Hey look

I’ve heard a lot of people say that “gaining confidence” is a big reason they train in a martial art.  It’s a huge benefit of training.  Long-term martial artists carry themselves differently, and “confidence” is probably the word most of us would use to describe that difference. I’ve been thinking about confidence lately.  Deconstructing it.  When I asked some friends what the word means to them, one person surprised me by describing it in a negative way, as arrogance.  Another described it as a kind of self-acceptance, that we’re ok being who we are.  Those are both nuances I hadn’t been focused on as “confidence” but both added to my understanding of the term.  So I want to be precise.  

I think there are several kinds of “confidence,” and that some of them are useful, and others are not.  I’m not a psychologist, I’m just a martial artist and instructor.  I’m speaking from my own experience and what others have told me of their experience.  If it’s helpful, take it, if it’s not then leave it. Please add to my thinking by offering yours. The arbitrary categories I care about right now I'll call: “false” confidence, “bravado,” “real” confidence, and “determination.” What prompted me to write about confidence is seeing a discussion in which senior martial artists tried to help a junior with a “confidence problem,” and the way they helped was by building what I would call “false” confidence. That’s not an isolated incident.  It happens all the time. It happens for a lot of reasons, many of them perhaps good ones.  It occurs innocently enough most of the time, but I think it’s a bigger problem than I hear discussed in MA circles. 

Students come to believe they have more capability than they really do. Or, more generally, students believe that the “hammer” they have been taught will serve them in all situations. That everything is a nail.

When I say “false confidence” what I mean is a mental state where someone has done a piss poor risk evaluation. They are deluded about their abilities in relation to reality.  If you sat and had a calm conversation with them they would express confidence in their ability to succeed where any informed person would say they’re fooling themselves.  

Young and inexperienced people often have false confidence because they just don’t know better.  I think training can create false confidence.  And while the name sounds bad, a friend pointed out to me that it isn’t necessarily bad.  If you don’t want a stranger to pick you out of a crowd as a target, walking with confidence is a good thing, and false confidence is indistinguishable from real confidence until it’s tested. 

False confidence comes from a lot of places in our training.

Training partners facilitate it. When we “go with” a technique because our friend is frustrated or it’s “close enough” or just because we’re building up their trust in the technique as our friend is learning it.  Or maybe we don’t know we’re doing it. Our own faith in the technique is so strong we just fall. Factors working against us include our own desire to be confident.  It’s a good feeling.  We seek it out.  But we also rationalize in order to achieve it.  We’re happy to nail a technique.  And if our partner lets it happen, we cooperate with that deception.

It’s a difficult game. Balancing conflicting goals for ourselves and for our students is a hard thing.  Teachers give students motivation or even belts for many reasons, which may not be the reasons we or our students think.

Schools are mostly businesses.  Students with broken confidence leave.  And it’s really hard to predict a person’s threshold.  Learning resilience means getting comfortable with failure, but most people are bad at that and lots of them never learn it.  Using doses of confidence to train resilience is built into martial arts methodology in every art I’m aware of.  But that’s not always confidence based on reality.  Teachers do what they have to do to keep people training, knowingly or not.  

None of this is a secret.  It’s a challenge, and it’s just part of training.  

What worries me is the many bad outcomes.  For example:  Youth students with black-belts and a boatload of false-confidence.  An untrained adult could sit on most (even very competent) youth martial artists.  It’s not obvious that the kids know that. (It’s a wildly rare kid who knows that, and the ones who do usually have the opposite problem with confidence...a lack of it.) 

Size and strength do matter, that’s why professional competitions use weight classes.  But parents want their kids taught “confidence” and schools oblige. So kids think they can fight when really their skills are mostly decorative until they get the weight and muscle of adulthood.

We also have teens going off to college with confidence, totally unaware that they’ve been training for low-likelihood risks and have no training for high-percentage risks (I’ve posted about this before).  Believing that whatever they learned is a “toolbox” they can apply to any problem...with no practice doing that.  Recipe for disaster. And unless they come report back, MA schools don’t know how badly they’ve failed those kids.

It’s not just kids and teens though. Adults often keep training, seeking those hits of “feeling confident.”  Throwing people around the mat successfully, showing off and getting new belts, hitting a technique you’ve been working for months.  That’s good stuff for the self-esteem.  Heck, it’s good stuff.  But when it’s false confidence, when you think just because you can throw a guy you know on a mat in broad daylight that you can do the same after you’ve had a couple of drinks when someone surprises you in the dark...  The result can be people taking risks they wouldn’t otherwise take. Or choosing to fight rather than run. An outcome of false-confidence is people being decimated when they bump up against real situations and their sky castles collapse.  It’s worse when those people have been training for a long time.  When you’ve built your confidence around martial arts skills and those fail you, that’s a rough situation.  Victims blame themselves because they “should have” been able to “handle” whatever problem it was they could never have been rationally expected to handle. (Problems created by others, it’s important to recall.)

Some things I’ve heard friends say recently have spurred me to deconstruct our idea of “confidence.” What we do for ourselves in training, and how teachers manage students’ morale can only be effective if we think it through.  We need to be as honest with ourselves as it’s possible to be.  

I’ve heard the argument from some teachers that we shouldn’t discuss these things, that it’s like the placebo effect.  That teachers are like puppetmasters apparently, manipulating students to become more “confident” which makes them better, and if students saw the man behind the curtain it wouldn’t work.  

I’m going to call foul on that.  In fact, one thing we now know about the placebo effect is that it works even when people know what they’re taking is a placebo.  That what matters is the trust they have in the doctor who gives it to them.  I think it’s the same with training.  A teacher can work a technique slowly with cooperative partners, and give students a taste of success without pretending that success is anything more than it is.  

But if we dismantle false-confidence, it needs to be replaced with something. One option, I think, is what I’m calling here “Bravado.”

Bravado is different than false confidence.  In its bad form, it’s a coward acting like a bully.  But in its good form, it’s a brave person who is afraid but “faking it until they make it.”  It’s often possible to see someone showing more confidence than they feel.  Some schools train this, usually the “good” form. Showing confidence can be a tactic.   If I had to choose for a student of mine, I would rather that they walk with bravado than with false confidence.  It might look like enough to make them less of a target, but with none of the down-sides of being out of touch with reality.  Food for thought anyway. But the gold standard in my opinion is what I’ll call “real” confidence.  It comes in flavors. I mean that which comes from experience, mastery, and tested use of skills.  A serious and experienced martial artist can feel confidence about hitting techniques in training conditions.  They can rationally evaluate their likelihood of success and make fast flowing decisions about which techniques to use.  They can be calm and collected under the pressure they’re familiar with.  And when a real-life scenario comes at them, their likelihood of success (if it matches what they’ve trained) is probably high (or at least higher than an untrained person).  They can measure how confident to be with some degree of accuracy.

This is what we try to achieve with training, confidence that matches reality.  That means not walking around feeling as if you can handle anything 24x7, but walking around humble about the scenarios you know you can’t handle.  

My best firearms instructor, and one of the best martial artists I’ve ever known describes good training as “learning what you *can’t* do.” When you get a real handle on the limits of your abilities, you can execute calmly and confidently within those limits. I just spouted that off as if it’s easy.  It’s the hardest thing to achieve.  It takes years of painstaking work, and that’s not a guarantee.  Painstaking work with a teacher willing to sacrifice your connection to reality by building false confidence, or one who is unable to make that distinction, or with training partners who don’t do their level best to keep themselves and you honest, or a “hammer” art that helps you believe you can solve any problem with the thing they teach, or a decorative art never intended to solve real-world problems, or just a little too much willingness to believe that your capacity is more than it is...any of that undermines your ability to get to the holy grail of real confidence. But it’s a knife-edge, even if you avoid every trap of false confidence, it’s much too easy to fall into believing you have no capacity.  Low confidence ends martial arts careers. But if the confidence that comes from decades of challenging and honest training is maybe too much a brass ring, I also think there’s another kind of “real” confidence. Maybe this is the saving grace. I’ll call it “determination” just to distinguish it from the other kinds.  And this, I think, is a mindset that can be learned through martial arts training.  But it comes naturally too. I think you can start with it. 

When an untrained person blazes into action in a bad situation, it’s using this kind of confidence.  This is the thing that happens to some parents when their children are threatened. No one is kidding when they talk about mothers being intimidating in defense of their kids.  Trained or not, there’s a confidence that can rise to push away all doubt when a moment of action is called for.  The “ordinary people” who run toward active shooters or calmly hide a class full of children in a closet aren’t deluded, they’re determined.   When pressed, a person who trains determination will flip on 100% confidence when it’s needed.  It’s not “false” by the terms I’m using, because they’re choosing it.  They’re choosing to believe without qualm or doubt or possibility of failure that they will hit their techniques perfectly, choose their best options smoothly.  But because they’re not deluding themselves, when failure happens, when they lose or get hurt, they have the possibility of resilience.  They can let go and keep believing that they will nail the next attempt.  I think that’s the goal. Realism, with the ability to flip that switch.  And that seems to be trainable.

I think teachers often make the mistake of training people up into false confidence when a better goal is determination.  And the difference is easy to distinguish.  If you sit with a student and run a tabletop exercise with various scenarios you know are overwhelming, the difference will come out.  I’ve known a lot of students who will talk through those multiple-attacker scenarios, the unarmed-versus-armed, the bigger attacker, the better-trained attacker...and they’ll tell you how they’ll use “surprise” or “quickness” or “better technique” or (bless their hearts) “kicking them in the balls.”  

Or they may pretend to be humble because that’s what they’re expected to do, but you can hear or see it in their eyes that they feel they could handle the situation.  In contrast, a clear-seeing student will give a better answer like “well, I’d probably die, but here are the things I would try to do to escape/win/achieve-the-goal.”  Realistic risk assessment.  Knowing what you can’t do.  Being suitably wary of scenarios outside of your experience.

But I think it’s important to distinguish those mindsets, and articulate the goal(s).  No one wants to crush a child’s spirit by making it clear that nothing they’re learning is really going to work in an actual fight.  The “fight for an escape” and “run and find help” training is the limit of what kids can reasonably expect to execute in a real-life scenario, and that is definitely not the fun stuff. Parents want to think their kids are being prepared to be little superheroes who will always be safe, and parents pay for that self-delusion.  But good teachers handle it deftly.  Smacking down false-confidence like playing whack-a-mole. Teaching kids their limits so they’ll make good choices, and teaching them to fight with determination in a worst-case scenario. For adult martial artists, it’s on us.  Some of us seek out more and more “realistic” training. Force-on-force. Training in more than one school to counter “dojo-itis.”  Seeking failure in training to practice resilience. Practicing the mindset of determination and taking pride in training to personal limits.  Learning our real limits and how to assess risk effectively.  Choosing teachers who may use the placebo effect of dosing us with confidence to build trust in technique, but who are transparent about it.  Doing extra reading or training or talking with survivors to compare what we know with what reality might present. Considering our own behaviors and watching ourselves as if we were strangers.

