I don’t know if it’s come through very well or not, but we here at MALS are pretty intellectual martial artists. We like to research, read, and think about the martial arts from all sorts of different angles. I find there is something valuable to consider in just about any martial art style, and that ultimately, each one of us has to choose the style/approach/philosophy that suits him/her best, but there’s always something interesting to consider in all of the various martial arts.
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about self defense and violence – specifically, how women initiate violence, and how to defend against it. I think in these modern times, female attackers are more common than they used to be, and something we are seriously remiss in considering.
Since almost all martial art styles are founded and led by men, it make sense that there’s a blind spot or a poor understanding of this area. When aimed at women, self defense is usually taught as a woman defending herself against a male attacker, typically in a sexual assault scenario. Another one is if a woman is grabbed and a male attempts to control her for some nefarious reason (not necessarily sexual assault, but perhaps in context with a domestic assault or some guy in a bar getting grabby). Good to know, good to practice. I have heard from time to time an instructor propose that the attacker is female, but the attacker usually was instructed to attack with a punch or kick (like… a guy might).
For guys, it’s always a guy attacking a guy. Typical examples are muggers/robbers attacking, or guy attacks a guy in a bar, or a guy and his friends attack a guy in a bar (btw: what is it with the bar fights? I am hanging out in the wrong – or maybe the right – bars).
But we never consider scenarios when an untrained female (or trained for that matter, but we assume trained women fight like guys, I suppose) attacks.
It seems to me that we, as martial artists practicing and teaching practical self defense, should look into female-initiated violence a little deeper.
- Why would a woman initiate violence, in what circumstances?
- Would a female attack you differently than a male would? Why?
- What tactics/techniques work against a female that would be less likely to work against a male (and vice-versa)?
- What strategies are successful against a woman attacker – is it different than a male?
- For the guys: are there cultural things they need to be aware of when defending against a woman’s attack? Is it harder to prove self defense? What tactics would be most useful in defense AND in making sure you’re not the one sent to jail?
This is by no means a complete list, and I am nowhere near the answers.
I think, by watching online videos of actual unstaged female fights and attacks, here’s some things I see with untrained female fighters:
Spontaneous attacks:
- Women tend to go for the head, face and hair – not necessarily to punch, but to scratch, stab, grab and control. They scratch, they grab that hair and they PULL, and two-handed grabs seem common. This is weirdly consistent and I have seen few exceptions to this rule (they’ll go for other shots LATER but the first aggressive move is almost always to the head and for the hair) .
- The “monkey dance” leading to female violence is more subtle and the female attack seems harder to detect when it’s getting ready to happen – it looks like more of a “surprise”. Men seem to have a more formalized “ritual” to this versus women, perhaps not only due to cultural mores but because of evolution and anthropology.
- Related to that, there seems to be unwritten “rules” of male fighting that women simply don’t have – there is a concept I’ve heard expressed by male martial artists and friends of a “friendly fight”. I don’t think this exists for women (at least, not spontaneously). I think it can appear, to men, as “fighting dirty”. For a female attacker, there is no such thing as a “low blow” and the violence is absolutely intended to damage as badly as they can manage.
- However, the female “monkey dance” is a lot more verbal than the male version (which is more physical in its display of challenge). “Fighting words” seem to have a lot of power to incite women to violence. Given women are typically more verbal physiologically than men, it makes sense to me that this might be true.
- When they get angry enough to initiate violence (assuming it is not premeditated), the encounter seems to last a long time, with alternating periods of verbal confrontation with violent attacks. It seems to me that this will continue even when the defender (or other attacker) inflicts pretty good injuries on the attacking female – it seems to take a lot to get a female attacker to stop (sometimes it seems only outside intervention stops it).
Premeditated attacks
- You see this when you get videos of girl(s) attacking a victim, typically lured to the spot for the purpose. I don’t quite understand why, but these seem to have more punches/body blows than the spontaneous attacks had.
- These also seem to last a long time, with periods of physical violence interspersed with verbal attacks.
I’m not sure where female violent criminals fall, as I haven’t seen a large enough sample to get a good feel for it.
What do you think? I’ll post more on this subject as I learn more (and my thoughts on the self defense scenarios we get taught that don’t seem to make sense against female attackers).
–Her
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