This book is the best thing I have read in so long. When I say book, to be clear it reads more like a slightly softer academic paper but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable. I have learned so much from this relatively short book that just cuts right to the core of everything in such a clear and understandable way. It really answered a lot of questions for me not just on a more general research level but a more personally philosophical one too.
I won’t even try to pretend that I can convey all that this book has to offer but there were two key things that stuck with me that I think would be really interesting to try and engage people with. One is the concept of what they do confusingly call “relationship” and “relationships” and what I retrained my brain to say when trying to explain is a sort of emotionally engaged relationship vs a more surface external relationship – whether you’re talking on personal or more societal levels. The argument being in very layman’s shit terms that we sacrifice the meaningful relationship with ourselves and create these more surface connections, where we perhaps hide our truest selves, in order to effectively survive in patriarchy, as soon as hierarchies and value systems began to reward the more dominant or powerful they become more self sustaining, evolving into the world we live in now. We adapt a part of ourselves in order to stay in the safety of the heard and the effect of this plays out differently for girls and boys, for women and men.
When exploring the differences of these effects in women and men, from childhood into adult life the authors talk about the ways in which this manifests as a general detachment coping mechanism summed up as “I don’t know” in girls and “I don’t care” in boys. I’m obviously not explaining all the magic behind that succinctly put concept but I think if you’re a parent in particular you will know instantly what the means.
I think these two major points have so much possibility for interesting conversation – I’m still working out how that might happen since they could be considered quite high concept if you have no familiarity with a lot of feminist discourse or a light understanding of gender based issues.
Anyway suffice to say that I loved this book, it really helped me understand so much about all the work I have been doing for the last few years and deepened my understanding of everything I thought I knew as well as illuminating much I didn’t of course.