So, the We Have Brains topic this week is about self-defense. I kind of hate to answer this one, because I feel like it's one of those places where my feminist bark is a lot bigger than my bite. I really think that it's important for women to be physically strong--not because having tight abs will make you look more like Christy Turlington, but because having strong arms will help you carry things, and beat off attackers, and live longer. (Natalie Angier's book Woman: An Intimate Geography has a lot of good stuff to say about this.) But I don't go to the gym with anything like regularity (partly because I'm intimidated by those sorority-girl, Christy Turlington look-alikes), and I've never taken a self-defense class. This is bad. I am not a big person, and I would definitely be in need of some skills if anyone ever decided to attack me.
In my own defense (heh), I am not a complete idiot. I'm really aware of my surroundings, especially here in New Orleans, which is just about as dangerous as it gets, per capita. When I walk the bad, bad dog at night, I carry mace, and I have it all cocked and ready to go. But in the end, I wonder how much good that would really do. And I'm certainly not going to get a gun.
I'm lucky I haven't been attacked so far. I have friends who have--according the statistics, pretty much everyone does. And for those friends, I'm not sure a self-defense class would have helped. I think there's always a danger here of blaming the victim--if only she'd known karate, had used the buddy system, hadn't been wearing such a sexy blouse. I think that protecting other women, looking out for each other and for ourselves, is great, and important. But even more important (though harder to control) is changing a culture where rape is considered par for the course, and where men even write a badly-researched, badly-written (but best-selling) book on how men biologically HAVE to rape women. They're just so horny, you know?
And, just because I sort of seem to have become the resident extremist at We Have Brains, I'll go ahead and say that I think there are times when battered women kill in self-defense, and they shouldn't be punished. Domestic violence is more prevalent than you think (the New Orleans weekly The Gambit just did a great three-part series on this), and it's often really hard to get out. The police aren't necessarily on your side, especially if you are, for instance, a poor black woman living in New Orleans. Preserving the sacred vows of marriage is, lest we forget, one of the main goals of the W. presidency, and they'll go to some lengths to keep a woman from leaving, especially if there are children involved.
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