This week’s prompt is:

“This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”

― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

  • @Phoenixbouncing
    2•1 year ago

    I see your point and I agree with it, but that is not at all what I read in the quote where the author dismisses the assertion that most men aren’t violent by asserting that they are “programmed from birth” to be violent, and as such the fact that they haven’t been is no reason to not treat them as if they had been.

    As for the expectation of violence in media, I’d say that the expectation is, today, far more gender neutral as we have violent and non violent protagonists of both genders in media. In some respects, the expectation is for men to show more restraint since inter-gender violence is not seen the same way depending on the gender of the aggressor (the fact that men are topically stronger obviously plays a role here).

    That said I agree with you that better role models are needed (we need more loving male protagonists and we need to see them triumph over situations where muscle fails). We also, as you shared in another post, need to do everything we can to get more men into services and care, as those men will be on the front lines to help give boys a more nuanced view on what it means to be a man.

    • @[email protected]OPM
      4•1 year ago

      the author dismisses the assertion that most men aren’t violent by asserting that they are “programmed from birth” to be violent, and as such the fact that they haven’t been is no reason to not treat them as if they had been.

      I think it is fairly clear that bell hooks is talking about external gendered expectations not any sort of biological essentialism.

      As for the expectation of violence in media

      I really don’t think it’s about media. Nor do I think the current state of on-screen violence is nearly as impactful to the adults of today. This sort of thing get’s ingrained during childhood and while of course individuals are always changing, childhood exposure while you are still building your model of the world is unique. The current state of affairs will tell us far more about tomorrow’s men than today’s.

      All that said I don’t think you need to look to media to see this phenomena. If you’ve ever walked a female friend or partner home, you’ve probably experienced these pressures. You may have taken them in stride as many are happy to fit those gendered expectations (most folks are very much willing to dish out the good violence) but there is a real sense in which those expectations are both unfair and contributing to a larger sense of violence as a necessity. For so long as we are discussing the right kinds of violence for masculine individuals to enact we are making assumptions about the intrinsic violence of masculinity.