Post-Feminist Self-Defence for Men
Most places in the world, women have formal or informal special protection in law when it comes to violence, and they know it. Often, this means the presumption is that the woman can do no wrong and that the man is the instigator.
“By determining that the [man’s] need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. The DAIP staff […] remained undaunted by the difference in our theory and the actual experiences of those we were working with […] It was the cases themselves that created the chink in each of our theoretical suits of armor. Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find.”
Boys are exposed to violence on the school yard, and are well aware of the consequences. They learn that if they hit someone, they will very likely be hit back. Women are often oblivious to this chain of causality, and the conditioning that men and boys receive, that “there is no reason to hit a girl” along with 21st century “you-go-girl-ism” can make women feel invulnerable and emboldened.
If violence is unavoidable, your goal should be to end the violence as quickly as possible and escape, without causing injury to your opponent.
You must maintain the legal and moral high ground, this will help you in any possible law enforcement fallout. At the same time, you must protect yourself from injury or death: people have been killed by a single punch, often as a result of an impact to the skull after being knocked down.
A woman that will hit you is a woman that will lie about what happened. You should try to video record any potentially violent encounters with women. One of the best ways to do this is to carry your phone in a neck pouch with the camera facing outwards and a dashcam app installed . This will allow you to unobtrusively record while keeping your hands free to defend yourself.
If you don’t have a neck pouch for your phone, hold the phone against your chest with your left hand. This will make it much more difficult to slap it out of your hand. Plus, if someone gets in range to interfere with your phone, they also have to get in range of your right hand, and by holding the phone against your chest, its much harder to interfere with it or to make you drop it.
From a legal standpoint, you have several responsibilities when it comes to self-defence. Firstly, in many jurisdictions, you have a duty to retreat, which basically means you should attempt to escape the situation. Secondly, you have a duty to use only reasonable force, which means no more force than is necessary to prevent the crime from taking place.
After being attacked, victims suffer subordination stress, a physiological syndrome that includes hypertension, increased cortisone secretion and other adrenal effects, reduced sex-hormone levels, and possible ulcers.
If victims avail themselves of the opportunity to get back at their victimizer, their stress is substantially alleviated. If you do not retaliate, you will suffer psychological and physical health effects, and are more likely to be subsequently attacked by others.
The best way to deal with violence is to learn to control and immobilise and restrain your opponent; you can learn this by studying a martial art like Aikido, Judo, Jujitsu or Wrestling, but these arts take years to master.
The other way is to inflict an overwhelming amount of pain in a short time-span. A shock large enough to leave your opponent focused on their pain as you escape the situation. Delivering only a small amount of pain may simply enrage your opponent. Inflicting pain involves knowing where and how to strike pressure points which are points where nerve clusters are close to the surface. The Charley Horse is probably the best known pressure point; a strike at the outside of the middle of the thigh, can deaden the leg and cause substantial amounts of pain.
If you sense the possibility of an attack, the following hands-ready posture is a good non-aggressive posture from which you can easily spring into action. The traditional advice is to hold your hands up, palms facing outwards, but an open palm can connect with memories of being spanked or slapped, and the surrender subtext can make some personalities more aggressive. The backs of the hands are less threatening. This works for dogs as well as people.
Being completely relaxed can often deter an aggressor. Focus your mind and observe how your breathing feels in your body — the air moving through your nose or between your lips. Relax and breathe in a completely natural way — nice and slow and regular.
The following are a selection of techniques designed to cause pain without causing injury.
Pinch the skin over the tricep area, on the inside of the upper arm. Curl your fingers up like making a fist, and press down on your index finger’s first knuckle with your thumb. Pinch and twist for maximal effect.
Do the same pinch, but the hair in the temple area, pinch and twist and pull. This also works on the ear.
Learn to do a wrist lock and arm lock. These can be extremely painful, and are used to control and immobilize your attacker.
The following arm and wrist lock techniques are from Aikido.
The arms and hands are often forgotten targets. Because Western Boxing tradition includes the use of gloves, hitting the arms makes little sense in boxing. With bare hands, if someone is trying to harm you, the closest targets are their weapons: hands and arms. Bash the shit out of someone’s hands and arms, and 9 times out of 10 they will pack up and go home.
If you see a slap or punch coming, there are a lot of extremely painful pressure points on the hand and arm that you can hit as part of a blocking motion. You should learn these pressure points. For example, you can block a punch or slap by punching the bicep or the ulnar nerve (same nerve as the funny bone, it runs on the inside of the upper arm, between the bicep and tricep muscles). Properly done, hitting the ulnar nerve can deaden the arm, and will at a minimum cause a large amount of pain, like hitting your funny bone, but much worse.
If you have to strike, an open handed whip-strike is easily learned, intuitive, long ranged and powerful.
A number of women read this article and get very offended. The reaction seems to be, OMG I would hate anyone to perform these techniques on me, therefore I am against the whole concept. Of course, they miss or ignore that the article is about self-defence against violent women, and not how to violently attack women. Ladies, the phenomenon of violent women is absolutely real, and there needs to be advice to men on how to handle it. My advice is to deal with it proportionally and without causing injuries.
If anyone has any suggestions of things that should be added, removed or changed, please feel free to contact me with your suggestions by emailing dmorton@bitfurnace.com
