Love

What a beautiful and needed post.

Rockit: I do think there’s an existing taboo against admitting that you want love. My intuition is that love is one of those intangible, “soft” things that are seen as unnecessary indulgences in a patriarchal, capitalist culture, something that people will say they can get along without if asked, and scoff at you if you state the plain truth: Everyone needs love. Everyone needs positive human interaction. And yet we speak of love as a gift.

I find myself thinking of the way we criticize children who state their desires too plainly. “Don’t tell Grandma what you want for Christmas unless she asks. It’s rude.”

The kind of love being talked about in this post, though, is larger than any one person or any one relationship. It’s a cultural shift that’s needed. Something revolutionary. Although I know this is a feminist blog, I think this goes way beyond feminism. It’s a core-of-our-culture thing that needs to be revamped, and the way to do it isn’t through legislation, or protest marches, or letter-writing campaigns. Love makes more love. It’s as simple as that, and as hard.

This is exactly the conversation we should be having! When I was still seeing my Jungian therapist (I miss her!), we often discussed why I was so unhappy in my (former) position as an office administrator. I enjoyed the job and my coworkers, but hated my boss and deeply resented that this person had power over me, in that he could just up and decide to fire me (though I would have certainly gone to the Labour Board, but would still have had to find a new job, which is always a pain).

Anyway, my therapist asked me what the opposite of power was. And, despite my vocabulary and education, I didn’t know. Her answer: “Love.” Love is the opposite of all the petty and not-so-petty power dynamics inherent in a patriarchal society – a society which relies on hierarchical order and the subordination of half the world’s population in order to continue.

I don’t know how a love-based society would look like, but I’d sure like to find out.

Great post! I’ve also been reading a lot of bell hooks lately, so this really hit home with what I’ve been pondering (Will to Change is on my list, haven’t gotten to it yet though). It’s really heartbreaking, and I think speaks the need for feminist parenting of boy children (obviously girls too). Now I have something to discuss with my (male) spouse when I get home!

That was a beautiful, articulate, and honest love letter.

The devaluation of love is a feminist issue if I ever saw one.

THIS. Absolutely this.

…let me emphasize that the original post, titled “Love”, touched my heart in a special manner which is far beyond the power of mere words to convey…

Thank you so much for writing this

Fascinating post– I hadn’t thought about love in this way, and now I have a lot to think about. Building on the theme that love is the opposite of power, I was telling my therapist about someone I loved (not romantically). He asked me “Are you afraid of them?” and when I said yes– he said– it’s not love if you fear someone. What does love look like without fear?

@Zailyn:

Friendships are automatically seen as less-than and there are limits placed on how important or deep friendships can be to still be considered normal by society. It strikes me how very bounded our notion of love has become, how we want it to fit into strict patterns and conform to our expectations…

Yes. I agree with this so much. On the one hand, it forces people to try to find all the varieties of intimacy and love we all need in one relationship, often leaving one or both partners frustrated and unhappy. Simultaneously, it works to keep friendships ultimately superficial and unsatisfying because it’s considered inappropriate to celebrate deep love or connection in a relationship that isn’t sexual. Our sexual partners are threatened by it, people make snide or hurtful comments about it, and often the people in the friendship don’t even understand it, because we don’t have frameworks that allow us to talk about it truthfully or accurately. It’s really antisocial, even anti-love, when you think about it, this fantasy of all-encompassing and self-contained romantic love.

Germaine Greer wrote a lot about this fantasy in The Female Eunuch (great book, btw — highly recommended reading on this exact topic).

I’ll de-lurk to say thank you for this post. And Donald, I think that “extreme” experiences are actually pretty common; I know mine was pretty bad … I can remember even as a boy of five or six, having it hammered into me by my peers that I had no “Need” of affection once I left diapers; that I had to be “Tough”(rage and lust were the only “acceptable” emotions in my admittedly backwoods peer group, and violence was glorified). Thankfully, I resisted, but I paid heavily for it by being bullied mercilessly (there were other factors as well, but this was near the top of their list).

I just wish more people of every sex, gender, race , class and creed had the ability to confidently seek the affection that all – or at least nearly all – of us crave in some form or another.

