When I originally started this blog, it was really to discuss what my experiences were in Systema , as a female, in the United States.
Things moved along in several directions, but I never forgot the one topic that really drove me here. I'd like to say my fight training began a few years ago when I stepped on a mat at my first Systema class, but that isn't the case.
Ever since I could remember, I loved to fight. And even when I didn't love it, I HAD to fight. And being female meant, that was not "ok".
From my earliest memories of my grandfather watching boxing on Spanish TV, I remember him sort of sparring with me off and on during commercials.I also remember feeling really, really guilty about sneaking around watching snippets of boxing.
That migrated to being slightly obsessed with military arts. I am not even sure how I knew about the military other than my brother had GI Joe "action figures" or that my Dad was in the Army, I just knew... I like guns,mud, and being loud. The biggest issue was that I am half Hispanic. Any Hispanic female will know that means... dresses, bows, long hair and primping..non-stop. That was NOT me. Luckily for me, my parents were divorced and my Dad owned a ranch in east Texas. This really meant one thing...I worked. Hard.
And any kid who is around horses knows that having horses means you work. Our chores were not divided by gender....I didn't stand around chasing butterflies. I picked up hay bales, rode bareback, got knocked around, bit and kicked by horses. Also, my Dad, was an adrenaline junkie. He had a high speed, high powered jet boat that we got to ride in all the time , which meant water skiing, water sports and getting the shit scared out of us when the boat felt like it was about to flip backwards due to speed.
To top it off, my Dad, was an avid wrestling fan. In Texas, we call it 'rastlin, but still. I got to meet several famous wrestlers as a kid, including Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant and many, many more. It also meant, our house was a constant , non-stop wrestling match. My Dad, was famous for his "claw" move and his hands, were enormous. He was extremely powerful and "trained" me to fight at a pretty young age. He threw me around, kicked, tossed and line drived me endlessly.
And, for what it's worth..at the time, I mostly hated all of this.
I was a nerdy, city kid. I preferred to read encyclopedias, drawing, working out complex math problems and trying to teach myself hieroglyphics in my spare time. There was not one thing I loved about my Dad's antics, because , ..he also had a vile temper(don't worry, he is a reformed angermaniac). And to make things even worse,I had an out of control, hyperaggressive, anger filled older brother. To make matters even worse, due to my parent's multiple marriages...at any given time, I had sets of step-brothers. Which means... I was the only female sibling to all this testosterone filled fighting and pecking order dominance.yay
I never sat around crying about it(unless I was really injured..which DID happen(thrown down a flight of stairs with roller skates on and bit through my tongue)), and I never felt like I couldn't handle anything. I did what any child of the '80's did... I took it,fought back,cried a little, and then hoped I could watch cartoons on Saturday.
Growing up like this, was really the only way I knew. I knew, I hated church because I had to dress up...I knew, I hated being quiet and being talked over by all the boys around me and I knew, there was not much I could do but learn to fight back.
This leads me to my first real school fight. I was in the 5th grade at an inner city school in Dallas. Her name was Cecilia and I will never forget it. Her boyfriend, Michael, kissed me on the cheek in the hallway. Back then, 5th graders, were still playing with toys, so even the idea that anyone had a boyfriend was weird...being kissed was even weirder. My best friend , Sharon, ran up to me in the hallway and told me Cecilia wanted to fight me after school. I wasn't too concerned, because my mom taught at the school, so surely, nothing would happen.
I was dead wrong.
By the time school was out, everyone was really amped up for this fight. Not only was I one of the only white(I am hispanic and white) kids in the school, I was a nerd and my mom was a celebrated teacher there. Cecilia was a bully, one of the bigger kids, and was known for fighting. On the way to the area behind the gym I kept thinking" ok, she's a Jehovah's Witness, I'm sure she won't hit me. She doesn't even say the Pledge of Allegance".--nerd thinking.
The closer I got to the location, the louder Sharon's voice got. "Girl, you just gotta get her....go all out!".
I wasn't even sure what that meant. I started to mentally pray the rosary.
