The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Zukav and Francis explain: “The more intense the pain of fear, unworthiness, and feeling unlovable becomes, the more obsessive becomes the need to have a sexual interaction.”

Nothing discounts the old antifeminist projection of men as all-powerful more than their basic ignorance of a major facet of the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death.

Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving.

Many men use work as the place where they can flee from the self, from emotional awareness, where they can lose themselves and operate from a space of emotional numbness. Unemployment feels so emotionally threatening because it means that there would be time to fill, and most men in patriarchal culture do not want time on their hands.

Much of the anger boys express is itself a response to the demand that they not show any other emotions. Anger feels better than numbness because it often leads to more instrumental action. Anger can be, and usually is, the hiding place for fear and pain.

War was in its earliest forms inclusive of women and men. Detailing its history in Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us that “by assigning the triumphant predator status to males alone, humans have helped themselves to ‘forget’ that nightmarish prehistory in which they were, male and female, prey to larger, stronger animals…. Gender, in other

“Something missing within” was a self-description I heard from many men as I went around our nation talking about love. Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being

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

Kimmel contends that male consumption of pornography is fed by the sexual lust males are taught to feel all the time and their rage that this lust cannot be satisfied: