An Analysis Of Bell Hook's 'Understanding Patriarchy'

“Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease”. Patriarchy is when men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it. With this said, in Understanding Patriarchy, it shows just how powerful this word truly is and how it goes so much farther than just its definition.
Bell Hooks the author of “Understanding Patriarchy” also connects Patriarchy a lot to religion, “At church they learned that God created man to rule the world and everything in it and it was the work of women to help men perform these tasks, to obey, and to always assume a subordinate role in relation to powerful man.” As seen in the powerful language and the way its being said you can already see that her rhetorical purpose is mainly to express her anger …show more content…
Then suddenly he snatched me up, broke a board from our screen door, and began to beat me with it, telling me, “You're just a little girl. When I tell you to do something, I mean for you to do it.” He beat me and he beat me, wanting me to acknowledge that I understood what I had done…. Our family sat spellbound, rapt before the pornography of patriarchal violence.” With such an emotional topic and such a deep and intense relation to such a topic, topped with such a traumatic past of this single word, the outcome in a speech or writing comes out as extremely painful and emotional. And as such the rhetorical appeal quickly goes straight to pathos. With such an emotional past you see how the Hooks grew up and practically transferred her pathos to become much more and actually made it so it became both ethos and pathos, she had lived through this experience of patriarchy and as such became the testimony of her own experiences. As such she was able to give powerful, descriptive, and piercing stories of her experiences that were impactful and all of this was backed by her own evidence of testimony. But she goes farther than this and states,“There is nothing unique or even exceptional about this experience.” she uses this statement to further broaden her claim and make her rhetorical argument much more powerful as it now applies to practically everyone. An example she gives is from “How Can I Get Through to You?” she tells of how a family …show more content…
You see that she believes that patriarchy is a long outlived mindset and has been around for way too long and that everyone has suffered from its consequences to still be around in today’s time. She also goes to explain that even patriarchal men are suffering because “If patriarchy were rewarding, the overwhelming dissatisfaction most men feel in their work lives- a dissatisfaction extensively documented in the work of Studs Terkel and echoed in Faludi’s treatise- would not exist.” In other words if being patriarchal led to a better life then so many men would not be experiencing such dissatisfaction with life. She then goes off to end her argument with explaining that men are not the enemy but patriarchy is. This final statement is what really brings out her argument as it sets her mindset so far away from the “feminist” mindset that men are the enemy. Once she stated this final piece of her argument she won over so much of the intended audience and changes her entire argument and rhetorical purpose from simply informing and expressing to making every word she had stated thus far