Reading: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks) / Chapter 7: Feminist Manhood To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State related tags: #HNvPtS
When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme.
Yes, because they had a vested interest in ensuring that people didn't understand what feminism was. Anytime women (any women) asked for anything, it has been met with incredible backlash and pushback. This has happened with every movement that has challenged the status quo, not just feminism.
Even though not all men are misogynists, feminist thinkers were accurate when we stated that patriarchy in its most basic, unmediated form promotes fear and hatred of females.
Even if it's unintentional, men who do not engage in unlearning and removing misogynist thoughts from their brains are misogynists. Anyone who refuses to do that unlearning is a misogynist, since we live in a misogynist culture.
Unintentional misogyny does similar harms as intentional misogyny, and you cannot be free of it until you recognise that you're engaging in it.
However, most men have not consciously chosen patriarchy as the ideology they want to govern their lives, their beliefs, and actions. Patriarchal culture is the system they were born within and socialized to accept, yet in all areas of their lives most men have rebelled in small ways against the patriarchy, have resisted absolute allegiance to patriarchal thinking and practice. Most men have clearly been willing to resist patriarchy when it interferes with individual desire, but they have not been willing to embrace feminism as a movement that would challenge, change, and ultimately end patriarchy.
This is annoying because it's like... all of us have not consciously chosen patriarchal values because we were all born into a patriarchal system. It's ignoring that, in their refusal to accept feminism or to consider it, they actively refuse to understand the world around them; this is also true of anti-feminists who aren't cis men. They actively benefit from a system; this also includes being able to blame feminism for their problems when it's quite literally upper class men of the hegemonic population who have negatively impacted them in most ways. They conflate personal pain (rejection by a woman, for example) with systemic pain (women being refused access to certain spaces simply because they're women). They refuse to understand these as different and refuse to understand that the rejection hinges on more contextual information (e.g., their own behaviour and/or the desires of that woman) than being barred via systemic discrimination.
I don't feel that this is said enough in this book anywhere.
Feminist movement was from the outset presented to most males via mass media as antimale. Truthfully, there was a serious antimale faction in contemporary feminist movement. And even though the man-hating women were a small minority of women’s libbers, they received the most attention.
The second and third sentences are weird in conjunction because of the framing of blaming this (admittedly small) contingent for the media calling all feminists man-hating. Why not address the agenda of the mass media (run by powerful men who are supported by the patriarchy) in maintaining the status quo? Even if the blame here is unintentional, it's hard not to notice that the people who were invested in discrediting all feminism did so via power structures they controlled.
The other problem is that this doesn't address anything. The rest of the paragraph doesn't really engage with any of these aspects, either). The most connected bit she adds here is quoting herself from her book Feminism is for Everyone about how women joined the movement angry at men in their lives (including the progressive men leading movements to support other liberation being womanisers or abusers) and that they had difficulty in shifting their view from it being men that were the problem to the system of patriarchy.
She apparently doesn't want to deal with the actual consequences of this supposedly “anti-male” politics (which... honestly, they really aren't). She fails to engage with how these supposedly anti-male politics are next to impossible to functionally do because they risk supporting queerphobia of varying kinds (such as the exclusion of closeted trans women and femmes and nonbinary people), and that is precisely what happens in most cases. We know that this is what happens because a lot of the women who held the view that we needed spaces “for women” often only meant “for cis women” and are current supporters of transphobic and queerphobic politics while pretending they're being feminist (which they aren't). It also doesn't engage with what happens to trans men. (The book is so built in gender binary that it doesn't recognise transness. Trans people didn't suddenly appear post-2004.)
However, though there were vocal feminists who would flippantly say shit about wishing some men (not all men) dead because of the frustration they had for how those men treated them (like partners, family members, and colleagues)... A lot of men refused to ever understand why they might have these feelings in the first place. These feelings (“I wish my dad would crash into a tree so he stops abusing my mother and me” or “I wish he'd have a heart attack so she'd be free of him”) were conflated with being man-hating, and she doesn't address this. It's specific-person-hating.
But cis men, particularly ones with access to powerful structures, had a vested interest in conflating ideas like that with wanting all men dead... because it discredited the movement. And people bought it (because they also had some vested interest in supporting it, whether they recognised it or not).
Despite this change in feminist agendas, visionary feminist thinkers who had never been antimale did not and do not receive mass media attention. As a consequence the popular notion that feminists hate men continues to prevail.
... Which feminists who hated men were getting mass media attention? Like, genuinely. Why not cite examples of who was routinely popularised? Because a lot of people reading this are not going to have this experience, since the “feminists” they saw were ones who were willing to be complicit in other systems of oppression and exploitation.
Here's part of my issue with her writing this in 2004... At that time, I think she could've easily looked at the ways in which corporate media utilised a manufactured girl band to popularise the slogan “Girl Power.” This deradicalised the phrase from its origins, which were in punk radical feminist spaces (like riot grrrl, which was a movement that the mainstream media had often intentionally misunderstood while sympathising with its detractors).
