Women VS Men: difference in self-defense approach

Are men and women all that different? Do they defend themselves differently? Should they be taught differently? If so, why and how? Should they be taught by a man or a woman? Age old questions. If you are teaching or planning to teach women self-defense, or if you are planning on attending such a class, do yourself a favor and read on. It’s a bit long but definitely worth your while.

I have been blessed with a male instructor possessing an incredibly open mind. He was willing to put himself in someone else shoes, even though he has never been a small woman before. Because something worked for him as a big tough guy, he did not assume it will work for someone else, smaller, weaker, with a different mindset. He was not going to try to fit a square peg in a round hole. I learned much from him, and I think him from me as well.

Still this has become a fixation for me to find out why and how we are different, and the best way to adapt and work with what I have. I attend classes that are very male dominated and I can see how different our responses are. Sometimes it gets frustrating to not be able to react the same way, they do. It looks so simple after all. The biggest hurdles I personally have encountered are: the fear of being overpowered and not reacting in a timely fashion, and showing too much compassion.

Is it physical, mental, emotional, genetic??

First of all, here are some of the physical differences I have found:

·              Men are over 30% stronger than women, specifically in the upper body. A woman who is the same size and same age as her male counterpart is generally only 80 percent as strong.

·              Differences in intake and delivery of oxygen translate into some aspects of performance: when a man is jogging at about 50% of his capacity, a woman will need to work at over 70% of her capacity to keep up with him. Age difference will alter those numbers.

·              Women's blood contains more water (20 percent fewer red cells). Since red cells supply oxygen to the body, she tires more easily and is more prone to faint.

·              Female lung capacity is about 30 percent less than in males

·              Females have better connectivity between the two hemispheres of the brain. Females are also able to transfer information between the hemispheres at a higher rate than males.

·              Men have better distance vision and depth perception, and usually better vision in lighted environments. Women have better night vision

·              The center of gravity is slightly lower in women than in men because women tend to be proportionally larger in the pelvis and smaller in the shoulders.

·              Men and women throw and punch differently. Women throw with their arms, a movement that looks like they're tossing darts, while men use their entire bodies, rotating their hips and shoulders separately. Women can’t generate equal power and velocity, because they rotate their bodies in one piece. 

·              So this basically means that pound for pound, men will have the advantage in speed, strength and power.

Here are some other differences (emotional, mental)

·              Men typically have stronger spatial abilities, or being able to mentally represent a shape and its dynamics, whereas women typically struggle in this area

·              Men love to generate solutions.  Women enjoy sharing the exploration of relevant concerns. 

·              Men and women perceive the world differently. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations. Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles.

·              Men tend to respond to heavy frustration with anger while women’s first response might be tears.

·              Women are better able to call upon both hemispheres and assess a situation correctly and quickly without knowing how or why they arrived at their assessment. Men can make the same assessments, but it takes them longer.  However, their assessment is explainable, logical, and can be traced step-by-step to its logical conclusion.

·              Men and women response to stress and adrenaline release is different. Men spike faster, have a short plateau and come down fairly rapidly. Women will take a longer period of time to spike and will plateau much longer than men. In short, it takes women longer to get mad but they stay mad much longer. Here is a typical example: husband comes home and notices some shopping bags still unpacked. Since they were supposed to be saving every penny for a new car, he gets upset. He may start screaming about his wife lack of discipline and why she has to spend all this money. He never bothered to ask, he just assumed. She bought birthday presents for his mother that he had asked her to get last week.  She can’t believe he forgot. She can’t believe he is yelling at her for it. She is trying to explain it to him but can’t get a word in over his yelling. By now she is starting to get upset that he did not trust her. She clams up. He slams the door and leaves to go for a walk. During his walk he calms down and comes home 10 minutes later to apologize. By then she is furious and screaming at him. Two hours later she is still furious at him. She is thinking about returning the presents and let him look foolish in front of his mother. Oh don’t let it fool you, she is planning something. Sounds familiar to any of you?  They both have a different adrenalization curve. We start at the same point and we end up at the same point but take different paths to get there.