I was recently given the opportunity to read an advance copy of “Doing Right by Our Kids: Protecting Child Safety at All Levels” (DRBOK) by Dr. Amy Tiemann and Irene vn der Zande.  Cutting straight to the chase, this is a great book.  I recommend it to everyone with an interest in self-defense, regardless of any connection you may have with children.  This is gap-filling education for anyone.  I found resources I’d never heard of, and several new ideas.  Most of the book is equally applicable to personal safety and self-defense skills for everyone, not just for children.  I’m often asked “I get that martial arts schools don’t teach what you describe as ‘self-defense,’ so what classes DO you recommend?”  But serious women’s or children’s or LGBTQIA+  or even just general self-defense classes are hard to find.  There are a few good programs out there (including Kidpower/Teenpower/Fullpower, which the authors of this book are associated with) but real personal safety classes are much rarer than martial arts schools.  So self-study is the only way to go for a lot of people.  This book is an outstanding supplement to martial arts training.  Most martial arts frame what they teach as “try to have situational awareness and avoid violence...now that we’ve said that, let’s fight!”  This book is the situational awareness.  This book is the avoiding violence.  This book is the 95% of personal protection and self-defense that can be used every single day in real life. (To my dear detailed readers, that is a made-up percentage, I think it’s probably a lot higher). The martial arts and self-defense literature is teeming with books, some excellent unmissables like “The Gift of Fear” (I’d rank this book right up there with it) and plenty of off-the-cuff “this is what I think” books (books that are like this blog...opinion).  But what sets DRBOK apart is the rigorous well-researched (and documented, check the bibliography!) approach by authors who are true experts. DRBOK identifies concrete problems, but not as a scare tactic. It calmly offers tools to solve (prevent) those problems.  It’s a guide to setting personal “rules” that can be taught to children, used with caregivers, or just used to form personal internal boundaries and triggers. So often we get into situations without that pre-planning, our gut says “something is wrong” but without the skills to identify exactly what that “something” is, we dismiss it, we fail to deal with it because the potential embarrassment exceeds the pressure from our instincts.  People seeking to take advantage understand all about using our embarrassment or sense of gratitude, about creating illusions of safety and trust.  This book puts all of that into the light of clear text. The book describes many behaviors and situations that may trigger our gut instincts and explains why each type of trigger is a real safety concern.  But it goes farther than that.  It’s not the usual unhelpful “say no!” or “punch someone!” or “set boundaries!” solution, instead the authors give advice about how to have productive conversations to achieve the goal of safety.  Realistic conversations.  Non-accusatory conversations.  But persistent conversations that keep risk-aversion in the spotlight.  The authors articulate how to prioritize safety, they provide resources, give examples, and outline truly useful approaches to the problem.  At the end of the book are checklists and outlines for approaching specific settings (family, school, camp) and audiences (teachers/leaders/babysitters/administrators/parents).  This book can be used to have guided conversations with people responsible for the safety of your kids, and internal conversations with yourself.  If you don’t know your risk-tolerance then you don’t know how to tell others what your lines are, or even know when a line has been crossed.  Protecting yourself or someone else requires thinking about that risk tolerance, understanding how to evaluate risk, and deciding up front what crosses a line.  This book is a toolbox to do all of that. I was taken with the many real-life examples.  These authors have taught workshops for kids, teens, and adults for years.  They lay out approaches that do actually work in real life, relating real uses of those words and techniques.  The authors’ approach is relational.  How do we interact with people to put safety into a priority position and work together to achieve that goal?  How can an organization create workable rules to protect children while achieving the purposes of their activities?  How can schools meet competing demands with low resources to create a safe environment for everyone?  How can churches navigate the challenges of creating trust consistent with faith in a context of safety for all congregants?   

Chapter 8, for example, outlines effective organizational approaches to setting rules for coaches/leaders/advisors/camp-counselors.  Because actual abuse doesn’t happen where people can see it, but grooming behaviors happen all the time where they can be spotted, rules need to address those very-common grooming behaviors.  (Gift-giving, “extra training,” personal messages, social media, etc.). 

With the new year about to start, I’m thinking about resolutions.  Things to change.  To quote Maya Angelou “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”

But I’m having trouble with that.  A lot of the time I don’t do better.  

Of course I want to “be the change I want to see in the world.”  But I also don’t want to introduce myself with my pronouns, because it feels weird, and the phrase “I am too old for this” plays in my head.  I understand that there’s some kind of thing about plastic straws being awful, but I’ve not read the articles and haven’t turned down a straw yet.  I’m still struggling to understand cultural appropriation (at least grayer aspects of it) and while I’m not buying any “Hot Buddhist Monk” Halloween costumes, I find myself thinking “how much does this really matter?” when YES it matters.  I think most people would agree it’s worse to knowingly do bad things than to accidentally or unknowingly do them.  I like to think I’m a good person…but this is some bullshit.

And not just me, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who knows better but screws up anyway.  If that wasn’t true then there would be no Doritos.

Right now we’re watching the long-overdue tipping point with sexual harassment, thanks largely to the #MeToo movement.  We’re tossing flawed men out of positions of responsibility as if it’s going out of style. And we’re vilifying them.  In some cases, for mistakes made back when those actions were the norm.  In other cases it’s dick pics.  Men fighting the tide of history.  Men who knew better, or had no excuse not to, but who propositioned those teenaged girls, those women at work.  Men who knew better, but grabbed women’s butts anyway.

And when I look at history, it’s filled with people who seriously had to know better (slavery? really?) but who just kept doing wrong.  Even people “on the wrong side of history” who definitely knew better.

I think we can all relate to knowing better but doing worse.  So how do we weigh that?  How do we handle all of this?  

I’ve engaged in discussions this year about how to honor historical heroes who were also deeply flawed people “by modern standards.”  If we judge historical people by what we now generally agree is wrong (slave owners are a great example) then we lose the good with the bad.  Thomas Jefferson, American hero…and terrible person who surely knew it was wrong to own people.

We’re also losing the good they’ve done (anyone feel like binging the Cosby Show?).  We have to figure out what to do with the artistic works, awards, philanthropy, invention…everything.  

So should we toss the baby with the bathwater?  And how do we think about those folks, past and present?  How do we think about ourselves? What wrongs are enough to write a person off completely?

So here we are, headed inexorably into the next New Year.  I’m considering resolutions, I want to “do better.”  I have a list of things I now know (or maybe haver for a long while) and I want to behave better.  But what if I don’t?  This issue is personal.  I can’t think “yeah, that Thomas Jefferson guy…” or “Dammit Al Franken!” without also thinking “and you.”  I’m no different than any people who didn’t “do better.”

We know that some social ills will only be fixed by waiting for a generation or two to die.  Young people who are “woke” waiting for older racist/sexist/homophobe/etc bigots to just die off and take their crufty views and behaviors with them.  Because change is hard.  People know better all day long, and don’t do better.

So it’s hard.  But is that an excuse?  (spoiler: no, no it isn’t).

So what are some of the things people debate “overlooking?” because of “the times they lived in?”   Owning slaves.  Harassing behavior that might have been the norm but was never ok. There’s this idea that if something was common that we should just understand and give people a bye.    I’m not so sure.

When I use a microscope, what I can see is a whole lot of people who knew clearly, long before the Civil War, that slavery was wrong.  Otherwise the Underground Railroad would have been to nowhere.  I see a lot of HR seminars on harassment and hostile work environment, laughed off by guys who didn’t want to change.

When recycling became a thing, young people were all over it.  There are plenty of Baby Boomers who throw away water bottles every day.  There are young people who would carry an empty plastic bottle across the earth to recycle it.  And there are people in between, who recycle if it’s convenient.  Do we give a pass to the individual boomers who can’t find a blue bin with both hands and a map, because it’s a “function of the times?”

Where am I going with this?

My dearest hope is that humanity will continue to advance. That the future will bring more social evolution.  More cooperation, less competition.  More selfless behavior, less profiteering.  More live-and-let-live and less authoritarianism.  I’d like to think that humanity will eventually produce the Federation of Planets.  

The best example I can think of where a sea-change is coming but we’re not yet at a tipping point is eating meat.  It seems likely that in the future, people won’t eat meat from real animals anymore.  Lab-grown real meat may be a thing, or good sense will have prevailed and folks will eat vegan, or just flat-out overpopulation will make meat a thing of the past.  I eat meat.  I know better.  I have the means to eat well without meat, and I don’t.  I try to source my meat from local farms with high ethical standards.  But not always.  But someday there will be whole generations of people who wouldn’t even contemplate killing an animal to make a meal.  How will they look at us?

If you speak to any not-deranged human being and say “is torturing an animal ok?”  The answer is unequivocally no.  Absolutely no.  But we rationalize.  We do it for medical science.  We definitely do it for food.  We wear leather but not fur.  We eat pigs but not dogs.  Ugly animals don’t count.  

But those people will look back at us in bafflement and disgust.  If we did awesome things, maybe won a Nobel Prize, or twelve Olympic medals…they will still look at us as “meat eaters.”  

What I’m looking for is a litmus test.  I’m no pinnacle of human perfection, there’s a lot going on that needs fixing here.  And our ancestors were the same.  People who knew damned well and good that women should be able to vote, but who went along with the social order of abuse and oppression.  Nazis.  Slave owners.  War profiteers.  Pussy grabbers.  Casting-couch sleaze.

But many of those people (not the Nazis) did great things.  Art, literature, war heroism, writing Constitutions.  We want to know those things right?

What would I want for future folk to think of me?  Not that I’m likely to be remembered in a hundred years, but if some future schoolchild does look back at my life, what do I want for them to think?  What would Thomas Jefferson want for me (and us) to think of him?

These are some answers I would give (TJ will have to speak for himself):

1. If I’m making mistakes (and history suggests that we all do that) then I’d like to be forgiven those.  If I really think I’m doing a good thing, but later hindsight says “nope,” future people please give me a pass.  I offer the same to people in my rear-view mirror.

2. When I already know better…How would I like to be viewed for that? When I refuse a major change with measurable benefit to the world, in favor of personal convenience or preference.  I’m the modern equivalent of the “nice” slave owner who knows it’s wrong so he makes sure that his slaves have good housing and food.  I’m a “product of my time” where most people who can afford to will eat meat every day. So even though vegans exist and ethics matter, I eat meat. When I look forward and think of those future great-great-great-great grandchildren looking back at me, I can’t meet their eyes.  If they need to dismiss whatever good I’ve done out of disgust for the things I do knowingly wrongly, I can’t blame them for that.  I know better, but I don’t do better.  My hope is that the problem (be it meat or something else) solved itself when a few generations died off, maybe including me and mine.

3. But what if I didn’t know, but I reallllly should have?  What if I’d never watched any PETA videos, never read Temple Grandin’s book.  What if I grew up without knowing how food comes to fork?  Some forms of Christianity differentiate between a sin committed knowingly, and one committed without knowledge.  Purgatory was invented because it wasn’t fair to think of all of those non-Christian souls burning in hell just because they never even had the opportunity to be forgiven.  Modern criminal law differentiates some types of offenses based on intent.  But I don’t know how I feel about those historical people who thought they were “protecting” women by treating them as voteless property.  I know that I’ve been confronted with ideas that I just haven’t had time or inclination or energy to deal with.  For example, the concept of “implicit bias” didn’t really land in my consciousness until this year, even though I had heard of it years ago.  It didn’t hit me with enough impact to motivate any effort on my part until recently.  But I could have learned it at any time.  The information was available to me.   I guess I’m not that forgiving.  Willful ignorance isn’t an excuse to me.  Your mileage may differ.  I hold myself accountable for things I chose not to know, at least things it would have been easy to know.  There’s a scale.  I’m ok with future people thinking “she used STRAWS?!  But didn’t she see those headlines on Facebook?” I hope they’ll cut a little slack for a primitive progenitor if the information wasn’t readily available, but if it was looking me in the face, that’s on me.

I don’t know how Thomas Jefferson would feel about this.  Or Winston Churchill.  My best guess is that they would feel as I do.  A Golden Rule situation.  If I would want for my progeny to forgive me for something, maybe I should forgive the same things.

