Communion: The Female Search for Love

Women are not inherently more loving than men, but society conditions women to value and seek love more. In the 19th century, women began to view marriage as more than just an economic prospect or childbearing path. Women were always considered nurturers, responsible not only for raising children but also for emotionally caring for men. Men were instead focused on power and domination. Love and nurturing were for women, who were considered weaker by men. While psychologists Jean Baker Miller and Carol Gilligan believe there are significant inherent differences between the sexes and that women are more suited to be caretakers, which writer John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus) agreed with, researchers Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan critique this viewpoint, arguing that women are socialized to be more nurturing, while men do not face such pressure. Gray argued that men do not seek emotional connection and intimacy like women do, which hooks refutes. Men and women are equally desirous of intimacy, connection, and love.

hooks critiques Gray’s work, especially his unwillingness to consider the ways that patriarchy and sexism inform women’s lives. Antipatriarchal thinking, hooks argues, requires acknowledgement of the biological differences between men and women alongside recognition that cultural conditioning is stronger than anatomy and that “anatomy is not destiny” (82). Women are not inherently more capable of caregiving, and care is only one aspect of love, which hooks states is also made up of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Women are trained from a young age to nurture and care, but they, like men, do not know instinctively how to love. Women are conditioned to verbalize their longing for love, but they are not inherently taught to love. Women fail at loving because patriarchal society conditions them to think they know how to love inherently, because love and care are falsely equated. Women who learn to love can challenge the patriarchy, and women who fail at loving demonstrate that the approval of men is more important than truly loving.

hooks did not realize that her relationships failed because she did not know enough about love until she was 40. She assumed love was a given and that the relationship failed due to shortcomings in herself and her partner. When she was single and celibate, she was able to examine her relationship with intimacy and recognize that she chose partners who were not “into” intimacy to avoid having to fully trust them (90). Women often choose male partners who are emotionally closed off in hopes that they will be able to make the men open up, as women view this process as their jobs as nurturers.

hooks chose partners whom she could not be entirely consumed by because she did not want to risk having something other than her writing become central to her life. She had no role models of female writers who were in healthy relationships, citing Sylvia Plath as an example of a woman consumed by marriage and family. Choosing partners who were emotionally reserved did not allow hooks to grow in her relationships, as she was never pushed to grow emotionally.

Women who are inclined towards nurturing often assume that they know how to love, as they equate desire for love with the ability to love. Women buy books that discuss love and relationships, like John Bradshaw’s Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth, which, though not as popular as his other works, interrogates patriarchal thinking regarding conceptions of love. Patriarchy primes women to think they are more capable of love than men, which makes women accept emotional withholding from men and pushes them to think they can fix men if they work harder. Women must unlearn this sexist conditioning to know real love.

Because women are viewed as inherent nurturers, hooks asserts it can be tempting to place them on a pedestal as incapable of causing harm. hooks often idolized her mother growing up, viewing her as the victim of her sexist father, but as she matured, she realized her mother upheld the patriarchy by acquiescing to her father and upholding his patriarchal values. Cultural idealization of women as inherently loving is often the only positive characteristic that women are allowed to claim, so women are hesitant to push back against it.

Women can learn to love, hooks claims, by first loving themselves because love of the female self is where the search for love needs to start. To do so, women must examine their ideas about the nature of love.

hooks asserts that women easily endorse a “mind-body split” that allows women to hate their bodies while claiming to be loving. Children learn from their parents’ actions, so a mother who tells her daughter that she is perfect the way she is while outwardly expressing disdain for her own body or a father who obsesses over his daughter’s thinness teach young girls that they should not love their body. Society also bombards girls with messages that teach them to hate their bodies. Girls are not told that hating their bodies makes them less desirable, nor are they informed about the detrimental psychological and physical effects of this hatred. Fashion magazines and women’s clothing designers encourage this hatred, as items like high heels put women in pain while magazines feature an idealized notion of beauty based in thinness.

Women cannot blame men for the obsession with thinness, as women are often the most stringent enforcers of beauty standards. Women, even before they ever pick up a fashion magazine, see the enforcement of these beauty standards by their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other female relatives. hooks’s father wielded patriarchal power in the home, but hooks’s mother enforced beauty standards.

Parenting girls is understudied, according to hooks. Young girls appreciate and feel comfortable in their bodies until puberty. Parents collude with patriarchal society to contribute to the growing self-hatred their daughters experience, and by the onset of puberty, many girls experience self-hatred. hooks illustrates that young girls begin to experience hatred and disgust of their genitals. When some feminist parents try to engage in sex-positive education for their daughters by informing them that their genitals are not something to be ashamed of, they receive pushback from other parents and educators who impose patriarchal patterns of thought that deem female genitalia shameful. hooks establishes a link between female hatred of the vagina, menstrual bleeding, and the obsession with being thin. Anorexic women often experience cessation of their menstrual periods, and the period is also maligned as disgusting by patriarchal society. In order to find love for the female body, women must militantly push back against the patriarchal societal order to find new ways of seeing themselves.

In order to find love, women must find love of their own bodies. Women cannot experience true love while hating themselves, cannot find love of their bodies in the love of another. The more women love their bodies, the more women can build deeper relationships with themselves.