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Be the Problem

April 30, 2019/0 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“What did you do today to prevent being sexually assaulted?”

Jackson Katz, a social researcher, asked the men in the room that question; they laughed. Then he asked the women.

The data is telling: Women live in a very different world than men, and, on balance, already know the preventative measures. They think about them every day, and constantly make decisions and alter their behavior to avoid putting themselves in vulnerable situations.

I’ve learned so much about this from the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife. Seemingly minor details like how her car only unlocks the driver’s door when she thumbs the key fob — something I found annoying as a passenger, having to wait while she opened her door, got in, and then unlocked the rest of the car — annoying, that is, until she told me why. With that shift in perspective it not only made sense — it was necessary.

This is why when I was asked to put together a video series of “10 tips for women to keep themselves safe,” I demurred. Women already know how to keep themselves safe. What’s missing is what to do when all those measures fail, and the situation goes physical.

We live in a society where women are not truly encouraged or supported in going hands-on physical for debilitating injury — oh, we pay lip service to it, *wink-winking* the whole time while death row inmates laugh at the resulting training. And so women are given weak-sauce options (“women’s self-defense”) based on socially-acceptable sporting frameworks put together by men who have no understanding of the real issues (i.e., not in touch with their inner psychopaths, so the solutions tend to be more social than operational). Everyone should be suspicious of any physical training for women that a man would not also find useful.

What’s lacking is verifiable, gender-agnostic information on how to put hands on someone so they can’t continue. I can recount as many situations as you’d like where something as simple as knowing how to take an eye would have prevented a murder. (See also: true crime TV shows.) These stories affect me deeply, because many times the outcome was entirely avoidable with the smallest bit of actionable information. The last three people who used what we do were women who found themselves over the event horizon of the physical — the place where prevention and social interaction cease to make a difference — so they doled out broken legs, crushed groins, unconsciousness, and gouged eyes instead. This is why we do what we do.

The real difference for women is in the profiles they’ll face — primarily being grabbed in an attempt to overpower them. But the solutions to those issues are found in injury, not in gender-specific moves. We trained the women mentioned above the same way we train military and law enforcement, the same way we train men. The same way we train everyone with a brain, a skeleton, and mass. In the realm of physics and physiology, minor differences in plumbing don’t affect the outcome.

So instead of telling women what they already know — and practice daily — I thought about what I, as a male hand-to-hand combat instructor, could offer as advice. After double-checking with the women in my life — those who train with us, female instructors, my wife — we agreed on these stair-stepped concepts:

• Do all the preventative things you already know how to do — but when that fails you must ATTACK & INJURE. Escape will occur as a side effect to you hurting him so he can’t continue!

• Your survival is up to you — and you alone. You can’t rely on others to save you. But you can do this. Don’t have a problem — be the problem!

• It’s not strength-to-strength — it’s effort-to-vulnerability. (Eyes-throat-groin & knowing what’s required to crush them.) A finger in the eye can change everything!

If just one woman sticks her finger in an eye instead of struggling to get away or, worse, doing nothing because she doesn’t think there’s anything she can do, then all our efforts as a training community are worth it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s Different for Me: A Woman’s Perspective on Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

