Hello comrades, it's time for our FINAL discussion thread for The Will to Change, covering Chapters 10 (Reclaiming Male Integrity), 11 (Loving Men) and the book as a whole. Thanks to everyone who's participated over the last couple months, I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts again. And if you haven't started the book yet but would like to, this thread will stay pinned for a while so you can share your thoughts as you read!
As we reflect on the book as a whole, there are a few questions I'm curious to hear everyone's answers for:
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What was your biggest takeaway from reading The Will to Change?
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How has the book's material and hooks' insights affected your everyday life?
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How can we apply hooks' lessons on healthy, non-patriarchal masculinity to improve the site culture of Hexbear?
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)
After this I would like to host another book club, probably here on /c/menby but it depends on what exactly we read. Please share any suggestions you have for books below!
As far as takeaways go, the biggest ones were the emotional suppression bits and how mothers reproduce patriarchy in their sons. They were most useful in understanding my own upbringing.
I havent really changed my day to day I dont think i can actually shut down the emotional suppression. I kind of need it to function. I don't really get to dominate often closest i can think of is competitive gaming, but thats kind of the point of competing.
It took me years of therapy, but looking back on it it feels like I just started a few months ago. The time flies and the hardest part was getting started and keeping to my schedule. The actual emotional work was hard, but my therapist was good about breaking everything up into easily digestible chunks so that no one week’s worth of work even felt consequential, let alone burdensome. But the sum of all that work is I’ve undone a LOT of repression (and came out as trans but ymmv)