The Will to Change - Book Club 1 - Chapters 1 - 3

obvious disclaimer: this was written over 20 years ago, some stuff might not be quite as applicable, or not very gay, yada yada. we’re all adults here, we can parse meaning and understand historical and audience related context within a piece of media.

AS ALWAYS FIRST BOOK CLUB IS FREE TO EVERYONE TO SEE IF THEY WANNA DO THIS.

Dropping this a couple days early because I want to give people a bit of time to see what I'm doing with formatting this time. Also i'm done with my notes and impatient, fuck the police i can do what i want this is my book club.

We're spicing up the format here! As i read i picked out passages i liked, or had something to say about, or thought were important and i chose to comment on those. That does not mean other things are not important, it's just what i picked. if you had other things you wanted to talk about, i love that for you. i want to see what you found personally interesting in all of this, just as I did with my sections. Also holy fuck i did too many quotes, do not feel free to do as much as I did. I gotta tone it down for next time good lord.

Anyways away we go!

Preface:

We are off to the races! thanks for joining number one. We’re spicing up the format a little bit Here so let me know what you think!

Just to talk a little bit about the preface, hooks comes right out of the gate, swinging with some important contextualization that I think a lot of people would normally associate with somebody not nearly on the left that she is. These are a few of the most important parts in my opinion of the whole preface.

Nowadays I am amazed that women who advocate feminist politics have had so little to say about men and masculinity. Within the early writings of radical feminism, anger, rage, and even hatred of men was voiced, yet there was no meaningful attempt to offer ways to resolve these feelings, to imagine a culture of reconciliation where women and men might meet and find common ground. Militant feminism gave women permission to unleash their rage and hatred at men but it did not allow us to talk about what it meant to love men in patriarchal culture, to know how we could express that love without fear of exploitation and oppression.

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love is about our need to live in a world where women and men can belong together. Looking at the reasons patriarchy has maintained its power over men and their lives, I urge us to reclaim feminism for men, showing why feminist thinking and practice are the only way we can truly address the crisis of masculinity today. In these chapters I repeat many points so that each chapter alone will convey the most significant ideas of the whole. Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving. 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.

Some of this almost sounds like things that a certain group of people would say, huh? You know me I love a good man hating patriarchy joke but there’s a difference between consciously making jokes while understanding a deeper systemic problem, and saying things like that in a dead serious tone that circles all the way back to being un critical and reactionary as a means of writing off a problem that affects everybody on every side.

I want to be clear: I know many people, particularly women and fem people, who have had many awful miserable no good experiences with men their entire lives. I do not want to in any way diminish the trauma or fear or bad things that have happened to people and that they still experience every day. There are also so many men, including myself who has had the exact same things happened to them. I’ve had plenty of conversation conversations with other men about how we’re afraid of men. Not even just queers, cis straight men as well also have plenty of this trauma. That’s pretty fucked up. And probably indicative of something a bit more serious. (she talks about this in chapter 1)

Nobody is ever obligated to help anybody do anything, but the big stinky patriarchy that is really just fucking over All of us is something that only everybody working together has a chance of dealing with. That includes the man who are being bad little boys, They have to want to change and work together. It’s not about becoming their caretakers. It’s extending the bare minimum to give them the chance to change their live lives. People will fuck up and be confused because it’s brand new to them exactly like happened to me, but as long as a stern grace is given, people can and will change. It’s also very unhealthy for people to walk around their entire lives in perpetual fear of half of the human race. Obviously, some of that is warranted, but there’s a threshold where it not only makes your life worse and more fearful, but will lead to interactions that will only deepen the vitriol all inside of other people making everything worse.

All of us are yearning to be better people, and everyone living in fear and anger will not lead to that happening.

Chapter 1

Every female wants to be loved by a male. Every woman wants to love and be loved by the males in her life.

Daddy issues anyone? This chapter really goes in hard about the desire for male love in both directions and trying to deny that doesn’t really do anybody much good. Fathers, brothers, the cool guy at your local deli who makes the really good sandwiches— having that level of connection is meaningful in their own ways. But of course, the good old patriarchy denies men the emotional literacy to love authentically, and everything becomes a problem of power. We are taught that male worth lies in dominance and control, and not emotional vulnerability, which then everybody internalizes in their own fucked up ways of emotional withholding patterns: women seek validation from men who can’t give love, men equate it with control and performance.

