Read The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love Online
Authors: Bell Hooks
Tags: #Politics & Social Sciences, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Politics & Government, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Sciences, #Gender Studies, #Men, #Women's Studies
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (16 page)
As individual men have become more aware of the lovelessness in their lives, they have also recognized their longing for love. This recognition does not mean that men know what to do. Importantly, when men love, it changes the nature of their sexuality, both how they think about sex and how they perform sexually. Many men fear learning to love because they cannot imagine a sexuality beyond the patriarchal model. In a world where men love, a focus on eros and eroticism will naturally replace male obsession with sex. All men could have the opportunity to enjoy sexual pleasure, and that includes sexual fantasy, for its own sake and not as a substitute for fantasies of domination or as a way to assert manhood in place of selfhood, were they taught a healthy eroticism.
Often men use perverse sexual fantasy (particularly the consumption of patriarchal pornography) as a hiding place for depression and grief. Patriarchal pornography is the place where men can pretend that the promise of patriarchal power can always be fulfilled. Michael Kimmel explores this aspect of male lust in his essay “Fuel for Fantasy”: “The pornographic utopia is a world of abundance, abandon, and autonomy—a world, in short, utterly unlike the one we inhabit…. Most men don’t feel especially good about themselves, living lives of ‘quiet desperation.’…Pornographic fantasy is a revenge against the real world of men’s lives. To transform those fantasies requires that we also transform that reality.” Transforming the real world men inhabit requires our collective will to dream anew the male body and being as a site of beauty, pleasure, desire, and human possibility. In
The Soul of Sex
James Hillman declares:
One of the first achievements to be made in the reconciliation of body and spirit, which is a prerequisite for a deepened, soul-filled sexuality, is a rediscovery of the virtue and value of the body’s eroticism…. To find the soul of sex we have to wrench it out of the materialistic and mechanistic body that we have created by means of our modern philosophies and reunite it with the subtle, fantasy-filled, mythologized body of the imagination.
Damaged in that openhearted place where they could imagine freely, men must undergo a healing restoration of the will to imagine before they can break with a model of sexuality that breeds addiction while denying them access to a sexuality that satisfies.
Steve Bearman explains male compulsion for sex as interrupted eros in his essay “Why Men Are So Obsessed with Sex”:
Directly and indirectly, we are handed sexuality as the one vehicle through which it might still be possible to express and experience essential aspects of our humanness that have been slowly and systematically conditioned out of us. Sex was, and is, presented as the road to real intimacy, complete closeness, as the arena in which it is okay to openly love, to be tender and vulnerable and yet remain safe, to not feel so deeply alone. Sex is the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves our overflowing passion. Pleasure and desire, vitality and excitement seemingly left behind somewhere we can’t even remember, again become imaginable.
Poignant and powerfully evocative, this is the promise of sexuality within patriarchy, but it is a promise that ultimately can never be fulfilled. Men and boys who embrace it are doomed to be forever yearning, forever in a state of lack.
Bearman makes the point that after being taught to be obsessed with sex via patriarchal conditioning, males are “then subjected to continuous conditioning to repress sensuality, numb feelings, ignore our bodies, and separate from our natural closeness with human beings.” He continues, “All of these human needs are then promised to us by way of sex and sexuality…. But in no way can sex completely fulfill these needs. Such needs can only be fulfilled by healing from the effects of male conditioning and suffusing every area of our lives with relatedness and aliveness.” Suggesting that men resist repression and choose passion as they reclaim their feeling lives, Bearman identifies passion as the “greatest ally” men can choose in their efforts to liberate their complete humanity. The root meaning of the Latin word
patior
is “to suffer.” To claim passion, men must embrace the pain, feel the suffering, moving through it to the world of pleasure that awaits. This is the heroic journey for men in our times. It is not a journey leading to conquest and domination, to disconnecting and cutting off life; it is a journey of reclamation where the bits and pieces of the self are found and put together again, made whole.
As men work to be whole, sex assumes its rightful place as one pleasure among many pleasures. Unlike addictive patriarchal sex, passion rooted in a life-affirming erotic ethos deepens emotional connection. According to Zukav and Francis:
Loving sexual intimacy…expresses care and appreciation. It is mutual giving, not mutual taking. It is an arena in which individuals nurture each other rather than exploit each other. In loving sexual intimacy, sexual partners are not interchangeable. They are unique in their histories, aptitudes, struggles, and joys. They know each other and care for each other. They empathize. They are interested in each other. They use physical intimacy to deepen their emotional intimacy…. They are committed to growing together.
Individual men who have found their way back to a restored sense of the erotic, to eros as a life force, need to share their bliss with men in general. Bearman tells us:
My vision for myself and for all men is that we reclaim every piece of our humanity that has been denied us by our conditioning. Obsession with sex can be healed when we reclaim all the essential aspects of the human experience that we have learned to manage without: our affinity for one another, caring connections with people of all ages and backgrounds and genders, sensual enjoyment of our bodies, passionate self-expression, exhilarating desire, tender love for ourselves and for another, vulnerability, help with our difficulties, gentle rest, getting and staying close with many people in many kinds of relationships.
Women who love men share this vision.
We yearn for boys and men to find their way to self-love. We yearn for boys and men to move from self-love to healing fellowship with one another. No man who reclaims passion for his life fears the passion in another man. He is not homophobic, for to be so would be a rejection of the self-acceptance and acceptance of others that is essential to the formation and maintenance of self-esteem. If all men were in touch with primal positive passion, the categories of gay and straight would lose their charged significance.
