The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (6 page)

The
Harry Potter
movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others. In
Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets
violence when used by the acceptable groups is deemed positive. Sexism and racist thinking in the
Harry Potter
books are rarely critiqued. Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism, and sexism of Rowling’s books.

Again and again I hear parents, particularly antipatriarchal parents, express concern about the contents of these books while praising them for drawing more boys to reading. Of course American children were bombarded with an advertising blitz telling them that they should read these books.
Harry Potter
began as national news sanctioned by mass media. Books that do not reinscribe patriarchal masculinity do not get the approval the
Harry Potter
books have received. And children rarely have an opportunity to know that any books exist which offer an alternative to patriarchal masculinist visions. The phenomenal financial success of
Harry Potter
means that boys will henceforth have an array of literary clones to choose from.

Literature for children is just as fixated on furthering patriarchal attitudes as television. There are just few a books with male characters focusing on boys that challenge the patriarchal norm in anyway. Since these books do not abound there is no way to know what impact they might have in teaching boys alternative masculinities. Writing a series of children’s book for boys, I was initially amazed by how difficult it was for me, a visionary feminist theorist, to imagine new images and texts for boys. Shopping for books for my nephew first alerted me to the absence of progressive literature for boys. In my first children’s book with male characters,
Be Boy Buzz,
I wanted to celebrate boyhood without reinscribing patriarchal norms. I wanted to write a text that would just express love for boys. It is a book aimed at little boys. This book strives to honor the holistic well-being of boys and to express love of them whether they are laughing, acting out, or just sitting still. The books I have written are aimed at offering boys ways to cope with their emotional selves. The point is to stimulate in boys emotional awareness and to affirm that awareness.

To truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions. To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.

E
very day in America men are violent. Their violence is deemed “natural” by the psychology of patriarchy, which insists that there is a biological connection between having a penis and the will to do violence. This thinking continues to shape notions of manhood in our society despite the fact that it has been documented that cultures exist in the world where men are not violent in everyday life, where rape and murder are rare occurrences. Every day in our nation there are men who turn away from violence. These men do not write books about how they manage to navigate the terrain of patriarchal masculinity without succumbing to the lure of violence. As women have gained the right to be patriarchal men in drag, women are engaging in acts of violence similar to those of their male counterparts. This serves to remind us that the will to use violence is really not linked to biology but to a set of expectations about the nature of power in a dominator culture.

Over the decades no matter how many television shows and movies we have watched in which the hero is the good man who uses violence to win the fight with bad men, many people have long felt that feminist thinkers exaggerate the degree to which men are violent in their daily lives. Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin has courageously and consistently dared to name the widespread scope of male violence against women. In
Scapegoat
she writes: “A recent United Nations report says that ‘violence against women is the world’s most pervasive form of human rights abuse.’ In the United States the Justice Department says that ‘one out of twelve women will be stalked at some point in her lifetime.’ The American Medical Association concluded that ‘sexual assault and family violence are devastating the United States physical and emotional well-being;’ in 1995 the AMA reported that ‘more than 700,000 women in the United States are sexually assaulted each year, or one every 45 seconds.’ ” These facts address actual physical assault and do not cover the widespread emotional abuse that has practically become an accepted norm in male-female relationships whether between husband and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister, or girlfriend and boyfriend.

