The Will to Change — men, masculinity, and love

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The Will to Change

bell hooks, 2004. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is a book about men written by a feminist not as an indictment but as an attempt to answer a different question: why do men who want love and intimacy so often become cut off from their own emotional lives?

hooks begins with a personal contradiction. She grew up with a harsh, explosive father, later loved men who had difficulty talking about feelings, and at the same time saw that much feminist culture had developed a language for describing men as oppressors without developing an equally rich language for male pain, the need to be loved, or the possibility of male change.

Her central argument runs through the whole book: boys are not born emotionally shut down. They are taught to sever themselves from dependence, fear, tenderness, the need for support, and much of their vulnerability. They gain recognition as “real men” for doing so, but the price is reduced access to self-knowledge, trust, and love that does not depend on control or domination.

For hooks, patriarchy specifically means a system of domination: males are expected to be strong, controlling, and above whoever is defined as weak; women and men can both reproduce that system through family, child-rearing, relationships, institutions, and culture. The rest of the book follows what that system does to the boy, the adult man, and the people around him.

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Preface. Why feminism has to talk about men

hooks recalls looking in feminist writing for a book that would help her understand men as people rather than only through violence and power. What she found instead was that radical critique had given women a language for anger at men but much less language for talking about love for fathers, brothers, sons, male friends, and partners.

In her account, part of the early movement effectively gave women permission to turn away from male needs. Feminists who insisted that the fate of men also mattered could be dismissed as too male-identified. hooks considers this a dead end: if sexism and domination are to change, men have to be part of the transformation.

She introduces another line that becomes central later. The simple formula “all men are oppressors, all women are victims” hides actual relationships between the sexes. It leaves little room to examine how women may fear men, hate men, depend on male love, enforce conventional masculinity, and punish men who depart from it.

Her personal route into the subject is her father. As a child, his rage and violence made her fantasize about his disappearance. As an adult, she concluded that simply rejecting him did not resolve the wound. She had to acknowledge her need for his love and, where possible, rebuild a relationship with the person behind the patriarchal role.

The book therefore presents itself as a search for a world in which women and men can belong together. Men, hooks argues, are neither hopeless nor simply unwilling to change. Many are afraid of change and lack a recognizable picture of who they can become after rejecting domination-based masculinity.

1. Wanted: Men Who Love — men who can love and be loved

The first chapter begins with the hunger for male love, especially father love. Physical presence or breadwinning is not enough. Children want to be seen, recognized, respected, protected, and emotionally loved by fathers.

In hooks’s account, the absence of that love does not disappear on its own. Girls and boys grow up still seeking male confirmation. Romantic relationships can become attempts to receive from a partner what an emotionally absent father never gave.

hooks describes her own childhood, where paternal attention was closely connected to punishment and fear. A child may accept even pain as a form of contact when another form of contact is unavailable. From this she develops one of the book’s recurring problems: emotional withholding can itself be coded as masculine, making the man who gives less tenderness appear more “manly.”

She does not place all responsibility on men. hooks admits that in her own relationships she asked male partners to speak about feelings and then struggled when they actually expressed fear, weakness, grief, or emotional need. She sees the same contradiction in other women: publicly asking for emotionally open men while privately reacting with contempt, discomfort, or fear when a man stops performing invulnerability.

This leads to the question of permitted male emotion. In hooks’s model, anger is one of the few intense feelings fully authorized as masculine. Pain, fear, sadness, dependency, and shame can be hidden behind irritation and aggression.

The chapter ends with a distinction that shapes the whole book. Men want to love and be loved, but women cannot save them by loving them harder. Women can support, teach, share relational skills, and affirm change. The man still has to reclaim his own ability to feel and practice love.

2. Understanding Patriarchy — what hooks means by patriarchy

The second chapter gives hooks’s working definition of patriarchy. It is a political and social system that treats male domination over the weak, especially women, as natural or legitimate and supports that domination through control, coercion, and violence.

A patriarchal person does not have to be male. Women can absorb and enforce the same rules. A household without a resident man is therefore not automatically non-patriarchal, and a mother may teach a son harsher rules of “real manhood” than a father would.

hooks develops the point through her own family. She was taught to serve, nurture, and accept a subordinate position. Her brother was taught to be served, provide, plan, be strong, avoid care-taking, and treat aggression as an acceptable part of male identity. Their actual temperaments did not fit the script well: she was more aggressive and competitive; he was gentler.

The chapter’s central family episode is a beating hooks received as a small girl for insisting on playing marbles, an activity her father defined as male. Her mother later explained that a girl had to accept her place. For hooks, the episode demonstrates a system maintained by both the man who enforces the rule violently and the woman who confirms the rule afterward.

