The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-11

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Partnership Model and Feminist Masculinity

hooks suggests that patriarchy is rooted in an evolutionary need for predatory behavior. Both men and women needed to be aggressive and violent to survive the harsh challenges of early human life. However, evolution changed the predator/prey relationship, and humans now find themselves at the top of the predator hierarchy. These principles were maintained, however, through patriarchy. Many people believe that men must be indoctrinated into a culture of violence and aggression to maintain their predator status and protect their families and societies. hooks shows that this need for “warriors” diminishes as patriarchy is dismantled.

What, then, can take its place, and how do people begin to engage in a cultural overhaul? Each chapter of The Will to Change explores the various ways that patriarchy adversely affects both men and women; hooks then ends each chapter with an alternative solution. She argues that the only way to dismantle patriarchal structures is through a willingness to change and proposes that a passive approach to patriarchy will always result in abuse and violence. hooks suggests that true change requires intention. While some men manage to challenge patriarchal values and carve out their own form of masculinity, few do so while actively considering patriarchy and its influence on their lives.

hooks opens her dialogue about feminism and patriarchy by making a declaration: Women must love men. She recognizes the paradox of loving men in a culture that rewards and affirms male domination. After experiencing abuse and oppression, women struggle to express love and empathy toward men. They find it challenging to trust men and to heal their pain and anger. Yet hooks argues that loving men and recognizing the way patriarchy damages and victimizes all genders is the first step toward healing. The second step is presenting a different model.

hooks argues that the “key to survival is love” (104). Throughout the work, she proposes structures that emphasize loving men and recognition of their humanity and oppression. She imagines a future in which men receive career counseling and participate in work settings that give space for recovering relationship and true community. In Chapter 6, hooks describes an alternative to the treatment of unemployed men. She postulates a scenario in which these men are paid to engage in a journey of reading and self-discovery. Later in the book, she advocates for the partnership model, which will displace the long-standing dominator model. hooks intentionally chooses the partnership model of equality, which embraces mutuality and connection. This is in contrast to simply focusing on equality, which emphasizes bringing men and women to an equal space in society and families. A focus on equality over partnership denies the need for the mutual support and love that are necessary to challenge patriarchal values. This model perpetuates feminist masculinity over patriarchal masculinity, emphasizing tenderness, assertiveness, and integrity. hooks suggests that a partnership model creates space for men to reconnect with their sense of self and begin to do the hard and painful work of healing and finding freedom.

Impacts of Patriarchal Culture on Men

Conversations about feminism are often centered on women and how patriarchal values affect them negatively. Yet hooks focuses The Will to Change on the impacts of patriarchal culture on men. She tracks how men are affected by patriarchy from infancy to adulthood. Indoctrination into patriarchal society begins early. Male infants are allowed to cry longer and louder than female infants; this is a product of the idea that giving in to their cries might lead them to grow up as effeminate. Children are discouraged from sharing and processing their emotions, and aggressiveness and rage are valued and encouraged. Mothers who subscribe to patriarchal culture dominate and manipulate their sons. They project their own unhealthy experiences with patriarchal oppression onto their children. Fathers, who are complicit victims in this violent cycle, impose patriarchal values while withholding love, maintaining distance, and exerting domination.

As adults, men feel dissatisfied in a system that leaves them powerless while it feeds them the idea that they should be in total control. Patriarchal masculinity projects the idea that men must dominate in order to connect to their own maleness, but this mode of thinking fails to acknowledge that it inherently presents men as “natural-born killers” and perpetrators of violence (115). Conservative rhetoric hails patriarchal masculinity while ignoring the many ways in which male violence occurs at home and in society. This places men in a terrible limbo between feeling as though they should be in control and living in a culture that strips them of their sense of self.

Men are told that they should feel fulfilled by their work, yet many of them are frustrated by jobs that are dehumanizing and stressful. Patriarchal propaganda that establishes men as breadwinners and emphasizes that their lives should center on their work is sparked by the capitalistic need for middle- and lower-class men to carry out grueling work from which higher-class individuals profit. Because their work leaves them feeling powerless, they attempt to exert dominance in their intimate relationships. They are unable to speak the truth about sex or express their continued dissatisfaction. They may develop addictions to pornography or substances to help stifle their depression and rage, or they may seek out the satisfaction that they failed to find in their work through gambling and other forms of capitalistic gain.

Perhaps the greatest impact of patriarchal culture on men is a sense of “aloneness and disconnection” (121). hooks argues that this is its most dangerous effect. Throughout their lives, men are denied the opportunity to deal with their emotions or to be vulnerable. They are taught to be disgusted by expressions of feeling. Patriarchal aggression and violence lead women to believe that they cannot fully trust men, while those same patriarchal values mean that women—even many liberated women—are not equipped to listen to male vulnerability. Men become isolated from their society and from themselves. They lose their sense of self by masking and suppression, and they lose their place in cultural collectivism by a need to always be in control. hooks demonstrates that these aspects of patriarchal culture damage men and invite them to participate in a cycle of damaging others.

Contributors to the Persistence of Patriarchy

People are ready and willing to put an end to male violence against women. They are eager to end child abuse and rape. However, hooks suggests, they are less willing to dismantle the patriarchal structures that perpetuate these forms of violence. This hesitation is not because they are benefiting from the societal structure; both men and women suffer at the hands of patriarchy. Why, then, does it persist?

hooks identifies the many contributing factors that perpetuate patriarchal values. She often calls the problem “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” emphasizing how patriarchy intersects with imperialism, racism, and capitalism and how these concepts depend upon one another. Capitalism needs patriarchy to survive. Imperialism needs patriarchy to exert control. Racism needs patriarchy to oppress. Yet when hooks uses this phrase, her audiences greet it with laughter. This laughter, she asserts, is just one of many indicators of patriarchy’s terrorism. By making a mockery of male vulnerability and feminist values, patriarchy can render any other societal structure ridiculous.

Working hand-in-hand with laughter is silence. Girls are taught at an early age to internalize the aggression of their fathers and to stay silent about abuse or the ways in which domination manifests in the home. Furthermore, children are not taught the word “patriarchy,” so they are denied access to the language they need to understand and deconstruct the dangerous principles that run their lives. Their silence continues in their partnerships. They feel that there is something wrong but are not given the vocabulary they need to address it. They dismiss their own dissatisfaction and tiptoe through their homes to avoid male violence. hooks describes a moment when her father beat her for wanting to play marbles, a game that was reserved for boys. Her mother soothed her afterward, reminding her that it was her father’s right to enact discipline and domination.

hooks intentionally exposes the ways in which women contribute to the persistence of patriarchy, especially within the home. Maternal sadism manifests as women fail to heal from their own experiences with male aggression and violence. Single mothers may suppress their sons’ emotions out of fear that they will be emasculated. Some mothers may express power and domination over their sons to cope with their own feelings of weakness and victimization. These boys grow into men who develop problematic relationships with female partners, playing out their frustrations and anger through emotional, physical, and psychological abuse. Some men may be so damaged by their relationships with their mothers that they seek out intimacy with younger women, or even girls, to play out fantasies of domination and a false sense of trust.

Everyone is responsible for upholding patriarchy. American culture is riddled with shame—shame regarding men’s feelings and shame at experiencing weakness and tenderness. Mass media reinforce this feeling, providing boys and men with patriarchal heroes who are lauded for their aggression. Men escape their emotions at work or through addiction, and their patriarchal tendencies are encouraged and affirmed through these experiences. Patriarchal culture provides no respite for male vulnerability. hooks argues that patriarchy will persist as long as men are isolated, unloved, and denied their humanity.