When someone says, “Women shouldn’t have to be able to defend themselves,” and we’re like, “Oh, so you think that the ability to defend themselves is solely the prerogative of men, CAROL?”  #seejanefightback

We are delighted to highlight guest blogger Hannah Kohn’s reflection on her experience with empowerment self-defense training.

I am in bed, under the sheets. The lights are dim. As I sleep, the man I am in bed with climbs on top of me. I wake up in the midst of his assault. But there’s a twist: this isn’t a bedroom, it’s a large room with a pile of exercise mats stacked up to look like a bed. Likewise, the man on top of me is not a rapist, but a padded, fiercely feminist instructor. The staff from PREPARE, a feminist self-defense program, have agreed to recreate the space in which I was raped so I can reclaim a moment I have long felt was stolen from me. Mind racing, flashback roaring, I toss the padded instructor to the side with my hips, strike him in the eye, knee him in the groin, and land a devastating punch on his helmet. I hear the whistle of the instructor. My classmates shout the familiar mantra: “look!” (around my surroundings, to identify my path to safety) “assess!” (is the aggressor still a threat?) “go get help!” (whatever that means to me). The scenario is over. I have successfully stopped the aggressor from completing their assault.

***

I was first raped when I was sixteen years old, but as is the case with so many women who experience sexual violence, my truth was systematically rejected. Adding the scars of gaslighting and victim blaming to the experience of rape, I became increasingly confused as to what constituted a violation of my body. Convinced by the people around me that what I had experienced was not, in fact, rape, I was subjected to sexual violence many more times without ever putting a name to it. I arrived at university, and was assaulted yet again in my freshman year.

Simultaneously, I was exposed to much more information regarding sexual violence. President Obama was in the White House, and at long last a President was calling out the national crisis of rape on campuses across the United States. Mandated by law, colleges had no choice but to educate students on consent, rape, and sexual assault. I was lucky to be on a campus that actively supported these mandates, and I found myself heavily involved in sexual assault prevention on campus, throwing myself into every opportunity for activism that came my way. However, despite the barrage of bystander intervention training, consent workshops, and awareness raising campaigns I went to and organized, I continued to be raped and assaulted repeatedly. I could easily understand how other were assaulted and raped, but remained oblivious to attacks on my own body. How could that be?

***

When I was in high school, I would have sworn on my life that I really just wanted to be “nice.” I was the most agreeable, generous, patient doormat of a girl there ever was. Nonviolence was a way of life, an unmoving principle, applying to every measure, action and thought. I went through the world timid to move too quickly, should I unwillingly send a reverberation through the air. However – and I would never have admitted as much at the time – behind my unshakeable kindness, there was a motive. I longed to be accepted and liked and adored by everyone, because…well, because of course I had been conditioned to please. I had been conditioned as a woman. And what a good woman I was turning out to be!

This all changed, of course, when I enrolled in a self-defense class with PREPARE.

***

Junior year: now a fully-fledged Women’s and Gender Studies student at Drew University in Madison, NJ, complete with Audre Lorde quotes on my wall and critical discourse analysis on my mind, I enrolled in a class called “Gender, Violence, and Women’s Resistance.” I had been told repeatedly that I should knock someone over to get into the course, as it was life-changing and chronically had a waitlist of disappointed students. As it turns out, the class is currently the only one of its kind in the nation: the first twenty hours, or five weeks, are spent completing a beginners’ empowerment self-defense class. The rest of the course focuses on the theory around self-defense and gender-based violence. Excited but completely unsure of what to expect, I went to the black box theatre where we would be learning to defend ourselves.

The first day, as we sat quietly in the black box, our Lead Instructor (a certified IMPACT instructor) bustled in. She is the embodiment of the phrase “I don’t give a c**p what you think,” if these words were uttered in the most feminist and compassionate of voices. She is comfortable being her authentic, loud, powerful self. She lives her work, and it’s impossible not to want to be exactly like her.

Within a few minutes, our instructors had transformed the room of well-behaved students into a united group of ambivalent fighters, yelling the word “no” at the top of our lungs. Confused theatre students wandered in and out of their space as we powerfully used our voices and bodies and practiced moves in the air as if there were invisible attackers in front of us. They weren’t invisible for long, though: padded instructors soon came in for us to practice our moves on. Working through adrenalized responses, each member of the class faced the padded perpetrators, yelling “no!” with each strike. I had thought of myself as non-violent my entire life. This perception changed over the course of that one class.