Before I made a complete turn of the corner, I felt a horrible sting to my face. I had been hit...hard. But not harder than any of my brothers or Dad hit me. When I slightly recovered and stood straight, I made eye contact with Cecilia. The look on her face was completely savage. She came barreling at me at a high rate of speed and all I could do was plant my hand on her face and squeeze. I remember feeling her eyeballs and mouth on my hand and it felt exactly like gutting a deer. As she grabbed gobs of my hair and clothes, I clung to her face and started swinging with the other hand, completely blindly. And speaking of blind...I had yet to get my prescription glasses, so I was damn near blind.
Once the gym coach pulled ME off HER, all I could think was how great it felt. I saw her laying there, flat on her back crying. I looked down and had all my appendages, but I knew I would be headed straight to the principal's office. Luckily, it was Mr. McCallister, who really didn't care and was ready to go home for the day. All he said was" she deserved it..she's a bully." . To this day, I am fairly certain my mom never found out about the fight. Although the following year, I was at a completely different school with a totally different demographic.
Along came junior high at another inner city school , or as what I like to refer to as "where shit went down". My nerd status was still maintained but the very first day of school, I was jumped. And again on the second day. By the third day, I realized, my skin tone was what was making me get my ass whooped. I decided to latch on to a few of the hispanic kids at the school who thought it was really cool that I was "white" but fluent in Spanish. They, were in a gang.
"Getting jumped" became less frequent but the one-on-one fights increased. The severity of the fights got worse, and if I wasn't fighting, I was fighting for one of my friends. By 8th grade I already had a reputation for being a full on brawler.
At about this same time, my already raging brother, began experimenting with drugs. I did not have a safe place to turn to. Not one ounce of solitude or peace. Other than juvi hall.The violence was so chaotic and bad in my life, that going to jail was always a better option.
By my freshman year in high school(again, another inner city school), I had seen so many shootings,stabbings and random fights, I was no longer phased by anything. I was sent to go live in east Texas with, sigh...my Dad.
The smell of horseshit and early morning wake up calls he gave me annoyed me to no end, not to mention that the total population of the high school I went to in east Texas was 300. I was considered a minority because I was half-Mexican and that increased their total minority population to 9 students. On my first day, I was in a throw down with a female football player named Rhonda who already had some missing teeth.
The one thing about the girls at this school was, they were tough. Not like, gang member-shit talking tough, but like, fast pitched softball, rodeo girl who hunts , tough. While I was still in my element of fighting, I was oddly not in many fights at this school.
Before long, we moved to Austin where, I was shocked that an entire month went by and I didn't see or was involved in one fight at school. I spent the rest of my high school career, waiting to fight ( I even started one in science class...).My home life was a different story all together. And way too shocking to go into detail here, but let's just say, I was more than used to sleeping with one eye open. It was rare that the police were not at our house on a weekend. Rare.
Along with getting through all of it, I chose a specifically, physically brutal field to work in. I decided to become a chef. My culinary apprenticeship at times, resembled that of what a Marine would go through in boot camp. I still have a scar from a narrowly missed pan that was "tossed" at me by an instructor. Not to mention, getting yelled at, degraded and sexually harassed on a regular basis...this was, what I was told" all part of the industry". I sucked it up and did my time, and made it out alive and quite successfully. I spent years breaking my back, carrying loads of items, hauling bags of produce and yielding knives with the best of them. And I never cracked, which was perhaps why I was never in need of a job in that field. I loved every minute of it. It was familiar, vile and hard.
Fast forward to today. I am no martial artist, but really wish my parents did put me in some formal training. However, what would change? I grew up , literally, fighting. I read most Army field guides, played with guns and knives and spent a regular part of my childhood with bruises and cuts all over me. While I am not great at Systema, what I did love about it was that I was able to initiate my daily skills into fight skills if need be. The one thing missing, was my gender group.
I had the great luck to train with a few great women, but as a whole, there was no promise of balance for women, at least here in the States anyway. While my local instructors were quite phenomenal and female trainee friendly, nationally, there was not a large presence of females who trained. Even when I asked a leading international instructor if he could guide me to a few female instructors, he boasted there were none. He also told me "women are not warriors"...(I've referenced this in a few other blogs).
