part of the reason i love how bell hooks talks about masculinity is that she shows real compassion towards men suffering from the effects of toxic masculinity. she was conscious of how we need to unlearn the ways we talk about men + masculinity just as much as we need to unlearn the same for women + femininity. so many times ill see someone talking about toxic masculinity like (hyperbolizing here but only slightly) "these FUCKING STUPID BABY BITCHES won't MAN UP and go to a therapist!!!" and like. i get the anger. but you see feminists recreating patriarchal manhood by only promoting good behaviors through patriarchal frameworks. any use of the term "real men" is bad because it reifies the idea that manhood is a special title you must earn, and it is something possible to fail and fake. & as important as it is to promote sexual equality + the pleasure of non-cis-men, lots of people are essentially still working with the idea that men need sexual prowess to have worth but just shifting it slightly so there is more emphasis on women's pleasure. but I want cis men to think about their partners' pleasure because they care about their partners, not because they need to check a box in order to keep their man card. and don't get me started on small dick jokes– and the absolutely pitiful excuse people will use that "well, I don't believe it, but misogynistic men get upset when I say it, so it's okay!"
basically bell hooks is so fucking right. in order to create loving men we need to love men, simply for being alive, whether or not they are performing. as much as we need to actively unlearn misogyny (and we do), it's equally vital we unlearn patriarchal ways of seeing manhood. we can't just assume that taking a feminist perspective automatically means there is no work to be done there.
My mom is a psychologist and she has gotten dudes to go to therapy just by telling them softly, one hand gently resting on their arm, "You deserve to go to therapy. You deserve to have someone help you and you deserve to feel better than this. You shouldn't have to go through so much alone."
When I tell you she's made men cry with this, I mean it. I have never seen anyone get a man to go to therapy by making it another task they have to do in order to be a Real Man (TM). I have seen full grown badass, shredded truckers and professional businessman and toughened good ole boys get teary eyed or freeze or cry silently when shown an ounce of compassion because men are starving for it. Men are so used to everything being yet another burden to carry and thing to do in order to earn manliness points in the eyes of the world that being told sincerely, "you deserve to be happy" just about short-circuits most of us. One time one of my bullies' dads went from yelling at my mom to trying not to cry because she just listened to him rant about how stretched thin he was being a single dad, put a hand on his and said, "That sounds like a lot to carry alone. I can't imagine how hard that's been." It was like she'd flipped a switch and suddenly he had permission to feel what the anger was disguising. (She then told my bully to try to think about his dad a bit more, because family needs family. And when I tell you this boy looked like he'd been called out by God Himself, I mean it; he had several revelations and stopped a lot of toxic behavior after that.)
I really hope this isn't derailing with personal anecdotes but I just. I really think it's baffling how tumblr will post all these quotes about kindness, compassion and love and then not extend them towards men. I just don't get it. Because men react to any of it extended towards them like someone in the desert presented suddenly with water.
One of my neighbors is known as the grumpy old guy who hates everyone. He is not grumpy or hateful towards me because I did the very Southern thing of making food for everyone and introducing myself when I moved in. I listened to him rant about how no one does that these days and how no one knows their neighbors and agreed that that's awful and we all need people and it sucks that we're all so isolated from each other. I told him it's cool that he still does stuff like foster cats and didn't let the world drain the kindness from him and y'all, that one tiny piece of acknowledgment that life is hard and his kindness in spite of it took work has made the "grumpy old guy who hates everyone" my bestie. He and I chat whenever we see each other in the hall. He is starving for positivity and gentleness.
One time on the bus, coming home from shopping, I got to talking to a guy in his 50's riding across from me. He wanted to know why I had a bunch of flowers. Snidely, he asked if I was giving them to my boyfriend. (I had on a vest with Pride pins at the time.) I explained actually, they were for my French professor, whose mother had died. He was confused that I said my professor was male. Nobody gave him flowers when his mom died a year ago, he said. I took a flower out of the arrangement and handed it to him as my stop approached. He looked at it as if I'd given him an entire flower store.
A chunk of the internet seems convinced that the way to stop hateful men is to meet hate with hate. I have yet to see that work. I have yet to even hear anecdotes that state that it works, only that it satisfies some internal desire to lash out in response to someone lashing out at you.
But I have seen a construction worker on a bus hold a single white hyacinth with the utmost care and be unable to meet my eyes as he said "thank you".
Reading bells hooks' "The Will to Change" forced me to think A LOT about my behavior and language and what I was actually doing. Was it uncomfortable? Yes, but my actions/behavior/language were uncomfortable and needed maturing.
Going back to the beginning of OP's post with another reference to bell hooks' writings, Feminism is for Everybody starts by covering how the man-hating feminist is a bad feminist, how that kind of thing pushes men away, how it pits men against feminism. The very first page covers this. This wasn't an observation hooks made of the incel movement or the modern MRA movement, but rather a response to 80s, 90s, and earlier (radical) feminism. What we're seeing with these modern pushbacks against feminism isn't new. As everyone in this thread has shown, meeting hate with hate doesn't work. All you really need is some empathy and a bit of tenderness and you can really change someone's worldview.
Later in the book, hooks covers her experiences with lesbian feminism, initially positioning it as a kind of utopia, a way to live without men altogether. Yet even here she saw the same things this thread is talking about, women themselves reproducing patriarchy and (internalized) misogyny to oppress not just other women but men as well. We are all guilty of this, and it takes a great deal of work to even be mindful of this, let alone to overcome it (which I'm not sure is possible in our current society).
This has overlaps with TERFs (real TERFs, not just "TERF as transphobe" as is common parlance). The branch of feminism that many of these men-hating feminists practice and espouse, radical feminism, posits that patriarchy is the root of all problems in society, with men as the enactors and sole benefactors of patriarchy. Anyone who's paid attention at all to just this thread, let alone society more broadly, can see the flaws in this position. Just as lesbian radical feminism presents men as the sole evil in society, TERFs, who refuse to view trans women as women, thus see trans women as men, with all the consequences of a radical feminist's perspectives of men. hooks doesn't cover or even mention trans women in Feminism for Everybody, largely due to how invisible trans people have been in US culture until very recently (with feminism more broadly failing to incorporate our voices until the fourth wave within the past ~15 years), but the throughline from earlier radical feminism to modern trans-exclusionary radical feminism is clear.