Applying those rules of thumb:  Sexual harassment and abuse in the workplace.  It’s never been ok. Women have taken men to HR or court over this crap since women have worked.  No one younger than 90 should be able to plead ignorance that work isn’t the place to get handsy or to talk about sex or to try to get a date with your subordinate. But men who knew better sure haven’t done better.  Many have, but many have not.  No one is getting a pass.

We fought a war in this country in which slavery was the primary or a collateral issue (depends on who you ask).  Plenty of people knew perfectly well that it was wrong…but many people who knew better did worse.  I vote no passes.

There are a lot of vegetarians and vegans around.  And people still make fun of them.  I think most of us know that’s really right-action and that our meat-eating isn’t.  I’ve also seen a lot of humor to the effect that vegans and vegetarians are on a high horse (riding, not eating) and shouldn’t look down at the rest of us. But I see two things there:

When you’ve seen better and done better, maybe it’s ok to express that there’s something others should wake up to.  Why would we NOT want that?  Lots of people go to church specifically to be reminded to do better.

Maybe when you’ve walked a lot of miles being made fun of for ethical uprightness, reminders come out less like “hey, there’s something to consider” and more like “wtf is wrong with you?”    

We should want that reminder.  We should want to wake up to what we’re doing wrong.  But when you’re around someone who you know is doing better, it feels like being judged. Which all of us hate.  We think of ourselves as good people, but we know we’re doing bad things, and people doing better just remind us of that.  We judge ourselves.  Then we thrash, to avoid those feelings.

It’s galling, isn’t it.  When you know you’re choosing worse, and someone else has chosen better?  We want to keep doing the thing we do, but we don’t like to think of ourselves as bad.  So we weasel and manage our cognitive dissonance.  From inventing religions that give us “absolution” so we can keep on sinning, to making fun of vegans to avoid the idea that they’re right.  We compound our wrongs with more wrongs.

Right now we have a society where people who do better are actively mocked by people who do worse.  “Social justice warrior” is somehow an insult (!!?).  It sounds like something that should be the highest possible praise.  Its as if the bullies all won, and decent people are getting shoved into lockers.  Only we’re all the bullies too, on one subject or another.

So “know better…do better” right?   There’s no pass for failure.  Of course it’s easier to do things when everyone else is doing them too.  But sometimes we’re the first generation to know better.  We still have to do it.  We may someday figure out how to handle the artistic, scientific, philosophical, and other goods created by slave-owners, harassers, abusers, profiteers, and others.  I hope we do.  I’m going to use the “what would future progeny think?” litmus test.  And if “they’d think I was scum of the earth,” that seems fair.  If I knowingly do something wrong, just because everyone else is doing it too, I shouldn’t get a pass. 

I’ve been thinking about something for a while. About why it is so hard for martial arts groups to police themselves.  This isn’t a problem unique to our schools. It happens all over. But martial arts schools are different in some ways. Many or most of our styles teach people to stand up, to be strong and to have integrity.  In theory, we should be learning to protect ourselves and each other. But in practice, many twisted and abusive things happen right in our schools, and we are complicit.  

I’m talking about everything from garden-variety sexism and glass-ceilings, to creepier types of manipulation and abuse. Teachers who undermine self-confidence, who pick favorites, who make rape jokes or gay jokes, who comment on women’s appearance but on men’s skill, who convey embarrassment over a student’s abilities, who exploit students, who treat the student population as a personal dating pool, who use the culture of martial arts tradition to avoid paying workers properly or just outright cheat their workers.  The list goes on.

if you train in enough schools it’s all there to see.  (If you haven’t seen it, awesome, thank your teachers).

This summer I had the opportunity to watch a peculiar set of events unfold with a local organization. Friends of mine have been involved with this group for many of the seventeen years it was open, but I only have an outsider’s view of it.  Though not a martial arts school, people could take classes there that would help them find strength, get out of their everyday self, and be something bigger.  They formed a close, trusting, and supportive community.  But this summer, there were news stories.  

According to the stories, and some friends’ posts online, the owner had engaged in over-the-line behaviors that bordered on abusive (or perhaps walked squarely into abusive).  Sexually inappropriate, failing to pay employees properly, weirdly sexist hiring and promotion practices, and passing it all off with personality and appeals to "community."  Which worked for many years to keep people from talking about the problems.  But then someone started talking, and others chimed in, and eventually people pushed to do something about it.

On friends’ Facebook posts, I watched guys who said they knew all along that “things weren’t right” stand up and own their knowledge and previous inaction.  They acknowledged their responsibility to stand, however belatedly, with the people whose experiences had been different than theirs.  

The story was interesting to me for a few reasons, but primarily because the situation was queasily familiar from my years in martial arts schools.  I wanted to see what would happen to that business.  The organization had brought richness to many lives, but it was owned by someone who poisoned the place, who made people deeply uncomfortable, who drove off valuable members with his behavior.  A charismatic person with damaging issues owned this place that was both life-improving, and misery-inducing.  

These people put their thoughts out into Facebook posts and news stories where we could see them.  Their thoughts were exactly what goes through the heads of every person who walks out of a martial arts school not because they are done with the art, but because they are done with the bullshit.  Once you’ve spent time in a martial arts school, the people there become more than your friends.  Sometimes far more.  The school becomes a home.  The teachers vary from never-to-be-questioned gurus to deeply-trusted mentors, to examples on a pedestal, to (at least) respected coaches.  

No matter what happens in an environment like that, the pressure (self-created and from others) to protect the school at all costs is intense.  The personal investment in a school’s reputation, in keeping alive the illusion that “everything is bright and wonderful” so that others can continue to train and benefit is so powerful.

The need for integrity in the profession of martial arts instructor really couldn’t be higher.  But the presence of integrity, as we all know, is a real crapshoot.  Some larger arts have formal training programs for teachers.  Some even do basic background checks.  For the most part, the immense responsibility and power of the “martial arts teacher” role is handed over to folks who have no training in counseling, crisis-management, or even the barest hint of what ethics might apply to their position.  Anyone can open or run a martial arts school. They can hire or appoint anyone they like. There’s no license for that.  If you consult the Internet, you’ll easily find “instructors” who look as if they've never taken a credible martial arts class.  

Teachers in our schools are usually just people who are good at martial arts (at best).  In spite of the many sales pitches made to parents about the endless virtues that martial arts will teach their children (“Discipline!”  “Respect!” “Confidence!” “Honor!” “Strength!”  “Character!”…) even in schools with some whisper of those things in the curriculum, what is taught most of the time is how to be good at punching, kicking, grappling, throws, weapons use, and escapes.  

Some schools are better than others at working in those "soft" lessons.  Maybe with words on the wall, or mantras the students yell, or lessons they need to study.  But mostly martial arts schools just teach martial arts.  Which has very little to do with personal character.  

I see three types of people attracted to martial arts.  Those who ARE decent human beings choose martial arts out of affinity for those goals; people who may not be stellar yet but who WANT to be better people choose martial arts for the same reason; and people who aren't decent at all, but who want to APPEAR to be decent also choose martial arts.  Because an environment like that makes it so easy to put on a facade and exploit people. I think that there are far far more of the first two types, but it doesn’t take many of the third type to do a lot of damage.

A quick Google News search will turn up plenty of “martial arts teacher messed up” stories.  Abusing kids, sexual misconduct, business misconduct.  Being good at a martial art doesn’t make you good at being a person. But those news stories are the exception, where someone got caught.  Mostly bad teachers just stay in their jobs, and if they have charisma they may stay for a very long time.  They do things that are abusive and “not right,” and they harm a lot of people, but martial arts schools are littered with them.  They have power, and they abuse it.  But only a small percentage cross into criminal territory and eventually get caught.

So seeing these news stories this summer, I could relate. The struggle between loyalty to their “family” and wanting to see something done about things that “weren’t right.”  I would be astonished, actually, to find people, particularly women, in martial arts with any significant years of training who could not relate to that, at least a little.

I’ve watched too many friends change schools, change arts, or give up martial arts entirely because of teachers who shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, but who owned whole schools. It’s routine in the women’s changing rooms and “women’s nights out” to vent about the bullshit. The glass ceilings and very different standards for promotion or hiring or teaching, the poor assumptions about women who train, the condescension from lower-ranked men that’s so rarely dealt with effectively by teachers. The promotion of women who look good, regardless of skill or hard work, and the failure to promote women (even ones who look good) regardless of skill or hard work. (All unfair to everyone involved). Women in martial arts just suck that shit up and keep training.  Or they leave, because it's an overt violation of the integrity martial arts is supposed to embody, and why would they stay?  Of course it’s not only women: favoritism toward younger people, racism, massive doses of anti-LGBTQ attitudes…all of the social ills we see everywhere are magnified in a martial arts school.

People who train are, just like most people, usually really decent. Plenty of men train because they want to be able to protect others or be better people.  So often they quietly tell us “I saw that, it wasn’t right,” or do things to “make up for” a bad teacher. Which keeps some folks training longer. But the environment of a school with a toxic teacher can suck the wind out of anyone’s sails.  

We’re often asked “why is it so hard to keep women students,” but the real answers go in one ear and out the other and we get pink gis rather than solutions. When a structure is betrayed by the people running it, that puts off a lot of students.  When the people up in front are all white dudes, and the occasional woman is clearly window-dressing or a token, or teaches mostly children’s classes, that’s massively off-putting.  

So this summer I watched this local kind-of-like-an-MA-school organization and its owner go through a public flaying with bated breath to see whether my own personal fear would be realized. The fear of everyone in a position of knowing things aren’t right with their beloved organization.  And it was realized.  The owner of this business agreed to step out, but couldn’t find a buyer (it was a reputation-based business, and this publicity had done it in).  The company folded.  Exactly the fear that keeps our people from speaking up when things aren’t right.  “What if I hurt my school?”

Watching this organization’s public laundry-airing, I mainly considered two things:

1. What INTERNAL fortitude and integrity does it take to speak up about things that “aren’t right” or to take those things seriously and act when someone else speaks up?  This group of not-martial-artists had a lot of guts, strength, and integrity.  Some spoke up, probably in fear that their friends would hate them.  Others acknowledged their own role in it, cleaned up their mess, and “did the right thing,” cutting through their own cognitive dissonance and risking their beloved company to do it.  I’ve not seen much of that in the martial arts community.  Usually the opposite.  People whose stated profession/avocation is about being strong and having integrity…mostly aren’t and don’t when it comes to handling toxic instructors, or even toxic students. 2. What EXTERNAL forces could be applied to pre-empt a hot mess?  What constraints, controls, or measures could be put in place in an organization (specifically a martial arts school) to keep things from getting that far?  To help people recognize “not right” and head it off at the pass? To remove control from abusive people or keep them from getting it to begin with.

The internal fortitude issue is complicated.

When most people leave a martial arts school in frustration after wading through the bullshit for too long, or after a traumatic encounter or shock, paradoxically, their greatest fear is that if they speak up it will hurt the school. If they were there long, they probably highly value their experience, even if it was painful or harmful. They may believe that other people don’t have the same harm from the bad teacher (though often it’s just that others are harmed and no one speaks up).  They don't want the people they care for to be hurt.  Better to step out quietly.  

I’ve been on the side of saying “I know that wasn’t right.” I’ve encouraged people to leave quietly to protect the school rather than speaking up myself or encouraging them to speak. I’ve bitten my tongue at the many “seriously not right” things that go on in a school like that because of loyalty, or hierarchy, or “did I really just see that?!” or because I knew that speaking up would do no good.  Probably many people of rank who have trained in a few different schools can say the same.

There isn’t much to be done when the harm is coming from the school owner.  I many times protected the larger “family” at the expense of those members who were hurt. I let those people down by not dealing with the ugliness. I did not act with strength or integrity, though I rationalized it all every time as protecting the family.  I think of myself as someone with integrity, so I had to handle that cognitive dissonance somehow when my integrity failed.  

