Communion: The Female Search For Love

bell hooks

This is an excerpt from a book I just finished reading and thoroughly enjoyed, written by the great feminist writer and social activist bell hooks (she has a lot more memorable work linking race, class and gender). This is from her book Communion: The Female Search for Love...

"The popularity of books like John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus indicates that lots of folks wants to believe that women are innately different from men in personality and habits of being and that these differences naturally maintain the social order. They choose denial over facing the reality that the gender differences we were once taught are innate are really mostly learned, that while biology is significant and should not be discounted, it is not destiny. Nowadays almost everyone knows that not all men are stronger than women, or smarter, or less emotional, and so on. Sexist notions of gender rarely hold up when we look at real life. And they hold up even less when we go outside the boundaries of this culture and look at males and females in other cultures. Living in the United States, people easily forget or remain ignorant of the reality that women in other parts of the world ofter do much more physically arduous labor than do their male counterparts. Or that a great majority of men in the world are suffering from malnutrition or starving and are nowhere near the physical equals of females eating three meals a day who are citizens of rich nations.

The aspect of patriarchy that most women want to change is the unkindness and cruelty of men, their contempt and dislike of women. It is a testament to the learned ignorance of political reality that so many females cannot accept that patriarchy requires of men cruelty to women, that the will to do violence defines heterosexual, patriarchal masculinity. Liberal, benevolent, patriarchal writes, like John Gray, offer women strategies for coping with male and female mutual dislike. In all his work Gray basically encourages women and men to accept their differences and find ways to avoid conflict and abusive behavior. Superficially, it may appear that the popularity of his work exposes women's passive acceptance of patriarchal thinking, but it is in fact women's dissatisfaction with negative aspects of patriarchy that creates an audience for his work. While is may help women to cope with patriarchal men, Gray's work does not call for an end to male domination. Instead it perpetuates the conventional sexist belief that it is natural for males to desire dominion over others.

When women eliminate sexist attitudes toward men from our consciousness, we are better situated to evaluate and like the real men we encounter...Knowing that both women and men are socialized to accept patriarchal thinking should make it clear to everyone that men are not the problem. The problem is patriarchy. Making the distinctions clear in Fear of Fifty, Erica Jong declares, "The truth is I don't blame individual men for this system, They carry it on mostly unknowingly, too. But more and more I wonder if it can ever be changed...I believe the word is full of men who are truly as perplexed and hurt by women's anger as women are perplexed by sexism, who only want to be loved and nurtured, who cannot understand how these desires have suddenly become so hard to fulfill." Patriarchy can be challenged and changed. We know this because many women and a few men have radically changed their lives. The men who are comrades in struggle search for love to find the communion that is needed to support their refusal to perpetuate patriarchal thinking. The men who are our comrades in struggle show us that they are willing to be challenged, that they are willing to change. As patriarchy changes, women are able to love men more, and men are better able to love us."

@LoveKaruna (Twitter)