Reader, I dearly miss kneeing a padded man in the groin every Friday morning. I would be lying to myself if I pretended for a moment that I didn’t relish each and every strike I landed on the padded instructors. I would never want to be faced with a situation outside the classroom where I would have to use these strikes; indeed, I hope and pray never to confront such a situation again. But allowing myself to be unkind to someone who was acting as an aggressor, to say no, to shake the deeply entrenched norms of femininity I had embodied for so many years, was endlessly liberating.  So liberating, in fact, that I organized an advanced PREPARE workshop a year after the beginners’ class had ended. The final advanced class brings us back to the bedroom scene I described earlier.

I had the unique experience of taking part in the PREPARE workshops as I worked through Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in part related to my history of rape, sexual assault, and other forms of intimate partner violence. Reclaiming my right to make decisions over my own body, my right to space, my right to confidence, and my right to my own reality impacted my recovery in a truly transformative way.

***

Although I appreciate the use of bystander intervention and consent education alongside empowerment self-defense classes, I speak from a very personal place when I say that alone, those forms of sexual assault prevention are not at all transformative. Why should I rely on a bystander to rescue me, or a potential perpetrator to miraculously change his mind due to consent education and not attempt to rape me? Data doesn’t back up these techniques long-term, and quite frankly, I’m not particularly comforted by the idea that a knight in shining armor will a) save me from a villain or b) not be a villain. If anything, I would prefer that the knight in shining armor reevaluate his benevolent sexism before talking to me. No, I would really like to stand on my own two feet and learn to protect myself, challenging the normative gender script of female damsel/male savior as I go.

Through taking part in self-defense training, I have come to understand why my involvement in bystander intervention wasn’t enough to allow me to recognize assaults upon my own body: its sole focus is on rescuing others, and so my perspective never faced inwards. Only through learning to protect myself did I come to recognize what it meant to be personally harmed. Bystander intervention didn’t stop me from being raped; it didn’t even help me to understand that I had been raped. On the other hand, self-defense restored my sense of self-worth, helped me to preserve and protect my boundaries, and made me realize that I am a goddamn warrior who will leave anyone who tries to hurt me in a state of deep, painful regret.

***

Since taking my first PREPARE class, no one has attempted to assault me. Not once. I guess I scream out “I will maul your groin if you get anywhere close to me” nowadays. I like that.

I have recovered from the worst of my PTSD. Where I was once convinced by a terrible ex-boyfriend that I was too stupid to go to college, I have now graduated Summa Cum Laude. I am in a relationship with a feminist who loves and respects me deeply. Most of all, I feel safe as I walk through this world, armed with the knowledge that I am, against all the perceptions my younger self held dear, a fighter.

Hannah Kohn is a graduate of Drew University in Madison, NJ. Having grown up in London and Hong Kong, she now lives in New York City. She is a fierce feminist with no patience for masculinity complexes. When she’s not geeking out over feminist theory, she can be found working on subversive cross-stitch projects, marveling over Central Park, and nagging her members of congress to vote against the latest attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She is one of those untrustworthy people who likes both cats and dogs equally.

A new book by feminist media studies professor Laura Kipnis champions self-defense.  Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017) chronicles what happened to Kipnis and some others who have been scrutinized, investigated, gagged, and in some cases fired as a result of Title IX investigations.  In Unwanted Advances, Kipnis argues that college campuses have a problem of administrative overreach and a related problem of cultivating helplessness in heterosexual college women.

Unwanted Advances describes a sort of childish martyrdom among heterosexual women, which feeds a growing administrative class of campus rape prevention educators and investigators who fuel a fear, if not downright sexual paranoia, of nonconsensual sex–without teaching women how to do anything about it (other than hope for the gallantry of a bystander to intervene, or expect to report it after the fact).

Say this stuff, as Kipnis too well knows, and you’ll be skewered as a slut-shaming, anti-sex, anti-feminist victim-blamer–no matter what sort of feminist activist or academic credentials you might have, an experience to which many self-defense advocates can relate.  Kipnis makes clear that she seeks to blame no victims, and she’s as pro-slut as you get: As she says, “‘Fuck all the guys you want’ would be my motto” (p. 192).

Thus by her second to last chapter, Kipnis argues how utterly nonsensical it is for so many anti-rape educators and administrators on college campuses to be against self-defense training.  Kipnis describes self-defense as “risk reduction” and argues that although it is not prevention it works to reduce the rape rate.  Of course, any good prevention work ought to reduce the rape rate, and we have argued elsewhere that “risk reduction” and “prevention” is a false dichotomy.  Indeed, self-defense fits all the criteria of “primary prevention” in the public health model.

