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

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What has the feminist movement done for relationships? Sure, the civil uprising has led to more respect for women in the workplace. What, though, has feminism done to help women suffering from intimacy deficiency in the bedroom? Bell Hooks seeks to answer these questions and more in her book. 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.” COMMITMENT IS THE GROUND OF OUR BEING THAT LETS US MAKE MISTAKES, BE FORGIVEN, AND TRY AGAIN (p. 216)

Masterful. A thinking women’s (and man’s) valentine, a fitting conclusion to hooks’ groundbreaking work on love in American life. Los Angeles Times 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. AndWhen we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.' I still think it’s important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society – because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not. She named herself after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks but spelt her pen name in lower case to point direction towards her ideas rather than her identity. I liked this book even though I don’t think it was as groundbreaking or tightly argued as her books The Will to Change or All About Love. For the first 70% of Communion, I felt that bell hooks made several strong and interesting points about women, gender, and relationships: that women are taught to search for love in romantic relationships, that women are also capable of perpetuating sexism and patriarchy, and that men who may advocate for racial justice or even gender equality may still enact sexism in contexts such as sexual relationships. I agree with other reviewers who state that hooks generalizes her points a bit much at times. While I didn’t mind that rhetorical technique when she used it either more accurately or more sparingly in her other books, in Communion it stood out to me more in a negative way, perhaps because I also found that her points blurred together and were a little discursive within chapters at times. When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." -Maya Angelou

She made us face our complexities, contradictions, consumptions and appropriations. May we better and always honor her work and life by daring to sit with what audiences found so compelling about her contributions, including the parts we don’t like. Stephanie Troutman (Robbins) As we leave behind the stuff of the past that is mere burden, the relationships that bind rather than set us free, as we experience a change of heart, we develop the inner strength necessary to journey on the path to love, to make our search for love be a grand life adventure and a profound spiritual quest. Along the way we do find soul mates, true friends, life companions. We find communion. Another great wisdom gift that women offer to those who have not yet discovered its pleasures is the wisdom that it is better to know the joy of dancing in a circle of love than to dance alone. While a romantic partner and/or soul mate may bring us joy, we add that joy to love already shared with all those who are truly primary in our lives -- the circle of people to whom we turn, who turn to us -- knowing that they will find us eternally there. No matter how sweet the love between two people, we ask too much if we demand that this relationship and this one other person be 'everything.' The truth we hold close is that 'love is everything.' And because love has this power, it is always there within us, within those we love. It offers to us the possibility of ongoing communion." I'm still going to give this a decent rating, though, because I feel like hooks made a lot of good points. She challenged the widely-accepted cultural idea that women are innately more loving than men, and highlighted how toxic gender roles are often still performed even within queer relationships. I felt particularly called out by her indictment of "negative body acceptance": Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.' What does a lady do when she wants more from her man, but he isn’t willing to put out? Start with one’s self. Hooks presents the notion of self-love being the starting point to women’s happiness in bed. By self-love, Hooks references the act of women accepting their body and soul as is, without trying to change things. Hooks presents the idea of love being an individualized feature that exudes out only when there is overflow. A woman cannot truly love a man and expect such affection from him unless she first appreciates herself.elinize ağır, teorik, terimler içeren, anlamaya çalışırken yorulacağınız bir kitap almıyorsunuz bence. yazarın da buna dikkat ettiğini düşünüyorum açıkçası. kadınların okurken eğitim, kültür, birikim seviyesi çok önemli olmadan anlayabileceği kitaplar yazmaya çalışıyor ki kitaplarında yer yer kendisinin de şikayetlendiği "teoride iyiydi güzeldi, yaşarken hiç öyle olmadı, kimse feminist pratiğin günlük hayatta nasıl uygulanacağından bahsetmedi" minvalinde bahsettiği kısımları var. bu yüzden kendisini bu kadar seviyor olabilirim. kendisinin de kitapta bahsettiği " hetoroseksüel bir feminist kadının erkek partneri ile yaşadığı cinsel alandaki özgürlük, hayır deme hakkı üzerine yazılmış makale bulamazsınız ama bu sıkıntıları yaşayan feminist kadınlar vardı ama kimse bahsetmedi" gibi durumları ve buna benzer örnekleri anlatarak hayat pratiğinin içinden anlatmaya çalışması feminizmi benim için değerli kılıyor kitaplarını ve kendisini. Bell hooks shares that the original work of love is the cultivation of care, knowledge, respect, and responsibility in relation to the self. When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.”–Maya Angelou The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. hooks talks about how hard it can be for powerful, self-actualized women to find powerful, self-actualized men who are deeply committed to equality and freedom for women, and that this means that women need to learn to thrive regardless of whether they have a partner, rather than counting on a partner to meet their emotional needs. We need intimacy, but we don't need partnership; we need community, and a circle of love, and friendship. Like hooks, I've learned to find all the love I need in spiritual practice and community, and while I long for an intimate romantic partnership, I know I will be OK without it. She also recommends what she calls "romantic friendship" as a healthy way to establish intimacy, friendships that are not sexual but energized by Eros. This has been my experience the last few years, as I've learned to have nonsexual friendships with extraordinary men that are emotionally intimate, safe, and inspiring.

A passion for love had to be kept secret—unstated. To speak one's longing was to risk shame. Those who knew love enjoyed its delights in private, and those who did not suffered in silence" (p. 59). Oh, how I was filled with delight when I heard Mama and her friends carry on about the joys of "the change of life." They never used the word "menopause." How intuitively sensible! Had they taken to heart medical ways of defining shifts in midlife, they might have been forced to take on board the negative implications this word would bring — the heavy weight of loss it evokes. Instead they had their own special language. A subtle, seductive, mysterious, celebratory way of talking about changes in... Communion According to the author, feminism stops at the bedroom door because of the innate teachings that label men as more patriarchal when they conceal their emotions. Women, as Hooks claims, are left to grapple with a corporate job that pays the bills and a second shift of satisfying a man who is sometimes impossible to read. Young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.'Hooks draws interesting links to the 21st century struggle for love that raises women up instead of oppresses, but at times the anecdotes from the feminist movement of the 70s did not offer much but reminiscence for a time that I didn't live through. One blue shiny thing I did get from this section is that if feminism rejects love outright then people looking for love have no where to find it except in oppressive cultural products, which could probably have been written in one chapter. 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. bell once wrote that “one of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone”. So I reached out to gather some memories from, as Stephanie Troutman says, “the beloved community bell helped to create”.