Author: Audrey

Audrey is a feminist philosopher, martial artist, logician, knitter, and beginning aerialist (in no particular order) happily living on a large Canadian island with a couple of wild dogs.
Guest Post · martial arts

Self Defense and Sexual Assault (Guest Post)

Audrey5 Comments

It probably goes without saying that this blog post contains potentially triggering discussions of sexual assault.

I was recently sent this article by my friend Tom. It has to do with Miss USA 2014, Nia Sanchez, who has a black belt in taekwondo, and the response she got when she was asked about the prevalence of campus rape. Miss Sanchez was heavily criticized for answering by talking about role that her martial arts training played in her life and the idea that this is something that more young women should have in their lives. The article defends her and makes several compelling points, but I admit that I’m conflicted.

I’m conflicted as someone who’s taught self-defense workshops (women only as well as co-ed), and who has a lot of martial arts experience. This is something I’m pretty good at. I’ve done over 25 years of taekwondo, several years each of wushu and capoeira, and about 4 years of high school wrestling, not to mention bits and pieces of other cross-training here and there. I’m not particularly big, but I’m definitely not delicate and I can use my weight pretty well. I can take a solid hit and keep fighting. These are all things I know about myself. If I’m out late at night, I walk with good posture and confidence, and stay aware of my surroundings. I know I can defend myself in a lot of situations.

I’ve still been raped. More than once.

The last time that it happened, the man told me that he couldn’t possibly have raped me – that is, I must have consented, because he couldn’t have successfully raped someone like me. Who can defend myself. Who can teach self-defense workshops. Who has surely got the physical skills to prevent herself from being raped. So regardless of whether or not I said no and clearly did not want what was happening, my black belt meant that I couldn’t be raped, because I would have been able to stop him had I put up serious physical resistance. That latter bit is most likely true, but does that really mean physically strong women are implicitly consenting when they’re not throwing elbows? Let’s hope not.

This happened when I was in my early 30s. The first time I was raped, I was 16. I got my black belt in taekwondo when I was 11. I have always been physically capable of defending myself. But I have, on several occasions, been emotionally incapable of defending myself against attacks from people I cared about. I don’t know that anything in martial arts prepared me for being abused by someone close to me.  Maybe my training should have given me more confidence in my everyday life to be able to walk away from that person earlier. But it didn’t. Or at least, it has never been something I have been willing to use seriously against people in my life, even to defend my own body. But the idea that all the things I learn at taekwondo should only be used in the dojang is something that has been drilled into me since I was 7. Of course we tell the kids that if they get attacked, they should defend themselves and escape – but our typical images of what counts as this kind of dangerous situation are pretty narrow in range, and tend to fall within the “dark alley” scenario.

And this is one of the great difficulties with self-defense and sexual assault. The stats show that crime TV is not the norm, that you’re more likely to be raped by someone you know, and that intimate partner violence is alive and well. And in this latter case, self-defense is only one tiny piece of the answer. You also have to be willing to use those physical skills against another human being who you have feelings for. And while you surely have the right to use those skills against someone who is attacking you, it’s honestly not always that simple. How many of us could really, honestly, punch someone we love in the face?

I don’t think there is a bottom line here, or a takeaway message besides the fact that sexual assault is complicated and varied, as is its relationship to self-defense. To be clear, I agree that women should know how to defend themselves. I agree that being fit, strong, and physically capable is a positive thing. I feel grateful for the martial arts training that makes me more confident walking downtown by myself at night. But this training did not stop me from getting assaulted. It did not give me the desire to escalate already bad situations into potentially worse fist fights, or risk physically injuring someone already in emotional pain, struggling with addiction, who I then deeply cared about.

