The Myths and Truths of Female Martialists

[Sukerkin]

A discussion in the Wing Chun forum touched on this area somewhat and I think it's a topic that could yield some interesting insights both in terms of 'modern' views and what the historical record has to show us.

To put my cards on the table, I'm a middle-aged Englishman brought up through a religious background and inculcated with what many would consider antiquated ideas about the nature of the roles of men and women. To say I was Idealised Victorian in outlook would not be too much of an insult :lol:.

However, I have tried to overcome the strictures of my youth and can quite clearly see that at times what my instincts tell me differs from what my observations tell me. So please bear that in mind as you read what follows and hold back with the flames and the RTM's . I'm aiming for a productive discussion not a flensing of the OP .

Anyhow, to begin I shall present a somewhat 'Straw Man' target of the most threadbare structure to get the counter-arguments flowing more easily.

The current general mindset of the Sexist Brigade might be baldly expressed with the simple sentence that women have no business fighting or learning how to fight as that is not the role to which evolution has fashioned them.

Bad as that sounds in this overly PC era, there is a certain element of truth buried within the stygian depths of that sentiment.

On average, or more properly by mean women are not as large or strong as men. They have a different muscular structure that is not so well suited to physical conflict.

The long term pain threshold of women is higher but the short term pain suppressing physiology of males makes them better able to handle the shocks of fighting, as does the rather surprisingly overlooked fact that males simply 'detect' the world more coarsely, their nerves/receptors being about half as sensitive as a woman’s.

Importantly, the mental architecture between the sexes is quite different in general, such that whilst a woman can demonstrate considerable skill in body or object control, a man’s situational awareness is greater in scope and detail. The most commonly given modern evidence for this is from studies done of drivers. Women actually handled the car better than men on average but were worse at being aware of what was going on around them on the road.

{Aside: To me, that last seems to be in contradiction to the end of my previous paragraph}

The obvious summary of the above is that women are simply not 'designed' with fighting in mind. They are weaker, smaller, more reactive to sudden pain and less aware of what is going on around them in a stressed situation.

_________________________________________________________

As oh so many exam questions say, "Discuss" but this one is a little broader as there is a clause tagged on the end that says "With reference to written or oral historica and how interpretations of same have changed over time" .

 

[exile]

The obvious summary of the above is that women are simply not 'designed' with fighting in mind. They are weaker, smaller, more reactive to sudden pain and less aware of what is going on around them in a stressed situation.

OK, here's my take on the debating point.

Let's assume, strictly for the sake of the discussion, that the quoted observation (which I'll call the starting premise) were true.

But it is also the case, as can be documented by both anecdotal evidence and by documented crime statistics, that women are the objects of aggression in a large percentage of cases.

Let's make one further assumption, which I think is not hard to document in the history of the MAs: the empty-handed TMAs were designed for civilian protection. They were not intended for battlefield use, nor were they intended for sport competition. They were close quarters defensive fighting systems first and foremost.

If these points are granted, then the conclusion has to be that TMA training for women is crucial. If women are at least as frequently targets for male violence as men, and if they are at a disadvantage in countering the kind of violence men bring to them, and if the TMAs are an effective way to 'level the field' in violent enounters—as many of us here would argue is the case, with good arguments readily available—then it would seem that serious training in the TMAs, particularly in their applied, CQ self-defense variants is something that is important for women to do, since such training can play a major role in offsetting the negatives assumed in the starting premise.

Therefore, intense, focused training along these lines seems to follow as the desideratum of the starting premise.

I'm not granting any of the components of the starting premise, mind. I'm just taking it as a 'worst case' assumption and arguing that if you accept it, then you are essentially obliged—by the way straightforward logic bears on the relevant facts—to conclude that SD training for women is desirable and important. And if the TMAs are valuable sources of SD competence, then training in TMAs (with a street-realistic applied focus) is desirable and important for women. QED, no?

 

[Andy Moynihan]

Look, it really is as simple as this:

This is an incomplete argument to begin with because it assumes that there is only one way to "fight". Usually the argument goes something to the effect that because men are most often physically larger and stronger than women, that they cannot match the man in toe-to-toe, strength-against-strength combat.

