Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense

by Martha McCaughey

An examination of women's self-defense culture and its relationship to feminism.
I was once a frightened feminist. So begins Martha McCaughey's odyssey into the dynamic world of women's self- defense, a culture which transforms women involved with it and which has equally profound implications for feminist theory and activism.
Unprecedented numbers of American women are learning how to knock out, maim, even kill men who assault them. Sales of mace and pepper spray have skyrocketed. Some 14 million women own handguns. From behind the scenes at gun ranges, martial arts dojos, fitness centers offering Cardio Combat, and in padded attacker courses like Model Mugging, Real Knockouts demonstrates how self-defense trains women out of the femininity that makes them easy targets for men's abuse.
And yet much feminist thought, like the broader American culture, seems deeply ambivalent about women's embrace of violence, even in self-defense. Investigating the connection between feminist theory and women physically fighting back, McCaughey found self-defense culture to embody, literally, a new brand of feminism.

Genres: Feminism, Martial Arts, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

Reviews

[Jennifer Abdo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Real Knockouts

~"Self-defense is another arena that helps women question the culture they live in-- and the culture that lives in them. Women can change society. We can transform our relationship to tradition. The mobility women achieve through self-defense complements the mobility and freedom sought by feminist artists, performers, activists, and philosophers."~

Part philosophy, part self-defense survey, this book brings together, what may be for many, two disparate topics: feminism and self-defense. (Women thinkers and philosophers are often dismissed as activists or derided as feminists - I challenge you to add some Angela Davis, Kate Manne, Judith Butler, or Catherine MacKinnon to your Hariri, Chomsky, and Hitchens!) It's a much needed women's perspective in a male-dominated area, whether we're talking self-defense or combat sports and martial arts in general. {But both feminism and self-defense/martial arts/combat sports have the potential to improve from studying and integrating the other. Cut?}

The first chapter is charmingly titled Balls versus Ovaries and gives insight into how women (and men) are socialized: men to see violence as masculine and women to see nonviolence as feminine. Things we take for granted as natural femininity or masculinity may in fact be constructed and performed. This deconstruction of the gender binary is considered subversive to some, but good news to those of us on the receiving end of attacks due to our weakness or vulnerability. If it's a construct, it means we can change the script.

Non-violence gets attributed to women in this construct, but the interestingly, in order to renounce violence, we have to have the capacity for it in the first place (i.e. learn it). This is the concept behind what many martial artists will tell you - that they learn martial arts so they won't have to use it or that learning martial arts makes it less likely they'll choose violence. So only after we have reclaimed our human potential, as McCaughey cites, for self-defense or violence can we really choose non-violence in the first place.

That concept of reclaiming our human potential or body sovereignty is a persuasive one. Many of us have learned a certain way of being in the world and the dominant culture punishes transgression. Think of how muscular women or those that shave their heads are received.

~"Cultural ideals of manhood and womanhood include a cultural, political, aesthetic, and legal acceptance of men's aggression and a deep skepticism, fear, and prohibition of women's. This set of assumptions fuels the frequency and ease with which men assault women, and the cultural understanding that men's violence is an inevitable, if unfortunate, biological fact."~

Women not only can learn a new way to be in the world through self-defense (I would argue that my years in Tang Soo Do and Brazilian Jiu-jitsu have functioned in a similar way.), but also participate for "physical competence, playfulness, and pleasures of developing bodily skills" (p156).

The generic self-defense class is geared toward men and the need to break the ego. Women need something a bit different - courses that function to build self-esteem. What distinguishes courses discussed in the book are things like discussion of emotions or prior assault experiences, what to tell the police, or different situations men and women are attacked.

There are different schools of thought within the women's self-defense classes, even as they are similar in supporting women through trauma. Model Mugging involves padded attackers in virtually any scenario you can think of. Chimera believes that you don't have to put women into situations that may retraumatize them. Again, I don't think there's one right answer, but these different approaches seem like a more positive way to address the wide range of trauma we're coming in with.

Women's self-defense firearms classes are similarly discussed. There are classes to use firearms, but the women's classes put it in the context of our lives and culture. I feel conflicted about firearms myself, but the way it was presented as part of physical feminism was compelling.

"Women are afraid to fight for the same reasons they are afraid of guns--in either case, women's size or strength is far less relevant than the social investment in a female body that does not exert coercive force."