The dominant feminist discourse in the struggle against gendered violence against women (trans and cis) and genderqueer afabs (assigned female at birth) rightly proclaims that men must unlearn, and teach other men to unlearn, societal conditioning and misogynistic behaviors. This discourse comes as a response to the common accusations that are thrown at us when we are assaulted by men (But what were you wearing? Why were you at that bar? Why didn’t you leave him sooner? Why were you walking home alone? Etc, etc, and onward for eternity).

It powerfully asserts that we are not the ones who should be the subject of scrutiny after these attacks, but rather abusive men must be the ones under fire for their actions, and must be the ones to change their behaviors.

But, what happens when they don’t?

I applaud the work that men have done to fight misogyny, and am heartened by this powerful shift in the cultural expectations of who must shoulder the burden of misogyny and transmisogyny. Cultural shifts take decades of work to see changes in dominant society. Consent has been a critical discussion in radical feminist scenes since the 1990s and yet, I find myself getting excited to see a consent poster up in a mainstream sports bar like it hasn’t taken almost 30 years for that poster to finally, and painstakingly, get posted. I’m glad the poster is there. I truly am. But presently, we are still in the midst of astronomical rates of violence against trans women, cis women, and queer people.

The reality is that there are still far too many men who hold misogynistic mindsets and who are more than willing to cause physical harm because of them. It hurts to consider how many times I have been cat-called, harassed, stalked, assaulted on the bus, assaulted at the store, assaulted on the walk home. It hurts even more to consider how many times misogynistic violence has resulted in intimate partner violence against me. I am absolutely sure that far too many folks reading this are recounting their own stories of surviving violence too.

For myself, after I was almost kidnapped by a random dude at a rest stop in the middle of the night, I finally decided that I could no longer wait for enlightened men to teach jerks like him to not commit violence against me. I could no longer be satisfied with theatrical street marches or hashtag movements. I decided that the next time a man pulled this kind of violence on me, I would be ready to defend myself, and in this defense, perhaps he would finally learn a lesson. Perhaps he would decide that it’s too dangerous for him to pull that stunt again. Perhaps this cultural shift could be expedited if the feminist norm is such that when men try to attack us, they are met with fierce resistance.

The reality is that there are still far too many men who hold misogynistic mindsets and who are more than willing to cause physical harm because of them.
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I began training. I joined a Krav Maga gym, and channeled my hurt, rage, and determination into self-liberation. Krav Maga, which literally means “close combat” in Hebrew, was developed in the 1930s by Jewish fighter, Imi Lichtenfeld, in (then) Czechoslovakia. Lichtenfeld developed a brutally effective form of self-defense that he could teach to his fellow Jewish neighbors who were facing violent anti-semitic attacks in the years leading up to World War II. The fighting form had to be one that could be easily taught, work for a variety of body types and ages, and was applicable to street fighting scenarios. As such, Krav Maga is a fighting form that is used to immediately incapacitate an attacker. A groin kick, followed by an elbow strike to the face, followed by a strike to the eyes, for example, is completely acceptable, and encouraged, because it works. This differs from sport fighting techniques that bar the use of these particularly brutal strikes and kicks.

Unfortunately, Lichtenfeld went on to train soldiers in the use of Krav Maga in the creation of the Israeli state, which has committed an ongoing genocide against Palestinian people since its violent formation in 1948. I choose to train in this fighting form, not because I support the Israeli Defense Force, or the numerous military and police forces that use it, but because it is an incredibly effective and teachable self-defense form. In fact, as a police and prison abolitionist (I strive to co-create a world in which police and prisons don’t exist), I see my training in self-defense as even more necessary. Learning self-defense has created a way in which I can further my safety and power in a world that seeks to disempower me, without having to rely on institutions that I don’t believe in.

For the past two years I have been intensively training and building fighting skills, not only for myself, but to share with my friends who also must navigate the world in bodies that are targeted by state and interpersonal violence. I am certainly not an expert in Krav Maga, but I share the skills that I am confident in my ability to explain, demonstrate, and teach step-by-step. I have spent the last year traveling in my region of Southeastern Appalachia teaching free and sliding scale self-defense workshops.

Learning self-defense has created a way in which I can further my safety and power in a world that seeks to disempower me, without having to rely on institutions that I don’t believe in.
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Unfortunately, the idea that those who experience misogyny should learn to fight back has been used against them. Many have argued that “boys will be boys,” and that self-defense should be the only tool used against violent men, whose actions are treated as inevitable. My desire to share my skills does not come from a victim-blaming narrative that would fault someone for not successfully fighting back. Nor am I arguing that learning and practicing self-defense is some kind of imperative. If someone can run or otherwise leave a situation without having to fight, that’s great, and men still need to take responsibility for their actions. But I am interested in the radical liberation that comes from protecting ourselves, and from protecting each other.

