Hello comrades, it's time for our first discussion thread for The Will to Change! Please share your thoughts below on the first two sections of the book. There's quite a lot to talk about between hooks' discussion of masculinity discourse within feminist circles, the ways both men and women uphold patriarchy, and the near universal experience of men being forced to suppress their rich emotional worlds from a young age. I'll be posting my thoughts in a little bit after I'm done with work.

If you haven't read the book yet but would like to, its available free on the Internet Archive in text form, as well as an audiobook on Youtube with content warnings at the start of each chapter, courtesy of the Anarchist Audio Library, and as an audiobook on our very own TankieTube! (note: the YT version is missing the Preface but the Tankietube version has it) Let me know if you'd like to be added to the ping list!

Our next discussion will be on Chapters 2 (Understanding Patriarchy) and 3 (Being a Boy), beginning on 12/4.

Thanks to everyone who is or will be participating, I'm really looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts! feminism

  • frauddogg [they/them, null/void]
    ·
    17 hours ago

    The femmes in our lives who love and cherish us are a blessing and an essential piece of unlearning the toxic norms that’ve been imposed on us, but they can’t do the true work for us, we have to be willing to do the work to change for the better.

    This is the one. I'd be a fool if I expected any of my partners to be able to fix me for me, they don't have to live in the warzone that is my head. Arguably it was because I was with them that I first understood that I couldn't stay the way I was. Not without doing people I actually respected and wanted a future with a disservice. One of those places where all the love I had for literature growing up actually t-boned my lifestyle and distance from everything in a way that the cognitive dissonance couldn't be ignored any longer.