By pure coincidence( note the dripping sarcasm) most proponents of this theory also are amazingly quick to claim that anything which is *NOT* a straight, toe-to-toe, strength-against-strength mutual fight is "chicken****", or "wouldn't work" on them. How curious.

To listen to them, one would think that in all of human history, a man had never had to deal with another, bigger, stronger man himself. That any form of systemized martial art, from anyplace in the world, exists, ought to be evidence enough for any logical person to see that this is not the case--why would entire systems, appearing in every human culture, devoted to defeating another person's attempts at aggression by applying one's strong points against their weak spots, if size or strength among all fighters was all the same? For that matter, why would there have arisen a need to build weapons to magnify one's ability to cause trauma if there were never a discrepancy in size or strength?

Exactly.

 

[Sukerkin]

Very good points, Andy. The obvious partial counter is the age old truism that "A good big 'un will beat a good little 'un every day".

 

[exile]

To listen to them, one would think that in all of human history, a man had never had to deal with another, bigger, stronger man himself. That any form of systemized martial art, from anyplace in the world, exists, ought to be evidence enough for any logical person to see that this is not the case--why would entire systems, appearing in every human culture, devoted to defeating another person's attempts at aggression by applying one's strong points against their weak spots, if size or strength among all fighters was all the same? For that matter, why would there have arisen a need to build weapons to magnify one's ability to cause trauma if there were never a discrepancy in size or strength?

My whole argument in the preceding rests on this point. The TMAs were created precisely to minimize the role that accidental differences in body mass and muscular strength would get to play in disrupting ordinary people's desire to live and let live. For that reason, they are the ideal remedy for the strength differences that put women, and smaller men, at a disavantage against unreasoning, violent agressors.

Very good points, Andy. The obvious partial counter is the age old truism that "A good big 'un will beat a good little 'un every day".

But there's a persuasive school of thought which holds that bullies—the ones most likely to confront a woman with unsought violence—tend to be lousy fighters. They're bullies precisely because they pick on people who they perceive as uncomfortable with violence themselves, and therefore less likely to counterattack. To be a good fighter (or a good tennis player, or whatever), you have to seek out opponents (or in this case, antagonists) who are better than you are, and train yourself up to their standard. That doesn't sound like a bully's MO to me.

So if this is correct, then a good little 'un is going to be able to defeat (or at least, to offset to an extent sufficient for survival), most of the unprovoked attacks that they encounter, precisely because these are much less likely to come from technically competent fighters. I find this line of thinking very convincing, overall....

 

[FearlessFreep]

But there's a persuasive school of thought which holds that bullies—the ones most likely to confront a woman with unsought violence—tend to be lousy fighters.

And a counter thought to that thought is that bullies tend to be bullies because of personality. By the time they run into you, they will undoubtably have been in many physical encounters before. What they may lack in direct fighting skill, they will certainly have in practical experience

 

[exile]

And a counter thought to that thought is that bullies tend to be bullies because of personality. By the time they run into you, they will undoubtably have been in many physical encounters before. What they may lack in direct fighting skill, they will certainly have in practical experience

But not practical experience with good fighters, is what I'm saying. A bully will be drawn to someone whom they think they can bully. They'll avoid the self-assured competent defenders and go for the people who cave in in the face of a hostile encounter. That kind of practical experience will stand them in very poor stead when facing a seeming victim who can in fact rip out their liver and lights and has both the trained knowledge, confidence and inclination to do so.

What I'm getting at is that serious, intense training in the applied, SD side of the MAs—not the flash competition, but the blunt-force trauma business end of the skill set—is exactly what someone needs to assure themselves of the ability to disable the kind of person who is most likely to attack a women, on average. I know I'm making an assumption here about what kind of person that is... but I'm willing to bet that that assumption, on average, is the right one.

 

[Andy Moynihan]

Very good points, Andy. The obvious partial counter is the age old truism that "A good big 'un will beat a good little 'un every day".

Then, too, there's the other immutable truth type saying:

*All things being equal, strength wins
*All things being equal, speed wins
*All things being equal, conditioning wins
*All things being equal, size wins
*Things are NEVER equal, EVER

 

[Brian S]

What I'm getting at is that serious, intense training in the applied, SD side of the MAs—not the flash competition, but the blunt-force trauma business end of the skill set—is exactly what someone needs to assure themselves of the ability to disable the kind of person who is most likely to attack a women, on average. I know I'm making an assumption here about what kind of person that is... but I'm willing to bet that that assumption, on average, is the right one.

