I don’t know how you got macho and posturing from my post, maybe time to check your filters?

But you wouldn’t want people like Tucsonian to think you’re being pompous and posturing with that macho tough-guy bullshit (and let’s not forget “detached from reality”) would you, Jennifer?

Because in the “real” world, standing up to harassment or assault is impossible, at least when you ask someone who is unwilling to do so. I guess that means any claims of possessing such a willingness to act are bogus and no one ever really steps in to help.

On second thought, maybe one of the contributing factors that allow this stuff to still be so widespread in 2013 is the relatively common unwillingness to step in to defend oneself or others against it.

Did you go beat up the men who actually propositioned your sister? No.

Of course not; for one thing I was only 16 at the time and was not very advanced in martial arts yet, and for another propositioning is not assault and a violent response is not justified but trying to pick up 13 year-olds is extremely troubling and I doubt he was giving out his card so they could get together and chat (plus I doubt it was the first time they’d hit on little girls; I wonder how many young girls those guys DID manage to “pick up?”). I’d classify the men as “predators” not harassers since their goal was probably to take girls somewhere private to engage in a host of serious felonies (hence the lack of taunts or catcalls or attempts at groping).

If one of the men had grabbed my sister’s hand or tried to make her get into the car it would be a totally different situation (justifying a violent response), and also the fact that she was a minor and the men were adults introduces variables that would not be present if all parties were adults.

So are you getting it yet? Need more?

I guess I should address your claim regarding my detachment from reality since it’s such an interesting (and ironic) one.

I post my perspective about violence because most of the time the perspective I see being expressed on this blog is one that I consider to be largely divorced from reality as I’ve experienced it (and I don’t mean theoretically). One thing that’s hard for people who don’t understand the dynamics of violence to grasp is that their security and safety is largely maintained by the willingness of others to engage in violence on their behalf, especially if they are unwilling to resort to it themselves.

They’ll vote down a comment like that but then not hesitate to call the police when they think someone might be trying to do them harm, and the police are just people with weapons who hopefully show up to defend us (in time to do any good) even if it means they have to use violence to do so. One factor that may be important to this discussion is that many people erroneously believe that the police exist to protect us as individuals from crime, but the U.S. Supreme Court made it very clear that the police have no obligation to protect an individual from being the victim of a crime; they exist as a “general deterrent to crime and as an investigative body after the fact.” Combine that with a response time that’s usually too long to affect the outcome of a violent crime and it seems prudent to assume we’re mostly on our own when out in public.

If you think a willingness to intervene on someone else’s behalf is only legitimate and not merely macho/bullshit posturing if one is wearing a police officer’s uniform then as absurd and irrational and divorced from reality as it is you’re certainly entitled to your opinion and are free to not lift a finger to protect yourself or anyone else and instead subcontract the dirty work to the police in hopes they arrive in time to do any good, which they probably won’t.

And what you wrote here is a classic example of projecting one’s own psychological issues onto someone else:
I promise you, and you will blatantly lie in response, but I promise
you, if a news story came out next week regarding a woman who harmed a
harassing predator who hadn’t physically detained her claiming self
defense, you’d have something to say about HER being unhinged or
psychopathic.

Is it ok If I make up random details to add to that loaded hypothetical situation so as to spin it back towards supporting MY arguments, like you do with my examples? It’ll make replying a lot easier, as you are obviously aware based on your doing the same.

Otherwise, to even attempt to answer your question would result in nothing more than projection on my part as the situation described lacks sufficient detail to comment on one way or the other with any factual certainty; for example a “harassing predator” who isn’t cornering someone or making any physical contact would just be a “harasser” and as far as I can tell most predators don’t harass first as that tends to tip off the prey that there’s a predator around (the term “predator” refers to someone who has much more serious intentions than mere verbal harassment which is why using both terms makes it a “loaded” hypothetical situation).

Harassholes will taunt and insult and intimidate but predators (e.g. muggers, rapists, serial killers) tend to ambush without warning as their goals are not the same. I suppose we can say that someone who gropes a woman on a crowded bus is a blend of both but IMO such an act leans more towards the harasshole end of the spectrum since the groping is probably the end goal.

While that is still technically an “assault” just like any case of unwanted touching is, it’s probably not a precursor to an attempted rape or mugging; once groped, the victim is vividly aware of the presence of a predatory harasshole which makes following the victim off the bus to an area where an ambush can be accomplished a lot harder, so if a full-scale attack was the intended goal of a predator then harassment would work against it’s success. That said, the woman would be justified if she reflexively struck him when he groped her, even if she hurt him really badly and he “just” pinched her butt.