As the writer of the article that prompted this post pointed out, there is no reason to expect one single correct answer to the problem of sexual assault. And one reason for this is that there is no one single story of sexual assault. I told mine because it complicates the role that self-defense plays. But one of the strengths of this blog generally, I think, is the way in which it fights against the single story. So I’ll end this post with a quote from a talk by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie:

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to  flatten my experience, and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single  story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but  that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

body image · fitness · Guest Post

Three Reasons Why My Dogs Are My Fitness Heroes (Guest Post)

Audrey4 Comments

two dogs on a rock overlooking a lake

I’ve mostly written posts on this blog about martial arts, one of the great influences in my life. So now I’m going to write about one of the other great influences in my life, namely my dogs. I currently live with a border collie, an Australian shepherd, and a boxer/doberman mix. And to indulge my additional love of lists, let me give you three reasons why these dogs are my fitness heroes.

3) They are motivated every day.

When you live with three healthy and active adult dogs, some form of outdoor physical activity is a non-negotiable part of the day. Taking a walk is just part of what you do. It’s admittedly not so fun when you’re sick or when the weather’s bad, and was pretty tricky when I was on crutches for a couple of months. But I really don’t often regret getting some fresh air and neither do they.

2) They exercise because they love it.

Sam has already blogged about dogs being intuitive exercisers. The reason why I love the way my dogs exercise is because they really don’t care about how many calories they’re burning, or which muscle groups they’re working. They exercise because they love to run around in the woods and play and chase things. And that matches my personal feelings about exercise, which is that it should ideally just be a consequence of doing things that you enjoy. I love kicking things, climbing rocks, and riding my bike to work, and I’m lucky that those things also help me stay in decent shape.

Another consequence of dogs’ exercising for the joy of it, is that they don’t feel as though they always need to work themselves to exhaustion to be satisfied. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever really tired out my border collie. (Though I’m also not sure whether it’s actually possible to tire out a border collie.) Regardless, he can still be happy and satisfied with a good hike even though he would surely be willing and able to do the entire thing all over again. Because they exercise for the joy of it, they don’t feel guilty (or even think) about whether they’ve worked hard enough.

1) They are unambiguously body-positive.

I came up with the idea for this post this morning when I was getting dressed and (as usual) poking at various parts of my body and inspecting them in the mirror to evaluate just how dissatisfied I ought to be with them. This part of my morning routine was (as usual) interrupted by my border collie nosing me in the leg, partly because he wanted me to hurry up and partly because he thought I should pet him instead. Both of these being eminently reasonable requests, I petted him, then hurried up. But it also occurred to me just how puzzled he must be by the fact that I delay our walk more or less every day by doing the same pointless thing.

I don’t know if you’ve had a dog. But if so, you know they love you no matter what you weigh or where you carry (or don’t carry) your body fat. Or how your hair, nose, or any other features look. In fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t even have a concept of human beauty ideals, much less the capacity to care about them. So really, dogs are more body-positive than pretty much any of us. But what we can at least take away from them is a concept of body-positivity that goes beyond “every body is beautiful.” This is a nice message, but sometimes I just want us to let go of this valuing of beauty altogether. That means instead of saying that we’re all beautiful, saying beauty doesn’t really matter. And some days I’d really like that. Instead of trying to come to terms with myself and convince myself I actually am beautiful, some days I’d rather just forget that the whole thing is even an issue. And that’s what I get when I hang out with my dogs.

So I’ll end this post with the message that I think my border collie was trying to send me this morning.

Wouldn’t you be happier if you took all that time you spend dwelling on your imperfections and just petted a dog instead?

Yeah. I thought so.

 

Audrey and a dog walking on a path

athletes · Guest Post · martial arts

Can the UFC handle a female Roy Nelson? Or is it all Rouseys? (Guest Post)

Audrey12 Comments

While plenty of other Canadians were obsessing over hockey this week, I was looking forward to UFC 170, in which as-yet-undefeated bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey would take on former Olympic wrestler Sara McMann. Those of you who care might already know that McMann didn’t manage to end Rousey’s domination of the division, though instead of ending the match with her signature arm bar, Rousey TKO’d McMann with a knee – admittedly with some controversy around whether or not the referee ended the match too early.

But that’s not what I want to talk about at the moment.