Cognitive dissonance plays another part too.  We imbue teachers with our ideals, so we make a lot of excuses for them to keep that “big bright” image. It is hard to cut through our constructs to see a problem, and there are so few ways to deal with a problem like a toxic teacher that we will do almost anything to avoid thinking about it.  Between wanting to believe that we have integrity, and that our idols do, we walk around in a bubble and allow harm to happen in ways that are the opposite of having integrity.

Speaking up about problems with teachers (who attain impressive loyalty from their students) is incredibly hard, and that protects the teachers who shouldn’t be there. Personal fear plays into it.  "What if I'm wrong/crazy." or "Will my friends turn away from me?"  Those are difficult questions.  They’re especially difficult if the toxic person is skilled at gaslighting (as so many are).  Far more difficult if the toxic person has a little cadre of gaslighters downplaying the harm on his behalf.  Like being with an abusive spouse and their thirty cousins who believe the abuser can do no wrong.

And most of those factors were true in the organization I watched this summer as well.  I was a little awed by what I witnessed when this local company was exposed.  The guys in that organization stepped up.  When presented with the reality, they cut through the same mental trap we face.  They posted publicly too, acknowledged the trouble out loud, and they ultimately sacrificed their beloved business in favor of supporting the people who had been hurt there.

They probably felt the loss keenly, after-all they hadn’t been harmed.  At least not directly.  (From what I saw them post, they were harmed. They knew things were “not right” and they were harmed by their inaction.  I harmed myself in that way, and regret it keenly. Because it hurts to let your friends be hurt and do nothing to stop it.) That’s a regret that doesn’t heal easily.

But I find a lot of irony in the courage of these people who do NOT train in martial arts.  We ostensibly train in “integrity, courage, discipline, honesty…” but we pressure each other to ignore the harm caused by these toxic teachers. We teach personal protection, we teach courage, strength, trusting our guts, doing the right thing.  But the secretive “keep it in the family” culture of too many martial arts schools doesn't mean "and we'll fix it in the family," it means we pretend bad things aren't happening.  We don’t step in when we know things aren’t right and many students leave quietly when the “not right” hits home too much for too long.  We should have better solutions.

I don’t have any silver bullets, but I do have some thoughts. Both about the “internal” problem of standing up with integrity when we encounter toxic teachers or when someone tells us about their bad experiences.  And also “external” options that may help nip these situations/people in the bud.

Student’s Bill of Rights

An obvious one is Better teacher training, and training on ethics.  Literally codes of ethics for teachers and school owners.  That’s an internal AND an external fix.  Some systems have those, and I would be fascinated to know whether it helps.  I doubt it keeps really bad teachers from doing bad things.  “Those teachers” are going to do what they do.  But inexperienced people who have never thought about what it means to be in a position of such responsibility should be taught. People who are ignorant rather than malicious can learn ethics.  Martial arts instructors are in a terrifying position of power over their students in many schools.  People handed that role should be told up-front what it means to be in that role and to do it responsibly.

As an external control, a code of ethics, like a “Student’s Bill of Rights” would illustrate “this is the standard of behavior for teachers.”  Knowing what a teacher should be like makes it much clearer when things are wrong.  Don’t throw a code in an owner’s manual somewhere, put it in the changing rooms on a poster. If a school doesn’t allow teachers to date students (or constrains such relationships with clear rules to prevent the harm it can cause), but a teacher asks a student out or asks them to hide a relationship, that’s a clear sign. But if students don’t know it’s wrong (or worse, teachers don’t)…well it happens all the time.

With a code, students can know “this shouldn’t be.”  And maybe having that sort of standard, and discussing it openly and frankly, would make it easier to bring things out of changing-room conversation and into open, frank discussion in schools.  

Trusted and Empowered Seniors

Maybe rather than keeping lids on until the cooker explodes, schools should create ways to have conversations that could release pressure and make things better. There’s nothing wrong with “keeping it in the family” as long as the “family” has ways to fix the problems. I just bet that some of the folks from that company I watched are thinking “is there anything I could have done years ago to deal with this?”  “Did it have to come to this public shaming and implosion?”  That’s a great question.  

I look back on my many friends who have lost martial arts from their lives, or lost their preferred art and had to take up another one where the school environment was survivable. I wish that I had had words or leverage or ability to make things better for them.  Or at least I wish that I had spoken up louder, and continued speaking up until I’d either been walked out the door or things changed.

Having senior (but perhaps not too senior) students designated individually or as a group to handle issues would help.  Of course most schools work that way informally.  Senior students take care of junior students.  Senior students listen to the woes of junior students and try to help.  But I think that an official role would make a difference.  It was my responsibility as a senior student (Instructor) to listen when people told me things were not right, but there was nowhere to go from there. The “yeah, I hear you, that sucks” problem.  

People should be told: “You are designated to make sure that this ethics code is adhered-to, and if it’s not, you need to tell X, Y, Z, and keep telling people up the ladder until the problem is fixed.  Whether it’s the newest coach on the floor or the owner of the school, you need to 1. Listen.  2. Use your judgment. and 3. Act on what you’ve been told.”

Maybe rather than individual responsibility, it could be a group that has the power to call anyone (even the owner) on the carpet.  Often just shining some light on dark behavior will make it go away.  When it’s issues like bias in promotion or hiring, that’s a tough nut to crack, but a group whose job is to consider the issues might have a shot at it.

Listening and Watching

We all have a  deep bias against people who stop training, an assumption of weakness or insufficiency.  That makes it easy to downplay any reasons they give.  People who quit things want to blame anyone other than themselves.  The best teachers out there will have a long list of quitters who say it’s the teacher’s fault.  So we take those excuses with a big lump of salt. Which is a great cover.

Let’s be real.  Attrition in martial arts is high, and that masks the effects of bad teachers.  Lame excuses for leaving can cover “I’m too lazy for this, it's too hard for me” but they also cover up “the teacher made me feel like dirt,” or “the teacher had his hands on me differently than he touched other people in class,” or “I watched some lower-ranked guy who trains a lot less get promoted over my head one too many times.”  or “I’m gay, and sick to death of people covering their discomfort with jokes like ‘it’s not gay if you don’t make eye contact.’”

When someone complains about others being promoted over them, it’s a near 100% likelihood that they’re whiners who didn’t get promoted because they didn’t earn it.  The people who we SHOULD notice didn’t get promoted fairly are good students who DON’T speak up.  A “good student” just assumes they weren’t good enough and keeps trying. There’s no system there for countering bias in promotions.  We rightly dismiss complaints from whiners, and the people unfairly held back go quietly unnoticed.  

But I think we should measure.  Keeping demographics on promotions/attendance/attrition.  We should see whether men are promoted faster on average than women, or white people faster than POC.  Or young people faster than old people.  Controlling for attendance, in a big enough school or over enough time we could spot bias pretty easily.

Also, taking comments and keeping them, either anonymously or with some bare demographic information.  Are there trends?  Maybe we could task senior students with writing down what people tell them, and keeping a file.  Sending friends to do “exit interviews” when people leave a school. Then annually review the file.  Spot trends.  See if it’s not just one whiner complaining about promotion, but a trend of older people all feeling they were held back.  Or women feeling that their teachers didn’t take them seriously.  Or even just “I can’t put my finger on it, but I don’t feel comfortable in X’s classes.”  

And when we spot the trends, we need to act on them.  Back to “internal.”  If we want integrity, we need to realize that integrity is an awful feeling, not a bright one.  It’s self-doubt, it’s sacrificing one value for another, it’s wondering if we’re doing the right thing.  It’s standing up to our friends.  Assuming “I’m a person with integrity” or “Teacher is a person with integrity,” and rationalizing our actions or dismissing the evidence of our senses is the opposite of integrity.

How it Ends

I hurt for the folks I watched over the summer, who did the right thing and lost their beloved organization.  In the movies that wouldn’t happen.  In real life, sometimes we have to choose, and we regret every choice.  That is the position a poisonous teacher or school owner puts us in.  Life is messy.  You can’t punch a problem like this in the face.  We like face-punchable problems.  These are not that.

I can’t answer whether risking a school failure to address issues is worth it. That’s a personal decision. One I’ve never answered “yes” to.  Presumably it’s all on a scale.  A teacher with a bad temper who just makes people feel bad occasionally is one thing, a teacher sleeping his way around the school or manipulating students against their own interests or not paying or promoting appropriately is quite another, and a teacher crossing over into criminal behavior ought to be a bright line.

But there are simple things.  If your school doesn’t have a code of conduct for its instructors, it might be worth asking for one.  And if there’s resistance…maybe it’s worth asking a lot harder questions.  When devoted students leave, senior students should pursue their reasons. There’s a difference between a loudmouthed white-belt leaving and a loyal black-belt leaving. Good teachers will ask questions and keep asking them until the answers come out.  Giving students trusted people to talk with to really understand if something has gone very wrong can draw that out.  People with higher ranks have responsibility to address those issues rather than stewing or silencing.  

I was looking for something mindless to watch and stumbled on an old chestnut, “Highway to Heaven.”  What’s better than some moralizing Michael Landon in a feel-good everything-works-out-in-the-end bit of fluff right? Apparently not so much.  Maybe it’s a mark of how much things have changed since then, but from the first minute of the first episode, I was hooked, watching in amazement as the train-wreck progressed.

It really was like watching a horror film.  I was talking to the TV, trying to warn the characters “No! he’s a stalker!”  “Don’t let him follow you home, he’s probably a rapist!” “Ack! Old people! Do not give him your life savings to gamble on a horse race!”  “Seriously kid? You just accepted a big wrapped gift from a total stranger who walked into your back yard and pretended to know your dad?!” Just…wow.  Ok, sure, on the show this guy is an angel, but he acts like the sleaziest grifter/rapist/stalker/pedophile/abuser in the world.  How did we not see it? (or maybe others saw it, and I’m just slow)

But it did make me think about some things.  One of the most difficult and frustrating experiences I’ve had repeated over the years when working with survivors of abuse and assault, and teaching women’s self-defense, is getting folks to see and believe red-flags. To trust their guts when some authoritative-sounding guy is gaslighting. To understand when lines are being crossed that might give a little advanced warning.  A heads-up to at least watch for issues (or just run the other way).

But the problem with red flags is that many apply equally well to both over-helpful persistently “nice” people and to stalker/grifter/rapist/abusers.  And there’s a reason for that.  Because these guys want so very badly to convince you that they are Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven.  Too good to be true.  Angels on earth.  Those words they use have come to us first in childhood television, from trusted authority figures, from “angels.” Of course those words are effective.

Men with these tendencies will argue with you that it’s just “gentlemanly” behavior to be pushy and overcome a woman’s objections to accepting their help.  They’ll say anything to quiet objections, persuade us to ignore our gut instincts. “What harm is there?”  “C’mon, I know you, you want to try it.” “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if people trusted each other?” “You could really help me out by…”  “I need someone I can truly trust and rely on to do _____ for me.”  

I wonder how much their techniques change over generations.  I wonder if they learn it from TV.  Because the words coming out of Michael Landon’s mouth sound like the playbook of an abuser.  And that’s the insidious thing.  Some of these abusers really believe themselves to be “angels.”  Others just put on that face.  There’s a lot of talk about “stalkery” romantic comedies that give people bad/dangerous ideas about how romance should work.  But shows about “nice guys” who use abuser techniques to overcome people’s instincts and objections are just as dangerous.  

