Love, Knowledge, and Mass Media

In All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks (aka, Gloria Watkins) offers the following reflection about the relationships between love, knowledge, and mass media.

Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love— “Care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn. Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are daily bombarded with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.

hooks penned these words in 2001. They remain relevant today: Just consider the latest shows streaming on Disney+, Hulu, or HBO. And though hooks focuses on erotic sexual love—something she identifies as but one species of love—we can extend her observations about the relationship between knowledge and love to all forms of love. Indeed, many of us feel unloved because few people have taken time to learn about us and the communities to which we belong. I feel this as a member of Boricua. And I feel it every time I see an advertisement that presents mi isla as a tourist attraction for the materially privileged. “Never mind the staggering poverty. Just look at these beautiful beaches! And, of course, don’t overlook these beautiful, erotic bodies?!”

Conquest and commodification continue. And both oppose love.