Why do you need to be empowered?
You bring up some good points and your passion is obvious. However you are completely wrong on a number of points.
You state that, "Do you ever see ads for men's self-defense classes or media pieces on men's self-defense? The reason you do not is that our patriarchal society automatically acknowledges that men have a self worth defending, and, rest assured, they will defend it."
There is a HUGE market in marketing and advertising for men's self-defense. Black Belt magazine lives on these ads. If you've ever seen the full page, two and three page ads by TRS or Jerry Peterson, then you know that hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on them each month.
There are over 215,000 martial arts schools across the country and the vast majority of students there are male. And, from personal experience as a commercial school owner, the vast majority of male students join to learn self-defense. Pick up any Yellow Pages book and think of what the combined national market for ads with "self-defense" must be.
Look elsewhere on this board and you'll see huge threads on self-defense subjects discussed mainly by males.
Men's magazines have articles regularly about self-defense and then there is the ABSOLUTELY GIGANTIC magazine market targeted (bad pun here) toward the (mostly male) American gun owner that is totally focused on self-defense.
Just because you are insulated in your personal experience, don't state that something doesn't exist because you haven't seen it.
Your assertion that the truth is "AMERICAN MEN RAPE ONE OUT OF EVERY FOUR AMERICAN WOMEN" is ludicrous. Twenty five percent of the female population is not raped. It is statistically likely that a female has a 25 percent chance of being sexually assaulted in her lifetime because of the RATE of sexual assaults per 100,000 women. But the TRUTH is that some women are sexually assaulted more than once. Some are assaulted multiple times during their lifetime.
Be that as it may, I think that even a 1 percent chance of being sexually assaulted is too high. That's why all of us on the board are working to help people defend themselves from the scum that would prey on the weak.
I have to tell you that as someone working in law enforcement, I find it very difficult to swallow your assertion "When a woman successfully defends herself against a male attacker, she is often accused of employing inappropriate and/or premeditated aggression."
If your use of "often" is your qualifier, I'm stumped. I'll tell you that in over 12 years of experience, I have had one -- one -- case of a woman that we took to jail instead of the guy for domestic violence. In the state in which I work, there are laws that require MANDATORY incarceration for domestic violence and that means the man is going to jail. Believe me, there is no coddling of males here, there is no discretion and there is no tolerance.
You state that "Even the phrase 'women's self-defense,' implies that it is, in essence, somehow different from men's self-defense."
The fact is, it IS different. A man will most certainly have to fight another man, but a woman will not fight another woman, she will also have to fight a man. So now you have to deal with developing strategies and techniques for a generally smaller person defending themselves from a generally larger and stronger attacker. You have to deal with the fact that men attack another man differently than they attack women. To paraphrase Tony Blauer, a man just has to defend his property or his life. A woman has to defend her property, her life AND her body.
And speaking of language manipulation tricks, how can you in good conscience state in the title of your program that you "empower" women. You're defeating your own argument. All humans have the power to resist inherently and instinctively within them. You can't give it to them or empower them to defend themselves. They already have it. People seek self-defense training to learn how to employ different strategies and techniques that make their instinctive fight or flight system work more efficiently.
The truth is that we live in crime culture. Big fish eat smaller fish. Evil people prey on good people. The "norm" is that violence is perpetrated against both genders, all sexual preferences, all age groups, all races, all occupations.
Train today like your life depends on it. Someday it might.
Brad Parker
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