Children should show respect for their elders and speak politely when adults address them.  Most of us probably agree with that.  And yet, we train our children about “stranger danger.”  If I approach a child in the park or a store, or if you do, or if almost anyone does, we mean them well.  We’re speaking to them for kindly reasons.  If we offer them help, it’s out of a genuine interest in helping.  A vanishingly small number of adults approach children to abduct or harm them.  And yet, children are taught to walk away without speaking to us.  Diligent parents and teachers tell them that politeness doesn’t matter, and that their safety very much does.  Adults understand that and don’t take it personally.  Politeness is always secondary.

I’m drawing a parallel, because I think we’ve got some cognitive dissonance in our culture.  Recently I’ve engaged with several friends in social-media discussions of a particular meme.  You may have seen it.  The post suggested that men opening doors for women was an oppressive and terrible form of patriarchy and a controlling behavior.  It’s designed to make everyone call bullshit. “our society is becoming so uncivil!  radical feminism! men who don’t open doors for women are awful!  women who don’t appreciate men opening doors must hate men!”   Whoever started this meme was a genius. Every time I’ve seen it come up, I see feminist (male and female) friends scrambling hard to assure the world that they think this idea is insane and that they appreciate the custom and think it’s harmless and healthy and should be observed at every opportunity. The implication being that even considering otherwise might be a social breach, let alone doing anything other than complying with the custom.

But I take a different view.  Not about politeness, I’m all for that.  I don’t think anyone is suggesting we should stop holding doors for each other and I plan to keep holding them and walking through doors held for me.  No, I take a women’s self-defense view to that quaint old custom. Specifically the custom of men holding doors for women.  Not the other way around, not men holding doors for men, or women holding them for women.  Specifically, the dynamics of men holding doors for women.  Of course almost always, it’s a nice guy holding a door because it makes sense, and he’d hold the same door no matter who was right behind him needing to enter.  But sometimes, it isn’t that.

We give children carte blanche to throw away respect for their elders to protect themselves, always putting their safety above “being polite.”  I don’t see us doing the same for women.  We say contradictory things to women.  We often seem to value niceness and compliance above women’s safety while we talk out of the other side of our mouths about women standing up for themselves.

It’s not a solid comparison with child-snatchers.  Children need bright-line rules (“ALWAYS walk away from strangers who offer to help you, don’t speak to them”).  Adults don’t get that luxury, and really don’t need that kind of rule.  On the other hand, child-snatchers are incredibly rare, but rapists and abusers are not and yet we allow more latitude for children to avoid a rare situation than adults to avoid a common one.  The situations are different.  But the fundamental question I suggest we should ask is the same.  “Is self-protection more important than being nice?”  

When we teach women to protect themselves, the primary lesson is “listen to your gut.”  Following on that, we try to teach them to put aside cultural conditioning and be rude if that’s what it takes, yell if that’s what it takes, to put their own safety above the comfort of others.  Women have mountains of conditioning and social pressure to climb all in a moment when they must take action.  

Abusers test women they are interested in forming a relationship with to determine whether those women can be manipulated and groomed.  Rapists trying to get a woman into a compromised situation use manipulation techniques to create trust and obligation.  They hide those activities in social constructs, innocuous cover like holding a door.  Nothing they do in that context can get them in trouble.  No one thinks anything of it because there is no immediate threat or risk.

In martial arts training, we like to talk about how “awareness” will allow us to spot a situation before it escalates to needing to use actual martial (fighting) arts.  It’s a nice theory, but a hard premise to prove. How does training on a mat teach us to spot subtle “wrongness” in communication?  Is it wishful thinking that martial artists are more “aware” of indications that a situation is heading in a bad direction than others might be?  I don’t know.  Maybe we’re just more willing to trust our guts, or engage in the question. But it is true that many of these manipulation techniques used by attackers and abusers are easy to hide in common everyday interactions. It’s also true that if we take those interactions at face value, fail to even consider that more might be going on, then we won’t spot a red flag.  We won’t hear our gut over the sound of cultural conditioning.

Door holding is one of those interactions.

I propose that we need to go back to fundamentals of women’s (and all other) self-defense.  Listen to your gut.  Yes, almost every person holding a door for another is being polite; when you and I hold a door, we do it with good intention.  But some people holding a door flick your radar.  Running ahead to get a door can be weird.  Speaking to you in some unnecessary or overly-familiar way.  Or something you can’t put your finger on.  But our guts can give us a heads-up if we’re aware that a seemingly-safe situation can lead to much worse.

It’s not our job to guess what’s in anyone else’s head.  It’s not sensible to walk around with suspicion of everyone around us.  But it is valid to recognize that some percentage of people (usually men) holding a door for a woman may be doing it to enforce “the order of things.”  Here and there are ones trying to see whether they can get a woman to alter her movements in some way, or accept an overture that will generate a hint of obligation.  (Just like the charities that send you greeting cards or a stamped envelope knowing that your sense of civility, obligation, or connection will make a contribution more likely.)  

Someone who has made a “gentlemanly” gesture may be counting on lowering our guard, creating trust or liking or familiarity.   The next step could be to “happen” to exit the store at the same time, and again extra-helpfully offer to help get groceries into the car.   If he hadn’t first held the door it would be easy to turn down that next “gentlemanly” gesture that seems like “too much.”  Or maybe it doesn’t seem odd at all, because the manipulation has already worked. We’ve put him in the “nice guy” category and we’re no longer listening to any part of us saying otherwise.  Or maybe he’s already reinforced it if we looked hesitant “hey, no big deal, just trying to be helpful!” with the implication that you’re being rude if you refuse.  There’s no potential immediate danger, it’s just a guy holding the door!  Isn’t that always nice? so how can we justify rudeness?

If you’ve ever experienced that guy who offered to be “helpful” in some way, and when you turned him down he got angry, you may have wondered “who does THAT work on?”  Well, it does work sometimes, and those guys are looking for the people it works on. Some women will apologize, backtrack, and ask him to help.

Going back to the child analogy: as a society, we’ve made the decision to throw out common wonderful interactions between children and perfectly amiable adults in order for children to protect themselves.  We allow children to be rude to adults to avoid a really rare but far-too-dire attack. It’s the only thing that makes sense.   I would like to see us consider these cultural structures around “politeness” between women and men in the same way.  Not to throw them out, because adult women are not children.  Just to acknowledge that rape and abuse are not rare, not at all rare. That if we want for people to “be aware” and spot a problem before it comes to needing to fight their way out, then we need to look harder at common interactions that attackers and abusers use as cover. That is when “earlier” takes place.

The next time you see that meme, maybe discuss it.  Consider your own biases in favor of men holding doors for women (as opposed to people of all genders holding doors for each other) and the power structure involved.  Consider what we do by reinforcing the requirement that all men hold doors and all women walk through them.  Everything we do to dismiss early warnings in situations routinely used by predators is a disservice in my opinion.  

It helps me to think of the goal of a polite gesture.  To smooth the way for someone. But shouldn’t it always be optional to accept a polite gesture?  If we didn’t ask for help, can’t we turn it down?  Especially if that help might have emotional hooks. Not in a child’s blanket rule that takes away a common courtesy, just in a way that allows us to consider that that common courtesy may actually be something else. People who try to reinforce those gender-role behaviors with ridicule or anger are people we need to watch out for.  

It’s easy enough to teach ways to avoid a problem.  If a gut-check says “avoid that,” stopping to look at a phone, walking back to the car, or just saying “no, after you” and insisting on noncompliance shouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eye (or if it does, that’s a bullet dodged).  But the first key is knowing a gut-check is important.  