The more I asked around, the more I realized , there wasn't much of a niche for women and when I was shown what some women were doing in Systema, it was largely not even remotely like what the men were doing. Often times, I was pointed to "women's self defense" classes, that were taught by the same instructors who taught Systema, just you know... this was for women .
I didn't understand what I like to now call "gender divided training" until recently, when I traveled to Russia to train with Andrey Karimov, who explicitly believes in co-gender training for the purpose of creating social harmony and so the men don't aggro each other out of the room. In fact, Karimov himself discusses about connecting with feminine energy and creating a balance in men, so they do not turn into hyperaggressive males with no pecking order and something to prove. These men, are often super stiff, wound really tight, and have no concept of true movement, which some martial artists say is key in learning combatives. These are the guys you see super ,duper stiff in training videos, often times have veins popping out of their necks and talk about being soft, when really, they just look like they are trying really hard to make a poop.
And....this is also what I looked like training. Not to repeat too much, but my blog about wearing a skirt for 30 days, really drove this home. I was indeed, a hyperaggressive female at one point in my life and it really affects who I am today. To make things completely ironic, I have been approached by several males who teach "women's self defense" in hopes that I would help promote them.
The issue is, is this ok?
I honestly didn't know there was a stigma to girls fighting until I went to a friend's house when I was in 7th grade. She had a younger sister and there was absolutely no holes in the walls, anywhere. She didn't toss her sister into a wall, and they didn't "roughhouse". Usually, when I visited them, I was in shock at how quiet their house was. It seemed abnormal , to me. Later on,I realized this was normal, and what I was living, was not.But, what I lived through, got me through alot of social,psychological and physical issues later on in life(including evading an attempted rape, running out of a burning building, and many other traumatic events)... I never played victim or felt really sorry for myself, and perhaps, my combat like childhood , is what saved me.
When I think of gender divided training, I can only think of one thing..."how would a woman survive an attack if she hasn't been knocked around by a dude?". Luckily for me, while training in Russia, I had instructors that understood this balance and how to teach it.Training here was a different story.
While one woman who I worked with regularly was great, a few others were way too "light" for me. Either I felt guilty not working my best with them, or I felt like I wasted time training. To find a really balanced male to train with, was pretty difficult. My most favorite training partner ever, probably doesn't know he was just that. He was soft enough to guide me, yet firm enough to work with me. He could go slow or fast,and knew what my weaknesses were on the mat. When I stopped training in the US, I realized that this kind of male, would be really hard to find . My anticipation for what kind of training I would go through in Russia, became engulfing. My first day in training I noticed one thing... all the men with whom I was working with, were exactly like this ONE guy I liked as a partner in the US.All of them.
There were several determining factors I noticed right off the bat.
Training is indeed different there and the idea of gender division, or "women's self defense" did not exist at all, not in our group. It was "just fight..in a skirt". And that's what we did.
In the months since my return, I've been asked to support or back several women's self defense groups and/or programs. Normally, I would consider it, but when I asked the male instructors of these programs what their backgrounds were in , they'd often list and itemize their college credentials, or police training outlines. More often than not, these men, had never even heard of the areas of Dallas I grew up in,or they had been divorced several times, had no female children and none of them had lived in the slums of anything. Ever. Technically, I would be better at teaching "women's self defense" based on my survivorship rate,alone.
