Defending Ourselves

This past weekend, as my co-columnist Abby was accosted and unceremoniously abducted by a 100-page "essay" due in less than two weeks, I (Andrea) was also attacked. By two large men in black plastic suits.

It probably wasn't quite as traumatic as it could have been (or as scary as Abby's situation), considering I was swathed in red padding and only had to escape to the other side of the Quincy JCR. But this moment, and others like it in my four sessions of HUPD's Rape Aggression Defense (RAD) course, did leave me with a few aching muscles--and, for both of us, a lot of food for thought.

The RAD course brought about 20 female undergraduates out from the depths of Quincy to bone up on our awareness and self-defense. Over the 12 hours we spent together, I listened as we laughed our way through demonstrations that were teaching us how to throw off attempted rapists--because, really, what else can you do with a subject all too real and close? I watched as women whom you couldn't picture harming a kitten giggled nervously, fidgeted in their dress shoes, talked themselves down--and then proceeded to kick ass again and again, loving it all the while. And Abby and I wondered, talking such things over after class, why and whether RAD should exist at all and what it means that it does.

I was struck immediately by my own and my fellow classmates' demeanor: our giggling, our initial inability to call "No!" without prodding, our hesitation. Why were we all being such girlie-girls? I was doubly struck at the relish with which we all, once goaded on by the instructors, pummeled and yelled and kicked out at imaginary groins as though we hadn't left a library carrel in weeks and were dying just to make noise and take up space.

On reflection, I don't suppose these disparate phenomena are so strange at all. I think of the ways women are expected and acculturated to be in everyday life: polite, non-aggressive if not overtly submissive, attractive. Standing in line at Christie's today, I stared at the cover of some magazine where Sarah Michelle Gellar (the vampire-butt-kicker of Buffy fame) was posed, her head tilted down and body caving inward like some little girl who just had her lollipop taken away. Popular culture seems intent on muting and negating the power of any woman who dares to be even remotely large and aggressive--even if it's only on TV.

Is it any surprise, then, that we are so tentative to act out, even in the comfort and safety of 20 other women and inside the JCR? And that many of us, myself included, feel the urge to negate the size of our voices and actions by laughing at the ridiculousness of it all--as if to say, "Look, I'm still just a girl"? It is not an everyday occurrence to watch a woman take herself and her body seriously, to see a woman scream and whack things and not then make light of it. It betrays a strength and power most of us are afraid to acknowledge, except in the most accepted of outlets, like sports or theater or dancing.

It is hardly surprising that all of us loved the RAD class. It was suddenly, joyously appropriate--no, expected--for us to throw our weight, stretch our vocal cords around "NO," assert our physical presence against large men in Darth Vader-esque uniforms. We didn't even want them to let us win; one woman made sure to ask that they not let her get away so easily again. I personally wished for another round or two.

Watching the videotape of our simulated attacks afterwards, we still laughed. Now, though, we laughed as one woman got in that gratuitous kick at her downed aggressor; as another screamed at the top of her lungs; as another hammered the helmet right off Darth. We reveled in such displays of aggression and victory, in the disparity between a five-foot-tall female and burly HUPD officers. I don't want to speak for the entire class, but I think we all felt a little more confident and powerful. I know I did.

So, each Sunday night I returned to the room giddy with my potential force. Abby--escaping from her academic captors long enough to hear the trials and tribulations of my JCR battles, but never quite emerging from her Social Studies stupor--couldn't help but engage me in discussions about power and gender constructions. I'd like to bring her, inebriated with theory, back to the column now, for she brings an intriguing critique to what I had seen as a simple self-defense course:

"I'm all for yelling and attacking men in padded suits, but I can't help but question a class designed around the premise that women are potential victims. So often violence and injustices against women are reduced to biological differences, when the real problem is partly a cultural ideology positing our gender as weak, passive and attackable. In this way, every warning to be careful, every insistence on a threat of danger, every limit placed on where I should go running, contributes to the vulnerability of women.

"I'm not implying, however, that we all go trotting around in dark alleys proclaiming ourselves invincible. How do we reconcile such theory and practice? I guess figuring out this dilemma is beyond the bounds of this thesis...uh, I mean column."

It is a point we turn over and over, finding no simple answers. Having experienced RAD, however, I cannot help but feel that I have done myself a service by taking this class. At its most effective, the course imparts a new sense of confidence in one's physical being; it reminds me that I can take care of myself. This is one small step towards a society that believes the same of all women.

Already, I return to muting myself both physically and vocally. This culture tries incessantly to teach us not to be too loud or too big. But at least for those few hours in the JCR, we were learning a different lesson.

Abigail R. Branch '98, a social studies concentrator, and Andrea E. Johnson '98-'99, an environmental science and public policy concentrator, live in Quincy House. Their column appears on alternate Wednesdays.