1. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
be! hooks

2. I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is
moving away from love. - bell hooks
“Communities of resistance should be places where people can return to
themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal
themselves and recover their wholeness.” – Thich Nhat Hanh, The Raft is
Not the Shore

3. bell hooks
Gloria Watkins was born September 25, 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, U.S.
American scholar whose work examined the varied perceptions of black women and
black women writers and the development of feminist identities. Watkins grew up in a
segregated community of the American South. At age 19 she began writing what would
become her first full-length book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which was
published in 1981.
hooks assumed her pseudonym, the name of her great-grandmother, to honor female
legacies; she preferred to spell it in all lowercase letters to focus attention on her message
rather than herself.
hooks studied English literature at Stanford University (B.A., 1973), the University of
Wisconsin (M.A., 1976), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (Ph.D., 1983). She taught
English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California from the mid-1970s,
African and Afro-American studies at Yale University during the '80s, women's studies at
Oberlin College and English at the City College of New York during the 1990s and early
2000s. In 2004 she became a professor in residence at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

4. bell hooks defines this project as an attempt to love men enough to
understand how patriarchy affects them, and understand how their pain can
help them transform and challenge patriarchy.
Hooks’ overarching point was that patriarchy has created a division
between males and emotion. She contends that this division has led to a
variety of problems in how men approach and manage their relationships
with others, and even how the lack of emotion has caused men to
conceptualize reality in problematic ways. The issue of male un-emotion
cannot be solved through societal, structural changes. Such changes ought to
be exhibited within the everyday lives of individuals through gracious words,
gestures, and overall expressions of love.

5. Patriarchy is taught through violence
The idea that patriarchy is all the time enforced by violence, and that
men are taught through violence to reject their emotions and become
cold-blooded and distant, which allows them to commit violence on
others.
“Violence is boyhood socialization. The way we ‘turn boys into men’ is
through injury… We take them away from their feelings, from sensitivity
to others. The very phrase ‘be a man’ means suck it up and keep going.
Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection
is masculinity.”
Tough Guise & my feminist crush...

6. Healing not Hating
“Within the early writings radical feminism, anger, rage, and
even hatred of men was voiced, yet there was no meaningful
attempt to offer ways to resolve these feelings, to imagine a
culture of reconciliation where women and men might meet and
find common ground.” p. xi
What does it mean to love men in a patriarchal culture?
Does it mean different things to men and women to love men?

7. “The truth we do not tell is that men are
longing for love.” p. 4
"Women and men alike in our culture spend very little time
encouraging males to learn to love. Even the women who are
pissed off at men, women most of whom are not and maybe never
will be feminist, use their anger to avoid being truly committed to
helping to create a world where males of all ages can know love.
And there remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel
strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are
concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women.
Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to
transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of
women, men and children are fundamentally changed for the
better."(pp10)

8. Questions hooks poses...
Do we not speak about men because we fear them, because we
have been taught to be silent about them, or because we have
been socialized to keep secrets?
How is male power enacted and maintained in our private lives?
To not talk about men is to not take man and masculinity
seriously.
Do we want patriarchs to die? p. xiv

9. Sex...
hooks examines the stages of a man's life, from babyhood through boyhood to the
teenage years into manhood. She finds patriarchy plays a role in most socio-sexual
ills, as boys and men seek alienating sex as a substitute for the love that often
seems, because of demands on families that destroy them or keep them from
forming, unavailable to men: "Sex, then, becomes for most men a way of self-
solacing. It is not about connecting to someone else but rather releasing their own
pain." p.82
is this a stereotype? why or why not?

10. feminist masculinity
“…only a feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys
and men and demand on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and
women, can renew men in our society. Feminist thinking teaches us all,
males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and
affirm life.” p. 111
bell hooks’ wisdom has opened up new possibilities for all men, and it’s up
to us to take the initiative, educate ourselves, get in touch with our own
emotions, our own human-ness and connection to others in a non-
dominating way, and work together in love and resistance. We don’t just
owe it to women, trans and genderqueer folks, we owe it to men too.

11. dominator model
“When culture is based on a dominant model, not only will it be
violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.” p. 116
Most often it looks like jokes, put-downs, humiliation, scorn, and
exclusion, but violence is at the heart of the matter. In fact, middle
school and high school in retrospect look like a 7 year-long gauntlet of
violent social training. Learning to express pain without shame, and
wield anger not against oneself (or others) but against patriarchal
society, isn’t something that can change overnight.

12. exchange relationships of power
for relationships of meaning...
“To offer men a different way of being, we must first replace the
dominator model with a partnership model that sees interbeing and
interdependency as the organic relationship of all living beings. In
the partnership model, selfhood, whether one is female or male, is
always at the core of one’s identity. Patriarchal masculinity teaches
males to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically
dependent for self-definition on the privileges (however relative)
that they receive from having been born male. Hence many males
feel that their very existence is threatened if these privileges are
taken away. In a partnership model male identity, like its female
counterpart, would be centered around the notion of an essential
goodness that is inherently relationally oriented. Rather than
assuming that males are born with the will to aggress, the culture
would assume that males are born with the inherent will to
connect.” p. 117

13. save themselves
“Ultimately, boys and men save themselves when they learn
the art of loving.” p. 16
“The vast majority of feminist women I encounter do not hate
men. They feel sorry for men because they see how patriarchy
wounds them and yet men remain wedded to patriarchal
culture.” p. 109
What are some concrete interventions that are safe?
(might not be safe even in our families)
VMEN, MRAV, peer educators, peers...

14. Loving Men
War and Warriors
Emotional Awareness
“We do not love better or more than men, but we do find it
easier to get in touch with feelings , because even
patriarchal society supports this trait in us.” (p.178)
Sex - an emotional outlet (p.180, 181)
Erotic p.183