The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks Read Free Book Online

of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

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Being a Boy
    B oys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture. Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved. Patriarchal assault on the emotional life of boys begins at the moment of their birth. Contrary to sexist mythology, in the real world of male and female babies, male babies express themselves more. They cry longer and louder. They come into the world wanting to be seen and heard. Sexist thinking at its worst leads many parents to let male infants cry without a comforting touch because they fear that holding baby boys too much, comforting them too much, might cause them to grow up wimpy. Thankfully, there has been enough of a break with rigid sexist roles to allow aware parents to reject this faulty logic and give boy babies the same comfort that they give or would give girls.
    In recent years it has become clear to researchers working on promoting the emotional life of boys that patriarchal culture influences parents to devalue the emotional development of boys. Naturally this disregard affects boys’ capacity to love and be loving. Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, stress that their research shows that boys are free to be more emotional in early childhood because they have not yet learned to fear and despise expressing dependence: “Every child, boys included, comes into this world wanting to love and be loved by his parents. Forty years of research on emotional attachment shows that without it children die or suffer severe emotional damage.” Despite these powerful insights they do not talk about the impact of patriarchy. They do not tell readers that to truly protect the emotional life of boys, we must tell the truth about the power of patriarchy. We must dare to face the way in which patriarchal thinking blinds everyone so that we cannot see that the emotional lives of boys cannot be fully honored as long as notions of patriarchal masculinity prevail. We cannot teach boys that “real men” either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings.
    Much of the traditional research on the emotional life of boys draws the connection between notions of male dominance and the shutting down of emotions in boyhood even as the researchers act as though patriarchal values can remain intact. Popular bestselling books such as Raising Cain and James Garbarino’s Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We can Save Them outline the way boys are being emotionally damaged, but they fail to offer a courageous alternative vision, one that would fundamentally challenge patriarchal masculinity. Instead these books imply that within the existing patriarchal system, boyhood should be free of patriarchal demands. The value of patriarchy itself is never addressed. In Raising Cain the authors conclude by contending: “What boys need, first and foremost, is to be seen through a different lens than tradition prescribes. Individually, and as a culture, we must discard the distorted view of boys that ignores or denies their capacity for feelings, the view that colors even boys’ perception of themselves as above or outside a life of emotions.” Kindlon and Thompson carefully depoliticize their language. Their use of the word “tradition” belies the reality that the patriarchal culture which has socialized almost everyone in our nation to dismiss the emotional life of boys is an