                                                    

And this shows that men and women inherently think and act differently. Even if we come up to the same conclusions, we got there through different methods. Men and women think, act and solve problems differently.

We first need to know and understand the differences before we can come up with an answer on how to make the proper adjustments.

Men tend to have a "fight or flight" response to stress situations while women seem to approach these situations with a "tend and befriend" strategy. This is attributed to years of the males being the provider, the hunter, while the females were the gatherers, the ones who took care of the family. There is a physical explanation to this which makes more sense to me. Under stress the body will produce specific hormones. Three of them play a crucial role: cortisol, epinephrine, and oxytocin. Men will produce a much smaller amount of oxytocin than women. And even if the amount of oxytocin were the same in both gender, the oxytocin mixed with estrogen (predominant in females) increases greatly its effects.  Oxytocin is a hormone released by the pituitary gland (notably during orgasm, childbirth and stress) – it is known to affect our behavior (referred to as the “love hormone”). It stimulates the uterus to contract during child birth and promotes lactation; this is why it is so important for women. It also promotes bonding, typically between mother and child. It further encourages comforting, re-assuring, be-friending, love, touching, affection, all emotions a mother needs to have toward her child, and a wife toward her husband. Tending involves nurturing activities designed to protect the self and offspring that promote safety and reduce distress; befriending is the creation and maintenance of social networks that may aid in this process. We are social beings; we are designed to function in groups to survive. Women have been conditioned through the years to think that they need a man’s strength to be able to survive. This is where be-friending comes in handy.  Making allies if you will.

In the male, oxytocin also produces bonding but it is countered with testosterone and vasopressin, which promotes aggression, territorial competition and dominance with other males. Thus the “fight and flight” more than the “tend and be-friend”. This explains why through the years, females have been the nucleus of the family while the man is the head and protector of the said family.

But for all its positive benefits, high oxytocin level inhibits cognitive ability by impairing learning and memory, which is not a good place for a female to be in when she is facing a life and death situation. But the impairing of the memory comes in handy after childbirth when the mother first hold her child and has already totally forgotten all the pain she suffered to bring it in to the world.

The physical effects of those hormones are why a woman will do nothing to protect herself from a rapist because she is afraid to insult him (read Betrayed by an Angel by Debra Anne Davis). The oxytocin having kicked in, we feel the need to take care of this person, to bond with him in some way; surely he needs to be comforted, re-assured. And it would not be very comforting of us to be rude to him, to hurt him. The hormonal release also hinders our rational thinking.

But the same woman will tear you to shred if you try to attack her child, the bond she has with her child is stronger than her personal feelings or safety. The oxytocin released will create a state of mind that is used to protect her child, her loved ones, not herself. The same hormonal release when geared toward her is supposed to bring bonding, love, and closeness. The main reason for the difference is that when violence is threatened against her child, the threat has suddenly become a member of a different “tribe”, he is not a human being in our eyes anymore. He is an animal trying to hurt someone you love. It is easy to hunt and take down a different specie. Compassion will prevent us from doing so to someone we see as belonging to the same group as we do, sort of a family member if you will. Remember how women make moral judgments through subjective feelings?

The effects of the oxytocin also explain why women under stress plateau slower than men.

The question is how to get a woman to switch from a sheep to a tigress, at the right time. How do you overcome the power of hormones and years of conditioned response..

I loved watching the TV show by Joss Wheadon, “Dollhouse”. Great show, so it was of course canceled. During one of the episode ( Man on the Street), the bad guys had planted hypnotized sleeper agents. Those agents were normal people, having day to day normal relationships. When the organization needed them to commit an assassination, they would call the agent and tell them a simple phrase “There are three flowers in a vase, the third one is green”. The agent would then instantly turn into a lethal killing machine. To return them to their sleeper state they would simply tell them “There are three flowers in a vase, the third one is yellow.” Brilliant!  This is what women need, to be able to turn on their killer instinct that quickly when the need arises. But how does one achieve this? We are fighting powerful hormones to actually prevent us to do so. The “tending” part only happens when we are protecting our children, our loved ones.

