Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
Location 59
never refusing to face the truth of our feelings as they rise up in us—even when we wish it were not the truth. So we have to admit to the truth that we sometimes wish our own fathers, sons, brothers, lovers were not there. But, this truth exists alongside another truth: the truth that this wish causes us anguish.”
📖 (Location 59)
Location 94
This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal father not to come home. Women and female and male children, dominated by men, have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change. They believe that men who are not dominators will not protect them. They believe that men are hopeless.
📖 (Location 94)
Location 114
It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change.
📖 (Location 114)
Location 116
To know love, men must be able to let go the will to dominate.
📖 (Location 116)
Location 170
The unhappiness of men in relationships, the grief men feel about the failure of love, often goes unnoticed in our society precisely because the patriarchal culture really does not care if men are unhappy.
📖 (Location 170)
Location 175
“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.
📖 (Location 175)
Location 193
Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.
📖 (Location 193)
Location 238
the role patriarchal notions of manhood play in teaching boys that it is their nature to kill, then teaching them that they can do nothing to change this nature—nothing, that is, that will leave their masculinity intact. As our culture prepares males to embrace war, they must be all the more indoctrinated into patriarchal thinking that tells them that it is their nature to kill and to enjoy killing. Bombarded by news about male violence, we hear no news about men and love.
📖 (Location 238)
Location 290
what will motivate males in a patriarchal culture who have been taught that to love emasculates them to change, to choose love, when the choice means that they must stand against patriarchy, against the tyranny of the familiar. We cannot change men but we can encourage, implore, and affirm their will to change.
📖 (Location 290)
Location 302
Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit
📖 (Location 302)
Location 376
“patriarchal rules still govern most of the world’s religious, school systems, and family systems.” Describing the most damaging of these rules, Bradshaw lists “blind obedience—the foundation upon which patriarchy stands; the repression of all emotions except fear; the destruction of individual willpower; and the repression of thinking whenever it departs from the authority figure’s way of thinking.” Patriarchal thinking shapes the values of our culture.
📖 (Location 376)
Location 385
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.
📖 (Location 385)
Location 420
Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male.
📖 (Location 420)
Location 434
Few men brutally abused as boys in the name of patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain true to themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.
📖 (Location 434)
Location 461
Patriarchy as a system has denied males access to full emotional well-being, which is not the same as feeling rewarded, successful, or powerful because of one’s capacity to assert control over others. To truly address male pain and male crisis we must as a nation be willing to expose the harsh reality that patriarchy has damaged men in the past and continues to damage them in the present. If patriarchy were truly rewarding to men, the violence and addiction in family life that is so all-pervasive would not exist. This violence was not created by feminism. If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives—a dissatisfaction extensively documented in the work of Studs Terkel and echoed in Faludi’s treatise—would not exist.
📖 (Location 461)
Location 477
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.
📖 (Location 477)
Location 479
Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation.
📖 (Location 479)
Location 568
we begin to protect the emotional well-being of boys and of all males when we call this propaganda by its true name, when we acknowledge that patriarchal culture requires that boys deny, suppress, and if all goes well, shut down their emotional awareness and their capacity to feel.
📖 (Location 568)
Location 573
rare boys who happen to live in antipatriarchal homes learn early to lead a double life: at home they can feel and express and be; outside the home they must conform to the role of patriarchal boy. Patriarchal boys, like their adult counterparts, know the rules: they know they must not express feelings, with the exception of anger; that they must not do anything considered feminine or womanly.
📖 (Location 573)
Location 587
debunked the heretofore accepted notion that it is natural for boys to go through an antisocial stage where they disassociate and disconnect. Recent studies indicate that it is actually emotionally damaging to young males to be isolated and without emotional care or nurturance. In the past it was assumed that aggression was part of the ritual of separation, a means for the growing boy to assert his autonomy. Yet clearly, just as girls learn how to be autonomous and how to create healthy distance from parents without becoming antisocial, boys can do the same. In healthy families boys are able to learn and assert autonomy without engaging in antisocial behavior, without isolating themselves.
