fuckin' A right, you punch first!

This admirable woman, Gia Milinovich, tells the scary story of how she dealt with a home intruder: she punched first. Go read her fascinating story, which stresses that, in a crisis situation, it's good to have knowledge of a self-defense technique. In Gia's case, this means boxing. Here's a disturbing paragraph:

Recently, the new Miss America suggested women take self-defence classes in order to defend themselves and “Twitter feminists” went crazy with accusations of “victim blaming”. Caroline Criado-Perez wrote an article in the New Statesman about how self-defence training wasn’t victim blaming and she got all kinds of crap from people saying it was, it was, it was victim blaming.

If you're a woman and you don't know how to defend yourself when an attack comes, whom do you blame, if not yourself? The attacker? If you'd had the knowledge to defend yourself, the attacker would've been in the damn hospital! It's not victim-blaming to encourage women to learn self-defense: if anything, it's a wish for women to be even more empowered.

But some people—some women—prefer to remain weak because victimology is easy, and appears to offer some sort of bogus moral high ground. Right, right—blame the attacker when you could have done something about the attack. There's more than one side to this issue.

One word that Gia uses over and over is injure. She's right. Fight to injure. Although, on a philosophical level, you've beaten your opponent only when you've beaten his mind (i.e., removed his desire to fight), the practical reality is that you need to remove his ability to fight. That means injury: gouge out his eyes, break his major joints, use a heavy object to stove in his skull. Fight to injure.

I love the way Gia's article ends:

Sociologist Jocelyn Hollander researches self-defence training and the prevention of violence against women. Her research into sexual assault has shown that:

women who complete a self-defense class are significantly less likely to be sexually assaulted in the following year than similar women with no self-defense training. Self-defense training has also been found to increase women’s confidence, shift their understanding of their own bodies, and change gender expectations and interactions.

Boxing training has very definitely given me confidence and a completely different understanding of my body and what this female body is capable of. Resistance to the idea of self-defence training is often based in deeply ingrained sexist ideas of what “a woman” is, should be and is capable of. We have been taught that we are passive, that we can’t ever be strong. The idea that women – feminists even!- continue to believe this saddens me. And I’m calling bullshit.

Women can be physically strong, women do not have to be passive, women do not have to be victims. I am strong, I can defend myself and, damn it, I punch first.

This woman is fabulous. More women should be like her.

Hat tip to James Turnbull for alerting me to this article.


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