Thanks for the info. It makes sense that sometimes people pull guns for the primary purpose of threatening rather than shooting their victims. I was thinking about it from the perspective that no one pulls a weapon that he or she doesn’t intend to use, and that empty-hand techniques against someone who really intends to shoot you would be pretty useless given how much immediate damage a bullet can cause. I will definitely check out Code of the Street, it sounds interesting. I don’t know if I have access to IMPACT-style training in my area, but I would certainly be interested in taking a class. Traditional martial arts are great, but they take a personal improvement and slow learning perspective to mastering the art. I think that training that has a more immediate focus on self defense and especially on how to handle fear and high adrenaline situations would be very useful for most women.

The first is somewhat objectifying of women – she’s weak and in need of saving. The latter is siding with the woman, focusing on letting the aggressor know that what he is doing is not appropriate.

Stepping in to “save her” perpetuates the larger problem of women being without practical agency. She is weak, and needs to be saved, both in the mind of the guy stepping in, and in the mind of the aggressor who may defer to an intervening male because of respect for the maleness, without acknowledging his own behavior as wrong.

It might be more useful to focus on the inappropriate behavior of the aggressor, and giving the message that this behavior will earn him contempt from men as well as women, rather than reinforcing the aggressor’s belief that a woman alone is weak and that men will determine her fate by aggression or intervention.

I guess I’m thinking of things like studies showing that domestic abusers who are reported to the police being more likely to escalate the abuse when they get home. I fear that a guy insisting on a white knight routine in an ambiguous situation could quite possibly do more harm than good, and that the woman involved in the situation is more likely to be able to suss that out than he is.

Which doesn’t make any of that right, of course. (And I’m not talking about an assault in progress; in that case, I’d say do whatever you can to break it up.)

But either women are people with agency or they’re not.

Meh. Trust intuition, but be wise and learned enough to tell intuition apart from prejudice/stereotypes. Feminism is good for the latter. Feminist principles should not override the former…they should only make one strive to have the latter down pat (and should help one get there).

I mean, Tom was referring to “women” getting into situations where they don’t say what they mean because the intimidation worked, and hey, I’d actually call that…a loss of agency. But it’s not a loss of agency that came about because of gender, in my opinion. It’s a loss of agency that came about because of intimidation techniques, which can work on anybody (it’s merely the nature and intensity of the technique that varies along social category power lines), if you think about it.

I myself believe that people of all groups can have things happen to them that make them lose some degree (even all, for a moment?) of their agency.

So in my opinion, if one intuits that this has truly happened to a person via that agency-depleting technique called “effective intimidation,” it might actually be the best and most moral thing to listen to one’s own intuition more than one is listening to the words of that person.

(But please don’t forget that I also think it’s essential to use things like feminist theory to tell if that “hunch” is really intuition / is really correct.)

Traditional martial arts doesn’t deal with modern weapons other than knives, and I know that in mugging situations if the assailant has a gun, women who fight back often die.

IMPACT and IMPACT-style chapters do deal with this, but it’s a class that any one chapter probably only offers once every few years, and only to people who’ve taken their Basic Skills course.

In the Basic Skills course, though, you can feel free to ask about it and they’ll give you great advice/answers.

I imagine they’d say something about guns being most likely a prop (especially before the fight really starts, so they might also say something about getting rid of it early) in a scenario that’s about sexual assault or some other “social category”-based dominance scenario. And they’d probably tell you that though you won’t get to practice fighting someone with a gun in that class, your practice coming up with what to do in an adrenalized state should help you size up the situation and make the best choice in the heat of the moment if faced with a gun. Adrenaline-state training is adrenaline-state training, to a certain extent. Oftentimes it doesn’t really have to be about the exact scenario you’ll face in the future–it just has to be a state you practiced being alert & fighting or talking in, period.

Anyway, that’s what I assume they’d cover. I’m not the pro, though.

As far as a money mugging, well, I suppose that if you really want to get into the psychology of what the gun is for (since knowing that can help you do the right thing once you ARE calmly going through your adrenalized moment), you could start with a book called Code of the Street. It’s about the logic & psychology of people who live in the ghetto, and one of the situations he covers (having interviewed people who stuck other people up) is stickups/muggings.