While yes, degrees count for a few points, life experience counts for alot more, IMO. I survived alot of actually being a female and being attacked. I don't live in fear and I don't walk around hyperaware. I am able to sustain huge amounts of pain(ex.breast cancer biopsy , no meds...), yet I am supposed to find comfort in the idea of this gender singular class, that will partner me up with , women who may or may not be fear mongered into training or women who , may or may not have already been attacked(which means, something during the class could actually trigger them). Out of all the "women's self defense" programs I've been sent to evaluate, not one , seems even remotely close, to what I went through in junior high , at the very least. Not one. Including Systema. Even then, only recently , I had the great honor of meeting female Systema O.G.("original gangster") , Janice Bishop. She sent me a link to a video she was in , where she is clearly being punched and she is punching someone else, full force. I had goosebumps watching her footage. In fact, I cried..perhaps out of anger or perhaps because I didn't meet her sooner, or even worse, because no one had ever mentioned her to me. In three years of training.I personally was lucky enough to get punched by an amazing instructor named Marc Breese. Anyone in Systema knows what I mean when I say"lucky enough to get punched". His punch was so smooth and powerful, that I can remember exactly how I felt immediately after the punch and to this day, have not been punched as well as he punched me.
Not that I felt incredibly isolated in training but it would have been nice to connect to the few women that existed in the art in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Russia....my good friend, Olga Malkova is making waves with her phenomenal sword and whip work and I am 100% sure she will kick my ass even harder when I go back to Russia next year. Because, as beautiful and soft as Olga is, the men she trains with, WANT her to be phenomenal , if not better ,than they are.
And let's be honest, Ronda Rousey, really, really helped open up combative arts to millions of females everywhere, but even still... we seem to just not be able to get it right. Not only has she been called "cocky" "mannish" and" he-man", she really lost alot of us(women and men) when she published her "Do Nothing Bitch" mantra.Sigh. I guess saying " I'm not a Do Nothing Yet Intellectually Stimulating Female Who Can Fight" doesn't have a ring to it.
At the end of the day, as an instructor in all this, ask yourself how you train your students.Do you slightly groan under your breath when a woman shows up to class? Do you try to balance the men in your class regularly so when a newcomer female comes in, she won't be scared away? Do you offer gender divided programs, and if so..why? Do you think you(if male) are emotionally, psychologically and physically qualified to train and work with women?
Like I said before, I was extremely lucky to have my first tastes of Systema with some great instructors who were fair and amazing at finding a balance. There were times, I did feel completely stuck in the program here, but I felt that was more the overall "program" rather than the instructors. But I've also trained with men who were extremely aggressive and awkward with women in the class and guess what guys? It shows. And when those same men make "women systema" videos or "women's self defense" videos, it's really, really not a good look to any woman who's got a decent grasp of what female fight culture is about.
If you have a sister, daughter, wife or mother, think.... "what do I want for them?", how would I like for them to feel in a training environment ,would I want them to be grouped with other females like them , and how does that apply to a realistic fight situation? What is the BEST I can do for the women around me in training?".
I highly suggest we all take a deep look at the "combative arts" and stop dismissing women as ho-hum weekly practitioners, and really focus on doing the work, for your school, class or program.Recently, a female Systema instructor in Virginia was promoted on a news cast for her free women's self defense class that she offered in light of recent events in her area.This was a HUGE advantage for all of the females in training in the US, yet not really discussed that much overall, in gen pop.I for one, posted it and discussed it as much as possible in the hopes of at least, creating a buzz that "hey...we can teach this stuff too!".She is exactly the kind of woman who should teach a women's self defense class, to other women. But she is also the exception to the rule, as it were , in combative arts.
On another side note, there are many, many Combative Arts forums and discussion pages, that have very little , if at all, female presence. And it certainly shows by the Neanderlithic tone of conversation, in a weird way. While some men are completely snarky and catty, others have very little or no actual survivorship rate, not enough to teach Combat Arts anyway. And most, count the times they were in a drunken bar fight. If you whittle away all the "I can teach this because of A,B and C"...and we are left with people who have only trained in so many arts that they have convinced themselves they are good, OR if we ask for real, life experience...by default, women would be better instructors across the board. We deal with every day attacks on our emotions, psyche, physical pain(hello...menstrual cramps and childbirth) , forced to perform out side of our comfort zone(have you walked in heels and a skirt near a construction site??no??try it)...but most men on these forums ONLY argue about how much better they are than the other men , or , how much MORE "paid for" training they've had. Very few can have an intellectual debate about fighting.Most of these same men, don't even have a girlfriend, wife,daughter or significant other they would dare to try to DEFEND. Imagine that?...why are they taking combative arts if the only thing they combat , is the keyboard?