I want to talk about the future of women in the UFC. Fans might know that the UFC is planning on adding a female strawweight (115 lbs) division, in addition to the existing bantamweight (135lb) division. And I think that’s pretty great since it means more opportunity out there for female fighters. On the other hand, the cynic in me wonders what motivated the decision to add this division rather than another. I know they can’t do everything at once, but the issue of female athletes and weight is, well, complicated. While journalists don’t report the weights of many female athletes, it’s pretty much inevitable in MMA, or any other fighting sport. So could it be that the UFC is playing it safe by adding more female athletes who are likely to be conventionally good looking and, well, marketable?

I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know about the politics behind it all, and there are certainly plenty of talented strawweight fighters. But there has also been a thriving division of talented featherweight (145lb) fighters for quite some time. In fact, Cris “Cyborg” Justino has recently called out Rousey, and wants to drop divisions to fight her. Gina Carano used to fight in that division and is now making action movies. There’s no shortage of amazing women there who already have a fan base.

Maybe this has some selfish motivation, but I want to see some heavier women fighting. And by “heavier,” I mean “heavier than the current fighters,” since 145 lbs is not exactly heavy, and that was about the heaviest women’s MMA division I could find much media coverage for. The world is already saturated with images of super-thin women who can apparently kick anyone’s ass. (See: basically any action movie with a female central character) We need to see something else as well.

This might also be a good time to point out that even the super-sexy Rousey has to cut plenty of weight to fight as a bantamweight. Her Olympic Judo career was spent at 155 lbs. So let’s not even entertain the thought that there aren’t talented female fighters over 135 lbs. I’ve met plenty of great female heavyweight fighters in taekwondo.  I’m sure MMA has them as well. And, fine, I don’t deny that sexualizing the fighters could just be arguably a good way of getting more people to watch them fight. But anyone who watches fights knows that, while some fighters (male and female) have conventionally hot bodies, there’s not too much of a correlation between how hot you look and how you perform in the ring.

So how about it, UFC? How about some women at lightweight, welterweight, heavyweight? Let’s get a female version of one of my favourite unsexy and super-tough fighters, Roy “Big Country” Nelson. Let’s get women who are just there because they can fight. Fine, market them with the usual moderately manufactured controversies, but get them fighting. I definitely see a lack of women at the higher weight classes, and I don’t think this needs to be the case. So… lack of encouragement? Not wanting to compete in a sport where weight class is one of the defining features of a career? What’s the problem? I don’t believe for a minute that it’s aptitude.

Get it started, world. If you really believe that “strong is the new skinny,” then let’s give some strong women (who might not be all that skinny) their day in the ring. And female Roy Nelson – if you’re out there – I want to see you fight.

body image · family · Guest Post · martial arts

Your Kid is Not in the Wrong Weight Class (Guest Post)

Audrey6 Comments

I was inspired to write this post based on this article about why parents shouldn’t worry so much about their kids’ weight. I’m not a parent, but I do teach taekwondo to kids and have done so for a while. And in that realm a few things come into conflict with each other. I think martial arts are fabulous for kids, and more kids should do them.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with encouraging kids to try out martial arts competition, including sparring competition (and I have a personal soft spot for times when the sparring turns out like this). But just as with other combat sports like wrestling and boxing, taekwondo has weight classes.

In practical terms, that means that kids generally need to register for competition at a particular weight, and will have to weigh in before that competition. So it really is a good idea for someone, whether a parent or a coach, to keep track of a kid’s weight in order to know how to register them.

But it’s also part of the culture of these sports generally to want to be in the lowest weight class possible. Lots of athletes cut weight, much to the horror of, well, lots of people who want them to stay healthy.  It should be obvious that kids shouldn’t cut weight, and fortunately, these extremes aren’t foisted on junior competitors so often.

But still, even in recreational competition, the mentality of “lighter is better” is pervasive. This is not completely unjustified, since there are benefits to being taller and having more reach, as well as having the power that tends to go along with size. But I’m among those who are somewhat skeptical that it matters so much at the non-super-elite levels. And anyway, that’s not the point.

