The Will To Change – Men, Masculinity and Love by bell hooks (Simon & Schuster, 2004)
Every man and woman, together wit those of undecided gender, should read this book. Wary men fearful of yet another feminist tract telling them how shit they are can breathe a sigh of relief.
bell hooks, real name Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted her pen name to be written in lower case so that people focus on her books, not her identity. She said : “I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal in ways that blind us to more important issues of life.”
I confess that I have been unforgivably ignorant of the importance of her writing until very recently. With a crushing irony, my belated discovery came just a couple of months before she sadly passed away at the age of 69. The only positive that might come from her death is that her works will be republished and freshly promoted. Hers is a radical voice for our times with refreshingly inclusive insights such as the recognition that “sexist exploitation [will] not change unless men [are] also deeply engaged in feminist resistance.”
This is a book aimed primarily at changing men but hooks is insistent that this transformation will not happen without a fundamental shift in female attitudes. She is most critical of those sisters who fail to appreciate that men are as much victims of patriarchal culture as they are. Of course, she is not blind to be fact that men benefit most from the system but urges women to make a vital distinction between masculinity and patriarchy. Maleness needs to divorced from the dominator model and to avoid all doubt on the roots of the problem and the scale of the challenge, she proposes the all embracive term “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”
In this study, bell hooks defines patriarchy as “a social disease assaulting the male body and spirit” whilst noting that men who are aware of this often find themselves isolated from other men. This certainly rings true for me personally. In the 1990s, I joined a men’s group which took Robert Bly’s ‘Iron John’ as a sacred text. In this environment, it was obvious that it was far from empowering for us ‘reconstructed males’ to declare ourselves as feminists. The overriding suspicion was that people like us were engaging in sexual politics to further our own ends rather than to truly embrace equality between the sexes. The consequence was that the so called ‘new man’ found himself between a rock and a hard place. Crucially, it didn’t pass unnoticed that unreconstructed males got laid more often and achieved a greater social status more easily.
Writing from a black female perspective, bell hooks is right to observe that her feminist peers strive to win the rewards and privileges of men in positions of power rather than suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune at the other end of the social scale. In so doing, they are merely helping to perpetuate the patriarchal model rather than working to dismantle it. On top of this, hooks concedes that women are capable of being as emotionally abusive as their male counterparts. She writes that “[they] have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men” reasoning that “it is better to be a dominator than dominated”.
The overriding message of this book is it is only through co-operation and mutual support between men and women that positive change will come about. Taking an unfashionably non-sceptical stance, she asserts that love can transform domination and that feminist writing, whether fiction or theory, should be centred on the premise that “It is possible to critique patriarchy without hating men.”
Today is International Men’s Day (IMD), a fact likely to be met with a combination of puzzlement and resentment – a mix of ‘why” and ‘how dare they?’
