Reviews and Comments

There are some interesting bits about 'being the fool' (like a jester or a trickster), especially as Bornstein sees them as the people who question society. As a weirdo who has always been interested in jesters, especially in modern fictional portrayals, I find this to make sense.

Though, it does come off a bit clunky and confusing. The original version is quippy and amusing, even if not entirely something I agree with. The new version struggles under both a call back to Bornstein's work on I Am Cait (with Caitlyn Jenner), where it feels more sinister than it's probably intended as a result of today's political landscape:

I had the great good fortune to accompany Caitlyn Jenner and company as a regular cast member of E! TV’s reality series I Am Cait. It was one of the very best times of my life. I remember at one point, Caitlyn Jenner was defending her right-wing politics to several of us, saying that if a right-winger ever ended up as president of the United States, she, Caitlyn, would be in a great position to be that president’s trans ambassador. Well, that made me think. And think. And think. And about a week later, I announced my solidarity with CJ, saying I would be in a great position to be that Republican president’s court jester.

It doesn't help that, currently, a refusal to even stand with trans people is a bipartisan affair (pretty much anywhere). It doesn't help that the modern Republicans are overt fascists (and were even in 2016, when the new version of this book was published).

If anything, it makes reading the new version feel incredibly disappointing.

This book is rubbish, and it's nothing short of constantly reinforcing the so-called masculinity it claims it wants to dismantle.

I've effectively made an essay for each chapter in the book comments here, but I just... I cannot with this book. I have always wondered why it is that I see so many abusive men, especially abusive men who claim to be "progressive" or "radical leftists" or "anarchists," promoting it and utilising it in their screeds that support abuse apologia... And now I know why.

Every claim comes with zero references or citations. When she does cite someone, they're frequently conservative white men. One of them was a former associate and romantic partner of Ayn Rand (Nathaniel Branden), while two others were Oprah-promoted "therapists" who comment on the attractiveness of their patients (Terrence Real and John Bradshaw)... Or another interesting one is Michael Kimmel (but that's because he later resigned from his role in a gender equality campaign group after being accused of sexual harassment in 2018—she probably didn't know about this one in 2004, but it's still an interesting pattern of the men she cites). There's also Gary Zukav, who once wrote that dolphins are killing themselves and giving themselves sicknesses because they're exhausted (not that humans are, you know, fucking up their environment).

Chapter 11. I'm finished. I don't want to write a long review, so I'm probably going to keep the essay to the chapter comment.

This chapter... I have a headache. She keeps doing this thing where, though she sometimes will critique the hyperfocus of US culture on the nuclear family, she places the responsibility for everything squarely within the nuclear family. It's like she can't decide if she wants to critique it (she doesn't in this book) or support it, and she routinely ignores... any aspect of communal child-rearing and communal support of families. It's a bit bizarre, and this is especially true because of her gross fascination with boys always needing male role models (if they don't have them at home, what about communal care? she avoids this conversation, and her work maintains a weird position on the role of parents).

She then drops this paragraph on the reader:

The notion that lesbian women are antimale always proves false when groups of women gather and talk about men. The most vicious man-hating comments are always made by women who are with men and who plan to be with them for the rest of their lives. After forty-nine years of marriage, my mother is angry with our dad. The perfect subordinated wife, now when they are both over seventy years in age, is upset that he is not more emotionally giving. Since she is not a feminist, she does not see that it is a contradiction to expect this old-time patriarch to suddenly give her love. Her anger surprises and enrages him. Mama’s anger masks her fear that any day now she could die without ever feeling loved by the man she has devoted her entire life to pleasing. Like the men who feel that patriarchy’s promise has not been fulfilled, Mama feels that she is left with broken promises, without the reward for performing the subordinate role she was told a good woman should perform.

And I find it to be one of the most unempathetic things I've ever read, especially coming from someone who keeps saying that we need to show real and genuine love (but I guess that real and genuine love is for cis men only, since apparently we can just ignore it in this instance).

Like, first: Why is she just dropping lesbians in here? It's like she's trying to say that lesbians are good, actually, because they don't hate men as much as the stereotype says!

Second: She provides no evidence for this claim. I don't think it's true, honestly. I think this is bell hooks conflating complaints of cis women in heterosexual romantic relationships with cis men who are tired of, well... the stereotypical ways that many men behave. That's not necessarily "man-hating." That's being exhausted and wanting their partner to actually be part of their relationship.

