Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, 2) by bell hooks

Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, 2) Reviews

• 
  Polly Trout

  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.
  
  In "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice become an expert at something. hooks says that most women only start to really excel at the art of love in midlife, and this has been my experience; only now am I really learning to love myself, and to approach all relationships with an open heart and a deep commitment to acting at all times with care, respect, and responsibility. I am only now beginning to love myself and others with deep knowledge of what it means to be human.
  
  hooks talks about how hard it can be for powerful, self-actualized women to find powerful, self-actualized men who are deeply committed to equality and freedom for women, and that this means that women need to learn to thrive regardless of whether they have a partner, rather than counting on a partner to meet their emotional needs. We need intimacy, but we don't need partnership; we need community, and a circle of love, and friendship. Like hooks, I've learned to find all the love I need in spiritual practice and community, and while I long for an intimate romantic partnership, I know I will be OK without it. She also recommends what she calls "romantic friendship" as a healthy way to establish intimacy, friendships that are not sexual but energized by Eros. This has been my experience the last few years, as I've learned to have nonsexual friendships with extraordinary men that are emotionally intimate, safe, and inspiring.
  
  She writes, "Self-love is always risky for women within patriarchy. Females are rewarded more when we experience ourselves and act as though we are flawed, insecure, or especially dependent and needy. A woman who does not learn how first to fulfill her psychological needs for acceptance will always operate from a space of lack. This psychic state will make her vulnerable and will often lead her into unhealthy relationships. Although it is risky, when we are self-loving, our growing contentment and personal power sustains us when we are rejected or punished for refusing to follow conventional sexist roles."
  
  More great quotes:
  
  "Personal integrity is the foundation of self-love. Women who are honest with themselves and others do not fear being vulnerable. We do not fear that another woman can unmask or expose us. We need not fear annihilation, for we know no one can destroy our integrity as women who love."
  
  "Powerful women reveal psychological wholeness when we refuse to embrace any type of thinking that suggests we should or must choose success over love. Powerful, self-loving women know that our ability to take care of our emotional needs is essential, but this does not take the place of loving fellowship and partnership. Many single successful women in midlife feel there are few places where we can talk openly about our desire to have loving partnerships without being seen as desperate or, worse, as needing pity. I found again and again that if I talked openly about the importance of giving and receiving love in my life, especially about my desire to have a partner, there feelings were ridiculed or mocked...They could not accept that a woman could be loving AND passionately committed to work. Unable to see the way these two passions enhance and reinforce each other, they wanted to negate my right to love. Passionate devotion to work has always heightened my awareness of the importance of love. On the desk where I write sits a card with Rainer Maria Rilke's lines stressing the kinship between love and work. With wisdom he writes, 'Like so much else, people have also misunderstood the place of love in life, they have made it into play and pleasure because they thought that play and pleasure was more blissful than work; but there is nothing happier than work, and love, just because it is the extreme happiness, can be nothing else but work.'"
  
  "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."
  
  From my father, I learned to mistake emotional attachment coupled with abuse for "love." It has taken me a very long time to unlearn that at my deepest and most visceral levels. It is exhilarating to be entering the second half of my life knowing how to love and be loved, and being able to distinguish love from desire. I am so grateful for my community and circle of friends for teaching me how to love.
• 
  Thomas

  I liked this book even though I don’t think it was as groundbreaking or tightly argued as her books The Will to Change or All About Love. For the first 70% of Communion, I felt that bell hooks made several strong and interesting points about women, gender, and relationships: that women are taught to search for love in romantic relationships, that women are also capable of perpetuating sexism and patriarchy, and that men who may advocate for racial justice or even gender equality may still enact sexism in contexts such as sexual relationships. I agree with other reviewers who state that hooks generalizes her points a bit much at times. While I didn’t mind that rhetorical technique when she used it either more accurately or more sparingly in her other books, in Communion it stood out to me more in a negative way, perhaps because I also found that her points blurred together and were a little discursive within chapters at times.
  
  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.”
  