📖 (Location 587)
Location 604
Anger prevents love and isolates the one who is angry. It is an attempt, often successful, to push away what is most longed for—companionship and understanding. It is a denial of the humanness of others, as well as a denial of your own humanness. Anger is the agony of believing that you are not capable of being understood, and that you are not worthy of being understood.
📖 (Location 604)
Location 632
Patriarchal fathers cannot love their sons because the rules of patriarchy dictate that they stand in competition with their sons, ready to prove that they are the real man, the one in charge.
📖 (Location 632)
Location 666
few male models for grieving, and he emphasizes that “men in particular seem incapable of grieving and mourning on an individual basis.
📖 (Location 666)
Location 741
emotional abuse is “an ongoing process in which one individual systematically diminishes and destroys the inner self of another. The essential ideas, feelings, perception, and personality characteristics of the victim are constantly belittled…
📖 (Location 741)
Location 790
male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships. Such relationships clearly trigger for many males the anger and rage they felt in childhood when their mothers did not protect them or ruthlessly severed emotional bonds in the name of patriarchy.
📖 (Location 790)
Location 831
“the choreography of patriarchy, this unholy fusion of love, loss, and violence, spares no one.”
📖 (Location 831)
Location 831
Mothers who ally themselves with patriarchy cannot love their sons rightly, for there will always come a moment when patriarchy will ask them to sacrifice their sons. Usually this moment comes in adolescence, when many caring and affectionate mothers stop giving their sons emotional nurturance for fear it will emasculate them. Unable to cope with the loss of emotional connection, boys internalize the pain and mask it with indifference or rage.
📖 (Location 831)
Location 835
unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner’s love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother’s love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant.
📖 (Location 835)
Location 852
patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves.
✏️ When women later ask men to give more emotionally.. They cant even grasp doing that. They need to reconnect what severed first. 📖 (Location 852)
Location 948
If women have been taught through sexist socialization that a journey through the difficult terrain of sex will lead us to our heart’s desire, men have been taught that their heart’s desire should be for sex and more sex.
📖 (Location 948)
Location 964
people still believe that sex is something men have to have. Underlying this assumption is the belief that if men are not sexually active, they will act out or go crazy. This is why male-on-male sexual violence is accepted in our nation’s prisons. This is why rape—whether date rape, marital rape, or stranger rape—is still not deemed a serious crime. This is why the rape of children, especially when conducted by mild-mannered, nice men, is allowed.
📖 (Location 964)
Location 979
Males, whether gay or straight, learn early on in life that one of the primary rewards offered to them for obedience to patriarchal thought and practice is the right to dominate females sexually. And if no female is around, they have the right to place a weaker male in the “female” position.
📖 (Location 979)
Location 1004
In patriarchal culture everyone is encouraged to see the penis, even the penis of a small boy, as a potential weapon. This is the psychology of a rape culture. Boys learn that they should identify with the penis and the potential pleasure erections will bring, while simultaneously learning to fear the penis as though it were a weapon that could backfire, rendering them powerless, destroying them. Hence the underlying message boys receive about sexual acts is that they will be destroyed if they are not in control, exercising power.
✏️ Rape culture is defined by the whole “he’s gotta have it” mantra 📖 (Location 1004)
Location 1017
Sexual pleasure is rarely the goal in a sexual encounter, something far more important than mere pleasure is on the line, our sense of ourselves as men. Men’s sense of sexual scarcity and an almost compulsive need for sex to confirm manhood feed each other, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of sexual deprivation and despair. And it makes men furious at women for doing what women are taught to do in our society: saying no. Despair and rage are the feelings men bring to sex, whether with women or with other men.
📖 (Location 1017)
Location 1040
Kimmel contends that male consumption of pornography is fed by the sexual lust males are taught to feel all the time and their rage that this lust cannot be satisfied: Pornography can sexualize that rage, and it can make sex look like revenge… Everywhere, men are in power, controlling virtually all the economic, political, and social institutions of society. Yet individual men do not feel powerful—far from it. Most men feel powerless and are often angry at women, whom they perceive as having sexual power over them: the power to arouse them and to give or withhold sex. This fuels both sexual fantasies and the desire for revenge.
📖 (Location 1040)
Location 1045
women are the targets for displaced male rage at the failure of patriarchy to make good on its promise of fulfillment, especially endless sexual fulfillment.
