The only time you should hit a woman

There is a general feeling in our society that guys shouldn’t hit girls. This is great. Girls shouldn’t hit guys either, but on the occasions that these rules should be bent, they aren’t. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about martial arts, where men and women come together to train themselves in self-defence – or attack. As a woman who has been training in martial arts for the best part of eight years, with numerous classes and sets of people, I’ve always found it a struggle to get a guy to hit me. Hard. This isn’t masochism; this isn’t a cry for help. I simply want to train, and yet I have met and seen women suffer with similar frustrations. So I’m writing to reach out to practitioners of martial arts and hopefully set the record straight. Women join martial arts out of their own free will. This means they have most likely weighed up the chances they might get hurt and don’t care. It’s part of learning how to defend yourself. Just as guys will fight hard with each other to prepare themselves for real combat, women want to do the same. We want to know that if the worst happens on a night out, we are ready to defend ourselves. We want to know that we are used to the challenge of dealing with force and punches that are thrown for real. If we were to ever be hit, we don’t want it to be a surprise that catches us off our guard. We want to know that we’ve been hit before; we’ve learnt to take it, to condition, to bounce back. Although it may seem like the gentlemanly thing to do, to hold back on a strike, it is actually only doing your partner a disservice. A class is a controlled environment where women and men alike want to learn to fight, and what it’s like to face an assailant. Holding back will only weaken their technique and leave them unprepared for the real world. I know instructors who have wrongly spread this idea as well. There is an idea that training with a women is good, until you want to really try the moves out. This is rubbish. Sure, don’t beat your partner up, but don’t base that on their gender. I hear people complain that they’re afraid that they’ll hurt their partner because they’re skinny or small or delicate. Again, rubbish. If you swapped that woman with a man of the same structure and physique, would those apprehensions still apply? For most of you, I’ll guess that the answer is no. So act on it. If gender is the only reason that you’re not putting your full effort into helping your partner learn how to defend themselves, change it now. I shouldn’t just leave this message to the men, because I’ve seen it happen among women too. I’ve seen women who’ll take pleasure in giving their male partner hell, but who seem just as frightened to land a strike on their female partners. Ladies, it’s a bad, bad circle we’re creating. If we won’t practice properly with each other, it’ll just encourage other guys to think that they can’t too. So fellow martial artists of all genders; don’t hold back on the women in your class. Give them the same respect and effort as you would to their male counterparts. It’s your job, as their partner, to give them the best practice they can - take that role seriously. And if it still feels uncomfortable, you can always just ask. You might just be surprised.