The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) by bell hooks.

I have always considered myself a feminist. To me, that statement is completely uncontroversial, even trivial. But as I grew up, I realised that this identification is extremely uncommon. Most men do not consider themselves feminists. Many would find it amusing or even embarrassing that I would call myself one.

This puzzles me. Why do so many men have such a knee-jerk distaste for feminism? Is it misogyny? Ignorance? The desire to avoid ridicule? These probably explain a great many cases. But they are also unfair, and above all, unhelpful. In The Will to Change, bell hooks offers a more compelling and more compassionate explanation.

Men are suffering. Most lead quiet lives of desperation, in Thoreau’s famous phrase. By painting men as the enemy, feminism has ignored this reality. Although most feminists do not hate men, there are (or were) many who did - according to bell hooks. By failing to draw attention to the ways in which patriarchy harms men, feminism as a movement did little to counter the perception that it was anti-male. No wonder that most men do not consider themselves feminists.

The real enemy, according to hooks, is patriarchy not men. Patriarchy harms both men and women, and women can be as patriarchal in their attitudes as men. This shift from men as individuals towards patriarchy as a structure is central to hook’s feminism. It enables her to be extremely compassionate and understanding towards individual men - many of whom are suffering enormously on a daily basis - without softening her critique of patriarchy as a system.

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In what ways does patriarchy harm men? Primarily through its insistence that men sever themselves from their emotions. Men learn from an early age that in order to be a *real man*, they must dissociate themselves from their emotions. Any form of emotional expression - save anger - is a sign of weakness. Of course, this does not mean that men are actually less emotional than women. Rather, they are simply less able to understand and express their emotions in a constructive way. The only socially acceptable emotional avenue left for men is anger. An angry man is a real man. He is to be feared. Respected.

But this anger is wreaking havoc on men’s inner lives. For many men, their anger is a mask that conceals untold levels of misery. Forcing yourself to be someone that you are not, to act in ways that the patriarchy deems properly masculine, is a profoundly alienating process. Patriarchy alienates men from their true selves, hooks claims. As a result, they lack integrity. Men under patriarchy are not whole; they have to compartmentalise themselves in order to function in society. I am sure every male reading this knows the feeling of having to hide something about themselves because it is not sufficiently ‘manly.' The fear of being called effeminate, or worse, gay, keeps even the unhappiest of men stuck in a cycle of perpetuating gendered stereotypes.

This emotional dissimulation renders men unable to love themselves. And as we all know, someone who does not love themselves cannot love others. This is really the crux of hook’s argument: men do not know how to love. To clarify: men under patriarchy do not know how to love. To hook’s great credit, she dismisses harmful and essentialist notions that women are naturally more caring and loving than men. We simply are not socialised to express love or learn relational skills in the same way that women are.

These facts are not immutable. Social structures can and do change. hook’s book is called The Will to Change because men can, and must, change themselves for the better. Of course, doing so will be hard. One of hook’s most interesting observations is that women often prevent men from adopting a healthier version of masculinity. Some women, for instance, find it unattractive when men express emotion and show vulnerability. Anyone, male or female, heterosexual or otherwise, can reinforce patriarchy as a set of gender norms.

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So much for what I find agreeable in hooks’ analysis. Is there anything that I am less convinced by? Well, for starters, hooks has a freewheeling style that I am generally not a fan of. She has a tendency to make huge and generalised claims about men and society, based solely upon anecdotal experience. The men she speaks to, for example, tell her stories that vindicate her analysis. This is selection bias. Obviously the men that seek out workshops run by bell hooks are going to be sympathetic to her analysis and tell her stories that confirm her worldview.

To say that hooks makes unsubstantiated claims would be putting it mildly. This seems to be par for the course whenever psychoanalysis is involved. I must admit that I find psychoanalysis to be pseudoscientific bullshit largely unsupported by scientific evidence. Consider the following extract:

“For boys this issue of [sexual] control begins with the mother’s response to his penis; usually she does not like it and she does not know what to do with it. Her discomfort with his penis communicates that there is something inherently wrong with it.” (p. 80)

Forgive me, but what the fuck are you talking about? How is it even possible - let alone ethical - to verify a claim like that? People can read whatever they want, but if it’s Freud, I prefer that they keep it to themselves.

At times, hooks seems to engage in the trope of single-mother bashing, blaming single-mothers for actually being worse in terms of perpetuating patriarchy than two-parent homes. I’m honestly a little stunned that a feminist would do that. To be fair, she does acknowledge - and I know of situations like this - in which single mothers live in fear of their sons. Domestic violence does not only occur between intimate partners, it can happen between mother and son also.

Lastly, as a lifelong martial artist and enthusiast for combat sports, I find hooks’ understanding of violence a little unsophisticated. At times, she seems to offer us a binary choice: either one is violent or they are passive. In her chapter on raising boys, hooks suggests that feminist mothers “tell [their sons] to be passive when another boy was attacking them on the playground”. No one, in my opinion, be they male or female, should be passive when someone is attacking them. If the only two options are passivity and violent aggression, then I suppose passivity seems like the lesser of two evils. But of course, this is a false dichotomy.

I am reminded of when I was preparing for my first boxing fight. My coach (a woman) said that I needed to work on staying calm under pressure. I told her that when my opponent became more aggressive, I felt that I could not match their aggression because I wasn’t fighting out of anger. I simply loved the sport. She told me it is not about aggression or even anger - in fact, these things are distinctly unhelpful for fighters. Instead, you must learn to be assertive.

Being assertive is about drawing boundaries. Being aggressive is about putting others down. To my mind, a healthy masculinity can replace aggression with assertiveness, but no one should ever be passive. hooks seems to admit this in her final chapter, choosing assertiveness as a trait of a healthy masculinity. If that is the case, her earlier examples strike me as odd and incongruent. Who knows? Perhaps I am splitting hairs.

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The Will to Change is a good book. Its message is powerful and (sadly) rings true. The delivery was not for me, but that’s okay. Not everything needs to be a work of analytic philosophy. Unfortunately, I cannot see the type of men who would benefit from reading this book actually reading it. And if you already share hooks’ view, then there isn’t much point in you reading it either.