Abusive Relationships and Fragile Masculinity: A reading of The Will to Change by bell hooks

It’s necessary that I include a TW because there’s mention of sexual assault, stalking, abuse of different variations.

Three or so years ago, I got out of an extremely abusive relationship that, at age 21, I thought was going to destroy me and destroy my life. It was a college relationship that I didn’t feel safe enough to leave until he graduated, one year ahead of me, which was the last time I ever saw him. I basically had to wait until he was physically gone to break up with him because he wouldn’t let me all the times I’d tried. He would show up to my house, leave letters under my door, leave shit in my car windshield wipers, show up when I was doing my homework in the library and corner me. He would manipulate me and beg me not to break up with him. At that point, I was so brainwashed and so emotionally drained and exhausted that I obliged him. He had me thinking every problem between us was completely my fault because I was “deviant” or whatever - he would call me sexually deviant, like, as an insult. Anyway, whatever. He also did everything in his power to break me down and make me feel unworthy. He picked on and touched my body in very intrusive, unwanted ways knowing I had a history of ED, he told me nobody would love me except for him, the whole shabang. And I had very low self esteem when I met him; I was 18 when I met him.

I get really down on myself sometimes for still getting triggered due to this situation I was in years ago, even when I have a partner now who I have an actually healthy and loving relationship with. It wasn’t until I finally severed ties with my ex that I could start putting the pieces of myself back together. That year following the relationship, which was my senior year of college, I had to process so much trauma. I hadn’t even realized how bad it really was. How loveless and honestly evil it was. How much I was brainwashed and controlled and broken down until I just didn’t have the energy to fight back anymore. And then entering into a healthy relationship, a year and a half or maybe, like, two years later, entering into a healthy relationship with   someone made me realize even MORE that I didn’t even know what it felt like to have someone be nice to me. 

I was a sophomore in college when Trump was elected. I was in a bad relationship with this guy who didn’t respect me, and simultaneously was going through something difficult regarding sexual assault. So I was testifying with her. So needless to say, I was full of rage and despair at the male species. It was heavy as fuck. I felt plagued by it. I was learning more and more all the time how dissappointing men are and how little they give a fuck about women or anyone but themselves for that matter. And I was also realizing things about my past … sorry, I just said realizing things … and, you know, I hadn't always realized how poorly I was treated by men. and I hadn’t always realized that certain sexual scenarios I was in were assault. I wasn’t sure why they made me feel so awful, ‘cause I didn’t have the knowledge or the vocabulary to classify it that way. I lost many male friends that I’d had - I didn’t have any male friends in high school, I had male friends freshman year of college, and by sophomore year, I was losing most of them after they sided w/ an assaulter. Basically calling my friend and I liars. LOL. Whatever floats your fucking boat, dude. So, I was carrying around a lot of anger and it was overwhelming and excruciating. 

My junior year, I read a book that literally changed my life. It was what made me realize my relationship was abusive. But it also allowed me to forgive men to a certain extent. I don’t forgive my ex though… Hopefully someday I will just so that I never have to think about it again, but I still can’t forgive what was done and said to me three and a half years later. But The book was The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks. 

Hooks says that patriarchy is the “single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.” She posits that the absence of love is the root of the issue, and that men are raised not truly knowing how to love or how to be loved. When patriarchal culture inhibits men from truly knowing themselves and from being in touch with their feelings, they are being kept from knowing love. We know we all need love.

Hooks defines patriarchy as, “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything adn 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.” 

Wonder if she intentionally used the word endowed…

Um, anyway, so… (Nicki Minaj voice).