Now, I’ve worked at plenty of tournament weigh-ins. My former team would put on a tournament every spring that could easily get 500 competitors, the majority of whom were kids. I was always one of the people in charge of making the divisions by gender, age, belt level, and weight. So I was always right there when a kid did not weigh in at their registered weight and had to be moved to a higher weight class. And I dreaded it every single time. Not just because it was a bunch of extra administrative work for me, but because I never knew what the parents would say. Some of them were great.

They just apologized to me for the hassle and moved on. But some of them would give their poor kids hell for being too heavy. Making their kids, male and female, feel awful for not being the weight that they had written down a few weeks prior. It was heartbreaking. All I ever wanted to do in those cases was take those kids aside and tell them that they were fine, that there was nothing wrong with them, that the number didn’t really mean anything except maybe what time their first match would be. I know some of those parents were monitoring their kids weights like crazy. And fostering the mindset that pounds gained were bad. Never mind that kids are supposed to gain weight. I mean, that whole growing thing.

I recognize that monitoring these kids’ weights is necessary to some extent. And I’ve talked about the practical reasons why, because I think that kids should be able to compete in sports that have different weight classes. But their weight does not have to have an evaluative component to it. Why should we teach kids, especially at such an early age, that the number on a scale measures how well they’re doing at anything? They’ll get that message enough in their lives from the mass media. Let’s try to make their participation in sports a way for them to feel good about what their bodies can do, not another way for them to feel as though they don’t measure up.

body image · Guest Post

Wow, You Must Work Out! (Guest Post)

Audrey16 Comments

yap“You look fine, just don’t let your arms get any bigger.”

I’ve spent way too much of my life living with the irrational fear that, left unchecked, my biceps would expand uncontrollably, maybe eventually taking over my entire body. I have lived in fear of sleeveless shirts, favoring loose-armed men’s T-shirts over anything like a girly tee. And don’t even get me started on cap sleeves.

Why the bicep-phobia?

I wish I could point to just one thing. After all, I do have a body type that tends to put on muscle. But I also started gymnastics, and then martial arts at a very young age, and do not come from a particularly athletic family. And let’s face it, being proper just never came naturally to some of us, much to (some of) our family’s consternation. So the fact that I was starting to look athletic growing up was not helping. And so that was the kind of thing that would be said to me. Just don’t let your arms get any bigger. It’s ok to be strong, just don’t get too big and unladylike. Well, I’m sorry. That’s just how I look when I’m strong.

Fast forward to several years of martial arts (wrestling, taekwondo, wushu) competition. And then rock climbing. Guys sometimes look at, or worse, feel, my arms and say, things like, “wow, your arms are bigger than mine!” Or just that they’re huge. I’ve been told I look like someone you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley. And I’ve gotten upset. And been told that I should just take it all as a compliment. Because that’s how it was intended. And not to be so sensitive.

So what’s wrong with that?

I think there are two problems. The first is that popular culture (also see: fitspiration) has left people without a realistic idea of what athletic women look like. Worse yet, with the idea that there is just one way we look. But when we’re conditioned to believe that the result of ordinary exercise is always the super-thin model, perhaps with visible abs, we think that any athletic-looking woman deviating from that norm has made a concerted effort to do so. If you work out all the time and don’t look like a fitspo poster, that must be because it’s your choice, after all. Right? Oh, wait.

The second problem is more complicated, at least for me. I want to be in a position where I am happy enough with my appearance to take any relatively accurate well-intentioned comment on it as a compliment. But I’m not. I’m still a product of our ridiculous sexist, sizeist culture, and no matter how much I think other strong-looking women look hot, I can’t quite apply that standard to myself. At least not yet. But really, I don’t think other people should get to dictate what I should want to look like. You’d like bigger arms? Great. Maybe I wouldn’t. You’d like to be thinner? Great. Maybe I’m trying to gain weight.

