As a fellow Ohioan, PREACH.

I personally cannot deal with this shit anymore. When Kasich defunded planned parenthood in my lovely state I took to Facebook to write about the Hyde Amendment. I lost friends in the process and am currently losing my ten year relationship with my hard right in laws over this nonsense.

Rural Iowa right here. I am involved in an effort to save our Family Planning Clinic. Just secured funding to keep it limping along another year. Time to try to get folks to open those pocket books now!! The place serves 7 counties!

I see you’ve completely lost your ability to comprehend what I am saying because this is clearly an emotional topic for you.

There’s nothing polite or delicate about your characterization my personal experience as being taught to beat people up or blaming other victims for how they react to sexual assault.

Hey, just because lots of other feminists think “violence” and “self-defense” are the same thing, doesn’t mean I have to agree. That’s the beauty of critical thinking skills; I understand that words mean things. If you read benjaminallover’s OP and understood it to be the story of how she demonstrated her mad karate…

You lectured her on the evils of “beating people up” in response to her story about how she saved her own life by defending herself against an attacker. And SHE’S the asshole? Nah brah.

Thank you.

It’s awesome that her training was able to help her but it ends up sounding too much like bad rape advice, “don’t dress too slutty” , “don’t drink alcohol.” etc etc

That’s not the culture, that’s me, based on a harrowing personal experience, which you totally second guessed. In my mind, that makes you the asshole.

Hey; if you actually need to use force, you should be okay with putting that person in the hospital as far as I’m concerned. Punching someone in the throat can collapse their windpipe and cause them to asphyxiate, and I don’t give a shit, because if I need to punch you in the throat you’re already assaulting me. I’ll…

Someone shared a personal story from their own experience. Other people shared their support for this. Nobody advocated mandatory self defense training be forced upon people.

This. So much this. I think those entry level women’s self-defense classes are really more about giving women permission to use force, not so much drilling realistic techniques into their heads. For so many women, it goes against everything they’ve ever been taught to react with force instead of freezing up or…

Self-defence is an important skill girls and boys should learn. In the same way swimming is. Sure, you may go through your life entirely able to avoid danger the same way you may entirely avoid water. But no matter how careful you are, you might fall in to the lake one day.

It completely incapacitated him for a few seconds, and I was outta there. I highly recommend. Women should also practice using elbow blows at close range.

Learning self defense is not learning how to beat people up. It’s learning how to defend yourself.

My parents did not teach me to beat people up for crying out loud. They and my judo instructors taught me physical confidence and self-defense. I’ve never struck a person in my life besides a stranger who grabbed me by the throat while I was walking alone, dragged me into the bushes and raped me. There is absolutely…

Excellent throat punch story, A+

And as we’ve seen over and over in so many woman-centric arenas—sexual assault prevention foremost among them—the impulse to protect is very different from the impulse to ensure equity, and the two things, worked out in practice, are often exactly at odds.

“The question, of course, is why Arnold felt Holtzclaw deserved a more rounded portrait in the first place.”