📖 (Location 1045)
Location 1049
Rather than seeing the violence men do as an expression of power, we would need to call it by its true name—pathology. Patriarchal violence is a mental illness.
📖 (Location 1049)
Location 1052
To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body,
📖 (Location 1052)
Location 1058
To fuck a woman is to have sex with her. To fuck someone in another context…means to hurt or cheat a person. And when hurled as a simple insult (“fuck you”) the intent is denigration and the remark is often a prelude to violence or the threat of violence. Sex in patriarchy is fucking. That we live in a world in which people continue to use the same word for sex and violence, and then resist the notion that sex is routinely violent and claim to be outraged when sex becomes overtly violent, is testament to the power of patriarchy. One might add that it is a supreme testament to patriarchy’s power that it can convince men and women to pretend that sexual violence satisfies.
📖 (Location 1058)
Location 1149
the behavior of men who make money yet refuse to pay alimony or child support, or their peers who head households yet squander their paycheck on individual pleasures, challenges the patriarchal insistence that men are eager to be caretakers and providers.
📖 (Location 1149)
Location 1159
The conflict between finding time for work and finding time for love and loved ones is rarely talked about in our nation. It is simply assumed in patriarchal culture that men should be willing to sacrifice meaningful emotional connections to get the job done. No one has really tried to examine what men feel about the loss of time with children, partners, loved ones, and the loss of time for self-development.
📖 (Location 1159)
Location 1165
Contemporary patriarchy has offered disappointed male workers a trade-off: the perks of manhood that a depressed economy takes away can be redeemed in the realm of the sexual through domination of women. When that world of sexuality is not fulfilling, males rage.
📖 (Location 1165)
Location 1183
they do not critique the economy that makes it necessary for all adults to work outside the home; instead they pretend that feminism keeps women in the workforce. Most women work because they want to leave the house and because their families need the income to survive, not because they are feminists who believe that their working is a sign of liberation.
✏️ Capitalism at work everywhere 📖 (Location 1183)
Location 1195
Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.
📖 (Location 1195)
Location 1234
working men must make time to get in touch with their emotional selves if they are to become men of feeling.
✏️ Its Sad that pop culture shows that only with extreme scenarios like impending death do men feel motivated to ease off work and make time to take care of self and emotions and others. Death is the only thing that gives us permission to love? and worst part? Once they’ve learned to love, then they die. They can’t be allowed to live their best and enlightened self. Patriarchy can’t have that. 📖 (Location 1234)
Location 1240
male who defines his self through work seeks to do so because “this is the only identity that can traditionally belong to us…believing we can still prove our masculinity by showing we do not need anything from others.”
📖 (Location 1240)
Location 1247
individual men are engaged in the work of emotional recovery every day, but the work is not easy because they have no support systems within patriarchal culture, especially if they are poor and working-class.
📖 (Location 1247)
Location 1253
The success of AA is tied to the fact that the practice of recovery takes place in the context of community, one in which shame about failure can be expressed and male longing for healing validated.
📖 (Location 1253)
Location 1278
“I am learning that the key to our survival is love. When we love someone and feel loved by them, somehow along the way our suffering subsides, our deepest wounds begin healing, our hearts start to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and to open a little wider. We begin experiencing our own emotions and the feelings of those around us.”
📖 (Location 1278)
Location 1282
Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable.
📖 (Location 1282)
Location 1299
When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.
📖 (Location 1299)
Location 1311
Feminist movement was from the outset presented to most males via mass media as antimale.
✏️ - Vocal minority and stereotype was anti male
- Many express their concern for the plight of men within patriarchy, even as they share that they are unwilling to give their energy to help educate and change men.
- Reformist feminist women (mostly white women with class privilege) pushed the idea that all men were powerful in the first place (not patriarchy) and used feminism primarily to demand their equal slice of the power pie.
- what’s missing and needed now is that only a feminist vision that embraces feminist masculinity, that loves boys and men and demands on their behalf every right that we desire for girls and women, can renew men in our society. Feminist thinking teaches us all, males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. 📖 (Location 1311)
Location 1347
gender equality mostly in terms of ensuring that girls get to have the same privileges and rights as boys within the existing social structure; they do not see it in terms of granting boys the same rights as girls—for instance, the right to choose not to engage in aggressive or violent play, the right to play with dolls, to play dress up, to wear costumes of either gender, the right to choose.
