I finished reading The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks, and spent several days letting the book settle before writing anything about it. I did not want to summarize it, list its arguments, or simply say whether I liked it. Some books demand a different kind of time. They need to take root in us, meet our resistance, stir up memories, until we can begin to understand what to do with them. And here I am, once again, writing about masculinity.
I return to this subject because it refuses to go away. It is present in romantic relationships, in friendships between men, in the way boys are raised, and in how we deal with work, sex, frustration, and fear. It is also present in what we avoid saying. bell hooks moves toward that silence and asks a disquieting question: What happened to us that made loving so difficult?
It is hard to ignore the importance of this book at a time when courses are proliferating in which men teach other men how to “be men,” promising to turn them into “beacons and forges,” while masculinist rhetoric continues to deny the existence of misogyny and even dismisses femicide as a hoax. bell hooks enters this debate from a different direction. She does not offer men a restored masculinity, stronger or more virile, nor does she treat them as a lost cause. Without downplaying male violence or using suffering as an excuse, she tries to understand what lies beneath the hardness, indifference, and need for control. She knows that investigating is not the same as absolving. It means rejecting the convenient idea that men are simply this way by nature and that, therefore, nothing could ever be different.
Men want love. The statement sounds obvious, but it is not. We are raised to desire closeness while learning to distrust almost everything it requires: openness, care, dependence, listening, and an acknowledgment of our own vulnerability. We want to be loved, but we are afraid of being known. And so we spend much of our lives trying to receive love without having to reveal who we are.
This separation begins early. A boy quickly learns which emotions make the adults around him uncomfortable. He learns that he may express anger as long as he does not admit to the fear underneath it. He can slam a door, disappear, drink, work himself to exhaustion, or turn his pain into a joke. What he cannot do is appear vulnerable. He does not stop feeling; little by little, he simply loses touch with what he feels.
I thought about this a great deal while reading. About how many men can recount what happened, sometimes in remarkable detail, but cannot say what it did to them. They speak about a breakup, a death, or a betrayal as though they were describing someone else’s life. Perhaps sensitivity is not what they lack. What they lack are words and, above all, the inner permission to use them.
What cannot be put into words finds other ways to surface. Sadness may harden into cynicism, the pain of abandonment into indifference, and fear into a need for control. Anger becomes one of the few acceptable ways to express distress because it can still pass for strength. In some cases, pain that has never been named erupts as violence.
Understanding how this happens does not absolve anyone. A difficult childhood does not entitle a person to hurt someone else, and no emotional deprivation turns a woman into a dumping ground for male anguish. One of the risks of talking about men’s suffering is that we may give them a reassuring story in which they appear merely as victims of an upbringing that also granted them privilege. bell hooks offers no such comfort. Pain may explain something, but it also demands accountability for what each person chooses to do with it.
Patriarchy promises men power, although few will ever possess it in the way they imagined. Many will be humiliated at work, treated as disposable, and repeatedly reminded that they have failed to live up to the masculine ideal they were expected to embody. Even so, the expectation that they should hold some position of authority remains. For some men, the home becomes the last territory available to them. There, through fear, force, or control, they try to reclaim the authority they were unable to secure outside it.
This is why we cannot talk about male pain while ignoring the power men wield over women and children. Yet merely condemning that power without asking how it takes hold and why it continues to be passed down also seems insufficient. Even men who successfully conform to the patriarchal model do not emerge unscathed. They may be respected, successful, and feared while remaining estranged from their children, their friends, and their own emotional lives.
That may be one reason men should read this book. Not so they can feel understood by bell hooks, but so they can recognize the magnitude of the absence they have learned to call strength. The book confronts us with what we have done, what we continue to do, and all that we have forfeited to sustain an identity that depends on constantly policing ourselves.
One of the ideas that stayed with me most was the definition of love as an action. For bell hooks, love involves care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Measured against these standards, many declarations of love begin to lose their innocence. Someone may sincerely believe that he loves another person and still fail to know the person he lives with, respect her freedom, or take responsibility for the pain he causes. He may say “I love you” while monitoring, belittling, or controlling her.
When I say that this book may also be important reading for women, I do so with the caution my position as a man requires. It is not my place to tell women that they need to understand men better, make room for their vulnerability, or take part in transforming them. For far too long, women have been made responsible for men’s emotional care, as though it were their job to teach men how to recognize their feelings and repair the wounds patriarchy has left in them. The book seems relevant to women for a different reason: bell hooks helps us understand how this structure reaches into our relationships, shapes expectations of masculinity, and ultimately implicates everyone, even as it distributes power, suffering, and responsibility in profoundly unequal ways.
The book also shows that patriarchy is not passed down by men alone. Women may, often without realizing it, teach boys to hide their tears, prize toughness, and distrust male vulnerability. Recognizing their participation does not mean treating everyone’s responsibility as equal or ignoring the disproportionate violence patriarchy inflicts on women. It means understanding that this system endures because it also shapes how children are raised, how intimate relationships are formed, and what we learn to expect from a man.
None of this relieves men of the work that belongs to us. We need to learn how to talk to one another as well. There is still something strange about the way men spend time together: we can share years of friendship, travel, parties, and work and still know very little about one another’s emotional lives. When we finally want to talk, we turn to a woman. We preserve the silence between men while burdening our romantic relationships with everything we have been unable to experience elsewhere.
As I read bell hooks, I found myself remembering some very ordinary scenes between men. A friend risks saying something intimate, and someone immediately makes a joke to ease the discomfort. Another says that he was hurt, then rushes to assure everyone that he no longer cares. Sometimes I am the one who hides behind irony so I do not have to remain too long with what I have heard or felt. These are subtle ways of policing one another and signaling how far we are allowed to go. Whenever tenderness manages to surface, someone is almost always ready to change the subject.
The book did not leave me with a ready-made answer. It left me with a suspicion. Perhaps men do not lack feelings, a desire for closeness, or the capacity to love. Perhaps we spend too much of our lives protecting a persona built to survive among other men. And I still do not know which is more frightening: discovering who we might be without it, or realizing too late everything it never allowed us to live.
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