Read The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love Online
Authors: Bell Hooks
Tags: #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Politics & Government, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Sciences, #Gender Studies, #Men, #Women's Studies
To grow psychologically and spiritually, men need to mourn. The men who are doing the work of self-recovery testify that it is only when they are able to feel the pain that they can begin to heal. With courage and insight Neale Lundgren speaks about this inner struggle in his autobiographical essay about boyhood, “The Night When Sleep Awoke,” confessing his longing to find a father model, to reconnect with manhood. “Just when I thought I had exhausted my search for the father, I began to reach out for therapeutic help. After several episodes of chronic, unexplainable depression, I made a decision to finally stop avoiding the hurt and anger. With assistance and support from therapeutically literate men and women, I began to explore the feared terrain of my wounded heart. I began to grieve past losses and attachments.” When a man’s emotional capacity to mourn is arrested, he is likely to be frozen in time and unable to complete the process of growing up. Men need to mourn the old self and create the space for a new self to be born if they are to change and be wholly transformed.
If a man is not willing to break patriarchal rules that say that he should never change—especially to satisfy someone else, particularly a female—then he will choose being right over being loved. He will turn away from loved ones and choose his manhood over his personhood, isolation over connectedness. Therapist George Edmond Smith remembers learning early that men will respond with rage and rejection if they are perceived to be out of control or making a mistake:
I also recall early in life that when I asked my father a question to which he did not know the answer, he became angry, as if to say, “Look, I don’t know the answer to your question and because of that I should kick your ass!” Of course, I realized this almost immediately and I stopped looking to my father for answers. Perhaps if he had taken the time to say to me, “Son, I don’t know the answer to that, let’s look it up together and find out.”
Only a father capable of being whole can have the integrity to acknowledge ignorance to his son without feeling diminished.
Men who are whole can speak their fear without shame. They do not need to wear the false mask of fearlessness. Fathers have been unable to share with their sons that they are afraid. They fear not measuring up to the expectations of sons. They fear that the son will see their jealousy and envy of the boy who has not yet severed his relation to feeling, who is not emotionally closed off. Writing about his boyhood, Neale Lundgren recalls, “I was in awe of my father, and it seemed to me that I often sensed he was afraid of me. Perhaps he was intimidated by my heart that was as his used to be when he was a boy: big, full, open, strong, and tender.”
Unable to acknowledge feelings, fathers often cover them up with rage, cruelly severing their own attachment to the son and refusing his love and admiration. The competitive performance model of patriarchy teaches men who father that a son is or will be his adversary, that he has to fear the son’s stealing his glory. Our myths and religious stories are full of narratives in which the son is depicted as the father’s enemy, ever poised to steal his power. The dysfunctional model suggests to men that separation can only be forged through violence and death. Only the man who chooses a healthy model—wherein the father figure, the adult man of integrity, the guide who shelters, protects, and nurtures the son—can gracefully attend the assertion of his own son’s healthy autonomy.
When father figures are healthy, they know when to let go; they can affirm the boy every step of the way. As Thomas Moore declares in his essay about boyhood, “Little Boy Found,” “If the fathers speak to us, we can preserve our golden spirits…. Fathers and sons need each other, for they sustain each other. We need to let our fathers be slow to grow up…. They need to take our childlike foolishness seriously, giving their lives for it, so that we can be fathers ourselves from our place in the sun.” Caring fathers with bold strength and integrity shield the open, tender hearts of their sons, protecting them from patriarchy’s hardhearted assaults.
When men practice integrity, they accept that part of the work of wholeness is learning to be flexible, learning how to negotiate, how to embrace change in thought and action. The ability to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility.
To be able to respond to family and friends, men have to have practice assuming responsibility. This is another component of healthy self-esteem. Nathaniel Brandon equates our capacity to be responsible with our capacity to experience joy, to be personally empowered. This sense of personal agency lets us break with imposed sex roles. This is true freedom and independence:
I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live. If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved. If I am willing to recognize that choices and decisions are crucial when values are adopted, then I can take a fresh look at my values, question them, and if necessary revise them. Again, it is taking responsibility that sets me free.
The patriarchal model that tells men that they must be in control at all times is at odds with cultivating the capacity to be responsible, which requires knowing when to control and when to surrender and let go.
