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I was in love with it, but then I fell progressively further out of love with it.

Chapter 7 depends entirely on the conservative, heterosexist defense of the heterosexual couple as necessary for healthy childrearing (!); the appeals to dated pop authorities like John Bradshaw are unconvincing; and the generic, diffuse spirituality advocated for loses all punch in the face of hooks' optimistic vision: People are intrinsically good, and the world is just: bad people suffer for their misdeeds, even if only psychologically or in the form of a metaphysical “soul murder.��

On the other hand, what hooks gets right, she gets EXCEPTIONALLY right. Above all, and what makes this book worth reading, however many its flaws: bell hooks shouts what so few so-called feminist voices are willing to acknowledge: Patriarchy destroys men, full stop. She cites Kay Hagan: “[Anti-sexist men] perceive the value of a feminist practice for themselves and they advocate it not because it’s politically correct, or because they want women to like them, or even because they want women to have equality, but because they understand that male privilege prevents them not only from becoming whole, authentic human beings but also from knowing the truth about the world.�� (137) This is the stuff that deserves to be memorized.

To give a few more highlights: see her critique of hiphop's strictly imaginary claims to subversive potential; the recognition that the violence of militant black power advocates directly served the interests of the white supremacist state (and in any case “black male rage is usually a sign of reactive powerlessness�� (90), a profoundly Nietzschean observation); the condemnation of the claims for superiority over white masculinity as being itself patriarchal; the recognition that, in psychoanalytic terms, white men do NOT possess the phallus (psychological wholeness); the terrifying need to give up what we have in order to finally achieve health (“they fear that if they give up what little 'power' they may have in the existing system they will have nothing�� (130)), the necessity of patriarchal females for the functioning of patriarchy, that anti-patriarchal men “can be somewhat disturbing to be around�� (!) (137), all of this, all of this, all of this is a damned god-send in a leftist discourse sunk into a confusion of identities with persons.

Hooks also has the rare gift of being able to take the contradictions of a person or movement without complaint: she re-claims the anti-capitalist critique of black power, acknowledges MLK's anti-communism and still cites his moral authority, but without in either case needing to either morally write-off or lionize a person or a discourse. She can sift out the good from the bad without the kind of totalizing either-or functioning of today's so-called “social justice��: Whether a person or a discourse is good or bad is besides the point; she has a rare knack for salvaging what can still be used.

There's plenty of meat on this bone, though it needs a lot of salt.