My Week Carrying The TigerLady Self-Defense Tool

On a chilly night in 2010 I sat alone at a bus stop in Vancouver, shivering while I waited for my ride home. A young woman — she couldn’t have been more than sixteen — took a seat down the bench from me and asked when the bus was coming.

“It’s two minutes away,” I told her. She thanked me and stuffed her chapped hands into her pockets.

I never would have predicted what happened next.

After glancing up and down the street, she whistled to her friends nearby. Then she shuffled closer to me and told me, in a low voice, that I was going to hand her my bag — and if I screamed, she’d kill me.

When I first learned about the TigerLady, a new self-defense tool for women that produces cat-like claws when squeezed, I thought about that night at the bus stop. If I’d had such a tool, would I have used it on the three teenagers who mugged me? Or would I have quietly turned over my bag as I did before?

The truth is, my “flight” instincts are strong. I may act tough, but “fight” is just not a response I have when I sense danger, and no amount of childhood martial arts classes could change that.

That’s why the TigerLady, released in 2015 and marketed heavily this year in response to widely covered sexual assaults — such as the Brock Turner case —…