Description:

From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, an evergreen treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all. Feminist writing did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men. Everyone needs to love and be loved—including men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways in which patriarchal culture keeps them from understanding themselves. In The Will to Change, bell hooks provides a compassionate guide for men of all ages and identities to understand how to be in touch with their feelings, and how to express versus repress the emotions that are a fundamental part of who we are. With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. The Will to Change “creates space for men to acknowledge their traumas and heal—not only for their sake, but for the sake of everyone in their lives” (BuzzFeed).

Review

Most feminist writing about men treats them as a problem to be contained, an oppressor class to be argued with or outlasted. bell hooks does something stranger and, by the lights of her own movement, riskier: she writes about men as people in pain who deserve to be loved, and she insists that no feminism worth the name can leave them out of its account of liberation. The book begins with a confession that ought to sterilize any sentimentality — that as a girl she lay awake plotting the death of her violent father — and proceeds, against that memory, toward reconciliation. That arc is the whole argument in miniature. The Will to Change is not a study of male behavior so much as a pastoral address to it, and the most useful way to read it is as a work of moral persuasion built on a single radical reframing: that patriarchy's first victim is not the woman a man harms but the boy he was forced to stop being.

I want to defend the claim that this reframing is the book's genius and, in the same breath, the place where its evidence thins into assertion — and that hooks chose this trade deliberately. She is not trying to prove a hypothesis; she is trying to hand men a vocabulary and a path. Judged as a blueprint, the book is bracing and frequently moving. Judged as argument-by-proof, it is uneven, and the unevenness is worth taking seriously rather than excusing.

The thesis is announced without hedging. "Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation," she writes, and the sentence is doing more work than its bluntness suggests. It relocates the harm. Patriarchy here is not a system that flatters men at women's expense but one that maims everyone, men included, and the maiming of men is the part the culture has agreed not to see. The crucial distinction, the one the entire book hangs from, is between masculinity as such and the particular deformation she calls patriarchal masculinity: "The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity." Men, she argues, have been handed the wound without the word for it — audiences laugh nervously when she names "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy," and that nervous laugh is itself the evidence, the sound of a system that reproduces by remaining unnamed.

From the diagnosis follows the prescription, and hooks states the practical premise of the whole project at the close of her Preface: "Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving." This is why she lets herself repeat key claims from chapter to chapter — each is meant to stand alone, to be findable by a reader who opens the book anywhere in need. The alternative she names is "feminist masculinity," a partnership model of selfhood she borrows by way of Riane Eisler's dominator-versus-partnership binary, grounded in integrity, emotional awareness, and mutuality. The book's title is its demand: the will to change is the willingness to surrender the will to dominate.

The opening chapters build the diagnosis from the inside out, and they are the book at its most persuasive because they are the book at its most autobiographical. hooks's claim that patriarchy permits men a single sanctioned feeling — "There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger" — lands not as theory but as a daughter's observation of a father whose silence broke only into rage. Around it she arranges the cultural scripts that keep the silence in place: "The masculine pretense is that real men feel no pain," and, on the other side of the same wall, the terror women are taught to swallow, since "We cannot love what we fear." Her honesty about her own complicity gives these pages their edge. The relationship with the partner she calls Anthony becomes her central confession — a feminist woman who met her lover's tears with contempt, who discovered she too had been trained to punish male vulnerability. By the time she reaches the childhood scene of her father beating her over a game of marbles, and the research she draws from Kindlon and Thompson, Garbarino, and Olga Silverstein showing that boys begin life more emotionally expressive than girls before being shamed into stoicism, the reader has been given both the data and the wound it describes.

The fourth chapter is the structural heart of the book, and its governing sentence is the one everything else is built to support:

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

This is the reframing that makes the book original. Male violence, in hooks's telling, is not an eruption of nature but the predictable output of a self already broken inward; the man who loves and abuses the same woman — the "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" partner — is not two men but one divided one. She enlists Terrence Real's clinical formulation, "Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity," to insist that the severance is not a side effect of how boys are raised but its actual content. The chapter's boldest and most contested move is to follow the violence back up the chain to mothers, naming a "maternal sadism" (extending Dorothy Dinnerstein) by which women do the first work of breaking sons in the name of making them men. It is a claim hooks needs — without it her insistence that women uphold patriarchy too would be merely rhetorical — but it is also the point where her method strains hardest, asserting a mechanism it largely illustrates through anecdote.

