Are Women Doomed on the Street?

KC, Great article! I totally agree that women need to start getting hit. I train with some women that won't spar with full gear because they are afraid of getting hit. The only way to overcome this fear is to take a blow and see that we are tougher then we think. It builds our confidence, plus if we ever are in a real situation we hopefully won't freak out and crumple into a crying heap when our atacker gets a blow in on us.

Oh, and I where acrylic nails, so even if the guys eyes are closed tightly, I am still going to do some damage when I jam my fingers in his eyes or rack them across his face.

 

Knife fighting dangerous legally and physically

I agreed with most of what you had to say on this topic, except one thing. Advocating the training of, and use, of knife work. Saying things "like women in urban areas of the U.S must likewise be armed and ready to protect themselves with their weapons of choice" and then talking about training to stab and cut is downright irresponsible from a legal standpoint.

What happens if while "defending" herself the other person dies. Arguing self defence may not be such a slam dunk as one may think, just because a man attacks a woman. Were there any witnesses? And what happens if the person doesn't have a knife and you kill him? What if he does? The police would likely view that as a fair fight, especially if the woman is trained to use a knife. What about the fact that carrying concealed weapons is illegal in most states. It is in Canada where I live.

What about the psychological impact of taking a life? The emotional ramifications can scar a person for the rest of their lives.

You would be wiser to stress how to avoid confrontations and disarming techniques, rather than advocating carrying knives and other weapons to defend oneself.

What say the rest of you out there in the martial arts world?

 

In the US, realistically, if evidence can prove that a woman was attacked and she can reasonably prove that she was in fear of her life, then she should be ok legally. The system is more likely to judge in her favor.
What about the psychological impact of being attacked, raped, brutalized and left for dead? That's a double edged sword that I am afraid I am unable to answer to anyone's complete happiness I am afraid. Truthfully, I would rather be able to regret taking a life then being dead myself. But that's just me, its different for everyone, male or female.
I would hate to try to disarm someone armed with a knife. The damage would be pretty substantial.
Anyone else have thoughts?

 

Knives are considered lethal force. It is better to be trained in lethal force so you can be more responsible, than to stick your head in the sand and pretend it does not exist.

I'm not advocating carrying or use of lethal force, but as an option, I advocate using it responsibly. Know the laws, know how to use it, know how to carry it and store it safely, and ACT RESPONSIBLY.

If I recall correctly, and my memory may not be correct with all the details, but I had a friend about fifteen years ago, she was followed down a street and attacked. She had a folder (knife) and cut the attacker on the arms, he let go which gave her time to pull out her pepper spray and use it on the SECOND attacker that was coming in because she fended off the first attacker. Okay, my memory is really going on this one. Anyway, she got in trouble because she did not know the local laws where she was travelling which did not allow her knife to be carried. She spent a night in jail, got the knife taken away and a slap on the hand. Then she was let go and the two attackers went to prison.

If local laws allow you to carry a weapon like a small folder or pepper spray, I recomend you learn how to use them responsibly. It gives you more options, just be aware the weapon only helps you if it is in your hands ready to go, so don't depend on weapons.

How can someone be responsible with weapons if they know nothing about how to use them properly and nothing about the local laws?

 

The arguement about whether or not to deploy deadly force is a difficult one. However I always think of Ed Parker's maxim:

Better to be judged by tweleve than carried by six

The fact is anyone concerned with self defense should be prepared to do what ever it takes to get home safely.

- Matt

 

Nose picking?Ya what if they have really long noses hairs?What would be the defence aginist this?

 

Absolutely ! Key point ....

Also a woman may not in fact be carrying such a weapon on her person, but say she manages to dislodge the weapon from her attacker (however this may happen... I have read about certain cases where the woman was hesitant in using the weapon due to the fact that they never held or even used a weapon before!)

Weapons training (aside from learning application) will dispel the fear that surrounds it.

Weapons training also heightens awareness skills. Having a weapon coming at you, be it a stick or sword does help to encourage you to pay close attention to your opponent.

