The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (13 page)

Contemporary books and movies offer clear portraits of the evils of patriarchy without offering any direction for change. Ultimately they send the message that male survival demands holding on to some vestige of patriarchy. In
Monster’s Ball
the male who is really different, who is humantistic, feeling, antiracist, and longing to move past patriarchal pornographic objectification to genuine intimacy is a victim. He kills himself. Watching this film, no male will be inspired to truly challenge the system. In another film,
Igby Goes Down,
the father, who is in touch with his feelings, is schizophrenic. When he shares feelings of being unable to bear the weight of patriarchal responsibility with his son, Igby cannot make an emotional connection. Driven by his hatred for his mother, Igby embraces the cruelty of the world around him and only escapes being violent by choosing to become a fugitive, a man on the run in search of a self he cannot find. The vast majority of contemporary films send the message that males cannot escape the beast within. They can pretend. They can dissimulate, but they can never break patriarchy’s hold on their consciousness.

Until we can create a popular culture that affirms and celebrates masculinity without upholding patriarchy, we will never see a change in the way that masses of males think about the nature of their identity. In
Good Will Hunting,
when faced with the possibility of knowing love, Will must make a choice. He must let go of his feelings of worthlessness and shame engendered by his traumatic past; he must choose life over death. His choice to love, to live, is the break with the patriarchal model that liberates his spirit. As viewers we celebrate his new awareness of his essential goodness, his redemption. His recovery gives us hope.

Mass media are a powerful vehicle for teaching the art of the possible. Enlightened men must claim it as the space of their public voice and create a progressive popular culture that will teach men how to connect with others, how to communicate, how to love.

M
en cannot speak their pain in patriarchal culture. Boys learn this in early childhood. As a girl, I was awed by a man in my church, a deacon, who would stand before the congregation and speak his love for the divine spirit. Often in the midst of his testimony he would begin to weep, sobbing tears into a big white handkerchief. The girls and boys who witnessed his tears were embarrassed for him, for in their eyes he was showing himself to be weak. When he wept, the men who stood beside him turned their eyes away. They were ashamed to see a man express intense feeling.

I remembered this beautiful man of feeling in the autobiography of my girlhood,
Bone Black:

To counter patriarchal representations of men as being without feeling, in both the books I write for adults and those I write for children, I have endeavored to create images of men that demonstrate their beauty and integrity of spirit.

Though we rarely use the word “patriarchy,” everyone knows how sexist masculinity has assaulted the spirits of men. Though wrong-minded in his implied blaming of women for the emotional deadness males feel, poet Robert Bly called on men to find the Wild Man within in hopes that they would in a safe space let their hearts speak, that they would howl, and cry, and dance, and play, and find again the spirit within. Of course men who participated in workshops such as those Bly conducted, let loose for a while and then journeyed back to their patriarchal world, leaving the wild spirit behind. Any reader of Robert Bly’s
Iron John
can hear the mother blame in his words. And Bly is right to demand that we all look at the role mothers play in deadening the spirits of boy children, but he fails to acknowledge that such mothers in their acts of maternal sadism are really doing the work of patriarchal caretaking, doing what they were taught a good mother should do.

It is highly ironic that we are now living in a time when we are told to question whether mothers can raise sons, when so many patriarchal men have been taught the beliefs and values of patriarchy by mothers, firsthand. Many mothers in patriarchal culture express their rage at adult men by directing anger at their sons. In
The Power of Partnership
Riane Eisler explains: “Some women direct their suppressed anger against men they feel are weak or vulnerable—their sons for example. The psychologist David Winter found that women living in countries or periods of extreme male dominance tend to be very controlling of their sons, who are the only males it is safe for them to vent against. Women in these circumstances are often subtly, or not so subtly, abusive of their sons.” Many mothers in patriarchal culture silence the wild spirit in their sons, the spirit of wonder and playful tenderness, for fear their sons will be weak, will not be prepared to be macho men, real men, men other men will envy and look up to.