Third: What a weird way to show you have no empathy for your own mother? I don't think this is a contradiction. I think, after 49 years of marriage (as of this book's publication), it's frustration for all she's put up with, for the life she probably feels stuck in and unable to leave, and for the man who has dominated her family for as long as she can remember. Why is her mother not allowed to complain about this? It's so weird.

I also struggle with this paragraph for so many reasons, too:

Many women despair of men because they believe that ultimately men care more about being dominators than they do about being loving partners. They believe this because so many men refuse to make the changes that would make mutual love possible. Women have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men, about their emotional well-being, to challenge patriarchy on behalf of those men with whom they want to know love. We read self-help books that tell us all the time that we cannot change anyone, and this is a useful truism. It is however equally true that when we give love, real love—not the emotional exchange of I will give you what you want if you give me what I want, but genuine care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust—it can serve as the seductive catalyst for change. Any woman who supports patriarchy who then claims to either love the men in her life or be frustrated that they do not love her is in a state of denial.

It feels like a disjointed jumble of thoughts that don't go together, but it also just feels like a verbose way of trying to say "if you love them correctly, then they might be able to change." It's hard not to read this as a victim-blaming text, especially because it puts the onus on women (because they "have not proven they care enough about the hearts of men").

Also, this strange assumption that we're all out here reading self-help books? I mean, I'm reading this one, but a lot of people keep portraying it as philosophy or feminist theory... which I disagree with.

Yet another paragraph that is just weird is this one:

Women who want men to love know that that cannot really happen without a revolution of consciousness where men stop patriarchal thinking and action. Because sexist roles have always given women support for emotional development, it has been easier for women to find our way to love. We do not love better or more than men, but we do find it easier to get in touch with feelings because even patriarchal society supports this trait in us. Men will never receive support from patriarchal culture for their emotional development. But if as enlightened witnesses we offer the men we love (our fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, comrades) affirmation that they can change as well as assurance that we will accept them when they are changed, transformation will not seem as risky.

It does precisely the thing I keep complaining about where she starts off with a thought that isn't all that bad (the first sentence) and the swerves hard-right into being like, "You know the men who have been abusive toward you? If you love them genuinely enough, they'll change." It also presumes that because women are afforded more space to have a wider range of emotions... that it makes it easier for them to "find their way into love." That is weird.

Either way, bell hooks really keeps putting the onus for men's emotional development and ability to change... on women. How is that feminist?

And the final paragraph that made me want to headdesk into oblivion:

Time and time again when I struggled to do the work of love with a male partner who was not changing, I was told to give up on him, to kick him to the curb. I was told I was wasting my time. All this negative feedback made me ponder whether healing places exist where wounded males can go where they will not be turned away, especially when positive change is not happening fast or fast enough. Women who have been victimized by men, women who have suffered ongoing hurt at the hands of men, naturally are wisely cautious about the energy that they can expend in the service of helping men heal. Yet there are many women who have been both helped and hurt by men.

This is literally abuse apologia and support for abusers over their victims. It's also nonsensical because it's conflating not changing at all with not changing fast enough.

Chapter 10. One more to go, ugh.

Snarky comment: I'm starting to think that bell hooks genre of "feminism" should be "Oprah Book Club Feminism," which isn't feminist at all.

She keeps referencing ~therapists~ who are highly questionable and have been supported by Oprah, like Terrence Real and John Bradshaw... both of whom seem to mention, in their books, the attractiveness of their patients (especially female). Or, and this is my favourite one, Nathaniel Branden! Who was a former associate and romantic partner of Ayn Rand. And once again, she references Gary Zukav and Linda Francis.

Seriously, the people she chooses to quote or reference... it is fucking wild that anyone would perceive this book as even a glimmer of being radical or visionary. (Yet, at no point will she actually cite or reference studies or researchers or anything of that nature.)

Imagine if I wrote a book about feminism, but the only people whose work I positively engaged with were all manosphere losers. It wouldn't make sense, and that's how this book feels with the choices she made. (I think one of the few people who she quotes that isn't strange is James Baldwin.)

