Sublime

How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised?

Individuals who choose to love can and do alter our lives in ways that honor the primacy of a love ethic. We do this by choosing to work with individuals we admire and respect; by committing to give our all to relationships; by embracing a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the p

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.

Then bell hooks stepped forward in 1981, writing in Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism: ‘The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that . . . women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labelling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that

to be accepted in our physical and spiritual beings rather than feeling we had to make ourselves into a fantasy self to become the object of male desire).

As a political theorist, hooks believed fiercely in the power of naming systems—her recurring phrase, in defining what we are up against, was “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”5 But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book, F

Men theorize about love, but women are more often love’s practitioners. Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.