檳榔嶼

- If women and men want to know love, we have to yearn for feminism.
  - For without feminist thinking and practice we lack the foundation to create loving bonds.
- As a consequence when it came to the issue of love the feminist take on the matter at the start of the movement was that female freedom could only happen if women let go their attachment to romantic love.
- Our yearning for love, we were told in our consciousness-raising groups, was the seductive trap that kept us falling in love with patriarchal lovers, male or female, who used that love to subdue and subordinate us.
- Romantic love as most people understand it in patriarchal culture makes one unaware, renders one powerless and out of control.
  - It supported the notion that one could do anything in the name of love: beat people, restrict their movements, even kill them and call it a "crime of passion", plead, "I loved her so much I had to kill her".
  - Love in patriarchal culture was linked to notions of possession, to paradigms of domination and submission wherein it was assumed one person would give love and another person receive it.
  - Within patriarchy heterosexist bonds were formed on the basis that women being the gender in touch with caring emotions would give men love, and in return men, being in touch with power and aggression, would provide and protect.
  - From the start heterosexual women came to women's liberation to stop the heartache - to break the bonds of love.
- They should have the ability to show love and compassion, show this love through their actions, and be able to engage in successful dialogue.
- We allowed patriarchal mass media to represent the entire movement as a politic grounded in hatred rather than love.
- Visionary feminism is a wise and loving politic. The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination. Love can never take root in a relationship based on domination and coercion.
  - However, females and males needed more that a critique of where we had gone wrong on our journeys to love.
- Feminist thinking and practice emphasize the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in partnerships and in parenting.
  - This vision of relationships where everyone's needs are respected, where everyone has rights, where no one need fear subordination or abuse, runs counter to everything patriarchy upholds about the structure of relationships.
- Feminist practice is the only movement for social justice in our society which creates the conditions where mutuality can be nurtured.
- When we accept that true love is rooted in recognition and acceptance, that love combines acknowledgement, care, responsibility, commitment, arid knowledge, we understand there can be no love without justice.
  - With that awareness comes the understanding that love has the power to transform us, giving us the strength to oppose domination.
  - To choose feminist politics, then, is a choice to love.