Justifiable Ignorance?

When FX announced their new series, Justified, I was excited. Put Timothy Olyphant in a cowboy hat and I’m there. After watching the season so far it ain’t no Deadwood but it is mildly entertaining in a run-of-the-mill kind of TV way. I was disappointed then in the writing in a recent episode.

A girl was stuck in the desert with a good guy and a bad guy. The bad guy started leering at the girl; backing her into a metaphorical corner. The good guy, already wounded, picked up a big rock and killed him, then sat in shock over the horrible thing he’d just done.

The girl comforted him that he’d done the right thing. “He was going to rape me!” She reminded him. Just like it was a foregone conclusion - as if she had no say in the matter, there was nothing she could have done to defend herself. I was on my feet screaming at the TV.

Was this episode written by a man who was going for the tired old “hero saves the helpless girl” crap? Or worse: Was the episode merely reflecting that perceived societal truth that there is nothing women can do to defend themselves against rape? Given that my whole life is about training women to do just that, my heart broke. I’m sure it seemed like an innocuous moment to many viewers and even those on the show. But that’s just it, this stuff is not innocuous. It’s how that kind of mindset infects both men and women by seeping in under the radar.

This is a good time for me to state that I never blame a rape survivor. Given that no girl wants to be raped, I’m very clear that all of us do what we know to do if faced with such a dire situation. The problem is that too many women don’t know that they do in fact have options - that it’s not a foregone conclusion, that there is something they can do with their own powerful bodies. TV scenarios like this just reinforce that potentially deadly ignorance.

I always worry about how the media may negatively influence my students. I caution them on watching too many popular procedural shows where the girl gets backed into the corner by the bad guy, she screams, flails her hands, cut to: she’s on the slab in the morgue and the clever cops go on to solve the case. Our brains record this information and if, God forbid, we are ever faced with a similar situation – backed into a corner, say, our brains search for what to do. If all we’ve seen are women screaming and flailing, our brains will likely settle on that as the only solution they’re familiar with. We’ll scream, flail…, and you know how the story ends. “Entertainment” scenarios in which women are consistently portrayed as helpless can be harmful to your health.

If you are involved in entertainment, be responsible for showing what real women are like: fierce, feminine, and able to defend themselves. It’s up to you to shift this perception by both men and women. It’s up to you to seed empowerment in the minds of women and girl viewers. Imagine a TV world where it was a given that a girl would simply kick the ass of someone who assaulted her. That’s MY reality. I’d like to see it reflected in my entertainment!

What examples of disempowering TV do you notice in a week’s time? I ask my girls to report on this weekly and sadly they always come in with plenty of examples. I’d love to hear what you notice. Here's hoping that Justified ups its game and shows women as the powerful creatures they are.

The Bunny Trap

Yesterday I was in my favorite nail salon when a lovely woman in her sixties asked me why I didn’t have my fingernails done. Relishing the chance to talk about the full-force self-defense fighting I teach for a living (teaching eye-strike to forty-five girls a day does not bode well for manicures!) I told her about IMPACT and my students. Without missing a beat the woman said “I’m so glad you teach that. I was raped.”

She went on to tell me about her youth as a Playboy Bunny back in the ring-a-ding Rat Pack days and the famous musician who asked her out. Indifferent, she went on a date with him and her gut instinct was confirmed: the guy was snoozeville. When he told her he needed to stop by his place for a jacket she was leary. She prudently stayed by the door until he casually asked for her opinion of his redecorated bedroom. When she hesitantly peered through the doorway he tackled her into the bedroom and raped her. When she finally got away and into a cab outside, she was crying and covered with bruises. The cabby wanted to know who he needed to beat up for her but she restrained him and begged him just to drive away. He looked at the apartment, sighed and said “Oh yeah, I know who lives there.”