And hey, I have an ex-boyfriend who, in his clear moment during a mugging (several people against him & a friend who froze), pushed her into a run and took off running…and it worked.

Which is not what you’d expect to work really well based on Code of the Street‘s description of money muggers.

But it did.

Anyway, for you, since you’ve had so much training, I’d say what you would get most out of IMPACT-style training is the experience of thinking, “Holyshit he’s pinning me down when I just woke up and saying he’s going to kill me if I fight him!” and fighting full force anyway (they wear so much padding that you can kick, knee, punch, poke, etc. at full force).

You might not need it–my ex didn’t have any such training and stayed clear-headed–or it might help. Who knows. (There’s also an IMPACT instructor who said the training saved his life by making him jump out of the way of a careening minivan instead of freezing in place when he saw it coming! Hee!)

Does that start to answer your question at all about how to size up people with guns and how to treat the info that comes from that sizing up?

I used to believe that I should try to avoid confrontation. I no longer do. I came to believe that was one of the reasons men feel they can behave this way, the utter lack of accountability. So now, I am loud, confrontational and quite willing to use whatever means necessary to ensure my physical safety. I would rather face 12 in the jury box than be carried by 6.

I live in Dallas, Texas now and last year I was leaving my night class and heading to my car, the parking lot was dark due to issues with the lights, which made it VERY DARK. As I am crossing the street to the parking lot, some guy began crossing against the light from the other direction trying to speak to me. I kept walking, my usual habit, and ignored him. He became indignant and followed me into the parking lot. I put 3 cars between him and me and turned and told him that following women he didn’t know into dark parking lots was probably not the healthiest thing to do. He became verbally abusive and continued to try and get closer to me. I hit my car’s panic alarm and told him, quite forcefully, to go away. We are now each dodging between cars, him trying to get closer and me trying to avoid him. By now, other students are trickling into the lot and notice what’s going on and he still won’t leave.

I now carry a gun which I bought since moving here and learned to use it. I also believe that the day I have to pull that gun on someone, that I will more than likely kill them. This is because I have been taught that you do not threaten with a gun. If you pull it out, you use it or don’t pull it out. And you shoot to kill.

Anyway, by this point, I was really becoming scared because he wasn’t backing off even though there are now about 10 other students in the parking lot trying to figure out what is going on, my car alarm is blaring, it’s pitch black outside and this has now turned into a SITUATION. I was seriously comtemplating killing another human being. But by this point, I had pretty much decided I had no choice but to pull out my gun. Right at that moment, as I am reaching for my gun, a police car comes flying down the street and pulls into the parking lot and starts shining lights everywhere. I am very glad that I was not forced to pull out my gun, but I would have.

The police sit him in the car and talk to both of us as well as some of the other students. It turns out that this guy had three warrants for assault and was suspected in a about 5 assault/rapes in DOWNTOWN parking lots at night. I was lectured on carrying a handgun by the police but this is TEXAS so it was short. However, though, one thing in my favor is that I was NOT near my car when the police arrived. You aren’t allowed to use a gun against someone in Texas unless you are are in imminent fear of physical danger. If you are near your car, an argument could be made that you were attempting to protect your personal property, which is illegal. However, the Legislature has seen fit to decree that that is no longer the case as of Sept. 1 this year. You will legally be allowed to protect your person or personal property with deadly force.

I did get the police report number and made a huge stink with the company that managed the parking lot and got other students and faculty to do the same to the extent that those lights worked two days later. And the night after that they weren’t operational, they left several attendants on duty after hours to escort people to their cars.

But, I was shaken to realize how close I came to using my gun but I still would have felt justified. I work late a lot, both here and in NYC and I have noticed that men who do not want to seem threatening, do non-threatening things to at least signal that all they want to do is get where they are going. And then there are some others that deliberately try to intimidate you. I often wonder, if more women carried guns and were as willing to use them as I am, would this change?