And it was also the time where Girl Boss Feminism started to become a prevalent idea, intertwining mainstream understandings Girl Power (particularly the individualism) with the capitalist desire to be the First Woman or the Only Woman to dominate an institution or organisation (while never interrogating the complicity of these women or those institutions).
I think the feminisms presented here are already so dated by the time of its publication as to make this a frustrating read because it's ignoring what had been happening around that time.
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.
I don't hate men as a whole, but I also don't feel sorry for them. They have had ample time to recognise the truth of what we've been saying about how patriarchy harms them, too. Why do they repeatedly turn to the manosphere of that era instead of work through it, even with the help that is so often offered?
While visionary thinkers have called attention to the way patriarchy hurts men, there has never been an ongoing effort made to address male pain. To this day I hear individual feminist women express their concern for the plight of men within patriarchy, even as they share that they are unwilling to give their energy to help educate and change men.
Have we considered that a lot of feminists across time have offered to give up their energy and time for men to address these problems, and they have been repeatedly rebuffed for it by the very men who claim they want that help? Maybe consider this instead of pretending zero of them have made attempts. If you've tried doing something a dozen times and it doesn't work, why would you waste your energy and time on it some more?
This goes back to: Men have been told and shown. They now have to want to change, and many don't. Please address this in your book.
Also, we address man pain so fucking much that every societal problem neglects everyone for men. Unemployment? Focus is on men. Alienation and loneliness? Men. Lack of being able to find a partner (should someone want to)? Men. Education? Boys and men.
Every fucking problem is first looked at for men (or boys) and then for the rest of us. Please stop pretending otherwise.
[Reformist feminist women] were the women for whom feminist liberation was more about getting their piece of the power pie and less about freeing masses of women or less powerful men from sexist oppression. They were not mad at their powerful daddies and husbands who kept poor men exploited and oppressed; they were mad that they were not being giving equal access to power.
... This is at least true. Wealthier women are never concerned with those beneath them and how they're being exploited.
Now that many of those women have gained power, and especially economic parity with the men of their class, they have pretty much lost interest in feminism.
They didn't have it. They never had it. Like every other marginalised person who has gained power and used their identity in the process, they rarely actually care about anyone other than themselves. If they did care, they'd stop trying to grab power over others and start working on horizontal structures.
As interest in feminist thinking and practice has waned, there has been even less focus on the plight of men than in the heyday of feminist movement.
This is a funny sentiment because, again, she wrote this book at the heyday of Girl Power. Which, even through its corporatised bullshit, still provoked a lot of girls and women to check out feminist causes.
It wasn't a perfect resurgence, but it still was one.
Clearly we need new strategies, new theories, guides that will show us how to create a world where feminist masculinity thrives.
Or maybe we can learn that masculinity doesn't need to be a thing and that people can do things that we believe are 'masculine' (what makes repairing a vehicle masculine?) or feminine (what makes painting your nails feminine?). Part of the problem is that so many men are so invested in following the patriarchal “what is masculinity” script that they refuse to deviate, even if they'd like doing those things.
Teachers of children see gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.
Yes, but also... Schools have never been an area for toppling the status quo because they were developed to support it, so...
Once the “new man” that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest.
EVIDENCE. WHERE IS IT. You can't just say this shit and pretend it's true because you believe it to be.
Reacting to this inversion of gender roles, men who were sympathetic chose to stop trying to play a role in female-led feminist movement and became involved with the men’s movement.
Sorry, are you blaming the feminist movement for men drifting to the men's rights movements and later incarnations? That is bullshit. Horse shit. It's all kinds of shit. But I see no evidence that you're right, nor has that been my experience anywhere else after. This reads terribly to people who endured Gamergate and beyond.
No wonder manosphere types and patriarchal “radicals” love this fucking ~feminist~ book.
The men’s movement was often critical of women and feminism while making no sustained critique of patriarchy. Ultimately it did not consistently demand that men challenge patriarchy or envision liberating models of masculinity.
BECAUSE THAT WASN'T THE POINT. Or rather, being critical of women and feminism WAS THE POINT. It wasn't about helping men; it was about keeping women down. Actually admit that please. Even men who joined these organisations because they thought it was about supporting men in healthy ways SAID AS MUCH. I swear, I don't understand how she got to these places.
Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as though they are offering a different script for gender relations.
Weirdly, some of those same New Age models ended up becoming high-control groups... and now a not insignificant number of former members are speaking out about unlearning what they were indoctrinated into.
Also, that control was often part of the point of the New Age models. We knew this even in 2004 because there had been similar groups prior; it was just neglected and overlooked because religious freedom or other rubbish, which gave them space to be beyond critique.
Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy “other,” be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against.