What is the difference between male chauvinism and sexism and patriarchy you might ask? Feminists began to use the word patriarchy to replace the other two terms so that all of us could become more aware of how it affects us all. However, in early, and sometimes today’s feminism, as well, those who blame these issues on men alone are making it so that they can “maintain their own allegiance to patriarchy, their own lust for power.” I think what she means by this is that this is not an issue of blaming men, and there’s a great deal of victimization that goes on here on the part of women. And I think this has been really detrimental to the argument of feminism and to the argument of dismantling the patriarchy. Because, unfortunately, men really can’t be the enemy here. Women play a large role in this as well. The enemy is really patriarchy as a whole.

Emotions are a fundamental part of who we are, and we need to feel them. hooks discusses one by one, all the areas of life affected by the patriarchy for men and for women (every area). And right now, I’m going to speak as, uh, in accordance with the gender binary bc that’s how she writes the book. She’s talking about men and women as we know them to be, not really acknowledging the fact that there are other genders out there. But regardless, Reading it, I was viciously underlining, finding myself screaming OMG MEEEE LITERALLY MEEEE, like, as I was reading it. . It made me cry, it made me feel seen, and when I read the chapter on abusive relationships, I was somehow not surprised that I related to every word, and saw my partner in every passage.

I have an art student in her senior year of high school who is extremely passionate about gender issues and womens’ rights. She and I got into it today, showing each other music and talking about male fragility, of course. (Each conversation we have together ends up being about how terrible men are because she is currently at the age where she’s coming to a great deal of realizations about this matter). The project she’s currently working on is meant to be based on the topic of femininity and religion. She was asking me, “Why is it that men are associated with God? Why is God a man? When women literally create life?” And I was ruminating on it with her. Because it’s convenient that way, isn’t it? When it’s convenient, women are closer to spirituality and nature, and when it’s convenient, God is a man. Women are closer to spirituality and nature (God) when we’re looking at it as something out of control, something that needs to be reined in, something dangerous, dark, and unruly. But when God is the all powerful supreme ruler, of COURSE he’s a duuuude. 

Anyway, we got to talking about the age old claim that women are emotional and sensitive. But every girl I know knows this is a hilarious lie told by men to disguise just how weak they really are. Women can handle rejection. Women can handle being belittled, being spoken over, being treated poorly, being made to feel small. We have to handle it because we face it every day. But god forbid a woman doesn’t do what a man wants, or a woman makes a man feel small… it will be hell to pay. Men can be so fragile. Their masculinity is hanging on by a thread in this day and age as the gender binaries are broken down and our definitions of masculinity and femininity are being questioned. Okay, I’m not talking about all men, but I shouldn’t even have to say that. You know who I’m talking about. And you know, deep down, if this is about you. 

Ahem.

One time I was crying to my ex about how frustrated I was by how horribly men treated women all day every day. Life in college felt like a minefield. I was telling him how tired I felt, being spoken over in classes and then leaving that class and immediately being catcalled on the street, and then running into someone who assaulted me, and then passing by someone who assaulted a friend, and then looking at the news in the coffee shop and seeing trump's face, and then my little sister calling me and sobbing because a boy at school was stalking and blackmailing her, and then hearing a song on the radio with lyrics that completely objectify women and say disgusting things about them, and it was just all so much. On top of that, I’m getting a college education at this time, and every class, whether it’s about gender and sex or not, is further drilling it into my brain how for all of time, women have not mattered to anyone and have been abused and ignored systemically. I know I’m privileged to not have had to fully confront these things sooner. Of course, I’d always known, but something was unlocking inside me like flood gates. I was growing into an adult and each day felt like a shock wave of realizing how fucking messed up the world is. Sometimes it still feels that way, like, I don’t even consider myself an adult to this day and I’m 25… Whatever, so- 

He looked at me, telling him how painful it was to realize all this every day (I was in a very transitional period, I was going from like age 20 to 21 or something), to remember every day that the world really doesn’t give a fuck about you and actually hates you. And he looked at me and screamed in my face, and I distinctly remember the spit particles flying into my face, he screamed,  “WOMEN DON'T HAVE IT HARDER THAN MEN.” OMFG, he couldn’t bear the thought that his straight white male ass wasn’t the most oppressed in the room. And I wasn’t even trying to call myself oppressed! I was simply explaining my experience to him, and you’d think someone I was in a relationship with would be able to hear what that is. 