  I’m so glad that, in my opinion, there’s more discourse about elevating friendship in society now, from explicitly naming the oppressive force of amatonormativity to openly discussing relationship anarchy. Throughout Communion and especially in the chapter on romantic friendships, hooks highlights her ability to question the status quo about relationships and to think outside of the box to procure long and lasting love. I’ll end this review with one more passage from that chapter I enjoyed:
  
  “In Barbara De Angelis’s insightful self-help book Are You the One for Me? she lists traits we should look for in a partner. They are ‘commitment to personal growth, emotional openness, integrity, maturity and responsibility, high self-esteem, and a positive attitude toward life.’ In my conversations and interviews, it was rare for any female to admit that we had found even one or two of these qualities in male romantic partners. Most of us had found these qualities present in lifelong committed friendships, particularly romantic friendships. It cannot be stated strongly enough that patriarchal culture, and patriarchal domination of the psyches of men, encourage most men not to develop these traits. No wonder that heterosexual women who do possess these traits, who are ready to be in mature, healthy love relationships, usually feel they cannot find loving male partners.”
• 
  Vicky

  I would have abandoned Communion at the first chapter if it weren't for a book club I wanted to attend. I'm glad I finished it even though I didn't really enjoy it. A lot of generalizing statements in here. I'm not interested in her use of "most women" and "we." bell hooks will be like, "MOST WOMEN had fathers who left them which is why WE seek out men who are emotionally unavailable." This happens throughout the book. Here's another one: "Lesbians, like all women, come from families where dysfunctional behavior. . .were the norm" (p. 203). Lol, whenever she mentions lesbians, it feels like a polite afterthought. D/c.
  
  Notes/things I agreed with/liked/etc/etc
  
  1. "who would want me?" (p. 8)
  
  2. Emily Dickinson as model of "forever alone is ok" lifestyle (p. 30)
  
  3. Idea of a "coming out process" to yourself for realizing/believing/identifying yourself as straight, sharing same process as those who had to consciously come out as queer (p. 35)
  
  4. "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).
  
  5. "Years later, when I was ready to leave this relationship, I planned my exit much as one might plan leaving a job" (p. 62) (a lot of work and love themes linked together in this book)
  
  6. ". . .awareness of problems alone is not a solution. To solve the problem of _______________, we have to critique sexist thinking, militantly oppose it, and simultaneously create new images, new ways of seeing ourselves" (p. 114, yeah good reminder)
  
  7. "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)
  
  8. "When I rebelled against my parents. . .I did not do so happily. I wanted and needed their support. Going against their wishes was frightening and psychologically upsetting" (p. 148)
  
  9. "love will enhance all areas of our lives, esp. work" (p 153)
  
  10. "Men and women who want to know love will find us, and we will find them" (p. 158) (TIMING OF ABSURD LIFE EVENTS)
  
  11. oh here's my favorite line of the book:
  COMMITMENT IS THE GROUND OF OUR BEING THAT LETS US MAKE MISTAKES, BE FORGIVEN, AND TRY AGAIN (p. 216)
  
  Interlude question: Is there anyone who wants to "platonically marry" me? :(
  
  PLACEHOLDER ANXIETY between women who are "romantic friends", when possibly, eventually, one of them finds a partner and leaves the other "behind" OR both find partners and leave each other a little bit
  
  bell hooks describes polyamory but doesn't use the word polyamory
  
  anyway
  
  Things bell hooks could address in revision of this book
  
  1. TELL MORE STORIES (vs. generalizing), BE VERY CONCRETE/SPECIFIC
  I really didn't like her ongoing reflections about an event in her life, making her seem like she has changed and learned something valuable, but she never tells us about the event itself, just her current feelings. Like refusing sex with her male partner for a long period of time, encouraging him to see other people, and not going into that for us to have a better idea of how she reached her thoughts on it. Major moments that influenced her thinking/reflections are mentioned really quickly like, "THAT TIME my best friend thought I was seducing her boyfriend" (AND??)
  
  2. INCLUDE A CHAPTER ON "ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS—WITH MEN"
  The "romantic friendships" chapter near the end was my favorite part of this whole book. (the chapter on women and aging is good, too, though)Most resonating for me. But it's about "romantic friendships" with other women, but it'd be really interesting to read about having this with men. A bit more complicated, jealousies from the guy friend's partners, women in competition, etc. How to deal?
  
  3. Maybe include more women, though, I get she's writing for women over 30, mainly women who love men, and stuff. That's cool. . .I probably feel a bit more "sad" afterward reading this to be honest. It didn't give me the same feeling of power/energy to love like All About Love did—what were my illusions? is it ok to be guarded? is it time for me to leave the office and go home? (20 more minutes)
  
  ♥
• 
  Kelechi

  bell hooks remains, to me, an irreplaceable voice in the discourse of feminism and love.
  Through hooks, I have gained more insight into the areas of conflict present in my understanding of love and my relationship towards love. Her writing has introduced me to the idea of non-sexual romantic relationships and it just all makes sense, like, all of it.
  I appreciate her insistence that men and women are not from different planets and the commitment she shows towards the disparaging holds of "gender differences."
  She gave me hope. Hope is important I think when one is on a quest of self-discovery.
• 
  Ariel [She Wants the Diction]

  I think hooks' writing suffers from a lot of the same pitfalls as her previous work,
  All About Love: New Visions:
  
  - overgeneralization of women and women's desires
  - a strongly heteronormative viewpoint
  - repetition of ideas
  - far too much quoting from self-help books
  
  However, the strengths of her writing are present here as well:
  
  - easy to read and understand
  - flows from the page
  - truly makes you feel something and want to act on it
  
  There was a lot less I disagreed with in this book, and I could see she made more of an attempt to be LGBTQ+ inclusive (although weak and insufficient).
  
