The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, And Love (2004) By bell hooks

"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being."

Bell Hooks 2004 publication on "men, masculinity, and love" should be considered an essential piece of feminist literature, especially in the modern age. It is progressive, inclusive and intensely thought provoking.

"We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together."

Each page features exquisite language, smooth dictation and a direct, but compassionate, tone. The individual chapters explore and confront different aspects of the far-reaching hands of humanity's "White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy."

"Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust. If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love."

The point can be made that Hooks makes reference almost exclusively to American and Western culture, though it can also be argued the very sentiments expressed also apply to the majority of other nations and cultures.

"Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing."

Hooks challenges the reader, particularly, but not exclusively, if the reader is a biological man, to think about, and address, a lot of the patriarchal indoctrination of their own life, and how it has impacted their familial, social and romantic relationships.

"When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent, but it will frame all relationships as power struggles."

I found this book to be poignant and illuminating in so many ways. Even I, who does not necessarily conform to every notion of the patriarchal man, found myself learning how I can improve my mentality, relationships and emotional wellbeing, as well as how to unlearn a lifetime of unhealthy and damaging behaviours.

"Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure."

Hooks provides readers with a quintessential and progressive work of feminist literature that enlightens, educates and awakens all who read it, especially men who wish to learn and embrace their true selves, and become emotionally enriched, and free.

"To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings."