I am, however, intractably resistant to the notion that a woman who wants to get laid is giving explicit consent to anyone who wants to fuck her. I have this crazy notion that a woman has a choice about who gets access to her body, and that men have to respect it.

It’s reminiscent of the scene that all of us have seen played out in bars, clubs, in the office, on the sidewalk, and in countless films in which a provocatively dressed woman refuses the advances of a man who then angrily demands to know why she’s dressed “like she wants it” if she doesn’t. Naturally, she may very well want “it,” but perhaps not from him. The idea appears to be that any man should do—a sentiment also built into the attitude that a provocatively dressed woman shouldn’t expect to have the right to choose with whom she has sex.

We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers. We carry the world of guilt — center of families, keeper of relationships, caretaker of friends — with a new world of control/ambition — rich, independent, powerful. We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

We must get A’s. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless.

Affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. […]

Most of us learn to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis.” In his book* [M. Scott] Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving.” We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist what they feel is love.

When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse can not coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposite of nurturance and care.