The part about hooks wanting to have that level of intimacy with her father, when he was unable to do so really struck a cord for me because I could definitely see something similar when I was growing up. And I definitely noticed myself internalizing more and more of how he acted as I got older and didn’t really realize it until more recently. Thankfully, we’ve both kind of unfucked ourselves in this regard as we’ve gotten older, but I can’t deny that some of those scars still remain and I think about how things might be different for both of us if we hadn’t essentially had all of that initial joy and curiosity burned out out of us.

The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love. This is the longing feminist thinkers must dare to examine, explore, and talk about.

I genuinely can’t understate the importance of this sentence. Despite being Woke McWokerston my entire life has been kind of crippled by a lack of resources for people like myself who have some intellectual understanding of my deep inadequacies as a man due to the culture that I was raised in but essentially zero resources to turn to. I’m always chilling this book because it’s one of the few that I actually know about that talks about this and I’ve done a shit ton of research to try and find good literature on the matter. In my opinion, it’s honestly part of the reason why people like Jordan Peterson have gained so much popularity because for all of his brain damage that he has spouted over the past 10+ years A lot of his base level guidance for men is honestly not bad. The issue is is that stuff like that can be co-opted and taken by people with much less savory motivations to radicalize them into women hating dick bags instead of people who realize that there is a systemic problem interfering with our capacity to be actual humans who can be loving and compassionate and vulnerable.

Patriarchal mores teach a form of emotional stoicism to men that says they are more manly if they do not feel, but if by chance they should feel and the feelings hurt, the manly response is to stuff them down, to forget about them, to hope they go away. George Weinberg explains in Why Men Won’t Commit: “Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can’t be worked out. When the slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.” The masculine pretense is that real men feel no pain.

Whenever I see the words Stoicism it makes me wanna bash my head into the wall. It’s not inherently bad, but as I said before, it’s something that has been co-opted by alpha male grind sent morons who think they’re helping men but in actuality are perpetuating these problems because they hate women. The amount of bullying I got as a kid because I would cry was an absolute nightmare into this day that has still made it difficult for me to legitimately cry around other people. Even just basic levels of vulnerability involving with talking about mundane parts of my day still feels like a bit of a problem and I really hate that because I really like it when other people do it to me. I’ve had conversation conversations before about how men just don’t really share stuff a lot of the time, People think it’s a meme until you think about it for two seconds and then you realize it’s true in a lot of situations.

Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.

LITERALLY THE PERFORMATIVE MALE TREND. Honestly, there’s a certain subset of people who would see me reading this book in public and assume that I was one of these people. There are people who assume a lot of things about men and assume they’re one of those people. It’s bad for the people thinking that thing and it’s bad for the men who are legitimately trying to change because it feels like there is genuinely no winning no matter what you do. Even if it’s a minority expressing that opinion, we live in an age where the minority is annoyingly magnified to seem bigger than it is, and that goes for a lot of different things which is why I try to be very careful about poking fun at people and trends.

There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad. And their mad-ness, no matter how violent or violating, is deemed natural—a positive expression of patriarchal masculinity. Anger is the best hiding place for anybody seeking to conceal pain or anguish of spirit.

This is why there are so many angry video game nerd type people on the Internet by the way. I also think this is why Stoicism has become so popular because there’s an understanding that anger is only acceptable in private situations or publicly when you are morally correct. Otherwise, you have to be an emotional wood board to appear common collective while you yell at video games and employees and your wife behind closed doors.

In a class with students who are reading the trilogy of books I have written about love, with forty men talking about love, we talk of fathers. A black male in his late thirties, whose father was present in the home, a hard worker, talked about his recent experience of parenthood, his commitment to be a loving father, and his fear that he will fail. He fears failure because he has not had a loving role model.

Disregarding all the other aspects of the world that doesn’t make me wanna have kids, I’d say a sizable chunk of it is the fact that I feel like I would just fail because of a similar reason towards this one. I love my dad and he’s come a long way and so have I, but everything that I have dealt with growing up in particularly as a kid has made me not want to risk putting a kid through that exact same circumstance. I know that’s not a good reason, but I don’t think it’s ever something I’m gonna get past. Plus, I also want to just have money and sex whenever I want around the house and not have to worry about a kid stealing 18 years of my life. But the fear thing is there too.

“Something missing within” was a self-description I heard from many men as I went around our nation talking about love. Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief.

I generally disregard any romanization of the past But this one really hits home for me. I’m sure it’s the same thing for many women and femme people, or anyone really. There’s a certain whimsy that you feel like you have as a child, despite any trauma that you might be in the process of enduring that feels like it gets pounded out of you with the more of culture you’re inundated by. And men have their own specific version of that when they’re inducted into the patriarchy as weapons to be utilized.

