in single-parent homes. As a consequence mothers in these families may be overly harsh and profoundly emotionally withholding with their sons, believing that this treatment will help the boys to be more masculine.

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. Feminist movement offered to men and women the information needed to challenge this psychic slaughter, but that challenge never became a widespread aspect of the struggle for gender equality. 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 range 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.

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.”

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.

In Good Will Hunting, when faced with the possibility of knowing love, Will must make a choice. He must let go of his feelings of worthlessness and shame engendered by his traumatic past; he must choose life over death. His choice to love, to live, is the break with the patriarchal model that liberates his spirit. As viewers we celebrate his new awareness of his essential goodness, his redemption. His recovery gives us hope.