Much of the anger men direct at mothers is a response to the maternal failure to protect the spirit of the boy from patriarchal harm. In one of the family therapy sessions Terrence Real writes about in
How Can I Get Through to You?
a son describes that moment when patriarchal culture intrudes on the emotional bond with his mother, and her acquiescence. The son recalls, “ ‘She was telling me. Let me go, darling. Just let me go. We know that your father’s a brute. We live together in a world of refined feeling he can never understand. But you see, darling, I am helpless, aren’t I? What am I to do?’ ” Every day mothers are ruthlessly and brutally terminating their emotional connection with male children in order to turn them over to patriarchy, whether to an actual unfeeling father or to a symbolic father. Boys feel the pain. And they have no place to lay it down; they carry it within. They take it to the place where it is converted into rage.

Learning to dissimulate, men learn to cover up their rage, their sense of powerlessness. Yet when men learn to create a false self as a way to maintain male domination, they have no sound basis on which to build healthy self-esteem. To always wear a mask as a way of asserting masculine presence is to always live the lie, to be perpetually deprived of an authentic sense of identity and well-being. This falseness causes males to experience intense emotional pain. Rituals of domination help mediate the pain. They provide an illusory sense of self, an identity. Poet and farmer Wendell Berry in
The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture
suggests that “if we removed the status and compensation from the destructive exploits we classify as ‘manly,’ men would be found to be suffering as much as women. They would be found to be suffering for the same reason: they are in exile from the communion of men and women, which is the deepest connection with the communion of all creatures.” Many men in our society have no status, no privilege; they receive no freely given compensation, no perks with capitalist patriarchy. For these men domination of women and children may be the only opportunity to assert a patriarchal presence. These men suffer. Their anguish and despair has no limits or boundaries. They suffer in a society that does not want men to change, that does not want men to reconstruct masculinity so that the basis for the social formation of male identity is not rooted in an ethic of domination. Rather than acknowledge the intensity of their suffering, they dissimulate. They pretend. They act as though they have power and privilege when they feel powerless. Inability to acknowledge the depths of male pain makes it difficult for males to challenge and change patriarchal masculinity.

Broken emotional bonds with mothers and fathers, the traumas of emotional neglect and abandonment that so many males have experienced and been unable to name, have damaged and wounded the spirits of men. Many men are unable to speak their suffering. Like women, those who suffer the most cling to the very agents of their suffering, refusing to resist sexism or sexist oppression. Their refusal is rooted in the fear that their weakness will be exposed. They fear acknowledging the depths of their pain. As their pain intensifies, so does their need to do violence, to coercively dominate and abuse others. Barbara Deming explains: “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious. You can’t be happy living a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught in the lie. But they don’t know how to break out of it, so they just go further into it.” For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released. When feminist women insist that all men are powerful oppressors who victimize from the location of power, they obscure the reality that many victimize from the location of victimization. The violence they do to others is usually a mirroring of the violence enacted upon and within the self. Many radical feminists have been so enraged by male domination that they cannot acknowledge the possibility of male suffering or forgive. Failure to examine the victimization of men keeps us from understanding maleness, from uncovering the space of connection that might lead more men to seek feminist transformation. Urging women to overcome their fear of male anger, Barbara Deming writes that men are “in a rage because they are acting out a lie—which means that in some deep part of themselves they want to be delivered from it, are homesick for the truth.” She explains that “their fury gives us reason to fear, but also gives us reason to hope.”

It has been terribly difficult for advocates of feminism to create new ways of thinking about maleness, feminist paradigms for the reconstruction of masculinity. Despite the successes of feminist movement, the socialization of boys—the making of patriarchal masculine identity—has not been radically altered. Feminist writing, whether fiction or theory, rarely focuses on male change. I am always disturbed when male students request references to literature that will serve as a guide as they struggle to interrogate patriarchy and create progressive identities, because there is so little literature to offer them. By contrast, I can offer countless references to any female student who tells me she is trying to critically understand and change sexist female roles. There needs to be more feminist work that specifically addresses males. They need feminist blueprints for change.