Oh, also, to be more specific about the question of identifying with anger, it seems like many of the titles and personalities in the feminist blogosphere do construct personae out of it: Angry Black Bitch; Angry Brown Butch; Fetch Me My Axe; Hate On Me; Diary of an Anxious Black Woman…

What these bloggers write is extremely valuable, and I’m not trying to single them out as “the angry ones,” or to suggest that everything they blog has a raw edge. And I get that reclaiming anger, the right to be human and angry at injustice, is especially important to us feminists, in various ways complicated by intersectional experiences.

Still, I do have these open questions about the roles of love and anger in high-profile feminist blogs.

Is it just me, or do we use a huge amount of snark and sarcasm?

What do we make of this?

Is it simply an effective writing device — deployed for entertainment value, and because humor can often cut through bullshit to the core of an issue? Or is it about seeming smarter, cleverer, wittier than the obtuse opponents? Clearly, it’s not a phenomenon limited to feminist blogs: lots of political sites, not to mention fashion, computer tech, etc., are heavy on the cutting banter. But does it have particular meaning on feminist sites? And how does love play into it?

Maybe I’m blowing the thing out of proportion, and I certainly don’t mean to attack anyone. But as someone who, in my own feminist blogging, has felt somehow pressured by a weird unspoken rule to snark whenever possible, I do wonder about the subtle differences between backbone and defensive posturing. What happens to love in the midst of snark culture? Can snark itself be a form of love? When and how?

Is it somehow related to the emotional self-mutilation among men that bell hooks talks about? Do we (non-men) compensate so much for the repression of female anger that we silence or sever the parts of ourselves that seem tender, vulnerable, or fragile? If so, is this simply a survival technique, in the sense that only by sounding like a man (no matter what gender you are) can you gain credibility?

Sorry this is rambling and kind of Cultural-Feminism-101…Thanks for putting up with me and my questions. :) I’d love to hear your thoughts. (And anyone else’s, of course!)

I was once involved in a small religious group that was making me intensely miserable. (And I was making many of the other members intensely miserable.)

I did a nine days’ prayer to Kuan Yin, asking for peace. And on day seven I got a very clear, pointed answer: “I cannot give you peace because that is not what you want.” It had the kick of something inarguably true.

I thought about it, and realized that it *was* true. I didn’t want peace with that situation. It would have done me harm to come to peace with it. I wanted to be fairly and decently treated; if I couldn’t have that, I wanted out. So I quit. Some years later, I managed to forgive both myself and the other members for the experience, and, indeed, find some peace with it. But I was never going to do that while still in the situation.

I think that advice to be loving sometimes hits people who are in the same sort of place I was, where accommodation to the situation is just self-mutilation. We need to find a way to teach love in such situations that isn’t asking for accommodation to the intolerable, but also helps people who are stuck that way to avoid scarring themselves with bitterness and hate.

Anger is a perfectly valid response to intolerable situations and experiences. The trick is not to let your response make things worse, especially by hitting out at the wrong person. I suspect men learn to do this better than women because there is greater danger from hitting out and less pressure not to show anger.

The ideal response is to use the anger to target the cause of the problem but that requires a lot of self control.

Reactions to “Love” and the quote from Bell Hooks:

One: The assumption that the emotional disconnectedness of men serves no purpose other than to reinforce patriarchy and the oppression of women is two-dimensional. It’s developed for a purpose, whether we like that purpose or not, though I can only speculate on what that purpose it is. The ability to kill is the first thing that comes to mind. The ability to ignore, deny, or disregard another’s right to self-preservation to wound, kill, or otherwise defeat them. This may or may not have always been the case—there may be vast differences among men who fight and kill, over time and in different cultures, in the degree of self-respect or respect of other (including and especially one’s enemy). And men have not necessarily engaged in warfare because they like to or want to, nor is it necessarily an outgrowth of a social system. War has occurred over throughout our existence as a species for a variety of reasons, many of which look a lot like simple—and very real—competition over resources. Many, of course (and probably most in the modern age), are much more political in nature.