Women have believed that we could save the men in our lives by giving them love, that this love would serve as the cure for all the wounds inflicted by toxic assaults on their emotional systems, by the emotional heart attacks they undergo every day. Women can share in this healing process. We can guide, instruct, observe, share information and skills, but we cannot do for boys and men what they must do for themselves. Our love helps, but it alone does not save boys or men. Ultimately boys and men save themselves when they learn the art of loving.

Again, we have incredibly important framing around how important it is for people with this kind of emotional knowledge to try and guide me into a better space. It’s not meant to be motherly, but instructional that people have to choose to engage with on their own terms, and not as little babies being guided through the hallway with a little toy dangling in front of their face. So many of us men literally do not have any way to learn or engage with this stuff on our own, and if it wasn’t for women in my life over the years, who took the time to call me on my shit And make me think about the ways that I exist and the ways that they exist I would not be where I am now trying to make a book club that actually functions normally.

Chapter 2

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.

One of the single biggest annoyances is how men have been alienated to this due to reactionary rhetoric being inserted into casual everyday life. This is especially prevalent in a lot of the nerd spaces online who are inherently toxic to women, amplifying this effect even more. Patriarchy has become one of those scary words that you really can’t say or else people will automatically react to it negatively like little babies even if you say 1 million things that they agree with Beforehand. Like capitalism. It’s so intrinsic to the experience of being a man yet completely alienating to most men’s simply because enough men are able to monetize the problems that come with patriarchy to make other men convinced that they can do the exact same thing.

When I responded with rage at being denied a toy, I was taught as a girl in a patriarchal household that rage was not an appropriate feminine feeling, that it should be not only not be expressed but be eradicated. When my brother responded with rage at being denied a toy, he was taught as a boy in a patriarchal household that his ability to express rage was good but that he had to learn the best setting to unleash his hostility.

This is exactly what I was talking about earlier when I mentioned that people were encouraging men to only be angry in specific circumstances. It is acceptable in acceptable places. It is justified when the right check boxes are ticked. And it is only allowed by men who are definitely not overly emotional whatsoever in any way.

Despite the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see men as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.

Hooks retailing of her story when her father beat her and her mother came into soothe her but also remind her of her place is something that I feel like I have heard 1 million times. This unnatural violence is normalized to the point that people Who become the victims of this feel as though it is an inevitability and natural, and the only way to present it is to follow the order of things as it was written in stone. I’m going to be talking about this in the video that I’m working on involving women and authoritarianism. Some people are just so lost in the sauce, psychologically beaten down that they will advocate against their own as a form of protection because they are so afraid of what will happen if they do not.

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together.

A good chunk of my next video is about concepts like this, We can’t fully dismantle a system until we acknowledge the parts that both sides play to perpetuate. Men absolutely have the upper hand, but we can’t deny that the pick me’s are really good at nestling themselves into a nice little protective bunker while they inevitably wait for a backstabbing. As annoying as some of these women are, certain ones can be pulled out of this dream coated nightmare that they’re in.

Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them in families is one way patriarchal culture is maintained. A great majority of individuals enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole that demands we keep the secrets of patriarchy, thereby protecting the rule of the father. This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionalized gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?

There needs to be more effort to educate kids about this sort of thing in general because going through life is a young sponge of knowledge absorbing things like this assuming it’s natural obviously has long lasting consequences. I’m not a children’s educator, I’m not even a real educator I’m just a dumbass with a YouTube channel and a Patreon, I have no idea how shit like this would work, but all I know is I think I would be way better mentally if I had a systemic means of understanding the world I live in before I was 26.

According to Joy Justice, separatists believe that there are “two basic perspectives” on the issue of naming the victims of sexism: “There is the perspective that men oppress women. And there is the perspective that people are people, and we are all hurt by rigid sex roles.”…Both perspectives accurately describe our predicament. Men do oppress women. People are hurt by rigid sexist role patterns. these two realities coexist. Male oppression of women cannot be excused by the recognition that there are ways men are hurt by rigid sexist roles. Feminist activists should acknowledge that hurt, and work to change it—it exists. It does not erase or lessen male responsibility for supporting and perpetuating their power under patriarchy to exploit and oppress women in a manner far more grievous than the serious psychological stress and emotional pain caused by male conformity to rigid sexist role patterns.

hooks really doesn’t spend a lot of time talking about this so for people who might be a little chuffed about some of her framing it is important to remember that this is the absolute core of her argument. There is no denying that men do a lot of dirty, stinky nasty things, and those should absolutely not be forgotten about or brushed under the rug. There is no denying that a lot of men actively support this And they suck. But we cannot reject the other side of this entire problem that men are also hurt by these form of gender roles and dehumanizing men does absolutely nobody any good. I’m being particularly annoying about this point because it’s one of the biggest criticisms that I have in a lot of very puritanical coded feminist discourse that I see surrounding men (Which I acknowledge is the minority) that is amplified by social media. This is not real feminism. hooks would be displeased. Rebecca Solnit would be displeased. Anyone who is actually serious about this understands that this is only a path to being more afraid of the world around you, the people you interact with every day, and go directly against the systemic principles that so many people claim to advocate for. We’re all allowed to make some man hating jokes as a treat, but they need to be jokes.

