Worum geht es? Bell Hooks befasst sich im Buch mit dem Thema Liebe. Liebe in all ihren Facetten: Selbstliebe, romantische Liebe, Liebe unter Schwestern und unter anderem das Verhältnis von Liebe zu Dingen wie Arbeit und Macht wird ebenfalls thematisiert. Die Abhandlung der Themen passiert dabei immer vor dem Hintergrund des Feminismus. When I rebelled against my parents. . .I did not do so happily. I wanted and needed their support. Going against their wishes was frightening and psychologically upsetting" (p. 148) When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." -Maya Angelou Idea of a "coming out process" to yourself for realizing/believing/identifying yourself as straight, sharing same process as those who had to consciously come out as queer (p. 35) When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou

When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." –Maya Angelou It takes courage for women to challenge the seduction of domination, the making of Love synonymous with erotic conflict between the powerful and the powerless." Lieben lernen — Alles über Verbundenheit“ von Bell Hooks habe ich wirklich gern gelesen. Die Autorin ist bekennende Feministin und im Original ist das Buch bereits 2002 erschienen. I also liked the way she tore into our culture's devaluation of platonic and queer relationships: In heterosexist, patriarchal culture, the only commitments that are deemed truly acceptable and worthy are those between straight women and men who marry. The vast majority of us have flesh on our bones. I wish I could report that we all love that flesh. Some of us do. Most of us do not. A great many of us simply give up, engaging in a process of negative acceptance. By that I mean that an individual woman may not like her looks, her weight, but ceases trying to change herself so that she no longer confroms to conventional sexist aesthetic standards, because to do so lessens her anxiety and stress. But she is still not self-loving. We cannot negate our bodies and love them. Ouch. If this isn't me to a T.awareness of problems alone is not a solution. To solve the problem of _______________, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new images, new ways of seeing ourselves" (p. 114, yeah good reminder) Anybody who identifies as female, um, including very young people. And I do wish I’d read this in college and was when I was first hearing about bell hooks, um, which would have been in like 2006 to 2010 when this book would have been newer. Um, I wish I’d read this book in college. I’m not sure. And she says this too, at the end of the book, she’s not sure if she’d known all this stuff if it really would have affected her path necessarily. Still, she could have gone down her whole path, maybe shortened some of the worst periods, um, a little bit, but, um, kind of gone down at all with kind of a greater awareness of self and her own worth. Um, so I think that’s really powerful. This will definitely be a book that I keep on my bookshelves is like a thing to have my daughter start reading when she’s in her teenage years. According to the author, a woman’s search for love, not equality, is at the helm of all things. Freedom only comes when she realizes her value and appreciates herself instead of waiting for substantiation from a man. Some of these "truths" had me physically wincing at how cliched they are. "Daddy issues" and "you can't love anyone else until you love yourself" are all ugly concepts that rear their heads throughout the course of this book. And personally, yeah: for me, true love didn't come until I stopped compulsively seeking it. I admit that only once I started focusing on prioritizing and improving myself did I attract the right person into my life. But maybe that's just coincidence, because correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation. Maybe it wasn't actually anything I did; maybe it was just timing.

I'm still going to give this a decent rating, though, because I feel like hooks made a lot of good points. She challenged the widely-accepted cultural idea that women are innately more loving than men, and highlighted how toxic gender roles are often still performed even within queer relationships. I felt particularly called out by her indictment of "negative body acceptance": The highlight of this book for me was hooks’ chapter on romantic friendships. This chapter spoke to me as someone who values my closest friendships way more than any man I’ve been into romantically or any man I will be into romantically. Here’s a passage from that chapter that I resonated with a lot: i loved how she challenged the idea that women innately have more capacity for emotion and are naturally more capable of giving love than men and how this idea influences our relationships and society (and allows us to accept men who are emotionally withholding). “Antipatriarchal thinking, which assumes that both women and men are equally capable of learning how to love, of giving and receiving love, is the only foundation on which to construct sustained, meaningful, mutual love.”A passion for love had to be kept secret—unstated. To speak one's longing was to risk shame. Those who knew love enjoyed its delights in private, and those who did not suffered in silence" (p. 59).

this book was written almost 25 years ago and although there were a few times where i was like hmmmm ya okay this book is as old as i am, so much of it was still so relevant. Her discussion of love is wonderful and, I would say, flawless. She discusses attitudes like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," their roots in patriarchy, and the unfairness of both sides of the coin: teaching women that love and nurturing are their realm and they should accept that men won't get it, and teaching men that strength and silence and dominance are their realm and showing emotion or communicating on a deeper level are emasculating.I breezed through this book in two days, and enjoyed it immensely. bell hooks is full of hard truths, but she presents her thoughts in such a way that her work is uplifting, compassionate, and hopeful. The voice of bell hooks rings with moral rectitude, but it is also a voice that is full of kindness, openness, and wholehearted forgiveness. She says that she started writing this book as a message to other women in middle life. Still, then it ended up being kind of so comprehensive and so much about what she wished that she had known that, uh, she really, then it was written for an entirely female audience, right.