I second that!!

Also, the rules listed before do not apply to ALL women. I've known some very strong and very tough women. Some that if attacked the attacker would soon regret it!

 

[Kacey]

In the thread which you reference, I stated the opinion that much of what occurs is due to cultural norms, and I stand by that opinion. There was, until quite recently (and still exists, in some places) the vision of femininity as a delicate flower to be protected from the realities and travails of life, in contrast to the many capable women who are out there in the world. Many women were raised to believe that women cannot change men - and some women (not enough, IMHO) have overcome that image and learned, through training and experience, that they can, indeed, defend themselves against a determined man. But too many remain convinced that men will prevail in any situation - fewer than previously, true, but still too many for my peace of mind.

Women are, indeed, built differently than men; that does not mean that women cannot defend themselves - rather, it means that people of different sizes (regardless of gender) need to learn techniques appropriate to their own size, strength, reach, and physical abilities. Too many women see themselves as defenseless; sadly, this become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Averages (or means) aside - there is a great deal of variability between and amongst people, and those studying MAs of all varieties, both as instructors and students, need to be aware that all MAs provide guidelines; to make any style truly your own, one must understand the techniques, practice them in multiple and variant situations, and make them one's own... regardless of age, size, gender, physical ability, or a multitude of other factors.

 

[tellner]

"Flamethrower"
"Check"
"Sparker"
"Check"
"Flensing knives"
"Check"
"Hazmat suit"
"Check"

To say I was Idealised Victorian in outlook would not be too much of an insult .

Mmm, I've studied enough about the period to think better of you than that. When it comes to women the Victorians were pretty reprehensible.

The current general mindset of the Sexist Brigade might be baldly expressed with the simple sentence that women have no business fighting or learning how to fight as that is not the role to which evolution has fashioned them.

That particular sort of pseudo-scientific, self-idolizing, tendentious, teleological, shoot the arrows then draw the circles around them balderdash is typical of the sociobiologists. It has little or nothing to do with actual science. Note that I'm not describing you with those words. My contempt is reserved to the idiots who originally stuffed the straw into that particular set of old clothes.

First: Evolution doesn't have goals, only outcomes
Second: Women are not termite queens. In the wild they have to function in many roles including defense against predators. Predators can have any even number of legs from zero to four with an option on wings or fins.
Third: If you want to go down that road humans have no business fighting. We have no natural armament. We are terribly weak compared to our close relatives. We're pretty darned wussy.
Fourth: The fact that someone is not as good at something as another is no reason not to try it.
Fifth: Almost everything we do is "unnatural" including wearing clothes, talking, reading, living in houses, brushing our teeth, cooking our meat and using tools. You don't get to pick and choose only those unnatural things which make you feel good about yourself
Sixth: The past hundred and fifty years has been marked by women entering and excelling in all sorts of fields that were obviously not what Nature had intended for them. If you want to get technical men shouldn't be in universities. If the UK went strictly by test scores and marks like they are supposed to, then according to your own Ministry of Education men would make up no more than about a tenth of the students in higher education.
Seventh: Opposable thumbs make all the difference. cf. The Once and Future King. I provide the following for your edification. I already checked on another occasion with a copyright lawyer to make sure quoting this entire passage was within Fair Use:

