Whenever I talk about the subject of love with someone of my generation, they get nervous or twist their face, especially when I address the lack of love. I have chatted with my friends many times about it, and more than one has suggested that I see a therapist. It seems to me that some have had enough of my insistence on the subject and, surely, they believe that if I spoke to a specialist it would give them a break. However, most people are afraid of what might come out when exploring the meaning of love in everyday life. When a single forty-year-old woman raises the question of love, the first assumption, derived from a sexist mindset, is that she is “desperate” to find a man. No one believes that they have a passionate intellectual interest in the matter. No one perceives his effort to understand the metaphysical meaning of love in everyday life as the fruit of a rigorous philosophical commitment (…)
In popular culture, love is a fertile field for fantasy. Perhaps that is why theoretical speculation about love has long been dominated by men; fantasy has always been its terrain, both in the sphere of cultural production and in everyday life. Male fantasy is seen as capable of creating a new reality, while female fantasy is considered pure escape. Hence, the romance novel remains the only area in which women speak of love with a degree of authority. On the other hand, when men appropriate the sentimental gender, their work receives much more recognition than that of women. One of the most significant examples of this is a novel like The bridges of Madison. If it had been a woman who had written this sentimental and superficial love story (in which, however, emotional elements are not lacking), I doubt very much that it could have become such a resounding success and transcend the traditional limits of the genre as did.
Of course, the audience that consumes love books is overwhelmingly female. However, male sexism is not enough to explain why there are so few love books – and about love – written by women. Arguably, women are eager to hear what men have to say about the feeling of love. A sexist perspective can lead a woman to believe that she already knows what another woman is going to say to her. Such a reader may think that she can get much more by reading what men write on the subject.
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When I was young, when I read a book about love, I did not stop lying about the author’s genre. Since he wanted to understand what we mean when we talk about love, he considered it an insignificant detail. But when I got to thinking about it seriously and writing about it, I began to wonder if there was a difference between male and female writers. Reviewing the literature on love, I realized that there are very few writers, whether men or women, who talk about the influence exerted by patriarchy and how male domination over women and children is an obstacle to love. . Create loveby John Bradshaw is one of my favorite books. The author has the courage to establish a link between male supremacy (the institutionalization of patriarchy) and the lack of love in families. Bradshaw, famous for his work on the “inner child” – according to which every person carries within them the child they have been – is convinced that the end of patriarchy will be an important step on the path of love. But her book has not received the same attention and recognition as the works of other men who write on the same subject without questioning the sexist definition of gender roles.
If we want to create a culture of love, we must make profound changes in our way of thinking and acting. Men who write about love always claim to have received it, and speak from that position, which gives them what they call “authority.” Women often speak from a position of lack, from the position of those who have not received the love they wanted. Today, a woman who talks about love remains suspicious. Perhaps because everything that an educated woman can say on the subject constitutes a threat and a direct challenge to the views offered by men (…)
Many of the self-help essays on love written in recent times by male authors — from Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus until Love and awaken by John Welwood – take a feminist perspective on gender roles; but, in the end, the authors remain clinging to conceptual systems that suggest the existence of inherent and profound differences between men and women. However, all the evidence in our possession indicates that, while it is true that the male perspective often differs from the female one, these divergences are due to learned characteristics, not to innate or “natural” traits. If it were true that men and women are absolute opposites inhabiting different emotional universes, men would never have become the supreme authority on love. Given the gender stereotypes that attribute feelings and emotionality to women and rationality and lack of emotion to men, “real men” would never engage in a dialogue about love.
Although men are regarded as the recognized “authorities” on the matter, very few express themselves without reservation, clearly stating what they think about love. The truth is that, in everyday life, both men and women talk relatively little about it. Silence protects us from uncertainty. We want to know what love is, but we fear that the desire to know it in depth will bring us closer and closer to the abyss of its lack (…) We want to know what it means to love, what we can do in our daily lives to love and be loved. We want to know how to convince unbelievers to open the doors of their hearts and let love in. But the intensity of this desire does not affect the insecurity of our society about the loving feeling. Everyone assures that love is important, but they bombard us everywhere with signs of their failure (…)
Another driving force we find in America is sexual obsession. There is no aspect of sexuality that is not studied, discussed, demonstrated. There are introductory courses on any dimension of sexuality, including masturbation. But there are no schools of love. It is taken for granted that everyone instinctively knows how to love. And we continue to consider that the family is the first school of love, although everything seems to contradict this assumption. Those who do not learn to love in the family also hope to know romantic love. But love often eludes us, and in fact, we spend our entire lives trying to erase the damage caused by cruelty, abandonment, and the various forms of lack of love that are experienced in the family of origin and in families. romantic relationships in which we do not know how to act.
Only love can heal the wounds of the past; However, these wounds are often so deep that one ends up bolting the heart, and we seem incapable of giving love or accepting that which is given to us. To open our hearts to the power of love, to receive its grace, we must have the courage to admit that we know very little about the subject, both in theory and in practice.
bell hooks (pseudonym for Gloria Jean Watkins, always written in lower case) is a writer and activist, author of ‘Am I not a woman? Black women and feminism ‘and’ Revolutionary parenting ‘. This text is an extract from his book ‘All about love’, which Paidós publishes this March 3.
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