gah! robert bly! bell hooks! gah!
Jan. 30th, 2006 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keryxWhy do so many feminists misinterpret Robert Bly so often and so [seemingly] wilfully? This is not a rhetorical question. I'd like theories.
I was happily reading bell hooks' All About Love in the car on Saturday when she swings off into this chapter about how the patriarchy makes women guide men in love & the men's movement prevents men from sharing emotion outside the safety of groups of men, and that Robert Bly never talks about love or cross-gender relationships.
*Sputter.*
Robert Bly! Doesn't talk about love! Or gender!
Ahem.
I realize that, as a feminist who's read most of what Bly wrote (including his poetry), I'm a bit of a freak. Most feminists have read, if anything, feminist critiques of Iron John, or at best the book itself (which is, though his most popular, also one of his weaker works). But even then. I mean, all the man talks about is how emotionality differs across gender - and while he never says the word "patriarchy", it is majorly, majorly implied.
Now, he does tend towards some annoying essentialist views of gender, but I think he's actually arguing the exact same point as hooks when he talks about post-feminist feminisation of men - which is that women can't define the new masculinity (whether in relation to love or otherwise), men have to, and men mostly didn't step up on that one. Thus, messed up concepts of masculinity.
Read that way (the right way, if you ask me) Bly is feminist critique of masculinity. And it really surprises me to read bell hooks, of all people, not getting that. They're such perfect visionary counterparts in so many ways.
I was happily reading bell hooks' All About Love in the car on Saturday when she swings off into this chapter about how the patriarchy makes women guide men in love & the men's movement prevents men from sharing emotion outside the safety of groups of men, and that Robert Bly never talks about love or cross-gender relationships.
*Sputter.*
Robert Bly! Doesn't talk about love! Or gender!
Ahem.
I realize that, as a feminist who's read most of what Bly wrote (including his poetry), I'm a bit of a freak. Most feminists have read, if anything, feminist critiques of Iron John, or at best the book itself (which is, though his most popular, also one of his weaker works). But even then. I mean, all the man talks about is how emotionality differs across gender - and while he never says the word "patriarchy", it is majorly, majorly implied.
Now, he does tend towards some annoying essentialist views of gender, but I think he's actually arguing the exact same point as hooks when he talks about post-feminist feminisation of men - which is that women can't define the new masculinity (whether in relation to love or otherwise), men have to, and men mostly didn't step up on that one. Thus, messed up concepts of masculinity.
Read that way (the right way, if you ask me) Bly is feminist critique of masculinity. And it really surprises me to read bell hooks, of all people, not getting that. They're such perfect visionary counterparts in so many ways.
