Sometimes something is effective, but unpopular. Like giving kids cough medicine. Or giving up chocolate to help lose fat. This one will be unpopular with Social Justice Cupcakes because they will be offended by it. But if they were offended by gravity it still wouldn’t stop the gravity.
Basic principles: You can’t fight something unless you understand it (at least, you can’t win except by accident and without knowing how you did it).
Basic principles: You can bitch and moan and support social initiatives to change the ways of a man-eating lion. Or you can take steps to protect yourself against the lion. Is it blaming the victim to expect them to stop trying to cuddle a known man-eating lion? I don’t know. I don’t care. Just stay away from the lion people.
Ending the abuse of women at the hands of men is a straightforward affair. There are 2 steps.
Step 1. Everybody reads Theodore Dalrymple’s incredible article. This article has the rare and magical property of cutting through the bullshit. It WILL inoculate a lot of women against the processes that allow abuse to happen and continue. This will stop a lot of women getting abused.
No really, go and read the thing. Like Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” This applies to domestic abuse. Oh boy does it apply.
Step 2. Anybody who wasn’t inoculated will (hopefully) get slapped into reality by their friends who were immunised.
Don’t forget to reread once a year. If you live in a ghetto, trailer park, township or slum where this stuff is like buying bread at the shop, then read it every week.
Know any friends with asshole boyfriends you think may be hitting them (or know they are)? Send them this article to read. But only only if you, you know, actually care about them.
This person, and this person, for example, should all read Dalrymple’s article.
There are other ways to end abusive relationships of course. But if someone is caught “in the cycle” and can’t muster the wherewithal to walk away, then the other solution probably won’t happen either.
PreDefence 
Domestic violence is a scourge that needs to be neutralized. Part of martial arts training isn’t just the physical ability and skills to win a fight, but overcoming the mental blocks that prevent us from fulfilling our potential.
Ask any of the VMA students. In a single day, a student will transition from not being able to do a flip, to accomplishing that goal. What has changed? Muscles did not grow in a single hour. The only thing that changed is the perception of their ability. What shocks them further is the realization that their body could do a flip or a kick earlier that day, if only they had the correct mindset.
The “I can’t” was so fundamental to their perception of reality that it inhibited them. Teaching martial arts, I wonder sometimes. Am I fixing the lack of knowledge? Or am I fixing the lack of belief?
LikeLike
Hi https://velocityma.com/
I agree, most people need more mental work than they do physical work. It doesn’t take much strength to stab someone in the eye with a pencil (and that will probably end most rape attempts etc.), but it takes a certain mindset before someone will recognise that it’s an option, realise it’ll help, and then be willing to cause so much damage to another human being.
Rory Miller likes to make the distinction between capacity and capability. You are physically capacity to kill someone, but are you mentally capable?
I like to (partly) blame being so far removed from our food sources (and our hunter-gatherer days). Not many people grow up with personally killing their supper (or seeing it happen, or even knowing that it happens). Chicken is this stuff that happens in the supermarket freezer. Death is something that happens in the movies (and then you see the same guy in another movie, magically alive).
Hard to to have a healthy respect for life (and from that the willingness to fight for it) when death is such an abstract, Hollywood movie, concept.
Everybody should read this when they hit 20:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
LikeLike
I also work in a hospital with critical patients and see death happen regularly and can be intimately involved in the end-of-life care. Death hasn’t lost any of its abstraction, and is still an enigma. Though I understand the process of death quite well, medically speaking, the finality of it is something that eludes my mortal self.
I can’t put my students in the dire situations that would truly prepare them for survival, it isn’t ethical. But I can slowly introduce them to mindsets that may keep them alive.
“The enemy is around you. You MUST act.” “If you do that, you’ll die.” “Are you bleeding? Good! Embrace it.”
Through some struggle, I’ve turned the accidental injury, bloody lip, bruise, into a token of pride. My students still avoid injury, but when they get injured, it is no longer a debilitating, tear-fest. For a five-year-old with a bloody lip, him smiling about it is part of that mentality.
We are mortal. Our history is wrought with battles and glory. Embracing our history as humans is to embrace our mortality.
I’m of the mindset that we live to our fullest capability. That way, if we succumb prematurely, we can die with honor. It is one of the reasons those with disabilities should be admired. Many kids with disabilities not only perform fully at their capability (like many of us don’t,) but they redefine what they are capable of (like even fewer of us do.) I think, to live with that kind of power, can help us approach death more bravely.
LikeLike