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! 
I don’t know what my malfunction is but reading this had reminded me of the deep lack of love I have in my life. I have geinune paternal love and fraternal love from my direct and extended family. I am deeply grateful and honored to have that. However, outside of the family bonds I don’t think I have any real meaningful exchanges of love in my life.
I have friends but they are more like “katz I know” rather than “people I love and people I know love me as well”. I haven’t known the love of a woman ever I think in a romantic sense so I find reading a lot of this to be “abstract” in that I can’t even conceptualize that. I gloss over mentions of being a partner/lover, not out of any sort disinterest but more so “it doesn’t really apply to me” which fine, not even word is for every person at every time.
To be totally frank, it’s really reminding me how isolated and alone I really am. Which is cool in the sense that it’s worth highlighting these feelings that exist in me, and also that I too fall into the trap of “stoic masculinity™©®” in that I just thug it out. My life sucks, I’m not happy, I don’t have love or really even access to it, but I gotta keep it pushin’ or I will perish. Which sucks and this book is giving me a reexamination of those feelings that she directly mentions that men package up and push deep down within ourselves. So much of the stuff I felt/feel is not anything I can meaningfully share or express (or feel safe to do so) in the real world. It’s really making see that I’m a really alienated from myself in like a bad way.
The part i find so interesting that as dudes we are taught both overtly, explicitly, and implicitly this sort of “stoic masculinity™©®”. I think my Dad is a good guy, old-school but overall decent and upright. Never did he say “REAL MEN™©® don’t cry” or anything like that. My uncles and older cousins were never on some “YOU GOTTA BE A REAL MAN™©®” shit either. However as I read this book I’m thinking that these messages exist in all sorts of seen and unseen ways in our childhoods and cultures. It’s really fucked.
It’s really just reminding me “Bro, you are deeply hurt and yearn for a thing you don’t even know. Lmaooo this sucks dude, you are so fucked”. I don’t say that in jest at all. Just turning the pages (i got a copy from local library) I feel that sense of “oh shit, you’re not not good my man, you not in a good place at all. You’re not broken or whatever but you certainly wounded and you just have had the fortune and fortitude to keep it going. As you are is probably isn’t how you ought to be”
It’s an uncomfortable read for me for sure. Though it’s uncomfortable I know it’s a worthwhile read.