howtofightwrite:

Street fighters are self-trained combatants. Usually we’re talking about poor kids, who’ve been forced to learn how to fight for their own safety. If your character’s growing up in dystopic slums (either in the future or in the modern third world), without access to any…

Taller women fight under male rules, shorter men fight under female ones. A heavy woman fights under the same laws as a skinny one, no really. The only generalization I’m actually making here is that the majority of women will find themselves facing male opponents in their lifetimes, the majority of those women will be smaller than the men regardless of how tall or short they are.  When we talk about “short” women on this blog, that’s what we mean and that’s all we mean. It is rare, but not unheard of for a shorter man to attack a taller woman and in that case, it’s reversed. But, of course, I assume you’re smart enough to figure that one out.

The same rules for the most part actually do apply whether the woman is four foot nine or five foot nine, a woman who’s five foot nine just needs to bend her knees more. A taller woman fighting a shorter one will face the exact same disadvantages and advantages as a tall man fighting a shorter one, but again, I assume our readership is smart enough to figure that out.

I don’t mention heavy weight women, not to be exclusionary, but because frankly? It doesn’t matter. A heavy, but well conditioned person between two hundred to three hundred pounds isn’t going to face any real obstacles in their fighting, if anything they’ll have the advantage of weight and if they are short, then they’re twice as hard to knock over as their skinny counterpart.

Most of the myths that surround fighting are just that, myths. A trained woman fights just as well as a man and an untrained one fights just as poorly. Height and weight matter a lot less in this situation than we pretend they do.

Most women, regardless of their actual size, will be faced with a larger attacker in their lifetime. Some of them will be faced with more than one. Women learn to fight from a disadvantaged position because of that reality. Small men learn the exact same lessons and what applies to small women will also apply to them.

Outside of a few, very select situations, height and weight don’t matter very much to trained combatants and they matter a lot to the untrained. You can find plenty of examples of heavier girls fighting each other on YouTube, if you really need a real world example. Then, compare it to the other skinny, untrained girl fights that are also on YouTube. There’s no difference there.