Can you explain a sentence from your bio? "To create loving males, you must love males"? I don't understand that sentence, because like does that work for all oppressive groups? "To create loving white people, we must love white people" or "to create loving straight people, we must love straight people". That doesn't make much sense to me, especially since women do this all the time. Women always make excuses for men's behavior, give them the benefit of the doubt, are empathetic and sensitive to men and make tons of posts on the internet about male positivity and yet men still commit 80-90% of violent crimes (from what I remember). And I'm not trying to argue or anything, it's a genuine question. How is being kind to men going to bring about the collective liberation of women from the patriarchy?
So this quote needs to be understood in the context of both the book it comes from (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love) and bell hooks' philosophy of love in general. Here's the full paragraph it comes from:
“Only a revolution of values in our nation will end male violence, and that revolution will necessarily be based on a love ethic. To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an antipatriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.”
People often see this quote or another one and assume a lot about bell hooks' point here, but The Will to Change includes her own experiences of abuse by men and her experiences with misogyny, alongside her observations about how men in her life experienced patriarchal abuse. She is not ignorant of the harms done to women when she says this.
My personal interpretation of her words is this:
The patriarchal expectations relating to how women are expected to "love" men is very different than what bell hooks means to love. Her concept of love requires self-love and self-care, and not being a doormat or adopting a "I can singlehandedly fix that incel by being nice to him!" mindset.
And, equally, how we are taught to "love" men is not good for men either. The patriarchy promises love to men in exchange for appropriate performance of dominance. It says that there are "real men" and "fake men" and only real men are deserving of love. It says that men must be constantly fighting each other, women, and queers in order to be deserving of love and escape punishment. bell hooks' argument is that we as feminists need to see inherent worth in men as people, and reject those patriarchal notions of what makes men worthy as well as the doomerist radfem impulse to label all men as evil and sever all connection forever. Men are people, and women are people, and we are all people in society together, and we always will be, so we need to be able to work together to create loving communities. Whether men are your friends, lovers, relatives, neighbors, patients, students, etc. you do live in a society with them!!! And we (intersectional / revolutionary feminism) cannot win without them. Not just as quiet allies on the side but as meaningful co-conspirators, fellow feminists with just as much a stake in the fight as any woman.
You can read this short chapter of one of her books where she explores love ethic in politics specifically relating to race.