June 8, 2018/1 Comment/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Note: The following was sent to us by a female client who wanted to share this on our blog, but wishes to remain anonymous.

~~~

People who don’t know me well would never imagine that I know anything about or have any interest in hand-to-hand combat training and I like it that way. It isn’t comfortable social conversation to talk about what that really means and I don’t want to defend what I know, why I know it, and what that means for me. People take a step back and wonder about you when you admit, with conviction, that yes, you would jab your thumb into someone’s eye socket or stomp their knee to render their leg useless if necessary. If it is their life or mine, I will always choose mine.

I have trained with men—big men, who far out-muscle and out-weigh me. I have been fortunate that they are some of the best trained instructors in the world and they care about my safety and well-being. They train hard and when they pin me against a wall with their hands on my throat or grab me in a bear hug and lift me off my feet, they will not release me just because I tried. They will let me go only if I hit my targets and they are forced to let me go by the laws of physics and human anatomy.

During training you move slow, slower than a violent confrontation would be if this were real. I know it is to keep everyone safe and to pay attention to targets, but for me there is another reason for going slow—to connect with the fear. When a man who is taller than you by at least a foot, with biceps as big as your thighs, pins you against the wall, hands on your throat, make no mistake about it, there is fear. I must drink in that fear—I need to feel it and pay attention to it. I have known my instructor for years and I trust him, so my feelings of fear are less pronounced than they would be in a violent situation with a stranger; therefore, in training I must tap into that fear, feel it, focus on it, and pay attention to how my body and mind respond in a fear state. It is a gift to be allowed to train slow, to be able to pay attention to your physiological responses to fear, and to figure out how to stay focused on targets. I have learned what it feels like to stay focused on targets that cause injury to another human being when I am pinned against a wall with hands around my throat, my heart racing, and my mind consumed by the need to survive.

Early in my training I had not yet learned the value of paying attention to how my brain and body respond to fear. None of my instructors talked about it and I did not admit that I felt fear—we were only training after all, what was there to be afraid of? I honestly do not know if my instructors didn’t talk about paying attention to your fear response because they didn’t experience it during training or if it is one of the subtle nuances of training that you don’t realize is valuable until someone points it out to you. I still vividly remember learning this lesson. It was early in my training and I was doubting my abilities. I decided that to build my confidence I needed to put myself into a situation where I knew my fear response would be triggered, so I asked my training partner to sit on my chest and pin my hands to the ground. It was at that moment that I learned not only to pay attention to how my mind and body reacts in a fear state, but I learned an entirely new lesson—the dramatic increase in the intensity of both my fear and other emotions that are triggered when violence and intimacy intersect.

The intensity of the fear response at the intersection of violence and sexuality is an aspect of training that I believe may be unique to women or at least much more prevalent for women. It is not something my instructors ever talked to me about, and honestly I am not sure that I would have welcomed the discussion because it is deeply personal and difficult to express. Prior to training I did not engage in any co-ed contact sports that required close physical contact with men. However, during training there are times when I find myself in positions with my training partner that I had previously only experienced in non-violent, consensual, intimate relationships. It is in these moments during training that my brain will sometimes trigger the recognition of the potential for a situation to be sexual and because I am a socialized and decent person who respects her training partner, my first response is to ignore those thoughts. However, I believe for women to get the most out of their training they need to tune in to these moments when they occur and place them squarely in the context of violence. Women must seize these moments and become fully present in their thoughts, feelings, and physiological responses associated with sexual violence so that they can understand how their mind and body might respond in similar situations outside of training. I will admit tuning into these moments during training is a terrible feeling wrought with intense emotion and a feeling I would much rather avoid all together, but I know I am not taking full advantage of my training if I ignore these moments and turn away.

Our male training partners and instructors need to know how valuable these moments are for us. These situations provide us with valuable opportunities to push back on a lifetime of teaching that reminds women and girls that we are vulnerable to violent confrontations in everyday activities like jogging along a path or walking through a parking lot. To further compound this narrative, historically women in our society have not been trained to respond to violence with effective techniques using our own bodies as weapons. Instead we are reminded frequently through media and social stories that we are not capable of effective response to violence and that in order to be effective we need to use devices that someone, somewhere thought would help us feel safer such as carrying a whistle or mace. However, these tools and devices so often pitched to women promote the narrative that women are not capable of inflicting debilitating injury on attackers who are bigger and stronger than they are, but effective training changes all that. After all, a crushed windpipe from a knee drop to the throat is still a crushed windpipe no matter who delivers it.

It has been several years now since I first learned the value of leaning into my fears and walking along that dark edge of intimacy and violence. I think it is one of the most important aspects of training for woman. The sessions on grabs, holds and chokes can really surface these fears and emotions, and for women who are rape survivors the intensity of the response to this aspect of training is even more pronounced because of their ties to a history of sexual violence. Over the years I have also watched and listened as the instructors have learned more about this aspect of training and how it is experienced by their female students. I am impressed by the compassion the instructors show in these moments as they continue to teach, but lean into the fears and emotions of their female students and encourage them to pay attention to their emotional and physiological response while also channeling their energy and strength to continue fighting. It has truly been a gift to be trained by and to watch these instructors. They are fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands and they care for their students like family and give generously of their time to ensure that every student succeeds. In all of my training I have always felt that my instructors believed in my ability to deliver a crippling injury to an attacker and that my knowledge of effective techniques was the most important tool they could give me for my own safety. They train me with a level of intensity that communicates to me that my life depends on it because the reality is that someday it might.

