Reading: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks) / Chapter 10: Reclaiming Male Integrity To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns.
... So clever, except that's not how etymology works because 'masculine' and 'mask' do not share similar etymological histories. So the clever joke (if I'm being charitable) doesn't work.
Therapist John Bradshaw explains the splitting that takes place when a child learns that the way he organically feels is not acceptable. In response to this lesson that his true self is inappropriate and wrong, the boy learns to don a false self. Bradshaw explains, “The feeling that I have done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone’s love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else—someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.” Sexist roles restrict the identity formation of male and female children, but the process is far more damaging to boys because not only are the roles required of them more rigid and confining, but they are much more likely to receive severe punishment when they deviate from these roles.
I don't like this hierarchical game of oppression nonsense. Ah, men are more harmed by patriarchy than everyone else... Except they're not. This isn't a “more harmed” situation; they either are harmed or they aren't, and everyone else is harmed by patriarchy (guaranteed).
Just because their roles are more rigid doesn't mean they're “more confining.” Can we look at the ways in which everyone else has to traverse the world? Women are forced to consider their every behaviour and recognise whether or not their own behaviours will lead to people blaming them for any violence or harassment done toward them; women are made to be responsible for ensuring that cis men do not harm them. That feels awfully confining, especially as cis men do not necessarily need to think like that in most contexts.
Queer folks often don't know to what degree we're even safe at all. How openly queer can we be? It is very confining to have to navigate a world where you don't know what level of yourself you can be.
So no, cis men do not have it worse. Does it hurt them? Yeah, it hurts a lot of them. There's no denying that patriarchy is multi-directional harm. But does that mean that we can say it is “more harmful” to them than others? No. Because creating these hierarchies of harm is... bullshit.
... It's no surprise, though, that this book gets weaponised by abusive men in a range of spaces... including “radical” abusive men.
Contemporary feminist movement created a socially sanctioned space where girls can create a sense of self that is distinct from sexist definitions; the same freedom has not been extended to boys.
While I'm personally not a fan of sex-segregated spaces, can we consider that men have had men's groups (and still have men's groups in many places) that do not allow the existence of women unless they happen to be working in the building they're using to meet? Men have had ample space to, you know, freely explore themselves. Why have many of them chosen not to?
The feminist movement also didn't say that men couldn't get together and have groups where they shared feelings and worked on unlearning patriarchy! But for some reason, the men's groups that formed after the 1970s seemed to form as a reaction to feminists... and then claimed we were at fault for everything. Why is that?
Hell, what about the Boy Scouts? Or other boy-only groups? What were they doing to diminish patriarchal bullshit? Hmm...
bell hooks ignores this... probably because it doesn't support her already largely unsupported thesis.
When males are required to wear the mask of a false self, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished.
WE ARE ALL REQUIRED TO VARYING DEGREES TO WEAR THE MASK OF A FALSE SELF, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU. I hate this shit of “boys and men are made to...” Yeah, THEY'RE NOT ALONE HERE.
Anyone who has a false self must be dishonest. People who learn to lie to themselves and others cannot love because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth and therefore unable to trust.
Oh, get fucked. There is a severe difference between intentional dishonesty and being forced to mask your true self because the world will hurt you otherwise. The reasons for doing it are entirely different.
They don't learn to become dishonest because they're taught to mask. If that were true, then neurodivergent people would lie about everything 100% of the time because we're often forced to mask this shit because people don't want to deal with it (and if we make them deal with it, they get abusive or withhold services we're asking for).
Emotionally wounding boys is socially acceptable and even demanded in patriarchal culture.
Not like it's unacceptable to emotionally wound anyone else... It's such dishonest framing.
Identifying the practice of integrity as a core pillar of self-esteem in his groundbreaking work on the subject, Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden talks about the way in which lying wounds self-esteem.
NATHANIEL BRANDEN WAS A FORMER ASSOCIATE AND ROMANTIC PARTNER OF AYN FUCKING RAND AND SUBSCRIBED TO HER VIEWS EVEN AFTER THEY SEPARATED, WHAT THE FUCK. How is this book VISIONARY or RADICAL or even remotely FEMINIST?
For years patriarchal culture has taught men that their selfhood, their manhood, is affirmed by a lack of interest in personal growth; all of a sudden in the wake of feminist movement, women were bombarding men with new emotional expectations. Collectively men responded with a feeling of depression.
Oh no. Heterosexual cis women had expectations of their cis men partners? Wowwww, how dare they. /sarcasm. Why do we keep putting the blame for men's behaviour at the feet of women?
... There was nothing more to say after the rest. This chapter is just... preachy and full of right-wing libertarian framing and way too much religiosity.