 

That depends very much on what mean by "the street". No, this isn't the Clinton impeachment hearings. It's the vital but seldom asked First Question in Engineering(tm): What problem are you trying to solve?

First, let's deal with the obvious things. Men, on the average, have more lean muscle mass, more upper body strength, longer reach, greater overall size, more testosterone and better familiarity with violence and physical aggression than women do. And women have generally been taught to be deferential to men. Those are all advantages for men when it comes to standing there and beating the heck out of each other. No doubt about it.

A woman whose goal is to beat a man on those terms had better be darned good, a body-Nazi, or a few standard deviations above the mean on some physical attribute.

Now look at what we mean by doomed, disadvantage and the street. It's a question of goals, resources and situations.

A lot of people (mostly men) talk about "The Street" in a very vague way. Self defense is part of it. Unexplained fights in bars with other men are a big part of it. What amounts to duels in the urban outdoors are another part. There are flavors of military operations somewhere in there.

The goals can be pretty fuzzy, but if pressed (and I've spent a bit of informal research time pressing people on this) it's a combination of things.

For men, establishing dominance over other men in social situations can be a really big part of it. Beating down someone who disrespects you, winning a bar fight, showing some punk who's boss, impressing your girlfriend and winning arguments when they turn physical are all dominance things. Usually they involve breeding rights at some point.

Women do these things with violence, too. But it's not nearly as common, and it's most often with other women. The differences between the sexes aren't that important if the sexes aren't doing the same things with the same people. Women tend to use weapons and tactics more suited to what they tend to be better at.

There are professions which involve the use of force like police officer, CO, security guard, bouncer, mental health worker, soldier. In all of these being big, strong and able to pug are useful. But most of the time you're managing people. Psychology is at least as important as your fists if you want to live long enough to collect Social Security. And the goals are usually not to win a fight b ut to control a situation, often two different things. You have to be able to use force as needed. But fighting isn't all of the picture even there.

Women will have disadvantages in a lot of these jobs, but they have advantages as well. It's not clear how the scales will tip on that score. The more the profession involves weapons or people skills the less important the differences become.

Then there are sports. A kickboxing match, a K-1 fight, backyard boxing or an IDPA meet are all sporting events. They are designed to test different things, sometimes to amazing extremes. I only mention them because a lot of people use sporting events to show that women are doomed in "The Street" and use the sporting environment as a simulation of the real world.

There are a few important things to keep in mind about sporting events.

The first is symmetry. Everyone there has the same goal. The same standards define winning and losing for each of the competitors. Once the action starts the event goes until time runs out or someone wins according to the rules.

The second is that specific things are being tested. In a practical pistol match it's a matter of who can hit the target as accurately and quickly as possible in a given situation designed to combine things like speed, eye-hand coordination, use of cover, stamina, and the mastery of task-specific skills. Mixed Martial Arts shows who can make another person submit with a combination of size, strength, conditioning and skill at some combination of wrestling and kickboxing.

Sports rules and goals reward specific things. Change the sport and you'll find other people winning. Take the 100m hurdles. If it's a question of running and jumping over the hurdles Ethiopians will beat Apaches. If you have to crawl under the hurdles at night without anyone hearing you, well, that is a whole different matter. In sports designed around size, strength, raw speed and physical aggression (i.e. most of them) men will usually beat women, particularly at the highest levels.

This gets back to the fundamental question "What problem are you trying to solve?"

The reality is that what women have to deal with is mostly the threat of violent crime directed at them by men. Here's where questions of goals and symmetry come in.

The criminal wants to do a crime as quickly and with as little cost to himself as possible. He wants to select a good victim and take what he wants. If he's got some foresight he also wants to minimize the chances that someone will make pay him later.

The defender wants to prevent the situation from developing, stop it early, escape from it, make the criminal give up his attack, make it impossible for him to continue or convince him that the price he'll have to pay isn't worth what he hopes to gain. Any one of these counts as success. Very few of them involve standing up, folding one's hands into fists and beating the attacker into submission.