In a course on feminist theory I asked students to comment on a book, film, television show, or any personal experience that offers them examples of reconstructed, feminist masculinity. In a class of more than forty students there were few positive responses. Several students talked about the old John Sayles movie
The Brother from Another Planet
and his most recent film,
Sunshine State.
I called attention to Alice Walker’s novel
The Color Purple.
Often when this novel is discussed, Celie’s transformation from object to subject receives attention but no one talks about the fact that the novel also chronicles Mister’s transformation, his movement away from patriarchal masculinity toward a caring, nurturing self who is able to participate in community.

In feminist fiction radically new roles for men emerge. As a fantasy,
The Color Purple
provides a utopian vision of the process by which men who embody a destructive sexist masculinity change. In
The Color Purple
Walker portrays the techniques of patriarchal domination used by males to maintain power in the domestic household, writing graphic accounts of abuse and terrorism, yet she also portrays the process by which the dominating male acquires a new consciousness and new habits of being. Her utopian vision of male transformation does not place the sole burden of change on men.

Celie also must change her attitudes toward men. She must not only affirm Albert’s transformation, she must understand and forgive him. Her acceptance enables him to rejoin the community, to embrace a vision of mutual partnership. At the end of the novel Celie says of Albert:

To change, Albert must understand why he has abused women. He locates that will to abuse in the trauma of his upbringing when he is coerced to choose against his true self as part of being indoctrinated into patriarchy. Dehumanized himself, it is easy for him to feel justified in dehumanizing others. Near the end of the book, Albert becomes a contemplative thinker who seeks to understand the reason for human existence. He says, “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things, and asking about the big things you learn about the little ones, almost by acident. But you never know nothing more bout the big things that you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.” As a patriarch Albert was unable to love.

Unlike Walker’s fictional character Albert, most men are not compelled by circumstances beyond their control to change. Most men who are suffering a crisis of masculinity do not know where to turn to seek change. In the film
Antwone Fisher
(which is based on a true story), the troubled young black male expresses his crisis by saying, “I don’t know what to do.” A feminist future for men can enable transformation and healing. As advocates of feminism who seek to end sexism and sexist oppression, we must be willing to hear men speak their pain. Only when we courageously face male pain without turning away will we model for men the emotional awareness healing requires.

To heal, men must learn to feel again. They must learn to break the silence, to speak the pain. Often men, to speak the pain, first turn to the women in their lives and are refused a hearing. In many ways women have bought into the patriarchal masculine mystique. Asked to witness a male expressing feelings, to listen to those feelings and respond, they may simply turn away. There was a time when I would often ask the man in my life to tell me his feelings. And yet when he began to speak, I would either interrupt or silence him by crying, sending him the message that his feelings were too heavy for anyone to bear, so it was best if he kept them to himself. As the
Sylvia
cartoon I have previously mentioned reminds us, women are fearful of hearing men voice feelings. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?

As I matured, as my feminist consciousness developed to include the recognition of patriarchal abuse of men, I could hear male pain. I could see men as comrades and fellow travelers on the journey of life and not as existing merely to provide instrumental support. Since men have yet to organize a feminist men’s movement that would proclaim the rights of men to emotional awareness and expression, we will not know how many men have indeed tried to express feelings, only to have the women in their lives tune out or be turned off. Talking with men, I have been stunned when individual males would confess to sharing intense feelings with a male buddy, only to have that buddy either interrupt to silence the sharing, offer no response, or distance himself. Men of all ages who want to talk about feelings usually learn not to go to other men. And if they are heterosexual, they are far more likely to try sharing with women they have been sexually intimate with. Women talk about the fact that intimate conversation with males often takes place in the brief moments before and after sex. And of course our mass media provide the image again and again of the man who goes to a sex worker to share his feelings because there is no intimacy in that relationship and therefore no real emotional risk.