Unfortunately, Kipnis is not aware of the scholarship on self-defense (outside of the New York Times’ coverage of Charlie Senn’s study published in the New England Journal of Medicine) or of the fact that many of us have been, for years, struggling to convince the campus rape prevention educators of the importance of self-defense.  It’s the reason we created this blog, the reason we say “My Vagina Has a Dream,” the reason we wrote Miss Eliza Leslie’s Hookup Handbook for Ladies, and the reason, in all seriousness this time, we explain the difference taking self-defense class has made.  Kipnis is not aware of the resistance to self-defense that we have faced.  But it’s nice, in any case, to read such a well known and well respected scholar describe how downright reasonable advocating self-defense would be, how helpful it was to her years ago when she took Model Mugging self-defense classes, and how advocating self-defense and a broader sense of taking charge of one’s own fate is not victim-blaming but simply “grown-up feminism.”

Kipnis understands from both her own experience and her feminist scholarship what it’s like to be socialized into feminine helplessness and passivity.  For her, this is all the more reason to support self-defense training, since it counteracts the gender norms so many embody unconsciously.  As Kipnis puts it, “someone has to call out the codes of self-martyring femininity” (p. 212).

Kipnis is not making a conservative call for curfews, teetotaling, or a new chastity.  Kipnis wants women to fuck all the guys they want to– but, crucially, recognizes that not  fucking the ones you don’t want to fuck “is where things get tougher, since this requires women actually knowing what they want, and resisting what they don’t want. It requires a certain amount of self-coherence, which isn’t readily available when one is passed out” (p. 192).  Despite partying like a guy, as if that is what’s feminist, let’s face it, to quote Kipnis, “self-induced helplessness isn’t gender progress” (p. 195).

Kipnis is perhaps even more aghast than we are that so few college women take themselves seriously and know how to say no.  As she puts it, “One of the dirty little secrets of hookup culture is that a significant proportion of college women don’t know how to say no to sex, which is painful to anyone who thinks that, by this point in the long slog toward female independence, no would be the easiest word in the language” (p. 195).  Self-defense instructors see firsthand women’s difficulty in and fear of saying “no”, and self-defense training helps make saying “no” far more accessible and appealing to women.  Is saying what Kipnis writes out loud even allowed?  If we can’t say this, then we are so scared of the victim-blaming charge that we are, ironically enough, leading women to get victimized.  Perhaps we ought to risk someone feeling blamed over someone actually be victimized.  

We love that women want to be equal to men, and that’s why we know they need to assert and defend this equality when facing a man who does not treat them respectfully.   As Laura Kipnis put it,  “Yes, there’s an excess of masculine power in the world, and women have to be educated to contest it in real time, instead of waiting around for men to reach some new stage of heightened consciousness–just in case that day never comes” (p. 214).

Unwanted Advances reminds us not to underestimate the power of a mindful awareness of one’s own motives and one’s own surroundings, of saying “take your hand off my knee,” and yelling, “No!”, or of pushing, striking, or biting to defend one’s boundaries. Doing so is defending one’s status as equal. Doing so is grown-up feminism.

Rape culture is highly gendered: women are far more likely to be targeted for sexual assault and men far more likely to do the assaulting.  Our culture’s constructions of gender present women’s bodies as legitimate and easy targets for “taking.”  Self-defense, as we have argued in the past, constitutes a feminist challenge to this gender ideology.

So why the heck do we have so much trouble convincing fellow feminists, rape prevention educators, and activists that self-defense (training in it and/or doing it) is neither bad nor antifeminist nor anything other than an effective, evidence-based enhancement to our collective movement to stop sexual assault and overhaul the societal constructions of gender that fuel the problem?

We have blogged urging people to help us put an effective rhetorical spin on the case for self-defense against sexual assault.  We have attempted numerous media-savvy  lists, golden rules, open letters, and memes hoping to spread the message. 

But here’s a new strategy. 

In his book, The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron notes the difference between safety and dignity.  Safety is inherently individualistic. It is about liberty.  Dignity, on the other hand, is concerned with a person’s basic social standing and the interest in being recognized as “proper objects of society’s protection and concern.”  Your right to safety is individualistic and about liberty, while your right to dignity is inherently comparative and about equality.  As Frederick M. Lawrence points out in a recent article about campus free speech/hate speech controversies, using Waldron’s argument, “to have one’s dignity respected is to be accorded the same basic social standing as any other member of the society.”

