The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

In Rediscovering Masculinity Victor Seidler states that the male who defines his self through work seeks to do so because “this is the only identity that can traditionally belong to us…believing we can still prove our masculinity by showing we do not need anything from others.” In

“We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them.”

I am responsible for accepting or choosing the values by which I live. If I live by values I have accepted or adopted passively and unthinkingly, it is easy to imagine that they are just “my nature,” just “who I am,” and to avoid recognizing that choice is involved. If I am willing to recognize that choices and decisions are crucial when values are

“Integrity means being whole, unbroken, undivided. It describes a person who has united the different parts of his or her personality, so that there is no longer a split in the soul.”

Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. It did not tell us the terrible terror that gnaws at the soul when one cannot love. Women who envied men their hardheartedness were not about to tell us the depth of male suffering. And so it has taken more than thirty years for the voices of visionary feminists to be heard tellin

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.

Bradshaw explains, “The feeling that I have done something wrong, that I really don’t know what it is, that there’s something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be wort

Men who try to develop a politics in support of feminism, whether gay or straight, are not in for an easy ride. They are likely to be met with derision from many other men, and from some women. It is almost a journalistic cliché that women despise Sensitive New Age Guys. They will not necessarily get warm support from feminist women.

The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named.