  The main problem with this book is she presents her ideas as the gospel truth. And while most of the platitudes held true for me personally, I don't expect they'll hold true for all women. It's almost as if she tried to extrapolate her experiences into universal truths about all women, without realizing you need more than just personal feelings to back these claims up. You can't just "intuit" things about the entire female race. Where's my statistics, my surveys? My facts, my figures? How about quotes from other women, peers, or contemporaries who agree with you????? ... Crickets.
  
  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.
  
  While I personally don't think it was a coincidence I found the right partner right at the time I was finally okay with being single and living most authentically myself, I also recognize that not everyone reading this book is going to have struggled with low self-esteem and body image issues, serial monogamist tendencies, or codependent/abusive relationships. My experience is certainly NOT everyone else's. And I think that's what hooks fundamentally fails to understand: you can't generalize something like this. I guarantee you her search for love looks nothing like a trans person's, for example (a viewpoint this book is highly lacking of).
  
  I'm still going to give this a decent rating, though, because I feel like hooks made a lot of good points. She challenged the widely-accepted cultural idea that women are innately more loving than men, and highlighted how toxic gender roles are often still performed even within queer relationships. I felt particularly called out by her indictment of "negative body acceptance":
  

  The vast majority of us have flesh on our bones. I wish I could report that we all love that flesh. Some of us do. Most of us do not. A great many of us simply give up, engaging in a process of negative acceptance. By that I mean that an individual woman may not like her looks, her weight, but ceases trying to change herself so that she no longer confroms to conventional sexist aesthetic standards, because to do so lessens her anxiety and stress. But she is still not self-loving. We cannot negate our bodies and love them.

  Ouch. If this isn't me to a T.
  
  I also have to admit this line chilled me to the bone:
  

  Let's face the fact that it helps to eroticize domination if you feel you can't change it.

  
  I had to sit with that for a long minute, and am honestly still thinking about it. I'm a big proponent of BDSM, and often find myself annoyed at the negative tone almost everything I read takes toward it. I also hate the myriad ways it's misrepresented in fiction and misunderstood by the general public. For some reason, it's associated with having "issues," and I fucking hate that, because in actuality it's one of the most healing practices out there, and one of the safest environments in which to explore power dynamics and kinks. But I digress. I had the same critique of
  Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, in that I think that book needed a more nuanced discussion of the practice of BDSM. Here, hooks merely raises the suspicion that the eroticization of power may be subconscious.
  
  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.

  
  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.

  
  Again, I felt that on a personal level, and it's given me a lot to think about.
• 
  Shagufta

  This book explores the female search for love, how women have been disappointed by men, how women have been encouraged to move away from love, how women have been told that they are better at love then men but that is not innately true. It explores how we are surrounded societally by ideas of love based on saving and romantic fantasies, as well as narratives of how to manage men (hooks describes popular books about relationships as examples), and be in patriarchal relationships, but we are not taught how to challenge patriarchy and how to transform the whole system. This book talks about there is work that men need to do, but there is also work that women need to do to both be rooted in ourselves and to have a circle of love around us. This book is about transformation, about mutuality, about self love, about commitment, and about being with and alongside men in ways that challenge and end patriarchy, and i finished the book with a lot of notes in the margins and in my notebook.
• 
  Paige

  This book has some really great stuff in it, and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it to people. But it still has its flaws. A group of my friends decided to read it and then get together and talk about it, and in going back through and pulling out quotes for discussion from pages I’ve marked, I can get a good sense of what I did and didn’t like about it.
  
  The subtitle of the book is “The Female Search for Love.” And yet, despite “love” being integral to this whole book and all her ideas, bell hooks never defines what she means by love. It’s not until page 88 that she tells us what she thinks love is (mostly paraphrasing someone else), and then she’s glad to leave it at one sentence, and none of the components (such as respect, trust, responsibility, knowledge) are elaborated on. It just seems…like a huge oversight, and kind of sloppy, to be writing hundreds of pages on love without ever concretely defining what it means to her. She tells us that it’s not just giving care, but since she herself admits that most people have this idea of it and that she herself didn’t know what it meant to be loving until midlife, it is clearly not self-evident what “love” is or in what context she uses the word. What is respect? How does she envision “knowledge” as it relates to love? I didn’t know then and after finishing the book, I still don’t.
  
