BLACKSBURG, Jan. 22, 1998--Our society tends to assume that men's bodies are dangerous and women's are helpless, and Martha McCaughey wants to change that image--especially when it comes to women's defending themselves from male violence.
"Many people tell girls and women to restrain themselves--to stay away from dangerous situations, to wear 'proper' attire, and to be alert to threat from men at all times," McCaughey said. "We don't tend to teach girls and women how to throw a punch or shoot a gun....Many people believe that women need men for protection from dangerous men, even though women are most likely to be assailed by the men they know and even though women are capable of spoiling most attacks."
McCaughey wrote the book Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women's Self-Defense because she thought feminists could not afford to ignore self defense. Having once been, as she described it, "a frightened feminist," McCaughey, a professor of women's studies at Virginia Tech who researches such topics as the body, violence against women, and gender and technology, began her research after taking a class in self-defense. "I noticed how empowered these women seemed and I wondered why I'd ignored self-defense training for so long," she said. Her participant-observation research involved some 140 hours in a wide variety of self-defense courses as well as conversations with self-defense students and instructors.
By neglecting the subject of self-defense, she said, feminists "are naively perpetuating, rather than dismantling, a key myth of rape culture: that women are helpless."
"I wanted to raise difficult questions for feminism," she said. "Is violence always oppressive and diminishing? Is staying away from all things we define as 'masculinist' a wise strategy? Is the body always simply an object that gets violated, objectified, stifled, and otherwise oppressed, or can the body be seen as an active agent and site of resistance to male domination?"
McCaughey wants to change attitudes with her no-holds-barred book, a sociological, feminist study of the women's self-defense movement with chapters such as "Balls vs. Ovaries: Women's 'Virtue' in Historical Perspective," "Getting Mean: On the Scene in Self-Defense Classes," and "Changing Our Minds about Our Bodies: What Can Feminism Learn from Self-Defense?"
Real Knockouts argues that we live in a rape culture in which women are expected to be polite, kind, nurturing, and nonviolent. "...Our gender roles prop up rape culture," McCaughey said, "because socially created roles of masculinity (aggression and dominance) and femininity (vulnerability and sexual availability) are celebrated as ideals and mistaken for facts of nature."
And that idealized woman, McCaughey said, is an ideal victim.
Women who do not fight back against an attacker are not at fault for the attack--only the attacker is, McCaughey emphasized; and all sorts of women get attacked and abused. As women train in self defense, many of them notice that initially they are hesitant to say harsh words, throw a punch, land a kick, or shoot a gun. "But self-defense trains women out of that feminine hesitancy and, in so doing, helps women see themselves as capable fighters--and as worth fighting for."
Being a scholar with a doctorate in sociology, and not a self-defense instructor, McCaughey does not endorse any particular method of self defense. "My book suggests what's feminist about the bodily work of self-defense training and why feminist scholars and activists must start seeing the female body in new ways," she said. "That's what "physical feminism" is all about."
Women's self defense, McCaughey said, has far-reaching implications. "If self-defense training became a more central part of the anti-gender violence movement, we might create change faster and more effectively," she said. Not only would individual trained women stand a better chance of thwarting an attack, but "a movement that challenges our culture to accept women's aggression as legitimate when it is in self-defense would create change at a structural, institutional level."
She hopes her book will start an urgent conversation among feminists and policy makers so that they will rethink their assumptions about women, violence, victimization, and the prevention of victimization.
She would like to see college women trained in self defense as part of their orientation instead of just being given information about the high rate of sexual violence on campus. She would like to see Web pages of campus women's centers offer information about self-defense, rather than information only about the fact of violence and what to do if one is raped. "There's a missing link on those Web sites, one that shows women they can resist their victimization and fight back. We need to show women how to resist, violently if necessary, or tell them where they can get that training."
She would also like to see changes in funding. "The Violence Against Women Grants Office (VAWGO) will not give grant money to researchers and social service providers interested in the prevention of violence against women," she said. "I'm convinced that this is because they see women only as victims or victims-to-be. I want the anti-gender violence movement to see women as more than victims." Once society realizes that women's bodies can be far stonger and more aggressive than popular social norms of femininity allow, McCaughey hopes that "the VAWGO will take a leading role in funding efforts to empower women before they become victims."
At the level of feminist activism, McCaughey would like to see Take Back the Night rallies and other forms of feminist activism that protest violence against women begin to incorporate self-defense demonstrations or instruction at their rallies, in their informational pamplets and educational videos, and on their websites.
"Yes," McCaughey confirms, "the rape rate is very high, and it's unfair. But we can do something besides garner sympathy for victims, lock our doors, and march in protest of the violence. We can reduce our chances of victimization while not limiting our freedom to move around in the world. In the process, I think women learn how invested the rape culture is in our physical disempowerment."
So, McCaughey insists, feminist activists must work not only to raise our consciousness about the inequities in our culture, but must also recognize the body as an important part of consciousness. "Male domination is already an embodied politics," she said. "It's time for feminism to get physical, too."
Real Knockouts was published in late 1997 by New York University Press. Information can be obtained from the Web site www.cis.vt.edu/ws/home/RealKnockoutsPage.html.