檳榔嶼

- Women talk about love. From girlhood on, we learn that conversations about love are a gendered narrative, a female subject.
  - In the eyes of a patriarchal universe we are never quite good enough.
  - Femaleness in patriarchal culture marks us from the very beginning as unworthy or not as worthy, and it should come as no surprise that we learn to worry most as girls, as women, about whether we are worthy of love.
- Raised with competitive, fault-finding mothers and fathers whom we can never really please or in a world where we are the "perfect" Daddy's girl who fears losing his approval to the point where we stop eating, stop growing up because we see Daddy losing interest, because we see he does not love women, we are uncertain about love.
  - To keep his love we must cling to girlhood at all costs.
- This is a female's first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.
- Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.
  - Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.
- Females learn early to search for love in a world beyond our own hearts. We learn in childhood that the roots of love lie outside our capabilities, that to know love we must be loved by others.
  - For as females in patriarchal culture, we cannot determine our self-worth. Our value, our worth, and whether or not we can be loved are always determined by someone else.
  - Deprived of the means to generate self-love, we look to others to render us lovable; we long for love and we search.
- Today's girls grow up in a world where they will learn from many quarters that women are the equals of men, but there is still no real place for feminist thinking and practice in girlhood.
  - Girls today struggle against sexist defining roles in the same ways that girls did before the contemporary feminist movement.
- A measure of that entrapment is the widespread fear among all girls, irrespective of race or class, that they will not be loved.
- Within patriarchal culture, the girl who does not feel loved in her family of origin is given another chance to prove her worth when she is encouraged to seek love from males.
  - Schoolgirl crushes, mad obsessions, compulsive longings for male attention and approval indicate that she is rightly pursuing her gendered destiny, on the road to becoming the female who can be nothing without a man.
  - Whether she is heterosexual or homosexual, the extent to which she yearns for patriarchal approval will determine whether she is worthy to be loved. This is the emotional uncertainty that haunts the lives of all females in patriarchal culture.
- From the start, then, females are confused about the nature of love.
  - Socialized in the false assumption that we will find love in the place where femaleness is deemed unworthy and consistently devalued, we learn early to pretend that love matters more than anything, when in actuality we know that what matters most, even in the wake of feminist movement, is patriarchal approval.
  - From birth on, most females live in fear that we will be abandoned, that if we step outside the approved circle, we will not be loved.
- Given our early obsessions with seducing and pleasing others to affirm our worth, we lose ourselves in the search to be accepted, included, desired.
  - Our talk about love has heretofore primarily been a talk about desire.
- The irony, of course, is that most of us were not loving too much; we were not loving at all.
- As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not salves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing - yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.
- Power feminism is just another scan in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.
- Patriarchy has always seen love as women's work, degraded and devalued labor. Patriarchal men have been the most willing to substitute care for love, submission for respect.
- We do need a feminist movement to remind us again and again that love cannot exist in a context of domination, that the love we seek cannot be found as long as we are bound and not free.
- Self-love was the key to finding and knowing love.
  - A deeper understanding of love as a transformational force demanding of each individual accountability and responsibility for nurturing our spiritual growth.
- All females who dare to follow our hearts to find such love are entering a cultural revolution that restores our souls and allows us to see clearly the value and meaning of love in our lives.
- While romantic love is a crucial part of this journey, it is no longer deemed all that matters; rather, it is an aspect of our overall work to create loving bonds, circles of love that nurture and sustain collective female well-being.