For Men to Change

And what that means to feminism

Thank you for reading unknown canon. I write about and advocate for intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis; and directly with survivors of assault.

It would mean the world to me if you could please support by liking and sharing this or other posts. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber — which helps grow both my writing and advocacy ♥️

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I imagine a lot of us are feeling overwhelmed and tired right now. Especially if you’re paying attention to the 24/7 news cycle.

Especially if you’re a woman, trans, an immigrant…global conflicts are at thirty-year high…I know everything feels uncertain and chaotic. I feel it too. I know it’s hard. And I know how tempting it is to give in, and to give up.

You know as well as I do that we can’t do that. And it’s time to wake up. Snap out of the stupor. Stop giving into news cycles that are intended to outrage, then leave us drained and exhausted, so that we have no energy left for the struggle.

If anything, we need people who care about ending gender-based oppression more than ever. Why? Because globally, we’re seeing conservative movements flourish. And the backlash to labor movements, to feminist movements, to anti racist, anti immigrant, anti Black movements — while those movements toward domination and vulnerable are thriving.

Want evidence? Take a look at these charts:

The first chart shows that the number of Americans who identify with feminism. Between gen Z and millennials, nine percent fewer men identify as feminists, but seven percent more women do.

Globally, only thirty two percent - less than half - of gen Z men identify with feminist values¹. That’s men across the global, surveyed in thirty countries.

The backlash is severe: that’s a generation of men who also believe that men are expected to do “too much” to support equality, and that conversely, they’re the ones being discriminated against.

Perceived Oppression

When I think about the perceived oppression of men, it reminds of me of the roommates I had years ago.

They were a wealthy couple, and he had retired before he turned thirty. She is Taiwanese-American, I’m Indian-American, and he is white American. Our genders and racial identities are relevant, because one evening, he told the two of us that he was discriminated against. He told a quick story about how he’d denied a job opportunity because the company wanted to hire someone that was “more diverse”.

His girlfriend walked over to me, and mumbled: “He doesn’t get that it happened to him one time, but it happens to people like us all the time.”

I also think about the secret that no one but me has access to or has ever seen. On it are the names of many, many men (and one woman) accused of assault or abuse. I don’t mean “touched her leg”, I mean “completed penetrative rape”. It’s my survivor advocacy list. I don’t record the names or identities of the survivors themselves. The names I record are their abusers. Most of the abusers reoffend.

So when men and women tell me they think the feminist movement or #metoo has gone too far: I’d argue that it hasn’t gone far enough. That my list — and that one out of three women globally has experienced sexual violence — is evidence of that.

It beggars disbelief that a subset of men believe they’re losing ground to women. Certainly, men are losing ground, but not to women. They’re missing that working class is losing ground because of the powers that be. Economies around the world are becoming K-shaped - that is, the wealth of the upper echelon is growing (the upward sweep of the K) and the middle, working, impoverished classes are losing ground (the downward sweep of the K). The powers that be are gaining wealth and power at the expense of people in the middle and lower.

Those men are choosing to blame the wrong people. It’s certainly easier for them to feel angry and take their problems out on women, immigrants, Black people, et al: people with less systemic power. For some people who feel like they’re losing ground, the way to feel powerful is to further oppress people more vulnerable than them. They’re making other people feel smaller so they can feel bigger. As Toni Morrison famously said:

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have serious problem.

They miss that doing this is simply causing further division, greater loss of ground, and miss the source(s) of their oppression.

The Wall Street Journal recently published a high school’s op-ed on this. “This” being the woes of some modern men.

At my school, we’re hit with a barrage of mixed messages every day. In history class, we’re taught about equality and the importance of respecting women as peers, often through lessons on past struggles for civil rights and suffrage. In English class, we dive into texts that unpack our privilege as white men; we are urged to feel some guilt for the inequities of the world, even if we didn’t create them ourselves. But in the locker room, it’s all about being tough and “manly” and never backing down.

