The Title
A certain level of irony exists in the very title of this tome. The title carries the hint of a suggestion that it will be a book capable of telling readers all they need to know about love. That is impossible, of course, but ironically the title does turn out to be literally true. The author has written a book that is all about the subject of the love.
It Takes a Mayberry
Author bell hooks is a Black liberal feminist with a penchant for not just seeing through the holes in capitalism, but brilliantly pointing them out. There is a kind of sweet irony, therefore, when she engages the specific example of My Three Sons to make a commentary on alternative parenting. In fact, this sort of alternative to the traditional two-parent family became an entire sub-genre of 1960s sitcoms and most of those were TV shows that conservatives cite when calling for a return to traditional family values. These shows featuring a single biological parent (usually a father) calling upon others to help raise their children (The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry RFD, Family Affair, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father to name just the more popular examples) that make traditionalists so nostalgic are actually deeply ironic examples of a liberal concept of community parenting made famous by the title of the book penned by Hillary Clinton: It Takes a Village.
Rear Horrorshow
According to hooks, the members of the younger generation are, as a whole, mistrustful of the concept of love. As for her own generation, things are not much better. When she writes about bringing up the subject of love with those of her own generation she is disturbed to find “it made everyone nervous or scared, especially when I spoke about not feeling loved enough. On several occasions as I talked about love with friends, I was told I should consider seeing a therapist.” At least according to those people of her generation she personally knows, love is less something to be suspicious about than something to outright fear or, even worse, it is something which should be designated a mental disorder.
Deadly Sins
Of the Seven Deadly sins, lust has historically been most often called into service as the greatest obstruction to love. The purity of true love is tested by depravity of base lust and, history tells us, purity rarely wins this showdown. Ironically, the author plucks another nemesis from the Deadly Seven to identify as the true villain which has wreaked so much havoc with the collective view of love as an essential component of human contentment. It is not lust which threatens the perspective toward love society once held, but greed.
Honesty
The concept of honesty comes in for some hard, cold, truthful honesty about itself. The act of being honest is situated as something that is far more prevalent in theory than in practice. “In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers.” The ironic message hooks put across is that, while everybody talks about how great honesty is, nobody is actually willing to commit to proving its greatness.