📖 (Location 1347)
Location 1353
Men were expected to hold on to the ideas about strength and providing for others that were a part of patriarchal thought, while dropping their investment in domination and adding an investment in emotional growth. This vision of feminist masculinity was so fraught with contradictions, it was impossible to realize.
✏️ Feminism offered this vision which I guess isn’t tenable? That led to perception of women finding these men as weak, and so men ignored all this. Some men went towards a men’s movement. Positively, the men’s movement emphasized the need for men to get in touch with their feelings, to talk with other men. Negatively, the men’s movement continued to promote patriarchy by a tacit insistence that in order to be fully self-actualized, men needed to separate from women. Basically adopting the matching stance of antifemale as feminists that were antimale. It was still creating an enemy other to be defined against. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of a benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control. 📖 (Location 1353)
Location 1380
restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model. This is why the term patriarchal masculinity is so important, for it identifies male difference as being always and only about the superior rights of males to dominate, be their subordinates females or any group deemed weaker, by any means necessary.
✏️ Define maleness as a state rather than as performance. It must stand for the essential core goodness of the self and the body that has a penis. 📖 (Location 1380)
Location 1389
touch the hearts of real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood or maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.
✏️ Mission or vision statement 📖 (Location 1389)
Location 1396
When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.
✏️ Don’t Forget a capitalistic culture 📖 (Location 1396)
Location 1412
Patriarchal masculinity teaches males to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent for self-definition on the privileges (however relative) that they receive from having been born male.
📖 (Location 1412)
Location 1415
partnership model male identity, like its female counterpart, would be centered around the notion of an essential goodness that is inherently relationally oriented. Rather than assuming that males are born with the will to aggress, the culture would assume that males are born with the inherent will to connect.
📖 (Location 1415)
Location 1417
it is enough for males to be to have value, that they do not have to “do,” to “perform,” to be affirmed and loved. Rather than defining strength as “power over,” feminist masculinity defines strength as one’s capacity to be responsible for self and others.
✏️ Traits of feminist masculinity 📖 (Location 1417)
Location 1422
constituents—‘avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality’—we
📖 (Location 1422)
Location 1424
integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected.”
✏️ Feminist masculinity traits 📖 (Location 1424)
Location 1442
Masai wise man, when asked by Terrence Real to name the traits of a good warrior, replied, “I refuse to tell you what makes a good morani [warrior]. But I will tell you what makes a great morani. When the moment calls for fierceness, a good morani is very ferocious. And when the moment calls for kindness, a good morani is utterly tender. Now, what makes a great morani is knowing which moment is which.”
✏️ Women can do this. it’s all about being able to relate and respond vs just react and overreact. 📖 (Location 1442)
Location 1453
women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.
✏️ The cost of patriarchal masculinity.. Fear, lack of trust, no love 📖 (Location 1453)
Location 1463
Patriarchal masculinity insists that real men must prove their manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection. Feminist masculinity tells men that they become more real through the act of connecting with others, through building community.
✏️ Batman is patriarchal masculinity . 📖 (Location 1463)
Location 1477
moved by the women in their lives to make changes in thought and action, but for many it was the experience of assuming an equal parenting role that really transformed their consciousness and their behavior.
✏️ How men have shifted..
- women in their lives
- being an active parent.. Intimacy and engagement with coparent and children only comes from leting go of dominator model 📖 (Location 1477)
Location 1484
love and domination can coexist is one of the most powerful lies patriarchy tells us all.
📖 (Location 1484)
Location 1487
rooted in the love of male and female being, refusing to privilege one over the other. The soul of feminist politics is the commitment to ending patriarchal domination of women and men, girls and boys.
✏️ More mission and vision stuff also, let’s go from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving. it’s all about mutual partnership 📖 (Location 1487)
Location 1492
“Mutual partnership is the foundation of love. Feminist thought and action create the conditions under which mutuality can be nurtured.”