The idea that a man doesn’t deserve to end up with one eyeball dangling from its socket by the optic nerve (or something similar) “just” because he grabbed the ass of some random woman on the street is one reason this shit still happens. When more men are walking around wearing eye patches or end up shitting their pants as they flop around on the ground after groping someone’s stun jacket I bet cases of groping will finally start to drop, and fast.

maybe the chances are one in a million that i’d actually be able to fight off an attacker if i had to, i’m not fantasizing about some elaborately choreographed action sequence (okay, maybe sometimes, but not seriously) so much as hoping i might be able to surprise an attacker by kicking him in the knee and dashing away, or holler aggressively at anyone who verbally harasses or tries to intimidate me, and that’s what every serious self-defense instructor i’ve ever seen is hoping for too. nobody thinks the solution to violence against women is arming all of us to the teeth, but there’s no reason why we should accept harassment and violence passively. in many cases this is exactly what we’ve been conditioned to do, so even if the benefit of a self-defense measure is purely psychological, that’s a very valuable thing.

And men like you, well, seem very detached from reality. Every 100 pound woman with a few hours of training can take down any man in any situation and never get in any trouble, and you’d totes beat up any man who harmed “your” women, except when the situation has presented itself, you did nothing because “nothing was happening.” I promise you, and you will blatantly lie in response, but I promise you, if a news story came out next week regarding a woman who harmed a harassing predator who hadn’t physically detained her claiming self defense, you’d have something to say about HER being unhinged or psychopathic.

Every actual (not hypothetical) situation is unique and given some time you might even be able to assuage your concerns about my comments all by yourself (or simply by rereading what I wrote and noticing the included caveats that already addressed some).

And it assumes that all people are physically capable of taking on all
other people with the right training. What happens when a 5 foot
nothing 100 pound woman with training encounters a 6 foot 3 300 pound
linebacker?

O ye of little faith. Size and strength disparities are why you go for targets where those factors don’t matter, like eyes or the throat or knees or the sacrum or testicles (kicks to balls should usually be reserved as Plan B as men instinctively defend them much better than most soft targets).

And with effective training as I define it the 100 pound woman can take the big guy down no problem, or rather I guess I should say “the probability that she will take him down is extremely high” since if I don’t I’ll get a litany of obtuse “what ifs” that would inevitably end poorly for the 100-pounder. But so what? Even Mike Tyson has lost a fight, but if he hadn’t fought he’d have lost them all.

Incidentally, the primary precursor art to JKD was Wing Chun, which was founded by two women and it’s focus was on defeating larger, stronger opponents (men) so it might just work fairly well for that (it does).

And the time to use those tactics is when you believe that you’re facing a genuine threat of bodily harm or kidnapping/false imprisonment even if no actual physical contact has been made yet. Striking first is perfectly legal if one is defending oneself from what one sincerely believes is a threat of serious and imminent harm, and to go back to the scenario above if a 100-lb woman is alone and cornered by a 300-lb meathead who is not backing off or letting her leave (but otherwise hasn’t touched her) then chances are she can strike one of his soft targets before he can react to her likely-unexpected response and would be legally justified in doing so. High-quality training but limited strength will usually defeat no training but lots of strength (almost everyone has more options to protect themselves than they generally believe, probably due to the grossly-inaccurate portrayals of street violence in movies and TV).

I used to live in Tucson so I know the weather very well. I hear India can be hot, too but that doesn’t seem to be dissuading the women who are making a stun jacket there. Tucson is where I came up with the water-bottle-and-webbing-loop-as-a-weapon idea since a lot of people carry water all the time in the desert (plus it’d already be in your hand before you even think you might need it so can be more effective than a concealed pistol if things go bad exceptionally quickly). Anyway, while verbal harassment may happen as much in the daytime as at night, unwanted contact would probably tend to happen more at night for all sorts of reasons and even in Tucson it gets cool at night for several months and downright cold for one or two. So no, don’t we

Though you sound like the type of guy who hears about rape or domestic abuse cases and says “if that was MY sister the courts would never get to him because I’d beat him to a pulp.” And for all of the violently devoted brothers, fathers, boyfriends, and friends you see on the internet, you never seem to hear on the news about them….

Then I read stuff like this, and I start to believe I was the only one.

In 2013 this stuff shouldn’t be happening.
Parents should be raising girls with voices, and boys with respect, and everyone should have the courage to stand up when it happens in front of them.