A quick and easy read on feminism, with a focus on the way that patriarchy hurts men. hooks’s central message here is that feminists have mostly neglected discussing masculinity, which for her is a big missed opportunity, and that they should see men (some of them, anyway) as allies. hooks believes blaming men can be an unproductive enterprise. It’s not only that they aren’t solely responsible for the upholding of patriarchal norms---she spends quite a bit of time stressing the ways women uphold patriarchal norms, with a particular focus on mothers’ relationships to their sons. She also believes that women cannot just silo themselves: they must work with men to dismantle patriarchy, who must find in themselves the titular will to change.
For hooks, patriarchal masculine norms dictate that men dominate women and children. While of course this hurts women and children, here she focuses on how these norms force a kind of self-mutilation on men: they make men violent, sexually aggressive, incapable of showing vulnerability, unable to ask for and give love, and makes them seek isolation. hooks thinks that these prevalent qualities of men, of which feminists have written so much about, are distortions of male nature, and that there is a fundamental goodness in maleness being hidden by these distortions. She believes men want love and intimacy, just like women, but they are not given outlet to express these desires. So it would be better for everyone for men to renege these norms, to give up the impulse for domination.
Strangely, The Will to Change is a bit repetitive for such a short book. I also get the nagging feeling that while lack of forbidding theory is refreshing, it merely skims deep waters. I would have liked her to have sketched out her vision for an unpatriarchal masculinity in greater detail. Sure, men need and want love and intimacy like women, but do they need and want them in the same way? What might replace the impulse to dominate in a world without patriarchy? Would gender “wither away” like the state in a communist society? But this might be too uncharitable for a book that reads like a primer on feminism for men. It’s certainly the book I’d recommend my male friends interested in beginning to read about the subject.