Men, Masculinity, and Love

I’ve just returned from an end-of-the-summer vacation (hence no blogs in a couple weeks), and am happy to have returned with a couple of new books in hand. It’s one of my favorite things to do when traveling in a new city to find a bookstore, wander into the psychology/philosophy/sociology section, and follow my gut to land on a book that feels like the right next thing to read.

Skimming over a row of books, I went past a title by feminist philosopher (she calls herself a “cultural critic”) bell hooks. I’ll be honest - for some reason, bell hooks has always scared the shit out of me. I’ve never read any of her stuff before, but in seeing her quoted I’ve always had the sense that this lady means business. I mean, she uses an intentionally all-lower-case pen name to write by (her real name is Gloria Watkins). She’s not messing around!

But wanting to challenge my assumptions and feelings about bell hooks, I went back to her book, pulled it off the shelf, saw the title The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, and started reading. 

Seeing the impact that various messages from our culture have on my clients, I always appreciate reading something that helps highlight and put words on those often-unspoken messages. In The Will to Change, hooks captures so much of what men, at least in American culture, face, and by extension what so many of my male clients face.

Patriarchy

In one of the earlier chapters of the book, hooks makes a distinction that I found really helpful: she believes that the crisis faced by men is not a crisis of masculinity, but a crisis of “patriarchal masculinity” in particular. 

In other words, what she’s critiquing in her work is not masculinity itself, and she’s not disparaging men themselves. Actually, she’s really defending men against deeply destructive and damaging messages about a particular version of masculinity into which they are socialized: patriarchal masculinity.

What is patriarchal masculinity? Here’s her definition:

Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that 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.

Like I said, she doesn’t mess around.

Domination

Another way that she refers to this type of masculinity is the “dominator model”, that a man’s masculinity according to patriarchy is based on his ability to dominate - to control or rule over something or someone.

It’s been interesting to keep this idea in the back of my mind as I notice the implicit messages that I receive daily as a man, and that I also hear from my clients. Man-as-dominator seems to show up in so many different ways. 

We as men can feel masculine by dominating physically, athletically, financially, politically, intellectually, socially, violently, etc. Though our culture seems to highlight some of these forms of domination more than others, they all seem to be suitable ways to feel masculine according to patriarchal masculinity, as long as they involve domination and control of something. 

Psychological Patriarchy

Masculinity-as-domination has obvious and severe implications both politically and socially. A man trying to define his masculinity by domination or control of someone or something, is obviously harmful to that which he is trying to dominate.

What hooks looks at more closely in this particular book, though, is how this dominator model of masculinity affects a man within himself as well. It’s harmful to himself as something he is trying to dominate.

She looks to family therapist Terrence Real’s idea of “psychological patriarchy”:

Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued.

This is patriarchal masculinity played out internally. My masculinity can be defined by domination or control over that which is deemed weak or that which is deemed feminine within myself, using violent means toward myself if necessary to maintain that dominant rule over myself.

As Terrence Real points out, this ends up meaning cutting ourselves off from half of ourselves. The half of ourselves seen as either weak or feminine is met with psychological violence, such as self-criticism, self-shaming, denial, repression, ridicule, numbing, or hiding.

This form of patriarchal masculinity requires an ongoing practice of self-betrayal, as bell hooks puts it. It leaves men as “emotional cripples”, denies them access to wholeness, their full will, and full emotional well-being.

Patriarchy may very well reward men socially and politically for playing out this version of masculinity, but as hooks says, “status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved.”

Men are not provided by patriarchal masculinity with support to be whole, integrated people who are loved simply for the essential goodness of their being. Instead, they are socialized into the message that their essential self is half-bad, and their worth and value comes from successfully doing and performing the masculine role that requires denying, repressing, and violently controlling the bad (weak) half of themselves.

Aside from setting the stage for such things as depression, anxiety, chronic irritability, anger issues, and addiction, this internal dynamic also has a huge impact on relationships.

Actual loving connection with another person requires the trust and safety to show up with one’s full self and feel accepted as one is, a practice that is in itself vulnerable. But if men are cut off internally from half of themselves, and they and their partners are both deeply uncomfortable with vulnerability in men, then patriarchal masculinity cuts men off from what’s needed for intimacy and connection.

Patriarchal masculinity then leaves men both cut off from half of themselves, from emotional integrity and well-being, and from intimate connection with others.

As a poor substitute for emotional expression, men living under patriarchy often channel all feelings through the one emotion that patriarchal masculinity allows for: anger. And as a poor substitute for intimate connection, men living under patriarchy often over-focus on the one type of connection that patriarchal masculinity allows for: sex (though a very narrow form of it that reinforces a sense of successful performance of control). These are poor substitutes, though, because they fail to deliver on what any human being really wants: loving connection.

Alternatives

Another thing that I loved about hook’s book is that it highlights an additional dilemma many men seem to face, which is that there’s no clear way forward at the moment. Even if you accept the critiques of patriarchal masculinity that hooks is putting out there, there aren’t a lot of alternatives.

Here’s how hooks describes the dilemma faced by men who have even looked to feminist critique of patriarchy for alternatives:

Men were expected to hold on to the ideas about strength and providing for others that were a part of patriarchal thought, while dropping their investment in domination and adding an investment in emotional growth. This vision of feminist masculinity was so fraught with contradictions, it was impossible to realize...The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift.

Let me say again, she means business. She doesn’t let women off the hook (pun emphatically intended). As hooks points out, it is both women and men who uphold patriarchal notions of masculinity, and men exploring alternatives often run into the dilemma that not only do other men often push back, but so do women.

Shame researcher Brene Brown describes a version of this dilemma that she discovered in her own work, quoted here from her book Daring Greatly:

Here’s the painful pattern that emerged from my research with men: We ask them to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust. And men are very smart. They know the risks, and they see the look in our eyes when we’re thinking, C’mon! Pull it together. Man up. As Joe Reynolds, one of my mentors and the dean at our church, once told me during a conversation about men, shame, and vulnerability, “Men know what women really want. They want us to pretend to be vulnerable. We get really good at pretending.”

Toward Healing

What this all means is that we’ve got a tricky situation at the heart of relationships with men and women, according to hooks’ critique.

Men and women both uphold patriarchal ideas that men should not be vulnerable and should be in control of themselves internally in order to successfully perform (at least in some ways) the role of patriarchal man, requiring them to deny half of themselves. In the process men are set up for poor mental health, isolation, and an over-reliance on anger as expression and sex as connection. To the extent that men are successful at performing patriarchal masculinity, they forcibly remain in positions of domination and control, going as far as psychological or even physical violence in many cases to maintain control and guard against vulnerability.

What hooks says is that “healing the crisis in the hearts of men requires of us all a willingness to face the fact that patriarchal culture has required of men that they be divided souls.”

It is necessary for all of us to recognize the ways we may be encouraging men to continue to deny their vulnerability, the difficulties we may have with envisioning and allowing for male vulnerability, and the opportunities we have to creatively envision a masculinity that allows for integrity, wholeness, and authenticity.

And it is necessary for men to find spaces, like therapy, where they can be vulnerable, can speak their pain without threat of being shamed, can collect the parts of themselves that have been split apart and denied, and learn the skills that allow for them to truly connect with both themselves and others.

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