It also doesn't help that every time she says something where you're like, "Sure, that idea makes sense," she has to immediately follow it with something ludicrous: a personal responsibility quip related to some kind of abuse a person endures, trite religious nonsense, a refusal to actually analyse the situation and opting for a general statement that doesn't make sense in any context... It's really baffling.

Chapter 9 makes me want to throw the book, except I'm reading an ebook on my computer... so I don't think I should do that.

A few parts of this chapter are completely recognisable to me, and that's because they are parts that I've seen both abusive radical men (such as a certain anarcho-celebrity) and Men's Rights Activists referencing... as a way to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. You see, it's because:

Many men in our society have no status, no privilege; they receive no freely given compensation, no perks with capitalist patriarchy.

Which is bullshit, even if you buy in to the logic of what she's saying. It's bullshit because it doesn't matter if they "don't have status." Cis men (because, let's face it, she's not here talking about any other kind of men) hold status over people of marginalised genders; though there are aspects of this that are largely dependent upon context, as a general statement... it's not hard to find examples, even across social classes. (If we add in things like race or sexuality or disability... It obviously is going to complicate things quite a bit in the discussion, and even hooks isn't really dealing with anything beyond a straight gender binary here.)

But why would men behave in ways that support patriarchy if they got nothing out of it? They perceive their status as superior (or that it should be superior, and this is how they access that superiority), they recognise that they get some degree of privilege by following that social structure... Maybe they're not being given better jobs all the time, but they're still getting some kind of privilege that they feel they benefit from.

If there was nothing gained (even a perception of something gained), there would be no functional logic for why patriarchy still exists. It's illogical to claim this.

There's also this bit that makes me feel like I'm kind of losing my mind:

I am always disturbed when male students request references to literature that will serve as a guide as they struggle to interrogate patriarchy and create progressive identities, because there is so little literature to offer them. By contrast, I can offer countless references to any female student who tells me she is trying to critically understand and change sexist female roles. There needs to be more feminist work that specifically addresses males. They need feminist blueprints for change.

I am not opposed to more feminist literature discussing masculinity, but I will say that this book is not that. It further entrenches masculinity in a lot of ways (whether she cared to recognise that or not), and it does not feel very feminist (especially with all the weird people she decides to quote as her minimal "proof," and all of them are anything but feminists).

But let me ask, why is it that yet again men are unable to understand texts unless they are catered to? Can men not read things that discuss gender roles and extrapolate to themselves? Are they only able to understand things when we directly address their needs perfectly? Can they not critically analyse the texts they are suggested and then see how it relates to themselves?

I find this truly baffling. There is such a repetitive notion of maintaining what feels like men needing perpetual mothering. No one else seems to need things to always be catered to them, but men seem uniquely positioned to be incapable of understanding anything unless we make everything easy for them to identify with.

That feels insulting rather than—as bell hooks keeps implying her work to be—"visionary."

Also, not a fan of the huge right turn into spiritualism and religiosity at the end.

Chapter 8 has so much wrong with it, and most of that comes down the fact that watching and reading things is a skill. There are so many fundamentally incorrect analyses about movies and children's shows here that it's beyond ridiculous. It's to the point that I feel like I'm being gaslit about these pieces of media because, if you actually pay attention to many of the pieces... Many of their story arcs for core characters... support the exact "redefining masculinity" that you'd think she'd want to see happen.

Again, no fucking sources. Citing sources was too hard, I guess. (And now that I've also seen people say that "she proved" things in this book while trying to hunt down fucking sources that might have even been used while she wrote the damned thing... it makes me hate this book even more. She has proven nothing here because she has provided no actual evidence of any of her claims.)

Chapter 7! And I feel like I'm losing my mind because of so many repeated things.

First is my common refrain: Why does she provide no evidence of claims she makes? And why do her claims sound so reactionary even as she claimed them to be part of a visionary feminism? For example:

Starting in early childhood, males need models of men with integrity, that is, men who are whole, who are not divided against themselves. While individual women acting as single mothers have shown that they can raise healthy, loving boys who become responsible, loving men, in every case where this model of parenting has been successful, women have chosen adult males—fathers, grandfathers, uncles, friends, and comrades—to exemplify for their sons the adult manhood they should strive to achieve.

There is no source for this. Do we know that the successful single mothers "choose adult males to exemplify [adult manhood] for their sons"? Or are these single mothers successful regardless, possibly because they have a supportive community around them who helps take care of her and her (in this case) son?