But men are so afraid. They’re so fucking afraid. One day my mom and I sat by the river in the middle of winter (she was visiting me at school) while I was struggling within an inch of my life to escape this relationship I was in, and we were discussing why men want to control women so badly. And We conceived of a theory. That men are petrified of they’re own mortality. They’re mortified that they, like all living things, must die. That, truly, they are no better than an ant or a leaf or a tree. I mean a leaf on a tree. But women. This is something we understand intrinsically because we bare life. So again, side note- I’m talking about men and women in a simplistic sense, and obviously gender is a construct, and it’s oversimplifying it, but, like the conversation needs to just be between men and women right now just for the sake of this episode. But, ok… ‘Cause I’m talking about bell hooks and blah blah blah, anyway I needa shut up. 

Ok, women understand intrinsically our own mortality because we bare life. 

We create it. We understand it’s fragility and accept it as something much larger than us. So we have nothing to fear. (But fear itself?) Anyway, men? They’re so afraid. They’re so afraid of nature, and they’re furious that women can do something that they can never do. So they try to squash it. They try to destroy Mother Nature, to conquer her. They disrespect her, treat her like shit. They try to squash peoples who are close to nature (Indigenous populations). They see humans close to nature (women are witches, indigenous are savages), as subhuman. The closer to nature you are the closer to animals you are and they don’t respect animals either. The only thing that matters, the most worthy being, is the white male. But they HAVE to tell themselves this because otherwise it would be WAY too much to hold, way too much to carry, to handle. To relinquish this perceived power that they’ve invented for themselves, that they actually never had to begin with, is too horrifying a concept. So they have to exert their power and conquer everything. Anyway, that was our theory. Quite dramatic, but, like, kinda makes sense right? 

But it really is crazy how deeply it runs. I mean, since the dawn of time women have been abused and controlled. I recently read this book called The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd. It is the story of Jesus’s wife told from her point of view. Because, I mean, Jesus’s wife is probably the most erased woman in history. Women don’t matter and they are raised with this message blaring in their face. Every major organized religion hates women. Fundamentalism is everywhere we turn. It runs deeper than anything. I think it’s literally the reason for climate change. Because women are the mother fucking Earth. I'm thinking about how, I, a privileged white woman, have felt this so deeply, been in so much pain over this. And I couldn’t ever, ever understand the plight of women of color, poor women, or any other women who have experienced it far, far worse than I have.

It’s in EVERYTHING. And this dude had the audacity to tell me it wasn’t true, that it didn’t exist. Talk about gaslighting! He was of the - now w/ all this PC shit, white men are actually the most oppressed now - group of people. 

What the fuck is that about? bell hooks writes, in The Will to Change, “no man who does not ACTIVELY choose to work to change and challenge patriarchy escapes its impact.” You’re allllll impacted by it.  And then talk about those who altogether deny it. 

And muhfuckers literally want a cookie for not raping us. 

bell hooks writes, “In Donald Dutton’s work with men who are violent, he identified women’s seeing behind the male mask as a catalyst for male violence:

He may apologize and feel shame 

immediately after, but he can’t sustain that 

emotion; it’s too painful, too reminiscent of 

hurts long buried. So he blames it on her. If it 

happens repeatedly with more than one 

woman, he goes from blaming her to blaming 

‘them’. His personal shortcomings become 

rationalized by an evolving misogyny… at this 

point the abusiveness is hardwired into the 

system. The man is programmed for intimate 

violence.”