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Masculinity isn’t bad, just like femininity isn’t bad. They can be strong and empowering to everybody, regardless of what gender or sex you Identify with. We love femboys and studs in these parts. The issue is one cannot be framed as better than the other. I enjoy labels so obviously, I am biased on this one, but I think they are useful tools for helping people identify with aspects of themselves and fit into certain cultural formations just like every other label that we use. If anybody reading, this doesn’t happen to be a big fan of labels I would be very curious to hear your perspective on this point Because personally, I don’t necessarily vibe with gender abolition And the subsequent things that come with it but different strokes for different folks.

To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

Shout out Terrence Real. I don’t think he’s wrong. We’re basically asking half the world to begin rethinking the roles that they’ve been put in naturally their entire lives. Women have had a head-start on this for a long time now, but for men, it can feel significantly more daunting because we’re not quite at Ground Zero but pretty close to that. The men’s liberation movement in the 60s and the 70s tried to do something like this, but they really kind of failed because they all collapsed in on themselves. There was a lot of friction with women when that started happening and I’m pretty sure we can actively see it going on right now with more and more men becoming enlightened soy cucks like myself due to other men reacting very unpleasantly to our presence. Despite the unbelievable nightmare that we are living through every day, particularly in America, I do think we are really for the first time moving forward on something to the alternative of patriarchal masculinity. It’s pretty small and I don’t really know how much bigger it can get considering everything going on right now, but it is there and we all have to work together to make that shit grow just like bell hooks says. Death to the patriarchy. Stop with the “performative men” bullshit.

Chapter 3

Boys are not seen as lovable in patriarchal culture. Even though sexism has always decreed that boy children have more status than girls, status and even the rewards of privilege are not the same as being loved.

I’ve been reading another book recently called Come As You Are by Emily by Emily Nagoski, which is a really good book about sex and how culture fucks up particularly women in terms of their relationship with it. This reminded me of a part which talked about how women are expected to be sexually desirable yet that also makes it so they’re not seen as lovable because they lack of purity in this weird fucked up paradox. We really do have 1 million ways of essentially devaluing men and women and everybody in between to make them unworthy of love and yet simultaneously make them valuable or powerful in a different way. It’s a form of dehumanization that definitely affects how men are seen almost as objects of violence and oppression and the power because that is what the patriarchy has magically decreed as correct, similar to the dehumanization of women as sex objects.

Antifeminist women like Christina Hoff Sommers curry patriarchal favor with men by spreading the idea, put forward in Sommers’s book Thee War against Boys, that “feminism is harming our young men.”

Fuck this bitch.

Where and how do boys learn what it means to be a man? They seem to learn it all too often from the mass media and from the most visible males in their community, particularly their peers. Boys’ friends are the arbitrators of what is masculine and what is feminine, so resilience among the boys in a community depends upon changing macho attitudes among male peer groups and broadening their concept of what a real man is and does.

One of the most devastating insult a middle school boy can be hit with this to be called a girl. Even if it’s from people that we fucking hate there’s still a level of insecurity around wanting to be perceived in this very narrow level of masculinity that were told is naturalistic and how we have to be or else we lack value and are lame and dumb. The people around us are arbiters of this and in school it’s completely up to chance who you’re stuck with. I’ve had long hair, basically my entire life and that has been an endless point of contention for so many men even though chicks (and everyone else) dig that shit.

There are two major barriers preventing researchers from targeting patriarchy. Researchers fear that overtly political analysis will alienate readers on one hand, and on the other hand they may simply have no alternative visions to offer.

One of my least favorite things is when people try to make something purely objective because it’s literally impossible to detach the material and social realities from any form of analysis about anything. Too many bitch ass centrists want to try to weave this magical narrative where everybody is somehow on the equal ground and If we remove all the impurities in our research, we can magically find a perfect solution. This essentially makes it so both of bell hooks points are combined into one. Without the overly political analysis, there is no way to develop an alternative vision. The very concept of patriarchy is entirely political and trying to divorce it from that reality only makes you look like a fucking moron.

