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

abuse will respond with fury when intimates want him to change his behavior. Men who do not daily lie and cheat at their jobs do so in their intimate bonds. This lying is usually connected to inappropriate sexual behavior or to discomfort about sexual behavior. In his powerful essay “Who He Was,” Eric Guitierrez recounts how he told lies to cover up the reality that his father was gay: “About the same time I began lying about my father I began lying about myself. I didn’t offer my lies indiscriminately…. Rather than making up comforting details that would portray my flashing, gay father more like the hardworking, lawn-mowing dads that lined our street, I instead embellished his shortcomings, his weaknesses, his rages, into real perversity…. I enthralled my classmates with stories of how my father would tie us up or throw crystal goblets at my terrorized mother…. I was an accomplished liar, building false identities for my father and myself by overstating truth on its own trajectory.” Lying about sexuality is an accepted part of patriarchal masculinity. Sex is where many men act out because it is the only social arena where the patriarchal promise of dominion can be easily realized. Without these perks, masses of men might have rebelled against patriarchy long ago.
    Little boys learn early in life that sexuality is the ultimate proving ground where their patriarchal masculinity will be tested. They learn early that sexual desire should not be freely expressed and that females will try to control male sexuality. For boys this issue of control begins with the mother’s response to his penis; usually she does not like it and she does not know what to do with it. Her discomfort with his penis communicates that there is something inherently wrong with it. She does not communicate to the boy child that his penis is wonderful, special, marvelous. This same fear of the boy’s penis is commonly expressed by fathers who simply do not concern themselves with educating boys about their bodies. Sadly, unenlightened approaches to child abuse lead many parents to fear celebration of their child’s body, especially the boy body, which may respond to playful physical closeness with an erection. 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.
    Adolescent sexual socialization is the vulnerable moment in a boy’s life when he is required to identify his selfhood and his sexuality with patriarchal masculinity; it is the meeting place of theory and practice. During these formative years, when a boy’s sexual lust is often intense, he learns that patriarchal culture expects him to covertly cultivate that lust and the will to satisfy it while engaging in overt acts of sexual repression. This splitting is part of the initiation into patriarchal masculinity; it is a rite of passage. The boy learns as well that females are the enemy when it comes to the satisfaction of sexual desire. They are the group that will impose on the boy the need to repress his sexual longings, and yet to prove his manhood, he must dare to move past repression and engage in sexual acts.
    Sexual repression fuels the lust of boys and men. Shedding light on the negative impact of this socialization in the essay “Fuel for Fantasy: The Ideological Construction of Male Lust,” Michael S. Kimmel demonstrates that sexual repression creates the world in which males must engage constantly in sexual fantasy, eroticizing the nonsexual. Exploring the link between sexual repression and