Some might respond that it is dangerous to fight back against an attack, that we are putting ourselves in more harm by attempting to resist. But, the world we live in is already dangerous. Simply walking to our cars (or in my queer, redneck, Appalachian case- walking to my truck) at night can be dangerous. For trans women, cis women and queer afabs who hold additional marginalized identities, such as trans women of color, this world is already immensely dangerous. My argument, therefore, is that we become dangerous. We can be a dangerous force that causes abusive men to seriously reconsider their confidence in assuming power over us.

Our fight club had little in common with Chuck Palahniuk’s vision. No one really talked about it, but that was more due to its lackluster marketing efforts than rules. Our band of women had little contact, physical or verbal, with the rest of the people in the warehouse. We mostly kept to ourselves and “wrestled” using whatever combination of moves we’d managed to pick up from self-defense seminars and a lifetime of watching action movies or WWE. But there was usually an air of confused and frustrated masculinity lingering on the worn mats as a group of random men practiced their best Aikido moves nearby.

Most of those men ignored us. Some of them regarded us with a contempt that they concealed about as well as they concealed their surreptitious flexing in the floor-length mirrors that lined the space. One kindly showed us random techniques, including a wrist lock defense “in case some guy grabs you.”

I was giddy with excitement over my new hobby, the possibilities of learning new technique running wilder than Hulkamania through my head. But almost immediately, when my muscles were still stiff from my first attempts at break falls, I started having to field puzzled questions. When I tried to explain this exciting new development in my life to casual acquaintances, friends, and family members, they’d respond with some variation of: You’re so little/sweet/smart/gentle/cultured. Why would you enjoy something so violent?

I didn’t know how to answer them. I wasn’t entirely sure that I understood the question at all. It was hard to associate what I’d done with my friends with my concept of violence. Yes, I’d been aware that there was a risk of injury inherent in everything that we’d tried at the gym, but I didn’t feel like I was in any true danger when I was sparring with my friends. I felt relatively safe in that gym. I trusted that no one around me truly wanted to hurt me and that I didn’t have to fear their actions. Which was more than I could say for the walks home after Fight Club in the middle of the night.

I led a relatively sheltered and privileged childhood, but I was still quite young when I first realized that there were other people who might want to hurt me. I was 10, it was the spring of 1992, and two teenage girls named Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French had been kidnapped and murdered not far from where I lived. At school and at home, little girls like me were warned about the danger lurking in our own backyard and told to watch out for a man driving a cream Camaro.

This is also when I first started fantasizing about kicking ass. I was vigilant and paranoid, holding my breath when I passed any light-colored car and going over and over what I’d do to the man if he tried to pull me into his vehicle. While the boys I played with pretended that they were the Karate Kid, or even my beloved Ninja Turtles, I just wanted to be the girl that got away.

That winter, Paul Bernardo was arrested. Besides Mahaffy and French, he had killed at least one other young girl and raped at least 13.

Violence was already a presence in my life, whether I wanted it there or not. The only choice I had in the matter was how I wanted to interact with what was already there and what would probably remain there for the rest of my life.

My first instinct was to try to arm myself. I was being told, both directly and indirectly, that I needed to be able to defend myself, that I had to develop and maintain the skills that could prevent others from hurting me, so I dutifully signed up for the first self-defense sessions that I could find. The lessons were effective enough — although, as blogger Kitsutoshi expertly lays out in her post “Martial Arts delusion and how it hurts women,” any self-defense program that primarily focuses on one’s ability to fight off a stranger in a dark alley leaves most women woefully underprepared for the kind of danger they’re most likely to face in reality. But they were ultimately unsatisfying. I was left with a random collection of skills that I hoped I’d never have to test in real life.

It wasn’t until I joined my weird little Fight Club and subsequently found myself on the fringes of the mixed martial arts community that I finally found the outlet I was looking for. Fighting — and watching fights — also allowed me, for the first time, to play with the skills that I’d learned, and to have some say in how I could interact with physical force. I was able to take the knowledge that I’d gained and apply it in a safe and controlled environment where I could be more than prey literally fighting for my life.

There’s a whole sub-genre of martial arts films, like The Karate Kid, dedicated to beleaguered young people discovering a discipline, standing up to bullies, and achieving glory. The narrative plays out in real life, too; combat sports, particularly boxing, have provided both an outlet and calling for generations of underprivileged fighters. But these origin stories usually center around boys, surrounded either by urban violence or bullying. We don’t talk about the women who turn to formalized, structured fighting as a respite from the chaotic threat we face every day.

That’s an especially unusual story in MMA, and MMA-adjacent training in disciplines like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, and wrestling. These forms of fighting are more associated with narratives about unleashing violence than harnessing it — and specifically, men unleashing the violence that is their innate masculine birthright. It’s often seen as an escape from a civilized and complacent society, the one place where emasculated modern men can reclaim some sort of long-lost rush of primal aggression both as fighters and viewers.

