I recently read Bell Hook’s ‘The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love’ and it challenged one of the views that I’ve held for a while now that it is not up to a woman to change a man’s ways. I disliked shows or movies that depicted successful, debauched men, who found the ‘love of their life’ (who is usually a young woman who has to give up something important) and decided they were ready to settle down after playing the field. Perhaps the most famous example of this phenomenon is Casanova, a story in which a notorious playboy conducts his lascivious life seducing all kinds of women: young, older, single, married – none slip through his fingers in his depravity. But then, he meets a singular beauty that somehow doesn’t fall easily to his tricks and that entices him even more. A woman that doesn’t fall as ‘easily’ for his charms is worth more than those who do because it must mean that she sees beyond the act or facade of obscenity that he has tailored to not let anyone get too close, and because she sees beyond this, he must chase her further. She will be the ‘chosen one’, the one that will teach him to be kinder, to be softer, to no longer be a wandering spirit in search of something he can’t name. And she will be his wife, carry his children, become a mother – a caretaker for both him and their kids. And it will in fact be a source of pride for her to have changed him, to have been the one that finally, metaphorically speaking, ‘chained him down’.
In the 2006 movie adaptation of this familiar story, a nun who is found to have spent a night with Casanova is punished for it by the inquisition who says she will face “eternal damnation for one night with Casanova”, to which she replies: “seems fair”. Because the satisfaction of having a man lust after you (regardless of the fact that he would do so with any other woman he met in place of you) is worth it? The movie itself makes a mockery of such woman, when a satirical play depicting Casanova is put on for the public – the audience laughs as ‘Casanova’ tells another woman that ‘she is the one’, because they know she isn’t, there doesn’t exist a ‘one’. That is, until he meets a woman who is ‘different from all the others’.
I believe this archetype; that of ‘bad-boy’, ‘player’, ‘salacious man’ depicted in media is what gave rise to the idea of ‘pick-me girls’ that the internet has been making fun of for years now. Because when, as a young girl, you watch shows and movies in which the popular guy in school falls for the nerd, or the quiet, shy girl, or the sporty girl who teaches him that there is more to life than popularity, you begin to believe that you need to stand out. You need to be less like the other girls and you need to be more like ‘the boys’ in a bid to get their attention, to be the singular ‘one’ for someone. You want to fix them because everything you’ve ever consumed tells you that men are misunderstood and they only need someone to look deeper to help them change their ways, to be reconstructed.
Another more relatable example of this may be Taylor Swift’s ‘you belong with me’, in which the music video depicts a cheerleader who doesn’t understand her jock boyfriend and is therefore unworthy of his affection. But the nerdy girl who doesn’t wear short skirts and sits in the bleachers is the one who is in fact worthy, because she gets his humour and listens to the kind of music he likes – things that the cheerleader girl would never relate to. The song starts with the lines ‘you’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset, she’s going off about something that you said’, implying that if she had been in the place of his cheerleader girlfriend she would never challenge anything that could be perceived as insensitivity because his girlfriend just “doesn’t get [his] humour like [she does]”. While I’m sure this song wasn’t written for this purpose, it sets a dangerous precedent for young girls to always give in, to never take issue even if they feel they should because otherwise they will be seen as boring, prudish, or they ‘just don’t get it’. Not only does it set this precedent, but the song and it’s video glamourise it in a sense; it tells girls that they can also (and should aspire to) get the guy as long as they are willing to be placatory.
I suppose the greatest thing I take issue with regarding forms of media that depict this kind of storyline is that the brunt of this is almost always taken by the woman. While a woman is shown to be proud and treat the process of marrying a man as an achievement, men joke with their friends that marriage has ‘tied’, ‘chained’, or ‘locked’ them down, restricting the freedom they once had and will never be able to have again. Where a lot of children’s and young-adult shows depict this relationship and encourage the idea that women have to be ‘different’ and less like other women to stand out and attract men, they are endlessly made fun of it online when they follow this guidance. It also treats women as a monolith. Before Casanova meets Francesca in the movie, women are simply a means to finding a ‘moment that lasts a lifetime’, they are all the same to him and none is different from the other because they have all given in to his advances. But why, when he has cultivated this image of himself as hyper-sexual and libertine are the women treated as ‘easy’? Why does that not also apply to him? Why is the woman eternally damned, while he lives happily ever after in the end?
In Friends, Joey doesn’t even remember most of the women he sleeps with, they are again a means to an end, sexually. But people root for him to find ‘the one’ that can change him, and for a while he thought this was Rachel for him. He has never felt this way about anyone – that is, he’s never been in love before – he tells Ross. He keeps thinking about her, which has never happened to him with any other women he’s slept with. While I didn’t hate this progression (I preferred Joey’s treatment of Rachel more than Ross’), I hated the idea conveyed that he’d never thought about any of the other women he’d met – is it because (as in Casanova) those women submitted so there was no challenge as they’d already given in to him and Rachel was the only one who hadn’t? Because love, as Amy March says in little women, isn’t a thing that just happens to someone. While it may creep on a person unbeknownst to them, there are moments before love. The moment where you first learn something about them, the moment you witness them do something unexpected, the moment you see a laugh that feels warm, the moment they make you laugh, the moment you watch them cry, watch them impassioned. How can you love someone if you never know them? And why then, has Joey been waiting for it to spontaneously happen to him instead of actually trying to engage with the women he slept with rather than seeing them as instruments for sexual gratification? Why do we have to watch the only time Joey has ever been in love in the series be with a woman who is ‘unlike the others’ (by way of Rachel never giving into his advances before this), essentially suggesting that you can’t be ‘the one’ for a man unless you are distinctly not like other women and why then do we shame women for carrying this out in real life when that is what popular media and culture tells them works?