She connects this to Terrence Real’s idea of psychological patriarchy: human qualities are split into masculine and feminine categories, the masculine half is valued above the feminine half, and relationships become organized around dominance and submission rather than mutuality.

hooks argues against two different simplifications. The antifeminist version says male crisis was created by women’s liberation and loss of male control. A crude feminist version treats patriarchy as a package of benefits for men. hooks insists that social power and psychological well-being are not the same thing: men may receive status while being emotionally damaged by the conditions attached to it.

Her conclusion is explicit. The crisis is not masculinity itself but patriarchal masculinity. Protecting boys from a few harsh rules is not enough; there has to be another model of male identity.

3. Being a Boy — how boys learn to cut themselves off from feeling

The third chapter moves the argument into childhood. hooks begins by separating status from love. A culture can value sons more highly in inheritance or status while responding less fully to their emotional needs.

She draws on writing about attachment and boys’ emotional development to argue that male infants need comfort, touch, and connection like other children, yet adults may fear that too much soothing or tenderness will make boys weak.

The pressure increases with age. Boys learn that dependency, crying, fear, and certain forms of tenderness can put their membership in the male group in doubt. Shame is especially important in hooks’s account. A child does not have to be beaten every time. A stare, a joke, silence, exclusion, or the threat of being called feminine can be enough.

She uses a story from Terrence Real about a little boy who enjoyed dressing as Barbie until other boys saw him. Their shocked disapproval communicated the rule without a speech. For hooks, these small moments are ordinary machinery of gender socialization.

She criticizes popular books on boys for trying to protect boys’ emotional lives while leaving the underlying hierarchy of masculine traits intact. Her argument is that one cannot preserve the ideal of a man who stands above vulnerability and then expect boys to remain comfortable with vulnerability.

Mothers and women are again treated as active participants in the process. A woman may protect a son from a brutal father, or she may tell him not to cry, to hit back, to be tougher than his sister, and not to become a “mama’s boy.” Male liberation therefore cannot be reduced to resistance against men as a group.

hooks’s alternative is a boyhood where strength and empathy, autonomy and connection, responsibility and emotional awareness can coexist. Temperamental differences do not have to become ranks. Some boys will prefer risk and physical challenge, others quieter pursuits, and neither preference alone determines masculine worth.

4. Stopping Male Violence — violence as power and disguised pain

The fourth chapter rejects the idea that male violence is an inevitable expression of male biology. hooks connects it instead to a dominator culture in which the capacity to inflict pain becomes evidence of power.

Physical violence is only the visible layer. She spends substantial attention on emotional abuse: sustained humiliation, intimidation, destruction of self-worth, and relationships organized so one person must continually submit to another.

hooks returns to the family secret. Children and women may know what happens at home but learn not to say it publicly. Silence protects not merely an individual man but the legitimacy of the household power structure.

At the same time, hooks refuses to explain violence only through privilege. Many men, she argues, harm others from a position of prior victimization. This does not remove responsibility. Her point is that focusing only on the external power of the perpetrator can obscure how violence reproduces itself through boys who were themselves shamed, beaten, neglected, or taught to deny pain.

The cycle she describes is consistent across the chapter: a boy is hurt and forbidden to experience himself as hurt; he learns to act as if the pain is absent; anger becomes an authorized channel; domination provides a brief sense of control and emotional release; the same relationship pattern is then passed on.

hooks also criticizes feminist culture for talking extensively about stopping male violence while offering few public images of men who have already rejected it. A prohibition is not a blueprint. Men need recognizable examples of how a man lives after refusing violence and domination.

For hooks, men who consciously choose against violence are already choosing against patriarchy whether or not they use that political language. These are the men she wants the culture to identify as heroes.

5. Male Sexual Being — when sex is expected to replace everything else

The fifth chapter reverses a familiar stereotype. hooks argues that men often pursue sex not because they have no need for love but because they have been taught to expect sex to provide the full range of states that love should provide: aliveness, closeness, touch, acceptance, relief from isolation, and confirmation of worth.

That makes sexual desire structurally unsatisfiable. If an encounter is supposed to meet needs for attachment, recognition, rest from self-control, and emotional contact, it will often fail. The failure does not necessarily reduce sexual fixation; it can intensify it.

hooks connects this to the promise of intimacy without commitment in post-sexual-liberation culture. Men could imagine gaining access to bodies and pleasure without having to develop relational competence. At the same time, public conversation about sex became easy while serious conversation about love remained embarrassing.

Pornography receives particular attention. hooks treats it as a fantasy space in which the promise of male sexual control can always be fulfilled. A man who experiences powerlessness at work, in relationships, or within himself can enter an imagined world where desire never makes him dependent on another real person’s response.