"When God had manufactured all the eggs out of which the fishes and teh serpents and teh birds and the mammals and even the duck-bulled platypus would eventually emerge, he called the embryos before Him, and saw that they were good.
"Perhaps I ought to explain" added the badger, lowering his paperse nervously and looking at the Wart over the top of them, "that all embryos look very much the same. They are what you are before you are born - and, whether you are going to be a tadpole or a peacock or a cameleopard or a man, when you are an embryo you just look like a peculiarly repulsive and helpless human being. I continue as follows:
"The embryos stood in front of God, with their feeble hands clasped politely over their stomachs and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, and God addressed them.
"He said: 'Now, you embryos, here you are, all looking exactly the same, and We are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up you will get bigger anyway, but We are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think would be useful to you in later life. For instance, at themomenty you cannot dig. Anybody who would like to turn his hands into a pair of spades or garden forks is allowed to do so. Or, to put it another way, at present you can only use your mouths for eating. Anybody who would like to use his mouth as an offensive weapon, can change it by asking, and be a corkindrill or a sabre-toothed tiger. Now then, step up and choose your tools, but remember that what you choose you will grow into, and will have to stick to.'
"All the embryos thought the matter over politely, and then, one by one, they stepped up before the eternal throne. They were allowed two or three specializations, so that some chose to use their arms as flying machines and their mouths as weapons, or crackers, or drillers, or spoons, whole others selected to use their bodies as boats and their hands as oars. We badgers thought very hard and decided to ask three boons. We wanted to change our skins for shields, our mouths for weapons and our arms for garden forks. These boons were granted. Everybody specialized in one way or another, and some of us in very queer ones. For instance, one of the desert lizards decided to swap his whole bodd for blotting paper, and one of the toads who lived in the drouthy antipodes decided simply to be a water-bottle.
"The asking and granting took up two long days - they were the fifth and sixth, so far as I remember - and at the very end of the sixth day, just before it was time to knock off for Sunday, they had got through all the little embryos except one. This embryo was Man.
" 'Well, Our little man' said God. 'You have waited till the last, and slept on your decision, and We are sure you have been thinking hard all the time. What can We do for you?'
" 'Please God' said the embryo, 'I think that You made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to Yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. If I am to have my choice I will stay as I am. I will not alter any of the parts which You gave me, for other and doubtless inferior tools, and I will stay a defenceless embryo all my life, doing my best to make a few feeble implements out of the wood, iron and the other materials which You ahve seen fit to put before me. If I want a boat I will try to construct it out of trees, and if I want to fly, I will put together a chariot to do it for me. Probably I ahve been very silly in refusing to take advantage of Your kind offer, but I have done my very best to think it over carefully, and now hope that the feeble decision of this small innocent will find favour with Yourselves'
" 'Well done' exclaimed the Creator in delighted tones. 'Here all you embryos, come here with your beaks and whatnots to look upon Our first Man. He is the only one hwo has guessed Our riddle, out of all of you, and We have great pleasure in conferring upon him the Order of Dominion over the Fowls of the Air, and the Beasts of the Earth, and the Fishes of the Sea. Now let the rest of you get along, and love and multiply, for it is time to knock off for the week-end. As for you, Man, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you, but all the others will be embryos before your might. Eternally underdeveloped, you will always remain potential in Our image, able to see some of Our sorrows and to feel some of Our joys. We are partly sorry for you, Man but partly hopeful. Run along the, and do your best. And listen, Man, before you go'
" 'Well?' asked Adam, turning back from his dismissal.
" 'We were only going to say' said God shyly, twisting Their hands together. 'Well, We were just going to say, God bless you' "

On average, or more properly by mean women are not as large or strong as men. They have a different muscular structure that is not so well suited to physical conflict.

Absolutely. Men are, on average by mean, median and mode, larger, stronger and faster runners. But if I am stronger than you does it mean that you have no place fighting.

When it comes to pain you are actually incorrect. The studies of both long and short term pain pretty clearly show that women and men have the same nerve impulses and experience the same intensity. Women are somewhat better at functioning when in pain and at ignoring it.

The mental architecture argument is a minefield. We know that there are differences. We know that the human brain is incredibly plastic. We know that we don't have any idea how much of the difference is innate and how much is a induced. As far as it goes, women are actually somewhat better at noticing details. Functional MRI studies show that the neurons physically fire off more at subtle changes in the environment. The last study I recall dealt with seeing dirt and dust. Honestly. Men simply did not phsysiologically register it as much as did women. But they could learn to do so.

{Aside: To me, that last seems to be in contradiction to the end of my previous paragraph}

Yes, it was

The obvious summary of the above is that women are simply not 'designed' with fighting in mind. They are weaker, smaller, more reactive to sudden pain and less aware of what is going on around them in a stressed situation.

That's just the point. We are not 'designed' for anything. We are a collection of kludges. We choose goals based on tropisms, social conditioning, the phase of the Moon, groundloops and magic pixie dust. Goals are matters of desire, usually the desire to avoid pain and experience pleasure. They are not rational. What is rational is the way in which one chooses to satisfy those goals.

