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43 pages 1 hour read

bell hooks

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Preface-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface Summary

To many women, men are a mystery. hooks explains that most women do not know how to grapple with what they experience with men or observe in them. Male violence leads women to fear men and, therefore, never know them. Feminism unlocked the opportunity for women to escape their own bondage under patriarchal culture, but it did not create space for them to explore and understand their love for men—even when the power between men and women remained unbalanced. In hooks’s view, many American female feminists write off all men as hopeless. She suggests that the only path forward is for women to openly acknowledge their feelings about men, even when they wish men would cease to exist. Contemporary feminism left activists like hooks in the position of being dismissed by their peers as “male-identified” (xiii). To include men in the conversation was to misdirect energy that could be better focused on women. hooks disagreed with this philosophy. She believed that systemic change would not occur unless men were part of the conversation.

hooks wrote this book in response to her disappointment in the lack of feminist writing about men. She recognized that patriarchal culture is designed to keep women silent as the “keepers of grave and serious secrets” (xiii) regarding how men maintain power and control over women, especially in their personal lives. By writing men off as patriarchal oppressors, it is easier for feminist activists to avoid talking about the complexity of their relationships with and understanding of men. hooks observes that many women even wish for the men in their lives to be gone, and she reveals her own wish for her father to die when she was younger. This was her way of coping with his violence. Many women, hooks asserts, feel this way: They trust that their lives would be better and freer if the men in their homes would simply disappear. Yet, in her view, the only way for women to claim their power is to accept that they need and want men in their lives; it is by placing the focus on men and the need for them to change that women can truly be free. In a search for self-healing, hooks worked on her own relationship with her father and learned to “revel” in her love for him. She argues that if men can be willing to change, then men and women can enjoy the benefits of belonging to one another.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Wanted: Men Who Love”

Regardless of their sexual orientation, hooks argues, all women want to be loved by men. However, women do not want to speak about it or confront the ways in which their desire for male love shapes their culture and their own lives. Some feminist activists swung so widely in the opposite direction that they focused their attention on hatred of men. They claimed that they, too, wanted to be rewarded for their coldness and ruthlessness. In the business world, men readjusted and made room for women. However, in their personal lives, the traditional emotional hierarchy rooted in gender roles persists. Children are taught to value their father’s affection more than their mother’s, and they seek it desperately. Adult romantic relationships often become the battleground on which adults play out the disappointment and rage that were left behind by absent or distant fathers. As a child, hooks desperately sought her father’s attention. When she realized that she could not acquire it by being good, she sought his anger and punishment. hooks suggests that people are trapped in a cycle of loving men more than they are loved by them; should men allow themselves to love, they would be written off as too feminine.

Feminist writing focuses often on male power—how men gain power and how they keep it from women. hooks criticizes the writing in this genre that does not acknowledge the pain men feel due to their own entrapment in a system that denies them the opportunity to express love. Men feel unable to talk about emotions or express their unhappiness in relationships. Male vulnerability is mocked, even by women who embrace liberation. hooks describes her own experience of couples therapy; her partner explained that hooks would ask that he share his feelings and then become angry when he did. Because a woman is raised to believe that her chief purpose in life is to love, her partner’s vulnerability about pain or feeling unloved feels like an attack on her character. The only emotion sanctioned by patriarchal culture is anger, and fear of male anger keeps women from emotionally engaging men.

A male student in hooks’s class felt fearful of his father and worried about how that might inform his own treatment of his family. hooks suggests that many men feel love but do not know how to practice it. When her brother was little, he was a positive force in the household, full of love and wonder. As he grew older beneath a patriarchal father and culture, he learned to suppress his emotions, including love. Many men hooks encountered spoke to her about “something missing within” (15)—the hole left behind by the continuous denial of emotions.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Understanding Patriarchy”

hooks views patriarchy as the greatest threat to society. She often describes this societal disease as “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (17). When she uses this expression to define the force that dominates culture, audiences often laugh. hooks views this laughter, too, as a tool for maintaining patriarchal power. The fundamental principle of a patriarchal culture is that men are inherently stronger than all other people. Therefore, it is their hereditary obligation to exert power over everything.

hooks recognizes the ways in which patriarchal culture shaped her own relationship with her father and her brother. Religion played a major role in advancing and maintaining patriarchal gender roles. She recalls, too, the ways that same culture shaped her male family members. Her partner, who once renounced macho attitudes and patriarchal norms, took on a more dominating persona as he realized it gained him attention and favor. As children, hooks and her brother did not subscribe to heteronormative gender roles. She was naturally aggressive and athletic, and her brother was more fragile and sensitive, but her father’s violence soon taught them to submit to gendered expectations. She remembers trying to play marbles with her father and her brother at an early age.  Because she refused to submit when her father told her she was a girl and could not play, she was beaten. Her memory of this household dynamic demonstrates that both men and women are forced to conform to patriarchal rules.