The middle chapters carry the diagnosis into the institutions that reward it. On sexuality, hooks synthesizes Michael Kimmel, Steve Bearman, and Robert Jensen to argue that "patriarchal sex" is an addictive substitute for the intimacy patriarchy forbids — that pornography, gay and straight alike, eroticizes the dominator script, and that the compulsion men experience as desire is misrouted longing for connection. Her refusal here is pointed: where an older antipornography feminism named male sexual violence as "an expression of power," hooks insists on a different register entirely — "Patriarchal violence is a mental illness" — reframing it as pathology produced by disconnection rather than as masculine essence or as power claimed. The chapter on work is, to my mind, the book's most underrated, and its most quietly materialist. Drawing on Studs Terkel's workers, Susan Faludi, and Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men, she dismantles the nostalgic premise of the entire "masculinity crisis" genre: paid labor never fulfilled most men, so restoring breadwinner manhood cannot heal them. Workaholism, drink, and household tyranny long predate women's mass entry into the workforce; they are compensations for alienated wage labor that patriarchy then redirects onto wives and children. It is the place where hooks's compound formula earns its "capitalist," and where her argument is least dependent on the therapeutic vocabulary that elsewhere does so much of the lifting.

Chapters seven and eight pivot to remedies and the obstacles to them, and they show hooks at her most combative. She positions herself against two mirror failures. Robert Bly's mythopoetic men's movement she reads, through Iron John, as nostalgia for a sanitized "Wild Man" that leaves the dominator model fully intact under a more poetic costume — an alibi for grieving men rather than a politics. Separatist, antimale feminism she rejects with equal force, as a refusal to take male suffering or male love seriously; "It is a fiction of false feminism," she writes, "that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men." Between these poles she sets her own portrait of the disease, the most clinically worded sentence in the book: patriarchal masculinity, she argues, "teaches males to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent for self-definition on the privileges (however relative) that they receive from having been born male." The chapter on popular culture then treats mass media — The Incredible Hulk, gangsta rap, Good Will Hunting, American Beauty, Monster's Ball, even the rule-breaking hero of Harry Potter who must in the end fight — as the daily curriculum that schools boys before any parent speaks, and notes with real bitterness that even the "sensitive" male character is reliably scripted to die or to be quietly recoded as a kinder patriarch.

The closing chapters are explicitly restorative, and they are where the book's spiritual register takes over. hooks begins the healing arc with the weeping deacons of her childhood black church, then turns to Thomas Moore, the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh for a model of compassion and "care of the soul" she pointedly locates in men of color and exiles — men whose soul-work, she argues, white feminism never thought to notice. Integrity, in the chapter that names it, is the un-splitting of the divided self, built through Nathaniel Branden's pillars of self-esteem, M. Scott Peck's stages of change, and the grief-work of recovery culture; the diagnosis is Real's again, that "We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them." The final chapter gathers the threads into the phrase she borrows from Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan — "communities of resistance" — and reimagines the intimate partnership and the family as small deliberate counter-cultures against dominator society, because, in the line that anchors the book's ethics, "Love cannot coexist with domination." She closes not on a manifesto but on her parents' nearly fifty-year marriage, drained of tenderness, and on a sentence that turns the whole indictment into grief: "Mama's anger masks her fear that any day now she could die without ever feeling loved by the man she has devoted her entire life to pleasing." Set against that warning is the memory of her grandfather, Daddy Gus, the loving and unpatriarchal man to whom the book is dedicated — proof, for hooks, that the alternative is not utopian but has already walked among us.

Placing the book in its lineage clarifies both its ambition and its method. It is, first and most obviously, a feminist text, but hooks's signature compound — imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy — is the hinge that lets her braid several traditions into one critique. The psychoanalytic strand runs through Real's "normal traumatization" and Bradshaw's false self; the materialist strand through Terkel and Ehrenreich on alienated labor; the decolonial strand through the insistence that the conqueror abroad and the father at home enact a single dominator logic, so that the cinema of war she invokes is the household's training writ large. The religious-mystical strand, easy to underrate, is what gives the restorative chapters their authority, drawing the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh against the "God-as-male-ruler" theology she blames the church for teaching children. The race analysis is the connective tissue: the white-supremacist version of patriarchal masculinity casts the black man as Paul Hoch's "black beast" or the criminalized father even as it recruits him into the same dominator role at home, and hooks answers it with a deliberate roster of black male exemplars — Joseph Beam, Antwone Fisher, the deacons, Daddy Gus.

