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# 2021-01-27 - The Will To Change by bell hooks
A friend recommended this author. Out of all of her books in the
local library, this one stood out to me. I have often felt
resistance when liberal women friends made posts about redefining
masculinity. I can't help but wonder "What qualifies this person to
redefine four billion people?" I hoped that i might learn new
insights from this book.
Prior to reading the book, i listened to the MEN series [1] from
Scene On Radio. This series taught me that according to
archeological evidence, male domination as we know it began about ten
to twelve thousand years ago around the same time as agriculture and
war. The significance is that male domination is not inevitable. We
have the choice to do something differently, if we will to. I was
particularly interested in episode 11: Domination. This episode
includes an informative study of sports talk radio, which doesn't
only discuss sports, but spends a surprising amount of time
discussing and reinforcing gender roles. I personally found it a
little encouraging to hear that harmful gender norms are already
shifting in prominent, mainstream media.
I felt challenged and a little daunted by this book. It is
powerfully written and the ideas in it generally ring true for me.
Bell hooks refers to many authors and experts. I get the feeling she
is eminently qualified to have a say on this subject. She makes a
distinction between patriarchal masculinity (our norms) and
masculinity itself. She points out that women are just as involved
as men in perpetuating patriarchy. So it is only logical that it
will require both women and men to resolve the problems of
patriarchy. She did NOT write about imposing a new definition of
masculinity on unwilling men. Rather, she wrote that women must
create guides and signposts, or else risk losing even the men who are
willing to change.
Below are prominent excerpts and [comments] from the book.
# Cover Page
In our rapidly changing society we can count on only two things that
will never change. What will never change is the will to change and
the fear of change. It is the will to change that motivates us to
seek help. It is the fear of change that motivates us to resist the
very help we seek. --Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Intimacy
# Preface: About Men
The lack of such writing [by women about men] intensifies my sense
that women cannot fully talk about men because we have been so well
socialized in patriarchal culture to be silent on the subject of men.
But more than silenced, we have been socialized to be the keepers of
grave and serious secrets--especially those that could reveal the
everyday strategies of male dominance, how male power is enacted and
maintained in our private lives.
This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield
patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely
life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various
states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their
suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal
father not to come home. 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.
The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is about our need to
live in a world where women and men can belong together.
# Chapter 1: Wanted: Men Who Love
We live in a culture where emotionally starved, deprived females are
desperately seeking male love. The place where most men refused to
change--believed themselves unable to change--was in their emotional
lives. [As children grow up into adults] ... they learn then to
settle for whatever positive attention men are able to give. They
learn to overrate it. They learn to pretend that it is love. They
learn to live the lie.
The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love. The
unhappiness of men in relationships... often goes unnoticed in our
society precisely because patriarchal culture really does not care if
men are unhappy. The reality is that men are hurting and that the
whole culture responds to the men by saying, "Please do not tell us
what you feel." If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting
patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom
them to live in states of emotional numbness. In female circles men
who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy.
There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by
men; that emotion is anger.
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. In an anti-patriarchal culture males
do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth
that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and
loved.
# Chapter 2: Understanding Patriarchy
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease
assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do
not use the word "patriarchy" in everyday life. Most men never think
about patriarchy--what it means, how it is created and sustained.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as
all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major function of
the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense
from birth until death.
Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are
inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed
weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and
rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various
forms of psychological terror and violence.
We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and
sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy
as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more
rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal
culture is work that men and women must do together.
Indeed, radical feminist critique of patriarchy has practically been
silenced in our culture. It has become a subcultural discourse
available only to well-educated elites. Even in those circles, using
the word "patriarchy" is regarded as passé. Often in my lectures
when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist
patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences
laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming the system is
funny. The laughter itself is a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It
functions as a disclaimer discounting the significance of what is
being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic
and not the system they describe. I interpret this laughter as the
audiences' way of showing discomfort with being asked to ally
themselves with an antipatriarchal disobedient critique. This
laughter reminds me that if I dare to challenge patriarchy openly, I
risk not being taken seriously.