She also writes about the male body. Patriarchal sexuality, in her account, narrows male bodily experience to genitals and sexual performance. Touch, tenderness, sensuality, bodily beauty, nonsexual physical closeness, and affectionate contact between men become suspicious or irrelevant.

Sexual obsession is therefore described as interrupted eros: a broad hunger for vitality and connection forced through one socially authorized channel. hooks’s solution is not suppression of male sexuality but expansion of it. Men should reclaim the whole body, tenderness, friendship, imagination, intimacy, and pleasure that does not have to prove masculine status.

6. Work: What’s Love Got to Do with It? — work, money, and male worth

The sixth chapter examines the other major foundation of male self-worth: work. The older script promised boys meaning through labor and the provider role. The modern version increasingly promises money itself as the marker of success.

The problem, hooks argues, is that contemporary economic life guarantees neither stable employment, meaningful labor, nor lifelong status as sole breadwinner. A male identity built on that promise therefore becomes unstable.

She challenges the nostalgic claim that men were content to work hard for family until feminism disrupted the arrangement. Drawing on writing about men at work, hooks argues that dissatisfaction with monotonous, dangerous, humiliating, or meaningless jobs long predates women’s mass entry into paid employment.

She also separates the symbol of provider status from actual care. A man may define himself as head and provider while contributing only part of his resources to family life and spending the rest on himself. The title of provider does not by itself mean he is living as a caring adult responsible for others.

Even successful breadwinners pay in time. Long hours drain energy from children, partners, friendship, and inner life. hooks sees this conflict as culturally hidden: men are expected to sacrifice connection to get the job done and later criticized for emotional absence at home.

Unemployment has an additional psychological threat. For a man who uses work to escape emotional awareness, time without a job means time with himself. hooks imagines periods out of work not only as status collapse but as possible opportunities for education, healing, and self-development.

The chapter also reads cultural stories of men who question their work and emotional lives only after breakdown, loss, or approaching death. hooks argues that the culture offers very few ordinary scripts in which a man can choose emotional well-being over a paycheck without losing adult masculine legitimacy.

7. Feminist Manhood — the masculinity hooks proposes instead

After several chapters of critique, hooks states a positive alternative. She is not calling for the abolition of male identity. She proposes feminist manhood: masculinity not organized around a right to dominate.

The core principle is mutuality. A man in relationship is neither the ruler nor a passive person who exists to satisfy another person’s emotional requirements. Both partners develop, articulate needs, care for each other, and refuse to turn love into a reward-and-punishment system.

Fatherhood becomes a major site of change. A man engaged in daily parenting learns the relational skills culture often codes as naturally female: listening, noticing needs, soothing, tolerating dependence, and caring without treating every act of care as status achievement.

hooks describes men becoming more aware of sexism after raising daughters because an abstract political issue becomes a direct threat to a specific child they love.

Women again enter the argument as agents. A woman cannot coherently demand a “new man” while continuing to eroticize or reward control, status, emotional impermeability, and domination as the proof of desirable masculinity.

For hooks, domination and love cannot coexist. Feminist manhood therefore is not a softer technique for retaining male rule. It is a way of having a self, taking responsibility, participating in mutual partnership, and placing justice above the need to prove manhood.

8. Popular Culture: Media Masculinity — who shows boys what men can be

The eighth chapter turns to mass culture. hooks identifies a strategic failure: feminist books may have changed the thinking of women who read them, but most boys and men learned masculinity from film, television, music, advertising, and other popular media.

She looks back at male writing from the 1960s and 1970s that criticized rigid sex roles but argues that it never created an equally influential positive image of reconstructed masculinity. Economic and sexual roles changed while the dominant cultural image of the man as controlling, powerful, dangerous, and emotionally restricted remained familiar.

Mass culture therefore repeats a common story: a beast lives inside the male and cannot really be removed. The sensitive man is often represented as broken, mentally ill, weak, or doomed.

hooks discusses several films. In Monster’s Ball she sees a strong depiction of racist and patriarchal inheritance from father to son, but the most emotionally open male in the chain dies, while the surviving hero moves only from violent domination toward a more benevolent patriarchal stance.

In Igby Goes Down, an emotionally vulnerable father is connected to mental illness and the son receives no workable model of mature male sensitivity. Good Will Hunting, by contrast, offers hooks a rare hopeful story: Will has to stop treating himself as unworthy of love, acknowledge trauma, and choose connection rather than defensive isolation.

The conclusion is that criticizing old masculinity is not enough. Culture has to represent the process of change and the life afterward: how a changed man talks, works, loves, parents, admits fear, and remains recognizably male.

