What is the Best Form of Self-Defense For Women?

What is the Best Form of Self-Defense For Women?

The best form of self-defense for a woman is to never live with a man, and to never enter into a relationship with a man. A woman, no matter how strong, is always at extreme risk when living with a man.

There are many health reasons to remain physically fit. However, the narrative that women would be safer if they learned physical self-defense is not helpful to women. It can give women a false sense of safety around men, and prevent women from knowing the best course of actions to avoid male violence.

Yes, there are individual situations where women successfully physically defended themselves against men. These are good outcomes, but not ones that women in general can rely on.

Unfortunately, even the most fit of female athletes are often weaker than high-school aged men. Women also have better things to do than to base their entire life around violence or physical fighting. Asking women to invest time into physical self-defense is asking them to put a large amount of time into an activity that may not offer them much return.

What are women better off doing? Besides choosing to never live with a man, spending time on education and career is the next best way to avoid male violence. Women that are forced to be with men are forced to do so out of the structured poverty that the patriarchy causes. Education not only gives women the option to choose not to be with a man, but it lets them know that it is an option in the first place.

While women’s physical strength and fitness should be commended, we shouldn’t believe that it can protect us from male violence. The way to avoid male violence is to go 4B; no sex with men, no dating men, no marrying men, and no giving birth.

Violence does not only occur when a man hits a woman. Unpaid labor, emotional exhaustion, and the excruciating pain of pregnancy and childbirth, are all real forms of structural violence that are forms of domestic abuse themselves. Any woman living with a man is enduring domestic abuse.

Women must leave men, and encourage other women to do so. Is it a guarantee of avoiding all violence? No. But it is the best way to significantly reduce it.

What About Weapons?

Some believe that weapons like firearms can be an equalizer between men and women. This would only be true in an ideal scenario. Someone might imagine that there’s full awareness that an attack will occur and that the man and woman would be at a far distance from each other, where the woman could just shoot him. This is not the lived reality for many women. The proliferation of weapons like firearms make women far less safe.

For women owning firearms, that weapon is far likely to be a male to kill her than being used by her to defend herself. Attacks by males occur in many situations where firearms would be useless. In close proximity, or suddenly by surprise. Having stored weapons nearby just increases the likelihood of male violence as well as unintentional accidents.

Yes, of course there are individual cases where a woman may have defended herself with a knife or firearm, but in general, the weaponization of society has let to horrible outcomes for women. Women are much safer without weapons.

Not Violence, Other Solutions

Regardless of how we might try, we cannot do violence as well as men. I understand women’s anger, and have seen many on social media imagine the retribution of women against men, but even the most angriest women can not do violence as well as the average man.

Are we weak because we cannot mete out violence? No. This is what makes women better.

We know how to build a society without violence. But how do we fight the patriarchy that is continuing to oppress us daily? The ways we always have. With education, with the legal system, and with protest. Violence is not strength. Men’s wars have not made society better. Women’s organizing has.

What about the women who are fighting with weapons in areas like Ukraine? They are no doubt brave women. We have supported women’s successful armed resistance in these cases, but we are wary about applying these principles to the entirety of society or pushing women to focus on armed solutions first. I also remember on social media, a woman commenting that women shouldn’t fight in men’s wars at all. I realized that this woman’s solution may be the best case after all. Women should refuse to participate in male-led violence at all. Why should women enter into a male’s battlefield, where she can be raped or kill by men on either side?

Trying to be violent like men will not free us. Trust me that it’s just not possible for us, no matter how angry or hateful we become, we just cannot be violent like men. Let’s spend our time uplifting other women and educating each other. The more educated women become, the less power men’s violence has on society. Decenter men, and go 4B. Other women are counting on you to do so. ♀