1. Have a pet rat that rides on your shoulder. Especially in Boston, with a huge wild urban rat population (both a huge population…and huge rats) that seemed to work for me.

2. Stick your finger down your throat and throw up all over the guy. Worked for me.

No seriously. You should have seen the look on the guys face.

As for the question of is it okay to be aggressive back…i think assertive rather than aggressive would be better. I’m a strong big girl, but I know that a typical man would have little difficulty overpowering me. I’d be too afraid that they’d just get pissed off and get more violent, or pull out a weapon or something, because you never know.

But I think responding assertively, loudly, or unexpectedly would probably be the better thing to do.

And can I add that I hate that we even have to have this conversation? What the hell is wrong with people that they feel it’s okay to do these things to other people?

Cassie and debbie, the problem is one of the signals that men have been receiving from feminism. The “natural” instinct of “what is right” feels like something that women no longer want us, as men, to act on, because it is “patriarchal” and “disempowering”. That is the message that men collectively have received from you.

Thanks for sharing, sweetheart.

To get back on topic, I experienced a bewildering number of explicit and unwelcome come-ons from strange men in the street when I was working in Paris in 2000. And there was nothing jovial about it, either. I remember standing on a platform waiting for the RER and being approached by this one guy, whom I blew off, obviously. I then watched as he proceeded to work his way down the platform talking to EVERY woman there who wasn’t accompanied by a man, from barely teenaged girls to retired women. And RER platforms are long. He was quite obviously not getting any positive responses, and some women at the other end of the platform noticed and started moving to areas he’d already canvassed in hopes of avoiding him. Didn’t work, but heck, maybe disturbing us and getting those women to disrupt their routine was the whole point.

I’ve never experienced anything comparable in the way of street harassment in London, Barcelona, or Madrid (surprised me, because I’d been told Spain could be very difficult for women travelling alone). I did notice some fairly appalling loud and obnoxious drunken behaviour by groups of young English male tourists in Paris and Madrid, though. But that was more indiscriminately ruining things for everybody around them, as opposed to sexual harassment. Never saw anything that bad by young Englishmen in London, though (never quite got that logic).

Home in Vancouver, I was groped on the Skytrain by an adult male when I was 13 or 14, but since then, nothing dramatic. Except the time I got screamed at by a huge drunk guy on the way back from the fireworks, but we were packed to the gills and he would’ve had a hard time moving far enough to physically attack me. Still scary, though, and that was a case where he got even more enraged when I did my usual calm-but-tough thing. Profuse use of the c-word, all because I didn’t want to get drawn in, but still wouldn’t pretend to be sorry for my initial “mean” response (which wasn’t especially mean, considering I was being approached by a large, crude drunk. If I’d known how much of a jerk he’d be, I would’ve been meaner). Nobody said a word, but somebody must’ve pushed the silent alarm, because security got on at the next stop.

Mind you, I’ve been taking transit regularly here for years, and have long since developed a don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. I know women who have horror stories of being sexually harassed or groped on the Skytrain or buses (to the point where one friend who lives in the ‘burbs refuses to take transit ever again), and they usually present in a not-very-confident way in public. NOT saying they bring it on themselves, just that harassers seem to have radar for sensing women who will be more upset and frightened (maybe because they’re apprehensive about taking transit in the first place?). And other than the groping incident many years ago, I’ve never experienced any kind of disturbance, sexual or otherwise, that didn’t seem to be alcohol or drug related. Can’t say the same for Paris.

I’m more likely to be nervous about street harassment in the suburbs than in Vancouver. I’ve walked home from transit at night many, many times in my urban neighbourhood, and there always seem to be people around (and usually those other people don’t seem to know me or each other. i.e. it’s very rarely me encountering a group, at least not without there being also some random person on the block walking their dog or or having a cigarette). In the ‘burbs, especially at night, it’s much more car-dominated, and there’s virtually nobody else walking. Plus the houses are all set way back from the street. No witnesses. And with it being almost all houses, as opposed to mostly apartments, people with dogs don’t walk them as much because they have yards.