menby

Hello comrades, as part of our sitewide effort to combat misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes, encourage people to become more familiar with theory, and kick off the reopening of /c/menby, we are launching a book club for The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks, a classic of feminist theory. From the Goodreads page:

Everyone needs to love and be loved—even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.

In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.

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. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.

The book is available free on the Internet Archive in text form, as well as an audiobook on Youtube with content warnings at the start of each chapter, courtesy of the Anarchist Audio Library, and as an audiobook on our very own TankieTube! (note: the YT version is missing the Preface but the Tankietube version has it)

It’s a fairly short read (the text is ~120 pages, the audiobook’s chapters are ~30min each) so we’re going to be discussing 2 chapters each week, starting with the preface and Chapter 1 on Weds, November 27th.

Please comment below if you wish to be pinged when the discussion threads go live.

I need to stress that we expect masc Hexbear users to participate in this book club and engage with the material. Hexbear, like most western leftist spaces, has well-established problems with patriarchal attitudes, misogyny, white supremacy, and western chauvinism. Any comments attempting to minimize or deny these problems will be removed and the poster will cop a ban. Kill the liberal in your mind, listen to what your marginalized comrades have been saying over and over again, and READ THEORY WITH US

Please comment with any other resources or suggestions you think would be helpful as we read through this. Shoutout to @[email protected] for running the original reading group last year. There was good engagement back then but we’re gonna pump those numbers up, right libs?