The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is a book by bell hooks about men, patriarchy, the relationship between them, and most importantly love. There is no need to pick up a copy, comrade Sen has already uploaded the entire audiobook onto Youtube. Content warnings are generously provided by Sen at the start of each chapter. This time we are doing chapters 2 & 3. Each chapter is only about 30 minutes long, so it's not a long commitment. Let me know if two chapters a week is too much or if I should change the format.

Discuss-

-What stood out to you about this chapter?
-Are there any ideas that bell hooks introduces in this chapter that you've never heard of or wish you had heard earlier in your life?
-Are there any stories in this chapter that resonate with you on a personal level?

Previous Chapter 1 discussion

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
    ·
    7 months ago

    Hey, remember this reading group?

    I got a little caught up with other stuff and am finally coming back to finish it.

    Interesting stuff from Chapter 2:

    -Both men and women uphold patriarchy, and men oppress women. The idea that women could also uphold patriarchy was so shocking to me when I first read this chapter that I was too scared to say it out of fear of being considered a reactionary, even though the evidence is all around us.

    -bell, naming the system is important but the phrase "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" does not exactly roll off the tongue. People are probably laughing at the clunkiness of the phrase.

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
      ·
      7 months ago

      Interesting stuff from Chapter 3:

      -Boys often learn patriarchy from each other, and are forced into it by their peers. They also learn it through the Internet and media now. The word "Andrew Tate" passes through my head often during this chapter.

      -"Boys either act out or implode." I feel this on a primal level. Earlier in my life my depression led me to either bring myself down or bring others down around me. It was either hate directed towards myself or towards others, and neither was good. Due to emotional maturity that comes with age, some therapy, a lot of thinking, medications, and a friend group here, that is much less the case now.

      -bell hooks accurately describes the school shooter phenomenon before it became as common as it is today: "It shouldn't surprise us that boys are violent, that they are willing to kill. It should surprise us that the killing is not yet widespread." Well, now it is.

      -anger hides fear and pain

      -The alienation of boys directly leads to violence

      -"There is no emotional outlet for the grief of the disappointed teenage boy." I remember hearing so clearly my first rejection from a girl in high school and just feeling the absolute worst. Being allowed to be sad about this, being allowed to not have to be the patriarchal figure I had heard so much about, would have helped so much. I was so upset not just with her reaction but with myself, for not fulfilling the patriarchal norm. I began to think that I was unworthy of love in general. I absorbed the worst of pop feminism of the 2010s and a bit of the pick-up artist crap of the era and determined that women felt uncomfortable around "beta" men like me and that I was a danger and thus shut myself off from dating for years.

      -Andrew Tate and people like him are the absolute scum of the earth that emerge to "help" the alienated young men. These men take advantage of other men and use their anger to grift, hurting more men and women in the process. Pick-up artists hate women, that is true, but they also hate men. They peddle bullshit about "alpha" and "beta" men to alienated teens. Those teens then go and commit patriarchal violence. Andrew Tate belongs in a gulag, or better yet, in a grave.

      -Now she's really pulling it together, showing how the alienation and brainwashing leads to men willing to die in war

    • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
      ·
      6 months ago

      "While feminism may ignore boys and young males, capitalist patriarchal men do not"

      This is the biggest lesson we should learn from the 2010s. If you want to know why GamerGate and the ensuing anti-feminist reaction got so big, look no further than here. When the only exposure to feminism most men get is an exposure to pop feminism, the "male tears" mugs and "girlboss" grindsets that put men down merely for expressing themselves, is it any wonder why the right got so big? Much has been gained by the strong trans activism in recent years and the ability to call these so-called "feminists" what they are, which is TERFs.

      Interestingly, right after I typed this comment, bell hooks immediately started shitting on the works of the infamous TERF author J. K. Rowling.