It may not be 'rational' for a woman to want to fight. But if she has the desire to do so she can certainly be better at it than she was before.

You know, I won't even grant that. If she wants to fight for dominance over the people she fights with, fun, status, money, exercise or the adrenaline rush that's no more or less reasonable than anyone else doing it for those reasons. She has just as much of a place fighting as anyone else. If she is trying to avoid becoming prey, she has a place fighting as do all animals from voles to vultures. She may have the potential to raise up fierce sons who will kill her enemies when they are old and weak or of calling on her close kin to defend their genetic investment in her. But those are not completely reliable strategies.

As oh so many exam questions say, "Discuss" but this one is a little broader as there is a clause tagged on the end that says "With reference to written or oral historica and how interpretations of same have changed over time" .

Things have not always been as they are now. They will change again some day. Women don't spend nearly as much time pregnant or raising children full time as they have in many other times. That gives them the opportunity to do things like take up boxing.

The way I see it, you can let them into the tent with the understanding that they will not, on average, have as easy a time of it as do men. Or you can say "They're weaker, smaller and don't have the testosterone." But then you'll have to start cutting out large chunks of the male population as well. Half of all men are below average fighters, after all.

And all of that ignores the fact that with the rise of technology from Stone Age on the use of tools has had an ever-increasing levelling effect. Once you start getting into arrows, rapiers and bullets the male advantages disappear. And if you take the other sexist contention that women are naturally better able to follow orders and cooperate you will be hoist by your own petard. We are most effective fighting as coordinated groups. Oops.

People's "business" is whatever they make it.

 

[Steel Tiger]

Good old sexual dimorphism, often the only appeal sexist bullies make to science. But take a close look at sexually dimorphic species. You tend to find fighting is not a cross gender activity - males fight males and females fight females. Its not that the females are not evolved to fight, but that they have evolved fighting other females.

Of course this is purely physical development, and as Tellner pointed out we have moved far beyond this aspect of our biology. Ever since some clever Homo habilis started banging rocks together it is like our technological development has put biology into an hiatis. As has been expressed by a number of people this technological development has even taken place in the MAs, producing logical systems of unarmed combat that take into consideration differences in size and shape with the goal of making them irrelavent.

So, are women not suited to fighting? I don't think that is true, its just that during those early days when our species was developing physically, females were not in a social situation that required them to defend themselves against males, so they did not need to match their size. But they still had to fight - other females, for survival, life was tough back then.

Now we have methods and equipment that render size an irrelevance, for the most part. what peoiple tend to see as the major differences between men and women, in this regard, is the result of socialisation. Boys are often taught to be confrontational and physical, while girls are not, it really has very little to do with whether or not a person has evolved for conflict.


Consider this, if any aspect of our species had evolved for combat they would have the weapons and defences for the job. No species on Earth has evolved to fight, many have evolved to hunt and kill, but that is not the same. A fighting species would have armour and weapons like some bizarre cross between a lion and an armadillo.

 

[Drac]

When I was studying Shorin-Ryu I had my butt seriously kicked by a female black belt, think Victoria Principal..I was at least a head plus taller and a whole lot heavier, it made no difference..I was told she was a technical fighter, she looked for any weakness and exploited it..

 

[Sukerkin]

Many thanks for the insightful posts so far gentlemen and lady.

Thanks to Todd for the information on the biology of pain too - I know I was building a Straw Man for people to get their teeth in to but it seems in this instance the information I drew on was out of date in more ways than one :lol:. Thanks also for the compliment with regard to my not being a twisted misogynist . When I used the term "Idealised Victorian" I meant those aspects that dealt with good manners and elegant behaviour a la Merchant Ivory i.e. a romantacised vision of a past that never really was .

I think the general thrust of responses has been along the lines of acknowledging that physical differences exist but that one of the major causal factors in the development of martial arts has been to reduce or overcome those differences.

We haven't done very well in bringing to the fore any historical references yet. I know that this is early days for the discussion of the subject and we're just getting past the part where the OP's premis is demonstrated to be false but I'd really like to hear any sources that people have for the active involvement of women in a martial setting.

Internet snippets like this one are intriguing:

http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-13474.html

But in the dim and distant past of my time as a physical historian (yeah, curatorial pun attack !) I seem to recall having come across documents that intimated that the percentage of a fighting force that were actually women was much higher than our recent prejudices might lead us to believe.

