“The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love”
by bell hooks
2004 Washington Square Press
bell hooks defines this project as an attempt to love men enough to understand how patriarchy affects them, and understand how their pain can help them transform and challenge patriarchy. For me it was a profound experience reading this because it touched on so many aspects of my life as a male, from childhood, to school, to sex and relationships, to friendships, etc. It allowed me to see old memories in new ways, and understand that my feelings of pain, confusion and shame were a result of the violent circumstances that I was subjected to growing up in this culture.
In the past I had “understood” patriarchy as something that primarily only affected women, and saw my job mostly as limiting the damage done to the women in my life and organizing. bell hooks pushed me to look inside myself first and foremost and see how this system has terrorized me personally, and how challenging patriarchy is necessary for my own liberation, as well as the liberation of all men, and everybody.
What struck me most significantly was the idea that patriarchy is all the time enforced by violence, and that men are taught through violence to reject their emotions and become cold-blooded and distant, which allows them to commit violence on others.
“Violence is boyhood socialization. The way we ‘turn boys into men’ is through injury… We take them away 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.”
I could think of hundreds or thousands of times that I’ve felt this threat of violence keeping me within the shallow emotionless world of patriarchal masculinity. Most often it looks like jokes, put-downs, humiliation, scorn, and exclusion, but violence is at the heart of the matter. In fact, middle school and high school in retrospect look like a 7 year-long gauntlet of violent social training.
Learning to express the pain I’ve felt without shame, and wield my anger not against myself (or others) but against patriarchal society, isn’t something that can change overnight. But bell hooks’ wisdom has opened up new possibilities for me and for all men, and it’s up to us to take the initiative, educate ourselves, get in touch with our own emotions, our own human-ness and connection to others in a non-dominating way, and work together in love and resistance. We don’t just owe it to women, trans and genderqueer folks, we owe it to ourselves.
“Communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, The Raft is Not the Shore
10 comments
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January 20, 2009 at 6:43 pm
hannah
this violence is definitely something that i see in my male middle school students. their masculinity is constantly in question by their male (and female) peers. my male students are terrified of appearing less than masculine, to the point that they will lash out at anything and everything that scares them. this looks like an awesome book! i can’t wait to read it and apply it to my classroom!
January 20, 2009 at 6:51 pm
endofcapitalism
right on hannah!
January 20, 2009 at 7:02 pm
jeff
this book changed my life forever!
January 22, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Patrick
One more reason to liberate our systems of education.
I’ll have to finally pick up this book and read it – it’s been sitting in my Amazon cart for several months…
March 4, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Davidcali
Having lived through the “7 year gauntlet of violent social training”, I can never forget the complicity of the adults, most of whom tolerated the situation and some of whom openly advocated and fostered the situation. This includes teachers, administrators and parents.
Almost 50 years have passed since I experienced my “training” and I see little evidemce of change.
Without the tacit and / or overt support of the adults and with zero tolerance for such “training” by all adult role models, I believe much of the violence in this world would be eliminated.
Davidcali
January 18, 2010 at 10:03 pm
Joey
Having been a very sensitive child, I was often ridiculed for overt emotional displays. Children in school would endlessly mock, critisize, and berate me for crying instead of fighting back. I soon realized in order to survive bullies, I would have to harden myself and don an invisible shield against their comments. When I assumed the take no shit attitude, however, the teachers in grade school punished me for talking back to my brutal attackers. They told me that I was headed down the wrong path – presumably because I was openly gay, not because I was swearing in the hallways. bell hooks has helped me to understand the system under which the majority of educators operate under and illustrates how to resist that system instead of becoming a part of it.
January 18, 2010 at 10:43 pm
alex
thank you so much for sharing, joey.
i feel so much of what you’re saying. the legacy of bullying unleashes so much trauma, and along with the ongoing daily bullying of politicians, police and media, holds us back from being truly free.
we must unleash our voices to create a world free from patriarchy.
alex
February 14, 2010 at 5:11 am
Ms Sheeba
I finished reading this incredible book forever. I too have been changed by it. As a young woman who fell victim to male abuse, I turned to feminism to vent my rage at the harsh and unwarranted treatment I often received from members of the opposite sex. This book made me see that I erred in doing this. That there is a much greater explanation to faulty male behaviour than I once thought. As bell hooks reiterates. The imperialist white-supremacist patriarchal system of being is what lies at the root of this problem and women and men alike should work together to remove ourselves from it because it does not only hurt women. It in effect hurts US ALL!
February 14, 2010 at 6:40 pm
alex
thanks for posting ms. sheeba!
i hope everyone reads this book! it should be required reading in middle school.
alex
July 31, 2010 at 3:33 pm
The End of Capitalism?: Interview of Alex Knight – Part 3. Life After Capitalism « The End of Capitalism
[…] beings. This force, I believe is deep, genuine love. The kind of transformative love that writer bell hooks talks about when she writes, “Love will always move us away from domination in all its forms. […]