In
How Can I Get Through to You?
Terrence Real includes a chapter titled “A Conspiracy of Silence,” in which he emphasizes that we are not allowed in this culture to speak the truth about what relationships with men are really like. This silence represents our collective cultural collusion with patriarchy. To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets. Real points out that the fundamental secret we share is that we will remain silent: “When girls are inducted into womanhood, what is it exactly that they have to say that must be silenced. What is the truth women carry that cannot be spoken. The answer is simple and chilling. Girls, women—and also young boys—all share this in common. None may speak the truth about men.” One of the truths that cannot be spoken is the daily violence enacted by men of all classes and races in our society—the violence of emotional abuse. In her groundbreaking work
Emotional Abuse
Marti Tamm Loring explains that emotional abuse is “an ongoing process in which one individual systematically diminishes and destroys the inner self of another. The essential ideas, feelings, perception, and personality characteristics of the victim are constantly belittled…. The most salient identifying characteristic of emotional abuse is its patterned aspect…. It is…the ongoing effort to demean and control, that constitutes emotional abuse.” Significantly, emotional abuse in families is not just a component of the couple bond; it can determine the way everyone in a family relates. If a woman is patriarchal, it can be present in a single-parent home with no adult males present. In many homes patriarchal power resides with teenage boys who are abusive to single-parent moms; this is male violence against women.

When Real breaks the silence, the stories he shares are from family therapy sessions where clients openly reveal the way fathers have enacted rituals of power, using shaming, withdrawal, threats, and if all else fails, physical violence to maintain their position of dominance. In my family of origin our dad in a booming, angry voice would often scream repeatedly at Mom, “I will kill you.” For years my nightmares were filled with an angry father sometimes killing Mom, sometimes killing me for trying to protect Mom. In our family, Dad was not consistently enraged, but the intense emotional and physical abuse that he unleashed on those rare occasions when he did act out violently kept everyone in check, living on the edge, living in fear. Usually a cold, silent, reserved man, Dad found his voice when speaking in anger.

The two men I have had as my primary relational bonds in my adult life are both quiet and reserved like my dad and my beloved grandfather. Unlike my grandfather, whom I never witnessed expressing anger, much less rage, these two men I chose as partners both needed to exercise dominance now and then through rituals of power. One of them was physically violent on a few occasions, a fact he always felt did not matter, and emotionally unkind quite consistently. My second longtime partner I chose in part because he was a major advocate for stopping violence against women, but as our bond progressed he began to be emotionally abusive now and then. It was as though he felt that I was too powerful, and that perception empowered him to challenge that power, to wound and hurt. I was stunned that the past was being reenacted in the present.

In self-help books galore the notion that women choose men who will treat them badly again and again is presented as truth. These books rarely talk about patriarchy or male domination. They rarely acknowledge that relationships are not static, that people change through time, that they adjust to circumstances. Men who may have seeds of negativity and domination within them along with positive traits may find the negative burgeoning at times of crisis in their lives.

The two men I chose as partners, like all the men I have loved, were victims of various degrees of emotional neglect and abandonment in their childhoods. They did not love their fathers or truly know them intimately. Growing from young adulthood into manhood they simply passively accepted the lack of communication with their fathers. They both felt that all attempts at reconciliation should have come from the father to the son. And yet as they matured into manhood, both these men began to behave not unlike the fathers whose actions they had condemned and hated. Observing them through time, I found that both of them had been rebellious and antipatriarchal in their twenties and early thirties, but as they moved more into the work world, they began to assume more of the patriarchal manners that identify one as a powerful and successful man. Though they had not been living with their fathers when it came time to be “men,” the early models of their lives were unconsciously reenacted. They could have protected themselves from this intimate repetition only by consciously working to be different, only by being disloyal to the dominator model.

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. Much of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior women describe in men who are alternately caring, then abusive has its root in this fundamental allegiance to patriarchal thinking. Indoctrination into the mind-set begun in childhood includes a psychological initiation that requires boys to accept that their willingness to do violent acts makes them patriarchal men. A distinction can and must be made between the willingness to do violent acts and actually doing them. When researchers looking at date rape interviewed a range of college men and found that many of them saw nothing wrong with forcing a woman sexually, they were astounded. Their findings seemed to challenge the previously accepted notion that raping was aberrant male behavior. While it may be unlikely that any of the men in this study were or became rapists, it was evident that given what they conceived as the appropriate circumstance, they could see themselves being sexually violent. Unconsciously they engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it.

This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men. Terrence Real calls this early indoctrination into patriarchal thinking the “normal traumatization” of boys:

This indoctrination happens irrespective of whether a boy is raised in a two-parent household or in a single female-headed household.