The former Bunny said that the next week the musician came into the Bunny Club again and asked her when they were going out again. Astonished, she blurted “Are you nuts? You heard me yelling ‘No, no, please, no.’ Why would I go out with you again? You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.” To which the musician cavalierly replied “You were fine, that’s what all the girls say.” Though the Bunny as smiling as she calmly told her story, I was chilled. This famous man had essentially admitted to being a serial rapist.

He told her he’d just keep showing up until she relented and went out with her again. She asked to see his Bunny Club card and when he smugly handed it over, she broke it so he wouldn’t be allowed back in the club. After he left, several other Bunnies who’d been watching the exchange related their similar experiences with the man. Yup, serial rapist.

And besides the outrage I feel when I hear about any rape, this story carried with it a sense of disbelief. Don’t hot musicians have women throwing themselves at them? Of all men a guy like that feels he has to resort to rape for sex? It just underscores the fact that rape is not about sex, it’s about power.

For years this beautiful, sparkling woman carried a sense of disempowerment over letting him get away with her assault and rape and a sense of and guilt about never reporting him and not knowing how many other girls he went on to inflict himself on. So a few years back when he was in the news again for assaulting a girlfriend, she called the prosecuting attorney and told her story at long last to someone who could do something positive with it.

I gave her my card and told her I would love to have her in a class. I hope she calls me. I’m so proud of her for finally coming forward. I am so honored she chose to tell me her story – a complete stranger who happens to teach girls they are worth defending. I am so sorry she had to carry that with her all these years. I am so angry that this man and I’m sure many like him got away with it and get away with it every day.

What a difference it would make if all of Hugh Hefner’s Bunnies took our Basics course and could defend themselves from those men who assume that just because they’re Playmates, they’re easy or theirs for the taking. How about it Hef? Anybody got a line to him? Let’s empower your Bunnies and all women who work in sexualized media.

My Unlikely Life Mission: Self-defense as Physical Literacy

This week I'm proud to feature an article by an amazing friend of mine. Like me, Ellen works to empower women. Like me, she wants you to read this! The pictures are of her speaking to the factory workers mentioned below and of the self-defense class we teach.

by Ellen Snortland- USA

Midnight. Intensely urban downtown neighborhood in Los Angeles where the alleys reek of urine and garbage. Dark Craftsman house in the Carpenter-Gothic style. My home. I cross the threshold and meet an interrupted burglar who raises his knife, ready to plunge it into my throat or heart. My scream is so intense he drops his knife, grabs his ears and runs like hell. “Thank you, mister,” I neglect to yell, because I was yet to know the impact this event would have on the balance of my life.

I’m truly grateful to this man, wherever he may be now. He inadvertently led me to my life’s mission, passion and purpose: to empower women and girls worldwide to know and act on the idea that they have a birthright to be safe from violence and to be able to defend themselves physically, if need be. I assert that if and when the females of our species learn how to stop violence while it’s happening to them, we’d see a transformation in women’s potential and in their participation in problem-solving on the planet within a remarkably short time.
The adage “Think Globally, Act Locally” applies perfectly. Nothing is more local than one’s body, and if a critical mass of women could protect their own bodies, the globe would benefit greatly.

From my experience with the man and his knife, I write a book about my investigation into female self-defense entitled “Beauty Bites Beast: Awakening the Warrior within Women and Girls.” Very few people want to discuss the possibility of violence, and so are in varying degrees of denial. In the U.S., we have no problem fully confronting the possibility of fire or car accidents by having drills, we learn how to drive “defensively”; we insure ourselves to the hilt and wear seatbelts. But intentional violence directed toward people, especially “defenseless” people (women, girls and boys)? Most people don’t want to think about it, let alone prepare for it.

Does it make any sense that I — a well-educated, well-read, well-traveled, well-off person — would not automatically make self-protection a part of wellness, in general? Why was I, an independent woman of the modern era, completely and utterly ignorant about defending myself from a possibly violent occurrence even though I live in a culture that swims in violence both in the news and in the entertainment media? Why had I never made it important to take a self-defense class? And why did I only make self-defense a part of my education after something scared me enough to take action? I set about to answer those questions from a personal and social point of view in my book I found there’s a dearth of studies on women defending themselves. As it turns out, I was opening up a new field.