Here is my theory on some different options on how to achieve this, most of them have been tested through trials and errors:

1.           Women need to have enough training under stress so they can reach a point where the stress level does not affect them nearly as much, a point where they can overcome the freeze. Just think about the first time you tried something new and scary, could be as simple as the first time you tried riding a bike without training wheels. You were nervous, shaking, sweating, your heart rate was up… basically you were going into adrenaline dump. The more you got use to it, the less stressful it became. Now you could do it in your sleep. I don’t know if I can ever become accustomed to violent confrontations or if I even want to, but I can become accustomed to dealing with stressful situations. The more you are used to or comfortable with a situation, the less hormones your body will need to release to get you through it. It is hard to fight hormones but you can try preventing them from being released.

Having a martial art background, this is something I noticed early on. I might have been very proficient at doing a specific technique but when formal testing time came around, I would freeze, forget everything. My current instructor changed my views on this. If I can’t perform a technique to save my life during a test, where I am amongst friends that care about me, what am I going to do out in the world against someone who does not care about my welfare. Good point. So training under the stress of pleasing my instructor became just as valuable as being put on my arse if I am doing things wrong. Doing live scenarios has also been a huge help as well. Let me re-phrase this, doing scenarios WELL have been  a huge help.

2.           Women can learn a new trigger response to the hormonal release. When you feel the adrenaline dump happening, if the other person causing that dump does not have an intimate relationship with you (spouse, child, close friend, parent), you need to hear in your head “Three flowers in a vase, the third one is green” and react appropriately. This is done by good conditioning. This is just an example. You need to develop a trigger that makes sense for you and that you will be able to use to achieve similar results. A trigger that gives you permission to cause damage to another person when the need arises.

3.           Find a “go to” response/technique (I do not like using the word technique because you can never be married to a technique but you can adopt a basic common sense approach that is principle based). It has to be something that you feel comfortable doing, something that works for the majority of situations needing hands on self-defense. Drill that response until it becomes second nature. Practice makes permanent.

4.           Since protecting a child will trigger our killer instincts, another option would be to imagine a child is strapped in a pack on our back when we have to deal with stressful situation. Thus it all becomes about getting our baby out of there safely. The mama bear will show her claws. Visualization is a very powerful tool. But again you have to adapt what works for you.

5.           Since testosterone makes a big difference on how men and women acts and reacts, there are ways to boost the production of testosterone in women

·         Add more quality protein to your diet

·         Add more good quality fats to your diet

·         Workout on a regular basis: strength training, especially compound exercises (movements that require more than 1 joint and more than 1 muscle group) are a must. The more the muscle mass, the more the production of testosterone.

·         Sprinting and interval training have shown to increase testosterone levels

·         Avoid long distance cardio

·         Limit your intake of alcohol. It may make you feel stronger and tougher but trust me, they are illusions. Plus it may put you at risk.

·         Have sex at least once per week (with your spouse of course)

·         Add vitamin C to your diet. Vitamin C helps reduce the enzyme naturally produced by your body that converts testosterone into estrogen.

·         Add zinc, magnesium and vitamin B6 supplements to your diet. These three powerful vitamins and minerals promote testosterone production and increase your immune system response, muscle building capacity and mental alertness.

6.           Women need to understand the difference between social and asocial violence. They need to recognize the pre-attack indicators of asocial violence, and use them as a green light. They not only need to understand them in theory but to practice them as drills. This was huge for me. I am older and getting slower every day, as most people do. We all reach a peak then a slow decline in our physical prowess. It does not mean we cannot train to be the best we can be every day. And being smarter and better conditioned makes up for being slower. Learning the pre-attack indicators is one thing, but using drills to ingrain them is even better. It taught me to see things I did not see before. So instead of being faster I could just be ahead of the curve by being able to know what could happen next.