The book's quarrels are as revealing as its alliances, and hooks fights them in the open. Faludi's Stiffed she treats as the exemplary near-miss — a writer who feels the male wound accurately but, by naming a "masculinity crisis" without naming patriarchy, diagnoses the symptom and misses the disease. Phyllis Chesler's About Men she frames as the disappointment that launched her own project, a feminist book on men that amasses clippings of male violence and offers no path back to reconciliation. John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus she dismisses as essentialist cover, pop psychology that naturalizes as biology what hooks reads as socialized injury — the same charge she presses against any account that grounds male aggression in hormones or evolution, since for her that grounding is simply the patriarchal alibi in scientific dress.

Which brings me to where the book is genuinely vulnerable, and where a reviewer who admires it owes it candor. The Will to Change is built almost entirely from secondary therapeutic and self-help literature — Bradshaw, Real, Branden, Peck, Gary Zukav and Linda Francis — braided with autobiography and the close reading of films. hooks offers no original data and leans on sweeping empirical claims (the mortality figures she attributes to Silverstein, AMA statistics arriving secondhand, Hochschild on the second shift) without the page-level documentation that would let a skeptic check them. Her readings of popular culture, persuasive as set pieces, function as evidence for arguments they can only illustrate; one could assemble a counter-list of films that complicate every generalization she draws. And the repetition that makes each chapter free-standing also means the argument advances by restatement more than by accumulation, so that a claim asserted forcefully in chapter two arrives in chapter ten with the same force and no more support. The genre-honest verdict is that her strongest chapters are the ones least dependent on the therapeutic frame — the demolition of breadwinner nostalgia, the naming of the unnamed system — and her weakest are the ones that need a contested mechanism to hold, above all the account of maternal sadism and the reframing of male sexual violence as mental illness, which trades one totalizing explanation (it is power, it is essence) for another (it is pathology) without quite earning the swap. To call rape a sickness produced by patriarchy is rhetorically generous to men and politically double-edged: it can dissolve the very accountability the rest of the book demands, and hooks does not fully reckon with the tension.

These are real limits, but I do not think they are accidental, and I do not think they sink the book — because the book is not finally asking to be read as social science. It is a blueprint, in its own word, and a work of love addressed to three audiences at once: men who have never been given language for their own injury, the women who love them and cannot understand why love keeps failing, and the parents raising the next generation of boys. To those readers the therapeutic borrowings are not a weakness but the point — hooks is reaching for tools a hurting person can actually pick up, not citations a peer reviewer would accept. What it gets right is large: the relocation of patriarchy's first violence to the boy himself, the refusal of a separatism that would write men off as hopeless, the materialist insistence that work never saved men so its restoration cannot, and the steady demonstration that naming a system is the precondition for resisting it. What it gets wrong is narrower but real: it mistakes vivid illustration for proof often enough that a resistant reader can wave away its hardest claims, and its most provocative reframings outrun the evidence marshaled to defend them.

Read it, then, not for findings but for a reorientation — the kind of book whose value is measured by whether it changes how you see the man across the breakfast table, or the boy you are raising, or the divided self you have learned to live inside. It is the rare feminist text that a man can read as an invitation rather than an indictment, and the rare self-help-adjacent text with a genuine political theory underneath it. hooks asks of her readers exactly what her title asks, and she states the terms plainly: "To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change." The book cannot make that choice for anyone. What it can do, and does, is refuse the lie that men were never wounded in the first place.

Notable Quotes

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.

Opening line of Chapter 2, where hooks establishes patriarchy not as an abstract political system but as a concrete threat to male well-being. — patriarchy, masculinity, male suffering

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.

hooks draws the crucial distinction that allows her to critique the system without condemning maleness itself. — patriarchy, masculinity, feminism

The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.

In the chapter on stopping male violence, hooks reframes the origin of male violence as self-directed before it is other-directed. — violence, emotional repression, patriarchy

We live in a culture where emotionally starved, deprived females are desperately seeking male love. Our collective hunger is so intense it rends us. And yet we dare not speak it for fear we will be mocked, pitied, shamed.

