Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us – we are not diminished. What we learn through experience is that our capacity to establish deep and profound connections in friendship strengthens all our intimate bonds.
At times women find it difficult to hear what men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.
Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others.
The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.
The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.
No wonder then that male rage is often most directed at women in intimate relationships. Such relationships clearly trigger for many males the anger and rage they felt in childhood when their mothers did not protect them or ruthlessly severed emotional bonds in the name of patriarchy.
Feminism makes it possible for women and men to know love.
Through the practice of compassion and forgiveness, I was able to sustain my appreciation for her work and cope with the grief and disappointment I felt about the loss of this relationship. Practicing compassion enabled me to understand why she might have acted as she did and to forgive her. Forgiving means that I am able to see her as a member of my community still, one who has a place in my heart should she wish to claim it.
One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this al the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.
Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement.
I knew that I wanted to follow their example and become a teacher who would help students become self-directed learners.
Who we are as African-Americans, as black folks in the diaspora, our cultural destiny, has been shaped by both the enslaved and the free.
In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy.
Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.
But simply being the victim of an exploitative or oppressive system and even resisting it does not mean we understand why it’s in place or how to change it.
Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.
And if one’s goal is self-recovery, to be well in one’s soul, honesty and realistically confronting loneliness is party of the healing process.
Woman-identified women, whether straight, bisexual, or lesbian rarely make garnering male approval a priority in our lives. This is why we threaten the patriarchy. Lesbian women who have a patriarchal mindset are far less threatening to men than feminist women, gay or straight, who have turned their gaze and their desire from the patriarchy, away from sexist men.
Given the changing realities of class in our nation, widening gaps between the rich and poor, and the continued feminization of poverty, we desperately need a mass-based radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrongminded while offering us new strategies.
The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.