This week's Ladies of Hive theme struck several chords for me, as I imagine it did most ladies out there.
Risk situations for women are common. Do you feel prepared to face physical and psychological threats? What do you think about a woman preparing for self-defense and what criteria do you think they should take into account to avoid being paralyzed in imminent danger?
I thought, prepared? hell no.
Much as we like to believe in physical preparedness, I don't believe it's a generally viable option for most women out there. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's extremely fit women, women who practice some form of martial arts, or are extremely confident in their fighting skills. I do think they're not a majority, though.
Take me, for instance. I'm very confident in my body in the sense that I'm aware of my strength, its limits, and am constantly working on developing it. However, being physically fit isn't enough, which is why I think most women aren't prepared to stare down a physical attack. It's one thing to be going to the gym, or practising tennis or whatever... quite another to be prepared to defend yourself. Which requires a mental clarity and strength that's gained in years of training. I don't think even taking the three-month self-defence course will mean that when someone comes at you, you put them into a chokehold.
The other exception there, I believe, is mothers or extremely maternal females protecting children. I do think a woman will demonstrate supernatural strength when it comes to physically defending a child, particularly her own...but that's not self-defence, is it?
Fight, flight, or freeze?
If we take "fight" off the table, and since "fawn" -- the fourth traditional trauma response doesn't really enter into physical threat -- that leaves us with flight or freeze. It's a sad reality that, for most of us girls, by far the best option is "flight".
The LOH question reminded me of an instance when I was travelling solo last year, and I was walking home from a show, in Germany, and it wasn't particularly late, but the street I was going down was isolated, and out of nowhere came these three guys who started whistling and making all these inappropriate gestures. My heart was thudding. I thought this is it, they're gonna rape me, kill me. I was so frightened, so I power-walked to the next corner, and then I bolted as fast as I could. They walked, I don't know if they were actively following me, or just walking and being inappropriate, as some men will be, but I just didn't care, I ran as fast as my legs carried me, until I reached a market area with a police car stationed. Only there, did I allow myself to catch my breath. Luckily, the three guys were nowhere to be seen as I walked the rest of the way home, but the incident really bothered me.
While our society has evolved a great deal, in some ways, where we are now is still very limited if flight is the only solution for many women. And it is. You need to run to where there's people. If you're a woman walking alone, you know that by far the safest place for you is where there are other people. In itself, that is also a fallacy. If someone was to, God forbid, attempt to hurt or kidnap you, it's extremely unlikely that the Joe walking his dog, or the elderly lady who's taking the air would jump into action and stop the attacker. But this safety in numbers thing acts, first and foremost, not as a physical barrier to aggression, but a mental one. We believe we're safer with people. An attacker knows it's riskier to attack someone when there's other people, so that psychological aspect is what's truly keeping you safe.
I don't think the "freeze" response really needs to be discussed.
Ways for a woman to keep physically safe?
I've considered taking self-defence classes, or starting martial arts, though I'm well aware it would take years to build up the confidence that would see me safe down the alley. I also think there's an obvious physical strength element that you can't ignore, so that all the "feeling safe" in the world won't protect me from a man who's got 100 pounds on me.
I know there are cases. I just think they're the exception rather than the rule.
What about psychological safety?
That part of the LOH question, I admit, drew me a lot, because I think the psychological arena is both more complex and more laden with potential. In other words, the chances of psychological violence are much greater, but so are your chances of defending yourself.
Psychological violence takes on a broad range of shades: verbal threats, sexual harassment, humiliation, all these are extremely common for women because for a long time, people equated a woman's lesser physical strength with a lower psychological strength. If we think about it, the amount of psychological and emotional weight a woman must put up with suggests a different story.
So I try to focus myself on that.
As a girl, I used to freeze in the face of verbal or sexual harassment. I thought if I didn't move, like many a wild animal, my predator would eventually stop seeing me and leave me alone. A lot of modern women employ the "flight" response when confronted with psychological harassment in the street. If someone shouts something lewd at you, we're taught to speed up and walk past, which is essentially also flight. But I don't think flight is a healthy response, at all, because it reinforces the idea that you got out by the skin of your teeth.
Likewise, I don't think fight is always a good response, either, as it can escalate a predicament, but I do think on a psychological level, we, women, need to fight.
Not even out loud.
Just for ourselves.
We need to make sense of our strengths and our weaknesses.
We need to understand which parts of our fragile psyche were triggered by a certain insult. Often, someone shouting "you bitch" after you doesn't trigger you in that moment, but rather hearkens back to an earlier event. And I think that's what psychological strength and self-defence equate to -- understanding yourself, defining your values, knowing and accepting your strengths and weaknesses, so that nothing that some random asshole throws at you can hurt you.
See, sometimes, when you run away as a girl, you're left with the feeling that you're a weakling, that you somehow invited the assault, and insult to injury, didn't have the gall to stand up for yourself.
I think, at least on a psychological level, we need to start equating self-defence with that voice inside your head that says nothing in that encounter was your fault. That can lay bare the facts of the aggression for what they were -- harassment of some nature or another that reflects in no way upon your character.
Reminds me of a Joni Mitchell lyric that I love:
When they sent me to the sisters
For the way men looked at me
Branded as a jezebel
I knew I was not bound for Heaven
Obviously, violence can be carried out by either gender, but this is a good reminder that you're not to blame for how other people look at you. That's too much weight for your shoulders, and trying to carry that will, eventually, grind you to a halt. So let that go. Defend yourself psychologically. Guard your emotional space as if it were sacred, because it is. Don't let someone else's blighted vision narrate your own story.
I hope there's a point in our history, eventually, where we move past this animalistic shit that still drives our society. The fact that a human being lives in fear, that their life might end or be ruined, by another human being's smallness seems like such a fucking waste.