Opening of Chapter 1, where hooks names the unspoken longing that drives much of women's relationship to men. — love, emotional hunger, shame

The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love. This is the longing feminist thinkers must dare to examine, explore, and talk about.

hooks identifies what she sees as the suppressed truth at the heart of the masculinity crisis. — love, masculinity, feminism

There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural—a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity.

hooks explains how anger becomes the only permissible emotional outlet for men, serving as a mask for pain and vulnerability. — anger, emotional repression, masculinity

Men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together—the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture.

hooks describes the collective silence around patriarchal fear that constrains both men and women. — fear, shame, emotional vulnerability

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

In Chapter 10 on integrity, hooks draws attention to the etymological connection between masks and masculinity. — masculinity, false self, integrity

Patriarchal violence is a mental illness. That this illness is given its most disordered expression in the sexual lives of men is powerful because it makes it hard to document since we do not witness what men do sexually like we witness what they do at work or in civic life.

In the chapter on male sexuality, hooks reframes patriarchal violence not as power but as pathology. — violence, sexuality, patriarchy

Love cannot coexist with domination.

A formulation hooks returns to throughout the book, expressing the fundamental incompatibility between patriarchal power and genuine love. — love, domination, relationships

Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.

hooks defines her constructive alternative to patriarchal masculinity, drawing on Olga Silverstein's framework. — feminist masculinity, integrity, emotional awareness

No man who does not actively choose to work to change and challenge patriarchy escapes its impact. The most passive, kind, quiet man can come to violence if the seeds of patriarchal thinking have been embedded in his psyche.

hooks argues that passive resistance to patriarchy is insufficient; active, conscious work is required. — patriarchy, violence, choice

Compulsive sexuality, like any addiction, is hard for men to change because it takes the place of the healing that is needed if men are to love their bodies and let that love lead them into greater community with other human bodies, with the bodies of women and children.

hooks connects sexual compulsion to the broader pattern of patriarchal substitution, where addictions replace authentic emotional connection. — sexuality, addiction, healing

We cannot speak of men and love, of love between women and men, without speaking of the need to bring an end to war and all thinking that makes war possible.

In the final chapter, hooks connects the personal politics of love to the global politics of militarism. — war, love, peace

Broken emotional bonds with mothers and fathers, the traumas of emotional neglect and abandonment that so many males have experienced and been unable to name, have damaged and wounded the spirits of men. Many men are unable to speak their suffering.

hooks describes the cumulative weight of unacknowledged male emotional trauma. — trauma, emotional neglect, male suffering

Popular culture offers us few or no redemptive images of men who start out emotionally dead. Unlike Sleeping Beauty, they cannot be brought back to life.

hooks critiques Hollywood's pattern of killing off male characters just as they begin the journey toward emotional wholeness. — popular culture, redemption, masculinity

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.

hooks explains why breaking with patriarchy requires not just awareness but active disloyalty to internalized parental authority. — patriarchy, emotional suppression, rebellion

If we are to create a culture in which all males can learn to love, we must first reimagine family in all its diverse forms as a place of resistance.

hooks draws on Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of communities of resistance, applying it to the domestic sphere. — family, resistance, love

Women who want men to love know that that cannot really happen without a revolution of consciousness where men stop patriarchal thinking and action.

hooks argues that love between men and women requires not individual adjustments but systemic transformation. — love, revolution, consciousness

Most men do not feel powerful—far from it. Most men feel powerless and are often angry at women, whom they perceive as having sexual power over them: the power to arouse them and to give or withhold sex.

hooks quotes Michael Kimmel to expose the gap between patriarchy's promise of power and men's lived experience of powerlessness. — power, powerlessness, sexuality

Ultimately boys and men save themselves when they learn the art of loving.

hooks' concluding statement in the preface, asserting that while women can support male healing, the fundamental work must be done by men themselves. — love, self-recovery, masculinity

Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politics. It is rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys.

hooks defines her vision of feminism as inclusive of male liberation, not opposed to it. — feminism, love, liberation

If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist.

hooks counters the assumption that patriarchy benefits men by pointing to the epidemic of dysfunction it produces. — patriarchy, violence, addiction

When men practice integrity, they accept that part of the work of wholeness is learning to be flexible, learning how to negotiate, how to embrace change in thought and action.

In the chapter on male integrity, hooks connects the practice of wholeness to relational flexibility. — integrity, change, wholeness

His smells fill my nostrils with the scent of happiness. With him all the broken bits and pieces of my heart come together again.

hooks quotes from her memoir Bone Black, describing her grandfather Daddy Gus, the man who modeled loving masculinity in her childhood. — love, grandfather, healing