In
A Queer Geography
Frank Browning makes the useful distinction between gay identity politics, which often closes down connection, and a commitment to eros and eroticism that widens connections:
By erotic, I mean all the powerful attractions we might have: for mentoring and being mentored, for unrealizable flirtation, for intellectual tripping, for sweaty mateship at play or at work, for spiritual ecstasy, for being held in silent grief, for explosive rage at a common enemy, for the sublime love of friendship. All or none of these ways of loving might be connected to the fact that I usually have sex with men because all of these loves can and do happen with both men and women in my life.
Patriarchy has sought to repress and tame erotic passion precisely because of its power to draw us into greater and greater communion with ourselves, with those we know most intimately, and with the stranger.
Feminism changed the intimate lives of women and men by offering to everyone a vision of relationships rooted in mutuality, a vision of partnerships without domination. This seductive promise can be fulfilled only as patriarchal thinking ceases to dominate the consciousness of women and men, girls and boys. Seeking to heal the wounds inflicted by patriarchy, we have to go to the source. We have to look at males directly, eye to eye, and speak the truth that the time has come for males to have a revolution of values. We cannot turn our hearts away from boys and men, then ponder why the politics of war continues to shape our national policy and our intimate romantic lives.
There is a war between the sexes in this nation, between those who believe they are destined to be predators and those they deem prey. Resistance to gender domination has intensified that war. As feminist thinking and practice loses visibility, many females look to patriarchy for their salvation. More than ever before in our nation’s history, females are encouraged to assume the patriarchal mask and bury their emotional selves as deeply as their male counterparts do. Females embrace this paradigm because they feel it is better to be a dominator than to be dominated. However, this is a perverse vision of gender equality that offers women equal access to the house of the dead. In that house there will be no love.
Most women have yet to collectively embrace the alternative theories and practices visionary thinkers—female and male but especially feminists—have offered to heal our wounded hearts and our suffering planet. Unlike most men, most women are taught relational skills. It is clear though that more often than not women have used those skills in the service of domination, of patriarchy, and not in the quest for freedom or love. Acknowledging this fact, we see that most women are not any more advanced than men as a group. In both groups individuals are seeking salvation, seeking wholeness, daring to be radical and revolutionary, but for the most part the great majority of folk are still uncertain about taking the path that will end gender warfare and make love possible. While it is evident that many men are not as willing to explore and follow the path that leads to self-recovery as are women, we cannot journey far if men are left behind. They wield too much power to be simply ignored or forgotten. Those of us who love men do not want to continue our journey without them. We need them beside us because we love them.
I share with Terrence Real the vision of relational recovery, which invites men who have been outside the circle of love to return. The male journey to love will never be easy or simple in patriarchal culture. Like women who have navigated difficult terrain to open our hearts, to find love, men need consciousness raising, support groups, therapy, education. Emotionally starved and shut down, males, sick with the pain of lovelessness, need loved ones to do positive interventions like those we are encouraged to make when addiction to substances is the issue. As Real states, “It is a tough antirelational world out there. The old terms have been with us for a very long time. We should expect to get caught up in them sometimes, losing our way. That’s when help from those who know and love us is essential.” Men seeking help often find it difficult to find support. We ask them to change without creating a culture of change to affirm and assist them.
Time and time again when I struggled to do the work of love with a male partner who was not changing, I was told to give up on him, to kick him to the curb. I was told I was wasting my time. All this negative feedback made me ponder whether healing places exist where wounded males can go where they will not be turned away, especially when positive change is not happening fast or fast enough. Women who have been victimized by men, women who have suffered ongoing hurt at the hands of men, naturally are wisely cautious about the energy that they can expend in the service of helping men heal. Yet there are many women who have been both helped and hurt by men. Kay Leigh Hagan testifies that the good men in her life have ruined her for man hating:
For both men and women, Good Men can be somewhat disturbing to be around because they usually do not act in ways associated with typical men; they listen more than they talk; they self-reflect on their behavior and motives, they actively educate themselves about women’s reality by seeking out women’s culture and listening to women…. They avoid using women for vicarious emotional expression…. When they err—and they do err—they look to women for guidance, and receive criticism with gratitude. They practice enduring uncertainty while waiting for a new way of being to reveal previously unconsidered alternatives to controlling and abusive behavior. They intervene in other men’s misogynist behavior, even when women are not present, and they work hard to recognize and challenge their own. Perhaps most amazingly, Good Men perceive the value of a feminist practice for themselves, and they advocate it not because it’s politically correct, or because they want women to like them, or even because they want women to have equality, but because they understand that male privilege prevents them not only from becoming whole, authentic human beings but also from knowing the truth about the world…. They offer proof that men can change.
Men like this are our true comrades in struggle. Their presence in my life sustains my hope.
Men in pain, in crisis, are calling out. If they were not calling out, we would not know that they were suffering. As we listen to their stories, we hear that they want to be well and that they do not know what to do. Based on a true story, the film
Antwone Fisher
chronicles one man’s search for a path to healing. Fisher’s poem “Who Will Cry for the Little Boy?” gives voice to the suffering that wounded man can no longer hide. We show our love for maleness, for men, by working to heal the wounds of men who suffer and those of us who bear witness with them. Many of us have lived the truth that recognizing the ways we are wounded is often a simpler process than finding and sustaining a practice of healing. We live in a culture where it has been accepted and even encouraged that women wholeheartedly stand by men when they are doing the work of destruction. Yet we have yet to create a world that asks us to stand by a man when he is seeking healing, when he is seeking recovery, when he is working to be a creator.