Am I supposed to lead or step back? Does “manly” mean just one thing, and should I still chase it? It’s hard to figure out what it means to be strong without being “toxic,” confident but not arrogant, assertive but not overbearing. Are we meant to shrink so others can rise? Is it always zero-sum? It’s confusing.

We also know that more women than men are graduating high school and going to college, which can feel a little like we’ve lost ground before we’ve even started.²

As

Joe Wrote

mentioned in his essay, which featured the same quote, the history and English texts and teachers probably aren’t “urging” white men toward guilt. The teenager (and many adults) conflate systemic oppression as a call out of themselves. The inequities stemmed from the four-hundred-plus year history of racist injustice and the longer history of patriarchal injustice are taught as an inheritance to overcome. The disingenuousness of the high schooler falsely interpreting the advancement of women as an statement on men — it’s not a competition or zero-sum game. If women improve our material conditions, men do not lose anything, their conditions do not become worse.

The high schooler continues:

That’s where figures like the Tates, Elon Musk and President Trump step in with bold answers: Don’t worry, just dominate. Trump’s brashness mirrors what many of the teenage boys I know crave—unapologetic power.

The Tates, popping up in our feeds and speaking our language, make it personal, like they are coaching us through the chaos. They tell us we don’t have to feel remorse for the things we didn’t do, or even for things we did.

Not everyone at my school falls for it. We debate these macho right-wing icons in class, and plenty of students push back. Real strength, they argue—I try to argue—doesn’t need to shout or flex online. Some guys here say these bros don’t empower men so much as tear down women. Others note that guys shadowed by legal troubles aren’t exactly role models worth following.

Here’s a problem that the high schooler doesn’t address: why do these teenager boys crave unapologetic power in the first place?

That original problem is compounded by figures like the Tates offering (1) easy, guilt-free answers instead of difficult emotional work, and (2) unchecked power and attention and consequence-free bad behavior can seem like a tempting illusion. And when these young men gather in locker rooms, but more importantly, through the echo chamber of the internet, their thinking gets resonated and amplified.

But as this student points out — it’s an illusion, many of us do try to check their power, and the Tates, Musk, et al also receive nearly as much dislike and hate as they do love and power.

The Will to Change

The first book written by bell hooks that I read was The Will to Change³. Through it, hooks offered a blueprint for men to change — for men to recognize their need to be loved, that others in the lives of men are asking for male love, and most of all, that men must examine the ways in which patriarchal culture keep them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their emotions.

In the introduction, hooks wrote of being dismissed by many women in the feminist movement.

Feminist thinkers, like myself, who wanted to include men in the discussion were usually labeled male-identified and dismissed. We were “sleeping with the enemy”. We were the feminists who could not be trusted because we cared about the fate of men. We were the feminists who did not believe in female superiority any more than we believed in male superiority. As the feminist movement progressed, the fact became evident that sexism and sexist exploitation and oppression would not change unless men were also deeply engaged in feminist resistance, yet most women were still expressing no genuine interest in highlighting discussions of maleness. ⁴

I sympathize with hooks: I receive a fair number of comments from people who think that I’m in the wrong for trying to build a movement to end sexist, racist, classist oppression. They instead arguing that oppression should simply end at the oppressors. That’s a nice, and very moral thought, but it’s not how the world works. If oppressors were simply going to stop oppressing when asked…well, then, they wouldn’t be oppressors. If it is from men that power and the patriarchy grow, then we must address men and welcome men into feminist movements in order to overcome sexist oppression.

The most severe way to oppress is through violence, both threatened and actual. For me, the existence of my list of assaulters and abusers is evidence of our collective need to stop violence. It collectively affects us all. I’m not a believer in carceral-based systems as the main instrument of stopping assault and abuse. Because those mean that you are waiting until someone has already started to assault and abuse, then wait to try to punish them after the fact, and also presuming that punishment will act as a deterrent. I’d rather think about stopping it altogether, instead of our societal focus on punishing it after the fact.

