Communion

The Female Search for Love

bell hooks

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063215955
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

"When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." –Maya Angelou

Renowned visionary bell hooks explored the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed bestseller All About Love: New Visions. She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Now hooks culminates her triumphant trilogy of love with Communion: The Female Search for Love.

Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives.

Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman -- mother, daughter, friend, and lover -- needs to have.

Eleven

The Search for Men Who Love

LOOKING for love and looking for a man are two very different agendas. Most women without male partners are looking for a man. And guess what? Men are easy to find. Finding a man is not the same as finding love. To find love with a male partner, women have to be clear that this is our desire. The feminist movement exposed the harsh truth of woman hating. More than at any other time in the history of this nation, the word “misogynist” became commonplace. It was the shortcut way to describe a sexist, patriarchal, woman-hating man. But the other reality that feminism exposed, which was more uncomfortable for women to talk about, was female hatred of men.

Years ago, in the heyday of the contemporary feminist movement, I remember lesbian women joking all the time about how wrong the world was in casting them in the role of man haters, because everyone knew that if you gathered a bunch of women together in a room and started talking about men, the most vicious man-hating sentiments would be expressed by women who were with men and who were planning to stay with men for the rest of their lives. Hearing these comments again and again, knowing firsthand the truth in these words, I searched my soul to see what my honest feelings about men were. I determined that if I looked inside and saw that I really held men in contempt, I would cease considering them as potential partners and lovers.

When I looked inside, I found my thinking about men dominated by three images: my patriarchal father, whom I feared, at times hated, and wished was dead; my eccentric, antipatriarchal grandfather, whom I never feared, loved at all times, and wanted to live forever; and my playful older brother. My father did not care for our souls. He worked hard to care for our material needs. I appreciated this, but I never felt he loved me, even when I tried to please him, to meet the conditions he set. Even though I was told that he had been “mad about me,” thrilled with his new baby girl when I was first born, taking me everywhere and showing me off, the dad I knew most intimately was cold, withholding, aloof, and emotionally shut down. Daddy Gus, my grandfather, was antimaterialistic and loved me unconditionally. Daddy was given to intense anger and now and then would throw a major violent fit. Our granddad was always kind and gentle, and he never spoke in anger. Our mother told us that he was not this way just with his grandchildren; he had been the same with his own children throughout their lives. She admired and loved him.

Then there was my brother, Kenneth. We looked like twins, even though he came first, eight months before me. Kenneth was everything a boy was not supposed to be: sweet, tender, playful, and fearful of being hurt. He charmed us with his humor. He was everything that Dad was not. His sisters loved him, and he loved us. We loved our brother, the eternal boy, ever Peter Pan, but we mostly feared grown men.

Honestly, had Mama’s father, Daddy Gus, not been in my life, I believe I might easily have become a man-hating woman or at best a woman who just simply feared men. Lots of women fear men. And fear can lay the foundation for contempt and hatred. It can be a cover-up for repressed, killing rage. When girl children are learning what men are like within patriarchal culture and shaping our sense of them, we look to the male authority we know to teach us about masculinity. If the primary male figures in our lives are cruel, unkind, and in some cases violently abusive, this is the way we think men are. If the men in our lives—our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, brothers—stand idly by while elder women abuse us, then we lose respect for them. We do not forgive them their failure to protect us from harm.

I am grateful that the images of masculinity surrounding me as a child were varied. I knew that lots of men were “macho” like my dad, but I also knew there were men like my granddad—calm, gentle, and kind. These diverse images shaped my perspective. In my childhood there were men who were not ashamed to express their love of God openly and to shed ecstatic tears. These men were renegades, rebelling against the patriarchal norm. And they were the men I was destined to love, the sensitive, soulful, shy men who were looked down upon by the patriarchy. The men who inhabited my dreams were men of feeling.

When I entered wholeheartedly into feminist movement, I had the full encouragement of my male partner, whose personality, as it turned out, was a mixture of my dad and granddad. At that moment in our lives we had not fallen into the gender strife that would later lead us to separate. Then he supported my efforts to become a liberated woman. He was not homophobic. At no time did he worry about all the time I was spending with lesbian feminists, as some men did. In our groups women confessed that the men in their lives did not want them to hang out with lesbians. Their partners believed that they would turn into lesbians just by sitting next to one. We laughed at those stories. And we felt sad for these men who were missing out on friendships that might have changed their perspective on love and life.

