Reading: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks) / Chapter 1: “Wanted: Men Who Love” To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
We live in a culture where emotionally starved, deprived females are desperately seeking male love.
I think there's a difference between “seeking love” (in general) and “seeking male love.” I don't live in a culture where I'm seeking the love of men, specifically. If there are men in my life, I want them to love me (as family, platonically, romantically... whatever their role in my life is).
But I am not seeking that love specifically. I do, however, want to be loved by the people around me. These are not the same thing.
Granted, I am also not “a female” (I hate this phrasing, and this book fucking loves it). I am agender, but I presume hooks would perceive me as feminine and slam me into the 'female' category.
The male bashing that was so intense when contemporary feminism first surfaced more than thirty years ago was in part the rageful cover-up of the shame women felt not because men refused to share their power but because we could not seduce, cajole, or entice men to share their emotions—to love us.
I'm sure a lot of women in the 1970s would be glad to know that their frustrations with men were a “rageful cover-up” of some apparent shame that they felt because they “could not seduce, cajole, or entice” men to love them.
What a fucking way to categorise feminism and frustrations around men's behaviours. Yikes.
No one hungers for male love more than the little girl or boy who rightfully needs and seeks love from Dad. He may be absent, dead, present in body yet emotionally not there, but the girl or boy hungers to be acknowledged, recognized, respected, cared for.
Yeah, and then some of us grow up and realise it'll never be possible, move on, and create the families we wanted to be part of. And I don't mean just in terms of having those families biologically. A lot of us put work into creating found families that meet the needs we never had and also provide those same needs to younger people.
This, btw, does not require “male love.” It might include men who are loving, but it does not require that we have men who exist to provide “male love.” Again, these are two different thoughts, and I'm not fond of what hooks is implying here.
Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. It did not tell us the terrible terror that gnaws at the soul when one cannot love.
Maybe I'm strange, but men could've been doing this for a long fucking time. Instead of using their so-called “men's rights” groups (which largely formed as a response against feminism) to lodge complaints about how no one cares about them, they could've taken the time to actually respond to feminism and look at their world through that lens.
We don't need to do their work for them. We can help them and work in tandem, but they've got to want to do the work themselves.
Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.
Citations needed, to be honest. To just say this as if it's a pure fact and provide no examples of it happening is just ludicrous.
In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.
Or maybe, and this is from my own personal experience, there are a lot of men who don't like following different rules of engagement. (And that's putting it lightly.)
I've seen them “empathise” with someone by effectively silencing them while they were still talking, usurping the space completely. I've seen them make meetings where people were trying to deal with interpersonal issues through discussion about themselves, especially when they were being criticised.
So you can't just say this and provide no examples, especially when I (the reader) can think of the many, many times where men have dominated spaces and usurped space for themselves with little to no care to the people they were shutting down, shutting out, and silencing. Even if they claimed to be feminist.
When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
This sounds like a you-problem more than an all-feminists-problem, as you've made it.
Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.
Evidence? I'm sure there are some, but show me that it's “many.” (And how often does this “male pain” about love come about from “male behaviours and actions” in that relationship?)
There are men who definitely deal with abusive women, and this needs to be engaged with (and ironically is more often engaged with by feminists... who she thinks ignore men's feelings and pain... and is routinely ignored by so-called “men's rights” groups until they can weaponise it against feminism).
But I think it's unfair to group this as a generalisation and then to neglect that very often in many more contexts? Men fail to recognise that their own actions and failures. There's an article about a man who believed he was divorced over the dishes that always comes to mind. The article still sucks in some ways, but in the course of writing it, he does at least come to terms with the fact that it wasn't the dishes that made his wife leave him; it was the fact that he was repeatedly showing her (and she had told him) that he did not respect her opinions and did not value her enough to have even a simple conversation over leaving the glass by the sink (among other things).
Ironically, it's usually as a silencing cudgel that I see hooks' work used more often than not, and it's done by supposed “men's rights” sorts and notorious abusers within various “leftist” scenes. I think this should've spoke to her about how she's positioned in the culture because it would upset me to work on supposedly feminist work only to see it weaponised against feminism.
We cannot love what we fear. That is why so many religious traditions teach us that there is no fear in love.
If this is true, then show me why many religious men often harbor some of the most abusive and hostile tendencies toward women and girls within their communities? Please, I'd love that explanation.
A black male in his late thirties, whose father was present in the home, a hard worker, talked about his recent experience of parenthood, his commitment to be a loving father, and his fear that he will fail. He fears failure because he has not had a loving role model. His father was almost always away from home, working, roaming. When he was home, his favorite way of relating was to tease and taunt his son mercilessly, in a biting voice full of sarcasm and contempt, a voice that could humiliate with just a word. Reflecting the experience of many of us, the individual telling his story talked about wanting the love of this hard man but then learning not to want it, learning to silence his heart, to make it not matter.
I have a question: Why does his role model for a “loving father” have to be his own father? Why can't he have a role model for a “loving parent” and that parent be his mother (if she was loving)? At no point in the rest of this anecdote does that become part of the question? Why not look to other parenting figures, including women, and take lessons from them?
This seems to me to be an obvious answer, but every part of this anecdote circles the father and uses the father as a central figure. One part is using him as a negative role model (e.g., do the opposite of what he'd do)... But nothing says to look at the parenting figures who loved you and learn from them.
So we're still going to entrench patriarchal bullshit while fighting it? I don't think that works.
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.
To paraphrase yourself back at you: Men have to be willing to change.
In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity.
Right, because everyone else gets to do that? My queer ass thinks not.
Heartbroken women in longtime marriages or partnerships rarely leave their men. They learn to make an identity out of their suffering, their complaint, their bitterness.
Oh, get the fuck out of here with this victim-blaming bullshit. Give me a fucking break. “Make an identity” out of it? And the expectation that, in this patriarchal world, they will leave even if it harms them further because there are no other supports (unless she's extremely lucky in having a supportive community)?
Let these women complain and not tell them they're making an identity out of a life of pain and suffering. Fuck the whole way off with that shit.
Self-help books galore tell us that we cannot change anyone but ourselves. Of course they never answer the question of what will motivate males in a patriarchal culture who have been taught that to love emasculates them to change, to choose love, when the choice means that they must stand against patriarchy, against the tyranny of the familiar.
Because self-help books generally support the status quo. Surprise.
We can guide, instruct, observe, share information and skills, but we cannot do for boys and men what they must do for themselves. Our love helps, but it alone does not save boys or men. Ultimately boys and men save themselves when they learn the art of loving.
Thanks for saying this, but you've already contradicted it repeatedly. Yeah, it's not our fucking job to fix (cis) men, and they have to want to change... So why are we getting all frustrated at feminists who are tired of men's bullshit, as if they're the ones who need to provide the blueprints? We've had decades (centuries) of feminist work, and a lot of men still actively refuse to learn from it... They've got the instructions, but many of them decided to toss them out and build something worse.
It's hard to read this in 2026 because I've seen the abject refusal by so many men and on so many levels.