“I want to be able to protect myself.”  From the hundreds of fellow martial artists I’ve talked with about why they train, this phrase sticks out at the top of the list. Over the years, I’ve become less and less convinced that martial arts actually does relate to “self protection” goals.  There are ways in which almost everyone who does martial arts may be “safer.”  (Exercise is healthy, improving balance and learning to fall safely will protect against common accidents...).   Some people, like law-enforcement officers or people who live or work in really bad neighborhoods, may have specific risks that martial arts can help them address. For the rest of us...it’s a great hobby.  It’s nice to feel like a badass.  It’s good for bonding with people.  Discipline, strength, confidence...it’s a hobby (or lifestyle, or obsession) worth pursuing. I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Many martial artists train for those reasons, for sport, or just because it’s fun.  Wonderful reasons. But the “self-protection” delusion is a problem.  I would like to see that delusion sliced open and its guts strewn in the dirt: in martial artists, in school marketing, and in the general population.  I would like to see women’s self-defense training that addresses the real risks taught more widely, and see things that are not women’s self-defense marketed accurately “women-only martial arts class” rather than “women’s self-defense” for instance.    It’s a big problem. Specifically, it’s a huge problem for women, whose risk profile is entirely different from men’s.  Women are led to believe and trust that by studying martial arts they will be safer from the risks they face, and that is at best a very small partial truth and at worst outright wrong. When men come to martial arts to learn how to fight off an attacker, it’s an active shooter, a violent mugger, a carjacker, or a drunk in a bar.  Risks that (other than the aforementioned LE officers and people in sketchy neighborhoods) they are beyond unlikely to face. For most people those are some of the least likely actual risks in their lives.  Giving up fried food, taking a defensive-driving class, and updating an eyeglass prescription would eliminate more risk from most people’s lives than decades of martial arts training. So the harm to men from martial arts training is that they get a great hobby with a lot of benefits, for reasons that are mistaken.  That’s even sometimes acknowledged among us, that we have to be crazy to do this stuff when it’s almost certain never to be needed.  When women, however, come with the purpose of learning self-protection, it’s sexual assault and abuse that they’re worried about.  “I want to learn to protect myself” means “I want to feel safe from rape.”   That’s where the delusion becomes a problem.  A big problem.   Martial arts training is a hammer, which makes every “protection” problem a nail.   Everyone has heard “the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone the woman is acquainted with.”   But when women sign up for a martial arts program, what they’re getting is stranger-attack skills.  In the real world, women’s acquaintances are not hiding in the bushes or in deserted parking lots to leap out and subdue their friends.   Spending just a little time thinking about the on-the-mat skills taught in almost every martial arts school anywhere, and comparing with the scenarios encountered routinely by 1:4 women in their teens and twenties shows the obvious.  That isn’t training for the risks those women will encounter. Assault by friends, boyfriends, husbands, co-workers, teachers, bosses, and relatives, the monumental majority of assaults inflicted on women, start with emotional manipulation.  Controlling behavior.  Envelope-pushing behavior. Boundary erosion.  Manipulation.  Creation of ambiguity.  Drugging of drinks. Encouraging of more alcohol or drug use than a woman intends.  Undermining confidence and self-worth.  A vast array of behaviors that can make an assault into a loathsome morass, a situation where punching and kicking are worthless. Different skills are needed.   Kayla Harrison is an example of exactly that.  She was already a gifted Judoka when she was assaulted.  If anyone could defend herself with martial arts, probably even as a small child, it would have been Kayla Harrison.  If martial arts skills are supposed to apply to acquaintance rape, and she couldn’t apply them, then people with no athletic skill walking in to a random school a couple of days a week surely can’t.  But that wasn’t the problem.  Kayla’s skills were not the problem.  Many women martial artists are raped every year in spite of their belts, training, and ability to put a foot directly through a man’s abdomen.   Martial arts skills are the wrong tool for that situation.  Totally and completely wrong. Knowing what skills are needed starts with risk analysis.  Risk analysis is something woefully deficient in most martial arts training. Most martial arts instructors enjoy various combinations of: punching, kicking, grappling, throws, chokes, locks...they enjoy sparring, rolling, using various weapons, they enjoy winning.  This is what those folks are great at, they love it, and they teach it. Looking beyond that takes a lot of effort.  The easier thing for people who have a subject they love is to believe that it can solve all problems.  The hammer. When it comes to studying, martial arts instructors might enjoy looking at old scrolls, or watching video of other martial artists, reading books about martial arts. When they research “modern attacks” they watch video of inmate interviews describing stranger attacks and how victims are chosen.  They watch security video of knifings and shootings.  Unless they’re the guy who wrote “The Gift of Fear,” (Gavin DeBecker...good stuff...read that) they rarely study the “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” or study women’s risk profiles from other sources. Studying martial arts the usual ways means reinforcing teaching martial arts the usual ways, and the delusion that martial arts can protect from “attacks.”  Regardless of the reality.   Delusion is like that. But some martial artists are women.  And women are a great target demographic.  And sometimes, the need for “something else” breaks through the comfortable idea that if you are just good enough at punching and kicking, then all situations can be handled. Enter “Ladies’ Self-Defense.”  Almost every martial arts school sometimes offers a women’s self-defense class.   Sometimes it’s even taught by women students or instructors.  And that’s where things get complicated.  Those classes are almost always intended just to bring in new students.  They serve a good purpose: an easy on-ramp to martial arts training.   We know that women often find it hard to walk in the door to martial arts, and such a ramp is a big help.   But it also reinforces the delusion. Advertised as “women’s self-defense,” the classes generally just teach a women-only version of whatever the school usually teaches.  Maybe a pink-washed version.  Maybe with “make this a slap instead of a punch,” or a hair-pull tossed in.  But really, it’s just the same stuff.  No different in addressing real risk for women than for men.  Nothing “women’s” about the self-defense except that no men are in the class. Sometimes there are classes in real women’s self-defense though.  That does exist.  Almost exclusively taught by women, and mostly not teaching any physical techniques at all.  Once in a while it even comes from a martial arts school.  Women who train sometimes go out of their way to learn women’s risks, to learn and develop curricula to address those risks.  Books and classes are out there.  But from the perspective of a woman with no background, there’s no distinction between a pink-washed regular martial arts class and a serious women’s self-defense program. Women coming in off the streets with no expertise, and just a vague idea  “I want to be safer” encounter confident martial artists who think that their hammer can address any nail (pun fully intended).  Those women can spend years and thousands of dollars learning skills that don’t address their real risks. They may love their art, they may become Kayla Harrison, they may never regret walking in the door of their school...but they’re not learning what they came to learn. The troublesome part of this is that many women who train in a martial art know all of this.  We have been saying this for a long time.   We care about women’s risks and the very alarming occurrences of those risks. (Comparing men who are unlikely to ever be attacked in any way with women who have a 25% chance of violent attack in their lifetime is stark).  We study, we read, we learn in other contexts.  In my case, I learned about women’s self-defense through a comprehensive sexuality education curriculum when I was 13, and again in my twenties when I became certified to teach that curriculum.  I learned more in training to become a Crisis Response Advocate for sexual assault and domestic abuse survivors.  I learned by reading real research and talking with real survivors (many of whom are fellow martial artists).  I know many other women martial artists and instructors who have sought out that information and those skills.  We learn that specialty, and we sound like broken records talking about the need to teach real women’s self-defense. But schools still mostly don’t teach those skills.  The delusion of “martial arts makes you safer” persists.  One reason is that it is vaguely true that martial arts makes you safer.  The “learning-to-fall-safely,” the “longer-life-through-exercise.”  The reduction of already-infinitesimal risk of stranger attacks that apply to men and women.  Those things are real.  Not that important, not that useful, but real. Also, it’s easy for the (mostly male) senior people who run schools and styles to pass off their female students’ concerns with an occasional seminar.  That feels like enough for a concern that doesn’t seem real to them.  They have no personal stake.  They’ve never guarded their drink like Fort Knox.  They’ve never known a dozen friends who have been pressured into sex by people they trusted and thought “that could have been me.” Never faced losing a job or a home if they didn’t sleep with someone.  Risks for other people are easy to pass off. Martial arts Instructors feel like warrior protectors, who think that if they are with a woman she is safe.  Which is the diametric opposite of the real risk analysis which says that a woman is safer walking alone than with a male acquaintance (don’t take that as advice).  Those men can believe in their punching-and-kicking hammer, wholeheartedly, as a panacea, point at the “women’s self-defense” class (that isn’t women’s self-defense) and be annoyed by the insistent nattering of the women students or junior Instructors who say otherwise.  Badgered to think uncomfortable thoughts when they could stay on solid comfortable ground instead.

There are other reasons. Economic reasons.  It doesn’t pay for most martial arts schools to let students think too hard about real risk analysis.  Some places teach an art that is beautiful and has nothing to do with self-defense, and the school doesn’t pretend it does.  I’m guessing that a Zen Archery teacher presented with a prospective student who said “I want to learn to protect myself” would point the prospect in another direction.  But in schools purporting to teach modern defense...either the instructors don’t know what the real risks are, or they just don’t want to think too hard about it.  They want to cling to the idea that “martial arts makes you safer” and take the money. They probably even believe it and are just bad at math. I prefer the Macy’s approach. Sending a prospective student elsewhere if what they need isn’t in the house.  Honesty and integrity and cutting through delusion.  If a woman comes looking for risk-reduction, and a martial arts school doesn’t offer real women’s self-defense, then sending the prospect to a class at a Crisis Response organization, or even another martial arts school (if there is one teaching those actual skills nearby) is a way to get more students, a better reputation, and loyalty from their own women students.  Doing otherwise is a breakdown in integrity, a crack in the facade that can run deep.

There are worse reasons. Some schools are run by men who have no business running anything.  Men who see the women in their school as their personal dating pool, or worse.  Men like Kayla Harrison’s early teacher.  A far-too-common thing in an industry full of alpha-males and narcissists.  Those men have zero interest in teaching women to protect themselves from the emotional manipulation they use.  The mindsets of those men could be a book all its own. We don’t like to talk about that, but Kayla Harrison’s situation isn’t as uncommon as it should be. The most innocuous reason for this delusion is that schools teach certain skills, the people running them may not get into heavy discussions about the whys and wherefores with their students. Many schools are fun, happy places where deep discussion isn’t a thing.   It’s just “caveat emptor.”  People need to do some research before they sign up to spend a lot of time and money on a hobby, to make sure it’s a hobby that will serve their actual needs. But what is the harm?  People train in a martial art, maybe get a black-belt even.  Enjoy themselves.  Make friends.  Feel like a badass.  Look cool.  They exercise.  They get discipline, and self-control, and endurance.  Martial arts is an outstanding, awesome hobby that I personally think everyone on earth should try.  It’s been a major life-changing thing for me.  If an acquaintance says “I’m thinking about martial arts” they get from me “YES, you should do it! You’ll love it!”  So where is the harm?   This article is about the harm.  

If you try to buy a car, and you get a giant cake shaped like a car, you might love the heck out of that cake...but it’s not what you paid for.  If you then try to drive somewhere in an emergency, you’re screwed.  (Please substitute a better analogy in your head).   

If a woman, (or the parents of a girl) walk into a school and say “I’d like to learn to protect myself” or “I’d like to make sure that my daughter can defend herself,” and everyone involved knows that they mean “I want (for her) to be safe from rape” and the school takes thousands of their dollars over the years without teaching them easily-acquired skills that will make them appreciably safer from that risk...that’s a harm.   Even if the women become badass black-belts.  Even if they love training.  Even if they wouldn’t trade that time in for anything else.  They still didn’t get what they paid for, and in the 1:4 chance that they encounter a situation they’re not prepared for, they are screwed.  That is the harm.  That’s a failure of unconscionable proportions.

But there are more insidious harms as well.  Some of those women and girls are exposed to those narcissist teachers who exploit them.  Many of them will go about their lives and suffer acquaintance-rape.  When that happens, my experience has been that it’s been worse for women martial artists than for other women in some ways. The difference between “I couldn’t protect myself” and “I should have been able to protect myself and I failed” is crushing.   One benefit of martial arts can be a feeling of almost super-hero-like ability to handle whatever is thrown at you.  It’s a positive, and a negative.  It reinforces the idea that martial arts is a hammer and every kind of problem is a nail.  Because we train, we can do anything.  Confidence helps us solve problems, but not all problems can be solved that way. People who train to punch and kick on mats in an air-conditioned and well-lit school don’t suddenly have skills that make them safe walking blindly down a mountain in the middle of the night, or the ability to whip a perfect merengue, or to perform an appendectomy, or to spot the red flags that often signal a controlling relationship that can lead to sexual assault and abuse.  Specialized skills require specialized training.   Martial artists like us really want to believe, as our instructors do, that the skills we’ve acquired through years of blood, sweat, and tears will serve us in many ways.  They do.  But they don’t substitute for other training.   And when women (or girls) who have learned to beat the tar out of an opponent on a mat feel that they are safe from rape, and then it happens, that is crushing.  It immediately undermines belief in themselves painstakingly built on a foundation of martial arts training.  They suddenly go from walking through the world as a black-belt to feeling like a victim and a failure.   This is not the fault of the woman, it is the delusion perpetuated by martial arts school culture and an abject failure to teach them the tools they need to protect themselves from easily-predictable and common attacks they are likely to encounter.   Putting aside the men and women law enforcement officers and the people who live or work in dangerous neighborhoods; men who train in martial arts are studying because it’s a hobby, not because it’s a sensible use of resources to make them safer.  Men mostly don’t need martial arts.  Women have a high risk profile.  We can expect that 1:4 will be raped, and mostly that will happen when they are in their late teens or early twenties.  Women need appropriate training and the knowledge and skills to be taught are readily available. Martial arts schools routinely fail to serve the demographic that needs them most and schools lead women to believe that they are getting what they need to protect themselves. All of this for a delusion.  The path with integrity is this: First and foremost, Instructors need to recognize that women’s self-defense is a specialized skill set, and not one that comes from being a black-belt in any normal martial art.  It’s not shameful for men who teach martial arts to acknowledge that they need to learn new skills or outsource some training for the good of their school.

Those skills can benefit all students.  Emotional manipulation happens in many contexts, to men and to women.  Male students would benefit from learning women’s self-defense tools.  It would make them better partners, instructors, and human beings.   Regular training needs translation.  Don’t assume that just because regular techniques can be interpreted to apply in different situations that students will be able to do that on the fly in an emergency.  Training needs to be interpreted on the mat, in safe environment, before it’s needed in the real world.

Marketing needs to have integrity.  Women’s classes are not “women’s self-defense” unless they actually are teaching skills specific to women’s risks.  Classes can still be easy ways to get women into training without misrepresentation.

Yesterday I had one of the best martial arts classes in the couple of decades I’ve been training.  Solid “wow” from beginning to end.   I learned new things. The class was challenging, fun, and it turned my perceptions upside-down.  It was the kind of class that fires you up and makes you excited about training.

The thing about training in martial-arts long-term (or training in anything I would guess) is that those "get you fired up" classes become few and far-between.  After the first (weeks/months/years) when everything is new and exciting, and it's cool that you're learning to do what you see in movies (ish), it gets harder.  Months and years of very similar classes, with the revelations and "cool new thing!" going from 2-3 per class to 2-3 per month, to "just be thankful when it happens."   So finding ways to get fresh eyes is good.  In a way.   From new approaches to training, to a new art altogether.  I've heard people divide "phases" of training up differently.  Right now I'm thinking of how the "learning like drinking from a fire hose" phase is very different from the "march through the desert" phase.  Those are really different kinds of training.  Both valuable.  Learning quickly can give you basic self-defense skills.  It fires you up and gets you hooked to love what you’re doing.  It gives you some principles of your art.  It keeps you engaged before you learn internal methods to stay engaged.  It’s FUN.