On the professional front, “Beauty Bites Beast,” my publisher discovers, is not an easy sell to reviewers. Even though it’s not a “how-to” book, reviewers reject it and place it in the female book “ghetto,” which makes it not reviewable. In our system, if a book is not reviewed, for all intents and purposes it does not exist. Nonetheless “Beauty Bites Beast” does exist, and fortunately I’ve have enough word of mouth endorsement that it continues to sell to this day. Gavin De Becker, best-selling author of “The Gift of Fear” and world renowned violence prevention expert, dubs “Beauty Bites Beast” a “classic,” and a “must read.”

So what is it going to take to place personal violence into the public discourse without reviews? Why isn’t my topic taken seriously? Promoting my book turns out to be a bit like peddling cod liver oil: yes, it must be “good for you,” but who wants it, since it tastes awful?

My challenge: how do I make an unpalatable subject — gender-directed violence — so palatable that responsible people feel they must include it in their sphere of learning? My other challenge: how do I break through the entrenched apathy toward women’s and girls’ status in the world, which is in large part kept in place because of and through violence, whether real or merely threatened? Force, or the threat of force, keeps women down very effectively -- in their own estimation and in families, communities, countries throughout the world. No wonder our voices are missing in the public sphere. I conclude that the threat of gender-directed force is the dark underbelly and the mainly unarticulated tapestry of patriarchy; its threads are so emotional, hidden, tangled and complex that I must find a more neutral way to spread my mission of self-protection as a human right.

Consequently I decide to frame the conversation about violence within a less provocative context of literacy, instead of staying solely within the realm of gender politics. Everyone aspires to literacy, right? But physical literacy… what is that? A physically literate person knows how to cross a street safely. She or he also knows that kitchen safety includes washing hands before food preparation. A physically literate person knows that using a seat belt in a car is not only legally mandated in most developed countries, but has also been shown to reduce injury and death in car accidents.

Similarly, a physically literate person should know how to block a hit, use an eye-strike or any number of easy-to-teach, easy-to-learn, self-protection skills and tools not dependent on sheer strength or weight to stop an assault effectively. If you have no clue what you might do if someone were to attack you, I assert you are physically illiterate. This is a radical idea. Therefore I usually talk with people about violence prevention in the context of “stranger” violence, because there at least is a consensus that strangers don’t have the right to go around hitting other strangers, regardless of gender.

In reality, the statistics about the violence women and girls live and die with show they are most likely to be hurt or killed by their so-called intimates. According to a Rutgers study, “Around the world, 1 in 3 women have been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in their lifetime. Most often, the abuser is a member of her own family.”

When I attended the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China in 1995 I asked every woman I met there if she was concerned about her personal safety. Tragically, the answer was a resounding “Yes!” no matter whether I was speaking to a high-level executive from the World Bank or a woman from a small village in Africa. Walking around in a woman’s body is dangerous! I decided I had to introduce the conversation about personal self-defense at an international level.

The third article of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), abridged version, says, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” “Everyone” includes women, girls and boys, and their own personal security falls squarely into the UDHR. The third goal of the United Nations 8 Millennium Development Goals is to “Promote gender equality and empower women.” Indeed, I believe in spreading the word whether by mouth, book or film. Throwing a handful of sand or gravel into an attacker’s eyes may spell the difference between life and death. Making that information common knowledge is a moral imperative since it can save countless women’s and girls’ lives. In the most primitive form of biological warfare, HIV-infected mercenaries intentionally rape women with the goal of infecting and killing them. Not only does a woman have a right to defend herself from rape, she has the right to save her own life from HIV/AIDs.

