bell hoooks Stirs Bridges Crowd
By Amy McDaniel
A&F Editor

Same place, one week later, similar amount of hype: it is impossible to avoid setting up Michael Moore’s off-putting, vapid performance in Bridges Auditorium right before Fall Break as a foil against which to discuss bell hooks’ provocative lecture last Thursday.

The first rambled, clearly unprepared and constantly seeking the roaring laughter that never came (Moore apparently believes that everything, no matter how petty or banal, emitted from his now-famous mouth is, by that virtue alone, a punch-line).

The second, with well-organized and cited notes in front of her, claimed authority by evidence of her great knowledge, understanding, and awareness—not by an obnoxious nasal voice.

Continuing to pit hooks against Moore, however, would belie their incomparability and would take space from a thoughtful discussion of the ideas presented by the former.

hooks, the renowned black feminist scholar and prolific author, taught by way of example. Her underlying idea was elusively simple: we live in a patriarchal society, and men and women are constrained by it, so we should enact change.

hooks chose to discuss her book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, which illustrates the most counterintuitive part; that is, that men (seemingly privileged with power in the patriarchal system) are disadvantaged by the role imposed upon them. She explains, “Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening disease attacking the male body and spirit.”

Jean Baudrillard succinctly expressed the demands of social roles on individuals, writing, “The indicative becomes the imperative.” The translation for men: I am a man, so I must be a man. In patriarchy—or, as hooks more commonly refers to it, the imperialist white-supremacist patriarchal capitalist system—to be a man means to be aggressive and, more importantly to hooks, outwardly unemotional. The price, hooks explains, is deep pain that men never learn to share and to deal with.

Taken alone, her claim is necessarily confrontational. Anyone making broad claims about the opposite sex leaves herself vulnerable to counter-attack—especially given the aggressiveness of patriarchal manhood.

But the subtext of hooks’ talk was much more inclusive; she did not intend to blame men for not being able to show love.

Instead, in a number of ways, hooks showed how she herself, a black feminist woman, has perpetuated harmful aspects of patriarchy during her life. She neither condemned nor excused herself, but she provided an intimate and candid portrait of a person who would presumably be one of the most disadvantaged in the patriarchal society but who has recognized how she still has upheld the system.

In an extremely fraught example, she described her ambivalent feelings toward her father. At times, she admits, her reaction to his “patriarchal terrorism,” or extreme and overbearing presence, was the wish that he die. She felt that “death was the only way out of the proclamation, ‘Wait ‘til your father comes home.’ If only he would die, we could live.”

But her implication in patriarchy was much deeper than hateful feelings; she simultaneously longed for his love. She explained that our society teaches boys and girls that dad’s love is more important than mother’s love, and this unfulfilled need extends to later relationships with males.

“Emotionally hungry, starved females are desperately seeking male love,” hooks said. But she, like many women, has been reluctant to explore this need. ”To speak of our hunger for male love would be to force us to name our lack and our loss.”

As a result, she concludes that women “close off the parts of themselves that need male love.” Women, like men, hurt themselves emotionally when they do not seek the male love that they need. And so the cycle continues.

She illustrates this complex problem with another personal example. In couples’ therapy in her twenties with her partner of over ten years, she recounts, he complained that she always wanted him to talk about his feelings. He claimed that when he did so, she “freaked out.”

He was right, she admits now. Possibly even more so than her male partner, hooks expected and needed the men in her life to live up to their societally prescribed, unemotional roles.

So the moral would seem to be that women need to encourage men to express love, and men need to open themselves up to this expression. This process will challenge patriarchy.

It’s easy enough to say, but the key is to begin. bell hooks compellingly exemplifies the first step in this daunting process: an awareness of self that indicts, that seeks to understand one’s own culpability in the system of patriarchy.