Sublime

How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised?

as

can

esteem. To complicate matters, women

Since many women believe they will never know fulfilling love, they are willing to settle for strategies that help ease the pain and increase the peace, pleasure, and playfulness in existing relationships,

to be accepted in our physical and spiritual beings rather than feeling we had to make ourselves into a fantasy self to become the object of male desire).

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.

knoweth God.’”

As a political theorist, hooks believed fiercely in the power of naming systems—her recurring phrase, in defining what we are up against, was “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”5 But she was far more ambivalent about the impulse to attach identity signifiers to our beings, to brand ourselves as a this, or a that. In her landmark 1984 book, F