This was one of the passages that I really had an AHA moment with. How misogyny gets built up over time when men are unable to deal with their emotions. They’re really conditioned to never feel anything, and sometimes in their childhood homes and family structures, both parents are fully adhering to patriarchal structures. For example… I mean, dad loud, mom quiet, dad breadwinner, mom doesn’t work, dad drives the conversation, mom’s in the background. And then for some, it involves domestic violence: dad exerting physical force on the family. Men have so much pain inside them that has never had a healthy outlet. “Hurts long buried,” like Dutton says. They point outwardly instead of looking inwardly.

Hooks states that neglect is more common than abuse. The whole “boys will be boys thing”... boys are abandoned and their behavior excused. Their emotional well-being is abandoned, because boys will be boys. Nobody questions whether their acting out is a result of an emotional issue they may be having, or wonders where the boy needs guidance or help. This happens to kids in general, but emotional neglect plants the seed of numbing oneself. I think a lot of guys have been described as sociopathic by women when they get fucked over or treated like an object? Especially when you’re hooking up with and/or dating them. You get ghosted or completely misled, and you’re like, how the fuck can you even do that to someone? I could never even do that to someone! Well, their emotional sides were never cultivated. They don’t have any clue how it feels, and they don’t know how to have empathy for women when they’ve been raised to believe they are more important than women. 

Patriarchy creates rage in boys and they hold onto it until they’re men. The rage actually helps them survive. It is, in a way, a survival mechanism. hooks says, “as a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.”

I don’t feel bad for them, but I can release some of my anger towards them. Like I mentioned earlier, men really can’t be made out to be the enemy here. It’s a much larger monster than they could ever be. It’s really hard to do, though. I totally am still full of anger and sometimes hostility. It’s literally how we protect ourselves. 

Sometimes a guy might try to sit down at your table, just bein’ friendly. I feel like I’m about to go off on a tangent, just so you know.

This actually happened the other day. It was my birthday and I was with my friends at a bar. A guy came and just abruptly sat down next to us. It was kind of awkward, he just asked if he could hang out with us because he wasn’t from here and was alone. I felt like I was being mean by not really wanting him to stay, and everyone sort of got a bit uncomfortable but we ended up being like, “yeah, totally,” and introducing ourselves and being nice. I feel like we’ve all been in situations when we’re traveling alone and trying to make friends: I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. I turned to talk to the other end of the table because I had just smoked weed, so I was kind of ignoring the fact that he was there. But, a few of my friends said he was being nice, so I felt like I had made a judgment for feeling like it was really intrusive and potentially creepy of him to come up to us. 

But the instinct we had all had to tell him to go away ended up being correct: OF COURSE IT DID - this is why women are quote unquote “rude” or “standoffish” to men when they randomly approach us. We have to protect ourselves. He ended up latching onto us and not leaving us alone for two hours. He got completely wasted, was making us all very uncomfortable, made a pass at my friend, and when she rejected him, he said, “you don’t want to kiss a guy who works at the blah blah blah?!” (He had a high profile job, so he was referencing said occupation). She ended up leaving him in the dust there as we moved onto the next bar. We walked twenty minutes downtown, and suddenly as we were standing outside the second bar smoking a cigarette, my boyfriend noticed that he had deadass followed us to the next bar we went to, twenty minutes away. So, ANYWAY, long winded thought, but what I’m saying is I GET being angry, and I GET hating men. I mean, this is such a small, measly example, but it’s just a nonstop thing. I get closing yourself off to them completely. We need to survive out here, period. And it isn’t our job to make it easier for them or to teach them anything. But ultimately the enemy is patriarchy as a whole, and they’re victims of it, too. 

But the thing is, they have to do the work, nobody is going to do it for them. It’s frustrating because we’re all suffering under the patriarchy, but men are obviously in the power position and they can be so resistant to letting that go. DUH. And there are tons of women who benefit from the patriarchy, too. If they’re white, if they have pretty privilege, have a lot of money, etc. And a lot of women contribute to keeping that system in place because they benefit from it. It’s all so complex and it’s all so much, but 

I think the Will to Change by bell hooks should be required reading for the Whole Wide World. 

