In The Will To Change, by feminist writer and activist bell hooks, hooks claims patriarchy harms both men and women -- producing damaged men, women, and relationships. She dismantles the old idea that patriarchal power dynamics are purely beneficial to men:
“I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it. Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death.
“If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.” hooks asserts that indoctrinating males into a patriarchal role requires abuse and produces ‘emotionally crippled’ men: angry, confused, full of shame.
She provides hope in her belief that every person possesses ‘the will to change,’ and quotes fellow writer Harriet Lerner in the beginning of the book: “the two things that will never change in our rapidly changing society are the will to change and the fear of change.” Our fear of discomfort often holds us back from realizing the changes necessary for growth. hooks defines patriarchy as “a social-political system that insists males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”
Throughout the book, hooks illustrates the ways in which patriarchy creates cycles of abuse, and reflects on her own role in upholding patriarchal ideals.
By inflicting what she calls “the normal traumatization of boys,” patriarchal thinking shapes men’s lives from childhood:
“Boys are traumatized by [forcing them] to feel pain and to deny their emotions. [...] ”Much of the anger boys express is itself a response to the demand that they not show any other emotions. Anger feels better than numbness because it often leads to instrumental action. Anger can be, and often is, the hiding place for fear and pain.”
After being taught to perform as a version of themselves or face humiliation, adult men are expected to express emotions in careful, limited ways that reinforce patriarchal ideals about what a man ”should” be: hardened, resolute, stoic. Relationships under patriarchy are often set up to fail:
“When males are required to wear the mask of a false self, their capacity to live fully and freely is severely diminished. [...] People who learn to lie to themselves and others cannot love because they are crippled in their capacity to tell the truth and therefore unable to trust.”
hooks reflects on a time she herself was responsible for rejecting her ex-boyfriend’s vulnerable display of emotion, “freaking out” to shut him down when he attempted to share his feelings with her:
“It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.”
She realized her dismissal reinforced the patriarchal notion that expressions of pain or sadness were undesirable in a man, and would be punished instead of heard.
Six months after my ex moved from Ohio to live with me in Brooklyn, he expressed feelings of loneliness and isolation adjusting to a large city where he knew no one, far from his small town where his family and friends lived. I offended when he said, I only have you here; I twisted his comment to mean I wasn’t “good enough” for him to be happy.
At the time, I did not see expressing my own emotions as an option -- vulnerability terrified me. Our relationship was built on mutual respect for the other person’s stoicism in the face of trauma. Because seeing him in a vulnerable state conflicted with my idealized version of him as a self possessed, unaffected man, I dismissed the conversation by making it about me instead of listening to him. He never brought it up again.
Looking back, it seems obvious that moving to a new location, leaving family and friends behind, would produce some amount of loneliness and longing. A single person, regardless of their role, cannot fulfill all companionship needs in another’s life. But because I couldn’t imagine changing our dynamic from one of mutual silence to mutual openness, I drove the conversation into the ground.
Though I am a woman, I endured similar rites of passage to be accepted in a patriarchal system. “Most of us,” hooks writes, “learned patriarchal attitudes in our family of origin, and they were usually taught to us by our mothers.”
If I wanted to thrive in a world dominated by unfeeling men, my mother taught me not to “whine,” or express pain -- I had to be tough. Afraid of the humiliation I’d face if I cried, I became proficient at hiding my pain -- be it from a breakup, the death of my father, or physical wounds. I joked about being sexually assaulted on the subway, calling it ‘part of being a girl in NYC.’ I repeated a stunted mantra about my father’s early death: it is what it is.
hooks goes on to discuss the role mothers have in perpetuating patriarchy, reinforcing gender roles and accepting abuse as natural male behavior:
“In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men towards the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females. Like its male counterpart, much female violence towards children takes the form of emotional abuse, especially verbal abuse and shaming.”
I remember my mother’s friend, Anna, and her son, Al, who my mother and I frequently spent time with. I despised them both -- Al because he bullied me, and Anna because she failed to intervene. He pushed me into a cactus, he held my head underwater in the pool. When I complained or cried, his mother shrugged Al’s behavior off: that’s just how he is.
