#bell hooks

And it is especially hard to speak of love when what we have to say calls attention to the fact that lovelessness is more common than love, that many of us are not sure what we mean when we talk of love or how to express love. Everyone wants to know more about love. We want to know what it means to love, what we can do in our everyday lives to love and be loved. We want to know how to seduce those among us who remain wedded to lovelessness and open the door to their hearts to let love enter. The strength of our desire does not change the power of our cultural uncertainty. Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure. In the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families, and in our romantic lives, we see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community, or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise.

Reading of the Week!

Individual female freedom fighters all over the world have single-handedly struggled against patriarchy and male domination. Since the first people on the planet earth were nonwhite it is unlikely that white women were the first females to rebel against male domination. In white supremacist capitalist patriarchal Western culture neocolonial thinking sets the tone for many cultural practices. That thinking always focuses on who has conquered a territory, who has ownership, who has the right to rule. Contemporary feminist politics did not come into being as a radical response to neocolonialism.

"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."

Without males as allies in struggle feminist movement will not progress. As it is we have to do so much work to correct the assumption deeply embedded in the cultural psyche that feminism is anti-male. Feminism is anti-sexism. A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat.

Often when individuals talk or write about contemporary feminist movement they make it seem as though there was a set body of feminist principles and beliefs that served as a foundation from the very beginning. In actuality when feminist uprising began to occur in the late ’60s, it manifested itself in diverse settings among women who often had no knowledge of one another’s existence. There was no clearly defined platform. While Betty Friedan was writing about “the problem that has no name,” addressing the way sexist discrimination affected highly educated white women with class privilege, Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Ann Moody, along with individual black women across the nation, were challenging the sexism within black civil rights movement. Appropriating the vernacular of black liberation, white women called their resistance to sexism women’s liberation. We do not know who “first” used the term “women’s liberation.” That is not important. Significantly what we know from charting the history of contemporary feminist movement is that individual women were rebelling against sexism all over the place. When those women began to meet and talk together, that collective rebellion came to be known as women’s liberation and would later evolve into feminist movement. Feminist struggle takes place anytime anywhere any female or male resists sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Feminist movement happens when groups of people come together with an organized strategy to take action to eliminate patriarchy.