robinturner | More self-defence stuff

[entry started yesterday before a power cut wiped it out and destroyed KDE in the process]

I've now got through the theoretical stuff in McCaughey and my patience has been rewarded with descriptions of actual self-defence classes. She deals with four types: padded-attacker courses, martial arts-based courses, firearms training and self-defence-oriented fitness courses (aerobox etc.). The second two didn't interest me, but the first two provided some interesting insights. I have no experience of padded attacker courses (one of which goes by the inane name "Model Mugging", which to me implies either training in mugging models or a mugging which is so perfect it can be held up as a model). The idea is that students practice self-defence techniques on an assailant who is so heavily padded up that they can use full force without seriously hurting him. This sounds cool, though I don't know where I can get that kind of padding here (I could manage to find some taekwondo gear, but this is much more serious custom-made stuff).

What interested me was that it was the padded-attacker courses that produced the most emotional turmoil. I don't know whether this was because those courses put more emphasis on working through emotional issues, or whether just being able to let rip on someone brings up a lot of emotional baggage (after all, for most of the women in the course, it's the first time they're given permission to hit someone). It's certainly very different from my own martial arts experience, where you concentrate on staying calm and controlling your actions (apart from the philosophical side of it, if people weren't calm and controlled, there would be fatalities).

While I think the padded-attacker idea is a good thing to introduce from time to time, I still tend towards the martial arts approach (which is hardly surprising considering my background). Although a self-defence course is very different from a martial arts course (no point in teaching spin-kicks, for example) I think that the mystique (for lack of a better word) of martial arts has its uses. What it does is to bypass the violater-victim scenario and turn a scary attack into a tactical situation where you concentrate on what techniques will work. I'm aware that I need to deal with some of the psychological aspects of self-defence, but I'm not sure how useful it would be to go into them in depth. McCaughy describes women on the Model Muggers course crying and even rolling into foetal positions, but I'm not sure how valid it is for people whose qualifications are in fighting rather than psychotherapy to induce those kinds of reactions. While I know I have to be prepared to deal with extreme emotional reactions, I would go to some pains to avoid the risk of their occurring. For this reason, although we obviously considered attempted rape when planning the techniques we were going to teach, we never mentioned it in class - we encouraged students to think in terms of fighting (actually, McCaughy makes a very good point that a major difference between male-male and male-female violence is that the former is seen as a fight, while the latter is seen as a violation, with the assumption that the female body is inherently violable).

Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm worrying my pretty head about this, given that the course is a long way off and may not even happen at all, especially given that the teacher who organised it has left and the guy I did it with has a very heavy (academic) teaching schedule this year and is finding hard even to turn up to hapkido classes. I suspect my interest is due to deeper personal issues. I find it very hard to live in a world where the strong oppress the weak, and I suspect that my interest in martial arts comes from that - in fact my interest was always less in self-defence than in other-defence. One reason why I would not hesitate to rush to the aid of a damsel in distress is my British gentleman conditioning, but I suspect another reason is that it would be a way to numb the pain of existence in an unjust world, giving the opportunity to succeed gloriously or die a meaningful death ("Today is a good day to die" and all that). Co-incidentally, tonight's episode of Angel was al about that.