If the classic self defence first trio - prevention, avoidance and deterrence - have failed, there's still a lot of asymmetry in the resistance and aftermath parts of the program. A robber wants to rob. A rapist wants to rape. Killing or injuring may be involved, but they usually aren't the primary motivation.

A defender who does her level best to tear the criminal's head off and beat him to death with it has certain advantages in achieving her goal of not being raped or robbed. She might get labelled as crazy, usually with the classic b-word tacked onto the end, but it's precisely that and that unwillingness to conform to expectations that can lead her to victory despite her "obvious" disadvantages. What she wants and what he wants are two very different things.

Or consider the aftermath part of the process. We had a self defense student who stopped a big, strong college football player intent on rape. She is the sort of well brought up young Chinese woman who wouldn't say excrement if she had a mouthful of it. Very pleasant. Smiles a lot.

First, she stopped his initial physical attack. She was a little unclear on exactly how, which is not unusual. All that we could determine four days later was that she had bruises on her knuckles and elbows and finger marks on one side of her neck. Then she yelled and swore at him for what she later figures was a quarter to half an hour.

Why did she achieve what she wanted "on The Street"? First, he wanted a compliant victim who wouldn't object. He made a mistake in the victim selection progress. He fell back on using size and strength. She was willing to escalate further. Then he tried verbal intimidation, a belated attempt at seduction, appeals to guilt and a few other things. She made each of these, and the hope that he could later pretend that the whole thing was consensual impossible.

I can not be more specific without violating the terms of service of this forum as regards profane language.

If it had been a contest of who could out box the other she would have lost. But his goal was to commit a crime which required success at every step. Hers was to interrupt the process at any point by any means.

 

A lot of training falls down here. Some of it because it relies too much on long term training, over-complicated technique, size or strength. Some of it fails on the confidence portion of the program. Many teachers stress humility and being peaceful. For a young guy with more testosterone than myelin that's probably a good thing. For a woman whose primary need is to be ready, willing and dangerous with someone whose first name she knows it can be just the wrong approach. The pseudo-militaristic dominance and submission games of a "traditional" dojo can start off teaching most women precisely the wrong lessons for what they need.

A lot of people would be surprised at exactly how little of that it takes to make a big difference in outcomes. Even holding Thai pads for their classmates a few rounds every week for a couple months gets them used to being knocked around. In confrontation exercises at the end of the program it's often that first hostile contact that gets them to grow fangs and claws and get mammalian on the attacker.

There's also an issue of economy of motion here. Most martial arts schools and too many self defense programs teach "Block then hit". That's two beats to his one. And the first one is reactive. It trains the student at some level to accept that the attacker is in control of the action.

My Silat teacher likes to say "If you block, you might block. If you hit, you've already blocked." It saves at least one beat and makes have to respond instead of controlling the action.

I have to agree and disagree at the same time. Training with men is important at some point in the program. In the context of long-term practical combatives training it's vital. In the early stages of a self defense program it can be extremely counter productive. We can go into more depth on this if you are interested. For now, I'll just say that psychological and social issues often need to be dealt with first.
[QUOTE
Point #7 Weapons training is indeed an asset .... besides knife and stick training, I also advise firearm training when applicable (age/area of country)[/QUOTE]
The old Colt Single Action Army used to have the following engraving:

Code:

"Be not afraid of any man,
No matter what his size.
When in danger, call on me.
And I will equalize." :woo: 

Indeed. If by street you include "Your own home" - the most common site of violent crime against women.

 

Indeed not.

 

In all fairness it usually means "shots you should be conditioned to go for if you can get them." If you have a real chance to get a knee bar or naked choke the knee and the throat are primary targets, more than punching the forehead for instance. A lot of women starting a WSD program have no idea at all what to hit or grab.