I never paid for any of my combative experience growing up.It was all free. So the overall question that gets trounced over and over is "WHY DO YOU TRAIN?". It's asked in every single forum I've been on, and very rarely, does anyone say" to protect my family". If you take an honest look at your reasons for training, and the reason are not to protect others, then why ARE you training?
And guys, for what it's worth...a GREAT male Systema partner is really someone that treats us like a brother would(a normal one)...roughs us up, teaches us how to fight, then lets us try it out without ego or getting frustrated. Remember..you want us to learn just as much as we want to learn from you.
(thank you to M. Brock for being the best male partner of all time and to Janice Bishop and Tiffany Lee for pioneering women in Systema in the U.S. and to Emlyn, for without, I would not have even begun this journey)
Things moved along in several directions, but I never forgot the one topic that really drove me here. I'd like to say my fight training began a few years ago when I stepped on a mat at my first Systema class, but that isn't the case.
Ever since I could remember, I loved to fight. And even when I didn't love it, I HAD to fight. And being female meant, that was not "ok".From my earliest memories of my grandfather watching boxing on Spanish TV, I remember him sort of sparring with me off and on during commercials.I also remember feeling really, really guilty about sneaking around watching snippets of boxing.
That migrated to being slightly obsessed with military arts. I am not even sure how I knew about the military other than my brother had GI Joe "action figures" or that my Dad was in the Army, I just knew... I like guns,mud, and being loud. The biggest issue was that I am half Hispanic. Any Hispanic female will know that means... dresses, bows, long hair and primping..non-stop. That was NOT me. Luckily for me, my parents were divorced and my Dad owned a ranch in east Texas. This really meant one thing...I worked. Hard.
And any kid who is around horses knows that having horses means you work. Our chores were not divided by gender....I didn't stand around chasing butterflies. I picked up hay bales, rode bareback, got knocked around, bit and kicked by horses. Also, my Dad, was an adrenaline junkie. He had a high speed, high powered jet boat that we got to ride in all the time , which meant water skiing, water sports and getting the shit scared out of us when the boat felt like it was about to flip backwards due to speed.
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| My 'rastlin costume |
And, for what it's worth..at the time, I mostly hated all of this.
I was a nerdy, city kid. I preferred to read encyclopedias, drawing, working out complex math problems and trying to teach myself hieroglyphics in my spare time. There was not one thing I loved about my Dad's antics, because , ..he also had a vile temper(don't worry, he is a reformed angermaniac). And to make things even worse,I had an out of control, hyperaggressive, anger filled older brother. To make matters even worse, due to my parent's multiple marriages...at any given time, I had sets of step-brothers. Which means... I was the only female sibling to all this testosterone filled fighting and pecking order dominance.
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| always had scuffed up panty hose |
Growing up like this, was really the only way I knew. I knew, I hated church because I had to dress up...I knew, I hated being quiet and being talked over by all the boys around me and I knew, there was not much I could do but learn to fight back.
This leads me to my first real school fight. I was in the 5th grade at an inner city school in Dallas. Her name was Cecilia and I will never forget it. Her boyfriend, Michael, kissed me on the cheek in the hallway. Back then, 5th graders, were still playing with toys, so even the idea that anyone had a boyfriend was weird...being kissed was even weirder. My best friend , Sharon, ran up to me in the hallway and told me Cecilia wanted to fight me after school. I wasn't too concerned, because my mom taught at the school, so surely, nothing would happen.
I was dead wrong.
By the time school was out, everyone was really amped up for this fight. Not only was I one of the only white(I am hispanic and white) kids in the school, I was a nerd and my mom was a celebrated teacher there. Cecilia was a bully, one of the bigger kids, and was known for fighting. On the way to the area behind the gym I kept thinking" ok, she's a Jehovah's Witness, I'm sure she won't hit me. She doesn't even say the Pledge of Allegance".--nerd thinking.
