FINISHED READING - The Will To Change by Bell Hooks

"Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving. It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate, they must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change."

I picked up this copy of The Will To Change, as part of my continued reading on the 'masculinity crisis'. I've encountered books recently by Richard V Reeves and felt a feminist perspective, though acknowledged, was rarely fully applied.  Of Boys and Men, in my opinion got bogged down in it's allegiances to facts and figures, and as Reeves is a former political adviser, he treated the masculinity crisis as any 'policy wonk' would, with a practical legislative agenda. That is one of many, perfectly valid approaches.

"The grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal future really does not care if men are unhappy....... The masculine pretence is that real men feel no pain."

This book by Bell Hooks, looked like a different place from which to start exploring a more psychologically imaginative feeling based perspective. At its root is the question - why is it so difficult for men to change themselves? If feminism's success is not the imagined progenitor of the current masculinity crisis, then what is?

"Once upon a time I thought it was a female thing, this fear of men. Yet when I began to talk with men about love, time and time again I heard stories of male fear of other males. Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked or shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together - the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture."

From the start she lays out a clear message, that this isn't just about achieving gender equality, or pay parity,  but examining the persistent and pernicious effects of patriarchy upon our collective world view. We are not taking the pressures patriarchy applies in twisting our psyche's out of shape, and the effect this has upon the lives of both men and women. And whilst there are very good men and women out there doing sterling work to challenge these effects, only small changes in this underlying zeitgeist are being made. 

"No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal."

She repeatedly states, how she understands women's reluctance to get drawn into men liberating themselves from the shackles patriarchy puts upon them. But the tendency is to then diminish the problem, in order to return the focus to further advancing women's progress. Which means we are only really addressing one half of patriarchy's sphere of influence. And you could say, well that's for men to sort out for themselves. Which if all things were equal that would be the case, but they are not. Because the effect of patriarchy upon men is so tightly drawn, so narrow and limiting in it's perspective, that stepping outside of it without some sort of guide or external help, can almost be too impossible to imagine.  

" Despite the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not being male, most folks continue to see men as the problem of patriarchy. This simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men . "

Unless, of course, you feel you are placed outside of it by being gay for instance. This, in my experience, can force you to question the whole idea of masculinity you are being presented with. Though as Hooks points out, even in gay male culture strong patriarchal echoes of insensitive brutality and predatory none consensual sex can still be found within it.

If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men,  the violence and addiction in family life that is so all pervasive would not exist.. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction extensively documented ... would not exist."

She also asks women to examine their own role in the creation of male patriarchy. How in the difficult state of a mother raising a son and a daughter, they may still hold and perpetuate residual patriarchal instincts or expectations. The far right might like you to believe that patriarchy is biologically determined by God, and is hence a natural thing, not a culturally nurtured choice, but Hooks will have none of that. 

"We cannot turn our hearts away from boys and men, then ponder why the politics of war continues to shape our national policy and our intimate romantic lives."

I found The Will To Change presented a refreshingly open and broad perspective on how patriarchy reinforces itself, in both men and women. She gave me some new things to think about, as well as clarifying my own understanding of why men are currently stuck in a no mans land, unhappy and unloved within the confines of patriarchy, but unable to find an effective route towards a new way of inhabiting being masculine. This is one of he most helpful books I've read on this subject so far.

"We cannot honour boys rightly, protecting their emotional life, 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. "

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8