In those days we used the phrase “male-identified” to describe women who did not necessarily like men, though they usually pretended to, but who supported any standpoint men in their lives held, who let their own opinions go to please men. Some of these women were subordinated against their will, but many of them were artful manipulators, pretending to embody the sexist feminine ideal even as they were contemptuous of real men, whom they believed to be stupid and childlike. Retrospectively, I can see that our phrase was incomplete. These females were not simply male-identified, they were patriarchally male-identified. Even then the most radical feminist woman knew that not all men wanted to be patriarchs. Male-identified women espoused the same negative sexist notions about gender common to any sexist man. They were not interested in the perspectives of progressive male advocates of feminism. To them, these men were not “real” men.

In our feminist consciousness-raising groups, women involved with men often had the harshest stories to tell. Knowing men intimately, up close and personal, they also knew the immediacy of male-inflicted pain. They knew about emotional abuse and domestic violence. Their rage at men was intense and unrelenting. At times it was infectious. It was difficult to hear a woman describing being raped repeatedly by an angry dad as a child, then running away from home with the first guy who was nice to her, only to find out later that when he was angry she was the punching bag for his rage—and on and on—and not feel antimale. These stories were commonplace.

Sitting in intimate circles listening to so much pain made us want to get rid of abusive men. It was easy to fantasize about finding them, interrogating them to discover whether they had ever abused a female, lining up the abusers, and blowing them away. Afterward you would go to the women they had hurt and assure them, “He will never hurt you again—never again.” These fantasies did not emerge from an irrational urge to bash men. They were the stuff of feminist dreams of ending male violence against women. They were the stuff of wanting to know what the world would be like if it were a safe place—a place where women could roam freely, where we could “take back the night.” Of course there were women in these groups who hated men and wanted revenge, but most of them expressed their rage and then went home to nurture and care for the men in their lives. Rarely were they lesbians.

Women’s disappointment with men is rarely given a public hearing in our society. The flip side of the feminist consciousness-raising group was the informal gathering of wives in any community who played cards, shopped, and shared, in between the gossip about this and that, their rage and anger at men. Unlike feminists, they did not want men to stop being patriarchs; they just wanted men to be kinder, gentler patriarchs. Using feminist terms, we called these men “benevolent patriarchs.” They were men who believed themselves to be superior to women and therefore felt they should rule over us. They just thought they should be kind providers and protectors. Prior to major feminist shifts in gender roles in our society, men who were cruel and abusive, usually found male-identified women to help justify and legitimize their actions. However, as feminist thinking about ending male violence against women, however diluted, has trickled down to the larger culture, most women will speak against male domination, against male violence, but still support patriarchal culture.

Women, like my mother, who have stayed in marriages with unkind husbands for more than fifty years, will condemn acts of cruelty and unkindness that as late as ten years ago they would have sought to justify or explain away. Whenever I would speak harshly about my father, my mother would always speak positively, reminding me of how steady a provider he had been. In recent years she has become more critical of his acts of unkindness. And she has grown bitter. Nowadays, past the age of sixty, when she makes comments about men in general, they are more likely to be negative than positive. As a mother of six grown daughters, several of whom suffered at the hands of unkind, abusive men, she, a traditionally male-identified woman, has begun to change her perspective. Now she knows that women are not to be blamed when men are treating us in violent and/or cruel ways.

More than ever before in our nation’s history, women in general feel free to speak their resentment and rage at men. My youngest sister wears a button reading SO MANY MEN, SO MANY REASONS NOT TO SLEEP WITH ANY OF THEM. In the wake of contemporary feminist movement, it has become harder to articulate what we like, desire, and love about men. In this world where so many women work, few females talk about the pleasure of being economically supported by a male partner’s income. And even a woman like Jane Fonda, married to one of the richest men in the world, who freed her from work, now testifies that she felt she was losing her identity in her marriage, and she left and began to create her own work projects.

Overall, women seem to agree that unless one has pleasurable and engaging pursuits, staying home is no fun. As should be the case, many working women find it wonderful to be home when they have a newborn babe. But even newborns grow up. The feminist movement created the social space for men to choose to stay home and be “househusbands,” and like housewives they suffer the same complaints if they are unable to use their time away from a paid job meaningfully. In Arlie Hochschild’s book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, women acknowledged that they prefer working low-paying jobs even if they must do a second shift at home. They would rather work than be financially dependent on men. They would rather leave home and work even if they do not earn enough money to be free. If wages for housework had become a reality, this might not be the case. A domestic revolution might occur if wages for homemakers (like child support in some states) were automatically deducted from the working partner’s paycheck.