  Secondly, she makes tons of generalizations. I’m okay with generalizations—I make a lot of them myself—but I usually take care to either explicitly spell out that I’m generalizing (either ahead of time, like she could have done in a preface, or in the moment by using qualifiers like “some,” “many,” “most,” etc), or to make generalizations amongst people who know that I’m generalizing (like with my boyfriend). Sometimes they cause her to contradict herself. For instance, she writes that Elizabeth Wurzel (now 47) “[came] to womanhood in a world of incredible social equality between the sexes.” And yet bell hook’s book, and indeed her career—both brimming with feminist philosophy—would not be relevant if “incredible social equality between the sexes” was actually the case. So—incredible compared to what? Compared to what hooks herself (age 62) went through herself? Compared to the 1800s? Compared to other more patriarchal countries or regions? Another example: “Before it was cool to simply announce one’s feminism…” Um, bell, it’s still not “cool” to “announce one’s feminism.” Perhaps it used to be even less cool, but with so many people these days thinking that equality has been achieved, or even that we’ve gone too far, and with many of the “visible” problems that early feminists addressed seemingly on the way out, bolding proclaiming your feminism today has the potential of making you seem even more out of touch than it did in the 60s or 70s. I get her point (I think), but again—it seems sloppy in a published work by someone who is a seasoned academic and an intellectual to make such claims without providing just a few more details of what she actually means. And the whole book is like this. I have about half the “??” passages as “!!” ones (“??” being “please expand / what do you mean / I disagree / that’s not true” and “!!” being “great point / good insight”) which is a pretty high rate for a book that I expected to love and overall think is really worthwhile. Maybe what I’m asking would make it “too academic” or “boring” for the average reader, and it’s true that I usually know what she’s getting at, but she sacrifices accuracy and clarity for concise and sometimes glib sentences or paragraphs.
  
  She also talks about gay people in a way that makes me slightly uncomfortable. I’m paraphrasing her here but she mentions repeatedly how great gay men are and how they “get it” more and says things like “gay men are such goooood friends to women.” While I’m sure that’s often true on an individual level, she doesn’t mention how gay men can also be cruelly (or unintentionally) misogynistic and sexist just like everyone else in the world; she seems to be under the impression that they are exempt from that. She praises lesbian relationships as this wonderful thing that solves tons of problems in the love arena, as if they are inherently healthier or better than heterosexual relationships without really acknowledging that gay people can form terribly abusive relationships as well. Like being gay automatically makes you more just, wise, or understanding. And I’m sure bell hooks herself would disagree with this attitude, and she did briefly mention that lesbian relationships can lack meaningful love, but I still came away with the impression of “gay people are magic!” from reading words she wrote.
  
  I’m going to stop my criticisms there lest people get the impression that I didn’t like it. Some sloppiness in exchange for a book that may be more appealing to a wider audience is not the worst thing. And while she does make some points that I (think? can’t tell for sure) actually disagree with, and a lot of what she said applied to her personally and didn’t resonate as much with me, her points are thoughtful and always worth considering. Overall I really like what she has to say and her approach is usually very compassionate, which I appreciate and admire. I want to be clear that although I've talked at length about things I perceived as weaknesses, there was actually more that I did like about it...I just have a hard time expressing those things as easily. There is lots of food for thought here and I’m positive this book will prompt some great discussions with my friends. I’m glad I read it.
• 
  Shivangi

  In line with my current fascination with the topics of companionship and love, I am finding a lot of understanding, warmth and good old fashioned lived wisdom in critical thinking based feminist texts.
  
  To that end, Communion goes into remarkably intricate nuances and bell hooks combines popular culture, academic research and her personal experiences to talk about not just community and love, but ambition, mother-daughter relationships, aging, monogamy and the lure and normalcy of separating romantic connections with sexual ones.
  