The perpetuation of male violence through the teaching of a dominator model of relationships comes to boy children through both women and men. Patriarchy breeds maternal sadism in women who embrace its logic. A great many women stand by and bear witness to their sons’ brutalization at the hands of fathers, boyfriends, brothers, and so on because they feel by doing so they show their allegiance to patriarchy. No wonder then that male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships. Such relationships clearly trigger for many males the anger and rage they felt in childhood when their mothers did not protect them or ruthlessly severed emotional bonds in the name of patriarchy.

Contrary to popular myths, single mothers are often the most brutal when it comes to coercing their sons to conform to patriarchal standards. The single mom who insists that her boy child “be a man” is not antipatriarchal; she is enforcing patriarchal will. Researching boyhood, Olga Silverstein observed: “In single-parent families, it’s common to see boys who have become their mother’s ‘little man.’ Often these boys are very bossy children who patronize their mothers, who in fact do uncanny imitations of a certain kind of husband, being alternately possessive, protective, and seductive.” Whether in single-parent or two-parent households, boys who are allowed to assume the role of “mini patriarch” are often violent toward their mothers. They hit and kick when their wishes are not satisfied. Obviously, as small boys they do not have the strength to overpower their mothers, but it is clear that they see the use of violence to get their needs met as acceptable. And while mothers of boys who hit them may feel that hitting is wrong, they may simultaneously feel that it is their job to meet the needs of any male, especially one who is coercive.

Many teenage boys have violent contempt and rage for a patriarchal mom because they understand that in the world outside the home, sexism renders her powerless; he is pissed that she has power over him at home. He does not see her autocratic rule in the home as legitimate power. As a consequence, he may be enraged at his mom for using the tactics of psychological terrorism to whip him into shape and yet respond with admiration toward the male peer or authority figure who deploys similar tactics. In patriarchal culture boys learn early that the authority of the mother is limited, that her power comes solely from being a caretaker of patriarchy. When she colludes with adult male abuse of her son, she (or later a symbolic mother substitute) will be the target of his violence.

Years ago the television show
The Incredible Hulk
was the favorite of many boys. It featured a mild-mannered scientist who turned into an angry green monster whenever he felt intense emotions. A sociologist interviewing boys about their passion for this show asked them what they would do if they had the power of the Hulk. They replied that they would “smash their mommies.” In her groundbreaking work
The Mermaid and the Minotaur
feminist theorist Dorothy Dinnerstein highlighted the extent to which boys respond to the autocratic power of mothers with rage. Like many feminist researchers today, she insisted that male engagement with parenting was needed to break this projection onto the mother as an all-powerful figure who must be rebelled against and in some cases destroyed.

Clearly, patriarchal mothers who have rage at grown men act out with sons. They may either force the son to enter into an inappropriate relationship in which he must provide for her the emotional connection grown men deny her or engage in emotional abuse in which the son is constantly belittled and shamed. These acts of patriarchal violence serve to reinforce in the mind of boy children that their violence toward females is appropriate. It simply feels like justifiable vengeance. Feminist idealization of mother-hood made it extremely difficult to call attention to maternal sadism, to the violence women enact with children, especially with boys. And yet we know that whether it is a consequence of power dynamics in dominator culture or simply a reflection of rage, women are shockingly violent toward children. This fact should lead everyone to question any theory of gender differences that suggests that women are less violent than men.

In patriarchal culture women are as violent as men toward the groups that they have power over and can dominate freely; usually that group is children or weaker females. Like its male counterpart, much female violence toward children takes the form of emotional abuse, especially verbal abuse and shaming, hence it is difficult to document. Maternal sadism must be studied, however, if we are to understand the roots of adult male violence toward women. To some extent the reformist feminist thinkers who have focused on women as the more ethical, kinder, gentler sex have stood in the way of an in-depth study of maternal sadism, of the ways women in patriarchal society act out violently with boys.