Read Online The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks - Free Book Online Page B

aimed at little boys. This book strives to honor the holistic well-being of boys and to express love of them whether they are laughing, acting out, or just sitting still. The books I have written are aimed at offering boys ways to cope with their emotional selves. The point is to stimulate in boys emotional awareness and to affirm that awareness.
    To truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions. To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.

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Stopping Male Violence
    E very day in America men are violent. Their violence is deemed “natural” by the psychology of patriarchy, which insists that there is a biological connection between having a penis and the will to do violence. This thinking continues to shape notions of manhood in our society despite the fact that it has been documented that cultures exist in the world where men are not violent in everyday life, where rape and murder are rare occurrences. Every day in our nation there are men who turn away from violence. These men do not write books about how they manage to navigate the terrain of patriarchal masculinity without succumbing to the lure of violence. As women have gained the right to be patriarchal men in drag, women are engaging in acts of violence similar to those of their male counterparts. This serves to remind us that the will to use violence is really not linked to biology but to a set of expectations about the nature of power in a dominator culture.
    Over the decades no matter how many television shows and movies we have watched in which the hero is the good man who uses violence to win the fight with bad men, many people have long felt that feminist thinkers exaggerate the degree to which men are violent in their daily lives. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has courageously and consistently dared to name the widespread scope of male violence against women. In Scapegoat she writes: “A recent United Nations report says that ‘violence against women is the world’s most pervasive form of human rights abuse.’ In the United States the Justice Department says that ‘one out of twelve women will be stalked at some point in her lifetime.’ The American Medical Association concluded that ‘sexual assault and family violence are devastating the United States physical and emotional well-being;’ in 1995 the AMA reported that ‘more than 700,000 women in the United States are sexually assaulted each year, or one every 45 seconds.’ ” These facts address actual physical assault and do not cover the widespread emotional abuse that has practically become an accepted norm in male-female relationships whether between husband and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister, or girlfriend and boyfriend.
    In How Can I Get Through to You? Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.” One of the truths that cannot be spoken is the daily violence enacted by