This week’s prompt is:
“This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
While I think you are touching on something important with the sense of martyrdom, I very much disagree with the idea that the violent aspects of patriarchal masculinity are somehow a result of that.
I very much disagree with bell hooks assertion that men are programmed from birth to be violent.
She’s talking about gendered societal expectations, not biological essentialism.