Also, why is she so invested in making sure that (cis) boys have male role models? She doesn't seem to share this for anyone of other genders to have them, and we know that people of other genders successfully grow up having people of other genders as role models. Tell me how many non-binary or agender adults had same-gender role models as children. It seems that (cis) girls don't always need female role models and are capable of finding role models in anyone (which should also be relevant to someone like bell hooks who critiqued pop culture—weird that so much media is made in a way that assumes boys can't identify with anyone other than boys and men, but everyone else can identify with whatever's on screen regardless—since it's a similar argument as representation).

Maybe the argument should be made that (cis) boys need to stop being encouraged to have male-only role models and seek out people who they want to emulate, whatever their gender.

This is a constant thing in the books of bell hooks' that I've read, and it makes me feel like I'm losing my mind at how often it happens. "We want boys and men to change, but they can only change if through a lens that caters to them" is the message I keep getting.

I'm also perplexed at her failure (or refusal) to understand what the point of Men's Rights movements (and other adjacent spaces) were or were forced into by an inability to push out harmful elements. She keeps critiquing that they "made no sustained critique of patriarchy," but many of the Men's Rights movements were formed as a response (a backlash, if you will) to feminist movements. Even the very few that were formed as "space for men to engage in feminism" found that they were co-opted, and some of the men who joined them seeking what they thought they were (to discuss liberation, not to critique feminism)... left because of what those groups actually showed themselves to be. (And this pattern has repeated time and time again, so it's probably hard for someone who experienced Gamergate—which was nothing more than misogyny wearing the "ethics in journalism" trenchcoat—to believe that someone could be this ignorant of that pattern. It wasn't even a new one in 2004.)

Lastly, I don't know why she cites or references Gary Zukav and his understanding of masculinity. he man who wrote the following passage is among the last people I want to take any advice from:

After several years of marriage to a willful partner, an acquaintance of mine found herself suffocating in the relationship, unable to express her deepest desires and her creativity. One winter morning her husband’s jeep, which was parked on their steep driveway, broke loose and rolled over her, crushing her pelvic area. Surgery and chemicals healed her hips and eased the pain of her body, but can surgery mend the damage that is done when a woman’s creativity—represented, in this case, by her pelvic area, her reproductive capability, the physical symbol of her feminine creativity—is crushed by the uncontrolled macho masculinity of her husband—represented, in this case, by a runaway jeep? Can chemicals ease the pain of a suffering soul?

(All of this makes me curious about bell hooks' older books. It feels like she ran into the path of New Age hacks, like Marianne Williamson, and just kept going with their bullshit and thinking it was 'visionary' or even largely helpful.)

One of the most exhausting things about this book is that she flippantly says shit for a sentence and then moves on like there's nothing to discuss, and it really pisses me off.

Sometimes they're really interesting things that could be expanded upon, other times it's that she just drops a few ideas into one place as if the paragraph can support all of them despite the fact that she... hasn't addressed any of them. Then there are times where she drops two contradicting sentences next to each other (or if not contradicting sentences, then they don't actually support each other).

An example of all of these is this bit that talks about how "no one has really tried to examine what men feel about the loss of time with children, partners, loved ones, and the loss of time for self-development," which is immediately followed with mentioning Susan Faludi's work on workers who "do not express concern about not having enough time for self-reflection and emotional connection with self and others." If no one has tried to examine this, then Susan's work wouldn't be there because she clearly did (according to this passage) try to examine it. If anything, what ends up being said is that these men opted not to express those concerns for whatever reason. (It also fails to engage with why this kind of research isn't often done. I wonder if there's something in varying institutional hierarchies that might also prevent this. It's very strange. /s)

I'm also bewildered by her choice in using the movie American Beauty to discuss anything about unhappy men who are engaged in "critical reflection" to become happier without actually engage with anything that happens in the movie that could be even the tiniest bit thematically defeating. (It's also not a movie that I would've used to discuss any of this.)

Chapter 5 hit me with a quasi-bait and switch where it started off reasonable and then just hit some notes that are incredibly... baffling for a book that is a "feminist" look at men. It's perpetually infuriating because there are a lot of truthful statements that are buried under a lot of things that make me ask "What the hell?" because they come out of nowhere.