📖 (Location 1492)
Location 1543
symbol of the ultimate patriarchal man—alone, on the road, forever drifting, driven by the beast within.
✏️ Incredible Hulk symbol of racism too doesn’t remember actions as hulk so can’t/won’t assume responsibility..also that was a dark and colored beast, so racism baked in 📖 (Location 1543)
Location 1548
The notion, originally from myth and fable, is that the summit of masculinity—the ‘white hero’—achieves his manhood, first and foremost, by winning victory over the ‘dark beast’ or over the barbarian beasts of other—in some sense, ‘darker’—races, nations and social castes.”
📖 (Location 1548)
Location 1581
Woman-hating dominator men are consistently depicted as loners, who may have been abused as children and who were not able to adjust in normal society. Ironically, these “bad” men share the same character traits as the “good” men who hunt them down and slaughter them. In both cases the men dissimulate (take on various appearances and disguises to manipulate others’ perception of their identity), and they lack the ability to connect emotionally with others.
📖 (Location 1581)
Location 1603
In Monster’s Ball the male who is really different, who is humantistic, feeling, antiracist, and longing to move past patriarchal pornographic objectification to genuine intimacy is a victim. He kills himself. Watching this film, no male will be inspired to truly challenge the system.
✏️ Media might show evils of patriarchy, but not the viable paths to change it 📖 (Location 1603)
Location 1639
male dominance tend to be very controlling of their sons, who are the only males it is safe for them to vent against. Women in these circumstances are often subtly, or not so subtly, abusive of their sons.” Many mothers in patriarchal culture silence the wild spirit in their sons, the spirit of wonder and playful tenderness, for fear their sons will be weak, will not be prepared to be macho men, real men, men other men will envy and look up to.
📖 (Location 1639)
Location 1706
As advocates of feminism who seek to end sexism and sexist oppression, we must be willing to hear men speak their pain. Only when we courageously face male pain without turning away will we model for men the emotional awareness healing requires.
📖 (Location 1706)
Location 1713
I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me?
📖 (Location 1713)
Location 1724
Sadly, we have all colluded with the patriarchy by faking it with men, pretending levels of intimacy and closeness we do not feel. We tell men we love them when we feel we have absolutely no clue as to who they really are. We tell fathers we love them when we are terrified to share our perceptions of them,
✏️ It makes men think they can have it all… Patriarchy as well as loved ones close. 📖 (Location 1724)
Location 1731
“when they speak of fearing intimacy, what they really mean is that they fear subjugation.” This fear of subjugation is often triggered by the reality that boys parented by patriarchal women are controlled via their longing for maternal closeness. In maternal sadism, the manipulative woman exploits the boy’s emotional vulnerability to bind him to her will, to subjugate him. This early experience resides at the heart of many a man’s fear of being intimate with a grown woman.
✏️ A powerful look at the whole stereotype about men who fear intimacy 📖 (Location 1731)
Location 1745
If we are to begin to create a culture in which feminist masculinity can thrive, then women who mother will need to educate themselves for critical consciousness. In the near future we may hope to have more data to show us the ways boys fare better when they have loving parents, whether together or apart, who teach them how to be intimate. Meanwhile let us create the space where males who lack relational skills can learn them.
✏️ Things needed for feminist masculine culture 📖 (Location 1745)
Location 1749
Before most men can be intimate with others, they have to be intimate with themselves. They have to learn to feel and to be aware of their feelings. Men who mask feelings or suppress them simply do not want to feel the pain.
✏️ Things that need to be done 📖 (Location 1749)
Location 1754
Since shaming is often used to socialize boys away from their feeling selves toward the patriarchal male mask, many grown men have an internal shaming voice.
✏️ One of the tools of patriarchy 📖 (Location 1754)
Location 1771
you “create intimacy when you shift from the pursuit of external power—the ability to manipulate and control—to the pursuit of authentic power—the alignment of your personality with your soul.”
✏️ Meaning of intimacy 📖 (Location 1771)
Location 1784
Men need to hear that their souls matter and that the care of their souls is the primary task of their being. Were all men seeking to uncover greater soulfulness in their lives rather than seeking power through a dominator model, then the world as we know it would be transformed for the better.
