I winced at the claim to “take up bell hooks’s work” in service of billing men for the “unpaid labor of love.” that Angelica Ferrara makes. hooks’s project wasn’t to price intimacy; it was to rehabilitate love as an ethic—mutual care, responsibility, and accountability—beyond domination. Turning affection and everyday care into invoiceable line items feels like a market logic so totalizing that even capitalists usually put love in the “priceless” column. Framed this way, the message men hear is: women’s love is conditional, meter-running, and therefore unreliable. That doesn’t build trust or interdependence; it risks deepening the very gender alienation feminism hopes to heal.
hooks also wrote about how, under patriarchy, boys often experience love withdrawal and shaming—what she at times calls maternal sadism—as a seed of later male violence. If we normalize the idea that intimate care is chiefly a debt to be collected, we risk repeating that wound rather than transforming it.
I winced at the claim to “take up bell hooks’s work” in service of billing men for the “unpaid labor of love.” that Angelica Ferrara makes. hooks’s project wasn’t to price intimacy; it was to rehabilitate love as an ethic—mutual care, responsibility, and accountability—beyond domination. Turning affection and everyday care into invoiceable line items feels like a market logic so totalizing that even capitalists usually put love in the “priceless” column. Framed this way, the message men hear is: women’s love is conditional, meter-running, and therefore unreliable. That doesn’t build trust or interdependence; it risks deepening the very gender alienation feminism hopes to heal.
hooks also wrote about how, under patriarchy, boys often experience love withdrawal and shaming—what she at times calls maternal sadism—as a seed of later male violence. If we normalize the idea that intimate care is chiefly a debt to be collected, we risk repeating that wound rather than transforming it.