windlion:

The Cambridge Companion to Time Travel: Tip: Women Are Not Weaker Than Men

bluefactories:

howtofightwrite:

Divorce yourself from this idea right now, author. While I’m sure it is the narrative you’ve been presented with your entire life, I’m here to tell you that it…

Fights begin in the mind, not the body. Yes, men have their own physical advantages. But more importantly than that, they have societies built around them where violence is reasonable and acceptable. For the most part, the men we will find as our attackers have never been given any reason to doubt their own strength (in comparison to a woman’s or the man’s or child’s they are going after) and because they believe they are stronger or that they just can, they’ll succeed.

You can circumvent a man’s upper body advantage, but that takes at least a modicum of training and, more importantly, the knowledge that you can. Most women, especially white women, spend their entire lives being told that they aren’t as physically strong as men (and they’re not) and that physical strength is all that matters in a fight. It’s not true, there are many techniques out there that will negate a man’s advantage, most of them are very easy to learn. If one takes the time to do so. But the knowledge for a woman that she has the capacity is just as important as the technique itself, if not more because fights begin in the mind. They begin through the subtle signals the body sends, being aware of our surroundings, the casual tells of eye movement and the shifts in stance before the first punch is ever thrown.

And yes, most fights are over in the first few hits. This is why stamina is so important during training and in real life. A fight is full on physical exertion, it’s like sprinting for a full 30 seconds (if the fight lasts that long), you need your stamina in case you take hits and to keep dishing out. To keep the finish the fight early or to keep it going longer in the case of you being put on the defensive. Better pain tolerance will help you learn to manage the hits that let you keep fighting, greater stamina will let you throw more techniques out in a shorter amount of time than your opponent can muster up the defense to respond to. Most men who have never trained have very little true offensive capability, unless they are facing off with someone else who has never trained. Hell, most men who’ve never trained don’t have the ability to keep a fight going very long anyway. Again, fighting does take physical effort. This is again, where stamina comes into play. So, all the more reason for most women to at least take one self-defense course.

We either figure out how to change the rules or we roll the dice. Most predators out there will think twice if the exertion to achieve their goal is more than what they counted on initially, especially if the threat includes being broken in such a way that they will never walk right again, never see again, or never use their arm again. You don’t have to follow through on the threat for it to be in play. All self-defense does and all a woman learning to make use of her natural advantages does is let her take back the ability to make a choice when faced with a bad situation, better educated than average sure, but it only gives a choice: to act or not to act. But choices give us power and take us from being trapped as victims in our own mind to actors in the given situation. This allows us a chance to retake control of that situation, thus taking the power away from our attacker.

It may be a small chance for some, but it’s better than we had before.

-Michi