Responsible men are capable of self-criticism. If more men were doing the work of self-critique, then they would not be wounded, hurt, or chagrined when critiqued by others, especially women with whom they are intimate. Engaging in self-critique empowers responsible males to admit mistakes. When they have wronged others, they are willing to acknowledge wrongdoing and make amends. When others have wronged them, they are able to forgive. The ability to be forgiving is part of letting go of perfectionism and accepting vulnerability.
At the same time, constructive criticism works only when it is linked to a process of affirmation. Giving affirmation is an act of emotional care. Wounded men are not often able to say anything positive. They are the grump-and-groan guys; cloaked in cynicism, they stand at an emotional distance from themselves and others. Affirmation brings us closer together. It is the highest realization of compassion and empathy with others. One of the negative aspects of antimale feminist critiques of masculinity was the absence of any affirmation of that which is positive and potentially positive in male being. When individuals, including myself, wrote about the necessity of affirming men and identifying them as comrades in struggle, we were often labeled male-identified. The women who attacked us did not understand that it was possible to critique patriarchy without hating men. Indeed, recognizing all the ways that males have been victimized by patriarchy (even though they received rewards) was a way of including men in feminist movement, welcoming their presence and honoring their contribution.
Critical analysis is useful when it promotes growth, but it is never enough. The work of affirmation is what brings us together. When men learn to affirm themselves and others, giving this soul care, then they are on the path to wholeness. When men are able to do little acts of mercy, they can be in communion with others without the need to dominate. No longer separate, no longer apart, they bring a wholeness that can be joined with the wholeness of others. This is interbeing. As whole people they can experience joy. Unlike happiness, joy is a lasting state that can be sustained even when everything is not the way we want it to be. In the essay “Celebrating Life” Jesuit priest Henri Nouwen declares that “where there is joy there is life.” Nouwen left his prestigious professorships at Ivy League schools to work in a community for the mentally handicapped. As spiritual guide and hands-on caretaker, he found his integrity affirmed through the act of serving others. Therapist George Edmond Smith in
Walking Proud: Black Men Living beyond the Stereotypes
testifies that his psychological growth was enhanced when he began “doing very simple things that are unselfish.” He tells readers that if men “would commit to good and not evil during each waking moment, their lives would change dramatically.”
Men of integrity are not ashamed to serve. They are caretakers, guardians, keepers of the flame. They know joy. I have written in praise of my grandfather, the man who loved me in my childhood consistently and unconditionally, in the memoir of my growing up,
Bone Black:
“His smells fill my nostrils with the scent of happiness. With him all the broken bits and pieces of my heart come together again.” This is the true meaning of reunion, living the knowledge that the damage can be repaired, that we can be whole again. It is the ultimate fulfillment that comes when men dare to challenge and change patriarchy.
G
rowing up, I knew my father as the strong man who did not talk, who did not show feelings, who did not give time or attention. He was the provider, the protector, the warrior guarding the gate. He was the stranger in the house. We were not allowed to know him, to hear his boyhood stories, to revel in his memories. His life was shrouded in mystery. We searched for him. Standing in front of the photos of him as a young soldier, of him as a boxer, Dad at the pool hall in his glory, Dad on the basketball court. We stood in front of the photo of the all-black infantry unit he served in during World War II. A favorite game of our childhood was to find Dad in the photo, our father, the quintessential patriarch—a man of his times, raised for war.
To write about men and love, I must speak of war. Time and time again we have been told that civilization cannot survive men’s loving, for if men love, they will not be able to kill on command. However, if men were natural-born killers, hardwired by biology and destiny to take life, then there would be no need for patriarchal socialization to turn them into killers. The warrior’s way wounds boys and men; it has been the arrow shot through the heart of their humanity. The warrior’s way has led men in the direction of an impoverishment of spirit so profound that it threatens all life on planet Earth.
Writing about his boyhood and the warrior way, in the essay “My War Story” Shepherd Bliss openly confesses that he is “a child of trauma, a specific kind of trauma—military trauma, war trauma.” Having grown up in the military, become a soldier, then having grown into an advocate of peace, Bliss takes a stand against war and the warrior’s way:
The warrior ethic has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond war and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits—like courage, teamwork, loyalty—but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.
Even though war is failing as a strategy for sustaining life and creating safety, our nation’s leaders force us into battle, giving new life to the dying patriarchy.
