CHARLOTTE

I've just read Loving to Survive and it was brilliant, I highly recommend it. There's a PDF floating around but it has quite a few missing pages. Regardless, there are so many excellent, thought provoking ideas in there:

- A society where women are unable to escape men and are at constant threat of male violence, but where small acts of kindness from men are also common create a sense of male chivalry. Where women become aware that cooperation with men can bring us possible benefits and protection. In order to survive, women must be constantly vigilant about our captors' needs and feelings and so we take on our captors' perspective. The level of hyper vigilance required to attend to take on our captors' perspective is all consuming and we can't just turn it off: we see ourselves through men's perspectives.

- Living in a state of terror all the time is bad for survival, so we create cognitive strategies to reduce terror and increase chances of survival. People who believe they have more control over their situation than they really do end up surviving longer than those who feel hopeless. Women fixate on the chivalrous behaviour of men/potential protections/goodness of men/romantic or emotional connections, in order to feel like they have control in a world where they can be hurt by male violence at any time. We tell ourselves that coerced decisions are our own choices so that we can be calmer and survive.

- A little bit of chivalry and no freedom or rights is safer than no chivalry. Our heteropatriarchal relations are based on rights and responsibilities. The classic: a woman devotes herself to one man and provides endless sexual, reproductive and domestic labour in exchange for his financial provision and protection. In return she gets a bit of safety and security from other men, money from a better paid partner and hopefully some occasional warmth, in return he gets a free source of all kinds of labour.

- But some parts of this arrangement are more precarious than others, women's rights, and men's responsibilities. Men make it clear all the time that if they feel even a tiny bit threatened they reserve the right to revoke all chivalry while retaining their own rights and women retaining all their responsibilities. E.g. Women are expected to do the same if not more housework than their mothers did while also working full time.

- This is why so many women fight against feminism and legal protections and advancements, they are scared that if men don't feel complete superiority, we will lose all male protection but remain with male hostility and endless female responsibility. Where we will all be public property. Through cognitive dissonance and taking on their captors' perspectives, both of which have proved to be pragmatic survival strategies rather than masochism as has previously been assumed, women have fought against measures that could give them more tangible power and protection.

- The final chapter about what we do about this I honestly found to be the weakest of the book, but that just speaks to the magnitude of patriarchy. Basically, we need to continue to be loud and persistent about documenting male oppression, working to break male identification in ourselves and others and take an interest in cultivating the female imagination of a world without patriarchy (achieved especially through science fiction)