The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks

enforced by peers as rigorously as they are in any adult male prison. Those rare boys who happen to live in antipatriarchal homes learn early to lead a double life: at home they can feel and express and be; outside the home they must conform to the role of patriarchal boy. Patriarchal boys, like their adult counterparts, know the rules: they know they must not express feelings, with the exception of anger; that they must not do anything considered feminine or womanly. A national survey of adolescent males revealed their passive acceptance of patriarchal masculinity. Researchers found that boys agreed that to be truly manly, they must command respect, be tough, not talk about problems, and dominate females.
    Every day across this country boys consume mass media images that send them one message about how to deal with emotions, and that message is “Act out.” Usually acting out means aggression directed outward. Kicking, screaming, and hitting get attention. Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.
    The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today’s boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood but is forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and dominance teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.
    Progressive feminist research on adolescent males has debunked the heretofore accepted notion that it is natural for boys to go through an antisocial stage where they disassociate and disconnect. Recent studies indicate that it is actually emotionally damaging to young males to be isolated and without emotional care or nurturance. In the past it was assumed that aggression was part of the ritual of separation, a means for the growing boy to assert his autonomy. Yet clearly, just as girls learn how to be autonomous and how to create healthy distance from parents without becoming antisocial, boys can do the same. In healthy families boys are able to learn and assert autonomy without engaging in antisocial behavior, without isolating themselves. All over the world terrorist regimes use isolation to break people’s spirit. This weapon of psychological terrorism is daily deployed in our nation against teenage boys. In isolation they lose the sense of their value and worth. No wonder then that when they reenter a community, they bring with them killing rage as their primary defense.
    Even though masses of American boys will not commit violent crimes resulting in murder, the truth that no one wants to name is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within and act as benevolent young patriarchs. (More and more girls who embrace patriarchal thinking also embrace the notion that they must be violent to have power.) Talking to teenage girls of all classes who are being secretly hit or beaten by boyfriends (who say that they are “disciplining” them), one hears the same Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde narratives that grown women tell when talking about their relationships with abusive men. These girls describe seemingly nice guys who have rageful outbursts. Time and time again we hear on our national news about the seemingly kind, quiet young male whose violent