  I am amazed and just plain humbled into gratitude for all that feminism has given, and continues to give, to all of us surviving patriarchal structures, not just on levels of policy and systems, but on the less immediately obvious selfhood one.
• 
  özgelerinuysal

  Feminizm ile üniversitede tanıştım. Aslında annem de feminist sayılacak denli bilinçli ve güçlü bir kadındı ancak evimizde politik olarak feminizmin konuşulduğunu anımsamıyorum.Feminist olmakla ilgili yıllar içinde çok şey duydum, okudum, deneyimledim. Kadınların sistemin dişlileri arasında nasıl ezildiklerini, kendilerine ve birbirlerine nasıl düşmanlaştırıldıklarını, mutfakta aşçı, yuvada namuslu anne, yatakta iffetsiz kadın, iş yerinde ayın elemanı olmamız bekleniyor. Bizden sürekli bir şey bekleniyor.Yakın zamana kadar kim olduğumuzu ve erkekler kadar iyi olabileceğimizi anlatmaya çalışırken onların bize verdikleri kalıplara uymaya çalıştık. Duygu Yoldaşlığı’nı okuduğumda, kadın olarak sevgiyi almaya ve vermeye dair kolektif ihtiyacımızı feminist politika çerçevesinde hiç konuşmadığımızı fark ettim. Duygu Yoldaşlığı, sevgi yokluğunun çocukluktan itibaren bizi hangi yaralarla tanıştırdığı ve şu andan itibaren bunu nasıl daha farklı yorumlayacağımızı dair, okuduğum en iyi feminist metinlerden biri.
• 
  Melissa Stacy

  Published in 2002, "Communion: The Female Search for Love," by bell hooks/Gloria Watkins, is an excellent nonfiction title by this prolific and deeply insightful author.
  
  I breezed through this book in two days, and enjoyed it immensely. bell hooks is full of hard truths, but she presents her thoughts in such a way that her work is uplifting, compassionate, and hopeful. The voice of bell hooks rings with moral rectitude, but it is also a voice that is full of kindness, openness, and wholehearted forgiveness.
  
  I loved this entire book. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the second half:
  
  "It is a testament to the learned ignorance of political reality that so many females cannot accept that patriarchy requires of men cruelty to women, that the will to do violence defines heterosexual, patriarchal masculinity." (page 168)
  
  "Nothing was more frightening to women who wanted to be with men than a feminist movement exposing the depths of male contempt and disregard for the female sex." (page 169)
  
  "The rise in sexual sadomasochism both in everyday life and in our intimate lives seems to be a direct response to the unresolved changes in the nature of gender roles, the fact that so much gender equality exists in the context of the same old oppressive patriarchy. Let's face the fact that it helps to eroticize domination if you feel you can't change it." (page 228)
  
  "Romance is different when two people approach each other from the space of knowledge rather than absolute mystery. No matter how well we get to know someone else, there is always a realm of mystery. Old ideas about romantic love taught females and males to believe that erotic tension depended on the absence of communication and understanding. This misinformation about the nature of love has helped to further the politics of domination, particularly male domination of women. Without knowing one another, we can never experience intimacy." (page 240)
  
  "It is certainly clear that sexist men are not rushing out to buy literature that will help them unlearn sexist thinking." (page 169)
  
  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.
  
  In this case, the power structure being scrutinized is patriarchy, a power structure that degrades, dehumanizes, mutilates, maims, and destroys the bodies of women, and does so through sexualized violence. Sexualized violence renders violence invisible (a quote from Gail Dines). Which is also to say: sexualized violence renders dehumanization invisible. As Andrea Dworkin consistently points out, regarding rape culture and the patriarchy, the message of sexualized violence, no matter what horrifying thing is being done to any individual woman, is always crystal clear: "She wants it. They all do." The victim is always to blame. "She wants it. They all do."
  
  They all do.
  
  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.
  
  bell hooks focuses her sights on the patriarchy, both male patriarchs and the female patriarchs who have learned to support the patriarchy in all ways. "Communion" is intensely powerful for its clarity and wisdom.
  
  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.
  
  Five full stars. Highly recommended.
  
• 
  Rachel

  Simple and good, although I was amused by the small aside where she’s like “all relationships have problems which can be solved with loving action and compromise such as these two cases with my white best friend, in both of which she was wrong”
• 
  chantel nouseforaname

  Bell hooks shares that the original work of love is the cultivation of care, knowledge, respect, and responsibility in relation to the self.
  
  I picked up this book because I’m on a journey of self-discovery and this seemed like the place to start for me in relation to love, self-love, and contentment.
  
  I realized that every time I quoted this book during the reading of it, every friend would be like — yo, can I read that after you? All the conversations I’ve had with women and my female friends, so many insights were given into those conversations at a much higher level here. I’ve officially become the friend on some: ~well, bell hooks says..~ LOL!
  