Whether they think of themselves as feminists or not, more women than ever before face the reality that we live in a male-dominated society. And many women like it like that, as long as they derive benefits from men and no negative side effects. The negative side effects—tyranny in the household or sexual violence—no woman likes or wants. What most women do not choose to face is the reality that if you support patriarchy, you get negative side effects. As Elizabeth Wurtzel puts it, “It still feels like men have all the power. They still seem to obey their impulses to run away while women are enslaved to their impulses to run toward. As long as men continually get messages about avoiding commitment while women are taught to desperately seek it out, the sexes will always be at odds with each other and nothing will work.” Of course, many men in patriarchal relationships deploy emotional abuse and physical violence to avoid intimacy. Perpetuating this violence makes the system of patriarchy work. Without male violence blocking the door, men might be emotionally open, they might find their way to love.

The popularity of books like John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus indicates that lots of folks want 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 often 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 writers, 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 this work. While it 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.

Many women feel despair about patriarchy’s ending and try to find ways to cope with male domination that will heighten their well-being. It is certainly clear that sexist men are not rushing out to buy literature that will help them unlearn sexist thinking. Patriarchal thinking keeps women and men separate, locked in the artificial differences that Gray and other thinkers choose to regard as natural. Nothing was more frightening to women who wanted to be with men than a feminist movement exposing the depths of male contempt and disregard for the female sex. Luckily, by changing the workforce, the feminist movement did alter in fundamental ways how men see women. Yet despite the feminist call to change patriarchal thinking that denies men access to emotional growth, most men continue to believe it is “natural” for them to behave as though emotions do not matter, as though all emotional work, including loving, is primarily a female task.

The first chapter of Shere Hite’s report Women and Love cites “men’s emotional withholding and distancing,” their “reluctance to talk about personal thoughts and feelings,” as a major problem. Hite reports, “Ninety-eight percent of the women in this study say that they would like more verbal closeness with the men they love; they want the men in their lives to talk more about their own personal thoughts, feelings, plans, and questions, and to ask them about theirs.” I read this and remembered the card by the cartoonist Nicole Hollander that has an image on the cover of a woman sitting in front of a female psychic who stares into her crystal ball. The woman is saying, “Why won’t he talk about his feelings?” And when you open the card, the caption reads, “At 2 A.M. men all over the world will talk about their feelings and women all over the world will be sorry.” I purchased this card years ago and held on to it.

It reminded me of the occasions in therapy with my longtime partner when he would say that I always encouraged him to talk about his feelings, but when he did, everything he shared upset me. This made him want to remain silent. What he shared usually exposed that he was not the person I thought he was—that his values, ethics, and beliefs were radically different from mine. Try having a conversation with almost any man about whether it is best to cease sexual intercourse if a woman is uncomfortable. Most men want to continue coitus irrespective of what women feel. And if women talked to men about this openly, they would know that men feel this way before they engage in sexual activity with them. Much of what men have to say would be a turnoff, so no wonder many male seducers learn to keep their thoughts to themselves, the better to manipulate and con their female admirers.

Women are afraid to hear patriarchal men speak their thoughts and feelings when what they reveal expresses a reality vastly different from how we imagined them to be. Not only does this speaking expose our differences, the ways we do not connect, it exposes the possibility that we may not be able to connect. This is the possibility that the card alludes to. Patriarchal men seem to know this better than women. Their silence helps maintain patriarchy. When they speak thoughts and feelings that reveal pathological narcissism or negate a concern for love, it becomes clearer to the women they are speaking to that these men will not provide desired companionship or meet their emotional needs. Women do not want to talk to men about love, because we do not want to hear that most men are simply not interested in the subject. An honest patriarchal man will boldly proclaim that he pretends interest in love to get sex.

We all know relationships in which couples remain together for more than fifty years but seem to be total strangers. They really do seem to be on different planets. Yet all too often it is the male whose needs are met in these bonds, who feels no desire to communicate, and the female who anguishes. Long before we had books like Michael Vincent Miller’s Intimate Terrorism, describing the underlying sadomasochism of such bonds, Tillie Olsen painted a moving and sad portrait of a marriage like this in her story “Tell Me a Riddle.” In the story it is the patriarchal man whose values triumph and the woman whose spirit is broken....