Woman Beats Crap out of Would-Be Attacker
You thought it was a real headline, didn’t you?
You thought for the first time in U.S. history, there was a story in the news about a woman beating her attacker senseless, instead of the other way around.
Sucker! It’s been how many years of print journalism, and how many years of TV news, and how many stories of men raping women, men beating women, men “sexually assaulting” (whatever that is) women, men strangling and mutilating women, etc.? And have you ever heard a news story where a man attempts to carjack a woman in a parking lot, and she turns around and kicks the crap out of him because she’s got some martial arts training? Or maybe she was a total dainty daisy, but managed to knock his head to right angles with his shoulders, using a purse filled with 75 pounds of cosmetics?
Or maybe she, you know, hauled out a gun and shot him dead and the D.A. is looking at the evidence right now to decide whether or not it was self-defense. I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear that one.
Where are these stories? I simply don’t believe they don’t happen. Maybe they just don’t get reported - at least here in the US. I don’t know about other nations - but I’d love to hear, if anyone feels like sharing a comment.
A lot of women have hand-to-hand training. A lot of women have guns. A lot of women have enough sense to take advantage of a situation if there is anything that could be a way out. Are we supposed to believe that all attackers are so skilled at picking victims who won’t be able to fight them off? That not even all those guys on “America’s Dumbest Criminals” run into a woman who can beat them at their own game? Weird, isn’t it? Unless, of course, that just supports your pre-existing belief that women always panic in a crisis.
Somehow, what we hear most often - particularly on TV - is about women pleading for their lives, or the lives of their children. We are shown only responses of fear and submission. Of women telling us “he was so strong, I couldn’t believe how strong he was”. Of women assuring us - on talk shows often hosted by women - “you think you’d rather fight and die than be raped, but then when it happens, you’ll do anything if he’ll just let you live”. I know women with experiences like this often feel that people think them weak: I want to make it clear that I don’t. I salute them for doing what it takes to survive, and I’m sorry they experienced the situation at all. But the fact is, it is statistically impossible to believe that there has never been an assault in which a woman found a way to fight off her attacker.
Occasionally, we hear stories where a woman fights a rapist and ends up murdered - though they are usually reported with vague phrases like “signs of struggle”, and you have to read between the lines to get the real gist. Still, that indicates to me that some women do fight back.
It’s just that the news only chooses to report about assaults that end badly for women. Now, seriously: what sort of a society does that?
When I was in high school in the eighties, my college friends were getting lectures from campus counselors on how it was preferable to submit to rape, because (they claimed) otherwise the physical damage would be more severe. This little theory lost steam after a couple of years because it’s patently absurd from both a biological and tactical standpoint, and because it was serving rapists so well in court - the argument being, if she submitted, it must have been consensual. But the fact that this sort of thinking ever entered mainstream education gives me the chills.
Combine it with TV news’ distinct bias toward reporting only assaults that end traumatically for women, and I start pricing quality tin-foil hats.
I’m sure the excuse TV networks would offer is that jeopardy gets high ratings and heroism doesn’t. After all, Lifetime TV, a network supposedly pandering to what women want to see, can’t seem to show enough “women in jep” (industry lingo for “women in jeopardy”, i.e., battered women, kidnapped women, raped women, women willing to submit to rape in order to save their kids, etc.) mini-series. What’s a TV news network to think?
And yet, every now and then, the local news likes to show a heartwarming story of a stranger who stopped a burglary and saved a shop owner’s life. Or the ever-popular “barely lingual child calls 911 and heroically saves Mommy’s life” schtick.
Oddly, the heroes in these stories are always men or children. Honestly, I can’t even remember a child hero story that involved a girl calling 911. It must be that women defending themselves is unladylike, and goodness, we can’t have that on TV.
This has everything to do with why I started this site, questioning the lack of fictional female heroes in TV and film - particularly U.S. network TV. I do believe someone’s trying to send us gals a message, possibly that it’s a woman’s lot in life to be a victim, and any attempt to deviate from that path will result in further abuse and degredation.
Be sure to read the COMMENTS on this entry - they really expand on this topic!