The closer I got to the location, the louder Sharon's voice got. "Girl, you just gotta get her....go all out!".
I wasn't even sure what that meant. I started to mentally pray the rosary.
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| Largely what I experienced in junior high |
Once the gym coach pulled ME off HER, all I could think was how great it felt. I saw her laying there, flat on her back crying. I looked down and had all my appendages, but I knew I would be headed straight to the principal's office. Luckily, it was Mr. McCallister, who really didn't care and was ready to go home for the day. All he said was" she deserved it..she's a bully." . To this day, I am fairly certain my mom never found out about the fight. Although the following year, I was at a completely different school with a totally different demographic.
Along came junior high at another inner city school , or as what I like to refer to as "where shit went down". My nerd status was still maintained but the very first day of school, I was jumped. And again on the second day. By the third day, I realized, my skin tone was what was making me get my ass whooped. I decided to latch on to a few of the hispanic kids at the school who thought it was really cool that I was "white" but fluent in Spanish. They, were in a gang.
"Getting jumped" became less frequent but the one-on-one fights increased. The severity of the fights got worse, and if I wasn't fighting, I was fighting for one of my friends. By 8th grade I already had a reputation for being a full on brawler.
At about this same time, my already raging brother, began experimenting with drugs. I did not have a safe place to turn to. Not one ounce of solitude or peace. Other than juvi hall.The violence was so chaotic and bad in my life, that going to jail was always a better option.
By my freshman year in high school(again, another inner city school), I had seen so many shootings,stabbings and random fights, I was no longer phased by anything. I was sent to go live in east Texas with, sigh...my Dad.
The smell of horseshit and early morning wake up calls he gave me annoyed me to no end, not to mention that the total population of the high school I went to in east Texas was 300. I was considered a minority because I was half-Mexican and that increased their total minority population to 9 students. On my first day, I was in a throw down with a female football player named Rhonda who already had some missing teeth.
The one thing about the girls at this school was, they were tough. Not like, gang member-shit talking tough, but like, fast pitched softball, rodeo girl who hunts , tough. While I was still in my element of fighting, I was oddly not in many fights at this school.
Before long, we moved to Austin where, I was shocked that an entire month went by and I didn't see or was involved in one fight at school. I spent the rest of my high school career, waiting to fight ( I even started one in science class...).My home life was a different story all together. And way too shocking to go into detail here, but let's just say, I was more than used to sleeping with one eye open. It was rare that the police were not at our house on a weekend. Rare.
Along with getting through all of it, I chose a specifically, physically brutal field to work in. I decided to become a chef. My culinary apprenticeship at times, resembled that of what a Marine would go through in boot camp. I still have a scar from a narrowly missed pan that was "tossed" at me by an instructor. Not to mention, getting yelled at, degraded and sexually harassed on a regular basis...this was, what I was told" all part of the industry". I sucked it up and did my time, and made it out alive and quite successfully. I spent years breaking my back, carrying loads of items, hauling bags of produce and yielding knives with the best of them. And I never cracked, which was perhaps why I was never in need of a job in that field. I loved every minute of it. It was familiar, vile and hard.
Fast forward to today. I am no martial artist, but really wish my parents did put me in some formal training. However, what would change? I grew up , literally, fighting. I read most Army field guides, played with guns and knives and spent a regular part of my childhood with bruises and cuts all over me. While I am not great at Systema, what I did love about it was that I was able to initiate my daily skills into fight skills if need be. The one thing missing, was my gender group.
I had the great luck to train with a few great women, but as a whole, there was no promise of balance for women, at least here in the States anyway. While my local instructors were quite phenomenal and female trainee friendly, nationally, there was not a large presence of females who trained. Even when I asked a leading international instructor if he could guide me to a few female instructors, he boasted there were none. He also told me "women are not warriors"...(I've referenced this in a few other blogs).
The more I asked around, the more I realized , there wasn't much of a niche for women and when I was shown what some women were doing in Systema, it was largely not even remotely like what the men were doing. Often times, I was pointed to "women's self defense" classes, that were taught by the same instructors who taught Systema, just you know... this was for women .
