Idea #2: Visionary Feminism

The Will To Change by Bell Hooks

About the Author

bell hooks was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

Patriarchal Expectation of Manhood

The book is driven by a desire to understand why traditional feminism and existing anti-patriarchal thinking fails to make an impact across society, and therefore, why members of society continue to fall victim to patriarchal thinking and patriarchal acts of violence. In this book, bell hooks wants to reinstate the place of men as subjects within patriarchy and not solely as perpetrators or profiteers of patriarchy. The key to anti-patriarchal success is to ensure that the will to change encapsulates all members of society. This book looks what stops this change, what allows the fear of change to overcome the will to 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."

As for a lot of victims of patriarchy, the author's journey of pain and understanding with patriarchal actions begins with her fraught relationship with her father. A complicated and hurtful relationship that meant that the death of her father would allow her "to feel freer". Here, the author mourns the life that could have been, should have been, and maybe would have been without patriarchy. It is apparent that the author's own fraught relationship with the patriarch of her family serves as the foundational idea that she explores in the book. She calls for a visionary feminism that will not only save the women, but also the men in our lives. She says; "to know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.” This sentence seems to encapsulate the written words she wished she had uttered to the men that hurt her in her life.

"The love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity."

The book begins by outlining the negative impact that a society, which inhibits men's ability to change and to love, has on children. bell hooks describes a patriarchal society in which men are ill-equipped or too scared to love their own children. Worse, because this inability to love is magnified by the dominance of patriarchal thinking in how humans are socialised, a child's desire for fatherly love can never quite be fulfilled by that of a mother. For bell hooks, this is because "patriarchal culture has already taught girls and boys that Dad’s love is more valuable than motherly love, it is unlikely that maternal affection will heal the lack of fatherly love." She goes on to quote Jan Waldon, who says that "the love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity." As the son of a father tormented by patriarchy, I resonated with this idea that a mother's love could never be enough because the value of a father's love is made scarce as a result of the barriers erected by society. Barriers that keep a much needed love out of bounds for too many of us.

If children are the victims of patriarchal men, then men themselves are the victims of patriarchal thinking. A thinking that upholds a culture in which "male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed". Through this lens, the scope of patriarchy's victims extends to encapsulate men, and acknowledges that men are stripped of the vocabulary to identify pain, but most importantly, to have others acknowledge their pain. It is a culture that also strips away the ability for women to nurse male pain, as the patriarchal concept teaches women that "male pain interferes with the satisfaction of female desire." Patriarchal thinking that is seeped in the socialisation of all individuals means that men's pain is fabricated then exacerbated by this understanding that men should feel no pain, and that a man's pain is taboo. A male's pain breaks the hegemonic understanding of what manhood is. It is the same society that has harnessed a culture that creates fear and a subsequent divide between sexes, crippling women’s ability to share to men how much they fear them, and in which men are unable to reveal that they “long to connect, to love, to be loved.” Where bell hooks’ ideas deviate from the norm is in her desire to highlight the role that women play in perpetrating and sustaining patriarchal culture, in a bid to disseminate the consciousness and understanding that even though men receive more rewards from patriarchy, both men and women's relationship to patriarchy enable its continuation. In this dual need of recognising that men suffer from patriarchy and that women are also accountable to maintaining the patriarchal system. The author outlines the idea of Visionary Feminism in which we need to recognise that men who are taught that real men do not feel or express feelings are denied their full humanity, and that “the feminist rhetoric that insisted on identifying males as the enemy often closed down the space where boys could be considered, where they could be deemed as worthy of rescue from patriarchal exploitation and oppression as were their female counterparts.” Men are in need of rescue because men have had their ability to express their feelings restricted by society's refusal to teach our boys the vocabulary to do so. These feelings that find no words, have turned to anger, and this is the answer that boys - and later men - have found to express those feelings. Anger is “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.”

This notion of male anger holds a central position in the author's exploration of patriarchy and its impact on men. As alluded to above, the book explores the underlying causes of this male anger, and is an attempt at positioning a sociological diagnosis to male violence rather than seeking a biological/evolutionary interpretation oft this anger. A common source of this anger begins early-on in a man's life, and the book looks at the chasm that patriarchy creates between a father and a son, in which the former denies love and emotional connection to the latter. Sons suffer at the hands, either literally or figuratively (or both), of fathers that live upholding the expectations of hegemonic patriarchal masculinity, and deny their sons the emotional connection and the love that all boys expect, leaving “just a space of empty longing”.