The later years...THOSE give you staying power.  Plateaus, walls, pits, pain, frustration, exhaustion, boredom, and every excuse your brain can rationalize, it's all there to overcome.  So spicing up those years can be a way to tackle obstacles.  But relying on new and fun can be deceptive.  Distracting.  At least they have been for me.  There were times when I got “bored” with my curriculum, and would suffer through routine training hanging my interest on going from cool seminar to new weapon study to whatever seemed interesting while I slogged through required classes...missing the whole point. The real work of that time, that “seen it, done it, can we PLEASE move on?” time, I am starting to see, is in the basics.  In incremental improvement, and small revelations.  Returning to class when your motivation is gone and instead of suffering through it, finding joy in it.  Finding those (sometimes tiny) bits of progress.   Realizing over and over again that you’re still a beginner, usually just when you think you’ve “got it.”  Finding the fun in training under those conditions is where the sublime happens.  

I think both types of experience are important, and it's apparently possible to do both concurrently.  Appreciating and enjoying the wonder of the new and unexpected, as well as the internal changes that come from regular work over long years.  Those aren't mutually-exclusive.  The seminars and new arts and new weapons and rejuvenating cool stuff...those are great.  But I get more out of those if they aren’t there to “keep me going” in the day-to-day.  I can be there and enjoy starting something totally new entirely for itself.  In the regular routine of training, I don’t have to be “reminded” of why I train.  That is fun and awesome in a totally different way.

Something a teacher once asked me, that I’ve pondered for YEARS, is why I felt that training had to be a series of obstacles.  As if if I wasn’t miserable, I wasn’t working hard enough or “doing it right.”  She was insightful and totally correct.  Obstacles and misery felt like “real” training.  Which led me to set up a lot of misery and obstacles...which ironically prevented a lot of actual training. (sigh) I think recently I’ve decided to overcome the obstacle of creating obstacles.  My original reasons for practicing martial arts are mostly gone now, they don’t apply.  But I still love it. Sometimes reasons don’t matter. This practice is one of my great passions in life.  The new/cool/awesome parts and the long-term familiar parts.   Not needing one to keep the other, enjoying both.

I was in a discussion yesterday about women in military combat roles.  This isn't about that (exactly) but it led me down a rabbit-hole of thought that I wanted to get some light on and hear some other thoughts.

In the discussion, someone said essentially "but if we apply the same standards to everyone then we will have to lower the standards so that more women can pass."  I exited that discussion, but couldn't stop thinking about that statement.  So this was my rabbit hole:

1. I hear that "we'll have to lower the standards so women can do it" mostly from men.  Sometimes from women who parrot men (the ones who don't do the things, I am told that Rhonda Rousey calls them DNB's.   I mostly see those women as simply lacking the self-confidence to do things, a problem which can be fixed, but they are hard to take until/unless they do fix it).  I can also imagine that a woman disappointed after failing to accomplish something she's dreamed of doing (firefighter? Army Ranger?) might also want the standard lowered (not how I respond, but perhaps a natural response, and sometimes the standard is a thinly disguised Jim-Crow-like "you must have a Y-chromosome to do this job" but outside of those thankfully-rare situations I think women don't often want a lower standard, and I bet the defeated men feel the same way.)  Almost exclusively though, I hear "we need to make it easier for women" from men. 2. I think I hear the men actually saying that they believe that WE want for things to be made easier for us, or that we women would FORCE them to make things easier for women.  I also hear them saying that they believe easier would be necessary in order for women to succeed.  (Mostly this comes up in a physical context, but I hear it in professional "but women have babies, so they CAN'T do the work men do because men work 937 hours a week whether or not they have babies" contexts. ) 3. Getting beyond the initial outrage and insult of the idea that even the namby-pamby "postmodern feminists" we're stuck with now would suggest that we need to lower standards so that poor weak women can meet them…I wanted to think about how we may well be CONVEYING the idea that we want that.  Surely this many men didn't come up with that idea on their own. 4. So I isolated the problem to something I know very well, and write about here:  martial arts training.  And after enough pondering, I see it.  I see how we "ask for things to be easier" and how we reinforce that canard and the male behavior to MAKE things easier for us.

So strictly in the context of martial arts training, this is what I see, so commonly that it really is beyond doubt "a thing."  

When faced with doing something new, women express self-doubt.  We do it more often than men do (some men never do that at all, not that they don't feel it), we do it in much different WAYS than men do (with women new to martial arts it's not at all uncommon to fall back into a funny or cute "I'm so fragile and afraid" routine that makes people laugh), we do it in a show-stopping way sometimes (Woman: "I am going to need to know that I will not die doing that thing before I attempt to do that thing."  Man: "BOOYAH!" as he jumps off of the roof.)  We are less likely to risk re-injury by doing something risky with a part of us that hurts (which can turn a long-ago-healed injury into a permanent mental block).  We ask for a lot of repetition or for the instructor to come tell us again how to do something.  A tendency I find in myself (that I'm working on) is trying to play-act the pain I would feel if my partner actually did hurt me with the technique he's practicing (to make my partner feel successful, but it makes me look fragile).   Sometimes we sit on the side, or leave the mat for a drink or the restroom.  Or we just straight-up say "I don't know if I can do that."

We totally tell men to make things easier for us.  An experienced woman martial artist will see and hear those things, and know that every single one of them means "I don't know if I can do this, I need you, Teacher, to give me your confidence because I don't have any."  We speak the same language.  Male teachers, good ones will catch a couple of those, few will catch them all, and most male teachers seem to take the woman at face-value.  (For another time, that too is a valuable lesson in saying and showing what you really mean.  But that takes KNOWING what you really mean, and I think we don't even realize what it is we mean when we do these things.  We're scared, and what we do feels legitimate, because it IS legitimate, but we may think it means something else.)

So when men teaching hear what they think means "make this easier for me" they do.  Allowing the woman to sit out and watch, or finding her a "smaller partner" or dumbing down the technique, or taking off the hard part, or hitting less hard, or laughing along at the funny deflection, or taking a wide berth with long-ago phantom injuries, or telling her she's "got it" when she clearly doesn't or a hundred other ways.   That's the dynamic I see.  We say "I'm unsure of myself, please express confidence" and get "you're right to be unsure of yourself, I will make it easier so that you can do it."    Applying a lower standard.

Now some male teachers have been around long enough to catch some of those things, and will have none of it.  Those are the gems.  The ones who insist, or if they do make something easier, they stay with it RIGHT THEN until the woman works up to the same standard.  It may take her longer, but she's overcoming a lifetime of that kind of "yes, your self-doubt is absolutely right" to do something scary, so it might well take longer.  But those rare teachers aren't piling on more "yes, your self-doubt is right, this is too hard for you" by misunderstanding what the woman is asking for.

But I think this is how we lose a lot of women who try martial arts training.  They come in over a big hump of self-doubt to try to do things that are scary and look impossible.  They express self-doubt in all of those ways (and more I haven't thought of) and get it reinforced, and so why would they continue?  They come to learn confidence, to learn to be AWESOME and hear that they won't and can't.  Women who continue martial arts training long-term, in my experience, already have life experience of continuing and succeeding in spite of opposition.  It's rare for women who come in without that experience to keep training in a martial art, unless they are in an environment with enough senior women to catch them and help them through.  Same with girls who train.  If they start so young that the instructors see them the same way as the boys and before they learn self-doubt, martial arts is an AWESOME thing for girls.  But teenaged girls who start, much harder.  Teenagers are the least self-confident creatures on the planet, and teen and twenty-something women have terrible attrition where men in that age group have comparatively low attrition.  (Martial arts is a high wash-out activity for everyone, but I do think that this is one of the reasons for higher women's attrition.)

Which I think is one value of experienced women as partners and teachers.  Not pairing women exclusively, that doesn't help, whether intended or not, that conveys "I think you are less capable so I will put the less capable people together out of the way of the people I'm really teaching."   But having relate-able senior woman coaching, or better, teaching is valuable.  Women can spot the obstacles and provide the "nope, you can totally do this" for ANY of their partners, not just the women.  Just because men do less expressing of self-doubt doesn't mean they don't feel it.  They're just more likely to hear "man up and do this thing" if they express it.  But women partners and teachers are good for male students too.

But for helping those new women, we can have the changing-room talks about how things really work, and how to get better training out of male partners and teachers (surely we have all been given the "never ever ever ever cry in front of the men, or your training will be ruined forever" speech).    We've probably used all of those ways of expressing doubt.  We call each other on that stuff, and we provide belief in our partners and student's abilities in ways that male partners and teachers only inconsistently do.   And to overcome serious self-doubt requires consistency.  Nothing is more valuable than a teacher's consistent belief that you can accomplish your goals.   That comes in the form of refusing to make things easier, or insisting that any concessions be brief and very circumscribed and accompanied with "because you don't need for it to be easier, you can do this."    

We all have our reasons for studying martial arts. Mine are nothing unusual. I want to be able to handle (dominate) any situation that requires fighting, to be strong and confident based on real skill, to have outstanding self-control mentally and physically...the usual.  But maybe more than that, when I started, I wanted to go from being a shy, clumsy, physically-inept, far-from-athlete to being someone worth seeing.  I think that desire kept me training for a long time.  I wanted desperately to escape from being a wallflower.  For a long time I hated seeing myself, so I avoided pictures and mirrors and video.  I didn’t want to just be in front of people, I wanted to deserve to be in front of people.  To be GOOD at something, to have something others would want for me to share.  To earn it and know that it was real and deserved.  To be seen because I was somebody worth seeing.

Martial arts offers a beautiful structure for that.  You start, as everyone does, as a clumsy, unskilled person who doesn’t know which side is her left, and over time, with dedication and diligence, gradually you gain skill.  You can look at people at different stages ahead of you, and predict with a fair margin of error (if your school is any good), when YOU will be “that good.”  It may be years, but if the people at a certain level in your school are all “that good” then you can expect to be there someday too.   I like structure.  I was very attracted to the idea that if I just work hard (and really, I am not a coordinated person, I have to work harder than most) that I could reliably become good at something. Not just “something,” but something I love, think about all the time, and want VERY much to be good at. 

I saw senior students helping in class and teaching, being out in front of the others, being seen.  I saw students and Instructors doing demonstrations, showing in public what the school is capable of.  I saw senior people bringing more to the art I study, and expanding all of our skill, being recognized for their contributions to the art.  I trusted that with time and diligence and determination (since native talent didn’t enter the picture) that I could be one of those people. I could know enough to help.  That I would have enough skill to be credible as an instructor, and enough “that good” to be worth seeing.  Martial, arts could be the vehicle to end my wallflower purgatory. Lately a particular memory has been coming to me. A time when that “work hard and you will be seen” promise happened in a way that it hasn't before or since.  A time I was very much seen.   My black-belt demonstration. Mountain Quest, the seminar where most people from my school do their tests.

I didn't feel ready. Don't know many people who do, but I was pretty sure that I must be especially not ready. I still felt like a clumsy, inept, unskilled fraud. But I trusted the system and trusted my teachers, and I could look at the skills required and actually acknowledge that I was familiar with those things. I trusted and believed that I would not be asked to test for a black-belt if I had not achieved the expected level of skill.  In other words, if the structure I trusted would put me there, I thought I might possibly have earned the right to be seen. 

