Communion: The Female Search for Love: 2 (Love Song to the Nation, 2)

Product Information

she did bash on patriarchal men a lot (love) but she never blamed men or suggested that women were the victim. she empowered women to take accountability and to put in the work to find and create meaningful, mutual love. i love how she wrapped the book up by talking about the importance of all love - self love, romantic friendships, and romantic love and how we need all of them to live a fulfilled life, and that giving and receiving love from yourself and close friends is what enriches romantic relationships. She just nails clarity. She doesn’t get bogged down in any details. She doesn’t have to spend a lot of time doing any definitions or anything. It’s just also rooted in her own experience. Um, that even though it’s nonfiction, it is storytelling. And When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.”–Maya Angelou

Some of these "truths" had me physically wincing at how cliched they are. "Daddy issues" and "you can't love anyone else until you love yourself" are all ugly concepts that rear their heads throughout the course of this book. And personally, yeah: for me, true love didn't come until I stopped compulsively seeking it. I admit that only once I started focusing on prioritizing and improving myself did I attract the right person into my life. But maybe that's just coincidence, because correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. Maybe it wasn't actually anything I did; maybe it was just timing. Idea of a "coming out process" to yourself for realizing/believing/identifying yourself as straight, sharing same process as those who had to consciously come out as queer (p. 35) awareness of problems alone is not a solution. To solve the problem of _______________, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new images, new ways of seeing ourselves" (p. 114, yeah good reminder) Men and women who want to know love will find us, and we will find them" (p. 158) (TIMING OF ABSURD LIFE EVENTS)In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks calls upon us to reimagine the rules of grammar surrounding love; from an oft-used noun to a rarely understood verb. This movement from one part of speech to another is not just a semantic move, but rather a shift away from lovelessness towards an ethic of love. For hooks, the transformative power of loving, which is a brew of “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, as well as open and honest communication” (p. 12), can only begin from a certain kind of truth-telling that entails admission of our collective inability to define love and the resultant cynicism that follows from such definitional obscurity. Honestly, she wasn’t always easy to love. Equal parts bite, tender hand and intellect, she may have been the most complicated person I have ever met or will, but I loved her fiercely and know she loved me. She taught all of us so much until the end and now she’s left us to continue our lessons on our own. Zillah Eisenstein We continue to put in place the anti-sexist thinking and practice which affirms the reality that females can achieve self-actualization and success without dominating one another.” They, of course, are women, and the girls who will one day become women. Girls and women who are all, truly, whores. Whores who must be policed by the violence that men dish out to them, to keep them in line. PLACEHOLDER ANXIETY between women who are "romantic friends", when possibly, eventually, one of them finds a partner and leaves the other "behind" OR both find partners and leave each other a little bit

Lieben lernen — Alles über Verbundenheit“ von Bell Hooks habe ich wirklich gern gelesen. Die Autorin ist bekennende Feministin und im Original ist das Buch bereits 2002 erschienen.If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.' Personal integrity is the foundation of self-love. Women who are honest with themselves and others do not fear being vulnerable. We do not fear that another woman can unmask or expose us. We need not fear annihilation, for we know no one can destroy our integrity as women who love."