After attending the annual U.N. Commission on the Status of Women for several years in a row as a journalist and NGO delegate for the United Nations Association, I learned first-hand that “self-protection” is notably absent from the usual discourse on ending violence against women. So on several occasions I have forced myself to ask publicly, “Are there any plans to educate women in developing countries on simple self-defense techniques?” knowing full well that my question would be ignored or minimized. Nonetheless, the topic deserves not just attention but serious consideration. I believe the question is met with such resistance because fundamentally both women and men have unexamined thoughts and prejudices about female human beings’ inherent inability to defend themselves.

We would never question whether a female lion or dog, for instance, should or shouldn’t defend herself. Self-protection within other species is not gendered. We don’t consider a female dog any less able to defend herself than a male. Whether she “wins” or not is a discussion separate from her gender; it depends on whether she’s got a litter, her size or other similarly variable factors. If we encounter a growling dog, we do not check to see if the dog is a male or female before we decide if we should be cautious in proceeding.

Knowing full well that the “nurture or nature” jury is not done deliberating, I assert that women’s so-called defenselessness is largely a result of nurture rather than nature. I also assert that not defending oneself is largely “unnatural” and a result of patriarchy, not biology.


In my effort to extend this conversation to as many people as possible, I’ve embarked on a documentary film project by the same name as my book, “Beauty Bites Beast.” An altruistic factory owner in Tijuana read my book and invited me to train the women who work for him. I, along with many incredible full-force, full-impact instructors from all over the U.S. trained over 20 women in his factory for an intensive course that transformed their lives. United Farm Workers co-founder and feminist activist Dolores Huerta delivered the women’s graduation speech. We saw the women grow from people convinced of their helplessness to citizens who stood up and declared, “No one ever gets to hit me again.” We left Tijuana knowing that at least 25 women would be ending violence in their families once and for all.

Now, as I release the 10th anniversary edition of the book “Beauty Bites Beast” and work to complete my film, I am still resolute. Women must reclaim their natural ability to be physically dangerous in order to achieve true freedom.

I am constantly amazed at how many women, upon hearing what my mission is, say, “I want my daughter/niece/grandchild to read your book” or “I want her to learn how to defend herself!” Rarely will a woman say, “I need to read your book,” or “I need to learn how to defend myself.” Explore that reaction if it’s yours: find out where it’s coming from and what it’s based on. I challenge mothers to include teaching their offspring how to defend themselves as a vital part of a “natural” job of good mothering and parenting; far more often than not, I meet daughters who tell me it was their fathers who taught them self-defense basics.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes by fellow “missionary,” Alice Paul:

Women’s dearest possession is life,
And since it is given to her but once
She must live as to feel no torturing regret
For years without purpose,
So live as not to be scarred with the shame of
A cowardly and trivial past
So live that dying she can say:
All my life and all my strength
Was given to the finest cause in the world
The liberation of womankind.

- Alice Paul, 1885-1977American suffrage leader and author of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923

About the AuthorEllen Snortland’s work as an author, self-defense advocate and instructor has been featured on Dateline NBC with her book, “Beauty Bites Beast.” A regular columnist for the Pasadena Weekly and frequent contributor to Ms. Magazine, she is a tireless advocate for women and girls and physical safety for all. Ms. Snortland believes that “Think Globally, Act Locally,” is vital for women and girls. She says, “There’s nothing more local than one’s own body.” Ellen received her Juris Doctorate from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

As a UNA delegate, co-chair of Fifty-Fifty Leadership and journalist, Ellen has attended United Nations world conferences and annual UN meetings. Her acclaimed one-woman show, “Now That She’s Gone” is a comic memoir about growing up as a Norwegian American in Colorado and South Dakota, which she is currently planning on having produced in a regular theater venue and as a touring show. She is also raising funds for and directing, “Beauty Bites Beast,” a documentary based on her self-defense advocacy. For more information, visit her organization’s website.

It Works

I am constantly amazed by my students. I watched some of them in a performance of the Scottish Play yesterday and was moved to see their self-confidence on stage, their spirit and talent shining through. Because I train them to kick ass, I know they get to walk around just a bit more comfortable in their own skins, pursuing dreams that matter to them. I know they'll know what to do should every woman's worst nightmare come true.