LA! The heavens open. The angel choirs sing. The Voice booms out "Give the man a cigar." :Angel:

My son, you have hit on the single biggest weakness in women's self defense training. Most of the really bad programs are designed around very specific scenarios. Unless everything goes exactly according to plan the defender fails. It sets them up to fail.

We've been over this elsewhere. It isn't about winning a boxing match. It's about showing up for a crime ready to fight. The success rate of untrained women stopping rapists by striking is just too high to ignore.

Eyup. Ever seen a bunch of footballers (soccer players to Americans) lining up for penalty kicks? On the other hand, we teach an advanced spiritual centering technique called The Sublime Meditation of the Four Verbs. It goes something like this: "Grab. Squeeze. Twist. Pull." The answer to this subtle koan is "What is the sound of one testicle rupturing?" That one is a lot less pain based and a lot more likely to make a guy go straight into shock - at least according to the professional opinions of ER doctors and urologists we have consulted.

 

Good article KICKCHICK, but

The article was very good. All of it's points are valid, but I can't help but wonder why it seems to imply that these elements are not in the normal training program (male or female).

Yes, I understand that there are "some" programs that may not have as much as some of us would like, but I really hope that most traditional or even semi traditional programs could claim these characteristics.

In my experience most schools elevate from no contact to light contact to medium contact and the advanced ranks tag each other rather regularly. I can't remember the last dojo I saw that didn't have at least a heavy bag.

Not only do I consider weapons like nunchucks, SAi & Bo mandatory for upper belts, I regularly explain their theories and application in the modern context, using other random implements in replacement.

Anyway, THis post isn't meant to be about me. I would tell anyone who identifies with the article ( meaning that these things are not in their program) to use it as a constructive checklist of what to ad. All students need to experience "reality". It is best we offer them a safe(er) place to do it than let them awaken to it outside.

Pete Ticali

 

Escaping is much more about grappling than striking. Though there are striking options in clinch and ground, they're predicated on having the positional skills to get out of there in the first place.
If you're not grappling, you have space to run away.

And what is the man doing this whole time? Men are naturally better strikers than women.
Striking is highly weight dependent. The vast majority of women simply aren't equipped to outstrike a man.

That depends on what you mean by "scenario": Is at alive or dead? Is the attacker really trying to hurt you? Is the contact real? Or is it prescripted, with the "attacker" told to give up when they guesstimate the woman might have won?

 

I was kindof being facetious, merely making fun of the cartoonish D34DLY STR33T language prevalent in WSD, but you bring up a good point. Prescripted scenarios set you up to fail. It's play acting.
Maybe to some people "scenario" means "attacker tries to take my damn head off" but that's not what is meant in most WSD courses.

Apperantly the success rate for actually trying anything is pretty high. Which begs the question "Why not just tell her to flail?".

Good luck doing that through denim. Or any other kind of pants for that matter.

 

Against a real threat of death or serious bodily harm? Not all women will be comfortable with the idea of deadly force. But it would be irresponsible not to fully inform them about the option and to provide competent teachers if they choose to prepare themselves to use that option.

There are legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of deadly force, including weapons. No doubt about it. But firearms and knives remain the single most effective means of preventing successful rape and robbery. And if, G-d forbid, a woman is the target of someone who really wants to kill her she had better be prepared to fight effectively with the best weapons she can find.

In private my wife and I refer to this as The Decision with the capital letters. A woman who says something like "I could imagine defending myself, but I couldn't possibly use a weapon. I might kill him," hasn't really made the decision for serious self defense possible. One who honestly says "I could do whatever it takes to defend myself or a loved one" has learned the only important lesson. She may choose to use a particular tool or tactic or not. But until she's come to that point she's lacking something essential.

What we're talking about here is "The immediate and otherwise unavoidable danger of death or serious bodily injury". Do you understand what we mean here? The situation is so terrible that if she doesn't use deadly force she honestly believes that she will be murdered, kidnapped, raped, sodomized, crippled, robbed by an armed man, be stuck in a burning building or stand by and watch it happen to an innocent person. That's the justification for the use of deadly force in Canada, the UK, Tanzania, Australia and so on.

