Reading: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks) / Chapter 2: Understanding Patriarchy To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
This chapter opens with this line:
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.
Which... probably? Maybe. But it later falls into this “joke”:
Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly.
So... this is how unfamiliar they are with it? While I don't agree with her focus on men, it's very bizarre that she's willing to make a sarcastic joke about how they're stupid.
Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.
Yeah, because they dismiss all of those things, and it's not only because they see them as irrelevant.
Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death.
Can we understand that this “basic ignorance” is part of the system that lends them that power and position over others? Because it's not supposed to be obvious to them; it's supposed to just be part of normal life.
Yet many female-headed households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households. Because they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles, women in such households are far more likely to idealize the patriarchal male role and patriarchal men than are women who live with patriarchal men every day.
While I do believe that this is a thing that happens in some families, where's the evidence that they promote such thinking “with far greater passion” and that they do it because “they do not have an experiential reality to challenge false fantasies of gender roles?”
Faludi never interrogates the notion of control. She never considers that the notion that men were somehow in control, in power, and satisfied with their lives before contemporary feminist movement is false.
Because... that isn't the point of the passage quoted (which I have other problems with). Also, this criticism is difficult to parse, but it's not purely within their lives that Faludi is discussing. It's systemic.
Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others.
But they are connected. Just because the system denies them access to being able to share their emotions doesn't mean that they don't feel powerful (or feel less powerful and are lashing out).
This is like the whole “hurt people hurt people” bullshit that pisses me off, especially because people who've been hurt are less likely (not more likely) to continue those patterns. And also, if you're a victim of childhood abuse, you're more likely to be abused as an adult (this comes from the UK).
So while, yes... Patriarchy does hurt men's ability to share emotions in healthy ways or to engage in life as they may so desire, it doesn't disconnect from the fact that they do still hold power and privilege over others (especially if they're white men). If we account for race, we can notice there are differences for outcomes and that it might depend on how well certain people are assimilated to the system of white cis patriarchy.
Anyway, I think it's weird that she thinks Susan Faludi asked the wrong question when I think this is valid (and also doesn't necessarily imply that men should stay out of feminism). She quotes this part:
Instead of wondering why men resist women’s struggle for a freer and healthier life, I began to wonder why men refrain from engaging in their own struggle. Why, despite a crescendo of random tantrums, have they offered no methodical, reasoned response to their predicament: Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt? … Why haven’t men responded to the series of betrayals in their own lives—to the failures of their fathers to make good on their promises—with something coequal to feminism?
I, admittedly, haven't read Susan Faludi... But when I look at the men's rights movements, the manosphere, Gamergate, Red Pill, etc... I have similar questions. Why haven't they staged a revolt against patriarchy if they're so upset? But they routinely fight feminists, and I think it creates space for this to be a valid question as to why they only seem to want to fight feminism with their own perceived injustices (which, they claim, are because of feminism... rather than patriarchy) and created a movement that is coequal to feminism.
To me, this limited passage doesn't indicate that they can't be part of feminism, but it simply opens the doors to wonder why it is that non-men in feminist movements... have to do the work for them before they'll jump any ship... sort of.