Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Forget about finding Mr. Right. Finding oneself is more exciting than romance. These celebrated feminists sound more like hosts of "The View" than sisters of the struggle.
Feb 5, 2000 | "Good evening, and welcome to our love night here at the Y," the announcer onstage crooned into the microphone. Somewhere in the packed auditorium, a female voice let out a whoop. "Love night" was a panel titled "What's Love Got to Do With It?: Women Speak Out on Intimate Relationships at the Beginning of the New Century," held Tuesday at the 92nd Street Y, New York's venerable cultural center.
The speakers -- "Each in her own way represents today's woman," we were told by the Y program director -- were Gloria Steinem (probably accustomed by now to being introduced as someone who "needs no introduction"), feminist professor and prolific author bell hooks, poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman and short-story writer Amy Bloom. Despite the presence of Steinem and hooks, there was surprisingly little in the way of gender politics. Hooks, probably the most prominent African-American feminist in the public arena today, did warn at one point -- after disclosing that she feels "panicked" when bright, talented women students marry at 22 or 23 -- that "Patriarchy hasn't gone away; it hasn't changed; though because of feminism we have more freedoms within it."
But this call to vigilance sounded a somewhat discordant, and muted, note against the mostly bright and good-natured tone of the evening. Indeed, it was one of the very few times that the P-word even came up.
The sunny mood was set by none other than hooks, who had organized the panel and presided over the discussion. I had expected hooks to talk about her belief, expressed in her new book, "All About Love: New Visions," that our social arrangements are rigged so that in relationships, "Men are more likely to get their emotional needs met while women will be deprived," and that "Most men use psychological terrorism as a way to subordinate women." (I was looking forward to asking her if men might have a different and valid perspective on which gender excels in psychological terrorism.) But nothing so provocative was ever uttered. The handful of men in the sea of women had no occasion to feel under attack.
The panelists, including Steinem and hooks, were eager to concede that men, too, have problems in relationships, maybe even the same problems as women, albeit in a different degree. A rather wan-looking Steinem showed not a flash of the anger that she has sometimes proclaimed to be a feminist's only alternative to depression. Hooks, meanwhile, turned out to be not just relentlessly sweet but -- there's no other way to say it -- girlish. From the opening moment when she coyly announced that she had asked for the lights to be turned up because "Love is better with the lights on," she kept talking about "circles of love." It was a phrase that seemed to mean simply a network of friends, but she repeated it like a mantra, eventually prompting Ackerman to interject with a wee bit of sarcasm, "How about a polygon of love?"
Worse yet, hooks seemed to see the panel itself as her "circle of love." She said things like, "I have grown in love because of the work of every other woman on this panel," and drew a none too reluctant Steinem into a full-scale love-in, extolling her ability to create such a circle across generations and declaring, "I claim you in my circle of love. Do you claim me in your circle of love?"
Steinem responded with a somewhat startled, "Yes." The two then spent a few minutes exchanging fond reminiscences of how they first became acquainted and how each initially felt intimidated by meeting the other. I was reminded of notes exchanged by best friends in junior high where the i's are dotted with hearts. I wondered, too, if this cooing about circles of love is what happens when '70s sisterhood meets New Age psychobabble.
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