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walkitoutThe author seems to be a few years older than me, and her experiences exploring self-defense appear to have occurred slightly earlier in her timeline than my experiences did in mine. But they are so close, that the book was interesting to me to buy while I was doing martial arts and taking firearms classes, going to the range and carrying a gun and taking a fencing class and things of that sort.
But my efforts to buy it at the time completely failed. Repeatedly. So it has been sitting on the shelf for more than a decade, surviving purge after purge -- my paper book library is less than a third the size that it once was. In the wake of my dismal failure to read _Smile at Strangers_, I thought I ought to go make a real effort to get through other books I own about women and self-defense.
Here are the problems.
(1) It was written in the first half of the 1990s. So while we had Terminator's Sarah Connor and Alien's Ripley, and we had Thelma and Louise, for whatever that may or may not have been worth, we didn't yet have Long Kiss Goodnight's Sam/Charly, or Barb Wire. And boy that shows in the cultural references. It is hard to really realize just how massive the turn was for women action heroes that occurred in 1996, but it was incredible. In a really good way.
(2) There are a lot of incorrect or very deceptive bits of evidence throughout the book. I've blogged a bunch of them, but notably the summaries of the Inez Garcia and Mary Ellen Nelson cases are incredibly misleading in ways that undermine how they fit into the argument. There are also fundamental misunderstandings of women's power movements of the past (separate spheres) and the interaction of women's activism in the Gilded Age and labor law (the results produce an inaccurate impression of what was actually going on).
(3) Because McCaughey comes at this topic from a Women's Studies perspective, the entire thing is framed through various lenses of feminism. And it turns out that feminism is a truly shitty way to frame self-defense, legally, or as an activity, or as a locus for activism or, really, anything. Who knew? Feminism, especially before same-sex activism beat back gender difference ideology as deployed by several kinds of feminists, was way hung up on rape, and McCaughey spends almost the entire book exploring the potential interaction between rape and self-defense. I spent a lot of time learning a lot of responsible ways to deploy and deflect and de-escalate violence. I am no pacifist and I'm not even particularly anti-violence (I just think you need to carefully consider the amount, type and target). And for all that I was raised to be freaked out about men sexually violating me, my childhood experience was of female on female sexual assault -- no men anywhere involved in it. My self-defense concerns were considerably more ordinary: I worried about property crime pointed at me, and violent interactions with persons experiencing psychotic breaks or otherwise altered. Basically, I wanted to be able to walk around large cities at night by myself and have a reasonable expectation that I would safely arrive at my destination without anything too traumatic happening along the way. If I was with other people, I wanted to be able to also protect them, altho this goal sort of faded as I realized that some people felt emboldened by my presence and their belief that I could cash whatever check their mouth and actions wrote. (Yeah, I got a list of idiot women I won't ever go drinking with again.)
So the book hasn't aged well, has a bad frame, and could have used much, much more rigorous editing for argument and evidence deployed in service of same. There are some nuggets buried here, because McCaughey really enjoyed her exploration of self-defense training and the people she met. She is sympathetic and clearly a really compassionate, earnest person who wants the world to get better, and believes that this is a way that women can make the world better for themselves and others.
If you _like_ women's studies arguments, and you read this book, I'm curious to know whether this qualifies as good, bad or indifferent. I can't tell -- I haven't read enough recently to have a decent sample size. I used to read some gender difference stuff, but I eventually gave up on it all because none of it made any sense to me and it just doesn't seem to have any utility.
If McCaughey had been able to take the perspective of the short, light men she ran into in martial arts contexts, she may have been able to work through their Little Man issues enough to understand that a lot of what we frame as _women's_ issues can be better understood as issues for people who are smaller adults. I know, I know, I'm going to sound all MRA here, and these idiots can definitely deploy white male privilege bravado with an offensively heavy hand, and they are often insanely aggressive. But they are coming from the same place of Easy Target, and at least a few of them are worth connecting with. If she _had_ been able to do that, it would have opened up a whole other area of analysis, particularly in the body work section. But, hey, that's okay.
I can't recommend it, but it's entirely possible that McCaughey's later work (she was pretty young when she produced this) is more careful on the evidence and so forth. I wouldn't walk away from a book she'd written. I'm unconvinced by her advocacy for a different self-defense standard for women than men, but I'm prepared to think about how a "reasonable woman" standard might be different from a "reasonable man" standard or even a "reasonable person" standard.
But my efforts to buy it at the time completely failed. Repeatedly. So it has been sitting on the shelf for more than a decade, surviving purge after purge -- my paper book library is less than a third the size that it once was. In the wake of my dismal failure to read _Smile at Strangers_, I thought I ought to go make a real effort to get through other books I own about women and self-defense.
Here are the problems.