This is in no way a defence of women who bring down other women in pursuit of male attention, as I find it as grating as the rest of the internet, but I am bringing to light that this behaviour is not innate, it is taught and learned.
So, for all the reasons above, I had staunchly taken the opinion that men do not need women to change. In fact, I believed that a woman has no place in getting a man to change as it should be a process they undertake of their volition, with their own will, and their own effort. Stories of the quintessential ‘man-child’ as Sabrina Carpenter put it, annoyed me and I thought that expending effort to ‘fix’ men who live by patriarchal standards and couldn’t understand the need for a social movement like feminism was a waste. Men who call woman the b-word (or more recently, ‘foids’), made jokes about inequality, or treated women as sexual conquests didn’t deserve to be taught why this is wrong, why this system does not benefit them either from the very women they were doing this to; it was up to them to figure it out, I thought. And I had never really received a rebuttal or disagreement to this until reading Bell Hook’s ‘The Will to Change’.
“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.”
As Hooks asserts, I was of the group of women who, ‘fed up with the male exploitation and oppression’, believed that men ‘were the enemy’ (although, maybe not quite so strictly). At the very least, I thought it wasn’t my responsibility to encourage meaningful discussion with men about patriarchy, about how it negatively impacts them as much as it does women and in doing so, I unknowingly perpetuated the patriarchy by virtue of keeping it in place. I placed the blame of the patriarchy’s everlasting existence in our lives solely on men without challenging its beliefs, consequently conserving its place. She details how this very act of conformance only maintains the patriarchy as it simply ‘[keeps] males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them…[enforcing] an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protecting [it]’.
Under the patriarchy, men are emotionally crippled as it is a system designed to suppress their emotions in a bid to be ‘accepted and affirmed’ by other patriarchal males. It is therefore a system which can also strip them of their freedom – the freedom to enjoy what they truly do, to voice that enjoyment, to engage in things that seem ‘too feminine’ or not manly enough. Strangely though, when a majority of men are asked about what they believe to be the biggest threat to their wellbeing or what they perceive to be one of the bigger problems in their life, they blame this crisis on women – on the feminist movement, which they see as a threat to traditional male dominance ‘because women have gone far beyond their demands for equal treatment and are now trying to take power and control away from men…. The underlying message: men cannot be men, only eunuchs, if they are not in control.’
This perspective is rooted in falsity as men were never [and still aren’t] in control or power or satisfied with their lives before the feminist movement. That’s because the patriarchy is inherently a system which denies males the ability to engage with the full spectrum of human emotion and experience for fear of not conforming to the mold of the ideal male. We know that men cannot be satisfied under patriarchy because if they were, the ‘violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive’ and the dissatisfaction they feel in the workplace that has been extensively documented would not exist, and yet it does. So why then, Hooks posits, has there been no movement equivalent to feminism that males have undertaken to change the conditions of their lives? She argues that this is because:
“No mass body of women has challenged patriarchy and neither has any group of men come together to lead the struggle. The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.”
This, in particular, stood out to me as I was reading because it especially pertains to the current climate rising in some spaces, specifically on the internet with the spreading of ‘manosphere’ content that indoctrinates young boys with patriarchal propaganda from the moment they try to engage with content that dubiously brands itself as self improvement. Having a younger brother myself, I am always careful to ask about his engagement with that side of social media, and to the best of my ability, I make sure to debunk and dissuade him from the messages being spread by men that, by patriarchal standards are ideal; with money, success, multiple women surrounding them etc. Thankfully, my brother has grown up his entire life around many older sisters and while this does not make him immune to this kind of media messaging, it means that he is more exposed to the reality of womanhood and is less likely to fall for the falsehoods being broadcasted by these creators.
As I engaged with this memory, I realised that as much as I may have told myself it wasn’t my responsibility to take on this role, I had already taken it on. In the relationship with my brother, in conversations with other male friends who I may have disagreed with and even, in some cases, with my own father. Coming to this realisation led me to another, which Hooks highlights in her book and is the purpose of this entire article: we are all responsible for one another and if the dismantling of patriarchy in society is not a task shouldered by men and women alike, we risk framing this pursuit as one that is a threat to men.
All in all, while I still do believe men have a lot of work and effort to take on in their pursuit of deconstructing their conformity to patriarchal standards, I now see the merit and recognise the importance that we as women also have in this pursuit. It is not enough to advocate for the end of patriarchal structures that benefit us and alleviate our (women’s) suffering, we must also look to alleviate the crisis that men undergo under a system which gives them a false sense of privilege. Privilege that only stems from the oppression of women and not from an inherent power to being a male.
To end this piece, I just want to recommend the book that this article has been talking about: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. It is not very long at all and can provide a much better account of all the issues presented above and Hooks’ writing is very easily digestible and engaging!
-oknaima💌
oknaima 