Two: What is patriarchy, why does it exist, and what has brought it to power? This is an important question. If we believe that things are as they are for a reason (not a good or bad reason, just a reason) then we have to look into why patriarchy exists. Doing so will inevitably lead us to compassion and take us into the the origins of patriarchy—those forces in our world which have encouraged its development—which must be addressed or undone if the negative attributes of a patriarchal society are to be corrected. Patriarchy has developed as a generally effective means of social control, as warfare has developed as a generally effective means of problem solving—at least in the short-term, and more so in the past than in the modern world. I assume this based on its persistence. “Effective”, again, does not necessarily mean good, and is arguable, particularly as it applies in the modern world.

Three: “…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.” Why have men been asked to engage in these acts of psychic self-mutilation? The language here is terribly assuming, and could, theoretically, be rephrased: “psychic self-mutilation” might be “psychological re-ordering”, “killing off the emotional parts of themselves” might be “inoculating oneself against the hardships of life with which one must contend”, “emotionally crippling himself” might be “emotionally fortifying himself”. Do you see how these are matters of perspective?

If these are extreme reactions they are nonetheless adaptations, in that they have developed for a reason. And are they extreme? Are they outdated? Unnecessary? Do we live in a world in which security is a given? Certainly aggression appears to threaten our security at least as much as it preserves it. After all, aggression would not serve us if aggression did not exist among others. But in the meantime, understanding that aggression and the emotional crippling (or emotional fortification) of men exists for a reason, we might examine whether or not these adaptations serve us, and if not, how to adjust them properly, healthfully, and realistically.

I have worked with low-income inner-city youth at therapeutic rich-kid programs (per scholarships), and generally been left with the sense that what the program teaches applies is much less useful to them. They will go home and the “I Feel Statements”, the “Emotional Literacy”, the “Self-Discovery” may or may not serve them. It may work against them. The shock between an ideal (and idealized) way that one might live and the reality of their lives may be dislocating, may serve to further relegate therapy and such to the realms of an imaginary way of living, imagined chiefly by affluent white folks insulated from the hardships of the street, the competition and struggle for limited resources. Their situation is, of course, an outgrowth of ways in which patriarchy has ordered the world (as is their response), which is itself an outgrowth of that which the world has forced us to contend with (the world including human beings). Until our inner cities are safe places to live, in which resources are plentiful, opportunities abound, and there is not actual, factual competition to survive, is it realistic or even ethical to ask folks to adjust the aspects of their personalities that have developed in response to real hardship? It is natural for a young man in a tough environment to harden, and, though they may being “killing off the emotional parts of themselves” in some ways or from certain perspectives, they are doing so as a matter of self-preservation. In this context, it is not self-mutilation any more than a ram growing horns is self-mutilation. It is a defensive, useful adaptation.

It is important, too, to realize that these defensive adaptations developed not just to defend individuals, but to defend peoples, whole tribes and societies. Culture developed among men the psychic fortitude (or inurement) to fight and kill so that they might do so as necessary, against attack, first by beast, later (and mostly) by man. Aggression, even, developed out of defensive impulses—preemptive attack as a means of security, of assuring the upper hand. Does this mean that all these impulses still serve us, or are the most appropriate adaptations or responses? Certainly not. But they have existed for a long, long time, undoubtedly for a reason, and should not be ignored or dismissed.

Talking about Patriarchy doing this and that forfeits a necessary deeper analysis. Culture—which perpetuates patriarchy—is an adaptive response to real-world stimuli. Perhaps aspects of it—such as patriarchy—are outdated. Perhaps one can argue that Patriarchy has never served us nor been a useful adaptation. Keep in mind—and I hope this is clear—that I am putting all this out there from a very rudimentary basic needs and survival perspective, which, if you consider Maslow’s heirachy of needs, ranks first and must be secured before higher needs can be adequately addressed. If you bring in Buddhist ideals of non-violence, you are bringing religious philosophy into the picture. The Buddhist tradition, believing a person may undo bad karma through non-violence and thus be born higher next time around, side-steps the most difficult questions that human beings—which are animals concerned with their own well-being—face in times of genuine hardship, struggle, and danger.

The conversation about Love is crucial. The examination of men’s emotional configuration is equally crucial. But what appears to be the absence of Love may in fact be an obscured expression of it, buried under layers of cultural heritance, patriarchy, what have you, and as invisible, at times, to men as it is to women. Without this recognition, we focus our energies against the obvious and the visible while the mechanism continues to operate, unaffected. We risk facing off against the wizard, rather than the man behind the curtain.