Hello comrades, it’s time for our first discussion thread for The Will to Change! Please share your thoughts below on the first two sections of the book. There’s quite a lot to talk about between hooks’ discussion of masculinity discourse within feminist circles, the ways both men and women uphold patriarchy, and the near universal experience of men being forced to suppress their rich emotional worlds from a young age. I’ll be posting my thoughts in a little bit after I’m done with work.

If you haven’t read the book yet but would like to, its 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) Let me know if you’d like to be added to the ping list!

Our next discussion will be on Chapters 2 (Understanding Patriarchy) and 3 (Being a Boy), beginning on 12/4.

Thanks to everyone who is or will be participating, I’m really looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts! feminism

  • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    Hitting on people in a way that is not potentially threatening and intrusive is hard. It’s another thing i’ve only started learning after coming out, and i don’t know if i could have learned that before because heteronormativity makes such a weird, counterintuitive dance out of flirting. This is already getting quite long because there’s so much implicit assumptions to unpack around gender and sexuality, but a lot of guys have a hard time establishing and respecting consent when they’re flirting, and that absolutely contributes to the self-preserving fear thing. We have to maintain a certain amount of distance to men we do not know very well simply to protect ourselves from advances we do not want. The “she was nice to me, that must mean she’s DTF” mindset is fairly prevalent and the reaction to that is that we are afraid to be nice to men.

    Thanks for saying this, as a man myself I’ve struggled with this for years. In high school I remember making women uncomfortable unintentionally and feeling like some sort of monster wandering around a school rather than a person. That experience pushed me away from dating for years and I have had to relearn how to flirt. Toeing that line is so incredibly difficult and it boggles my mind that the only people in a career of teaching men how to flirt are the people who give the most patriarchal, controlling advice possible (pickup artists).