I didn't understand what I like to now call "gender divided training" until recently, when I traveled to Russia to train with Andrey Karimov, who explicitly believes in co-gender training for the purpose of creating social harmony and so the men don't aggro each other out of the room. In fact, Karimov himself discusses about connecting with feminine energy and creating a balance in men, so they do not turn into hyperaggressive males with no pecking order and something to prove. These men, are often super stiff, wound really tight, and have no concept of true movement, which some martial artists say is key in learning combatives. These are the guys you see super ,duper stiff in training videos, often times have veins popping out of their necks and talk about being soft, when really, they just look like they are trying really hard to make a poop.
And....this is also what I looked like training. Not to repeat too much, but my blog about wearing a skirt for 30 days, really drove this home. I was indeed, a hyperaggressive female at one point in my life and it really affects who I am today. To make things completely ironic, I have been approached by several males who teach "women's self defense" in hopes that I would help promote them.
The issue is, is this ok?
I honestly didn't know there was a stigma to girls fighting until I went to a friend's house when I was in 7th grade. She had a younger sister and there was absolutely no holes in the walls, anywhere. She didn't toss her sister into a wall, and they didn't "roughhouse". Usually, when I visited them, I was in shock at how quiet their house was. It seemed abnormal , to me. Later on,I realized this was normal, and what I was living, was not.But, what I lived through, got me through alot of social,psychological and physical issues later on in life(including evading an attempted rape, running out of a burning building, and many other traumatic events)... I never played victim or felt really sorry for myself, and perhaps, my combat like childhood , is what saved me.
While one woman who I worked with regularly was great, a few others were way too "light" for me. Either I felt guilty not working my best with them, or I felt like I wasted time training. To find a really balanced male to train with, was pretty difficult. My most favorite training partner ever, probably doesn't know he was just that. He was soft enough to guide me, yet firm enough to work with me. He could go slow or fast,and knew what my weaknesses were on the mat. When I stopped training in the US, I realized that this kind of male, would be really hard to find . My anticipation for what kind of training I would go through in Russia, became engulfing. My first day in training I noticed one thing... all the men with whom I was working with, were exactly like this ONE guy I liked as a partner in the US.All of them.
There were several determining factors I noticed right off the bat.
- None of these men were hyperaggressive males.
- They could dance and sing and play musical instruments.(Karimov himself could sing high notes, often mimicked an old babushka and of course, danced.)
- They all had a sense of humor and they all were as powerful as our instructor.
- Almost all had been in the military.
- None, tried to SHOW me what I was doing wrong or tried to overcorrect me
- None made the assumption that I had no idea what I was doing.
Training is indeed different there and the idea of gender division, or "women's self defense" did not exist at all, not in our group. It was "just fight..in a skirt". And that's what we did.
In the months since my return, I've been asked to support or back several women's self defense groups and/or programs. Normally, I would consider it, but when I asked the male instructors of these programs what their backgrounds were in , they'd often list and itemize their college credentials, or police training outlines. More often than not, these men, had never even heard of the areas of Dallas I grew up in,or they had been divorced several times, had no female children and none of them had lived in the slums of anything. Ever. Technically, I would be better at teaching "women's self defense" based on my survivorship rate,alone.
While yes, degrees count for a few points, life experience counts for alot more, IMO. I survived alot of actually being a female and being attacked. I don't live in fear and I don't walk around hyperaware. I am able to sustain huge amounts of pain(ex.breast cancer biopsy , no meds...), yet I am supposed to find comfort in the idea of this gender singular class, that will partner me up with , women who may or may not be fear mongered into training or women who , may or may not have already been attacked(which means, something during the class could actually trigger them). Out of all the "women's self defense" programs I've been sent to evaluate, not one , seems even remotely close, to what I went through in junior high , at the very least. Not one. Including Systema. Even then, only recently , I had the great honor of meeting female Systema O.G.("original gangster") , Janice Bishop. She sent me a link to a video she was in , where she is clearly being punched and she is punching someone else, full force. I had goosebumps watching her footage. In fact, I cried..perhaps out of anger or perhaps because I didn't meet her sooner, or even worse, because no one had ever mentioned her to me. In three years of training.I personally was lucky enough to get punched by an amazing instructor named Marc Breese. Anyone in Systema knows what I mean when I say"lucky enough to get punched". His punch was so smooth and powerful, that I can remember exactly how I felt immediately after the punch and to this day, have not been punched as well as he punched me.