Citizens of this nation fear challenging patriarchy even as they lack
overt awareness that they are fearful, so deeply embedded in our
collective unconscious are the rules of patriarchy. Until we can
collectively acknowledge the damage patriarchy causes and the
suffering it creates, we cannot address male pain. If patriarchy
were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family
life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. The crisis facing men
is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal
masculinity. To end male pain, to respond to male crisis, we have to
name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is
patriarchy and work to end patriarchy.
# Chapter 3: Being a Boy
Boys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture. Contrary to
sexist mythology, in the real world of male and female babies, male
babies express themselves more. They cry louder and longer. They
come into the world wanting to be seen and heard. ... patriarchal
culture influences parents to devalue the emotional development of
boys. Naturally this disregard affects boys' capacity to love and be
loving.
All over the world terrorist regimes use isolation to break people's
spirit. This weapon of psychological terrorism is daily deployed in
our nation against teenage boys. In isolation they lose the sense of
their value and worth. No wonder then that when they reenter a
community, they bring with them killing rage as their primary defense.
Even though masses of American boys will not commit violent crimes
resulting in murder, the truth that no one wants to name is that all
boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the
killer within and act as benevolent young patriarchs. (More and more
girls who embrace patriarchal thinking also embrace the notion that
they must be violent to have power.) Talking to teenage girls of all
classes who are being secretly hit or beaten by boyfriends (who say
that they are "disciplining" them), one hears the same Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde narratives that grown women tell when talking about their
relationships with abusive men. These girls describe seemingly nice
guys who have rageful outbursts. Time and time again we hear on our
national news about the seemingly kind, quiet young male whose
violent underpinnings are suddenly revealed. Boys are encouraged by
patriarchal thinking to claim rage as the easiest path to manliness.
It should come as no surprise, then, that beneath the surface there
is a seething anger in boys, a rage waiting for the moment to be
heard.
Much of the anger boys express is itself a response to the demand
that they not show any other emotions. Anger feels better than
numbness because it often leads to more instrumental action. Anger
can be, and usually is, the hiding place for fear and pain.
Literature for children is just as fixated on furthering patriarchal
attributes as TV. Shopping for books for my nephew first alerted me
to the absence of progressive literature for boys. The books I have
written are aimed at offering boys ways to cope with their emotional
selves. The point is to stimulate in boys emotional awareness and to
affirm that awareness.
# Chapter 4: Stopping Male Violence
Every day in America men are violent. Every day in our nation there
are men who turn away from violence. As women have gained the right
to be patriarchal men in drag, women are engaging in acts of violence
similar to their male counterparts. This serves to remind us that
the will to use violence is really not linked to biology but to a set
of expectations about the nature of power in a dominator culture.
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. Indoctrination into
the mindset begun into childhood includes a psychological initiation
that requires boys to accept that their willingness to do violent
acts makes them patriarchal men. A distinction can and must be made
between the willingness to do violent acts and actually doing them.
When researchers looking at date rape interviewed a range of college
men and found that many of them saw nothing wrong with forcing a
woman sexually, they were astounded. Their findings seemed to
challenge the previously accepted notion that raping was aberrant
male behavior. While it may be unlikely that any of the men in this
study were or became rapists, it was evident that given what they
conceived as the appropriate circumstance, they could see themselves
being sexually violent. Unconsciously they engage in patriarchal
thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it.
The perpetuation of male violence through the teaching of a dominator
model of relationships comes to boy children through both women and
men. In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men toward
groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually
that group is children or weaker females.
Ever since I started writing about love, I have defined it in a way
that blends M. Scott Peck's notion of love as the will to nurture
one's own and another's spiritual and emotional growth, with Eric
Fromm's insight that love is action and not solely feeling. 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.
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 emotional crippling himself, he can count on
patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his
self-esteem. ... Women demanded of men that they give more
emotionally, but most men really could not understand what was being
asked of them. ... They simply could not give more emotionally or
even grasp the problem without first reconnecting, reuniting the
severed parts.
