檳榔嶼

.   To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients - care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.
.   There can be no love without justice.
.   Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

美國女權主義作家Rita Mae Brown對階級的定義：“階級的劃分遠不是馬克思所說的有沒有生產資料這麽簡單。階級包括了你的行為，你對人生基本的設想。你的人生經驗會證實這些設想：你的行為舉止，你對自己和他人的期許，你對未來的想像，你怎麽看待、解決問題和怎麽思考、感受。這些都冥冥之中由你的階級決定。”正因為階級更具備流動性，hooks觀察到在美國社會討論階級相對於性別和種族來說更困難，“我們一談論到階級就緊張、焦慮，因為我們不確定自己到底在社會的什麽位置。”因為貧困者的自我否定，階級問題也就更為棘手。

hooks對愛的定義是：“對於個人和他人靈性的成長意願”。這樣的定義可以把愛和關注（cathecting）區別開來，也意味著這樣的愛不是沒有疼痛的，而是一段追求自我和解與讓社會更公平的過程。“沒有公平，就沒有愛”。在仰慕名利和中心、唾棄弱者和邊緣的資本主義、父權、種族主義的社會中長大的我們本就注定在不斷的自我懷疑和否定中殘缺，而所謂靈性的成長正是一種慢長而反覆的治愈之旅。

在這樣一個追求名利最大化的仰慕中心的社會中，沒有人可以自由而自洽地活著。
因此，女權最好的位置是邊緣，酷兒最好的位置也是邊緣：“酷兒並不是與誰同枕的單一。酷兒關乎一個與周圍格格不入的自我，如何打造和尋找一個空間生存和綻放。” 而愛，是這個空間的養料。

- Money alone will never heal the wounds of black America. As long as white supremacy remains the order of the day, we must always work to control our representations, to offer a progressive vision.
  - Returning to love and a love ethic can provide every black person with the strength to survive with dignity and passion, no matter what their economic lot in life. It can empower us to create communities of resistance that can eliminate all forms of violence in our neighborhoods: the violence of addiction, of physical abuse, of emotional torture.
  - Simple things like ceasing to watch television, refusing mindless consumption, engaging in postive thinking, learning how to read and write, and learning how to think critically are among the myriad ways we can practice love in action, a redemptive love that can heal wounded spirits.

- Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. Then, then next step on love's path is communication.
- Searching for love, I found the path to freedom. Learning how to be free was the first step in learning to know love.
- Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.
- No wonder, then, that women who yearn to know love often feel they have no choice but to return to conventional ways of thinking about coupling and romance.
- By failing to love, women make it clear that it is more vital to their existence to have the approval and support of men than it is to love.
- When females are taught to believe we are more capable of giving love than are our male counterparts, we are embracing patriarchal assumptions.
- Let's not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of loving is with the self - that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change.
  - The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself.
  - We begin this journey to love by examining the ideas and beliefs we have held about the nature of intimacy and true love.
  - Rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourage us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving.
  - Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.
- If someone loves us but we are trapped by self-hatred, their love will never reach us.
- More men were attracted to me and to other women I knew when we were untogether. This is because it's easier to subordinate someone who does not feel good about herself or her life, or someone who may feel constantly insecure and afraid.
  - While fewer men may "want" women who are healthy and self-loving, bonds with these men who do are more affirming, constant, and fulfilling.
- Women often bond by sharing secrets and common experiences, lying about anything that would reveal differences in perspectives or desire.
  - Before women can create abiding love with one another, we must learn to be truth tellers, to break with the sexist notion that a good woman never tells what she really thinks.
- Women in sisterhood share their ongoing commitment to being honest with each other, to forgiving to nurturing our personal growth.

- Looking for love and looking for a man are two very different agendas.
  - Most women without male partners are looking for a man. And guess what? Men are easy to find. Finding a man is not the same as finding love. 

- We used the phrase "male-identified" to describe women who did not necessarily like men, though they usually pretended to, but who supported any standpoint men in their lives held, who let their own opinions go to please men.
  - Some of these women were subordinated against their will, but many of them were artful manipulators, pretending to embody the sexist feminine ideal even as they were contemptuous of real men, whom they believed to be stupid and childlike.
  - These females were not simply male-identified, they were patriarchally male-identified. Male-identified women espoused the same negative sexist notions about gender common to any sexist man.
  - They were not interested in the perspectives of progressive male advocates of feminism. To them, these men were not "real" men.

- What most women do not choose to face is the reality that if you support patriarchy, you get negative side effects.