7.           Women need to have confidence in their training. They need to know they can rely on what they have learned because it WILL work. The first time we throw a punch or kick, or even shove someone, it is usually done in a halfhearted manner. We need to know what works and what does not work. Punching a guy in the arm or any areas where there is a large amount of muscle mass will do nothing, except maybe annoy him or trigger him into retaliation. Using good biomechanics to control his spine and/or center of gravity will work. Remember that you will most likely be attacked by a predator. If what you are using to defend yourself would not work on an animal predator (lion, bear, wolf) it will not work on a human predator. You can’t just slap a wolf on the shoulder and think he will go away.

There is no bigger disservice to women than a man teaching them ineffectual strikes or techniques against a larger, stronger opponents while screaming at the top of his lungs “You go girl, you are now empowered, you know how to use your anger.”  I am not knocking using your anger, when done in the proper manner. But putting your anger on steroids will not make you stronger or more capable of defending yourself. Harder and faster does not equate better. Using smart and dependable skills, has a much higher rate of getting you home safely. This is a skill I definitely had to learn. I always thought I could “hide” my lack of strength by going faster. Hey, if it works for Bruce Lee, it’s got to be good right? Wrong. Bruce Lee is doing fast AND correctly.  I was able to achieve this by countless repetitions of doing it achingly slow. How many of you had to do a presentation in high school? You had 2 minutes to talk about a specific subject. You wrote it down, went home to rehearse it in front of a mirror… 2 minutes… perfect. You are now standing in front of the whole class, stress is kicking in and you give the same presentation in 45 seconds. You said all the words, you did not miss a thing, but you did it on high speed. Under stress you will be able to do faster what you have practiced at a slower pace. But if you practice it wrong, you will just do it wrong faster. Hence why the achingly slow practice worked well for me. When the stress factor kicked in, I was able to unconsciously do it fast and right. Now there’s that  power I need.

I was always frustrated practicing against stronger opponents. If their lack of skills was showing, they could just muscle through it; use their strength to get what they wanted. That never worked for me since I was always outweigh. This forced me to do it right every time or to end up on my arse. As frustrating as this seemed at the time, it was a huge help in the end. It forced me to have good conditioning. I experienced this a few weeks ago. I used to train with this gentleman who is easily 3 times my size, no exaggeration. He used to be able to throw me down and hold me with just his body weight. Beyond frustrating for me! I had not seen him in a few years when 2 weeks ago he showed up for training. I was not only easily able to take him down; I literally bounced him off the mat. I was actually surprised. I should not have been, after all this works!

8.           Since we are weaker and with less physical stamina, we have to worker smarter, not harder. We need to give ourselves permission to fight dirty if the need arise. If someone attacks us with intents to hurt, rape or kill, he has made a choice to forego his own safety. We do not need to worry about hurting him or insulting him. He has already chosen pain. You are worth it, give yourself permission to get righteously angry and fight. You don’t need to be or stay in the role of the prey. You can become the predator.

9.           Women have to be taught to not disregard their “intuition”, which is nothing more than being able to analyze things with both hemispheres of the brain. It’s not a mystical power. We have to trust this instinct and use it when our life is in danger, even if we cannot explain it at the time. This is one of nature’s strongest survival tool, use it! A good training in violence dynamics will let us be capable of explaining the “whys” after the fact, after you are home safe and sound. Unless you are a “bad person” you will make the right choice using your intuition. 
Under stress, especially the stress of being attacked, your cognitive mind slows down as other parts of your brain take over. Your survival depends on how you have programmed yourself to react under stress. An attacker will be faster, stronger (as we have previously seen) and will take you by surprise. 
The following points are what you need to use to explain your justification of having needed to use the amount of force you did.  You are not only justified in using a higher amount of force, you will need to use a high level of force to survive an attack.

• Inability to disengage
• Proximity to weapon
• Injury or exhaustion
• Hazardous environment
• Special knowledge
• Surprise
• Ground level
• Skill
• Size
• Strength
• Numbers
• Mental state
• Gender
• Sometimes age
• Physical or mental disability

10.       Which brings us to articulation.  Articulation is the ability to explain why you did what you did and why any other options would have been a bad choice. You need to practice this as much as your physical skills. This is something that was very difficult for me in the beginning. But there are exercises and drills you can use to become proficient with this skill. Yes, articulation is a skill, which means you can learn it. With proficiency comes competence and with competence comes confidence. When you know in your heart AND in your mind that you are doing the right thing, it will prevent the “freeze” so many people experience. It will make you react much faster. And being good at articulation will avoid any ugly entanglements with the law.

