I’ve been reading Communion: The Female Search For Love by bell hooks recently, and I have plenty of thoughts. With work, life, and all my various projects in progress, I don’t have as much time for reading as I would like anymore. Perhaps I thought this would be an ‘easier’ read, as non-fiction books tend to require more intellectual focus than emotional buy-in. I couldn’t have been more wrong, but bell hooks does that to you.
Reading more feminist works is always a priority for me, and this book has been sitting on my shelf for months. Feminism is still considered a dirty word to many, and while I don’t care to change your mind if that’s true, I think you’d still find bell hooks’ work insightful. She writes about issues with calm wisdom, gliding from topic to topic seamlessly in an easy to read style.
Reading more feminist works is always a priority for me, and this book has been sitting on my shelf for months. Feminism is still considered a dirty word to many, and while I don’t care to change your mind if that’s true, I think you’d still find bell hooks’ work insightful. She writes about issues with calm wisdom, gliding from topic to topic seamlessly in an easy to read style.
Just because it’s easy to read doesn’t mean it won’t cut you to your core however. hooks has a way of turning your world upside down with a sentence.
I have long since used a ‘second brain’ on Notion to store my notes, thoughts, and the ideas I take from various books. Now that I have a blog, I thought I’d put this here instead. The concepts may help you too, or spark good conversations that help us all to grow. It’s good practise for me to work on a literary criticism/response piece, as I miss that from my university days.
Of course, in this no-nuance-net day and age, I simply must add a disclaimer! This post contains my takeaways, notes, and responses to the book. If you don’t like it or disagree, that’s fine. I enjoy discussion so I’d love to hear what you have to say, unless it is nasty and in bad faith. If that is the case, go get the book and write your own response 🙂
Chapter One: aging to love, loving to age
While working an office job for the last year, I’ve met dozens of women in all stages of their lives. They are so interesting, with so many different ideas and life experiences, full of beauty and passion. And with all their wisdom they love to impart their most important lesson:
Aging is horrible, you will get fat and slow and ugly and hate your life!
Super encouraging, yeah.
I hate it. I genuinely hate hearing them say this, as if my youth (which has been pretty unpleasant as well) is the only time in life where I will be valuable or remotely happy. I wondered if I was to be doomed forever, depressed during the only time in life when things were okay, then depressed for the rest of it too.
When I picked up this book and read the first chapter however, I was stunned. After speaking with the women in her life about love and aging, hooks writes, “The exciting news is this: Everyone agrees that aging is more fun than it has ever been before” (1).
The exciting news is this: Everyone agrees that aging is more fun than it has ever been before.
— page 1
Women’s “courage to choose adventure” in their lives, and the courage to speak up about their issues has been key to progressing these feminist causes. Discussing aging, choosing to love their bodies loudly, and refusing to suffer in silence any longer brought forth new conversations and change. Challenging sexist ways of thinking offered us new standards and perceptions of beauty, where curved and plump bodies were beautiful, and hair under the armpits or covering our legs was no longer hideous (though there is still a ways to go with this!). Women got to speaking about how aging doesn’t have to be an early death of the self, but a process for further growth and self-discovery.
How could this be, when so many of the older women in my life told me how awful aging really is? I was hooked (no pun intended) and I had to read more.
hooks was raised in “an exciting world of women” (4), and “learned early that aging would be full of delight”. This is a stark contrast to the messages I received from others, but deep down it’s the one I’ve always wanted to hear. How could the experience, wisdom, time and love that comes with age be a bad thing? Maybe it isn’t.
“Women around us talked about the prime of their life as though it was indeed the promised land. Like beautiful snakes, they were going to reach their prime, boldly shed their skin and acquire another—this one more powerful and beautiful than all the rest. Something in them was going to be resurrected. They were going to be born again and have another chance.”
— page 4
I had to include that whole section, the quote too beautiful to pass over. The Biblical imagery and terminology here adds a mythical element to aging that it needs. For so long, logic and intellectualism has sought to stamp out any kind of fun or whimsy, removing all wonder from the conversation. This bleak way of thinking means we see aging as a painful necessity, because it leads to the breakdown of our minds and thus the intelligence we cling to for our superiority.