War was in its earliest forms inclusive of women and men. Detailing its history in
Blood Rites,
Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us that “by assigning the triumphant predator status to males alone, humans have helped themselves to ‘forget’ that nightmarish prehistory in which they were, male and female, prey to larger, stronger animals…. Gender, in other words, is an idea that coincidentally obliterates our common past as prey, and states that the predator status is innate and ‘natural’—at least to men.” Calling attention to the fact that war has been not simply a male occupation but rather “an activity that has often served to define manhood itself,” Ehrenreich argues that “warfare and aggressive masculinity” are mutually reinforcing. The gendered nature of war makes men predators and women prey. We cannot speak of men and love, of love between women and men, without speaking of the need to bring an end to war and all thinking that makes war possible.
The slogan “Make love not war” was popular at that moment in our nation’s history when individual males were most conscious of their need to resist patriarchal masculinity. It is no accident that Daniel Berrigan, imprisoned for antiwar activities, would talk with Thich Nhat Hanh about the need for solidarity, for everyone to learn how to make community. These two men of integrity talk together in
The Raft Is Not the Shore
about the need for communities of resistance. Thich Nhat Hanh says:
And resistance, at root, I think must mean more than resistance against war. It is a resistance against all kinds of things that are like war. Because living in modern society, one feels that he cannot easily retain integrity, wholeness. One is robbed permanently of humanness, the capacity of being oneself…. So perhaps, first of all, resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly…. 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.
Berrigan asks that relationships, committed partnerships, be seen as vital communities of resistance.
In dominator cultures most families are not safe places. Dysfunction, intimate terrorism, and violence make them breeding grounds for war. Since we have yet to end patriarchal culture, our struggles to end domination must begin where we live, in the communities we call home. It is there that we experience our power to create revolutions, to make life-transforming change. We already know that men do not have to remain wedded to patriarchy. Individual men have again and again staked a different claim, claiming their rights to life and love. They are beacons of hope embodying the truth that men can love.
If we are to create a culture in which all males can learn to love, we must first reimagine family in all its diverse forms as a place of resistance. We must be willing to see boyhood differently, not as a time when boys are indoctrinated into a manhood that is about violence and death but rather as a time when boys learn to glory in the connection with others, in the revelry and joy of intimacy that is the essential human longing. We should follow the wisdom of Thomas Moore when he calls for nonpatriarchal adoration of the boy:
What a mystery it is to be a boy, so close to death and birth, so uneducated and therefore so fresh and uncynical. We should end our disparagement of the boy, of our own immaturities, of our tardiness in growing up, of our sheer delight in beauty, of our love of the sun, of our vertical inclinations, and of our wanderings and great falls…. We could speak words of encouragement to this boy where we find him—in our friends and students, in our institutions, and in our own hearts. If we do not speak to him in this way, he will be lost, and we will have lost with him, all tenderness and grace.
To create the culture that will enable boys to love, we must see the family as having as its primary function the giving of love (providing food and shelter are loving acts).
Learning how to love in family life, boys (and girls) learn the relational skills needed to build community at home and in the world. Poet Wendell Berry speaks of such a movement as a return to a respect for the innate holiness of all beings:
If we are lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who love us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live…we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.
When our families are functional and not shaped by a dominator model and the patriarchal thinking that comes in its wake, the model of health Berry describes can become the norm.
In such a world boys may think of games that do not center around the causing of pain, the creation of death, but will indeed be forms of play that celebrate life and wholeness. And the individual differences that arise between boys, and between boys and girls, will not need to be interpreted as a cause for domination, for one to rule over the other, but will become occasions for exploration, for the sharing of knowledge and the invention of new ways of being. Loving parents already see that if rigid gender roles are not imposed on boys, they will make their decisions about selfhood in relation to their passions, their longings, their gifts. We cannot honor boys rightly, protecting their emotional lives, without ending patriarchy. To pretend otherwise is to collude with the ongoing soul murder that is enacted in the name of turning boys into men.
Without a doubt there will always be boys who will choose activities that are rambunctious, that call for physical strength and require an element of risk, but there will also be boys who will seek quieter pleasures, who will turn away from risk. There will be boys whose personalities will be somewhere in between these two paradigms. If boys are raised to be empathic and strong; autonomous and connected; responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society; able to make community rooted in a recognition of interbeing, then the solid foundation is present and they will be able to love.
