I believe in learning self-defense too, to which end I'm currently both armed and a student of wing chun.
Anyway, when it comes to the rest, have you ever considered how other species address these issues? There are lots of them out there that aren't nearly so patriarchal as ours has tended to be. Everything from ants to bees to orchas and dolphins to elephants, chimpanzees, and lions and much more are matriarchal. Among the most common approaches to family organization among non-patriarchal species is a system whereby males are kicked out once they reach adulthood. That ensures that all the adults are female.
Elephant families are governed by the eldest female while chimpanzees are conversely governed by the youngest female (which...probably explains a lot about them right there
). Human females though value egalitarian principles more than that and seem to think more like lions, which (forget what you saw on The Lion King, it has nothing to do with the facts) tend to have fairly democratic, not-so-hierarchical family social structures. They too though expel males once they reach what they regard as the age of adulthood. The males then fend for themselves or band together with other males. To fend off rapists and other attackers, the females tend to either travel in groups and/or hire a male bodyguard with the provision of a good cut of the food. Male guardians though have no say in the governance of the family itself and the females also do the hunting themselves.
Anyway, these are things I think about in this connection. There are also communities around the world that are open only to women. There are even a couple surviving ancient matrilineal communities like the Mosuo (i.e.
China's "Kingdom of Women", as it's known to outsiders) who have family life organized such that husbands and wives live in separate homes and children live with their mothers and grandmothers, who govern family life and pass on the family name (which, in contrast to our approach that often involves custody battles, keeps the lives of children stable even if divorce occurs, and it often does). The Mosou's system is egalitarian and conversely reserves political authority to the men, and both men and women participate in the economy and own property autonomously.
My point being that it
is indeed clearly possible to live without male rule and patriarchy. The path to that situation though seems to, as a general pattern, involve institutionalizing a good deal of physical separation between men and women, especially in the home. That seems to be the most successful strategy. These realities convey why I think the female separatists have a point.