chapotraphouse

Well, I wanted to link the whole text of The Will to Change since why try to paraphrase bell instead of putting her forward in her own words, but some dorkasses are DDOSing the internet archive right now. : (

https://archive.org/details/the-will-to-change-men-masculinity-and-love-by-bell-hooks-z-lib.org.epub/page/n1/mode/2up

But I highly recommend The Will to Change. bell analyzes her experience in the feminist movement in the 70s, 80s, and 90s to better understand how Patriarchy works as a holistic system of violence. Based on her experiences she examines how in order for patriarchy to perpetuate itself it must use violence against men to force them to conform to patriarchy and force them to act as soldiers of patriarchy. It puts forward the argument that to end patriarchy the means by which patriarchy uses violence against men to coerce men in to enforcing patriarchy must be understand as an integral part of the system and that the liberation of women necessarily requires the liberation of men; To destroy patriarchy me must disrupt the cycle by which it recruits boys in to the patriarchy and makes them in to violent men, and doing so is an integral and necessary part of the struggle against the entire system of patriarchy.

While bell is very much making a compassionate appeal to understand the ways in which boys and men are themselves victims of patriarchal violence, there's also a purely cold-blooded and pragmatic analysis; To defeat an army one must deprive it of soldiers.

I believe bell's theory relates to this article as baldness in men is part of a very complicated way that men build hierarchies among themselves using intra-masculine violence. A young balding man is shamed, an older balding man may be respected. Balding in middle age is treated as a shameful failure of masculinity. Women participate in this aspect of violence by enforcing masculine beauty norms while men use it to harm each other in order to establish hierarchies of dominance. As part of those intra-masculine systems of dominance men harm women in order to assert their masculinity both to themselves, to other men, and to women around them. All of it becomes part of a holistic system of violence that enforces gender norms and constantly re-creates and re-produces gender violence in society.

Understanding how men use patriarchal violence against other men to enforce and maintain patriarchy is necessary to bringing about the ultimate defeat of patriarchy. A theory that does not exactingly analyze this phenomena cannot be complete.