Rather than viewing men as the enemy, hooks views men as co-victims of the destructive force of patriarchy. Patriarchal societies force young boys to ignore all emotions except rage, while young girls are taught to be meek and submissive. Patriarchy subsists through blind obedience and a loss of willpower. hooks’s own mother contributed to the patriarchal structures in their home, soothingly reminding her daughter that she was “just a little girl” (21). Both men and women play a role in maintaining the power structure.

hooks suggests that silence is one significant way that patriarchal societies nurture their imbalance of power. Children are not even taught the word “patriarchy” and are denied the ability to verbalize their experiences. Although people are ready and willing to end violence again women, they are hesitant to dismantle the structures that lead to this violence. Yet brutality is one of the many ways in which patriarchal masculinity manifests. hooks shows that a system that is designed to place men at the top of the hierarchal ladder still stifles and oppresses them.

Preface-Chapter 2 Analysis

hooks begins with a clear call to action. Women need to embrace their desire and need for male love. She argues that militant feminism reacted to male violence and domination by embracing its own dominator model. hooks recognizes that her argument is controversial, especially within the feminist community. The history of feminism is female empowerment—moving women up the hierarchical ladder so that they can become equal members of society. She chastises this approach for ignoring the role men play in patriarchal society and the ways it victimizes them. Instead, she urges everyone to consider the lens of the Impacts of Patriarchal Culture on Men. hooks’s thesis is that women must love men.

Throughout her career, hooks’s feminist rhetoric relied upon a foundation of love. She believed that it was not enough to recognize systems and try to break them. The actions taken needed to be rooted in love. In The Will to Change, hooks suggests that patriarchal values will continue to permeate American culture as long as men are left unloved and feel like outcasts in a society that rewards them for their lack of vulnerability. This is the paradox that hooks draws attention to throughout the book: The very system that places men at the top of the hierarchy of power continuously undermines and damages them by stripping them of their humanity and emotions. For society to heal, men must heal. For men to heal, they must be loved.

However, hooks is also sympathetic to women. She acknowledges their fear and finds it justified. Her childhood story of being beaten for wanting to play marbles sends the message that she shares other women’s experiences and understands their feelings. She says women are right to be angry and frustrated, and they are also right to be afraid. Yet hooks believes that loving men is the only way to break the bonds of patriarchal culture. She suggests that the fear of men keeps them at arms’ length, leaving them disconnected from society and intimacy; this further perpetuates structures of violence and domination. In her view, this is one of many Contributors to the Persistence of Patriarchy.

Another factor that sustains patriarchy is silence. Fear and indoctrination into compliance with patriarchal gender roles inhibit women from speaking up about their intimate experiences with male violence or confronting their male partners about their exertion of power. Women are taught not to talk about what goes on at home. They internalize the terror of their intimate lives. Patriarchal culture feeds the lie that a man’s anger is always just and that it is the patriarch’s role to express rage and inflict discipline where he sees fit—rage that hooks later identifies as a reaction to the continuous oppression of men.

hooks also proposes that many women fantasize about the death of the men in their lives. She claims that this is one more element of silence, one more way women internalize their pain. While women are achieving and breaking glass ceilings in the workplace, their home lives are riddled with emotional mines. They tiptoe through their houses, wondering when their loving husbands might turn into Mr. Hyde. For hooks, feminism has made great strides in some areas while leaving others woefully ignored.

As hooks acknowledges women’s fear and recognizes their justifiable pursuit of power in a system that historically left them powerless, she suggests that female liberation may also be dependent upon a love of men. She recognizes that women inhabit their own dominator model—the same model used by men to oppress others. They feel that it is their right and that this is equality. hooks argues that this approach continues to subject women to patriarchy; their intimate lives will continue to be defined by a lack of power in the home. hooks wants to break that system. She suggests that women need to love men and be loved by them to be truly liberated. This theory rejects a notion of total independence and instead insists that true freedom is predicated upon mutuality, respect, and love. Both men and women must commit to dismantling patriarchy.

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