✏️ More things to do for better masculinity 📖 (Location 1784)
Location 1788
men who come to mind are His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In
✏️ Men who embody nurturing masculinity. Also, Ted lasso 📖 (Location 1788)
Location 1804
When the hearts of men are full of compassion and open to love, then, as the Dalai Lama states, “there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma, for our own heart, our own mind, is the temple and the doctrine is compassion.”
📖 (Location 1804)
Location 1806
When contemporary feminist movement was at its most militant, those of us who worshipped male deities were often made to feel as though we were traitors. Yet many of us found it especially useful in maintaining our love for males and appreciation for the sacredness of the male soul to separate patriarchal ideology from the powerful images of nurturing and loving kindness embodied in male religious figures. Many of us who were wounded daughters from Christian backgrounds found it useful to meditate daily on the twenty-third psalm because it evoked for us the image of a father caring for our souls, affirming and assuring us that we would survive, that goodness and mercy would be accorded us and that the father would keep us forever in his care. This image of loving fatherhood embodies feminist masculinity in its most divine form. Healing the spirit, caring for the souls of boys and men, we must dare to proclaim our adoration, to bow down not to the male as dominator, but to the male as embodied divine spirit with whom we can unite in love, with no threat of separation, knowing a perfect love that is without fear.
✏️ I like this because it’s saying we shouldn’t be black or white about all this. It’s not that male is dominator therefore cancel them altogether.. It’s that male can be divine fatherly love and let’s embrace and foster that image instead. 📖 (Location 1806)
Location 1819
his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder.
✏️ This keeps getting repeated and is a core issue to internalize 📖 (Location 1819)
Location 1828
Contemporary feminist movement created a socially sanctioned space where girls can create a sense of self that is distinct from sexist definitions; the same freedom has not been extended to boys.
✏️ This is why the past feminist movements were half effective. We didn’t address men 📖 (Location 1828)
Location 1857
Since most men have been socialized to believe that compartmentalization is a positive practice, it feels right, it feels comfortable. To practice integrity, then, is difficult; it hurts. Peck makes the crucial point: “Integrity is painful. But without it there can be no wholeness.” To be whole men must practice integrity.
✏️ Integrity vs compartmentalization 📖 (Location 1857)
Location 1863
“lies do not work.” To honor his self-esteem, to practice integrity, he learned that the truth had to be told, that “by procrastinating and delaying I merely made the consequences for everyone more terrible.” Furthermore, he writes, “I succeeded in protecting no one, least of all myself. If part of my motive was to spare people I cared about, I inflicted a worse pain than they would otherwise have experienced. If part of my motive was to protect my self-esteem by avoiding a conflict among my values and loyalties, it was my self-esteem that I damaged.” This faulty logic he describes is the same that many patriarchal men use to avoid telling the truth and practicing integrity.
✏️ Hitting close to home 📖 (Location 1863)
Location 1917
To grow psychologically and spiritually, men need to mourn. The men who are doing the work of self-recovery testify that it is only when they are able to feel the pain that they can begin to heal.
📖 (Location 1917)
Location 1931
Only a father capable of being whole can have the integrity to acknowledge ignorance to his son without feeling diminished.
📖 (Location 1931)
Location 1939
Our myths and religious stories are full of narratives in which the son is depicted as the father’s enemy, ever poised to steal his power. The dysfunctional model suggests to men that separation can only be forged through violence and death. Only the man who chooses a healthy model—wherein the father figure, the adult man of integrity, the guide who shelters, protects, and nurtures the son—can gracefully attend the assertion of his own son’s healthy autonomy.
✏️ Our dangerous mythologies 📖 (Location 1939)
Location 1947
part of the work of wholeness is learning to be flexible, learning how to negotiate, how to embrace change in thought and action. The ability to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility.
✏️ Qualities needed 📖 (Location 1947)
Location 1957
Responsible men are capable of self-criticism. If more men were doing the work of self-critique, then they would not be wounded, hurt, or chagrined when critiqued by others, especially women with whom they are intimate. Engaging in self-critique empowers responsible males to admit mistakes. When they have wronged others, they are willing to acknowledge wrongdoing and make amends. When others have wronged them, they are able to forgive. The ability to be forgiving is part of letting go of perfectionism and accepting vulnerability.