Yesterday before the play we were visited by a former student - a girl still in high school. She pulled my co-teacher (and the president of the company) aside and explained that she'd been assaulted over the weekend. It was at a party. The man was trying to rape her. Scared out of her mind yet without needing to think, her IMPACT training kicked in and she fought him off. She told us she was positive she would have been raped if she hadn't taken our class.

Ladies, you have no excuses. One in three women will be assaulted in her lifetime. Get your asses in this class. Now. Get your daughters and sisters and nieces and moms in this class. Now.
Your life is worth fighting for.

Letters from the Front

I've posted before about the importance of women learning to defend themselves. It's not something I take lightly. In the year since I took my first full-force self defense class, I've become fully committed to the cause; to EVERY woman getting that her life is worth defending. I had one of my final training sessions today in preparation to become a full-fledged teacher of full-force. In the new year, I will teach at a local high school. I am honored to be able to instill these amazing skills in a new generation of young women.

Another sister out in the trenches with me is the indomitable, charismatic activist/writer Ellen Snortland. She sends this missive to the defense community today:

Lessons Learned
A would-be sexual predator tangles with the wrong girl
By Ellen Snortland

My strong suit is persistence. Even though I'm a nationally known self-defense advocate, it's still embarrassing to pick up that phone one more time to plead with friends: "Hi, me again. There's another self-defense class coming up. How about it?"I have friends I've contacted for 15 years, every year. I don't get paid nor do I get a free toaster oven for referring students. What I get is the utter joy of knowing that I can possibly avert injury, maybe even — heaven forbid — death for people I care about. Indeed, there was an assault at a gay bar in Pasadena several months ago that a dear friend finally told me about. I'm going to call her Wendy Whoop-ass because although hers is a story of victory, not victimhood, she's still reluctant to have her name or the name of the bar publicized. I'd pestered Ms. Whoop-ass for four years to take a full-force, full-impact class — which she finally did. So while this is a self-defense "success story," it's also a cautionary tale.

Many women have discovered over the years that gay men's bars provide a place for dithering, dancing and drinking the night away without constantly having to deal with being hit on by men. Nights out at a gay bar are kind of like having your beefcake without the bullying. This story erodes that assumption of safety.

Ms. Whoop-ass was dancing her ass off with a guy she assumed was "safe." She then went to the ladies' room. She was in her stall when she heard the door to the bathroom open. She heard a man's steps, looked down and saw the tips of black cowboy boots sticking into her stall. (What is it with men, toes and stalls, anyway?) Then the toe tips disappeared and the outside door opened and closed. Tipsy herself, she finished, opened her stall door and stepped out toward the sinks. That's when she saw the man she'd been dancing with standing with his back against the bathroom door to keep her from leaving."Now I'm going to fuck you," he said as he grabbed her shoulders and threw her up against the paper towel dispenser where she hit her head hard.

That's when her fury and training kicked in despite her blood-alcohol level.

She remembers that he ended up on the floor not moving. She left the bar and called them later to tell them about the attack. She then went into a funk for a couple of months, not really realizing that she'd "won."Why didn't she tell me right away? I am her self-defense "fairy godmother," after all. I needed to know that her class had worked to give me strength to keep encouraging my other friends (for however long it takes) to get them into classes too. Her class at Impact Personal Safety was 20 hours that had really paid off. Their basics class gives students confidence, physical and verbal boundary skills and the ability to "open a can of whoop-ass" on an attacker. (They have men's classes also. Men get assaulted and raped too.)

"I was embarrassed because I'd had too much to drink. I'm also upset that I let him get as far as I did. He shouldn't have gotten a chance to throw me up against the wall," she explained.

"Excuse me? You successfully prevented your own rape and you're upset at yourself for not having done it perfectly?" I asked. This was a new angle on "blaming the victor." She laughed. Hers is a success story if I ever heard one. This training works! Did she have any memory of what she did?