  There’s so much here and during my slow read of this book, I found myself over and over again nodding my head in agreement regarding the concepts surrounding the ways that patriarchy and base-level feminism has shaped my life and the lives of people I know. I found myself reflecting on the ways in which I’ve watched myself battle through relationships based on or steeped in notions and ideals that I inherently rejected (based on familial history), have outrightly rejected (once presented to me) or those that I have struggled to squeeze myself into when I was lost in conflicting emotional states (my own, the ones that were thrust upon me or that I had courted into my life). Self reflection is a bitch. Necessary for growth tho. Always necessary.
  
  I don’t want to turn this review into some diary shit but what I will say is: loving yourself is always worth the investment and bell hooks covers why on every! single! page! She said that she wrote this book for women in their 40s, but that really deep down she wishes that younger women would make an audience of this book to change the narrative sooner. Not wait until middle age to liberate themselves from stifling, patriarchal thinking about love that would never see them self-actualize... and to reframe their search for love to consider themselves as a whole woman. A whole woman that can exist outside of the confines of the bullshit heaped on women and our relationships with friends, lovers, partners and most importantly ourselves.
  
  There really is so much power and satisfaction in self love and it bleeds into every aspect of your life. Free yourself from ideals that don’t give a fuck about you.
  
  Every black woman, woman, should read this book and take it in. I’m buying it for mad ladies for Christmas this year.
• 
  Miriam T

  Would def give this 3.5 stars.
  
  I read another review about Communion on here and the reviewer mentioned that this book was full of generalizations. I think that was my big issue. hooks would take something hyper specific from her own relationship and say “all women experience….” It happened so often and it made me almost, distrust (?) her argument. Second issue I’ll say is that it was a really heteronormative book. Idk quite what I was expecting bc this was my first hooks read but I was sort of shocked at how queer women were absolutely an after thought in this book. It wasn’t particularly intersectional.
  
  But despite those things, I found this book incredibly accessible. hooks is clearly masterful at writing and thinking and there were a ton of aspects that I will take with me. I found the chapter/s on older generations to be particularly insightful and useful for me, as I reflect on my parents’ marriage. I would def recommend people read this but I’m excited to read All About Love bc I think that’s the one everyone really loves.
• 
  t-kay chingona

  ok my 17 year old self feels a lil guilty giving 2 stars to bell hooks, an author who was so formative in developing my feminist consciousness. at the same time, let's also rejoice that intersectional feminist thought has moved beyond the gender binary and heteronormative language that makes this book feel so dated. many of the concepts in here are timeless (rejection of patriarchal relationships, duh), but their articulation through 90s references doesn't resonate strongly anymore. shout outs to bell for helping start this conversation that we needed at the beginning of the 21st century.
• 
  Amy Xiang

  “Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject.“
  
  This one took me a while to get through, but it was amazing. I definitely want to visit it again when I’m older, as the target audience seems to be older women/mothers (lots of reflections on the beauty of aging and menopause). A little outdated at times, and includes lots of generalizations, but one cannot doubt the genius of bell hooks and how much she paved the way for current feminist discussions of love.
• 
  Lucy Sysoeva

  Reading this felt like a conversation with an older sister/ maternal figure about love and life with no barrier and complete vulnerability. Hooks is a visionary with her work about love. Such an mesmerising and gripping work, this was so highly motivating and mind altering. Must read!
• 
  Liz

  Definitely posed some ideas that I haven't thought of before, and some that I've been aware of for quite some time--but this is a testament to what hooks states, in that the younger generation has had the benefit of the feminist movement when it comes to love and finding those who love in a liberated manner. I wish I had read this 10 years ago, and I think every woman needs to read this in order to break down the patriarchal ways we think of love and relationships--both in heterosexual, homosexual, and even friendship partners. At the root of the book, what I took to heart the most, was that loving yourself first is the most important step to loving others, and that loving is learned, rather than biologically inherent, as patriarchal society would have us believe.
• 
  Shanti Boyle

  Bell hooks engages in such clear, compelling discourse about how women love and learn to love. I felt validated and appropriately chastised, and I adored how she laced her own narrative through discussion of theory. My one edit is that her book exists in this binary, gendered world, and seems to exclude trans and nonbinary people. I appreciate how she may not be able to speak on that, but an acknowledgement of her limitations would have been prudent, I think.
• 
  Özün

  bell hooks'un okuduğum ikinci kitabı. ilki "feminizm herkes içindir" idi. ilkinde gözlemlediğim meseleyi basit anlatma tavrı bunda da geçerli.
  