I mean, this is hard for me, because the standard people are trying to hold me to is one that I would like to have already adopted for myself. But I just haven’t been able to do that yet. So there’s a double judgment tied up in all of this, because not only do I hear an insult, I also hear the fact that I am still sizeist. And both of those things hurt.

So what’s a friend to do? I mean, you’ve got this athletic person in your life, and you want to tell her she looks great, but now I’ve made it all difficult, because you don’t know if you should tell her she’s skinny, or strong, or healthy, or what? How do you know what she wants to hear? Well. Maybe you could just tell her she looks great. Or maybe this time you shouldn’t compliment her on her looks at all.

Some women exercise to look good. Lots of us also exercise because there’s something we love doing that requires us to move our bodies in ways that exert a bunch of energy. So maybe you should compliment her on whatever that thing is. Maybe you could tell her how great it was she did that bike race. Or that she climbed that route really well. Or ask how her soccer team’s been doing. How about that? My body got this way because of the way I live in it. And I think all in all, I’d rather be complimented on what I’ve done with it, than on how those actions have made it look.

 

athletes · competition · Guest Post

Rousey and Carmouche in the UFC: Can we bring un-sexy back? (Guest post)

Audrey6 Comments

“Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else (and it hasn’t), it’s that girls should stick to girls’ sports like hot oil wrestling, and foxy boxing, and such and such…” — Homer Simpson

Many many thanks to Sam and Tracy for giving me the chance to guest post on their blog, and to the always articulate Homer Simpson for starting me off talking about women and combat sports. When Sam asked me if I’d be interested in writing something, I’d just caught up on my fight-watching with UFC 157, the first time women had been the title match-up: Ronda Rousey vs. Liz Carmouche. Now, most of my familiarity with women’s combat sports has been as a competitor rather than a spectator: taekwondo as a kid, and then again in graduate school, and wrestling in high school. So I hadn’t really been following the competitors’ careers before that point, though I did know Rousey was a former Olympic medalist in judo. And to be honest, I wasn’t really sure how it would all play out for the TV audiences.  But what made me optimistic from the start was that their title fight would be run using the same rules as the mens’ fights, with 5 rounds of 5 minutes each (and let me assure you that this is a VERY long time to be fighting).

But let’s back up a minute, so I can tell you what made me apprehensive in the first place.

First of all, it’s the UFC, where there are very few women, except as ring girls. Those are the girls who walk around the ring in bikinis between rounds with a number card so you know what round number we’re on. And the title holder Rousey herself has a pretty sexy image. I just didn’t want this title match to be played as, well, foxy boxing. Most men in the UFC, with the notable exception of Georges St-Pierre, don’t have much of a sexy image. And most of us couldn’t care less.

Because let me tell you, images of hair-pulling and shredded clothing aside, fighting isn’t all that sexy. And that’s not me telling you that violence isn’t sexy, or anything of the kind. I’ve just fought enough matches (and seen photos of myself doing so) to come to the conclusion that you generally don’t look all that great when you fight. Your hair’s a mess, you’re covered in sweat (not all of which is your own), and you’re probably bruising up already. And if you’ve got a solid opponent, looking hot should be pretty low on your list of priorities.

Watching Rousey and Carmouche in the ring did not disappoint. It was a good fight with two obviously skilled competitors.  The referees and announcers took them seriously. There were obvious mentions of this being the first women’s title fight, but nobody I heard said they looked hot in the ring, nobody said they fought well – for girls, that is, and from what I could see, everyone gave them the respect they were due.

Carmouche and Rousey

So I’m hopeful. UFC is a sport that people watch. The exciting thing isn’t knowing who got submitted and how fast, but it’s seeing them do it.  Lots of people endorse seeing skilled women in the ring. I want that too. But I also want to see them looking sweaty, exhausted, and in pain, like real fighters do. It’s our right to look as bad as we want when we’re busy kicking butt. So come on, UFC. Let’s help bring un-sexy back to women’s sports. Please?

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Audrey is a logician, feminist, martial artist, and rock climber (in no particular order) happily living on a large Canadian island with her boyfriend and their pack of wild dogs.