At first, it started with addressing the common stereotypes of how men only think about sex and the ways in which they view it... and then it just throws any attempts to engage with these stereotypes, how pervasive they are, etc straight into the nearest bin and opts to discuss some very weirdly framed things.

Like how mothers "do not like" or "don't know what to do with" their sons' penises and that they don't communicate to their boys that their penises are "wonderful, special, marvelous." And that their fathers are also afraid of them so they just don't address them at all, teaching them nothing. (I showed the passage where this is found to two people without any name attached and asked them what kind of nonfiction writing this sound like; my friend said it sounded like Ray Blanchard or his ilk, and my partner asked me why I was reading a manosphere book.)

Or how "lying about sexuality is an accepted part of patriarchal masculinity" by referencing an essay where a man was writing about the lies and embellishments of his father's abuse (and weirdly chose to edit the quote in a way that makes him sound homophobic). This quote wasn't just about lying to "cover up" his father being gay, but it was also in relation to the abuse he endured as a child. I don't think it's a good piece of evidence for the socially accepted aspect of lying about sexuality.

It also includes what I'd consider to be an interesting typo (where Eric Guitierrez wrote about his "flashy, gay dad" and bell hooks copied it as "flashing, gay dad").

And not gonna lie, but a lot of the conversation around pornography and sex addiction reads like it's coming out of evangelical or conservative new age spaces. It doesn't help that 'patriarchal' is attached to the front of 'pornography' every now and then, especially when it reverts back to generics.

I just don't think this is doing a good job at, like... unravelling the dynamics that it purports to discuss.

The absolute lack of specific examples and the overreliance upon vague notions of things existing annoys me. The first example of this in Chapter 4 happens at the precise beginning:

Every day in America men are violent. Their violence is deemed “natural” by the psychology of patriarchy... This thinking continues to shape notions of manhood in our society despite the fact that it has been documented that cultures exist in the world where men are not violent in everyday life, where rape and murder are rare occurrences.

What are these documented cultures? Do you want your audience to learn anything? Why not cite them? Why not point to them?

There are a bunch of times this happens, and a lot of it is tied to victim-blaming structures of "analysis." This bit is tied to how women stand by and watch their sons get brutalised (and then says it's done because of allegiance to patriarchy, which I find to be a lazy and harmful way to discuss the actual dynamics):

No wonder then that male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships.

But there's no citations to it, and it's bizarre. Men's violence aganist women is formed as a result of their boyhood trauma because... women were bystanders (for whatever reason, though that reason is far more likely related to a desire for safety and a decrease in their own brutalisation)? I get the social conditioning of boys to participate in patriarchy, but I find it weird that this is just left there as an excuse for why men abuse women.

Then there's this gem about single moms that comes with no evidence and a quote that doesn't even support it (because it's irrelevant to the opening of the paragraph):

Contrary to popular myths, single mothers are often the most brutal when it comes to coercing their sons to conform to patriarchal standards.

She then goes on to say that their sons will be little patriarchs, and then says that this happens regardless of single or dual parent household... So... Why does it happen in dual-parent households? And what does the phenomenon have to do with single mothers? Weird setup, if we're honest.

I'm not going to keep listing examples of all the times I kept screaming "EXAMPLES? CITATIONS? REFERENCES? ANYTHING AT ALL?" because that would be almost every paragraph. The assertions she makes have a grain of truth behind them, but I don't agree with the analysis (and often find it to be erring too much on the side of victim-blaming women and "the feminist movement") while simultaneously making sure you know she thinks this violence against women is bad.

I'm not comfortable with giving abusers an out or an excuse, and I'm not comfortable letting them weaponise their abuse as a reason for why they're abusive. At that point, their trauma and abuse doesn't matter; they are hurting someone, and there is no reason for it. If anything, her writing reminds me frequently of the ways in which manipulative people often engage in trauma-bonding, trying to break down a person's defenses and get too close too quickly so that they can manipulate and abuse them.