- In order to know love, men must challenge patriarchy. And there are men who are rising to the challenge. These are the men women want to find.
  - Men's silence helps maintain patriarchy.... Women do not want to talk to men about love, because we do not want to hear that most men are simply not interested in the subject.
  - Lots of women fear men. And fear can lay the foundation for contempt and hatred.
  - Now that some males have changed, all women have to confront the reality that sexist, masculinist behavior once believed to be innate not only is learned but can be unlearned.
    - These exceptional men offer to women they encounter in either friendships or romantic relationships the possibility of experiencing mutual love.

- Looking for love and looking for a man are two very different agendas.
  - Most women without male partners are looking for a man. And guess what? Men are easy to find. Finding a man is not the same as finding love. 

- Lots of women fear men. And fear can lay the foundation for contempt and hatred.

- There was a "new man" in the making. ... however confusing, to challenging and changing patriarchy. This man had eagerly taken women's-studies courses and had never embraced sexist thinking.
  - These exceptional men offer to women they encounter in either friendships or romantic relationships the possibility of experiencing mutual love.
  - When it comes to choosing a partner, I am most attracted to men who are wholeheartedly committed to feminist thinking and practice.
   - Enlightened feminist heterosexual women in midlife, who have known both types of relationships - those in which we have to convince men of our rights and those in which men come to us embracing the truth of equality - know that once you have experienced the latter, there is little incentive to intimately engage unreconstructed men.

- ... my initial confusion and fear when I had a male lover who truly honored my body. Free to give full expression to sexual feelings, including the right to say no during any sexual interaction and at any stage, I was not sure how to behave. I was so accustomed to men who placed the satisfaction of their sexual desire over my and any woman's well-being. Unlike all other sexual encounters I had with men, there was never a moment when I had to pretend to feel something I did not feel. All my with hostility if the woman expresses displeasure or discomfort. When I shared with women friends the nature of our interaction, they kept saying "Are your sure he isn't gay?" I learned an important lesson then. We demand that men change, and when they do, we are often not ready to affirm and embrace the liberation we claimed to desire.

- When women who want to be with male partners search for love, we must first accept that we will never find it in the arms of patriarchy.
  - I have encountered many men who want to be loving and who are willing to do the work. They find it difficult because there are just not enough support structures in place to affirm loving feminist masculinity. The path to male self-love is as arduous as the path to female self-love. We all usually have to begin this journey by going back to childhood to do the work of reparenting, to love ourselves rightly.
    - These men are working to recover the joy that they experienced when they felt they could open their hearts and just let the feelings come in.
  - We are eager to read the books by men who are not from Mars but who are right here on this Earth giving and receiving love. They can offer us healing wisdom. When they let their hearts speak, the dialogue of love can commence and true heterosexual communion can emerge.

- Silverstein and Rashbaum : "The good man, like the good woman, will be empathic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable."

- Now that some males have changed, all women have to confront the reality that sexist, masculinist behavior once believed to be innate not only is learned but can be unlearned.

- <<The Hite Report>> : More than 90 percent of straight women found emotional relationships with men disappointing because of male refusal to share thoughts and feelings. Women loving women surveyed in the report stated that they found their relationships satisfying because there was consistent mutual communication.
  - Without romanticizing lesbian bonds in a glib or shallow way, we can acknowledge that women loving women for the first time in midlife often find these relationship more fulfilling than the bounds they previously shared with men.  (為什麼我們有大量的異性戀浪漫愛情故事在媒體上每天每天不斷播放，而同性戀的故事卻是少之又少呢？這是一個很好的思考切入點，我們的異性戀真的的是天生的嗎？如果是天生的，為什麼從童話故事開始，就需要這麼多的資訊轟炸，特別是針對女人？)
  - By the time we reach midlife, lots of women are simply not interested in power struggles with either gender.
  - "Are love relationships between women different?"

- In conscious-raising groups we often talked about nonlesbian women choosing to widen the scope of our desire to include women as an act of resistance, one that would make us less vulnerable to being co-opted by men.
  - Key Hagan, <<Fugitive Information>> : "No one escapes induction into the dominant-subordinate paradigm imposed by male supremacy. Lesbians, too, must work hard to create new ways of being in relationships. Avoiding men does not eliminate internalized oppression or unconscious obedience to oppressive values."