Emotionally self-mutilated, disconnected, many men make overtures of
emotional connection only to later undermine them with emotional
abuse. They simply do not get that love and abuse cannot go
together. ... Teaching men to understand that women and children do
not feel loved when they are being abused, is one of the primary
goals of groups that work to end male violence. "You should not have
to tolerate any abuse to be loved." Women who stay in long-term
relationships with men who are emotionally abusive or violent usually
end up closing the door to their hearts. They stop working to create
love. Men who win in patriarchal terms end up losing in terms of
their substantive quality of life.
# Chapter 5: Male Sexual Being
Most men and women are not having satisfying and fulfilling sex.
When I first began to write books on love, to talk to lone
individuals and then large audiences about the subject, I realized
that it was practically impossible to have serious discussion about
love--that discussions of love, especially public conversations, are
taboo in our society. Yet everyone talks about sex. Most folks
believe we are hardwired biologically to long for sex but they do not
believe we are hardwired to long for love.
Children today learn more about sex from mass media than from any
other source. Yet much of what they are learning about sexuality
conforms to outmoded patriarchal scripts... Adults may know better,
from their own experience, but children become true believers. They
think that men will go mad if they cannot act sexually. This is the
logic that produces what feminists thinkers call "a rape culture."
Hence the underlying message boys receive about sexual acts is that
they [the boys] will be destroyed if they are not in control,
exercising power. [Isn't it true that uncontrolled sexuality
violates consent, which can destroy a person's social capital?]
Sex, then, becomes for most men a way of self-solacing. It is not
about being connected to someone else but rather about releasing
their own pain. Patriarchal men have no outlet to express their
pain, so they simply seek release.
Patriarchal violence is a mental illness. That this illness is given
its most disordered expression in the sexual lives of men is powerful
because it makes it hard to document since we do not witness what men
do sexually like we witness what they do at work or in civic life.
Male despair, often initially expressed as anger, is a far greater
threat to the patriarchal sexual order than feminist movement.
# Chapter 6: Work: What's Love Got To Do With It?
Before the feminist movement boys were more likely to be taught, at
home and at school, that they would find fulfillment in work. Today
boys hear a slightly different message. They are told that money
offers fulfillment and that work is a way to acquire money...
Nowadays working men of all classes experience periods of
unemployment. In order to keep the faith, patriarchal culture has
had to offer men different criteria for judging their worth than work.
As a primary foundation of patriarchal self-esteem, work has not
worked for masses of men for some time. Most male workers in our
America, like their female counterparts, work in exploitative
circles; the work they do and the way they are treated by their
superiors more often than not undermines self-esteem.
The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love
and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation. [I thought it
was often referenced as work-life balance.]
Many men use work as the place where they can flee from the self,
from emotional awareness, where they can lose themselves and operate
from a space of emotional numbness.
The success of Alcoholics Anonymous is tied to the fact that the
practice of recovery takes place in the context of a community, one
in which shame about failure can be expressed and male longing for
healing validated.
# Chapter 7: Feminist Manhood
... most men have not consciously chosen patriarchy as the ideology
they want to govern their lives.
Truthfully, there was a serious antimale faction in contemporary
feminist movement. It was difficult for women committed to feminist
change to face the reality that the problem did not lie just with men.
Once the "new man" that is the man changed by feminism was
represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful
females who were secretly longing for his male counterpart, masses of
men lost interest. Reacting to this inversion of gender roles, men
who were sympathetic chose to stop trying to play a role in
female-led feminist movement. Positively, the men's movement
emphasizes the need for men to get in touch with their feelings, to
talk with other men. Negatively, the men's movement continues to
promote patriarchy by a tacit insistence that in order to be fully
self-actualized, men needed to separate from women. The idea that
men needed to separate from women to find their true selves just
seemed like the old patriarchal message dressed up in a new package.
Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require
the construction of an enemy "other," be it a woman or the symbolic
feminine, for them to define themselves against. Starting in early
childhood, males need models of men with integrity, that is, men who
are whole, who are not divided against themselves.
Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to
be held hostage to patriarchal domination. There is a creative,
life-sustaining, life-enhancing place for the masculine in a
non-dominator culture.
Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is
defined by the will to dominate and control others. When culture is
based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will
frame all relationships as power struggles.
To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the
dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and
interdependence as the organic relationship of all living beings. In
a partnership model male identity, like its female counterpart, would
be centered around the notion of an essential goodness that is
inherently relationally oriented. Rather than assuming males are
born with the will to aggress, the culture would assume that males
are born with the will to connect.
Rather than define strength as "power over," feminist masculinity
defines strength as one's capability to be responsible for self and
others. The core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender
equality and mutuality as crucial to interbeing and partnership in
the creating and sustaining of life. Such a commitment always
privileges nonviolent action over violence, peace over war, life over
death.
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."
Men who are able to be whole undivided selves can practice the
emotional discernment beautifully described by the Masai wise man
precisely because they are able to relate and respond rather than
simply react. Patriarchal masculinity confines men to various stages
of reaction and overreaction. Feminist masculinity does not
reproduce the notion that maleness has this reactionary, wild,
uncontrolled component; instead it assures men and those of us who
care about men that we need not fear male loss of control.
This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every
female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the
loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to
patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in
patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males
with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then
we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.
Patriarchal masculinity insists that real men must prove their
manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection. Feminist
masculinity tells men that they become more real through the act of
connecting with others, through building community.
Feminism as a movement to end sexist domination and oppression offers
us all the way out of patriarchal culture. Feminist theorists argued
from the onset of the movement that were men to participate in
parenting in a primary way, they would be changed. They would
develop the relational skills often seen as innate in women.
# Chapter 8: Popular Culture: Media Masculinity
In the world of television, shows directed at children never stopped
their sexist myth making. One of the most popular children's shows
with a subtext about masculinity was The Incredible Hulk. A favorite
of boys from diverse class and racial backgrounds, this show was
instrumental in teaching the notion that for a male, the exertion of
physical force (brutal and monstrous) was a viable response to all
situations of crisis. When a sociologist asked young male viewers
what they would do if they had the power of the hulk, they [many of
them] said that they would smash their mommies.
The Incredible Hulk linked sexism and racism. The cool,
level-headed, rational white-male scientist turned into a colored
beast whenever his passions were aroused.
One of the ways patriarchal white males used mass media to wage the
war against feminism was to consistently portray the violent
woman-hating man as aberrant and abnormal. In a real world where
more than ninety percent of violent crimes are committed by men, it
is not surprising that popular culture offers both negative and
positive models of the masculine. Woman-hating dominator men are
consistently depicted as loners, who may have been abused as
children, and who were not able to adjust in normal society.
Ironically, these "bad" men share the same character traits as the
"good" men who hunt them down and slaughter them. In both cases the
men dissimulate (take on the various appearances and disguises to
manipulate others' perception of their identity), and they lack the
ability to connect emotionally with others.
Contemporary books and movies offer clear portraits of the evils of
patriarchy without offering any direction for change. Ultimately
they send the message that male survival demands holding onto some
vestige of patriarchy.
Until we can create a popular culture that affirms and celebrates
masculinity without upholding patriarchy, we will never see a change
in the way that masses of men think about the nature of their
identity.
# Chapter 9: Healing Male Spirit
Men cannot speak their pain in patriarchal culture. Much of the
anger men direct at mothers is a response to the maternal failure to
protect the spirit of the boy from patriarchal harm. Boys feel the
pain. And they have no place to lay it down; they carry it within.
They take it to the place where it is converted into rage.
Learning to dissimulate, men learn to cover up their rage, their
sense of powerlessness. Yet when men learn to create a false self as
a way to maintain male dominance, they have no sound basis on which
to build healthy self-esteem. To always wear a mask as a way of
asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be
perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and
well-being. This falseness causes men to experience intense
emotional pain.
As advocates of feminism who seek to end sexism and sexist
oppression, we must be willing to hear men speak their pain. Only
when we courageously face male pain without turning away will we
model for men the emotional awareness healing requires.
