The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (7 page)

In our household growing up it was clear that our mother believed wholeheartedly that it was the role of the man to be a disciplinarian, to be in charge. When our dad used excessive violence, she merely saw it as his right. Lots of women who believe that it is the right of men to dominate feel that they should not resist male violence toward themselves or their children. Not surpisingly, these women, my mother included, use all manner of violence to discipline children. Fearful of being the objects of a grown man’s rage, they may desire their children to be perfectly behaved so as not to arouse Daddy’s ire.

In conversations with men whose mothers were passive as their sons were victimized by fathers or other male parental caregivers, I found that the men were far more likely than other men to idealize their moms, seeing them as victims without choice. While they did not direct anger toward their mothers and were often unable to even consider that she could have acted to protect their rights, these men were themselves violent in their intimate relationships with women. Their behavior affirms Terrence Real’s insight that “the choreography of patriarchy, this unholy fusion of love, loss, and violence, spares no one.” Mothers who ally themselves with patriarchy cannot love their sons rightly, for there will always come a moment when patriarchy will ask them to sacrifice their sons. Usually this moment comes in adolescence, when many caring and affectionate mothers stop giving their sons emotional nurturance for fear it will emasculate them. Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner’s love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother’s love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant. In
Man Enough
Frank Pittman says of men that “while most of us want to be loved, controllers are willing to forego love if that is what it takes to be the boss.” Being the boss does not require any man to be emotionally healthy, able to give and receive love.

Ever since I started writing about love, I have defined it in a way that blends M. Scott Peck’s notion of love as the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth, with Eric Fromm’s insight that love is action and not solely feeling. Working with men who wanted to know love, I have advised them to think of it as a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Most of our relationships have one or two of these aspects. Patriarchal men are schooled in the art of being responsible and giving instrumental care. As a teenager, when I complained about Dad’s emotional neglect and abuse and his sporadic violence to Mama, she was always quick to remind me that he worked hard and provided for his family, that he was home almost every night, and for that reason alone we should respect and honor him. The fact that men often mix being caring and being violent has made it hard for everyone in our culture to face the extent to which male violence stands in the way of males’ giving and receiving love.

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. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. Feminist movement offered to men and women the information needed to challenge this psychic slaughter, but that challenge never became a widespread aspect of the struggle for gender equality. Women demanded of men that they give more emotionally, but most men really could not understand what was being asked of them. Having cut away the parts of themselves that could feel a wide rage of emotional response, they were too disconnected. They simply could not give more emotionally or even grasp the problem without first reconnecting, reuniting the severed parts.

Describing a couple in family therapy, Real recalls the qualities the wife wanted from her husband: “Sensitivity to others, the capacity to identify and share his feelings, a willingness to put his needs aside in the service of the family.” These are the same qualities, Real points out, that “most boys, even in these enlightened times, have had stamped out of them.” He concludes: “In our culture, boys and men are not, nor have they ever been, raised to be intimate.” Women seeking intimacy from men often find their expressions of longing belittled. Many men respond to females’ wanting emotional connection with emotional withdrawal and, in worst case scenarios, with abuse.

Emotionally self-mutilated, disconnected, many men make overtures of emotional connection only to later undermine these with emotional abuse. They simply do not get that love and abuse cannot go together. And why should they get it, when television shows, movies, and so much else in popular culture gives the message that any time there is intense passion between a couple, violence can erupt? Teaching men to understand that women and children do not feel loved when they are being abused, is one of the primary goals of groups that work to end male violence. Kay Leigh Hagan’s autobiographical essay “A Good Man Is Hard to Bash” begins with the story of her dating a man who she felt was abusive and was potentially capable of physical violence. She calls his best male friend for advice about how much abuse she should endure, saying, “ ‘If I’m serious about him, and if I want the relationship to work, to last, there will be ups and downs. I don’t think I should run away when it gets hard. I should be willing to tolerate a little abuse if I really love him.’ ” The friend looks her directly in the eyes and tells her, “ ‘Kay, in a loving relationship, abuse in unacceptable. You should not have to tolerate any abuse to be loved.’ ”

With characteristic boldness and radical honesty Hagan shares that her “understanding of love and power changed forever in that moment.” She had imagined that her lover’s friend would take his side: “Instead, his reaction encouraged me to love myself, to take responsibility for my own well-being, and to reject violence even in its subtler forms.” Hagan was lucky to receive this wisdom early in life. The fate of most women is dramatically different, especially females who worship at the throne of patriarchy. These women feel, as Hagan did initially, that to choose to be with a patriarchal man is automatically to sign up for some level of abuse, however relative. Every day women explain away male violence and cruelty by insisting on gender differences that normalize abuse. Heterosexual women who are single and want to be with men feel that they cannot escape being victimized at some point by emotional and/or physical abuse at the hands of male partners. Collective female acceptance of male violence in love relationships, even if the appearance of acceptance masks rage, fear, or outright terror, makes it difficult to challenge and change male violence.