(1) It was written in the first half of the 1990s. So while we had Terminator's Sarah Connor and Alien's Ripley, and we had Thelma and Louise, for whatever that may or may not have been worth, we didn't yet have Long Kiss Goodnight's Sam/Charly, or Barb Wire. And boy that shows in the cultural references. It is hard to really realize just how massive the turn was for women action heroes that occurred in 1996, but it was incredible. In a really good way.
(2) There are a lot of incorrect or very deceptive bits of evidence throughout the book. I've blogged a bunch of them, but notably the summaries of the Inez Garcia and Mary Ellen Nelson cases are incredibly misleading in ways that undermine how they fit into the argument. There are also fundamental misunderstandings of women's power movements of the past (separate spheres) and the interaction of women's activism in the Gilded Age and labor law (the results produce an inaccurate impression of what was actually going on).
(3) Because McCaughey comes at this topic from a Women's Studies perspective, the entire thing is framed through various lenses of feminism. And it turns out that feminism is a truly shitty way to frame self-defense, legally, or as an activity, or as a locus for activism or, really, anything. Who knew? Feminism, especially before same-sex activism beat back gender difference ideology as deployed by several kinds of feminists, was way hung up on rape, and McCaughey spends almost the entire book exploring the potential interaction between rape and self-defense. I spent a lot of time learning a lot of responsible ways to deploy and deflect and de-escalate violence. I am no pacifist and I'm not even particularly anti-violence (I just think you need to carefully consider the amount, type and target). And for all that I was raised to be freaked out about men sexually violating me, my childhood experience was of female on female sexual assault -- no men anywhere involved in it. My self-defense concerns were considerably more ordinary: I worried about property crime pointed at me, and violent interactions with persons experiencing psychotic breaks or otherwise altered. Basically, I wanted to be able to walk around large cities at night by myself and have a reasonable expectation that I would safely arrive at my destination without anything too traumatic happening along the way. If I was with other people, I wanted to be able to also protect them, altho this goal sort of faded as I realized that some people felt emboldened by my presence and their belief that I could cash whatever check their mouth and actions wrote. (Yeah, I got a list of idiot women I won't ever go drinking with again.)
So the book hasn't aged well, has a bad frame, and could have used much, much more rigorous editing for argument and evidence deployed in service of same. There are some nuggets buried here, because McCaughey really enjoyed her exploration of self-defense training and the people she met. She is sympathetic and clearly a really compassionate, earnest person who wants the world to get better, and believes that this is a way that women can make the world better for themselves and others.
If you _like_ women's studies arguments, and you read this book, I'm curious to know whether this qualifies as good, bad or indifferent. I can't tell -- I haven't read enough recently to have a decent sample size. I used to read some gender difference stuff, but I eventually gave up on it all because none of it made any sense to me and it just doesn't seem to have any utility.
If McCaughey had been able to take the perspective of the short, light men she ran into in martial arts contexts, she may have been able to work through their Little Man issues enough to understand that a lot of what we frame as _women's_ issues can be better understood as issues for people who are smaller adults. I know, I know, I'm going to sound all MRA here, and these idiots can definitely deploy white male privilege bravado with an offensively heavy hand, and they are often insanely aggressive. But they are coming from the same place of Easy Target, and at least a few of them are worth connecting with. If she _had_ been able to do that, it would have opened up a whole other area of analysis, particularly in the body work section. But, hey, that's okay.
I can't recommend it, but it's entirely possible that McCaughey's later work (she was pretty young when she produced this) is more careful on the evidence and so forth. I wouldn't walk away from a book she'd written. I'm unconvinced by her advocacy for a different self-defense standard for women than men, but I'm prepared to think about how a "reasonable woman" standard might be different from a "reasonable man" standard or even a "reasonable person" standard.
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no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 08:19 pm (UTC)rape and self-defense
Date: 2015-01-13 08:48 pm (UTC)You -- if I understand you correctly -- perceive rape as more important than other kinds of violence perpetrated against women, but self-defense as not necessarily being an important solution to that problem. And I don't think you feel strong motivation to pursue self-defense for any reason. Please feel free to clarify, because I'm very uncertain about all of this.
I do not see rape as a central problem. (This would be yet another example of, as near as I can tell, a bunch of socialization went past me and ... missed.) I do think self-defense has some things to offer people who are working to reduce rape as a problem. My primary motivator for learning self-defense/martial arts was a desire to protect myself from property motivated attacks (mugging) and attacks that resulted from mental illness, as I intended to be out and about in an urban environment after dark. Rape was pretty low on my list of concerns and other reasons to attack me (someone had it in for me in particular) were even lower. My concerns have evolved over time, but the position of fear of rape in the hierarchy has, if anything, just dropped down even further.
And this is why I think a gendered perspective on martial arts cannot be framed in absolute terms.
ETA: And ranking issues using my feminist hat, instead of my martial arts hat, causes me to place things like equal pay, and comparable expectations of work around the house and child rearing and so forth, much higher than rape.
no subject
Date: 2015-01-13 11:53 pm (UTC)I did take a women's self-defense class in college, and I took karate for a year or so as well (didn't get very far -- I thought I should try it out as one of my brothers loved it and one of my sisters had been taking tang soo do and was very keen as well, until she hurt her back too badly to continue).