We're not talking about "slam dunks" here. We're talking about life or death or as close as makes little difference if you aren't ready to use whatever you can to stop the crime. Even in the UK, which completely bans the carrying of any item, even a toothpick, if it's meant for self defense, the law has alwys held that a person in that situation is justified in using any means and any tool that comes to hand as long as it doesn't unduly endanger other innocent people.

Any responsible teacher will do his or her best to teach students to stay inside the law. We get the professional advice of lawyers or at least have the relevant statutes on hand for our students to read for themselves since we aren't attorneys.

And why do you put defend in quotation marks? And what is this about fair fights. We're talking about not getting robbed or raped here. Not "mutual combat" or "duelling" which are completely different matters under the law. If what I've seen and heard from court reports, police, lawyers and expert witnesses is any indication a woman who was honestly afraid that she was about to be robbed, raped, murdered etc. uses a knife or gun she has a very good chance of not getting anywhere near a courtroom unless it's as a witness for the prosecution in the rape or robbery trial.

So does being killed. So does having a man stick his penis into you without your permission. There is research on this in the criminology and psychology literature. To make a long story very short, those who kill in legitimate self defense are not unchanged by the event. But they do an awful lot better than those who were victimized. They even do better than police officers who were thrust into the situation because their jobs demanded it.

Do you have any idea at all what you are talking about? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to disarm an armed man who is trying to injure or kill you? Do you know anything about the success of cognitive, communication, and reasonableness in stopping an attempted violent crime?

No?

Well, disarming someone who has a weapon is very, very difficult. If you think you could take a knife away from my wife you are welcome to try. I'd be willing to bet three months mortgage payments that you can't do it. Most police departments teach that the presentation of a weapon is grounds for the immediate use of deadly force or the threat of deadly force, not a wristlock to harmlessly disarm the attacker.

The non-violent non-confrontational approach is fine right up until the time that violence is offered. At that point it drops your chances of escaping unraped to about four percent or slightly higher than your chances if you do nothing at all. Once someone has decided to hurt you in particular and has made it physical a whole different set of tools is required.

Frankly, I think your post shows an incredible contempt for the good sense and competence of women.

 

.... and I thought I was the only one that thought that. Let's try and change that

Good discussion here .. very informative posts tellner -thank you!

.... I'm glad I posted this article.

 

Ubermint, a couple points

1) I never advocated wild flailing any more than you advocate flopping around on the ground like a landed trout. Pure striking isn't a good physical strategy any more than pure grappling is, but it's something that we can teach the basics of in a short time which also has a high percentage in the real world. We try to teach as best we can. When I have some health issues squared away I plan to go back and get more grappling skills to improve that part of the program.

2) We tried out the G-S-T-P with me in various kinds of pants. Denim was more difficult, but after a while the experimenters were able to get ahold of one or both goolies with a pretty high percentage of success, even through regular weight jeans. Skin tight ones were very difficult. The stylin' saggin' sort would have been child's play if playing with children that way weren't illegal There's a little bit of technique to getting it to work. In experiments with other volunteers the reaction to the attempt was interesting. They didn't have much of a problem with women trying to kick or knee them in the groin. A woman grabbing and starting to squeeze a testicle got a definite flinch reaction - a statement so understated as to be actually misleading.

3) When you try to be humorous you often make good sense. When you try to make sense you come off as humorous. *shrug*

 

Thank you, KickChick. *doffs cap, tugs forelock*

I'm kind pretty passionate about the subject. Preaching and teaching it is somewhere along the lines of a religious obligation.

 

Impact training = Hitting bag, am I right?

TMAs could definitely do with more of that, if my Shotokan class is anything to go by. We don't do any.

Oh, and Tellner, I admire your articulateness (is that a word?)

 

I don't know about impact training but bag/pad work is resistance training.