— Anonymous

Mama Said Knock You Out: Women in Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

May 10, 2018/6 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

When a bullet enters an eye, there’s nothing in that interaction that is affected by the gender of the person who pulled the trigger. The universe doesn’t stop and check to see if it was a man or a woman before allowing the chunk of metal to tear through soft tissue — the only question in the cold equations is “Does the energy exceed the tissue’s ability to deform without disruption?” Will it bounce, or stick?

Likewise, the question of gender doesn’t matter to the newly blind person, and the first responders dealing with the casualty don’t care about the chromosomal makeup of the shooter. Gender has no bearing on the energy interaction event — either there was enough “oomph” to wreck anatomy, or there wasn’t.

The truth about violence is that people are machines that can be broken and shut off, and the person reflected in the patterns of head-meat is inconsequential in the face of raw physics. In other words, if you engage with the person you’re in a fight for your life; if you engage with the single square inch of anatomy it’s just about delivering a beating.

Don’t mistake the ability to deliver a beating with the ability to take a beating, or to overpower someone — which is what we think of when we think of “fighting.” The poisonous idea that violence is about going toe-to-toe and trading blows in a contest of durability and strength — like rams butting heads — reinforces the belief it’s something women can’t do, or at least that they need special classes, tailored to their gender, in order to have any hope for survival.

While a big, strong man can “take a beating” (endure non-specific trauma) it’s a different story with a ruptured eyeball. Or a collapsed airway. Or a knee folded backwards. The average adult female weighs more than enough to do all of that work — the universe only cares if the burst rating of the anatomy in question was exceeded or not. If the cold equations math out, it’s broke.

We don’t differentiate between genders in this work because gender has no impact on the raw physics. A finger in the eye is a finger in the eye, chromosomal makeup or identity notwithstanding.

As of this writing, the last two people who had to use this information were female; both were in life-or-death situations, and both handled it with specifically applied blunt force trauma — two injuries each to achieve nonfunctional states — and both walked away as the winners. They weren’t bigger, faster or stronger than the men they put down — they just knew where to apply the forces they were capable of generating. They didn’t waste any time or effort on trying to defend themselves or “fight for their lives.” They just hurt people — the very definition of “dangerous.”

One of the things I’ve learned in my 28 years of teaching is that while the men we train have to navigate the stupid dance of intermale aggression, it’s the women, on balance, who end up having to use violence for survival. Women know truths about our society that men can barely intuit (often being the unwitting perpetrators of inequality, if not outright predators themselves) and so women show up for training with a much more sober outlook on what’s at stake. They know it’s not a game, and that they can’t afford to screw it up — this makes them get better, faster than their male counterparts, something many men find frustrating, especially in a husband and wife team where the wife is doing far better than the husband at this thing that is ostensibly the epitome of manliness. The best thing for everyone in this situation is to drop the social stuff and focus on the mechanics where we all meet in the middle.

At our most recent weekend seminar I had two participants thank me, one right after the other, notable because of the social distance that separated them: the first, a man, a former police officer who had just returned from a decade of contract work in the Middle East (precisely the kind of person one would expect to find at a course like ours); the second, a woman, a brave survivor of some truly harrowing violent experiences. Both reported that they got a lot out of the course and appreciated it a great deal, something that didn’t surprise me as they were both well-versed in the realities of violence before they set foot on the mats. Upon later reflection it occurred to me that what made this significant was that they both took the same course, at the same time. We didn’t alter the course for their assumed social and gender roles — it wasn’t “women’s self-defense” or “manly combatives” — it was applied physics and physiology, the use of violence as a survival tool, the place where all of us, as vulnerable meat machines, are rendered starkly equal.

This is why women who train with us report that while they may have been initially reluctant to hit the mats (our lack of sugarcoating repels everyone), once they realized it was just physics and physiology — stuff that’s always on and available to everyone — they wanted more. I’ve seen the most unlikely people — people who would never in their wildest dreams imagine themselves in a “hardcore” hand-to-hand combat course — engage calmly and coolly in the ancient work of pure survival, pressing a head to the mats to slot a knife into the carotid, for example. And so someone who showed up because they were afraid of what might happen to them is too busy doing to remember that initiating fear. What was once terrifying is now a tool held firmly in the fist.

While there are things we could do to make the course more appealing to women (and men, for that matter), that would require wasting time talking about things that just don’t matter. Our lack of pandering isn’t about making everyone “tough it out” equally, but about the fact that the social stuff we think about all day, every day, just doesn’t matter when the skeleton, driven by mass in motion, penetrates the eye socket. We don’t care about societal norms and minor differences in plumbing because the cold equations don’t care, either.

Here’s what our female instructors and the women we’ve trained want you to know: regardless of what the world tells you, if you want to do this, you can.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: women

Be the Problem

It’s Different for Me: A Woman’s Perspective on Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

Mama Said Knock You Out: Women in Hand-to-Hand Combat Training

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