Thank you for hosting! I loved this book!

1. What was your biggest takeaway from reading The Will to Change?

Two main things: A lot of personal reflection about my own socialization, that can't quickly be put into words and a renewed resolve to strive for kindness and compassion towards others and myself, especially where it goes against patriarchal conditioning and expectations.

2. How has the book's material and hooks' insights affected your everyday life?

It gave me room to think about things and I recommended it to many friends. I'm more aware of patriarchal behavior.

3. How can we apply hooks' lessons on healthy, non-patriarchal masculinity to improve the site culture of Hexbear?

I don't know and I don't understand enough about hexbear to suggest anything. I hope, that it already helped a bit. In the last chapter, hooks says she used to wonder if there was a place, where patriarchal men, who did hurtful things and were accordingly excluded, could turn to. Where they could go to change and grow. I don't know, if a virtual thing like a website can ever be that place. I can't imagine us stopping to ban toxic people. Maybe the best we can hope for is to encourage people to try and find a place like that in their lives and maybe help those who have the will to change along the way. And like I said, this book club might already have done a lot for the people who participated.

For a practical takeaway, here are some ideas, that might have been tried before: Leftist spaces in real life should actively encourage masc-socialized people to engage in self reflection. Within any org or movement, there could be a feminist structure, where men do group meetings and learn and share. And they could also be tasked by the awareness team with staging interventions if a man in the group engaged in any form of patriarchal violence. They could then work directly with the preparator (given the consent of the affected) and do a large part of the often neglected long-term work of community accountability and restorative justice.

That way, men who hurt comrades, but want to change wouldn't be automatically excluded from the org or movement. And the burden to deal with more of their patriarchal bullshit, which will probably come up on the way towards healing, wouldn't fall on women and marginalized genders, but on people with male privilege.