One Lone Female

One Lone Female: Female Self-Defence and the Experiences of a Woman in the Martial Arts

I thought now was a good time to look back at my experiences after ten years (on and off) studying martial arts, often as the only female in the class. I should probably start by saying that in the same ten years I’ve also done my GCSEs, my A-levels, my gap year, my degree and found my first real job (and now I feel old!). I’m not a black belt, having, until now, lacked the time and dedication you need to put in to get that far. Having studied three different martial arts (karate, the Japanese art ninjutsu and a combination art called Dragon Boxing) under a total of six teachers hasn’t much helped either, though it does give you a very broad perspective, and some fascinating and weird experiences. For those who want to know, the best guess of all involved is that I’m around halfway to a black belt, with at least two years’ hard work ahead of me to achieve that.

You could ask at this point what an article like this is doing on thefword.org, where witty put-downs of the latest sexist advertising campaign jostle for space with in-depth looks at the latest movements and ideas in feminism and the occasional angry rant. It isn’t as though there has been a recent focus on women and the martial arts in the papers lately, and martial arts are practised only by a minority of people in Britain. However, they have survived and thrived for around thirty years now, and around people in the UK participate in them, males and females, so they could reasonably be said to be part of our culture. With the ‘summer of sport’ having been and gone, and the Olympics lying ahead of us, now seems to me to be an appropriate time to reflect on the participation of women in a physical activity. There’s probably a whole other article waiting to be written on how the majority of sporting events this summer have been exclusively male (with the exceptions of Wimbledon and the Olympics), but.. that’s a whole other article.

There’s another and bigger reason why I’m writing this article, which is that being a female martist artist gives you an interesting perspective on on of the more uncomfortable aspects of feminism; physical differences between women and men. This is something all feminists will have thought about one way or the other, usually in the context of ‘There’s no physical reason why women shouldn’t be considered equal to men’. Okay, so as a group, we’re physically weaker and less aggressive than men. Okay, so unlike men, our bodies are designed to conceive, incubate, give birth to and nourish children, with all the attendent bonding with the child which that usually entails. But our intelligence is equal, our feelings no less complex, our ability to work - which our current society uses as the ultimate measure of success and status – as great. Society no longer needs a warrior caste of knights to defend it from attack, and, given our more enlightened attitudes to unattached women, women no longer need strong male protectors nearby at all times to beat off would-be rapists and attackers. Surely, therefore, these physical differences don’t matter in any meaningful way in our modern society.

Hmm. Well, I do believe a lot of what I’ve just said. But, I also believe there’s a flip side. In 2003, 11,441 women reported being raped in Britian every year and the real total is probably considerably higher. In 2001, there were 514,350 reported incidents of domestic violence affecting women in the UK (surveys estimate only 35% of domestic violence incidents are reported to the police) and – brace yourselves, this is horrendous – an average of two women a week are killed by their partner or ex-partner. Gang rapes are a growing problem for young women in deprived inner-city areas. And this in a modern society. God alone knows what life is like in other parts of the world where feminism has yet to make any significant impact. There’s an interesting programme, Drunk and Dangerous, which BBC1 shows on a Monday night from time to time. If you watch it, I guarantee that almost all the individuals doing the really nasty stuff - kicking others in the head, waving knives around, fighting policeman and exposing themselves on buses – will be male. Most people in prison for violent offences are male. The old saying that women and men are different, but equal, is surely never so true as here.

Most men are not like this. But men as a group are bigger than women, stronger than women and, given their higher levels of testosterone and the fact that men are conditioned in the schoolyard to believe that a man who can’t defend his honour physically is a wimp, more aggressive than women. Again, most men are not violent misogynists, but if you are unlikely enough to be the victim of an attack involving physical force, in the vast majority of cases, the attacker will be male. As a female martial artist, you are made aware of this difference between the sexes all the time. There’s no getting away from it. This is why I am always very slightly dubious about self-defence leaflets. Although good ones, like the one on the website, will always tell you that you should find a qualified teacher, their existence tends to imply that you can learn self-defence by reading about it. You can’t, any more than you can learn to drive a car by reading the Highway Code. Self-defence is a physical skill and needs to be learn and practised by doing.

I say this because one thing I have learned in years of training is that, despite what you might read sometimes or see on the TV, fighting off an angry man is a very, very, difficult proposition. Without testosterone surging through your veins to give you aggression, it’s very hard to fight back when your instinct – unthinking, primitive instinct – is to flinch back and avoid the attacker, even to freeze. If you don’t believe me, try this; go up to someone, lean forwards into their personal space, scowl at them and shout loudly (or get someone to do it to you). Watch them shrink backwards. The good news is, with a bit of application it is possible to lose this instinct quite easily. Indeed, a lot of self-defence training teaches you to use it against the attacker. Another advantage possessed by women is that men often don’t expect you to fight back. I still treasure the memory of the looks of surprise on the faces of some male students I’ve thrown over my shoulder in training.

More good news is that in ten years of training I have never encountered any really outright sexism. Never once has a teacher or student told me I shouldn’t be doing this because I’m female. Nor, to be fair, has anyone I’ve told about my hobby outside the training room, although I have learned to ignore the ‘Ooh, I won’t pick an argument with you then!’ response. (Note to readers: if you ever meet someone who tells you they do martial arts as a hobby, please, please, do yourselves and them a favour and resist the urge to say this. Seriously, do you really think that person would beat you up if you disagreed with them?) I have had the odd person ask why I do it, to which I answer.

1. Because I feel more confident and happy knowing that I can defend myself if I ever have to
2. Because it’s fun and sometimes I can pretend I’m Trinity from the Matrix (I never said I wasn’t shallow).

The only really major problem I’ve experienced as a female training in mostly-male classes is that some men tend to adopt one of two annoying attitudes. The first is where they refuse to train with you properly because you’re a girl, and it’s not nice to hit girls. I agree with the sentiment, but I wouldn’t be in the damn training hall if I wasn’t prepared to defend myself. In a way, they’re actually putting me in more danger, by making it harder for me to learn to defend myself. The second annoying attitude is where they assume that they should make absolutely no allowances and hit as hard as if they were training against another man. Which again often starts off from good intentions, but ignores the fact that women lack the thick layer of skin and muscle that most men possess, and also we are more sensitive to external pain (having not been taught by years of "Big boys don’t cry" conditioning to ignore it). Over two hours of training, this can make quite a difference. Of course, a very few men adopt this attitude as a way of driving out female students, to which I say; take your inadequacies outside, thank you very much.

Would I encourage more women to join in? Yes, definitely. We need more female students, so that the arts being taught reflect the real needs of women who don’t, as a rule, get into fistfights or drunken brawls (though it does happen sometimes!). And also, it’s fun, great for fitness and self-confidence and doesn’t require you to be able to run fast. We need more female teachers, to ensure that women’s needs are properly represented within the art. Which from my point view leads to the final question; can I put my money where my mouth is and discipline myself to get my black belt, so that there will be one more female teacher? Who knows? Is anyone out there willing to join me?