When the seemingly mild-mannered professor I lived with moved from emotional abuse to physical violence, I felt I should be understanding, forgiving. Like me, he had been raised in a dysfunctional family. However, even though he went to therapy, even though his physical violence stopped, he never really believed that he had done anything wrong. He harbored the notion, as many men who act violently do, that I was responsible for his bad behavior. In Donald Dutton’s work with men who are violent, he identifies women’s seeing behind the male mask as a catalyst for male violence:

Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not “smash their mommy” and still receive her love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in a relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.

Women who stay in long-term relationships with men who are emotionally abusive or violent usually end up closing the door to their hearts. They stop working to create love. Often they stay in these relationships because a basic cynicism, rooted in their experience, affirms that most men are emotionally withholding, so they do not believe that they can find a loving relationship with any man. When I wanted to leave my first longtime partner, who had been continuously emotionally abusive and occasionally physically abusive, it was other women (my mother, close friends, acquaintances) who cautioned me about ending the relationship, letting me know that the man I was with was better than most men, that I was lucky. Leaving him was a gesture of self-love and self-reliance that I have not regretted. Yet I found that the observations of the women who cautioned me about what most men were like were fairly accurate.

The man I had lived with in partnership for almost fifteen years exhibited a mixture of patriarchal masculinity and alternative masculinity. We met during the heyday of feminist movement, and he was willing to work at creating gender equality. As it is for many men today, it was much easier for him to accept equal pay for equal work, sharing housework, and reproductive rights than it was for him to accept the need for shared emotional development. It is more difficult for men to do the work of emotional development because this work requires individuals to be emotionally aware—to feel. Patriarchy rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings. Whether engaged in acts of violence against women and children or weaker men, or in the socially sanctioned violence of war, men are better able to fulfill the demands of patriarchy if they do not feel. Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men. This fear of isolation often acts as the mechanism to prevent males from becoming more emotionally aware.

When large numbers of young men in this nation rebelled against patriarchy to oppose the war in Vietnam, many of them were concerned with justice, many of them did not want to kill, but a great many simply did not want to die. To oppose war and the imperalism that promotes war placed these young men at odds with imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy. They suffered by choosing to take a stand. They were ridiculed by other men, more often than not represented as traitors. In the past ten years mass media have produced a number of movies aimed at boys that glorify war
(Saving Private Ryan, Independence Day, Men in Black, Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbor,
to name a few) that once again make it appear heroic to die alone, away from home, fighting for a cause you may or may not understand. These movies are part of patriarchal antifeminist backlash. They glorify the patriarchal masculinity that enlightened women and men critique. They serve as propaganda, recruiting the hearts and imaginations of boys. Like gangsta rap, they celebrate male violence on all fronts, including the domination of women.

Conservative mass media offer daily lessons in patriarchal pedagogy; they tell boys what they must do to be men. In those homes where enlightened fathers daily work to repudiate violence, television reaffirms its importance, making courting death glamorous and sexy. Poor and working-class male children and grown men often embody the worst strains of patriarchal masculinity, acting out violently because it is the easiest, cheapest way to declare one’s “manhood.” If you cannot prove that you are “much of a man” by becoming president, or becoming rich, or becoming a public leader, or becoming a boss, then violence is your ticket in to the patriarchal manhood contest, and your ability to do violence levels the playing field. On that field, the field of violence, any man can win.

Men who win on patriarchal terms end up losing in terms of their substantive quality of life. They choose patriarchal manhood over loving connection, first foregoing self-love and then the love they could give and receive that would connect them to others. Feminist researchers have long since exposed the widespread domestic violence in our society. Yet since that exposure, violence against women has not declined and in some cases it has intensified. Antifeminist pundits seek to blame the intensification of male violence on women’s greater equality. Yet most studies of family life indicate that in that sphere gender relations did not undergo any major revolution. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild has provided important data showing that domestic gender dynamics between men and women remain fairly sexist; women work outside the home but continue to do the lion’s share of work in the home. Of course men who were covert misogynists before feminist movement felt more entitled to unleash their rage overtly as the movement gained momentum, but the rage was already present.