9. Healing Male Spirit — healing the male spirit

The ninth chapter opens with an image of a man crying in church. As a girl, hooks watched an elderly deacon weep openly during religious testimony. Children were embarrassed and adult men looked away, yet later the image became for her evidence that deep male feeling exists and does not destroy male dignity.

hooks reviews spiritual and therapeutic attempts to restore men’s contact with emotion. She discusses Robert Bly and male groups where men were encouraged to cry, shout, dance, and rediscover vitality. Her criticism is not that such practices have no value. It is that temporary release changes little when a man returns to the same relational system and puts the same armor back on.

Healing is therefore not one cathartic event. It is sustained return to personal history: locating where a boy first learned to hide himself, understanding broken bonds with mother and father, naming shame and fear, and seeing where pain has been converted into addiction, withdrawal, or domination.

hooks links unspoken pain to both dependency and violence. Men may cling to the same system that wounds them because acknowledging injury appears to violate the ban on weakness.

Community is essential in this chapter. A man is not expected to recover alone. Friends, groups, therapy, education, and people who support change after the immediate crisis all matter.

Spirituality is used broadly: as restoration of inner worth, connection, and the right to a full emotional life. The goal is not to make men less male but to return pieces of the self that were declared incompatible with manhood.

10. Reclaiming Male Integrity — wholeness instead of the mask

The key word of chapter ten is integrity, used in its sense of wholeness. hooks describes patriarchal masculinity as teaching boys to split: the actual feeling exists in one place; the acceptable male response exists in another.

A boy learns that some parts of his real self make him wrong or unlovable. To gain recognition he constructs a false outward self. In adulthood the same technique becomes compartmentalization: a man can be one person at work, another at home, another among men, and another internally.

hooks connects this split to lying. If a man must continually perform fearlessness, independence, certainty, and emotional self-sufficiency, truth becomes dangerous to status. Lies may be justified as protecting others, saving a relationship, or avoiding conflict, but they erode trust and the liar’s own self-respect.

Integrity means reversing the split: bringing together parts of the personality that were kept in separate rooms. A man can name fear without shame, admit a mistake without losing dignity, and say “I don’t know” without pretending to mastery.

Fathers are important here. A healthy father does not have to appear omniscient. He can admit ignorance, fear, and mistakes to a son without losing authority. Knowing when to let a son separate and supporting the son’s distinct self are treated as marks of mature fatherhood.

Self-criticism and repair also belong to integrity. A man can acknowledge wrongdoing, make amends, and forgive others. Letting go of perfectionism makes vulnerability possible.

hooks then argues that critique alone is insufficient. Men who have been evaluated mainly for performance and function need to learn affirmation of self and others. Care-taking, service, protection, mercy, and support are presented not as loss of status but as expressions of integrated strength.

11. Loving Men — loving men as part of change

The final chapter returns to hooks’s father: a strong, silent provider and war veteran, shaped by a culture that prepared men for combat. From this image she moves to the relationship between masculinity and socially organized killing. If men were simply born killers, she argues, there would be less need for sustained cultural training that links masculine honor with warfare and violence.

Her alternative begins with family rather than abstract politics. Family should be a place where love is a primary purpose, not merely a training ground for hierarchy. Boys can learn autonomy and connection at once, become strong without abandoning empathy, and experience body and affection without turning every form of closeness into a status test.

Male recovery often begins by returning to boyhood. The adult looks for the moment when he stopped trusting his own feelings and deliberately recovers knowledge that had to be suppressed.

Women have a major role in the final argument. hooks says women across political positions want men to be more loving. Desire, however, does not automatically change practice. A woman can complain that a man is emotionally closed while also insisting that he dominate, earn more, never need support, and always remain in control.

She distinguishes equality from mutuality. Formal equality alone does not guarantee that two people see, respect, care for, and respond to one another without hidden relations of dominance.

hooks rejects the slogan that “we cannot change anyone” as a complete account of human relationship. She is not telling women to remodel men. Her claim is that real love — care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust — can create a setting in which change no longer feels like loss of belonging.

Women are not asked to endure violence or provide endless emotional labor. hooks acknowledges that women harmed by men have good reason to protect their energy. Her broader concern is cultural: a society that demands male change while providing few places where change is supported makes the task harder.

Men trying to leave the old script need conscious education, therapy, groups, loved ones, and other men who embody alternatives. hooks especially values “good men” who listen, reflect on their own actions, receive criticism, challenge sexism among men, and change for the sake of their own integrity rather than simply to win female approval.

The book ends with male return — not to an old role, but to the self. A man stops building identity around emotional hunger, domination, and performance and regains the capacity to feel, make community, and receive love. For hooks, that is the will to change: willingness to surrender a defense that may once have helped a boy survive but now prevents a man from living.

Edition

bell hooks. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Atria Books, 2004. First Atria Books hardcover edition.