Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives. What does a lady do when she wants more from her man, but he isn’t willing to put out? Start with one’s self. Hooks presents the notion of self-love being the starting point to women’s happiness in bed. By self-love, Hooks references the act of women accepting their body and soul as is, without trying to change things. Hooks presents the idea of love being an individualized feature that exudes out only when there is overflow. A woman cannot truly love a man and expect such affection from him unless she first appreciates herself. Men and women who want to know love will find us, and we will find them" (p. 158) (TIMING OF ABSURD LIFE EVENTS) Finally, she raises this idea that feminists aren't truly ready for "the new men": We demand that men change, and when they do, we are often not ready to affirm and embrace the liberation we claimed to desire. Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey she must choose to be truly free. Silencing our fears about becoming women who love too much, Communion answers all of our questions about the place of love in a woman’s life.

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). As we leave behind the stuff of the past that is mere burden, the relationships that bind rather than set us free, as we experience a change of heart, we develop the inner strength necessary to journey on the path to love, to make our search for love be a grand life adventure and a profound spiritual quest. Along the way we do find soul mates, true friends, life companions. We find communion. Another great wisdom gift that women offer to those who have not yet discovered its pleasures is the wisdom that it is better to know the joy of dancing in a circle of love than to dance alone. While a romantic partner and/or soul mate may bring us joy, we add that joy to love already shared with all those who are truly primary in our lives -- the circle of people to whom we turn, who turn to us -- knowing that they will find us eternally there. No matter how sweet the love between two people, we ask too much if we demand that this relationship and this one other person be 'everything.' The truth we hold close is that 'love is everything.' And because love has this power, it is always there within us, within those we love. It offers to us the possibility of ongoing communion." I don't know a whole lot about feminist theory, but what I learned about it here I found fascinating. hooks' treatise on love is passionate and positive, and goes a long way to build up strength and determination in readers.I think hooks' writing suffers from a lot of the same pitfalls as her previous work, All About Love: New Visions:

Affirming our natural beauty before we adorn it in other ways keeps us from developing a dependency on artifice" (p. 119), even though I have this same feeling, I could see where it'd be disagreed with (thinking of Imogen Binnie's chapter on clothes/fashion) 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. According to the author, feminism stops at the bedroom door because of the innate teachings that label men as more patriarchal when they conceal their emotions. Women, as Hooks claims, are left to grapple with a corporate job that pays the bills and a second shift of satisfying a man who is sometimes impossible to read.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. 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: Romantic friendships are a threat to patriarchy and heterosexism because they fundamentally challenge the assumption that being sexual with someone is essential to all meaningful, lasting, intimate bonds. In reality, many people in marriages and longtime partnerships are not sexual; behind closed doors their relationships may be similar to, if not the same as, romantic friendships. Many single heterosexual women spend their time in relationships with men in which they feel unloved and unfulfilled, only to experience a moment of critical awakening in midlife, when they begin to do the work of self-love. And the outcome of that work is often the recognition that they would rather be alone than remain in unsatisfying partnerships. Or many of us are not able to meet men with whom we want to make committed partnerships. Finding a man to be with is a lot easier than finding a man who can be a loving partner.”

We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice. bell hooks also includes some memoir material in this book, detailing parts of her life I had never read about or learned about before. I enjoyed that material a great deal. bell hooks is such an incredibly brave, incredibly fierce and inspiring feminist. It always ennobles me to read her work. Dieses Buch handelt von der Stellung der Frau in einer patriarchalisch geprägten Gesellschaft. Es handelt von Gleichberechtigung und Vorstellungen, die längst überholt sind und ganz wichtig, von Selbstliebe. Die Texte lassen sich leicht und flüssig lesen. Aber leider, leider konnte mich das Buch nicht überzeugen. They, of course, are women, and the girls who will one day become women. Girls and women who are all, truly, whores. Whores who must be policed by the violence that men dish out to them, to keep them in line. I loved this book. I love bell hooks in general, but happened to read this book at exactly the right time in my life so that it was a profound and transformative experience; it is always gratifying to see my own philosophy laid out in print with articulate grace, and "Communion" was deeply affirming in that way. hooks agrees with Fromm that love is an art form, "an action informed by care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility." hooks says that it is not possible to have love and domination at the same time; we only really love in relationships that honor freedom and equality.

bell hooks'un okuduğum ikinci kitabı. ilki "feminizm herkes içindir" idi. ilkinde gözlemlediğim meseleyi basit anlatma tavrı bunda da geçerli. A lot of people react to the statements in this book, and others like it, by yelling things like, "Not all men!" or "We live in a post-feminist world!" or "Don't disrespect people who are into kink!" or "Sex workers are good for society!" and so on and so forth. Lost is the fact that bell hooks, and writers like her, are discussing a power structure, not individual people. Lieben lernen" von bell hooks, übersetzt von Elisabeth Schmalen, erschien am 22.02.2022 im HarperCollins Verlag.

When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou Hooks draws interesting links to the 21st century struggle for love that raises women up instead of oppresses, but at times the anecdotes from the feminist movement of the 70s did not offer much but reminiscence for a time that I didn't live through. One blue shiny thing I did get from this section is that if feminism rejects love outright then people looking for love have no where to find it except in oppressive cultural products, which could probably have been written in one chapter.

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. Den Text bzw. die Aussagen von bell hooks sind sehr pauschalisiert. Sie provozieren. Aber genau diesen Aussagen konnte ich nicht zustimmen, sie nicht teilen, mich nicht mit ihnen identifizieren. Ein möglicher Gedanke, weshalb ich mich mit einigen Aussagen nicht so recht identifizieren konnte könnte sein, dass das Original bereits 2002 erschienen ist und aufgrund dessen eventuell die eine oder andere Aussage überholt ist. bell hooks is a feminist theorist and writer and this is part of a group of books she wrote about love. This one examines love from a female perspective, delving deeply into feminist theory, where feminism both succeeded and failed, and the utter importance of learning how to love for everyone (not just women). She discusses the importance of loving yourself before you can love anyone else, and the fact that love cannot exist in patriarchal relationships. She discusses the false idea that women are naturally more loving, showing how this is part of patriarchy, and argues that everyone can (and must) learn to love, optimally beginning in childhood.