I don't remember for sure how ambivalent I was about the self-defense class at the time. It certainly seemed to me later that it was too focused on stranger-in-the-bushes stuff and not the far more common scenarios of someone one knows. But they did stress that one of the effects was meant to be simply to increase one's self-confidence and one's feeling that no one had a right to interfere with you and you did have a right to fight back if they did.
A right to not be raped does seem to me more logically fundamental than a right to equal pay, putting one's body before one's property. But it may make perfectly good practical sense to lobby harder for the latter, as a far more attainable and measurable goal. I don't think the suffragettes should have put eliminating the marital exemption before getting the vote, for instance. Abortion rights, however, seem to me to be both logically fundamental and economically urgent.
I don't think of rape as an issue specific to women
Date: 2015-01-14 01:11 am (UTC)I'm going to sit here now and contemplate my own history with lack of consent sex as a minor with other minors, my own history rebuffing (vigorously) an attempted purse snatching and think, once again, that when compared to my parents' disciplinary strategies, both pale. I sure didn't like getting slammed up against a wall by my soon to be ex-father-in-law. That bothered me for a really long time.
My martial arts experience is wildly unusual and was intentionally so, because I had observed a really high injury/dropout rate and wanted to avoid that. I don't know how useful self-defense/martial arts are for someone-one-knows, altho being comfortable pushing back when pressured sure helps, and martial arts can help develop that. It's very different than self-confidence per se -- it's more about boundaries, which was one of the things I liked about what McCaughey found in self-defense.
One thing we know from development work in nearly every time and place is that people of all ages and genders who bring in money are treated better in a household. Right there, I think, is my best argument for equal pay as more important than other approaches to stopping rape. It isn't perfect, of course. [ETA: Also, money coming in creates opportunities to leave, as well.]
I, of course, completely agree with you on meaningful reproductive choice being the First and Foremost of all feminist issues.
Re: I don't think of rape as an issue specific to women
Date: 2015-01-14 03:01 am (UTC)I suppose the basic value I'm defending here is bodily autonomy (hence sexual and reproductive choice, among other things), and while men and boys frequently have it taken from them as well, they aren't seen as lacking it by default.
Re: I don't think of rape as an issue specific to women
Date: 2015-01-14 03:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-14 12:29 am (UTC)nail polish vs defensive driving
Date: 2015-01-14 01:26 am (UTC)The nail polish seems like sort of the same thing, or perhaps along the lines of locking car doors, using The Claw, parking under a street light to reduce the likelihood of a breakin etc.
In my mind, the nail polish is along the lines of The Claw: worrisome more because I suspect it would fail me, more than because hey, I shouldn't have to worry about being roofied/my car being stolen.
I cannot help but think of my thwarted purse snatcher. I know I was where I should not be (3 a.m. in De Wallen in January, taking a young Aussie man around to see the "sights", because he felt weird going by himself), and I felt good that my training enabled me to retain my purse when someone attempted to take it when the Aussie foolishly stopped to take a closer look at some ... one. (Attacker apologized! The Aussie when pressed started moving again but it took him a few dozen yards to process what had just happened, at which point he sort of freaked out. I think he was having a lot of trouble because he kept getting distracted by the other guys walking past us or behind us muttering what kind of drugs they had on offer.) I wouldn't suggest that everyone else should have bothered taking martial arts, and I would for sure suggest that anyone taking a similar walk keep moving or maybe just go to bed like a normal person would.
I don't feel at all bad that I have these thoughts.
Re: nail polish vs defensive driving
Date: 2015-01-14 03:11 am (UTC)Re: nail polish vs defensive driving
Date: 2015-01-14 03:53 am (UTC)I'm trying to figure out the actual odds on the roofie risk. And what I am finding is truly bizarre. Apparently, the current ratio of drugged women to men is running 60-40 (!!!), and most of them are not being sexually assaulted afterwards. And the numbers are fucking insane.
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/what-you-might-not-know-about-getting-roofied.html
http://observer.com/2014/10/roofied-at-50-youre-never-too-old-for-date-rape-drugs/
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/health/healthcare/health/healthcare/hospitals/story/2011-11-11/Drugs-slipped-into-drinks-sending-many-to-ER/51166844/1
So you can pretty much pick a number: tens of thousands a year, a million a year, almost an even split between men and women. This is not about rape. This is about poisoning. And we appear to have a really serious problem.
ETA: Another product, a straw, to detect some drugs:
http://io9.com/a-straw-that-will-prevent-you-from-ever-being-roofied-1102993455
Invented by a _man_ (with help) who was drugged and didn't want it to happen again.
Re: nail polish vs defensive driving
Date: 2015-01-14 05:54 am (UTC)Re: nail polish vs defensive driving
Date: 2015-01-14 01:36 pm (UTC)