reminder that the beauty standard for women being thin and dainty is designed to discourage women from working out and building strength to defend themselves against men. all the girlies need to be strength training 💪
I don't think that's true. Beauty standards vary a bunch over time, ascribing some timeless reason like that to them doesn't work. Also, IIRC strength training wouldn't help that much since female athletes are still weaker than the male average.
Strength isn't the only factor in combat yeah; it's generally quite important but that varies by context.
So back to the topic, strength training alone doesn't seem very promising — there are pretty innate biological aspects to that disparity, which are what the sexist tropes are taking inspiration from; if those expectations were removed (which I support) then the problem would remain.
We could speculate that a culture where martial arts was a widely popular women's pastime and generally unpopular among men might address this more.
However I think a culture where the threats women would want to defend themselves against were less normalized would be as or more achievable, and better.
as a woman i've used pepper spray to defend myself in the past and it's worked. i also own a glock (never needed it fortunately). my (male) cousin owns a BJJ academy and he says that the trained women can submit many of the lower ranking men, and that it works for self defense against untrained men. he's a black belt now but when he was training he did get submitted and tapped by women
We agree on all of that. But, I'd say
militarizing society isn't necessarily the best outcome. The solution to violent crime is better social norms, economic policy, and state regulation, not privately imported AKs — similarly in the context of sexual assault, regardless of gender, we should make this a matter of social convention and state intervention rather than a private physical competition which men have a biological and institutional lead in.
The thing is in BJJ I'm pretty sure you can't strike. In a real altercation you can stack the odds against an opponent, but there's always windows of opportunity for a man to overpower a trained woman. Even a male champion fighter in a lighter weight division vs a heavier man with only strength training would absolutely have certain positions where raw strength would overpower technique
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u/LaBaaDiabolique 11d ago
reminder that the beauty standard for women being thin and dainty is designed to discourage women from working out and building strength to defend themselves against men. all the girlies need to be strength training 💪