Many antipatriarchal parents find that the alternative masculinities they support for their boy children are shattered not by grown-ups but by sexist male peers. Progressive parents who strive to be vigilant about the mass media their boys have access to must constantly intervene and offer teachings to counter the patriarchal pedagogy that is deemed “normal.”

I found this section about the parent who is helping her son deal with all this stuff for liking the things that he likes to be very endearing. I would say that my parents were more neutral on this than one way or the other and I do feel to a certain degree that some extra guidance would’ve been helpful. Thankfully, I had a whole swap of YouTube video essays to learn about this as I got older, but there really wasn’t much in terms of legitimate guidance when I was a young dude who just wanted to enjoy long hair. Literally any form of mentorship can be super valuable and I feel like that’s something that a lot of people Simply do not have access to in any other way, and that leaves them highly susceptible to a lot of the dumb bullshit that we see online or perpetuated through our peers.

Every day across this country boys consume mass media images that send them one message about how to deal with emotions, and that message is “Act out.” Usually acting out means aggression directed outward. Kicking, screaming, and hitting get attention. Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.

Everybody complaining about my iDubbbz video is a fucking moron.

Even though masses of American boys will not commit violent crimes resulting in murder, the truth that no one wants to name is that all boys are being raised to be killers even if they learn to hide the killer within and act as benevolent young patriarchs. (More and more girls who embrace patriarchal thinking also embrace the notion that they must be violent to have power.) Talking to teenage girls of all classes who are being secretly hit or beaten by boyfriends (who say that they are “disciplining” them), one hears the same Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde narratives that grown women tell when talking about their relationships with abusive men.

The amount of young women who are almost immediately thrust into a violent relationship is incredibly disgusting, and I’m sure this is very similar in queer male relationships in some regards as well.

Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity. Luckily there have been and are individual gay men who dare to challenge patriarchal masculinity. However, most gay men in our culture are as embracing of sexist thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behavior that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men. Hence many gay men are as angry as their straight counterparts.

Remember everybody, misogyny is a bonding practice amongst men no matter How many rainbow flags they might have hanging around their apartment.

Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.

The military runs off of this. Silicon Valley runs off of this. Alpha male Podcasts runoff of this. Similarly to what Naomi Klein talked about in the beauty myth (shout out to my exploring gamer beauty standards video), male rage is seen as something actively profitable to engender, just like the sexualization of women. It is seen as naturalistic and morally good and therefore financially acceptable. big money = big good obviously.

The Harry Potter movies glorify the use of violence to maintain control over others. In Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets violence when used by the acceptable groups is deemed positive. Sexism and racist thinking in the Harry Potter books are rarely critiqued. Had the author been a ruling-class white male, feminist thinkers might have been more active in challenging the imperialism, racism, and sexism of Rowling’s books.

FRIENDLY REMINDER ROWLING SUCKS AND ALWAYS HAS, AND HOOKS CALLED THAT SHIT 20 YEARS AGO.

Literature for children is just as fixated on furthering patriarchal attitudes as television. There are just few a books with male characters focusing on boys that challenge the patriarchal norm in anyway.

It’s not a children’s book but shout out Lord of the Rings. If anybody else has any other good examples of this specifically related to children’s media, I would really love to hear anything. I feel like avatar the last Airbender is a pretty good example. The newer She-Ra show is pretty good too.

To truly protect and honor the emotional lives of boys we must challenge patriarchal culture. And until that culture changes, we must create the subcultures, the sanctuaries where boys can learn to be who they are uniquely, without being forced to conform to patriarchal masculine visions. To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both private and public, where their right to wholeness can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.

I think too many people get caught up on the idea that the patriarchy and the current culture is one big massive unchangeable blob, but it’s important to remember that bigger change only happens when you start making smaller changes and more localized areas. We have to work on building these smaller communities and places for discussion that can eventually grow and prosper into something that can ideally eclipse the massive shit storm that we’ve made for ourselves. We have to try even little things like making some stupid book club to work on getting these ideas out into the public because that’s the only way this shit works. We gotta help dudes, realizing that we’re not taught to be people, but just a different form of construct akin to what women have to go through on their side of the aisle. Until both sides begin working together to dismantle the things that the patriarchy wants of both of us, we will never be able to truly better ourselves.

Howdy, did I have a lot more to say than I thought I did but I thought that this was pretty fun and I liked the format and please tell me if you did too. Or if it was stinky. I’m excited to read all of your cool thoughts, and I am excited to see you you all again for the second book club November 8th!