I have some hope for men to change. I also have some hope for transformative and restorative justice models. Those models came out of and are more popular in the Black, indigenous, and queer communities for a reason: because those are communities that were traditionally targeted by traditional legal systems. The core idea of which starts with the perpetrator admitting to committing the violence and agreeing to consider the needs of and repair to the survivor(s), and then taking real steps to move away from violence. It also does not guarantee that the perpetrator will never reoffend. It does not mean no consequences⁵.

Whether it be accountability and transformative work or emotional work to know yourself and become more loving, that type of work is months and years of intensive work. And frankly, it’s too often not supported by most of society. When men tried to change, too much of society and too many feminist activists mocked them as narcissistic and needy⁶. I understand where that mockery is coming from: when women are assaulted, abused, experience so much discrimination, it does register as morally wrong to feel any concern about men. Yet, if we’re going to end that women and others are oppressed, we also need to address men.

Make no mistake: that action, what bell hooks calls the will to change begins with the man himself. He’s responsible for instigating the difficult emotional work. It’s not the role of women and others to alleviate his loneliness, nor is the role of women — of mothers, girlfriends, wives — to work to repair the men they love.

It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change. It is true that masses of men have not even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.⁷

bell hooks quoted feminist writer Barbara Deming frequently throughout The Will to Change.

I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they’re acting a lie, and so they’re furious at being caught up in the lie. But they don’t know how to break it…They’re in a rage because are acting out a lie — which means that in some deep part of themselves they want to be delivered from it, are homesick for the truth.⁸

Through The Will to Change, bell hooks digs deep into male experience, with the implication that addressing the causes of male violence and being out of touch with emotions can be repaired if the causes are addressed. She theorizes that the causes are indoctrination through parents, schools, mass media into male violence and expectations of dominance, and reinforcement of suppression of emotion in early childhood. There’s data around this: research shows baby boys express more emotions and reactivity than baby girls. They cry longer and louder. There’s also research that show people speak more to baby girls, and they encourage baby boys and toddler boys to be “manly” and “strong” instead of crying and expressing distress at distressing situations. hooks believed that the techniques used to were shaming and reinforcement of anger and domination as the few valid options of emotional expression that young boys were allowed.

Stanley Fritz

wrote this thoughtful essay about his experiences around how men are taught violence through other men and boys. Progressive feminist research also shows the damage done to adolescent males when they are isolated and left without emotional care or nurturance⁹.

Today, we call the latter the “male loneliness epidemic”. I understand a lot of the eye-rolling at the phrase, especially when women are asked to repair the male loneliness. However, if you take together the Wall Street Journal op-ed from the high schooler, and Stanley Fritz’s essay on his experiences growing up around men: men are causing a lot of each other’s loneliness. A source of that repair should be within communities of boys and men. As hooks wrote and Fritz touched upon:

Once upon a time I thought it was a female thing, this fear of men. Yet when I began to talk with men about love, time and time again I heard stories of male fear of other males. Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed.¹⁰

Back to Feminism

The high schooler, blaming women graduating with from high school and college at higher rates than men. Antifeminists blame feminists for putting women into the workplace when it’s capitalist culture and the shrinking purchasing of the working and lower-middle classes that put women in the workplace.

Say that you are a feminist to most men, and automatically you are seen as the enemy. You risk being seen as a man-hating woman. Most young women fear that if they call themselves feminist, they will lose male favor, they will not be loved by men. Popular opinion about the impact of feminist movement on men’s lives is that feminism hurt men. Conservative antifeminist women and men insist that feminism is destroying family life. They argue that working women leave households bereft of homemakers and children without a mother’s care. Yet they consistently ignore the degree to which consumer capitalist culture, not feminism, pushed women into the workforce and keeps them there.¹¹

hooks points out that feminism hasn’t hurt anyone in the ways that male violence have:

No feminists have murdered or raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating. ¹²

Frankly, feminism isn’t hurting men. Antifeminist arguments are easily disproved. For example, a few gems from anti-equal pay advocate Phyllis Schlafly:

"The women's liberationist... is imprisoned by her own negative view of herself and of her place in the world around her.... Someone - it is not clear who, perhaps God, perhaps the 'Establishment,' perhaps a conspiracy of male chauvinist pigs - dealt women a foul blow by making them female. It becomes necessary, therefore, for women to agitate and demonstrate and hurl demands on society in order to wrest from an oppressive male-dominated social structure the status that has been wrongfully denied to women through the centuries."