Instead, hooks likens aging to the ‘promised land’, the beautiful and bountiful place we will be able to call home at the end of our journey. It is not the end of the journey, as we are always living—and always aging. But it is a beautiful place to continue that journey from.
Biblically, snakes are most commonly associated with the serpent who deceived Eve into the original sin, but snakes are not always associated with sin. Yahweh also used a bronze serpent mounted on a pole to heal the Israelites after a bout of disobedience. Further, a snake’s ability to shed their skin and emerge again is a picture of Jesus’ transformative death and resurrection, which hooks mirrors as she calls the aged self a more powerful and beautiful version.
Part of the reason why, hooks writes, is menopause, “a rite of passage in which they would move from slavery to freedom” (4). No longer could women—solitary, celibate, queer or otherwise—be trapped through sexual coercion after menopause. No longer would they have to fear an unwanted pregnancy that bound them to another, whether that be a male partner, his family, a rapist, or the child created as a result. Unable to bear children anymore, these women become free to finally take care of themselves.
Aging has traditionally meant giving up power for women, while men often gain power as they progress through the years. Now, women are more empowered than they have been in centuries with their ability to make different choices in their lives, though the patriarchy is still not yet accepting of this newfound freedom.
This creates new issues, hooks argues, using the example of women staying in loveless and unhappy marriages for years. Women nowadays, even those who refute feminism or believe it has no bearing on their lives, are more empowered than ever to leave relationships in which they are treated poorly, abused or merely unloved. Unfortunately, both options left people feeling cynical about love, as women and men have long believed that women are undesirable in their older years, especially after having children.
hooks said, ‘this was one of the most painful lessons about love and heartache that I learned as a girl in the bosom of patriarchy’ (9). I have to agree, and I’m still unlearning this lesson for myself too. It doesn’t help when you have so many other women in your life reminding you how unloveable you’ll become, but the battle for our minds and agency is relentless these days. The only way to fight it is to keep showing up, keep hoping, and keep trying to build better relationships.
Yet, times are changing, as hooks keeps reminding us. Women are discussing their experiences more, learning more from each other and helping one another! I see it so often online when women share videos of them interacting with their spouse, recreating abusive or unloving dynamics. Often these women are quick to defend their husbands, boyfriends, and family members, assuring us that ‘we don’t know him!’
The thing is, we don’t have to know anyone to recognise patterns. And people are always more than the sum of their parts! Noticing bad patterns or habits in someone does not make them a bad person—in fact, if they are the ‘great guy’ you believe him to be, he’ll take on board the feedback and work to change those harmful behaviours!
Sharing that could be the difference between life and death for some. I don’t go online to make judgements about people or comment criticisms about them, but I am grateful for the women who call out these behaviours. So often I hear or read stories from abuse survivors, who didn’t even know that the things they were experiencing were wrong. They certainly didn’t think that anyone else had suffered that treatment either. They often blame themselves and internalise the problems, so having other women to inform them and call out the inappropriate, nasty, and abusive behaviours they see is vital—sometimes for their own survival. These conversations are necessary as men must learn that they cannot treat women that way any longer, and women must refuse to accept their cruelty for another moment. If one can get away with it, they all can.
As a child of the fifties, hooks experienced the deconstruction of the sixties and seventies, and decided to juggle her church upbringing with new wave thoughts around love and relationships. She gave up the desire for marriage, instead believing in consistent commitment to seek a lifelong companion, not a husband. Love was not involuntary but “an act of choice and will” (10). She sought to keep the “good stuff from the old ways and blend it with the best of the new stuff coming in” (10) but found this to be hard in practice with her own partner.
“Radical feminism encouraged women to question our obsession with love” (10) with more extreme schools of thought urging women to give up a quest for love completely, in favour of power. Yet, hooks refused to give up her passion for love. Her desire for love and fulfilment began as a girl with her Barbie and Ken dolls, where she could create ‘paradise’ between them. Her grandparents were married for almost eighty years and her parents stayed together despite their challenges. This fostered an obsession with the question of fulfilment and a desire “to understand how to make love work” (11).
