My boyfriend who is fucking awesome told me he learned from Bell Hooks. Bell Hooks came up when we were talking about reaching the apolitical masses of the countryside.. I'll explain: So many liberals deride country folk as being too backwards and stupid to be any good. My boyfriend and I, we're Communists, so we don't view rural people as enemies. We don't view "rednecks" as bad guys. And we don't view ignorance as an inherent flaw or personal shortcoming. Instead, ignorance is something that is fostered in deprivation - absence of literacy, abundance of abuse, lack of resources, inaccess to information, shit like that. Many rural peoples in the u.s. live in fucking terrible conditions. Liberals from the cities often have no fucking scientific understanding of how all that is tied together, and so instead they just crack on country folk like it's a joke or popularity contest. As if growing up in better conditions makes them superior or something. Anyway..

So whilst discussing our approach to rural peoples' - people who don't have the benefits of quality healthcare access, quality infrastructure, diversity of culture, bustling fast-paced markets, etc - he brought up that he likens the approach he prefers to that of Bell Hooks. He said Bell Hooks was a feminist who reached out to men where they were, instead of reaching to them in some imaginary place where men and women are exactly alike and men had somehow magically understood what its like to be a woman. Just like the good Communist respects, acknowledges, and remediates the existence of conditions that lead to backwardness in ruralites, the good Feminist so too acknowledges the conditions which shape men.

I actually haven't read Bell Hooks except maybe in passing, like an essay here or there not knowing who she was. But apparently she made a big impact on my boyfriend. So maybe yall wana check her out.

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The rest hereafter in this post is unimportant but just some extra background. I come from a mixed-income family. Got raised by greatgrandma who had a good pension and lived her whole life in DC, was Germanic and had (thanks to her dad being ahead of the curve and INSISTING all his daughters go into secretary school, one of the few industries which women in the u.s. could work) a good education. But thereafter her son married a borderline-homeless appalachian hillbilly woman to dodge the Vietnam draft. And then their kid, my mom, that lil harlot (lol), she insisted on marrying a poor boy from the other side of the tracks, and so - despite my urbanite heritage - my upbringing was halfway "white-trash" as they call it. Mom went to college till she had to drop out from being pregnant, but my dad was barely literate until he learned to read the Bible, was a laborer who got undercut by the bosses hiring immigrants, and was consequently prone to gambling and drink. Experiencing both affluence and poverty at different times in my life gave me a more rounded view of stuff than I may have had otherwise. I also was an "MRA" (Before that phrase existed) prior to developing my feminism, so I like to think I have a pretty well-rounded view of sex too. My boyfriend says he grew up with really bad attitudes about women, and feminism helped draw him away from being abusive like his dad. I hope to marry and have kids with him one day, I think he'll be a really good dad. I've posted in here before about how I think the traumas endured by boys sent to fight in (or who had to flee from!) U.S. imperialist wars - not to mention puritanical religious dogma - helped shape today's fucking awful relational landscape. I think old-school feminism (not this liberal neo-feminism you see prolific today) can really help people a lot if they give it a chance.

I credit feminism and communism with coming to forgive and understand my dad who was really quite bad at dadding lol. Only when viewed through the revolutionary lens does his behavior make sense - he never stood a fucking chance. It didnt matter how good at his craft he was; he was renowned in the whole state for the quality of his work - the profit-motive carried out by the Capitalist demanded they cut his and his fellows' wages as far back as possible, so underpaid was labor that even a dual income household couldn't feed and clothe their god damned family. In the 80s millions of jobs took flight overseas, then NAFTA opened up the borders. And it didnt matter how much my mom loved him, she had 3 kids who needed shelter and school supplies and couldnt continue to be exposed to his violence. So in 1999 we got the bad news. The good news. That inevitably mixed-quality news. Divorce. I know that the violence my dad carried out upon us wasn't meant for us - it should have been aimed at the bosses.

Hopefully this next generation of young men have learned from history and punch up. I'm grateful to any guy who takes the time to read choice pieces of feminist literature and find common ground with the women in their lives.