- Remember that no matter the gender of one's partner, commitment to loving will determine the outcome of one's relationship.
  - May Sarton : "I know you don't want to hear this but I must be honest with you. I want my influence not to narrow my young friends down, but to open the path for them... If you truly love a woman then be with her and make a life with her. But a life of pure self-indulgence just won't work because it cannot feed your deep hungers...."
  - Clearly, women in search of love need to become mindful and aware of their true desires and longings.
  - The freedom young women's decision to explore varied choices usually comes from their questioning of patriarchy and male domination and their desire to have different relationships from those that they have witnessed older generations having. Women loving women who choose paradigms of mutuality and reciprocity over domination and subordination are acting in resistance to everything they have learned about the nature of romance.

- When one adds to these realities the effort to be self-loving in the face of homophobia, the struggle to love is as rigorous and intense for lesbian women as it is for anyone else raised in this culture, if not more so.
  - June Jordan, <Where is the Love> : "it is always the love that will carry action into positive new places" and that such love comes only when we have a secure foundation of self-love. 
    - Expressing her concern that we distinguish issues of sexuality from the practice of love, "I cannot be persuaded that one kind of sexuality, as against another, will necessarily provide for the greater happiness of the two people involved. I am not talking about sexuality. I am talking about love, about a steady-state deep caring and respect for every other human being, a love that can only derive from a secure and positive self-love." All women must work at the art of loving.
  - Key to that work is a commitment to honesty.
    - Harriet Lerner, <<The Dance of Deception>> : Until all women recognize the damage done to self and others when we are addicted to pretense, we cannot progress on the path to love. Truth telling enables us to break through pretense and deception.
    - Adrienne Rich, <<Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying>> : "The right to use the word 'love' only when we have made commitments to tell the truth urging us to remember: It is important to do this because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity... we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."

- Women who are steadfastly heterosexual may live a lifetime without feeling true love between themselves and heterosexual partner. The greatest tragedy of marriage within patriarchal culture is not that so many couples divorce but that an even greater number of couples stay together without feeling that they love one another.
  - Sadly, sexist notions of romance that romanticize domination often keep women and men from learning how to love.
  - Particularly, women and subordinated men often accept all manner of abuse in romantic partnerships, behavior they would find unacceptable in even the most casual of friendships.
  - No wonder, then, that as independent women, especially single women, practicing the art of loving in midlife and beyond, we often cherish anew the friendships with both female and male friends that allow us to dwell in love, to know true love in relationships with others even if we have not found such love in romantic partnerships.

- These romantic friendships lacked sexual engagement but were rich in erotic passion. Nonsexual erotic passion has little meaning in today's world.
  - Nowadays the assumption is that something is wrong if an individual feels intense erotic connection with someone and does not allow that eros to lead him or her to sexual intercourse. 

- In keeping with the spirit of romantic friendships, individual women are choosing to create lifelong partnerships or to make lifelong commitments with individuals they never live with, or live with for a time.

- Many abiding romantic friendships between women are broken when one of the individuals finds a mate or marries. This is especially the case when an individual woman does not have a feminist consciousness.
  - value on our bonds with women as we placed on partnerships with males, to value our nonsexual bonds with male friends as much as we value those in which we are sexual.
  - That consciousness-raising must continually take place as long as patriarchy exists, for it teaches girls and women to value fully our bonds with one another, to value all deep bonds equally.
  - In a homophobic culture, deep, nonsexual, same-sex intimacy is often viewed suspiciously by straight and gay folks alike. For that reason, it has been harder for females who share nonsexual, same-sex romantic friendships to talk openly about these bonds.
  - In heterosexist, patriarchal culture, the only commitments that are deemed truly acceptable and worthy are those between straight women and men who marry.
  - It is still difficult for nonsexual partnerships to receive the respect automatically give heterosexual relationships. A romantic friendship that lasts for a lifetime may be considered not as important as a sexualized romantic partnership that ends in a few years.

- 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.
  - When women 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. Finding a man to be with is a lot easier that finding a man who can be a loving partner.
  - Barbara De Angelis, <<Are You the One for Me?>> : List 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."
  - Patriarchal culture, and patriarchal domination of the psyches of men, encourage most men not to develop these traits.
   - Many progressive, liberated, loving women never imagined that we would one day turn away men as partners because we would see so clearly that they are not ready for healthy, mature relationships and may never be ready.

- Granted, most heterosexual women try again and again to entice men to do the work of self-healing and self-love so that the promise of true love can be fulfilled, but most men are just simply comfortable with the status quo, or they lack the courage to go through pain to the space of healing that would enable them to be mature, love adults.
  - Growth usually means that we have to experience suffering, and plenty of men want to avoid emotional pain at all costs.
  - In deep, abiding, romantic friendships, commitment to personal growth is a given. The work of healing is shared, the pain and the joy.