I forced my entire family to read it, my current partner read it (obv I asked my ex, too, but he refused. He refused to read anything by a woman. He wouldn’t admit that explicitly but it was simply the case) but anyway my boyfriend saw all my annotations and all my insane and fervent underlining. When I realized I had given him that copy that I had marked up in the heat of a very abusive situation, I was kind of embarrassed. But it did allow him to see what I had dealt with more clearly, I guess.

But I really don’t understand what it is about someone powerful (and I don’t mean shallow power, I don’t mean power from money or status or physical strength, or size, or stature. I mean power in who they are, empowered… someone sure of themselves, someone who exudes something special), that makes people want to run them down and abuse them and weaken them and take advantage of them. I’ll never understand that. It obviously has nothing to do with them and everything to do with the low self esteem of the other person. And just Their Fear they have deep within them that’s literally gushing out of their pores and bubbling to the surface. And the closer it gets to the surface the more avidly they attempt to hold onto whatever perceived power they have. The tighter they hold on to that person. The tighter their grasp will become, as they try to squeeze everything out until there’s nothing left. 

This kind of violence, I’m talking about- Right now, I’m talking about it in the sense of violence towards women, from men. Andrew Dworkin writes in Scapegoat, that “violence against women is the most pervasive form of human rights abuse.” The U.S. Justice Department says, “one out of twelve women will be stalked at some point in her lifetime.” I believe its 1 in 5 women that will be raped. The American Medical Association found that “sexual assault and family violence are devastating the U.S. physical and emotion well-being.” In 2019, 406,970 women were raped or sexually assaulted while the corresponding number for men was 52,336. That’s only those that were reported or spoken about. I venture to say there could be more than twice that number, actually. But these facts discuss PHYSICAL abuse. 

But… What about emotional abuse? Emotional abuse is widely accepted in male/female relationships, no matter the nature of the relationship. Father/daughter, brother/sister, friend/friend, boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife. It doesn’t matter. It’s very widely accepted in these relationships. It’s exactly what I experienced in my relationship, and I really didn’t know that it was even abuse because it wasn’t physical. I think this is an epidemic. hooks argues, “we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like.” Terrence Real calls it “A Conspiracy of Silence.” - I just love that. It’s fucked up, but I love it. - But keeping silent isn’t going to help dismantle the patriarchy. That’s why I discuss my own personal experience. And it’s not easy to do. I’m afraid of putting things like this out because I don’t know what’s going to come after me. I don’t know what could happen if this were to get back to certain people. But I don’t want to keep men’s secrets. This is something that women are told to do. That we are raised to do. To keep men’s secrets. But I actually refuse to do that. The truth that women hold has to be kept in silence, doesn’t it? That’s how we’re raised. And actually (hooks said this, but I completely agree with her), young boys also suffer this expectation. Real says, “none may speak the truth about men.” “None may speak the truth about men.” Isn’t that just insane?! I mean, wow. This shit is pervasive as fuck.

Emotional abuse is the very concept I was discussing just before, where men will try to break someone down until there’s nothing left. Marti Tamm Loring, in her work Emotional Abuse, says that it is “an ongoing process in which one individual systematically diminishes and destroys the inner self of another.” When I read that in bell hooks’ book… I mean… I realized that is EXACTLY what had been done to me. I was being told everything about me was wrong. That my sexuality was disgusting and deviant, that my body was unattractive, only attractive to him, only touchable to him, that I wasn’t smart, that everything I said was annoying, that I had nothing to say… by the way these are pretty much verbatim quotes that were said to me constantly, for years… but this was both explicitly and implicitly told to me for over THREE years. And It REALLY did a number on me. Did some damage. The most important aspect to note about emotional abuse is its ongoing pattern. It’s done to someone over and over again, a constant attempt to demean and control. That’s emotional abuse. This is male violence against women, hooks says. 

I’m getting a phone call from my sister now, so gotta go.