... It's also hard to read a list of movies that she (mostly) correctly labels as "glorifying war" (those movies including Saving Private Ryan, Independence Day, Blackhawk Down, Pearl Harbor, and Men in Black—the latter of which I never felt glorified war but did glorify secret agencies, even while trying to prevent destruction)... and then says they are "patriarchal antifeminist backlash." While there might be antifeminist messages in those films, I don't know that I'd label them as backlash because... these kinds of movies were not uncommon genres. (It's also weird to see Will Smith get hit twice here? Especially when he's known for playing characters that usually break stereotypes, even of masculinity. Or characters who might have what is recognised as traditional masculinity but also aren't afraid of other expressions that aren't gendered as masculine. It's weird that he's here as 'patriarchal antifeminist backlash'.)

Maybe it's also because 'backlash', to me, implies that they are responding to that particular movement and in that particular way. I don't think Men in Black is responding to feminism; I don't think Independence Day is responding to it, either. Either way, this part is distracting (along with the dig at 'gangsta' rap for being violently misogynistic—not like other genres... like country or random pop songs by guys who literally outline stalking in the lyrics).

I also find a lot of the analysis about women's tolerance for abusive men lacking.

I find it really hard not to be annoyed at this book and the structure it takes, and I also find it so obnoxious that there are so many places where she could cite examples and... chooses not to. Sometimes I wonder if it's because it requires actually looking for it, and sometimes I wonder if it's because the anecdote is only half true. You'd think an academic would, I don't know, cite things more often.

Part of my annoyance comes from the fact that I'm like "Yeah, that's a true sentiment," and then I'm annoyed because she relies on super ahistorical nonsense to make her point (edit: see later, not the next point).

Like, okay. I hate JKR and her horrible wizard book of bigotry, but the fact that she says it "glorifies violence as long as the right side does it" is a bit weird? Perhaps it does (she gives no examples of what she means here—the scenes I remember most frequently are people retaliating to violence done against them... but there are probably examples of vengeance being done). On top of this, she also doesn't provide any kind of nuanced discussion of violence and implies that it is always bad. She doesn't think about the strategic use of violence (as a means to support other aspects of life), and she tosses in this bold parenthetical:

(More and more girls who embrace patriarchal thinking also embrace the notion that they must be violent to have power.)

This is completely refusing to engage with how women might use violence. There's a lot of nuanced discussion to have here, and she just... doesn't. I get that it's a book about men, but the kinds of violence that might be used by oppressed and marginalised groups... may have differences from when dominant groups use it against them. I refuse to claim all violence is bad, especially when we can't even accurately define what violence actually is in society.

There's also this weird bit about how Harry Potter was marketed primarily to boys? Which doesn't make sense because Bloomsbury started publishing it after the editor made his daughter test-read it. What she might want to say is that she was told to use a more neutral name because "boys won't read books by women." This might have actually helped bell hooks' argument that she ignored, too! Which is this constant refrain of [cis] boys needing male role models but never considering that no one says the same thing about non-cis boys. Trans boys and trans girls are never said to need relevant trans role models (except as representation in media! never anywhere else); non-binary and agender kids are never said to need relevant non-binary and agender role models; [cis] girls aren't really said to need female role models. But boys always need male role models... Why is that? Why do children of other genders manage to find role models in people of different genders? Why doesn't bell hooks mention this? (JKR would be a terrible role model for anyone, but we weren't aware of just how horrible she would show herself to be in 2004.)

There's also this anecdote about single moms enabling patriarchal patterns because they have "no time." In it, she talks about how her friend was parenting her son to do what he liked (use his middle name, which was Ruby; paint his nails) by either showing all the men named Ruby who did cool things to the children at her son's school or calling the "cool" adult men to come show that he could do it when his male peers told him he couldn't and made fun of him. She was only able to do this during graduate school (when she... had more time???), and this stopped when she started working (because she lacked time). I feel like it would prompt a huge question: Did her community just... vanish, leaving her and her son to fend for themselves entirely on their own? Or did they exist in the first place? It's a weird anecdote, but it should prompt more questions about what alternatives we could have... and doesn't. It just throws those questions on the ground and runs from them.

Something I hate about this printing of the book (or maybe it's all printings? I only have this one) is that they italicise the honorific '-san' (and I'd guess all the others, too? haven't encountered others). They do it because it's ~foreign~, but it reads more like a bunch of snarky jerks sneering the honorific at each other. I wish English books would stop this nonsense of italicising other language terminology; it's so obnoxious and dated.

Anyway, I like the story thus far.