- Significantly, romantic friendships can coexist with the fact of partners' marrying, because their reason for being is not to replace marriage but to open up the possibility of sustained, committed true love existing among friends, and not just same-sex friends.
  - Our goal is to bond within a circle of love, of deep and abiding affections that are inclusive rather than exclusive.
  - Ideally, when females and males have feminist consciousness that enables them to break with patriarchal thinking about romance and the notion that there should be a dominant party and a submissive party, then they can honor the bonds of love that they hold with one another and with anyone else.

- Commitment is the ground of our being that lets us make mistakes, be forgiven, and try again.

- If women of all ages freely embrace the term "romantic friendship", we will open up the space where we can develop primary bonds in platonic relationships that are constant, committed, and able to last a lifetime. These relationships ensure that the woman who does not find a perfect mate will still know true and abiding love. And at the end of the day it is this love that sustains us and gives life meaning.

- In the aftermath of feminist change, it has become most evident that few couples are willing to do the work of love that would make mutual joy possible in partnerships. Since so many young women and men, as well as their elders, do not know how to love, it is easier strike a bargain using the old norms of top and bottom, of dominant and submissive.

- Mutuality, like love itself, must come through work. Wise women know that the happiest, most fulfilling committed partnerships (legalized via marriage or not) are those in which mutuality is the core value, in which the spiritual growth and development of each individual matters.
  - Wise women who love know we have to leave time for love. Most folks will say that their loved ones matter most to them, but when you look at what they actually do with their time, it becomes evident that what they claim to love the most receives the least attention.
  - Genuine love requires time and commitment. Self-love takes times and commitment, particularly on the part of those who are wounded in the space where we would know love in our childhoods.

- My hope for younger generations of women is that they will examine the unfulfilled spaces of their lives soon and boldly, unabashedly choosing to do the work of love, placing it above everything. Again and again it must be stated when I talk about doing the work of love, I am not talking simply about partnership; I am talking about the work of self-love in conjunction with the work of relational love.
  - When we place emphasis on building a beloved community, of which having a partner may be an essential part but not the whole, we free ourselves to lead joyous lives as single folks, and sometimes if not always as celibate folks
  - Celibacy is often a liberating self-loving choice among women for whom the search for sexual pleasure has consistently led them down a self-sabotaging path.
  - Joyless sexuality is not life-affirming. Within patriarchal intimacy, many women have sex against their will and desire. Many men would be shocked to find that their female partners are pretending sexual interest and feigning pleasure they do not feel and never feel.

- The best sex and the most satisfying sex are not the same. I have had great sex with men who were intimate terrorists, men who seduce and attract by giving you just what you feel your heart needs then gradually or abruptly withholding it once they have gained your trust. And I have been deeply sexually fulfilled in bonds with loving partners who have had less skill and know-how... 
  - Fred Newman, <<Let's Develop: A Self-Help Guide to Continuous Personal Growth: "the best kind of sex, the sex in which there's the least amount of pretense - the most gratifying and satisfying sex - is sex you do with the person in your life whom you are most open."

- Self-actualization is no easy task. And it may well be that there remains a body of women who find it easier to target men, to blame them for all that remains unfulfilled in their lives, than do the work of love.
  - No one can bestow happiness or lasting joy upon us if we have not found the way to joy within ourselves. Self-knowledge is the way to find out what the secret of joy is in our individual lives.

- 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.
  - Until women and men begin to think of knowledge as an erotic space of connection, both self-understanding and understanding of the other, we cannot change our sense of romance.
  - Within patriarchal culture, most people learn romantic love as a union of opposites. Women have often looked to men, especially more powerful men, to fill the incomplete spaces in their lives.

- John Welwood, <<Love and Awakening>> : "We imagine that we should be able to establish a rich and satisfying relationship with someone we love, even if we have never learned to relate to ourselves in a rich, satisfying way... We often don't see that how we relate to another inevitably follow from how we relate to ourselves, that our outer relationships are but an extension of our inner lives, that we can only be as open and present with another as we are with ourselves."
  - "True love always requires great daring."
  - Awareness born of love is the only force that can bring healing and renewal. Out of our love for another person, we become more willing to let our old identities wither and fall away, and enter a dark night of the soul, so that we may stand naked once more in the presence of the great mystery that lies at the core of our being.

- Love comes only as we find love within. To risk self-knowledge is to begin love's journey.
  - The cultivation of care, knowledge, respect, and responsibility in relation to the self, when we do this work earlier in our lives, we have the skills that make loving and receiving love possible.
  - The intensity of mutual connection lays the groundwork for two individuals to become soul mates - partners who are willing to do the work of love.