But they can't be models that are offered by non-men, especially people who aren't cis men. Like, we need to truly understand this contradiction. Feminists (presumed to largely be people who aren't cis men, especially women) are expected to give up time and energy to create these models... but these models can't be given to men by them because men won't accept them. She doesn't engage in this ever, but it is the message that keeps coming through loud and clear. Especially here:
Starting in early childhood, males need models of men with integrity, that is, men who are whole, who are not divided against themselves. While individual women acting as single mothers have shown that they can raise healthy, loving boys who become responsible, loving men, in every case where this model of parenting has been successful, women have chosen adult males—fathers, grandfathers, uncles, friends, and comrades—to exemplify for their sons the adult manhood they should strive to achieve.
First: Evidence. She provides none. Prove to me that “every case where [single mother parenting of boys] has been successful” is because “women have chosen adult males ... to exemplify for their sons.” Fucking prove it.
Second: Once again, and I pointed this out either earlier in this book or with all about love, but why is it that everyone else other than cis boys (and later men) can have role models who don't match their gender (and no one seems to care)... but only boys require to have male role models around? How does that assumption even make sense in a book where men are supposed to challenge their understandings of patriarchy? That is baby's first patriarchy, quite literally.
Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.
That's not inherently true. While there are undoubtedly people who state that we need an end to manhood and do mean this, the correlate (we need an end to womanhood) is also likely to be true. I don't know where she's getting these sentiments (because she almost never cites a fucking thing that you can go look at)... but I think it's a fair sentiment to have in the abolition of gender.
Since I can't tell if she's referencing people who want to abolish manhood on its own, abolish our current perceptions of manhood, or abolish gender... This just reads like a “figure out what I meant yourself” passage.
It is a stance that seems to be more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self that has a penis.
Glad we're back to associating masculinity with penises. I wonder if that might also be a problem bell hooks has? It seems like one to me that would also create a lot of issues in feminist theory.
... AND SHE KEEPS REFERENCING GARY FUCKING ZUKAV. Who wrote the following in The Seat of the Soul:
The dolphin soul is leaving the Earth, that is, the dolphin species is becoming extinct. The dolphins are beaching themselves. They are creating diseases within themselves. This is their way of refusing to continue to live upon the Earth. They feel that they cannot fulfill the purpose for which they are born. Therefore, they are leaving. Their deaths are not suicides because they are not frightened. They are exhausted.
Or worse yet, who wrote this following anecdote that is present in the same book:
After several years of marriage to a willful partner, an acquaintance of mine found herself suffocating in the relationship, unable to express her deepest desires and her creativity. One winter morning her husband’s jeep, which was parked on their steep driveway, broke loose and rolled over her, crushing her pelvic area. Surgery and chemicals healed her hips and eased the pain of her body, but can surgery mend the damage that is done when a woman’s creativity—represented, in this case, by her pelvic area, her reproductive capability, the physical symbol of her feminine creativity—is crushed by the uncontrolled macho masculinity of her husband—represented, in this case, by a runaway jeep? Can chemicals ease the pain of a suffering soul?
I swear. Why would you accept this dude's understanding of masculinity when he states that a woman's PELVIS is the PHYSICAL SYMBOL of her FEMININE CREATIVITY? Or say she was crushed (LITERALLY) by the “uncontrolled macho masculinity of her husband?” Good fucking grief.
If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love. When I was a girl, my father was respected as the patriarchal provider and protector in our family. And he was feared.
Why are these in the same paragraph? These are two separate ideas. One is discussing the potential for men to be rapists and murderers and the other is discussing very real abuse... And that very real abuse would lead you to believe that men (especially men you're in close proximity to) will be violent... while the former is a thing that we're (somewhat? but not entirely?) socialised to believe. We're more cognisant of this lesson during certain times and in certain spaces than others; if we truly were socialised to completely believe it, we'd all be scrambling away from men everywhere all the time... and we haven't.
It's a lesson that we know statistically rather than intrinsically, and that's a huge difference between the potential harms and the actual harms being discussed here.
Feminism as a movement to end sexist domination and oppression offers us all the way out of patriarchal culture. The men who are awakening to this truth are generally younger men, who were born into a world where gender equality is more a norm. Unlike older generations of men, they do not have to be convinced that women are their equals.
Considering the sheer number of men in my generation (millennial) and younger who support fascist movements that curtail the freedoms of demographics unlike themselves... Where the hell did she think the future was going?
And to think she somehow ignored how 2001 impacted visions of masculinity in the US, particularly that of citizens vs. non-citizens.
I have had many conversations with men who in parenting daughters suddenly find themselves enraged by patriarchal biases that they had been unaware of or cared nothing about until the moment when they saw sexism begin to threaten their daughters’ action and being.
I mean... I get it, but like... how did the other women and girls in their lives... not have similar impacts? And a lot of men who recognise this get mad when you ask them that, which I think is weird. (Not all, but enough that it's a pattern.)