Read the Will to Change by bell hooks

This is an adapted/expanded version of a twitter thread I did (on an account I had for a week). I want to be clearer now that I’m publishing it somewhere that these are really all ideas I got from the book in the title. But this is something I’ve been thinking about and wanted more men to see.

hooks explains that

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

I started moving toward saying “patriarchal” over “sexist” in most situations because I think it describes the behaviors better and connects them to the systems of power that we have in place.

When I first started thinking about this, I thought that women were the victims of this. Men target violence and abuse at women every day in almost every space. I thought that unlearning patriarchal beliefs was just something that men could (and should) do to help women. Women are usually the targets of patriarchy, but it’s damaging us too.

In the US, we live in a society where men value ourselves based on our ability to dominate others and avoid being dominated. Like hooks said in the definition, that domination is usually directed at things we view as weak (unwilling or unable to dominate others). But before we get comfortable treating others like that, there are a lot of things we learn to make that behavior seem acceptable.

One of the first things we learn is to repress emotions associated with weakness, which is the worst trait a man can have within patriarchy. In childhood, we scold our boys out of crying until they understand being visibly sad is inappropriate. I cried a ton as a kid. Once I got to a certain age, parents, teachers, friends, and others in my life made it clear that I should stop. It was tolerable when I was a kid, but when I started to approach manhood, it had to be corrected. By the end of elementary school, I was either ostracized or told to stop when I cried. I learned to hold back my tears so well that I didn’t know how to access them anymore.

But that repression really prevents us from exploring the depths of all the emotions we feel. It’s not that I stopped feeling sad; I just learned that sadness was to be tucked away and ignored when possible. With that approach to emotion, there’s no way to understand what you’re actually feeling. And the problems don’t actually go away even if you ignore them.

This is such a hollow and empty way to live! It really fucking sucks to not know yourself at all because you’re afraid to explore what’s going on in your own head. My go-to tactic was/is to convince myself out of being sad rather than learn how to deal with the problem. Years of running away from pain instead of dealing with it head-on leaves us with no tools to manage our feelings.

It’s more than not being able to feel sad, though. The emotional immaturity combined with the desire to dominate harms our ability to form meaningful relationships with people. We can’t be vulnerable with others because we’re terrified that they’ll use that vulnerability to prove that we’re weak. It’s hard to form real connections with those walls up. You can’t tell people what you need in a relationship when can’t talk about how you feel. You can’t get others’ help with a problem when you can’t talk about how you feel. You can’t accept people’s love when you can’t talk about how you feel.

People say stuff like “guys have less drama” because relationships with men often require less maintenance, but I think the truth is that our relationships with men are just shallow and devoid of intimacy. There’s less friction in our relationships with men because we’re not as invested in each other. There’s less maintenance because we don’t really know how to do it.

Being angry is okay though! Anger can be used to dominate people, so we’re comfortable when men express it. As men, we understand that and just kind of fold all of our negative emotions into anger. There was a period in high school where I felt really lonely, and my response was fits of anger that started with slamming the door when I got home (my mom was at work so I didn’t get in trouble). Why did I think that was the appropriate response? I was more comfortable being an angry guy than a sad one.

Understanding the spectrum of negative feelings beyond anger requires work. We turn to women to do that emotional work for us because it’s obvious that they have so much more experience doing it. And the men in our lives — even if they were willing to help — are often too stunted to have good emotional conversations with.

Sometimes we’ll depend on romantic/sexual relationships with women because they provide us with an emotional guide, and we think that sex will be able to fill the hole of intimacy and connection in our lives. And we’ll often push platonic relationships with women into something else because we’re so unfamiliar with kind and loving friendships. We get that from women in our lives and think that something sexual or romantic must be at play.

That, combined with the domination mindset, makes life really unsafe for the women we come across. We make advances when it’s not appropriate, and we often treat sexual relationships with women as something we pursue and they withhold — until we can convince them otherwise. The sum of this, which should be clear if you listen to women in your life, is that men routinely violate their boundaries wherever they have to interact with us.

One of the worst parts of patriarchy is that it demands we be silent about the pain we feel (and demands our victims be silent about the pain we cause them). We have to break that silence to make any progress. We have to admit to ourselves and others that we feel pain. We have to choose honesty, vulnerability, love, and earnestness. We have to separate our self image from our ability to control others. It can be hard work, but I don’t think we’re doing great as things stand.

Here’s hooks explaining it much better than I could

Currently, sexist definitions of male roles insist on defining maleness in relationship to winning, one-upsmanship, domination: “Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents — ‘avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality’ — we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathetic, autonomous, and connected.” The core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender equality and mutuality as crucial to interbeing and partnership in the creating and sustaining of life. Such a commitment always privileges nonviolent action over violence, peace over war, life over death.

Even if you think this doesn’t apply to you and your relationships, men are always capable of patriarchal harm, and we have to be attentive to prevent it. Also, there are definitely men in your life who do the things I’ve described, and we won’t truly be free from this until everybody is on the same page.

My main point is: patriarchy is hurting all of us! Patriarchy may give us certain privileges, but they’re not worth the restrictions it imposes. Right now, most of the people trying to undo this violent system are women, and we have to change that. It’s too much to ask women to fix this it while they’re targeted by it every day.

PLEASE read The Will to Change.