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Agreed! Bell Hooks was the first writer who made feminism accessible and relevant to my (male) experiences. I was gifted a copy of The Will To Change a few years ago and it's among the best gifts ive ever received.

"The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" is the most revelatory book I've read, I think ever. It discusses the ways power- and domination-based roles for men negatively affect both men and women, starting in boyhood. It felt like every page held a connection to my experiences.

Hm... this is some pretty typical Neoliberal misinformation--just the kind I expect to see pedaled on HN. I will read this book, if you think it's important, but it's astonishing how quick you are to desire children's alienation from their feelings. Really, that's an atrocious desire. You should critically question that one. You should also consider reading bell hooks' "The Will to Change," which goes into great depth on the ways men like you and I are emotionally crippled--not coddled, crippled. At any rate, that's what you would do if you'd been "taught to critically question" your beliefs.

There's a few great lines in hooks' book about how we adopt our patriarchal ontologies unquestioningly, never stopping to think what about "being a man" we would have chosen for ourselves.

I will read "The Coddling" because I can't be in every American classroom, and it's possible I am simply unaware of some training as atrocious as "be on the lookout for microaggressions and report them," but I suspect it's a deliberate misinterpretation of the feminist understanding that the common American ideological worldview is an deference and adherence to rape, exploitation, domination, and violence. Standing against these things early on, when they're recapitulated as "mere" schoolyard bullying, is a heroic act, and not the result of "coddling," but of a stable, enriching family life--something you can read about in Deborah MacNamara's "Rest. Play. Grow."

Unfortunately, the American home life often recapitulates endemic American patriarchal violence. As hooks puts it, "the love of a father is an uncommon gem, to be hunted, burnished, and hoarded. The value goes up because of its scarcity." No surprise, then, that that children teach one another to relate in the terms of domination and submission.

> Americans who hold strong racist opinions. But that's another subject.

I'm not sure it is. America has strongly patriarchal institutions, enforcing very particular and rigid sex/gender roles. Our economy, for example, relies on women staying at home to raise children. This removes them from the arena of compensated labor, depriving them of commercial agency except as a bread-winning man's proxy.

More or less.

This kind of economic role-enforcement is also heavily racialized; latino workers are massively represented in agriculture, black workers in service work, and both groups are deprived of the high-pay, high-tech opportunities that white men like myself take for granted.

In her indispensable feminist text, "The Will to Change", bell hooks uses the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics.

"The Will to Change" by Bell Hooks

From reading books like "Yes Means Yes!", "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses", or "The Will to Change".

From observing mainstream and right-wing media's treatment of sexual predators—especially the narrative of concern for their reputations, academic careers, etc.

From sitting in on violent men's groups, and realizing that the roots of their violence are common to all supposedly "non-violent" men. It's plain to see that the man who throws his cousin down a staircase, or kicks open his girlfriend's door to make demands of her does so for the same reasons that old men shout at waitresses, call female politicians "whore, "bitch", and "cow", roofie drinks, wear uniforms, hire secretaries, don't hire women engineers, and generally do the complex and pervasive work to substantiate sexist collective ontologies as a "society" of "rape culture."