a side effect of women's lib

I have never taken a self-defense class as they are advertised. Though I have seen what my sister and cousins have learned in their classes. The classes presume that the attacker is going to be someone who is going to kidnap them, a stranger, a mugger, someone they don't know that is looking to grab something from them or grab them themselves.

What I have come to hear more often and experienced myself once, and again this is anectdotal at this point, is that women are getting punched at bars and clubs, mostly from men whose advances they may have reneged. One woman described how her daughter and her daughter's friend on two separate occasions were punched (broken front teeth and the other a black eye) by a man in a bar. And these are both women who had gone through extensive self-defense training complete with padded guy to beat up. These were women who thought they could defend themselves and knew what to look for.

And what I came to realize, and at this point is an hypothesis (so I'll see if it continues to hold true), is that 1) women are more and more often being punched by men who they know, who they just met and 2) these men are reacting in a way that men instinctually react in this kind of situation if it were a man they were talking to and 3) this generation of men learned that "women were equal to men" but to them it meant that they could treat them like men.

Women's first weapon is often their voice. At a bar or a club, they dodge the advances of men by politely telling them they're not interested or maybe overtly telling them to get lost depending on how they are approached. Up to this point, women could cut men down to the core of their ego with their words, but the mantra had been to men, "Never hit a girl". You hit a girl and you're less than a man. But I don't think that's going through this generation. This generation learned that they compete directly with women, that women are equals, to treat them like equals, but what has tranformed to, "treat them like men."

So, there's no more holding open doors, no more courtesies or should I say not as many courtesies that men in general learned to give to women.

Now if two men were confronting each other, most men grow up learning that when tensions run high look out for the sucker punch. No words, just a fist flying. So when tensions run high in a confrontation between two men, they gear themselves up to either throw a punch or to defend a punch. Women have never been punched and if we go into a fight, there's some serious name calling and cussing before it heads to blows. Men, in general, don't necessarily say anything before they throw down, but you do see the change in their face. While men can read this change in their face, women more often than not do not "read" this and cannot "see" the blow coming.

Women's pent up frustrations tend to come out emotionally or verbally, while men's pent up frustrations tend to come out physically.

So here's the situation, a guy approaches a girl and he thinks he's kind of the world and hot stuff and thinks that he deserves everything he wants (because we are also too an instant gratification society) and he wants this girl. But she either ignores him or blows him off. He doesn't take the first no, so he continues. The back and forth continues. Now, if he ends up getting fed up with all the rejection and she happens to wound his ego a tad more, he ends up having no qualms about a single straight shot to the face. And from what I hear it's usually the face. In my experience, I got punched in the back.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I'm saying that the rules have changed, the world is different. I'm not saying all men are this way, because I know of many wonderful caring gentleman who would never do such a thing. But I'm saying that I've heard this happen to actual people more times to know that this is actually happening. And maybe what I'm saying is that women shouldn't presume that guys won't hit them just cuz they're a girl. And maybe the self-defense classes need some updating. And maybe they haven't been because we're more afraid of being kidnapped and raped or mugged by strangers, than being sucker punched. I don't know. It's just something I've been thinking about for a few days now. And if I'm lucky, I'm heading in a direction to do something about it.