Not that I felt incredibly isolated in training but it would have been nice to connect to the few women that existed in the art in the United States.
Meanwhile, in Russia....my good friend, Olga Malkova is making waves with her phenomenal sword and whip work and I am 100% sure she will kick my ass even harder when I go back to Russia next year. Because, as beautiful and soft as Olga is, the men she trains with, WANT her to be phenomenal , if not better ,than they are.
At the end of the day, as an instructor in all this, ask yourself how you train your students.Do you slightly groan under your breath when a woman shows up to class? Do you try to balance the men in your class regularly so when a newcomer female comes in, she won't be scared away? Do you offer gender divided programs, and if so..why? Do you think you(if male) are emotionally, psychologically and physically qualified to train and work with women?
Like I said before, I was extremely lucky to have my first tastes of Systema with some great instructors who were fair and amazing at finding a balance. There were times, I did feel completely stuck in the program here, but I felt that was more the overall "program" rather than the instructors. But I've also trained with men who were extremely aggressive and awkward with women in the class and guess what guys? It shows. And when those same men make "women systema" videos or "women's self defense" videos, it's really, really not a good look to any woman who's got a decent grasp of what female fight culture is about.
I highly suggest we all take a deep look at the "combative arts" and stop dismissing women as ho-hum weekly practitioners, and really focus on doing the work, for your school, class or program.Recently, a female Systema instructor in Virginia was promoted on a news cast for her free women's self defense class that she offered in light of recent events in her area.This was a HUGE advantage for all of the females in training in the US, yet not really discussed that much overall, in gen pop.I for one, posted it and discussed it as much as possible in the hopes of at least, creating a buzz that "hey...we can teach this stuff too!".She is exactly the kind of woman who should teach a women's self defense class, to other women. But she is also the exception to the rule, as it were , in combative arts.
On another side note, there are many, many Combative Arts forums and discussion pages, that have very little , if at all, female presence. And it certainly shows by the Neanderlithic tone of conversation, in a weird way. While some men are completely snarky and catty, others have very little or no actual survivorship rate, not enough to teach Combat Arts anyway. And most, count the times they were in a drunken bar fight. If you whittle away all the "I can teach this because of A,B and C"...and we are left with people who have only trained in so many arts that they have convinced themselves they are good, OR if we ask for real, life experience...by default, women would be better instructors across the board. We deal with every day attacks on our emotions, psyche, physical pain(hello...menstrual cramps and childbirth) , forced to perform out side of our comfort zone(have you walked in heels and a skirt near a construction site??no??try it)...but most men on these forums ONLY argue about how much better they are than the other men , or , how much MORE "paid for" training they've had. Very few can have an intellectual debate about fighting.Most of these same men, don't even have a girlfriend, wife,daughter or significant other they would dare to try to DEFEND. Imagine that?...why are they taking combative arts if the only thing they combat , is the keyboard?
I never paid for any of my combative experience growing up.It was all free. So the overall question that gets trounced over and over is "WHY DO YOU TRAIN?". It's asked in every single forum I've been on, and very rarely, does anyone say" to protect my family". If you take an honest look at your reasons for training, and the reason are not to protect others, then why ARE you training?
And guys, for what it's worth...a GREAT male Systema partner is really someone that treats us like a brother would(a normal one)...roughs us up, teaches us how to fight, then lets us try it out without ego or getting frustrated. Remember..you want us to learn just as much as we want to learn from you.
(thank you to M. Brock for being the best male partner of all time and to Janice Bishop and Tiffany Lee for pioneering women in Systema in the U.S. and to Emlyn, for without, I would not have even begun this journey)