When we describe self-defense, it is all too often placed into the “safety” category.  Indeed, many campus sexual assault prevention educators insist on listing any self-defense classes their campus offers in a category called “Safety,” along with emergency blue-light phones and not walking alone at night.  In this light, it is no surprise that we get accused of committing an individualistic, neoliberal sin when we advocate self-defense training.    

So let’s try framing self-defense as dignity.  This is, of course, precisely how many self-defense instructors and advocates understand it already, implicitly if not explicitly.  When we train to defend ourselves, we are learning how to enforce that our dignity be respected, that we be accorded the same basic social standing as others.  

To be clear, safety and dignity are not incompatible concepts.  Self-defense training, while providing an avenue to move more safely through the world, does so deliberately by demanding that women be accorded the same basic social standing as men–the right to move freely, autonomously, and safely.  

Defending ourselves is demanding respect and our equality.  That is hardly a neoliberal safety stance insisting that sexual assault is an individual problem.  Defending ourselves is a stance of dignity which insists that sexual assault is a social issue, that women are the proper objects of our collective concern, and that women are worth defending.  Being alone in the action of self-defense when it happens does not make self-defense any less a social matter of dignity and equality than the assault itself. 

FUQ….!  We say that a lot in conversations, both casual and academic, about self-defense training it because is so often dismissed outright.  When we press the issue, asking, “But what is your concern about self-defense training?”, we start to uncover the assumptions people sometimes hold that they can’t easily challenge, because they don’t even ask the question!  We therefore offer you our Top 10 Frequently Unasked Questions (FUQs) about empowerment self-defense, along with our answers.  

1. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense teachers actually know the realities of who assaults whom, or do they naively believe all rapists are strangers who jump out of the bushes?  A:  Yes!  Empowerment self-defense instruction is informed by the data on violence against women, and so these instructors know very well that women are more likely to be attacked by someone they know – an acquaintance, a friend, an intimate.  Empowerment self-defense training includes the dynamics and responses to sexual assault by known perpetrators as well as strangers.  Without asking this FUQ, you might have the impression that this training is about karate chopping strangers and street fighting.

2. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense teachers realize some women have frozen during an assault because they were so shocked it was taking place?  A:  Absolutely.  “Freezing” is a common and natural response when the body is flooded with adrenaline as part of a fear response.  Empowerment self-defense training teaches women to minimize how long that response lasts by creating realistic assault scenarios and teaching women to breathe, focus, yell, and fight.  Adrenaline then facilitates women’s ability to fight back, rather than interfering with it.

3. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense teachers realize that a lot of women are impaired by drugs or alcohol when they are assaulted?  A:  They do; in empowerment self-defense training, women learn that drugs and alcohol can impair their ability to respond in an assault situation, and that at times, perpetrators deliberately use drugs or alcohol to create impairment to facilitate an assault.  Women are reminded that while drugs and alcohol are risk factors for assault, the responsibility for assault always lies with perpetrator, and never the target/victim/survivor.  Moreover, empowerment self-defense training increases the likelihood that women can and will have options to respond, even with some impairment from drugs or alcohol.

4. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense teachers train women in anything other than karate chopping and throwing someone to the ground?  A:  “Karate chopping”?  What is this, 1970?  🙂  Empowerment self-defense training uses a range of physical and verbal strategies that are demonstrated to be effective in thwarting assault.  While some empowerment self-defense instructors have a martial arts background, the techniques taught and practiced in empowerment self-defense are simpler to master in a matter of hours, not years, of training.  And the verbal skills are of equal importance to the physical techniques; women learn that they are entitled to set and maintain their own boundaries, and the words and language to calmly and assertively do so; the physical techniques are designed to maximize women’s areas of strength, and to target areas of vulnerability on the perpetrator.

5. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense teachers even realize that the gender norms and expectations in our society encourage women to be nice and pleasing, not mean and aggressive?  A.  They certainly do.  Gender socialization is an explicit topic in the psychoeducation that accompanies the verbal and physical strategies taught in empowerment self-defense, and women are encouraged to try and practice different traits and behaviors, regardless of what they have been taught or what feels “natural”.  Just like for drugs and alcohol, women are not blamed for being targeted for assault by virtue of their “niceness”; niceness is not asking for it.  However, our (un)questioning friends, women’s socialization and adherence to – and access to – stereotypical gender norms varies in multiple ways, and women in empowerment self-defense courses are understood to have different socialization experiences.  See Question 6!

6. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense classes recognize the way gender is not the only form on inequality– that women’s experiences are in fact filtered by physical ability, age, religion, race, ethnicity, size, etc.?  A:  Um, yes!   Intersectionality, or the concept that our identity is multi-faceted and that systems of oppression…well, intersect around different aspects of identity (thank you, Kimberle Crenshaw) is critical in understanding violence against women, and the differences in violence that different women experience.  

7. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense classes assume you have to be young and fit to learn and/or use self-defense?  A:  Absolutely not! (as the increase in our aches and pains in our 20+ years of work with empowerment self-defense can attest).  For example, Prepare Inc., the NYC-based chapter of IMPACT (c) Personal Safety, address that very issue on their web site:  “This system of self-defense is appropriate for all ages, all levels of fitness, and all body types. You will discover and learn to enhance your own body’s natural strengths. Limited class size ensures individual attention and personalized instruction, including accommodations and adaptations for pre-existing injuries, physical disabilities and learning challenges.”

8. Q:  Are advocates of empowerment self-defense assuming that we shouldn’t teach men not to rape, and making only women responsible for addressing violence against women?  A:  Are swim instructors assuming we should fire all the life guards?  Are nutritionists assuming we don’t need any FDA regulations?  Are…okay, you get the idea – and NO!  Teaching women to effectively defend themselves against sexual assault is a critical aspect of combating violence against women, and with more demonstrated efficacy in reducing rates of sexual violence than programs targeting rape myths, norms around masculinity, and bystanders, but NO EMPOWERMENT SELF-DEFENSE INSTRUCTORS ASSUME THAT THIS SHOULD BE THE ONLY WAY TO ADDRESS VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN.  Sigh. Forgive the yelling.  We just say this A LOT. 

9. Q:  Do empowerment self-defense classes teach about how to get help if you’ve been assaulted?  A:  Empowerment self-defense training focuses on all critical issues around gender violence and sexual assault; in addition to verbal and physical safety strategies, instructors talk about awareness, interpersonal dynamics, and self-care – before an assault is imminent, in the face of assault, and after being targeted or attacked, regardless of whether the assault was attempted or completed.  Women are encouraged to be aware of what they need, and to believe they are entitled to get it.

10. Q:  Are empowerment self-defense classes blaming women who did not fight back when assaulted for being assaulted?  A.  Never.  Empowerment self-defense training is designed with the goal of increasing women’s options and choices – in life and in the face of assault.  Instructors work to provide women with knowledge, skills, and resources; they trust women to make the choices that are best and safest for themselves, and they respect those choices, whether women choose to resist an assault or not, and whether the assault is thwarted or completed.

There were no courses called “Feminist Juijitsu” when we were in college.  But if you’re a student at the College of Charleston you can enroll in just such a class.

We learned that incoming frosh who sign up for the course sometimes think it’s about “feminist juijitsu” in the figurative sense.  We enjoy imagining what this version of “feminist juijitsu” might be:
“I got my health insurance to cover the cost of my birth control pills after telling them my menstrual cramps were a health condition… feminist juijitsu!” or perhaps, “I went out on a date with three boys and never once paid for my own bourbon… feminist juijitsu!”

But, all joking aside, when students enroll in the Feminist Juijitsu course, they are learning feminist juijitsu in the literal sense.  Students actually learn how to wrap their legs around an opponent who has climbed atop them, and squeeze the opponent’s neck with their clenched thighs and locked lower legs.  They also study scholarship about gender and violence in our society, and research on the prevalence and prevention of interpersonal violence.

There are two courses taught as complementary components by Amy Langville, John Venable, and Kristi Brian.  (The three instructors are pictured here practicing the moves they teach their students.)  The first-year students take a First Year Experience course doing readings and assignments in a regular classroom along with a physical course practicing combat moves in the juijitsu tradition.

According to Urban Dictionary,  juijitsu means “the practice of gentleness”.  Somehow, we like the idea that the feminist practice of gentleness involves putting a sexual predator in a headlock.

Young YouTuber Anna Akana explains in her “How Not to Get Raped” video that she’s “so fucking tired” of being told what she can do to thwart attacks, because we should be telling men to stop raping.  But take it from us, Anna, we are WAY older than you and we are really very so fucking tired. . .  of waiting for men to change.  (See video below for a dramatization of our getting older and older as we wait for men to change.)