To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the
silence, to speak the pain. Often men, to speak the pain, first turn
to the women in their lives and are refused a hearing.
Being "vulnerable" is an emotional state many men seek to avoid.
Some men spend a lifetime in a state of avoidance and therefore never
experience intimacy.
Before most men can be intimate with others, they have to be intimate
with themselves. They have to learn to feel and be aware of their
feelings. Men who mask feelings or suppress them simply do not want
to feel the pain. Since emotional pain is the feeling that most
males have covered up, numbed out, or closed off, the journey back to
feeling is frequently through the portal of suffering. Much male
rage covers up this place of suffering: this is the well-kept secret.
Often when a female gets close to male pain, penetrating the male
mask to see the emotional vulnerability beneath, she becomes a target
for the rage.
It cannot be a mere accident of fate that the visionary male teachers
who are offering us messages about ways to care for the soul that
will enhance life on this planet are men of color from poor
countries, men who live in exile, men who have been victimized by
imperialist male violence.
# Chapter 10: Reclaiming Male Integrity
Healing the crisis in the hearts of men requires of us all a
willingness to face the fact that patriarchal culture has required of
men that they be divided souls. The quest for integrity is the
heroic journey that can heal the masculinity crisis and prepare the
hearts of men to give and receive love.
Anyone who has a false self must be dishonest. [All of us are
complex, multi-layered beings. None of us are pure, true selves who
are perfectly one thing or another.]
Patriarchy encourages men to surrender their integrity and to live
lives of denial. By learning the arts of compartmentalization,
dissimulation, and disassociation, men are able to see themselves as
acting with integrity in cases where they are not.
One of the reasons the church has been so important in the lives of
black men is that it is one of the locations where they are allowed
to express emotions, where they can grieve.
To grow psychically and spiritually, men need to mourn. The men who
are doing the work of self-recovery testify that it is only when they
are able to feel the pain that they can begin to heal. When a man's
emotional capacity to mourn is arrested, he is likely to be frozen in
time and unable to complete the process of growing up. Men need to
mourn the old self and create space for a new self to be born if they
are to change and be wholly transformed.
When men practice integrity, they accept that part of the work of
wholeness is learning to be flexible, learning how to negotiate, how
to embrace change in thought and action. The ability to critique
oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition
of being that makes us capable of responsibility.
To be able to respond to family and friends, men have to have
practice assuming responsibility. When men are able to do little
acts of mercy, they can be in communion with others without the need
to dominate.
# Chapter 11: Loving Men
... if men were natural-born killers, hardwired by biology and
destiny to take life, then there would be no need for patriarchal
socialization to turn them into killers. The warrior's way wounds
boys and men; it has been the arrow shot through the heart of their
humanity. The warrior's way has led men in the direction of an
impoverishment of spirit so profound that it threatens all life on
planet Earth.
In dominator cultures most families are not safe places. To create
the culture that will enable boys to love, we must see the family as
having as its primary function the giving of love (providing food and
shelter are loving acts).
To make this solid foundation [so that boys can grow up able to
love], men must set the example by daring to heal, by daring to do
the work of relational recovery. Men are on the path to love when
they choose to become emotionally aware.
In a world where gender inequality is for most people an accepted
norm, men withhold from women their respect. The root of the word
"respect" means "to look at." Women want to be recognized, seen, and
cared about by the men in our lives.
Patriarchy has sought to repress and tame erotic passion precisely
because of its power to draw us into greater and greater communion
with ourselves, and with those we know most intimately, and with the
stranger.
The work of male relational recovery, of reconnection, of forming
intimacy and making community can never be done alone. In a world
where boys and men are daily losing their way we must create guides,
signposts, new paths. A culture of healing that empowers males to
change is in the making.
References:
[1]
MEN, a series of radio programs about men
Book information:
author: hooks, bell, 1952-2021
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Bell_hooks
LOC: HQ1090 .H65
tags: book,gender,non-fiction,philosophy
title: The Will To Change
# Tags
book
gender
non-fiction
philosophy
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