📖 (Location 1957)
Location 1961
Giving affirmation is an act of emotional care. Wounded men are not often able to say anything positive. They are the grump-and-groan guys; cloaked in cynicism, they stand at an emotional distance from themselves and others. Affirmation brings us closer together. It is the highest realization of compassion and empathy with others.
✏️ Batman shit 📖 (Location 1961)
Location 1966
critique patriarchy without hating men.
✏️ Key motto to keep in mind always 📖 (Location 1966)
Location 1970
When men are able to do little acts of mercy, they can be in communion with others without the need to dominate. No longer separate, no longer apart, they bring a wholeness that can be joined with the wholeness of others. This is interbeing. As whole people they can experience joy. Unlike happiness, joy is a lasting state that can be sustained even when everything is not the way we want it to be.
📖 (Location 1970)
Location 2014
resistance means opposition to being invaded, occupied, assaulted, and destroyed by the system. The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly… Communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.
✏️ Defining a safe space for men to recover 📖 (Location 2014)
Location 2028
falls… We could speak words of encouragement to this boy where we find him—in our friends and students, in our institutions, and in our own hearts. If we do not speak to him in this way, he will be lost, and we will have lost with him, all tenderness and grace.
✏️ Thomas Moore quote 📖 (Location 2028)
Location 2030
To create the culture that will enable boys to love, we must see the family as having as its primary function the giving of love (providing food and shelter are loving acts).
✏️ Good question to ask..what is purpose of family? To give love 📖 (Location 2030)
Location 2076
Inequality, in and of itself, does not breed domination. It can heighten awareness of the need to be more loving.
✏️ Another good quote about difference between equality and mutuality/respect 📖 (Location 2076)
Location 2107
we are handed sexuality as the one vehicle through which it might still be possible to express and experience essential aspects of our humanness that have been slowly and systematically conditioned out of us. Sex was, and is, presented as the road to real intimacy, complete closeness, as the arena in which it is okay to openly love, to be tender and vulnerable and yet remain safe, to not feel so deeply alone. Sex is the one place sensuality seems to be permissible, where we can be gentle with our own bodies and allow ourselves our overflowing passion.
✏️ First we’re conditioned not to feel anything, then we’re told that those feelings we’re subconsciously longing for can be found in sex.. but if course sex can’t do that. 📖 (Location 2107)
Location 2114
after being taught to be obsessed with sex via patriarchal conditioning, males are “then subjected to continuous conditioning to repress sensuality, numb feelings, ignore our bodies, and separate from our natural closeness with human beings.” He continues, “All of these human needs are then promised to us by way of sex and sexuality… But in no way can sex completely fulfill these needs. Such needs can only be fulfilled by healing from the effects of male conditioning and suffusing every area of our lives with relatedness and aliveness.”
✏️ The sinister aspect of patriarchal sex 📖 (Location 2114)
Location 2174
For both men and women, Good Men can be somewhat disturbing to be around because they usually do not act in ways associated with typical men; they listen more than they talk; they self-reflect on their behavior and motives, they actively educate themselves about women’s reality by seeking out women’s culture and listening to women… They avoid using women for vicarious emotional expression… When they err—and they do err—they look to women for guidance, and receive criticism with gratitude. They practice enduring uncertainty while waiting for a new way of being to reveal previously unconsidered alternatives to controlling and abusive behavior. They intervene in other men’s misogynist behavior, even when women are not present, and they work hard to recognize and challenge their own. Perhaps most amazingly, Good Men perceive the value of a feminist practice for themselves, and they advocate it not because it’s politically correct, or because they want women to like them, or even because they want women to have equality, but because they understand that male privilege prevents them not only from becoming whole, authentic human beings but also from knowing the truth about the world… They offer proof that men can change.
✏️ Good men and why they do good 📖 (Location 2174)
Location 2188
We live in a culture where it has been accepted and even encouraged that women wholeheartedly stand by men when they are doing the work of destruction. Yet we have yet to create a world that asks us to stand by a man when he is seeking healing, when he is seeking recovery, when he is working to be a creator.
📖 (Location 2188)