One afternoon, when we were around ten years old, I retaliated by hitting Al in the face as hard as I could. I remember feeling surprised when he burst out crying and ran to his mother for consolation. She laughed at him.
You deserved it, Anna said.
I was confused; I was being praised for something I was explicitly taught was wrong. Even as a child, I remember knowing it must have hurt Al to run to his mother for help only to face her humiliating laughter. I wondered why Anna didn’t intervene before that moment, stopping his cruelty before it escalated.
Instead, Anna’s behavior communicated a patriarchal ideal that, as a male, he was naturally violent and therefore deserving of further violence to deter or control him. After that, Al seemed to realize I was capable of defending myself and turned his meanness on smaller kids, sometimes animals.
I learned a lesson then: I was responsible for protecting myself, and inflicting pain on others to prevent them from inflicting pain on me was acceptable and expected. It wasn’t the outcome I wanted -- I hoped someone would stop him or allow me to stop hanging out with him. Instead I accepted that my own anger was a weapon I could wield to protect me.
hooks says: “most young women fear that if they call themselves feminist, they will lose male favor, they will not be loved by men.”
By high school, the tenderness I saw in female friendships frightened me. If a friend hugged or complimented me, I froze like an animal suddenly under spotlight. I gendered ‘loving’ qualities: sensitivity and compassion were female, resilience and stoicism were male. These ideas led me to consider myself “like a boy” when really I was just a person, like myself. I struggled to connect with other girls. Though I had female friends, I mostly hung out with boys and told myself I simply “didn’t relate” to girls as much.
Due to my stoicism in the face of abuse, my high pain tolerance, and my independence, men labeled me as ‘bad ass.’ I rejected feminism as one long complaint about inequalities of yesteryear -- women could vote, own property, work, join a band, travel the world alone if they pleased. Because I harbored a subconscious fear that claiming to be a feminist would alienate men, leaving me unloved, I refused to examine feminism beyond reductive patriarchal dismissals by men that it was obsolete.
In early July, I invited my friend, Emma, and her new boyfriend, George, to spend a weekend at my house upstate, along with myself, my boyfriend, Sean, and my friend, Jim. She’s bubbly, sardonic, witty, charming -- when we met, I was impressed with how easily she held a conversation with anyone, almost always making other people laugh.
Emma could make a dress from Target look like Gucci. She inspired me to dress with care and intention, even if I were just mailing a package or walking my dog. Highly esteemed at her demanding, specialized job, she somehow still made time to be a sensitive and compassionate friend. At the same time, I noticed how Emma struggled to stand up for herself. She often erased herself in friendships and intimate relationships: venting about times she felt dismissed or undervalued, she resisted communicating her concerns or setting boundaries.
When we first met seven years ago, I related to this struggle. Though I was angry reflecting on previous abusive relationships I’d been in -- at myself for tolerating the abuse and at the other person for inflicting it -- I didn’t know how to be honest with other people without lashing out. If a man condescended to me, I typically took this interaction as proof he identified some inherent flaw in my personality which separated me, forever, from truly valuable people. After years of suppressing my emotions, anger was the easiest way to respond to my feelings of insecurity.
When George and Emma arrived, we sat by the lake together, making small talk. After a few minutes, George turned the conversation towards his friend’s girlfriend: she was annoying, he said, and he couldn’t stand her. George is white and in his early 50s. He’s a high ranking professional at a prestigious institution, and on his off time, jet sets between his houses scattered across the globe. His deep, resonating voice carries across any room. I’m providing these details because I believe they help illustrate the dynamic between us during the following conversation. As my friend’s chosen partner, I wanted to give George a chance. He turned to me.
You’re a wordsmith, aren’t you? Give me a word for a type of woman who thinks she deserves everything. Who thinks life should be like a Disney movie.
I’m not sure what you mean.
You know, an annoying woman who thinks she can have what she wants in life. Like a Jane Austen character — Pride and Prejudice?
I’ve never read Jane Austen.
I’m surprised you haven’t.
Why are you surprised by that?
Because she’s a woman, and she’s a writer. She was progressive for her time, you know.
Because I found his response condescending and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of defending myself, I let his comment hang in the air. In the silence that followed, his face tensed and darkened.
I’m allowed to say I’m surprised you haven’t read Jane Austen, he snapped. What about Russian literature?
