Browsing through my Facebook feed this morning, I saw a video titled “Pay Attention To The Girl”. I’ll try to past the link here:
https://www.facebook.com/394399738035335/videos/2258746081075180/?t=0
I like this video for a couple of reasons, not the least being the apparent meting out of justice by one person on behalf of another person who appears to be the victim of a violent attack. I made a few observations as I watched it: the Bad Guy who gets knocked down shows signs of being intoxicated; the female cashier strikes the Bad Guy 3 times, and she clearly knows how to throw a good punch; the Bad Guy falls backward after the 3rd punch and appears to strike the back of his head on the tile floor, which in my experience was likely the injury that “knocked him out”.
In a similar vein, I saw a video a while back in which a slender female does a hoppity-hop and then lays a roundhouse kick to the side of a much taller man’s head, knocking him to the ground. Here’s the link to that video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3WsumbigBc
Again, a small female appears to deliver retribution to a larger and aggressive male with supreme authority. Experts analyzing the footage point to a number of features that suggest this video was staged, however, and I tend to agree with them. But the video went viral nonetheless, and I have heard several younger women crowing about how this video proves a woman who knows what she is doing can take a big man down. The fact that the guy was knocked out by his head striking the floor isn’t mentioned.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for women knowing how to fight. I taught my daughters the rudiments of self-defense tactics and techniques (as much as they were willing to learn, anyway) when they were teens. In firearms training past and present I routinely work with females who demonstrate real proficiency in their combative skillsets.
But I worry that such demonstrations may make some women dangerously over-confident, and may lead to them making decisions in encounters with aggressors that could get them seriously hurt.
If the aggressor in the first video hadn’t been drunk, or had been inclined to put up even a token defense, or hadn’t struck his head on the floor, the outcome may have been a whole lot different. The cashier may have ended up dead. If you have to stomach for it, do a Youtube search on men kicking women in the head to see the more common result. The plain fact is that women who engage with men in fights on even terms do not do well, even when they are in the same weight class. (For the sake of brevity, I won’t get into the reasons behind fighters being grouped according to their weight, but if you have any questions about how important that is, do some google-fu and get educated.)
Along those lines, I saw a clip on the Joe Rogan Youtube podcast discussing the very real differences between men an women when it comes to martial arts. Joe is a former MMA fighter, and whether you like him or not, he knows quite a bit about fighting with feet and fists. He points out the cold, hard reality that men aren’t just bigger than women, but their muscle and bone structures are markedly different from women. By way of illustration, he holds up his fists for the camera, and I have to say, those are some impressive-looking meathooks! He goes on to say that his fists look like that because he was training his hands for striking from childhood onward, striking hard objects to toughen them up, working on the strength in his hands, and so forth. MMA fighters tend to do that sort of thing, but they’re not the only ones. Look at the hands–more important, feel the hands–of young men who grew up on farms and ranches, working with their hands. Hard labor makes tougher hands, and tougher muscles than any amount of time in a gym can do.
Check out Joe’s Youtube clip here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MugDgv3Nl4c
The plain fact, and I mean scientific fact, proven over and over again millions of times, is that on average men are bigger and stronger than women, they have more dense bones and muscle, they can exert more force per kilogram of body weight, they have a higher pain tolerance (yes, that’s been studied many times over, and childbirth notwithstanding, women aren’t able to absorb pain and keep going the way men can). Oh, and women have a higher susceptibilty to concussions than men, something I suspected for a long time in my sports medicine practice as a Concussion specialist, and which much research has now come out to prove. (Here’s link to start you off if you want to look into that whole thing: https://healthcare.utah.edu/the-scope/shows.php?shows=0_qk20dbwr .)
Listen guys, I ain’t no misogynist. I’m a medical doctor with advanced degrees in biochemistry and endocrinology. I was steeped in the literature of the hormonal world for years, and I continue to follow this literature. I follow the science. Unfortunately, a whole lot of the Politically Correct world doesn’t. (Although they like to pound on the junk science of anthropogenic global warming as if that proves the opposite, but I digress here…)
Testosterone makes a huge difference between men and women. And it doesn’t start making that difference at puberty: it starts in utero, as the male fetus is being formed. The way boys and men make bones and muscles is literally different than the way girls and women do, and it’s becaue of testosterone. The way our brains develop is different because of testosterone. And so on, and so on. Men behave differently than women because of testosterone. It’s the way we are made, and no amount of social science flabberjab is gonna change that.
This makes men more resilient as fighters. It made our ancestors capable of fighting, hunting, and killing bigger, badder animals than ourselves. Mastadons, cave bears, lions and tigers, all succumbed to our tools and our aggressive nature. I don’t call it good, but I don’t call it bad, either. It’s what happened. If it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be here to write this, and you wouldn’t be here to read this.
So taking the attitude that women can negate all of that biological difference by their attitude and skill set is quite simply insane. It defies logic, and it defies science. Yet people are doing it with increasing credulity, and I am stunned by this.
Jennifer Garner made a movie recently about a bad-ass woman who takes on the entire LAPD and the Mexican Cartel called Peppermint. If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. The fight scenes are awful, the plot ain’t much better, and every character is flawed, jaded, abused, and downright nasty from start to finish. The fight scenes will make anyone who’s done even an intro to Defensive Tactics cringe, they’re so bad, and the gunfights are beyond stupid.
Nonetheless. I was in the ER one night a few weeks ago and overheard a few of the nurses discussing the movie, and how much they enjoyed it. They all actually believed that a woman could train to the point of being able to pull of the laughably improbable combatives Jennifer Garner displayed in this movie. I tried to gently persuade them that it wasn’t even remotely possible, but they remain convinced that women are becoming men’s equals in the warrior’s arts.
I suppose this was inevitable. I suppose we will have to see some catastrophic defeats of American armed forces units, with large numbers of women killed and wounded, before this folly will finally be knocked off its Snowflake perch. I already see too many women with broken faces, heads, and limbs in my ER, but I am resigned to seeing more of them as “tough” women get their heads knocked in when they take on male aggressors using the skills they learned in the gym or dojo.
I wish America would stop trying to make women into men with boobs. The narrative is a lie. The narrative is going to get some good women hurt, and hurt badly.
