The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.

Separatist ideology encourages women to ignore the negative impact of sexism on male personhood. It stresses polarization between the sexes.

Only a revolution of values in our nation will end male violence, and that revolution will necessarily be based on a love ethic. 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

Heterosexual girls and homosexual boys can and do become the women and men who make romantic bonds the place where they quest to find and know male love.

M. Scott Peck discusses the root meaning of the term “integrity,” which is the verb “to integrate,” emphasizing that this is the opposite of compartmentalization.

Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term “masculinity”) is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity that a boy learns.

He states further that “patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school systems, and family systems.” Describing the most damaging of these rules, Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression o

It has been hard for many male thinkers about the emotional life of boys to see feminism as a helpful theory because to a grave extent antimale sentiments among some feminists have led the movement to focus very little attention on the development of boys.

Patriarchal masculinity teaches men that their selfhood has meaning only in relation to the pursuit of external power; such masculinity is a subtext of the dominator model.

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.