"I think I went for his eyes first, and then kicked him in the crotch, but it all happened so fast. I just wanted to get away," she said.

I got into the field of self-protection because I too had my "it could never happen to me" denial shattered once and for all by an encounter with violence that was unrelated to gender. I too prevailed. I began to research just how many "success" stories there are and how they often go unreported by the victim and or the media. Success stories by their very nature mean that an attempted crime was stopped. Unfortunately, we learn to be more afraid from hearing stories of completed crimes than we do of attempted crimes where something the intended victim did worked after all.Wendy Whoop-ass' would-be predator is smart. Was he a straight, bi or gay rapist? Rape is a crime of violence, not totally sexual attraction, so who knows what his orientation is? Wendy Whoop-ass is now on the road of persistence with me. She calls her friends every time there's a new cycle of classes and says, "Hi, me again. There's another self-defense class coming up. How about it?"

Ellen Snortland is the author of "Beauty Bites Beast." Contact her at: www.snortland.com .

Defense of Self, Part Two

I recently visited my father. He happens to be one of the kindest, most chivalrous people I’ve ever met. He’s that old school guy we don’t have enough of these days who holds the door for you and helps strangers and believes the handshake should be as binding as a legal contract. Yet like so many men he too is entrenched in gender behavior to such an extent that he is unaware of its influence. And coming from him, I know it’s not malicious or meant to harm. But it is just as insidious.

On a recent hike we met two women on their descent. We chatted briefly about the nice day before my dad joked that he would join them since they had the easier job of going downhill. I felt them recoil. Not from my dad as a bad guy but in the internal alert all women have that tells us an uninvited male is asserting claim on our space. Joking or not, it makes us instantly assess our safety and wonder if we will need to defend ourselves.

In the past, I would have brought this to my dad’s attention later with a “don’t say things like that to women,” or “do you know how uncomfortable you made them?” But I don’t bother anymore because the answer is he truly doesn’t know. He thinks I’m just being reactionary and ridiculous when I bring it up. But I saw the ice that flashed across their faces. I don’t think men can see it. They are, and I’m generalizing, not attuned to read subtle energy changes the way we are -- the way we’ve had to be to keep our wits about us and our bodies safe.

Later that day my dad and I went to dinner. A man at the bar wouldn’t stop staring at me. After a good half hour of this I mentioned to my dad how uncomfortable it made me. He shrugged and said “Take it as a compliment. He just doesn’t know how to communicate it in a tactful way.”

Hmmm. A compliment. I saw his point and I tried to let it go as I squirmed in my seat. I thought about my options. I could get up and say something to the man about how rude he was being but then I’d be the asshole. Why is that? Why am I the bad guy if I set a boundary for myself? Big secret answer: because society doesn’t want women to have boundaries. They are to be objects. Property.

My stomach knotted. I was sitting there with the chief protector of my well-being and yet feeling like a rabbit dangling before a wolf. My kind and upstanding dad could never understand the upset and injustice of the moment. He could never get the experience of being a woman under a male gaze.

A compliment? I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks: should my friend who was raped take that as a compliment too? Poor guy just didn’t know how to properly express his admiration or desire for her? I know this is an extreme leap but, f**k NO! Unwelcome male attention is never complimentary. It is disrespectful and invasive and damaging. But what can we do? Not much until society shifts to value women and their right to feel safe and comfortable in their own skins. Given two thousand years of patriarchy, that’s not likely to happen in the next week or so.

So what do we do in the meantime? Mothers, train your sons to respect all women as yourselves. Train your daughters to take pride in themselves and stand up for themselves. Girls, get your butts into a boundary setting self defense class.

Now that I’ve had my amazing self defense training which included a huge amount of verbal boundary setting things would go differently. Now I’d walk up to the staring man and say “Sorry to disturb you but when you stare at me it makes me feel uncomfortable. Would you please stop.” If he squirmed in discomfort, so be it. Why should I work to make him comfortable when he’s making me uncomfortable? So ingrained in us girls is that useless response! Most likely, he’d be so surprised he’d acquiesce. I’d thank him and be able to enjoy my dinner with my dad.

And if he kicked up a fuss, so be it. When men start to realize that women aren’t afraid to cause a scene to stand up for ourselves maybe even strangers will treat us with the same respect they’d accord their mothers or sisters. Now that would be a compliment.

Defense of Self, Part One

I consider myself a fairly bad-ass chick. Six feet tall and a life-long athlete filled with a hearty streak of warrior woman and Leo, I can be physically intimidating when I want to be. I’ve always felt relatively safe.

“I traveled alone in Croatia during the war,” I say cavalierly. One of many self-sufficient accomplishments in a litany of “look how bad-ass I am” facts. But the truth is I’ve never been in a fight. In fact, until recently the only physical scuffle I’d ever been in left me feeling quite ineffectual. About fifteen years ago, feeling faint in the hot crush of a concert in a small club, I tried to push my way out of the front row and was groped by a guy I passed. I turned and hit at his back as best I could. He and his girlfriend laughed at me.

On some level, I long for the opportunity to crush them. Not that I wish for bloodshed. I suppose I just want to feel like the victor for once. But am I so victimized in our society? It’s a hard question to answer. The social norms of being a Western woman are so quiet we don’t even notice most of the time. But ask any woman what it’s like to feel like prey and chances are she’ll be able to tell you a story of being followed down a dark street or stared at on the subway. Sadly, she may tell you a story of an actual assault. One in three women will be assaulted in their lives. We don’t defend our selves because we’re taught that would invite violence and after all the offending male is stronger … because he’s male, right?

My problem isn’t so much with these physiological facts. It’s that everyone’s response is to make it OK.

Longing for a toehold of personal power I enrolled in a self defense course. Impact Personal Safety trains women to repel an attacker who is fully padded so you can and must use your full power. You learn to work past the natural fear/freeze response and function in a fully adrenalized state. I took it because I wanted to actually be as bad-ass as I feel. I wanted to know I could beat the shit out of some guy if I had to. I took it because they claim a woman’s chances of being assaulted drop to one in twenty after the class.

During the class fueled by nerves, fear, and years of rage I craved my turn in the fight line. The sensation of physical power. The knowledge that it was, in here at least, OK to unleash anger, to even feel hate for these men. And after one session I felt exhilarated. Focusing all those past frustrations on our mock muggers, I thrilled to the adrenaline sensation of finally fighting back; pounding a guy into submission, mock though it may be.

And even as I did, I was surprised to note how much apologizing we all did for a mislanded or over-hard blow. So ingrained in us is the submissive woman. So hard is it to grapple with the idea of ourselves as women asserting ourselves and maybe even hurting someone. We are trained to accommodate and care-take. Not injure and stand our ground. It is totally normal for women to apologize for hurting someone who is hurting them. Are you not wigged out yet?

As I drove home from class that first day, I felt like a noodle. But a powerful noodle. I understood the basic 1 in 20 statistic now: a woman who carries herself with confidence makes a much less appealing target. I know how much force I can pack in a punch or kick now. I know that the boundaries I choose to set for myself are valid because I choose them. And then a surprising thing happened. Instead of behaving like a puffed-up bad-ass, I found myself full of peace as I drove. I let other drivers in, I smiled at people. I felt relaxed and powerful. And instead of craving some kind of test that could serve as retribution for all those past starers and gropers. I found myself hoping I would never have to prove myself.

Now, having completed the Basics course, I feel more peaceful and powerful than ever. That rage I used to feel has ebbed into determination. My producing partner took the course with me and we’ve incorporated a significant amount of the IMPACT training in the girl power film we’re producing. Anything to get the message out there to the young women of the world: your lives are worth fighting for. Ladies, if that statement strikes a doubtful note in you, get your ass in this class.