The American Civil War was one which sticks in my mind, perhaps because I think the long documentary TV series about it touched on this matter.

 

[celtic_crippler]

The current general mindset of the Sexist Brigade might be baldly expressed with the simple sentence that women have no business fighting or learning how to fight as that is not the role to which evolution has fashioned them.

Bad as that sounds in this overly PC era, there is a certain element of truth buried within the stygian depths of that sentiment.

On average, or more properly by mean women are not as large or strong as men. They have a different muscular structure that is not so well suited to physical conflict.

The long term pain threshold of women is higher but the short term pain suppressing physiology of males makes them better able to handle the shocks of fighting, as does the rather surprisingly overlooked fact that males simply 'detect' the world more coarsely, their nerves/receptors being about half as sensitive as a woman’s.

Importantly, the mental architecture between the sexes is quite different in general, such that whilst a woman can demonstrate considerable skill in body or object control, a man’s situational awareness is greater in scope and detail. The most commonly given modern evidence for this is from studies done of drivers. Women actually handled the car better than men on average but were worse at being aware of what was going on around them on the road.

{Aside: To me, that last seems to be in contradiction to the end of my previous paragraph}

The obvious summary of the above is that women are simply not 'designed' with fighting in mind. They are weaker, smaller, more reactive to sudden pain and less aware of what is going on around them in a stressed situation.

Is that not an argument for why women should train in MA?

I'm male and focus much of my training on my weak points to make them stronger.

A woman can't expect to have a "male escort" 24/7 and training in MA, though never a garauntee, will increase one's chances of surviving an attack and/or winning a fight regardless of sex.

 

[exile]

It's important I think to disentangle two quite different questions that the OP has been parsed into:

(i) should women learn how to defend themselves (i.e., train for combat that's unsought)?

(ii) should women learn how to function competently in combat situations that they themselves seek out (sport or active duty military)?

Celtic Crippler, Andy, me, and a couple of other people have been addressing (i). (ii) is quite a different question—i.e., the nature of the claims and the arguments involved in (i) don't carry over to (ii), because there are different points at issue in the two different questions. For myself, I think it's fine for either sex to pursue that kind of training (the morality and ethics of war is, once again, a different question; whatever the answer to that is, my own feeling is that gender is not relevant to it). But I think we have two discussions running concurrently in one conversation and that may be clouding things somewhat...

 

[Phoenix44]

I'm a middle-aged Englishman brought up through a religious background and inculcated with what many would consider antiquated ideas about the nature of the roles of men and women. To say I was Idealised Victorian in outlook would not be too much of an insult

Having looked at your profile, let me tell you the following about me:
1. I'm older than you.
2. I was also brought up in a religious tradition, maybe not the same as yours, where women historically did not enjoy all the freedoms and choices afforded men.
3. My parents did not even pretend that my sister and I deserved rights and freedoms equal to those of men.

At some point, as we hopefully become mature and self-directed individuals, we have to examine our early upbringing, come to terms with it, and decide whether we want to buy into it wholeheartedly, or to reassess and put into perspective--and practice--what we discover to be true. I'm not pretending it's easy, but no worthwhile endeavor ever is.

Personally, I always wondered why men would think I couldn't lift a 35 lb propane tank, but saw nothing odd about me picking up up a 70 lb child. Or why anyone would think I couldn't be a corporate CEO or President of the United States, when I was fully expected to single-handedly run a 24 hour a day business--including accounts payable and receivable, operations, human resources, health services, purchasing, crisis management, communications, transportation, maintenance, landscaping, food service, and life support--in other words, my household! (And with no vacation time either) Or that I can subdue a raging toddler in need of a vaccination, but heaven forbid I practice martial arts!

Your assertions about supposed basic differences between men and women are scientifically unsupported. There is significant overlap between males and females for every single parameter--size, strength, pain tolerance, hand-eye coodination--you name it. And some of these factors are easily affected by training, education, and experience.

So, I have to say, Sukerkin, you need to get over the aspects of your upbringing that are untrue and unproductive. Just like I did.