Chapter 2. I was going to read two chapters before bed, but I'm stopping here because I keep wanting to shake my head.

Overwhelmingly, I don't disagree with the premise that patriarchy is responsible for men's pain. It definitely has a lot of responsibility for it. However, I find it hard to take this chapter seriously in many ways because I've... seen GamerGate, the many trials of women against their abusers (especially high-profile queer women) and the public smear campaigns that their former partners put them (and sometimes their children) through, the trials of women against abusive non-partner men in their lives and those smear campaigns, the way that abusive men are able to weasel out of responsibility for their actions (frequently by partnering with more conservative men who support them), the creation of various men's rights and manosphere projects (which solely blame feminism for their problems)... and people focusing on this so-called "male loneliness epidemic" when... Oh, right, it's an everyone loneliness epidemic called alienation.

So when I see her also blame feminism for not taking men's pain seriously, it's a difficult pill to swallow because if any movement has even tried to consider the pain of men... it has been feminism. Men's rights movements haven't done so; they've wasted their time yelling at feminists for ruining the world (as if feminism is why all their common talking points happen, even though most of their common talking points are patently untrue or are only true in certain contexts).

I find it weird that she doesn't engage with the fact that, if men have a "basic ignorance" over their position in a system... that the system is working as it's intended because they're not meant to recognise the defaults. If they notice it, they might question it. Instead, she claims that this is something that "discounts" the project of "men as all-powerful." That doesn't negate their privileged position (or the power they derive from it).

There are also a lot of claims where I know the evidence doesn't support her (implications that being abused leads to enacting more abuse—the "hurt people hurt people" thing is not really as true as we make it out to be, and people who are abused as children are more likely to be abused as adults) or where I'd like her to provide evidence. For example, she claims that "many female-headed households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households," but provides zero citations for this. Do we know this to be true? Was it true in 2004?

And while I haven't read Susan Faludi (and do not plan to because I've already dumped enough work on myself), I find it interesting that the quotes she provides don't quite say what she's analysed them to... at least in the form we're provided. As such, there are potentially valid questions ("Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt?") that she neglects in favour of placing responsibility on feminism (and feminists) for prompting men to change (despite also claiming that this is their own responsibility) and creating the blueprints for them to change.

Chapter 2. I was going to read two chapters before bed, but I'm stopping here because I keep wanting to shake my head.

Overwhelmingly, I don't disagree with the premise that patriarchy is responsible for men's pain. It definitely has a lot of responsibility for it. However, I find it hard to take this chapter seriously in many ways because I've... seen GamerGate, the many trials of women against their abusers (especially high-profile queer women) and the public smear campaigns their former partners or other abusive men have put them (and sometimes their children) through, the creation of various men's rights and manosphere projects (which solely blame feminism for their problems)... and people focusing on this so-called "male loneliness epidemic" when... Oh, right, it's an everyone loneliness epidemic called alienation.

So when I see her also blame feminism for not taking men's pain seriously, it's a difficult pill to swallow because if any movement has even tried to consider the pain of men... it has been feminism. Men's rights movements haven't done so; they've wasted their time yelling at feminists for ruining the world (as if feminism is why all their common talking points happen, even though most of their common talking points are patently untrue or are only true in certain contexts).

I find it weird that she doesn't engage with the fact that, if men have a "basic ignorance" over their position in a system... that the system is working as it's intended because they're not meant to recognise the defaults. If they notice it, they might question it. Instead, she claims that this is something that "discounts" the project of "men as all-powerful." That doesn't negate their privileged position (or the power they derive from it).

There are also a lot of claims where I know the evidence doesn't support her or where I'd like her to provid evidence. For example, she claims that "many female-headed households endorse and promote patriarchal thinking with far greater passion than two-parent households," but provides zero citations for this. Do we know this to be true? Was it true in 2004?

And while I haven't read Susan Faludi (and do not plan to because I've already dumped enough work on myself), I find it interesting that the quotes she provides don't quite say what she's analysed them to... at least in the form we're provided. As such, there are potentially valid questions ("Given the untenable and insulting nature of the demands placed on men to prove themselves in our culture, why don’t men revolt?") that she neglects in favour of placing responsibility on feminism (and feminists) for prompting men to change (despite also claiming that this is their own responsibility) and creating the blueprints for them to change.