If we feminist advocates and activists had a “negative view” of ourselves and the world, we wouldn’t be struggling so hard on our behalf. We wouldn’t find ourselves or the world worthy of struggle.

“The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy.... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

Same goes. If I was solely a victim instead of a fighter, I wouldn’t be fighting. Moreover, I’d argue that it’s the antifeminists that picture themselves as victims: that men and women see women’s equality as somehow oppressing men. As that second chart showed (the part about men being asked for too much), that high schooler’s op-ed, or

Joe Wrote

’s essay on conservative male victimhood — it’s the antifeminists that all too often see themselves as the victims of feminism. Maybe they ought to take their own advice on “self imposed victimhood”.

So when people complain about feminism, I first hear them out to see if they’re commenting on the lack of intersectionality in feminism — that maybe they’re complaining because they don’t feel like they’re included in feminist movements. I’ve felt that way, so I have compassion, and I’ll do the work of explaining intersectionality and that feminism is about ending oppression and domination.

If the complaint is that women are hurting men with the #metoo movement or exaggerated claims of harassment and assault, I’ll also engage sometimes. I’ll ask questions, and they go in a few directions. That men are being accused and “cancelled” for small indiscretions — a false fear, considering that the US president and several of his buddies remain in power after serious allegations. So I explain what I mean by sexual assault. I’ll also explain that false accusations are rare (but not zero), and the hesitation that most women with valid claims of assault and harassment have.

In real life conversation, these approaches often works — if it’s coming from a place of genuine curiosity and good faith. On the internet, I don’t have these conversations, because the commenters rarely approach in good faith and with calmness.

I’ve had many friends over the years comment on my hopefulness. That I think that real change is possible. I didn’t notice that about myself; well, more accurately, I didn’t realize that other people felt that change wasn’t possible. I became a survivor advocate about a year prior to the start of #metoo. I’ve seen so much change in public opinion through that alone. I’ve seen the way people and organizations talk about sexual misconduct and sexual assault radically change too. I have male friends who have changed, took classes, went through therapy, did a lot of work on themselves. I’ve seen women who also thought that other women who came forward about assault were liars — those victim-blaming women changed too. Seeing that type of change makes me believe that greater change is possible. Not easy, not quick, but possible. It’s something I plan to keep working toward — something I’ve dedicated my life to.

Thank you for reading unknown canon. I write about and advocate for intersectional feminist♀️and lesbian ⚢ literature, history, and analysis; and directly with survivors of assault.

It would mean the world to me if you could please support by liking and sharing this or other posts. If you have the means, please consider becoming a paid subscriber — which helps grow both my writing and advocacy ♥️

1. King’s College, London. Gen Z men and women most divided on gender equality, global study shows. March, 2025.

2. Thompson, Eli. Boys at My High School Love the Tate Brothers. Here’s Why. Wall Street Journal. May 2, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/boys-at-my-high-school-love-the-tate-brothers-heres-why-6b1df184

3. I’ve added a summary with questions for men to ask themselves here (it is paywalled):

bell hooks the will to change

4. hooks, bell. The Will to Change. (New York: Washington Square Press. 2004). introduction.

5. Ibid. p 6.

6. I don’t want to distract from this essay with an entire paragraph or two on the intricacies of transformative/restorative justice, but happy to write about them in another essay if readers are interested.

7. ibid.

8. ibid, p 4.

9. ibid, p 43.

10. ibid p 8.

11. ibid, p 107.

12. ibid, p 107 - 108.