  elinize ağır, teorik, terimler içeren, anlamaya çalışırken yorulacağınız bir kitap almıyorsunuz bence. yazarın da buna dikkat ettiğini düşünüyorum açıkçası. kadınların okurken eğitim, kültür, birikim seviyesi çok önemli olmadan anlayabileceği kitaplar yazmaya çalışıyor ki kitaplarında yer yer kendisinin de şikayetlendiği "teoride iyiydi güzeldi, yaşarken hiç öyle olmadı, kimse feminist pratiğin günlük hayatta nasıl uygulanacağından bahsetmedi" minvalinde bahsettiği kısımları var. bu yüzden kendisini bu kadar seviyor olabilirim. kendisinin de kitapta bahsettiği " hetoroseksüel bir feminist kadının erkek partneri ile yaşadığı cinsel alandaki özgürlük, hayır deme hakkı üzerine yazılmış makale bulamazsınız ama bu sıkıntıları yaşayan feminist kadınlar vardı ama kimse bahsetmedi" gibi durumları ve buna benzer örnekleri anlatarak hayat pratiğinin içinden anlatmaya çalışması feminizmi benim için değerli kılıyor kitaplarını ve kendisini.
  
  kitabın kendisine gelirsek, ben sevgi arayışı, sevginin ne olduğu/olmadığı, neden inatla bu kadar önemli olduğu konusunda bu kadar düşünmemiştim. tabi ki annelerimizin bizi çoğunlukla sevgileriyle istismar ettiği, babalarımızın da bizi sevmeyerek istismar ettiği bir gerçektir, bunun farkındaydım. ama kitapta kendisinin de bahsettiği " güçlü görünmek adına çok seviyor görünmemek" "sevgisiz de yaşanır diyen" kadın profilinin bu kadar sık göründüğünü, çoğunluğumuz için bunun mesele olduğundan haberdar değildim ( bir uzaylı kendim sanıyordum). kadınların birbirini sevmesinin, özellikle tehdit olarak görmeden sevmesinin ne kadar önemli olduğunu, kadınların özellikle birbirine sahip çıkmasının kıymetli olduğunu düşünürüm ben de. o sebepten kitap bitince sanki bir kız kardeşime sarılmışım gibi oldu. kadınların okumasını, üzerine düşünmesini tavsiye ederim.
  
  bir de orta yaşlarında olan kadınlardan daha genç yaştaki biz kadınlara inatla "kendinizi sevin" tavsiyesi geliyorsa, epeyce ciddiye almak gerekir.
• 
  Bucket

  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.
  
  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.
  
  For the most part, I find her discussion fair and balanced, and rooted in eliminating patriarchy and creating equality for all people. However, there were some early points, especially in the discussion of sex, that seemed off to me. She argues (rightly) that women should be able to say no to their partners, even over extended periods of time. However, a few pages later, she describes a feminist whose male partner has said no to sex with her over an extended period of time and accuses him of withholding sex. Perhaps she is right about the man in this particular case purposefully withholding, but I would argue that women are equally capable of purposefully withholding and men have just as much right to say no, even over extended periods of time.
  
  Her discussion of love is wonderful and, I would say, flawless. She discusses attitudes like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," their roots in patriarchy, and the unfairness of both sides of the coin: teaching women that love and nurturing are their realm and they should accept that men won't get it, and teaching men that strength and silence and dominance are their realm and showing emotion or communicating on a deeper level are emasculating.
  
  All in all, a book worth reading that I never would have picked up on my own. Looking forward to discussing with my book club!
  
  Themes: love, women, feminism, sex, relationships, self-acceptance, equality
  
• 
  laura dutrisac

  4.5 - really really enjoyed this one. i realized i have read basically zero books about feminism???? fail!
  
  this book was written almost 25 years ago and although there were a few times where i was like hmmmm ya okay this book is as old as i am, so much of it was still so relevant.
  
  i loved how she challenged the idea that women innately have more capacity for emotion and are naturally more capable of giving love than men and how this idea influences our relationships and society (and allows us to accept men who are emotionally withholding). “Antipatriarchal thinking, which assumes that both women and men are equally capable of learning how to love, of giving and receiving love, is the only foundation on which to construct sustained, meaningful, mutual love.”
  
  i just loved how she talk about the importance of mutual love built on respect, responsibility, accountability, etc. because care alone is not enough. also one of my fav quotes “Making a relationship “work” is not the same as “creating love.”
  
  she talked about self love in such a convincing and inspiring way!!! we can’t embody and give love if we are picking and choosing in which specific ways we are self loving. “Females easily endorse a mind-body split that lets us cultivate the false assumption that we can hate our bodies and still be loving…the culture lets us get away with thinking that we can hate our bodies and still be seen as the group most capable of teaching others about love. Or, better yet, that we can hate our bodies and manifest positive self-esteem.”
  
