The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Overview With the courage, honesty, and compassion that have made her one of America?s most provocative authorities on modern culture, bell hooks takes on the interior lives of men and answers their most intimate questions about love. Everyone needs to love and be loved ? even men. In this groundbreaking book, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are ? whatever their age, ethnicity, or cultural persuasion. Written in response to the author?s in-depth discussions with men who were inspired by her trilogy,? All About Love, Salvation, ?and? Communion, ?bell hooks?s? The Will to Change ?addresses maleness and masculinity in new and challenging ways. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks answers the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves. Only through this liberation will they lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. Men can access these feelings by giving themselves permission to be vulnerable. As they grow more comfortable and start believing that it?s okay to feel, to need, and to desire, they will thrive as equal partners in their intimate relationships. Whether they are straight or gay, black or white,? The Will to Change ?helps men to reclaim the best part of themselves. Book details ISBN-13: 9780743480338 Publisher: Atria Books Publication date: 01/06/2004 Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER NOOK Book Pages: 208 Sales rank: 180,079 About the Author bell hooks ?is a cultural critic, a feminist theorist, and the renowned author of more than twenty books. A charismatic speaker, she divides her time between teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. She lives in Kentucky and New York City Read an Excerpt Chapter One: Wanted: Men Who Love Every female wants to be loved by a male. Every woman wants to love and be loved by the males in her life. Whether gay or straight, bisexual or celibate, she wants to feel the love of father, grandfather, uncle, brother, or male friend. If she is heterosexual she wants the love of a male partner. We live in a culture where emotionally starved, deprived females are desperately seeking male love. Our collective hunger is so intense it rends us. And yet we dare not speak it for fear we will be mocked, pitied, shamed. To speak our hunger for male love would demand that we name the intensity of our lack and our loss. The male bashing that was so intense when contemporary feminism first surfaced more than thirty years ago was in part the rageful cover-up of the shame women felt not because men refused to share their power but because we could not seduce, cajole, or entice men to share their emotions ? to love us. By claiming that they wanted the power men had, man-hating feminists (who were by no means the majority) covertly proclaimed that they too wanted to be rewarded for being out of touch with their feelings, for being unable to love. Men in patriarchal culture responded to feminist demand for greater equity in the work world and in the sexual world by making room, by sharing the spheres of power. The place where most men refused to change ? believed themselves unable to change ? was in their emotional lives. Not even for the love and respect of liberated women were men willing to come to the table of love as equal partners ready to share the feast. No one hungers for male love more than the little girl or boy who rightfully needs and seeks love from Dad. He may be absent, dead, present in body yet emotionally not there, but the girl or boy hungers to be acknowledged, recognized, respected, cared for. All around our nation a billboard carries this message: ?Each night millions of kids go to sleep starving ? for attention from their dads.? Because patriarchal culture has already taught girls and boys that Dad?s love is more valuable than mother love, it is unlikely that maternal affection will heal the lack of fatherly love. No wonder then that these girls and boys grow up angry with men, angry that they have been denied the love they need to feel whole, worthy, accepted. Heterosexual girls and homosexual boys can and do become the women and men who make romantic bonds the place where they quest to find and know male love. But that quest is rarely satisfied. Usually rage, grief, and unrelenting disappointment lead women and men to close off the part of themselves that was hoping to be touched and healed by male love. They learn then to settle for whatever positive attention men are able to give. They learn to overvalue it. They learn to pretend that it is love. They learn how not to speak the truth about men and love. They learn to live the lie. As a child I hungered for the love of my dad. I wanted him to notice me, to give me his attention and his affections. When I could not get him to notice me by being good and dutiful, I was willing to risk punishment to be bad enough to catch his gaze, to hold it, and to bear the weight of his heavy hand. I longed for those hands to hold, shelter, and protect me, to touch me with tenderness and care, but I accepted that this would never be. I knew at age five that those hands would acknowledge me only when they were bringing me pain, that if I could accept that pain and hold it close, I could be Daddy?s girl. I could make him proud. I am not alone. So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire. We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real ?men.? In her moving memoir? In the Country of Men ?Jan Waldron describes a similar longing. She confesses that ?the kind of father I ached for I have never seen except in glimpses I have embellished with wishful imaginings.? Contrasting the loving fathers we long for with the fathers we have, she expresses the hunger: Table of Contents Contents Preface: About Men 1 Wanted: Men Who Love 2 Understanding Patriarchy 3 Being a Boy 4 Stopping Male Violence 5 Male Sexual Being 6 Work: What?s Love Got to Do with It? 7 Feminist Manhood 8 Popular Culture: Media Masculinity 9 Healing Male Spirit 10 Reclaiming Male Integrity 11 Loving Men