11.        The types of violence used against women are very much different than the violence perpetrated against men. Women need to understand what they are most likely to face out in the world.  You cannot get a women ready to defend herself against a bar brawl that will probably never happen to her. Waste of time on both of your parts. What most men in this country have to worry about is social violence, social dominance games. The skills you need to avoid or overcome such violence are very much different than the skills you need to survive asocial violence.    Asocial violence is the most likely type of violence used against women. I am not bringing up domestic abuse because this is a different can of worms.

Asocial violence is the type of violence where the threat does not see the victim as a person but rather a resource (a different species to be hunted). He wants something from you: your money, your purse, your car or just the enjoyment of a violent act. Either way this is never going to be a fair fight; he will take every advantage he has to get what he wants. The first thing he will want is privacy to do his dirty deeds.

Since the type of violence we experience as women is different than what men go through, teaching women to use the skill set to survive social violence during an asocial violence occurence might get them killed or seriously hurt. Let’s have the right tools for the right job.

12.       This point might seem strange but women should not be afraid to join a training that may cause pain or close physical contacts. Remember the first time you were struck, punched, slapped,  pushed around? I guarantee this makes the majority of people freeze, if not everyone. The first time you get screamed/ cussed at by a stranger, it is scary. The first time you get shoved down on the ground, it will take a while to readjust and orient yourself. The first time you are stuck in a corner with nowhere to go but through the huge guy blocking your path, you will freeze or babble like an idiot that you need to go home and make supper for your kids, or use ineffectual strikes. Do you want all those first time to be out in the world done by strangers who mean to hurt you? It is much easier to live through those in a training facility against people you trust. Embarrassing? Maybe but you can survive embarrassment. You can make a mistake in a gym/dojo and have a safe do-over. It’s possible you may have a bump or a bruise but those will heal fast. You don’t get a do-over out in the real world. You can’t just erase a rape or a knife wound.

Practicing with a good partner/ teacher, you will come to understand what an effective strike or technique is. If you just randomly punch or kick with no specific intent, you may succeed and you may fail. You need to know the difference. You need to understand that your intent is to disable the attacker, not to inflict pain, not to vent your frustrations with strikes, not to serve justice. Once the attacker is disabled and you are out of danger. Call the police and let them handle the dispensation of justice.

As scary as it may seem, you will become inoculated to this kind of stress after a while. And when a man with evil intent hits you or pushes you around, you can look at him without blinking and say “Gee, my friends hit me harder than this.”… OK please never say that if you are attacked but you can have the attitude of confidence that would go along with those words without saying them. That attitude of confidence alone might be a deterrent to an attack. NEVER provoke a crazy or desperate person. And never ever tell them “What are you going to do, shoot me?” Don’t make them lose face.

It seems to all boil down to proper education, good training and conditioning.

Before you decide to teach women self-defense, you need to ask yourselves if you are trying to pass on the social fighting skills you have learned through experiences and/or training, or if you are ready to teach them what they actually need to know to survive. Are you just gratifying your own ego or are you sincerely trying to help. Take time to understand where your students are coming from before you just assume you know everything about their situation. Listen to their fears and their concerns.

Self defense class for high school girls
Here is a typical example of teaching ineffectual strikes. I am not doing this to put anyone down, it's not my style. But at the same time it is a good visual of what I have been explaining.

I personally think the perfect teacher for WSD is a combination of a man and a woman. Both need to impart their knowledge, their skill and their experiences. Men can really help us learn how men think, how they will act and react. Women understand how other women think and feel. They can demonstrate them that this will work for them thus imparting the confidence that women need to have in their own skills and training.

Be smart, stay safe and help keep others safe.