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6 comments
There’s certainly been some reports over here - a cursory search of the BBC news website revealed a number of ‘woman fights back when attacked’ stories, including a number of stories where women successfully fought off sex attackers.
I’m sure we’ve also had at least one story recently where someone jumped the wrong woman and she kicked the shit out of him but I can’t find it at the moment.
Fascinating - I really can’t remember even one story like that in my entire life from any US news, local or national. Not even from the 24-hour cable news networks, who need every headline they can get to fill up the time.
From what little I’ve seen of the BBC, I think they have a very different approach from the US networks. For example, they don’t seem bent on making every story into a potential threat the way the US news syndicates do.
There are cases where women successfully use violence to defend themselves, but your chances of finding these incidents reported outside the martial arts and/or weapons communities are nil. For example, back in the 90’s Black Belt magazine reported on an incident where professional kickboxer Kathy Long physically defended herself from some (male) nutjob with road rage. The various shooting magazines regularly report on incidents of women successfully scaring off attackers just by pulling out a gun, w/o even firing a shot.
Linnea, you raise some *great* points that go well beyond the scope of my article, and I would actually like permission to repost your comment as an article in response to my article (a lot of readers miss the comments). If you’re interested, you can write me through the Contact Me link in the upper left corner.
For now, I’ll just say I agree with you - we have a culture of victimization. We seem to think it’s better to become a martyr than risk slipping over to the dark side. I disagree: I believe passivity merely sidesteps the challenge of being a good person, as opposed to fulfilling it.
Like Linnea, I too am a female black belt. I was once involved with several other female black belts from many different martial arts schools in creating a one-day self-defense seminar for women.
It is my experience, incidentally, that untrained women have a very hard time responding to anything with violence. We’re heavily socialized against it from a very early age, and it takes quite a lot of effort and training to overcome the “nice girl” responses and learn to actually hit someone, for most women. Because of this, we focused mainly on escaping techniques in the class I helped to develop, which was something that most of the women we worked with had no trouble whatsoever learning and performing.
So, anyway, I’ve got two big points I want to hit here:
1) I think it’s harder for the average American woman (not a martial artist, not unusually “butch” to begin with) to respond a threat with violence than it is for the average American man. That said, however, it certainly does happen. More frequent yet are times when an average woman has responded to a threat with very effective escaping techniques. Over the course of researching for and teaching these classes, I spoke to a -lot- of women about their personal experiences with sexual violence. Quite a few of them managed to startle an attacker into letting go and then got away quite handily.
This comment is getting huge, but as someone who has taught self-defense courses for women, and who has been through all of the sensitivity training one takes before teaching such a course, I do have to add - there is no shame in submitting, either. If you are attacked, and you survive, whatever you did was *the right thing to do*. It wasn’t your fault, and whatever you did in your own unique circumstance was absolutely the correct response. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
2) Ok, and after my reflexive counseling motion, moving on to point the second:
There’s definitely something going on, culturally, about repressing the idea that women can either fight back or get away from an attacker. We were lucky enough, when I was working on that program, to have some really wonderful cooperation not only from our Southern Arizona Center Against Sexual Assault, but also from a couple police officers and other representatives of community groups involved with sexual violence. These people were really enthusiastic about the kind of empowering we were trying to do, and very encouraging, as well.
Not long afterwards, however, I had my own personal brush with sexual violence, and the response to it by the campus police was totally bizarre to me. I’ve written pretty extensively about all of my thoughts and feelings about it (which you can read, if you like), but what I really want to share here is something that came up sometime afterwards during a class, when my experience came under discussion.
My professor told us that she had once been told that something like 60% of all women who fight back against an attacker end up with serious physical injuries. The implication of such a statistic is clearly that women shouldn’t fight, because it will only get them injured. I’ve heard similar statistics tons of times before, from many different sources. What my professor pointed out, though, and what never really gets said, is that 100% of women who don’t fight back against a rapist…get raped.
[...] first month this site existed, I wrote a post asking why there weren’t more news stories about women fighting off their would-be rapists (or other types of assailants). It must happen occasionally; so why do you never see the headline [...]
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