檳榔嶼

- Many of us feel better about aging because the old scripts that told us life ends at thirty or forty, that we turn into sexless zombies who bitch bitch bitch all the time and make everyone around us miserable were thrown away.
- By challenging sexist ways of thinking about the body, feminism offered new standards of beauty, telling us plump bodies were luscious and big bellies sublime, that hair hanging under our arms and covering our legs was alluring. It creates new possibilities of self-actualization in both our work lives and our intimate lives.
- As women have changed our minds about aging, no longer seeing it as negative, we have begun to think differently about the meaning of love in midlife.
  - In looking to things other than the body beautiful for inspiration, we're being forced to redefine the second half of our lives, to become pathfinders.
- The approach of midlife was exciting because it meant that they were no longer compelled to spend all their time taking care of others. They were finally have time for themselves. The absence of free time - time spent doing nothing - had plagued them all their lives.
  - Days when they could think about play and reset and forget about work.
- For most of our lives women have followed the path of love set for us by patriarchal pathfinders. Despite our disappointments and heartaches, we have gone along with the program and accepted without challenge and critique the notion that love can exist in a context of domination.
  - Since domination is still the primary order of the day, women, especially women who desire to be in partnerships with men, want to know how to love and be loved.
- There are so many women I talked with who, like me, never thought about midlife, so many of us who thought we would be dead before the age of thirty.
  - Our reasons for thinking this were rooted in tremendous fears about growing up, about becoming grown women. We wanted to be girls forever.
  - As girls we felt we had power. We were strong and fierce and sure of ourselves.
  - Fascinating research on girlhood is happening these days. It confirms that young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity.
- Giving up power has been what aging has traditionally felt like for most women. And with the loss of those feelings of power came the fear that we would be forever abandoned, unloved.
- Today masses of women - women who would never call themselves feminist, who may not even feel that their lives have been in any way affected by a feminist movement - are empowered to leave relationships when they are terrorized, or miserable, or maybe not treated poorly in any way but are merely unloved.
  - The older stay-married-forever generation were and often are cynical about love.
  - I remember urging Mama with all the hubris and wild courage of late-sixties adolescence to leave Dad. And I have never forgotten the sad and weary look on her face when she turned to me, saying the smallest voice, "Who would want me?"
    - This was one of the most painful lessons about love and heartache I learned as a girl in the bosom of patriarchy.
- I was reluctant to give up all the values of my upbringings, so I tried to juggle worlds. I would give up on state-legitimized marriage, but I would hold on to my belief in the importance of commitment and constancy. I would not be seeking a husband, but I did want a lifetime companion. I rejected the notion of falling in love because it implied a lack of choice and reason, embracing the vision of love as an act of choice and will.
- Contemporary feminist movement had taught me to question notions of love that encouraged women to be victims or to masochistically subordinate ourselves to terrorizing, patriarchal men.
  - It taught me that I did not necessarily need to place all my longing for companionship in the direction of men - that women were also a romantic option.
- From the outset, radical feminism encouraged women to question our obession with love.
  - Despite more than twenty years as a feminist thinker and activist, my obsession with love is as keen as it was when I first introduced my new Ken doll to Barbie. It was indeed an arranged marriage.
  - After feminist conversion, my thinking about love was no longer heterosexist the way itwas before feminism. 
- Women have greater freedom than ever before, and yet it is not clear whether that freedom has given us greater access to true love. It is not clear how that freedom has changed the nature of romance and partnership. 
  - Our longing for companions, for love, is rarely talked about in any way that realistically articulates the nature of our lives.
- Until recently there has been little discussion of our fate when it comes to romantic love and partnership, other than the more commonly known notion that any single woman over thirty who is heterosexual is more likely to be alone forever. And God forbid she reaches forty without having found a man.  When mass media seized on this notion, using it as propaganda to strike fear in the hearts of women, it was a subtle, indirect form of antifeminist backlash.
  - As a threat, these stats served to warn women that we'd better get back to focusing on the business of getting and keeping a man - that this above all else should be our primary concern.
  - When this dire warning struck my life, I was struggling with whether or not I should leave the man in my life. We had been together for more than ten years, but I was simply not satisfied. He was not committed to personal growth or emotional openness. While he supported equality in the workforce, in our intimate lives he saw me as there primarily to serve his sexual needs.
  - Ultimately, my fears were not as important as my longing for freedom, self-actualization, love.
  - To me, leaving this relationship was not about giving up on love; it was the gesture that would set me free to really search for love - the gesture that would allow me to love again. And so I left. And leaving felt good.
- True love begins with self-love.