 

[Hyper_Shadow]

Hm, never seen the sexist argument go so deep before but I like black and white, it makes life so much more pleasant, besides which true one on one combat is always black and white so here goes:

Should women learn to defend themselves?:

Yes. Why?: Because they can. That and the fact that most of the aforementioned bullies out there are more likely to attack seemingly defenseless women.

Should women learn how to funtion competently in combat situations that they themselves seek out?:

Yes. Why?: Because they can. Regadrless of how you've naturally been made you can mould yourself into a fighter. Anyone can do it. So fair enough men are designed to bash each other around, that doesn't mean they have to; likewise women aren't designed specifically for it, but that doesn't mean they don't have to. If anything it just means a woman would have to push herself a little further than a bloke to achieve the same results.

But martial arts are martial arts, arts/craft/technique/strategy/processes used in war. In war you fight on equal ground, man or woman.

 

[harlan]

This us why God, in her infinite wisdom, created weapons. 'Women aren't designed to fight.' Right. And chimps don't make war/kill...another myth.

They are weaker, smaller, more reactive to sudden pain and less aware of what is going on around them in a stressed situation.

Seriously, if using 'they' instead of 'females', I understand it's a truism that 'size matters' when hand to hand...and it applies to both genders. Just because there are few recorded instances of females fighting, doesn't mean that they don't. Ever hear of 'pick your battles'? There are documented instances of women serving openly, and in disguise in war (US Revolution and Civil War, and in various European conflicts).

 

[MA-Caver]

This is a great thread and responses (thus far) are just marvelous.
Reading through it all took a bit. It did allow me to think and reflect upon my own views and experiences.
I honestly cannot remember if I ever thought "girls/women shouldn't fight". Personally I don't think they should play pro football or rugby or be in professional boxing. But nearly everything else, sure why not. Especially in the realm of martial arts by any style.

As Kacey said there are obvious differences between the two sexes and they're primarily for biological and reproductive reasons. Other than that we have the same overall body shape/configuration. Both sexes can be immensely strong, powerful or frail and weak.

Zen teachings tells us we should always look to nature for examples. To look and study and then use our minds to find the best application of what we see to ourselves.
As mentioned earlier in the wild it's the females that carry on much of the work in the preservation of the species, food gathering, protection and so on. Also note that the females while not fighting... and most fighting is between males for the right to mate/breed-- which makes sense because the stronger/experienced comes out to keep that genetic superiority within the species so it can better continue... but females when they do fight are extraordinarily fierce and end up kicking butt. An example of that is a mother bear with her cubs is far more dangerous than a male trying to protect his dinner.

I've seen both sexes fight, I've seen both sexes fight each other and their opposites. Outcomes of said fights varied as was pointed out by Andy with his "All Things Being Equal" reply. The difference in sex didn't play into the reasons why one or the other won the fight.
Female ma-ists have always been around. I recall Sifu Yip Sing lecturing on the origins that WC was created by a woman. I've learned from Ceicei when being her uke during her Kenpo training that EPAK fits in fine for a woman. Watched female swordspersons (as opposed to swordsmen) soundly defeat their male opponents in the mock battles by those pretending to be in the middle ages (forget what they're called).

I would think that most of the myths are from male sexist attitudes and yes, Victorian values that seem to still be there to this day, or a hold-over from the late 1700's to mid 1800's and the Civil War attitudes (particularly Suthern) that a "gentleman fights for the honor of a lady" because women just aren't supposed to fight.

We're seeing changes in attitudes now and more so since the end of the era of the 60's and 70's. It's always been there just seeing more of it and it's being more accepted. Culturally it's becoming more evident. Examples are Emma Peel from the Avengers, Laura Croft, Ellen Ripley (Aliens), The Bride (Kill Bill), Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, recent Bond Girls are becoming more fighters than cowering pretty faces behind the strapping title hero, and so on. But even old Chinese cinema women were the heroes and fighters. Some even were portraying men (wearing cheesy mustaches).
So it's always been there... it's how we choose to look at it. Or as John Lubbock said: "What we see depends mainly on what we look for."

Oh on the pain thing. I watched last night "Courage Under Fire" (because it's one of my favorite films to watch)... in it Meg Ryan's character who was gut shot by a SAW rifle no less was arguing about the amount of pain she was in... she says gritting through her teeth; "I gave birth to a 9 pound baby ***---- I think I can handle it!"
I think that said it all on the pain tolerance threshold.