I was not going to waste that moment. My training partner and I started planning our demo YEARS before the day.  You might say that we overdid it.  But I hope that my epitaph will read “Kim never underdid anything” and Clare is always uniquely appropriate about everything.  We took our charge to “show what you love about this art” literally.   We did the required twelve physical techniques (actually a few extra) and those were fine. We practiced constantly for months. But we went above and beyond.  We had a huge group of attackers in our demonstration.  We had dialogue, and a sound system (the test takes place in the woods) and a narrator, we had props of all kinds. We brought the techniques into context. All solid self-defense methods. That demonstration was a lifetime of “LOOK AT ME!” waiting to escape, and all focused on expressing the martial art I loved.  

I don’t know what the audience saw.   I do know that every person there remembers our demonstration.  I’ve heard people eagerly tell others who were not there what they missed.  Maybe they saw “over the top.”  If they saw a cast of thousands, maybe they missed “LOOK, I have FRIENDS, and those friends mean everything to me!”   If they saw props, maybe they didn’t see “Check this out! I can use ANY of these things in a fight, because my art encompasses ALL OF THIS.”  If they saw a ten-minute demonstration, maybe they didn’t see “I can go on FOR AS LONG AS I NEED TO, because that is what my art teaches,” or “I have so much to show that it takes a long time because my art is so rich!” If they heard funny dialogue, maybe they didn’t get “LISTEN!  These are the things my teachers have taught me.  All of their favorite phrases reminding us how to do this art well!”  This was my deepest respect and appreciation for the people who helped me learn. This was my gift to my teachers, saying 'I hear every word you say to me.'”  What I’m certain they didn’t see was that for a rare moment I believed that I was worth seeing. Camera-shy though I was, I even arranged for a professional to get the video because I wanted to see it myself.

Size matters. I've been a lot of sizes over the years, tried on quite a few body types to figure out (pun intended) what works for me.  It's easy to give in to outside influences, whether that's eating a lot of pie or donuts because they are amazing and your friend made them for you, or thinking "skinny is best" because that's when people compliment you.  Appearance matters, it affects how people think of you and how effective you're able to be in the world.  But it's complicated.  So many levels of complicated.  Pretty enough to be noticed, but not so pretty people assume you're stupid, unless you want to be underestimated, except it's not that straightforward.  "Striking" rather than conventionally pretty is usually a better strategy for almost anything, and striking can actually come in some forms that aren't at all like "good looking" but that's deeply oversimplifying the problem.  And of course, what works for women is different than what works for men, and the things people SAY they think about appearance are not at all how they BEHAVE with respect to appearance. So it's hard to figure out what works.   In the end, strangely enough, I come back over and over to the advice moms and mom-like people give, that we dismiss as if it's silly.  "Be yourself."   It cuts through the complexity in unexpected ways.  It's a hard thing to find, but finding it feels like a joint popping back into place.  "Yeah, that's right.  How did I not know that?"  People who are at home in their bodies have impact that self-conscious people do not.   I'm not saying "let it all go,"  I'm saying "know what your intentions are so that you can live them."  At least that's working for me, finally, after a lot of things NOT working. After my most significant weight loss (93lb), more than ten years ago, it was easy to get caught up in the well-meaning "have you lost weight?" reactions. (people would still ask me that years later with no additional weight loss!)  BMI measurements, fitting into conventionally-pretty clothing, lots of reinforcement of skinny.  Of course that meant overlooking other reactions as well.  Being noticed for appearance means drawing attention to the wrong thing in a business context.  I don't have the level of problem seriously pretty women do, but still, a distraction to overcome.  Never an advantage in the work I do, where being trustworthy and known to have good judgment is far more important than any other consideration.  That means not just BEING trustworthy and having good judgment (iffy in my case), but sending visual cues to reinforce it.  Putting form on top of substance.   Substance alone won't get the job done efficiently.  You can be trustworthy as the day is long, but if you send visual cues that people associate with "fluffy" or "superficial" it doesn't much matter because they won't trust you.  Visual cues aren't fair.  They're built on biases we don't even realize we have, and they are just not fair.  But some of them can be cultivated.  Like size.  Big women are "nicer" and "more trustworthy" than little women...regardless of reality.  It took a long time to acknowledge that dynamic...I know I'm trustworthy, so why do I have to work harder than I anticipate to be seen that way?   Well, in my mind I'm a much bigger person.  When I picture myself, I see the big, happy, trustworthy, nice person.  But others see something else.  For all of those years, I figured other nagging feelings would go away as well.  When I'm training, I have to use a lot of skill to knock someone off of their feet, and that feels wrong.  In a way, being skinny is to martial arts training what a weight vest is to endurance training.  It just makes everything more demanding and requires you to do technique well, or it just will not work.  I like having the skill, but I feel as if I should be able to shoulder-check a regular sized person and knock them a long way.  Likewise, when people try to tackle me or knock ME off of my feet, I believe that they should bounce.  Like a scooter hitting the side of an F-450.  Not because my feet are aligned with my knees and hips just-so, but because the laws of physics should be on my side.  Their momentum hits my inertia and I absorb it or reflect it, and they fall down.   That's the way things should work when all is right with the world.   

When I looked in the mirror, I didn't look the way I expected to look, or, when I finally acknowledged it, the way I WANTED to look.  I'd worked hard to lose a lot of weight and worked harder to maintain that...and it wasn't what I wanted.

Trying to generate the effects that were missing, I've worked hard to add muscle, which has helped.  But I hit a wall with that as well, where I wasn't getting appreciably stronger without seriously increasing my weight training.  At my age, strain injuries are easy to get and hard to recover-from, so adding hours and reps would have me doing things I don't enjoy, risking injury, to get not really what I want.  I don't want to spend a ton of my time in the gym.  Going at the problem differently, it would be hard to justify the sketchy-to-illegal methods used as shortcuts by people who only care about muscles.  Plus, it STILL wouldn't fix the problem.  When competition fighters train, they cut weight to get into lower weight classes, and the point of it is to then gain back the water and be the heaviest person in the weight class.  Bigger is an advantage.  Strength is an advantage too, but weight can trump strength.  Anyone who has spent a five-minute round being sat-on by the newest guy in the room who happens to weigh 250lb will tell you that even if you can bench-press that guy, and even if you have a toolbox full of technique, getting him off is still a PAIN IN THE ASS.    I don't train to compete in a sport.  Living as a Lightweight is losing for me.  I want to be the heaviest in my weightclass in LIFE.   So I added twenty pounds.  Went straight to my gut.  Hurt like the devil to take back those pounds that were the hardest to lose.   But when I let go of that, I like what I see in the mirror.  I'm a middle-aged person, and a little pear-shape looks "right."  it's already been easy to see better results from strength-training since I now have built-in reserves.  I don't have to drink protein powder in perfectly-timed intervals, I can just work out and eat if I feel like it, and the muscle comes more naturally.  Big people get stronger more easily.  With every push-up.  I'm hoping to send most of that gut up to my back and shoulders eventually, and if that works, I may add another ten pounds and do it again.  But right now it's a precisely-maintained middleweight, sitting right in my middle.

Last night I was fortunate to have a martial arts class taught by an Instructor whose given-name in our art identifies silence as a singular characteristic of his. Which it is. There is very little more unnerving than finding that this not-small and not-insignificant person has been standing at your shoulder for…well you didn’t know he was there and that’s a problem.

We worked in class on making our movements more efficient. Fewer steps, more purposeful, and particularly more silent. This instructor was perhaps uniquely qualified to help us with that. He has his name for good reason, and has had it for years.

You might be a female martial artist if some of these experiences resonate for you. It makes life fun though:

1. If you learned to use a cover stick, probably from a guy, when you said. “I can’t go to work like this!” after getting your first black eye. And now you carry it in your purse as essential equipment.

2. You have to argue with your nail person when you get a pedicure. “Can you leave the callus on? I need that.” “How about if we pare it back a little? It’s like an extra toe!” “No! Not that much!!” (Bonus points if you had to take the tape off of a toe to get that pedicure.)

3. Trying on any pair of shoes includes seeing how well they stay on when you kick. …or whether the heel would make an effective weapon.

4. Valuing a long-term relationship with your doctor because she no longer asks you about all of the bruises…and knows that “don’t train for a few days/weeks” is an unacceptable treatment recommendation.

5. Appreciating your old familiar training partners when a new guy apologizes for ALMOST hitting you.

6. Appreciating the men you’ve trained with for years even more when the guy who started yesterday shows you how a technique is “supposed to work” and your friend “happens” to walk up just then to ask you to demonstrate something for him. #grateful

7. When the guy you’re drilling arm-bars with tries to kill you by putting his hands on your neck and sternum rather than risk putting a hand in the vicinity of your chest.

8. Explaining to your hairdresser about the damage. “My hair gets stepped-on. A LOT. You can fix that right?”

9. Family vacation planning includes “Oh! There’s a dojo just fifty miles from there, let me check their schedule!” “Look, you and the kids can hit that museum while I train. Just a few hours…”

10. The refuge of the changing-room. Where all of the questions the new women didn’t know how to ask in class actually get answered, and where “I couldn’t see how to do X” “Oh, yeah, it actually works a little differently for us” conversations happen. #sisters

11. Knowing the “controversy” over suggesting martial arts training for women is nonsense, because you don’t rely on other people or their good decisionmaking to keep you safe. (Though having strong friends is an excellent bonus of training!) You wish every woman could feel the same sense of freedom.

12. You take dress clothes out of your closet to make more room for gis. You’re also VERY hard on “foundation garments.”

13. You don’t really know how most women get though their days without being able to hit things. But it gets you statements like “wow, how can you be so calm all the time?” #iftheyonlyknew

I moved to a new house this week.  After seventeen years in the old one, moving is an ordeal.  The weeks leading up to the move have been hard, and this week would have been overwhelming, except for a handful of remarkable, special people.  I hope everyone has one or two (or more) of these people in their lives.   Even though moving someone else is the only thing worse than moving yourself, these are the people who show up.   You always hear things like "2% of the people do 98% of the work."  In real life, that's not true.  Most people pull their own weight.  But where it is true is when the work is like moving someone else…not fun, not paid, not likely to get much or any return.  But the people who show up do it because someone needs them.  It's not about anything other than being there for someone else.  Not everyone who came for me was a long-time bosom friend, some haven't known me long at all.  But their showing up, even if just to keep me company for a little while, has taken a week that would have been a hard burden and made it an opportunity for connection and a reminder of who I want to be in the world.    I have one friend who came early and stayed late, never stopping except to ask "what's next?"  She spent most of her weekend helping, and then the next night, after the move, called to ask if I needed her again because she could skip her class to help more if I did.  Another had some rare free time from work and came over to spend hours with me, days in a row, carrying heavy stuff, and just spending that time helping me get through boxes.  My best friend stepped out of a party to sit on the phone with me for a very long time, while I finally coped with leaving a place I loved.   Another friend came from driving five hours home from the mountains after a family funeral, to help unpack books for a few hours. Another works on her feet most days and spent her day off with me, moving things.   Another lost her job and came over the same day to arrange my china cabinet.  One brought every tool he could think of to help with a project, and another cheerfully pulled the seats out of his minivan when it turned out we needed something big moved, then stayed the whole day, and even made a run to the Habitat ReStore to take some huge things we needed to get there.  Another set of friends formed a line and hauled a monster attic full of boxes down and stacked them up, knowing that my husband and I would have been up all night doing it. A teacher once told me that accepting help gracefully is important.  Some weeks it's necessary.  Having the opportunity to experience the need for help, and have it given so spontaneously and opened-heartedly has been very moving.  Literally and figuratively.  It's also reminded me strongly of who I want to be in life.  I want to be one of the 2%.  Not just for my dear, close friends, but for folks who just need it.  My friends this week have given me examples to admire, as they so often do.  Living up to that standard may be over-ambitious.  But I'll think of this week for years to come when I feel too tired to help, or that helping would be inconvenient.