To make this solid foundation, men must set the example by daring to heal, by daring to do the work of relational recovery. Irrespective of their sexual preferences, men in the process of self-recovery usually begin by returning to boyhood and evaluating what they learned about masculinity and how they learned it. Many males find it useful to pinpoint the moments when they realized who they were, what they felt, then suppressed that knowledge because it was displeasing to others. Understanding the roots of male dis-ease helps many men begin the work of repairing the damage. Progressive individual gay men in our nation, particularly those who have resisted patriarchal thinking (who are often labeled “feminine” for being emotionally aware), have been at the forefront of relational recovery. Straight men and patriarchal gay men can learn from them.
Men are on the path to love when they choose to become emotionally aware. Zukav and Francis see this as a process: “Emotional awareness is more than applying techniques to this circumstance or that circumstance. It is a natural expression of an orientation that turns your attention toward the most noble, fulfilling, joyful, and empowering part of yourselves that you can reach for. That is your soul.” Women want men to be more emotionally aware. This is especially so for women who want to be in loving partnerships with men. Yet just as there is a crisis for men, women are experiencing a crisis of faith where men are concerned. The form that crisis takes is despair about the capacity of men to make constructive change, to achieve emotional maturity, to grow up.
The notion that lesbian women are antimale always proves false when groups of women gather and talk about men. The most vicious man-hating comments are always made by women who are with men and who plan to be with them for the rest of their lives. After forty-nine years of marriage, my mother is angry with our dad. The perfect subordinated wife, now when they are both over seventy years in age, is upset that he is not more emotionally giving. Since she is not a feminist, she does not see that it is a contradiction to expect this old-time patriarch to suddenly give her love. Her anger surprises and enrages him. Mama’s anger masks her fear that any day now she could die without ever feeling loved by the man she has devoted her entire life to pleasing. Like the men who feel that patriarchy’s promise has not been fulfilled, Mama feels that she is left with broken promises, without the reward for performing the subordinate role she was told a good woman should perform.
Women who are not feminist, women who support patriarchy, who do not have problems with sexism, share with their feminist, antisexist counterparts the wish that men would be more loving. Shere Hite documented this longing in her massive study
Women and Love: A Cultural Revolution In Progress.
Her chapter “Loving Men at This Time in History” begins with the observation that “strangely, hauntingly, most women in this study—whether married, single, or divorced, of all ages—say they have not yet found the love they are looking for.” The love women are looking for in relationships with men is one based on mutuality in partnership. Mutuality is different from equality.
Women once believed that men would give us more respect if we showed we were their equals. In a world where gender inequality is for most people an accepted norm, men withhold from women their respect. The root of the word “respect” means “to look at.” Women want to be recognized, seen, and cared about by the men in our lives. We desire respect whether gender equality exists in all areas or not. When a woman and man have promised to give each other love, to be mutually supportive, to bring together care, commitment, knowledge, respect, responsibility, and trust, even if there are circumstances of inequality, no one uses that difference to enforce domination. Love cannot coexist with domination. Love can exist in circumstances where equality is not the order of the day. Inequality, in and of itself, does not breed domination. It can heighten awareness of the need to be more loving.
Many women despair of men because they believe that ultimately men care more about being dominators than they do about being loving partners. They believe this because so many men refuse to make the changes that would make mutual love possible. Women have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men, about their emotional well-being, to challenge patriarchy on behalf of those men with whom they want to know love. We read self-help books that tell us all the time that we cannot change anyone, and this is a useful truism. It is however equally true that when we give love, real love—not the emotional exchange of I will give you what you want if you give me what I want, but genuine care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust—it can serve as the seductive catalyst for change. Any woman who supports patriarchy who then claims to either love the men in her life or be frustrated that they do not love her is in a state of denial.
Women who want men to love know that that cannot really happen without a revolution of consciousness where men stop patriarchal thinking and action. Because sexist roles have always given women support for emotional development, it has been easier for women to find our way to love. 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. Men will never receive support from patriarchal culture for their emotional development. But if as enlightened witnesses we offer the men we love (our fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, comrades) affirmation that they can change as well as assurance that we will accept them when they are changed, transformation will not seem as risky.