Before North American WMMA pioneer Gina Carano started attracting attention, women in mixed martial arts were acknowledged only by the community’s most dedicated disciples, and even then their motives were often misunderstood. More often than not, these female competitors and fans were dismissed as outliers who either wanted to impress boys or ruin their fun. We might be tomboys, or Not Like Other Girls, or maybe we had some scary feminist agenda. But few were open to the idea that we were there for reasons that were outside of their own experiences or knowledge.

Every single woman I’ve ever met through training, watching, and now writing about martial arts has had her own origin story as individual as she was, but we all had one thing in common: None of us had turned our backs on a safe and innocent paradise of pacifism to embrace a life of wanton violence. The violence had been in our lives all along.

The next five years of my life were an ongoing variation on these themes. I left the fight club women to join an all-female professional pillow fighting league, where I engaged in mostly unskilled and barely-regulated MMA-style matches — with pillows! — for tiny sums of money and even tinier traces of glory. I joined a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu gym to become a better pillow fighter, and then I quit bedding-based martial arts entirely so that I could take my BJJ training more seriously. I attended a class run by a brilliant female black belt from Brazil who spent 30 minutes teaching us what to do if a police officer chokes you at a bar. (“You say ‘Not Guilty!’” she laughed, throwing her hands up. Then she showed us how to snap a pinkie finger backward.) I took up Muay Thai and the occasional MMA class, jokingly dubbed my fists “Mary Kate” (left) and “Ashley” (right), and learned to throw one of the meaner Ashleys at the gym. I received both praise and warnings for my efforts. “You’ll break that if you try to hit a guy who’s attacking you,” one instructor warned as he pointed to my tiny fist. “Use your elbows instead.”

People from the outside world continued to wonder what the hell I was doing, I tried various explanations out on them the way I’d test newly learned submissions: It was good for fitness. It was great for stress relief. There were worse ways to meet new people. If I was feeling particularly whimsical, I’d joke that I’d always wanted to be a Ninja Turtle (preferably Michelangelo) or Emma Peel. All of which were true, but none of which were really convincing to other people or satisfying to me on their own.

I wasn’t even convinced that what I was doing was actually violent. Yes, I regularly came home from the gym with black eyes and bruises in the impression of my training partners’ fingers all my limbs. I even broke one of my toes at a grappling tournament, although that was the result of me running tarsal-first into a giant man during warm-ups as opposed to an actual in-combat injury. But I didn’t consider any of that any more brutal than anything that could have happened to me — or that I could have inflicted on someone else — during any other athletic activity. My opponents and I were trying to win, not hurt or kill each other. I never felt scared or threatened when I was fighting them. Any time I was remotely hurt, overwhelmed, or overpowered, I could make it all stop immediately with a couple of light taps in submission.

It was physical. It was intense. But at no point on the mats did I ever feel like I had to be wary of the people around me. No one dared to touch me without my clearly indicated consent. And, if they had, it would never have been excused in any way.

When I stepped off the mats (or out of the ring or cage), I still lived the same way I always had: on alert, carefully guarding my drinks, walking with keys threaded between my fingers, hoping that I could trust my instincts, my training, and my reflexes if circumstances ever required them. Hoping that one wrong move couldn’t cost me my life. To me, that was violence. What I did on the mats was fun.

Mixed martial arts may have have been a Thunderdome-like “human cockfighting” free-for-all when it first made such a polarizing impression on the public consciousness in the early 1990s with the first Ultimate Fighting Championship PPVs, but in its current form it’s a complex and highly-regulated sport filled with dedicated athletes who are masters of multiple disciplines. And while the culture surrounding the sport is still not entirely safe — and, in some cases, not entirely welcoming — for anyone who’s not a cis male, the training and the fights themselves can offer a welcome alternative to the violence that surrounds us in real life.

When I fight, or when I watch fighting, I’m indulging a rare opportunity to dictate the terms on which I engage with violence. However briefly, I can take something that has been an ongoing source of fear, frustration, and genuine danger, and turn it into something that I can enjoy. Something I have some control over. Something that, when I actually bother to train properly, I can actually do well. I’m not sure that I’d go so far as to declare the experience liberating or empowering, but it certainly is refreshing.

For the men who hail martial arts in general and MMA in particular as a gloriously barbaric return to a time of brute strength, honor, and the alpha male, I can image that the sport does offer an exciting alternative to a world that they believe is too safe and sanitized. But as someone who doesn’t have the privilege of living in a world with so little risk and so little threat, two evenly-matched, consenting adults who engage in bouts with clear rules, regulations, and supports represents a different idealistic fantasy. It’s a fantasy that’s often missing from my own life: a fair fight.