How We Talk About “Patriarchy” According to Bell Hooks
The term “patriarchy” can trigger dismissive eye rolls within certain groups, often shutting down conversation. The assumption is that it’s nothing more than a pejorative used by progressives to unfairly blame men for all the world’s problems. And like other terms conscripted into the cultural wars, one can certainly find superficial or absurd examples that call the term’s further usefulness into question. But substantive explorations of “patriarchy” exist as well, ones that challenge the notion that it’s just a ridiculous construct rooted in mysandry and victimhood. Bell Hooks is an oft-cited feminist author whose 2004 book The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love tackles the subject. It’s fair to say Hooks is as polarizing as any other figure in the emotionally charged discourse. But at the very least, it’s worth engaging her thoughts for the sake of sharpening how we approach the subject.
Hooks doesn’t just critique the political structure of patriarchy (i.e., men should be in charge), she explores the ideological underpinnings that lead humans to fall into patriarchal patterns and systems. At the heart of it is the belief that life is ultimately just a Darwinian competition for survival. In this view, the ability to exert one’s will over others (i.e., power) is the ultimate virtue. At its most basic level, this leads to an increased value being placed on things like physical strength and the ability to commit violence (physically, emotionally, politically, etc.). These traits are associated with the masculine, while the absence of these traits and/or the presence of “softer” traits (empathy, thoughtfulness, openness) are associated with the feminine. Relationships are then ordered based on the threat of dominance (hence the appeal of “alpha” language). As Hooks summarizes, “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.”
But for Hooks, masculinity itself is not the issue. The ideology that warps our sense of masculinity and then builds a system around it is the issue. Readers might be surprised to encounter how much empathy Hooks has for men. And for a writer who has written numerous scholarly texts criticizing “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, she is surprisingly comfortable pushing back on expressions of feminism that she feels dehumanize men. She writes, “The radical feminist labeling of all men as oppressors and all women as victims was a way to deflect attention away from the reality of men and our ignorance about them. To simply label them as oppressors and dismiss them meant we never had to give voice to the gaps in our understanding or to talk about maleness in complex ways. We did not have to talk about the ways our fear of men distorted our perspectives and blocked our understanding. Hating men was just another way to not take men and masculinity seriously.”
Because the issue is the ideological system, not masculinity itself, Hooks also discusses how women can be shaped by it. She writes, “In patriarchal culture, women are as violent as men toward the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females.” That said, she does not shy away from discussing the ways women and children are disproportionately harmed by a system that stunts healthy development in men while giving them power.
Masculinity advocates often express frustration that their pain is invalidated, that they have no room to process their own hurt or disillusionment with the conversation being turned on them. Hooks agrees and argues that this is actually an expression of patriarchy’s intolerance of emotion. She writes, “The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, ‘Please do not tell us what you feel’ … We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed.”
This suppression of feeling, which is a suppression of authenticity, is the primary wound boys suffer under patriarchy. Hooks writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males … is that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation.” Put another way, “No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.” Boys are taught to disconnect from their emotional lives and never EVER show what they are feeling, with one exception: anger. Anger can co-exist with dominance and the threat of violence, so it is accepted as masculine. More than that, it is CELEBRATED as masculine. As Hooks states, “Acting out violently is the easiest, cheapest way to declare one’s manhood.” And for men who never learned to process their emotions, anger becomes the one culturally sanctioned outlet and the only way they know how to feel anything. Again, Hooks states, “Rage is the easy way back to a realm of feeling. It can serve as the perfect cover, masking feelings of fear and failure.”
Hooks would argue that the proliferation of mantras like “no one cares, work harder” are the byproduct of a patriarchal system where men are cut off from their emotional lives and discouraged from opening up. She writes, “The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy.” What are men to do if they feel disconnected from themselves, while also feeling as though the world has no interest in them being anything but “productive” and “strong”? Hooks quotes feminist author Barbara Demming, who said, “I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they're acting out a lie, and so they're furious at being caught up in the lie. But they don't know how to break it.”
What’s the answer? We start by challenging the underlying ideology of competition and dominance. Then we challenge the association of femininity and weakness and the unwarranted fear of the feminine. Hooks writes, “Clearly, men need new models for self-assertion that do not require the construction of an enemy other, be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against.” And finally, we start to build an imagination for masculinity that has room for emotional integration. That can start with raising boys who are free and encouraged to love and offer safety. Hooks writes, “It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.”