Yes, I love Dostoevsky. I mentioned Humiliated and Insulted. One of multiple narratives in the novel follows Natasha, a poor girl with two suitors: Vanya, quiet, reliable, and gentle, and Alyosha, a hot fuckboy from a rich family. Alyosha ghosts Natasha for several days on end, only to reappear shrugging, his attitude like the quintessential fuckboy text: hey, are you up? Natasha’s infatuation with Alyosha exhausts both herself and Vanya, always waiting to pick her broken ass up once the cycle restarts. When Natasha and Vanya finally marry, their love is threadbare, damaged by all the shenanigans. It’s like a Dostoevsky soap opera -- the drama sucks the reader in.
I thought the story might relate to this woman’s situation, at least the skeleton of it -- someone throwing reliable, boring love aside for the self destructive, thrilling drama of impossible fantasy.
You mean The Idiot.
No, I mean Humiliated and Insulted.
I’ve never heard of it, and I’ve read all of Dostoevsky. I’m pretty sure you’re talking about The Idiot.
Googling the book, he frowned when he discovered he was wrong.
I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this before. It’s not even listed as one of his most prominent works on Wikipedia.
Who’s surprised now?
He didn’t laugh.
Over the next two days, our conversations revolved around George’s whims. He steamrolled over whoever else was speaking — including Emma — by increasing his volume to comment or change the subject when the topic bored him. If George disagreed, he loudly reasserted his opinion and became visibly agitated if the topic of conversation did not pivot to something else.
George fielded questions about himself with curt answers and didn’t engage or reciprocate. He mostly wanted to talk about trivia, television shows from the 80s, and things or people he disliked. In private, he asked Emma if Jim, Sean and I were “a weird throuple.”
Sean and Jim entertained George, taking the burden of responsibility off me in moments they noticed I was struggling to maintain my composure. When the weekend was over, I asked Sean for his perspective on the experience. He told me his former career as an artist was rife with similar interactions.
“The best part about people like him is that they don't realize you’re treating them like they’re a child and will eventually get tired of listening to themselves speak and leave you alone for a few minutes." This was one of many moments in my relationship with Sean where I appreciate him as a person who is more secure in his identity than I am in mine. While I was basically foaming at the mouth, resisting the urge to blurt out a rude remark, Sean was shrugging the whole thing off.
When Emma and George left, Sean and Jim told me they were proud of me for “showing restraint.” My initial reaction was annoyance. Did they think of me as an unruly asshole? But when I paused to think about it, I realized they appreciated progress in my behavior that I hadn’t recognized.
In my 20s, I would have taken George’s behavior personally, allowing his condescending attitude to trigger my old insecurity that maybe I really was disagreeable for refusing to bash this other woman, or stupid for not caring about the books he mentioned. I would have wanted to convince him to treat me like a person so I could see myself as one.
Freeing myself from the burden of convincing George to treat me with respect, or see things ‘my way,’ I showed up as myself and made room for his reactions. I didn’t try to control or manipulate his responses through anger or by performing a version of myself I thought would be more acceptable to him. Because I wanted to make the weekend as enjoyable as possible -- for everyone, including myself -- I at least tried to enter every new interaction with him in line with a section I read from hooks that I’ll end this essay with:
“I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live. If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved. If I am willing to recognize that choices and decisions are crucial when values are adopted, then I can take a fresh look at my values, question them, and if necessary revise them. Again, it is taking responsibility that sets me free.”
stuck in a hotel with my beyond religious family and wishing i was anywhere else, reading this helped me melt into the lobby couch a little better and be grateful i could find a moment or two for my own solitude. thank u!
Really appreciate all the perspectives in this essay. I had a typical Gen X patriarchal childhood—abusive dad, passive mom, numerous bullies targeting my natural femininity. So glad I discovered David Bowie, who embraced himself and didn’t waver. Real emotional nuance didn’t come until my thirties, and my relationships strengthened, thanks to kind, patient women who helped me unpack. As a restaurant server, I listen to men dominate discussions and jokingly belittle their wives. For the sake of diplomacy, I can only ignore them, and lend all credence to the women at the table. I feel (I hope) we’re watching that boorish world pass away.