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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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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.