“Love was for victims; power was for victors”
— page 10
hooks recognises how the feminist movement has “opened up avenues that had always been closed for social equality with men” (12), but also admits it’s not yet clear whether our newfound freedoms have given us better access to ‘true love’. Women are more economically self-sufficient, but also more single and childless. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as it shows how much choice women are now afforded, but is there much choice when the options for partnership with men are so limited?
These are the conversations we’re seeing more nowadays as the ‘loneliness epidemic’ is a hot topic. We’re told that men are lonelier than ever, but honestly, so are women. Social isolation is rife across the world, and has lead people to make strange or dangerous choices as they desperately seek connection. From incel forums and alpha-male podcasts taking off, to people speaking with and building relationships with AI chat bots, the possibilities are growing more dystopian and concerning by the day. Add in the sex-robots, and we’re hurtling towards a world in which love for one another is totally replaced by the convenience of a machine. No need to be lonely when you’re AI-companion is right there for you, providing all the positive reinforcement you could ever want and need.
When men do not want to listen to women, do not want to consider their safety or care or desires, women withdraw their affection—just as men withdraw their affection for women who do not appease them too. Unfortunately, if no one wants to cooperate, be part of insightful conversations, figure out how to build and maintain better relationships or change for the better, the breakdown of social relations is inevitable (and wild to witness in real time).
hooks recognises the impact of propaganda in our world and relationships too, discussing how mass media convinced women that they were doomed if they did not have a partner by 20, 25, 30, 35 etc… These messages served to tell women “that we’d better get back to focusing on the business of getting and keeping a man—that this above all else should be our primary concern” (13). Now, women are refusing to play along with this, and men are a bit stunned. They received the same messages growing up, but instead of women trying desperately to win them over as they were promised, women are now rejecting them entirely. Men are left clueless about what to do. (Well, not clueless, because women have told them what to do, and what they want—you know, basic respect and care. Most men just refuse to listen or do any work themselves. After all, that’s women’s work, right?)
bell hooks experienced this exact challenge in her own romantic life, as she was bound to a partner who did not value or commit to personal growth, emotional openness or deepening his intimate relationship with her. hooks had to face herself and consider how important her own satisfaction and love was. She decided that “ultimately, my fears were not as important as my longing for freedom, self-actualisation, love” (14). Leaving her relationship was less about giving up on love and more about enabling herself to search for it more deeply.
Love is important. That is the key message of her work, and she believes it wholeheartedly. My own hesitations around this concept are no doubt due to the severe social and patriarchal conditioning we are all subject to, alongside my own difficult experiences. Love, she writes, “should be as important to women in midlife as it was to us when we were girls” (14), and though many are still looking, they should not give up hope.
True love also begins with self-love, she asserts, as our search for love will always bring us back to ourself. Wherever you go, there you are, as the saying goes. It’s why we cannot deny it or write love off as something that makes us weak. Loving ourselves is the only way to be strong, the only way to continue on the journey through life.
Feminist critiques of love are necessary, as they have opened up the way for new conversations but they must not inhibit our ability to speak about the importance of love in our lives. Silencing this topic undermines “the freedom of all females to be fully self-actualised, which women’s liberation first championed” (15). We must, hooks concludes, come up with “new liberatory visions full of hope and promise” (15), as these visions will provide the path to love.
She summarises it best, writing, “Women, along with the culture as a whole, need constructive visions of redemptive love” (15).
Young women like myself need better visions of love from the older women in our life, and the older women of the world need more hope from their younger counterparts. It must be a team effort. Their experiences are invaluable, and we must learn from one another. I’ve been working on this myself, by following older women online, listening to their stories and appreciating the beauty, grace, and love they possess. There are good stories out there, and there are examples of women who are so loved by their partners. There are men out there who do want to love and join with women in good, reciprocal partnership. We must foster this, reward it, and help more love to grow.
| Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 |
References
hooks, bell. Communion The Female Search for Love. Harper Collins, 2002.
Leave a Reply