We took birth control, and considered our ability to control our fertility a relatively empowering thing. We did not say it should be up to men to prevent pregnancy.  We also learned to swim. We did not say it should be up to lifeguards to keep us from drowning.

And, as we have said before, it’s not either/or.  We believe men can change, and people can change, and culture can change.  That being said, we can play an active role in those changes, and empowering ourselves to enforce boundaries if someone challenges them.

Our faithful readers are well aware that we take pains to understand why our fellow feminists find the idea of self-defense so abhorrent.  Since the 1990s feminists have commonly accused anyone advocating self-defense of a) victim blaming, b) asking women to act too much like men, c) putting the burden to stop rape on women instead of on men, or d) being too fixated on the body and bodily pleasures to be truly political.

In addition, self-defense has also been subject to the charge of neo-liberalism.  In this view, advocating self-defense is an individualistic strategy that naively places all the responsibility for solving a social problem on the individuals who deal with said problem which is, of course, actually a structural problem.  Individual approaches to structural social problems are a neo-conservative’s dream because it rationalizes the removal of social programs and government funding that would help those suffering from the problem.

The charge of victim-blaming is a close cousin to the charge of neo-liberalism.  For if one commits the sin of misunderstanding a structural, political problem for one that is solved by individuals, then this ultimately blames victims for the problem’s existence.   The scholar who in 1971 invented the concept of “blaming the victim,” William Ryan, was talking about the racism involved in the ways that Black people were blamed for being poor.  Poverty is caused by structural inequalities and statistically speaking there are likely to be way more poor people than rich people.  Of course, feminists found the concept of victim-blaming very useful for criticizing the ways in which we excuse perpetrators of violence against women for their actions.

The charge of neo-liberalism in feminist circles presumes that a solution involving an individual woman’s agency or body is somehow not truly feminist because it places the burden on her to change the society.  At the same time, the trend among post-structuralist and post-colonial feminists has been to emphasize women’s agency and practices of bodily resistance.  When we talk about ways women use their bodies to resist sexist social structures, we need not sacrifice a feminist, structural analysis of social problems.

But, as Alison Phipps points out in her 2014 book, The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neo-Liberal and Neo-Conservative Age, in a neo-liberal social climate many people merge or twist the post-colonial, post-structuralist feminist agenda of resistance with their neo-liberal agenda.  The neo-liberal agenda turns an otherwise empowering, feminist discourse of personal choice, self-invention, and bodily agency into a conservative politics of personal responsibility.

Sometimes feminist efforts walk right into the neo-liberal trap.  For example, as feminists did the amazing work of de-medicalizing childbirth in the 1970s, insisting that women know more about their bodies than they’d been given credit for and advocating that “breast is best,” feminists often ended up talking about “natural” birthing and breastfeeding practices.  This discourse was putty in the hands of conservatives who embraced that rhetoric for their own arguments that women shouldn’t be in the workplace so that they could breastfeed their babies and do other household chores that were the “natural” job of women.  Feminists had to emphasize that workplace policies should enable women to breastfeed (or pump their breastmilk), and also had to acknowledge that an unmedicated birth is not necessarily a “natural” birth.  Phipps argues that the feminist emphasis on breastfeeding and unmedicated birthing has become so successful across our culture because it fits well neo-liberal approaches to the privatization of responsibility and personal accountability for health risks.  Even still, we don’t want to go back to the norms of 1965.

Can advocating self-defense also fall into a neo-liberal trap?  Sure it can.  But, just as feminists advocating more empowering and healthy options for women around birthing and infant feeding must remind people of the structural and political issues at stake, we can remind people that advocating self-defense can and must be done as part of, not instead of, a structural approach to the problem of sexual violence.

Besides, not advocating self-defense falls into other conservative agendas–namely, that women’s bodies are too weak to fight aggressively, or that women ought to know their place and let men, bystanders, and the state protect them from harm.  In other words, feminists don’t avoid an unholy alliance by avoiding self-defense advocacy.

When we advocate self-defense, we do not advocate cuts to federal funding aimed at preventing violence against women or serving the victims of it.  We advocate including self-defense training as part of those prevention efforts.  Ignoring self-defense–as so many of our colleagues in the rape prevention education arena do–is like throwing out the breastfeeding baby with the hospital bathwater in an effort to avoid cooptation by a neo-liberal agenda.