Manhood for Feminists

Two books I'm reading this week: bell hooks's The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love; and Michael Chabon's Manhood For Amateurs . I really like Chabon as a novelist, and he is one the few writers to explore men's sexual fluidity in his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Manhood for Amateurs is a nice collection of personal essays, but not much else. It's hyper self-aware, yet lacking any kind of greater awareness of the different expectations society puts on men compared to those it puts on women when they become parents, except for his thoughts after a stranger compliments his parenting skills: "I don't know what a woman needs to do to impel a perfect stranger to inform her in the grocery store that she is really a good mom. Perhaps perform an emergency tracheotomy with a Bic pen on her eldest child while simultaneously nursing her infant and buying two weeks worth of healthy but appealing breaktime snacks for the entire cast of Lion King Jr." He could have used that sentence as a jumping-off point, but like any stray observation it hangs midair.

bell hooks's The Will To Change, actually does examine the way the patriarchy harms men. It should come as no shock that I'm a huge bell hooks fan. Her work is immensely readable -- and relatable -- even when it's rooted in academia. That being said a lot of her writing is a little too heterocentric, and I also don't really agree with her views on what place a man should have in feminism. I'm not going to tell any man he can't call himself a feminist, but I think he needs to do some serious searching, and unpacking of privilege, before he can be considered an ally. Without that, I think it's an easy shortcut to, "see, I'm not an asshole; you can't get angry at me." Plus I think she places the onus too often on single mothers, though noting that women can too be patriarchal is something seldom heard in feminism, or at least, the brand of feminism that preaches that women are all good and men are all bad.

Will to Change is a a little 101, but not much within feminist literature has been written about men, so it's an essential read in my opinion.