  she did bash on patriarchal men a lot (love) but she never blamed men or suggested that women were the victim. she empowered women to take accountability and to put in the work to find and create meaningful, mutual love. i love how she wrapped the book up by talking about the importance of all love - self love, romantic friendships, and romantic love and how we need all of them to live a fulfilled life, and that giving and receiving love from yourself and close friends is what enriches romantic relationships.
  
  okay this was the longest review ever i guess i needed to process this book some more lmao but can’t wait to read more by this queen
• 
  Kayla Ucci

  I feel like a clown saying this book changed my life because it’s 20 years old and bell hooks is a well known author, but these words have completely changed my perspective on love. Not only was I validated, but also challenged by the broad topic of women and love. I haven’t been inspired for such deep reflection by a book in a very long time. This book couldn’t have jumped off the shelf at me at a more perfect time. Targeted towards women in midlife, I think this book is a very important read for young women in their 20’s and 30’s to start doing the work of self-love now with wisdom from women in midlife. Will be coming back to this book time and time again without a doubt.
• 
  Natalie Elizabeth

  "It takes courage for women to challenge the seduction of domination, the making of Love synonymous with erotic conflict between the powerful and the powerless."
  The best parts of this book were the chapters that talked about how women can do this.
  
  Full disclosure I read this book like a bowerbird looking for jewels relevant to ME, and outright skipped the chapters which talked about women's experience of midlife. I found pages and pages to be saying things that I (and I think most eager feminists in their 20s) would have thought about already, but then again, this book has a very broad target audience!
  
  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.
  
  Still I've rated this book 4 stars because the gems I did find were well worth the slog. I definitely feel enriched by this book! I just wish it had even more to offer.
• 
  Klelly

  i read this at amandas wearing the bee costume and i also want to give this to my mom. she unpacks all the conflated societal messages while writing directly and encouragingly. we can choose love amidst a culture of lovelessness, which is to say a culture of domination, control, and exploitation of power. we can create positive self esteem as the basis for self love and living fully. love takes work and energy, as does constructing a space for mutuality.
  she references and critiques contemporary self help writers and feminists, threading their quotes throughout the book. i liked reading her responses to the way women are characterized in popular culture. e.g. "When I first saw the film version of Charlies Angels, all I could think about was how glad I was to be in my forties and not receiving a cultural mandate telling me that I must be superwoman in the world, girlie-girl on the home front, and have the tight flesh of an Olympic athlete, while maintaining an ability to submissively throw myself at the feet of an all-powerful symbolic daddy named Charlie."
  
  Self acceptance: the refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself.
• 
  Melissa

  An engrossing read, although its resonance suffered since I was clearly not the target audience (since I am not a middle-aged woman at the turn of the millennium). Pros: a wonderful, nuanced discussion on how the patriarchy really screws with both women and men when it comes to love and relationships; a sadly accurate analysis of girl-on-girl hate; an interesting history of Hooks and her experiences in the feminist movement. Cons: Lots of generalizations, lots of assumptions, and confusing look at love that somehow is overly intellectual and also boasts the term "soul mates" unironically. Hooks is all about choice when it comes to love, and I think in that way misses looking at the irrationality and difficulty that actually constitutes "the journey" toward love, especially self-love. A handwave explanation of "therapy, feminism, and menopause" as a cure for the pains of the patriarchy didn't make up for the fact that I didn't see any woman's journey to self-love or successful "true" love. I think this book was supposed to inspire me, but it just made me sort of sad/convinced if I ever do experience Hook's definition of love, I'll have to at least be 40.
• 
  Randi M

  I felt like this book was more like a memoir/opinion-piece than the book I thought it would be. It dives into the topic from a very personal point of view, and while some of it did ring true, a lot of it was off-putting when structured like that. Much of what I read is rooted only in the author's experience with mostly "I" statements before stringing it together with some extremely broad, vague, and repetitive conclusions. It lost me along the way.
• 
  Michelle Pei

  I really like bell hooks, and I really tried to like this book. But I can't stand the sweeping generalizations littered throughout this book, and I found it difficult to relate to her points. I still very much enjoy her style, but the content eludes me.
• 
  Amanda Samuel

  My first book by bell hooks, and won’t be my last. I appreciate writers that can put words to things that are hard to explain and I can see the way her insights have been so influential in feminist thought.
• 
  Katherine Liu

  ⚠️ warning⚠️ : this book contains FACTS🤌
  
  
  Saw a comment about generalizations in this book which I can see but I enjoyed IMMENSELY!!! Interested in reading her other books about love