bell hooks Says I Need to Be a Better Feminist

Opting to live off campus this year, I moved into an apartment with three other people—my sister, her boyfriend, and his cousin. I realize it is an interesting living situation and many people think it’s a fascinating set-up, akin to New Girl or Friends. I can’t say I’ve felt much like a Jessica Day these past few months (I’m very much a Schmidt anyway). Instead, I’ve been trying my best to adjust to living with men—a group I fear I’ve been thinking about all wrong. 

I grew up in a home where women outnumbered men. The women in my family are a force, especially when all together. The large majority of my friends growing up were girls, the only exception being my friend Ryan who I met in sixth grade. We bonded over our mutual love for RuPaul’s Drag Race. 

I didn’t understand men. In elementary school and middle school, I detested boys. Taking after the women in my family I boasted about my love for feminism, which often ostracized me from my male peers who didn’t quite understand what feminism was let alone spoke about it. Unfortunately, my pride in my beliefs made me an easy target. In high school, I still detested boys because I figured they all detested me but there was a new twist; I also wanted to date and fall in love with them. This was confusing, irritating, and seemed completely implausible to me. 

Now, as a college student, not only have I found that I am often frustrated by men and want to fall in love/be loved by them, but I also want to understand them, maybe more than anything. I’ve always been so confused by their behavior, specifically the way that I’ve witnessed adolescent and young adult men treat me, my friends, and strangers, and I just want to know the thought process behind it all. I want to get inside their heads, learn how to work with them, and now, how to live with them. 

In my quest to try and understand men, I’ve realized that I’ve been thinking of the male species all wrong. I’m currently reading Communion: The Female Search for Love, a book by my favorite feminist and author, bell hooks, who famously wrote her name in all lowercase because she believed it would shift the focus from her identity to her ideas. Hooks, known for her social critiques on love, framed this book as a guide for women who want to approach and think of love differently, focusing on self-acceptance as the primary force behind a woman’s journey to romantic happiness. 

She discusses friendship, community, motherhood, the workplace, body image, and more but what stood out to me most in this book was a chapter called “Women Who Fail at Loving”, a harsh yet poignant title for some harsh yet poignant content. I got halfway through the chapter when one specific line opened my eyes: “The insistence that there is a naturally biologically based world of sex differences is at the heart of patriarchal thinking” (Communion: The Female Search for Love, hooks, 2002). 

I’ve spent my whole life thinking that men are invariably different from me, a woman. I’ve spent the better sum of twenty years thinking that there could be no commonality between us because our brains wouldn’t allow for it. Of course, biologically, men and women are different but certain stereotypical gender traits are the cause of socialization, not biology. For example, that guy who’s man-spreading on the train next to you is doing so because he hasn’t been taught to consider how much space he’s taking up. Women, on the other hand, are trained to make themselves smaller to make room for others. 

Hooks quotes a study conducted by Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan titled “Singing at the Top of Our Lungs: Women, Love and Creativity” to support this point. The study states, “Men are defined by the need for autonomy and women by the need for attachment. Yet we know that men crave intimacy as much as women and women crave autonomy as much as men” (78). The description of the study made me aware of how we fill in the gaps that are expected of us by a culture that invokes stereotypical gender norms. 

Hooks makes a lot of commentary about John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, a book that perpetuates the idea that men and women are fundamentally, unchangeably different. She writes, “They [books such as Gray’s] choose denial over facing the reality that the gender differences we were once taught are innate are really mostly learned, that while biology is significant and should not be discounted, it is not destiny” (Communion: The Female Search for Love, hooks, 2002). 

I have been hurt and insulted by men and boys consistently throughout my development and therefore have isolated myself from what feminism is truly about: the equality of men and women. I have advocated for feminism while believing that men and women carry no realistic mutual understanding and therefore may never understand one another. This anger I’ve felt towards the male species can be boiled down to a simple lack of understanding mixed with the jealousy of male privilege that allows them to not worry and fuss over love the way women are expected to. But “biology is not destiny” and the belief in equality is necessary for the existence and perseverance of feminist beliefs. 

I want to learn how to work with men. I want men to be interested in learning how to work with me. I want to reinstate the proper meaning of feminism in my life by understanding that to forge the path of equality, men, and women need to be held on the same plane in my mind. I want to keep learning from other feminists who paved the way for me and this generation of activists. It is important to acknowledge our differences but I also feel I need to start giving men the chance to understand me without fixating on what divides us. I want to lead with love, as bell hooks says, because love is the string that binds us together and mutual understanding is the only pathway to love.

• #feminism
• #relationships