Anger in Relationships

If the book begins by exploring and understanding the impact of patriarchy on a micro-level it then extrapolates its impact to a macro level and looks at how this anger plays out a macro-scale. By denying boys the emotional outlet to express this longing sadness, boys turn their feelings into anger. This anger turns into rage, and this rage is commodified and used to fuel a socio-economic system that runs on dominance and exploitation. A socio-economic modality that demands an understanding of manhood in which “disconnection is masculinity” and it this severing of a man’s emotional needs, of his sadness, of his vulnerability, that keeps the wheel’s of our system turning. A system that “rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings. Whether engaged in acts of violence against women and children or weaker men, or in the socially sanctioned violence of war, men are better able to fulfil the demands of patriarchy if they do not feel.” The book further explores the Faustian bargain that patriarchy strikes with men, by which it teaches them to equate asserting control and domination with success and happiness. However, as the author says, “if patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.” This violence and this quest for domination is explored in the context of sexual relationships or sexual encounters. These are the spheres in which male violence is intensified, and bell hooks believes that the intensification of this violence is due to “men who endorse patriarchy", discovering, "that the patriarchal promise of power and dominion is not easy to fulfil“. In a culture where domination struggles for power are enacted in daily human relationships, sex “is where many men act out because it is the only social arena where the patriarchal promise of dominion can be easily realised.” This idea of an unfulfilled expectation of domination being played out across the sexual realm and as an underlying factor of male violence towards women shines a humanistic light on the failings of men, and this is where Visionary Feminism exists: in the space between blame and confrontation. The author then goes onto to explore the, at times, contradictory relationship that men (both homo and heterosexual) have with sex in our patriarchal culture. In one place, sex is a realm for revenge for men who have been promised reward for dominance through employment and power but have seen this promise come short. Women are seen as holding the power of arousal through consent and this infuriates the men who cannot accept being denied what they see as their right. In the other, sex is seen as the one place in which intimacy and sensuality as forms of vulnerability are seen as acceptable, it is the only place in which a need for intimacy can be safely enacted. This antagonistic relationship with sex, where violence meets sensitivity, creates a dual threat for women as they simultaneously hold a man's desire with his longing for connection. This duality creates a confusion in a man's relationship to another and because this duality cannot be expressed with the vocabulary taught by patriarchy, the answers turn to anger and violence.

Critiquing Reformist Feminism

The book then delves into a critique of ‘reformist feminism’, a movement which saw female liberation coming through women acquiring a piece of the power pie rather than preoccupying itself with freeing women and ‘less powerful men’ from sexist oppression. bell hooks criticises the leading-class of the reformist movement as women who had lost interest in feminism after they had "gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class."

Her criticism of the reformist movement isn't extensive, and the book focuses on making-up for the failings of the movement, because the world needs new strategies, new theories, and a feminist movement that embraces "feminist masculinity’". A movement that "loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women." She proposes a world in which gender equality is seen "in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls - the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose." This idea of a feminist masculinity, a visionary feminism in which men’s rights need to be upheld for gender equality is the new idea and the new perspective that encompasses the radical approach of the book. It could be perceived as controversial (and it may certainly be), but at its core the message is radical because the society we live in, with its violence and domination, calls for radical change.

Conclusion

For change to happen and for men to experience this change, society, and those who populate it, need to create a concept of man that "is a state of being rather than a performance." This performance being what we see men having to live-up to, whether to themselves or to other men. Killing themselves or others if they fail to live up to this male performance where man is a dominator and not a carer. Where a man is always a surgeon and never the nurse. The perimeters of this performance are set by Patriarchal Masculinity’s framework that sees successful manhood as one of aloneness and disconnection, a framework that "keeps fathers from touching the hearts of their children". This disconnection that impacts father-child relationships is circling back to the beginning of the book where bell hooks shares the fraught relationship that she had with her dad. How his death had come as a relief, though a painful one. A situation that too many of us, myself included, can relate to.

‘Love cannot coexist with domination.’

This performance and demand to fulfil this one-dimensional masculine expectation, seeped in domination and power, exists in a socio-economic reality in which the dominance men were taught to exert is neutered, and in fact where the majority of men are the ones who are dominated. Therefore this ‘libidic’ need to dominate is converted into violence, abuse, and domination in the relationships that men create; for these men "domination of women and children may be the only opportunity to assert a patriarchal presence."

This book is therefore a call for compassion, a call for society to dismantle Patriarchal Masculinity through a Radical Feminism that sees men not as replicants of power but as victims replicating the ills of their teaching. As the books comes to an end, its final message rings as the foundation of what we need for a better tomorrow to emerge. Talking about men who are the victims and the perpetrators of Patriarchal Masculinity, the author asks us to ‘"to stand ready to hold them, offering a love that can shelter their wounded spirits as they seek to find their way home, as they exercise the will to change."