The Last Taboo
The Last TabooBy Keith Vargo |
In the space of 40 years, male martial artists have gone from reluctantly including women in training sessions to seeing women run their own dojo. Female champions in every type of competition have become genuine stars. In their prime, kickboxers like Kathy Long and Lucia Rijker were some of the biggest draws in the sport. Meanwhile, Christy Martin and Laila Ali raised women’s boxing to new levels of popularity and acceptance. In spite of all that progress, one taboo remains: men and women fighting each other. There’s a practical reason why man-versus-woman matches generally aren’t sanctioned. The average man has greater upper-body strength and more lean muscle mass than the average woman. So men start out with a natural advantage. When you have two people punching each other in the head, it’s the kind of advantage that’s both unfair and dangerous. That doesn’t mean intergender fights don’t happen. Over the years, there have been a few man-versus-woman boxing matches. But when such bouts are sanctioned, they generally aren’t between top male and female athletes. It’s usually some nonathletic, sexist blowhard getting called out by a superior athlete. A prime example was two boxing matches in Germany between champion fighter Regina Halmich and TV celebrity Stefan Raab. Raab was the host of a German variety show who made sports challenges a regular part of his program. In 2001 he challenged then WIBF flyweight champ Halmich to a boxing match, claiming that his win would be a blow to the legitimacy of women in the sport. When they met, Halmich busted his nose in an early round and beat on him at will. Raab barely made it to the final bell. He got a rematch in 2007, but the intervening years didn’t change anything. The talented Halmich beat him just as badly the second time. Watching a loudmouth like Raab get a smackdown at the hands of a woman is satisfying on many levels because it’s so rare to see arrogance gets its comeuppance. The millions of Germans who tuned in to watch both matches apparently felt the same way. Yet it’s hard to see this as a trend that will last. A great female athlete pounding on a tubby, delusional misogynist is one thing; matching up the best female and male fighters in the same weight class is another. In a truly competitive match between a man and a woman, it’s the seriousness that makes it taboo. High-level professional fights always take place in the shadow of injury. Sure, you can argue that segregating men and women into separate competitive leagues is artificial. It may even be true—assuming you could ensure equality of strength and skill—that gender doesn’t matter in the ring and the risk of injury is no different. But none of that matters when compared to the basic wrongness of men hitting women. This is really what our taboo against men and women fighting is about. It’s where the drive for increased opportunities for women and the demolishing of sexual stereotypes clash with a totally different kind of social progress: the desire to end violence against women. Sanctioning intergender matches means that society approves of a man punching a woman and trying to knock her out. That’s something that everyone can rightly be squeamish about. Some might argue that the real reason men don’t like fighting women is it threatens their own sense of superiority. They’re afraid of losing their status and masculine identity by succumbing to a woman. While that’s certainly a part of it for some, winning is no more preferable. If you’re not the guy who loses to them, you earn the tag of “that guy who beats women up.” It’s not so much a patriarchal attitude of exclusion as it is a nod to positive social change. Many modern men simply don’t want aggressive physical conflict to be part of their relationships with women. So much of why we practice the martial arts is about how we want to define ourselves. When we think more broadly about the meaning of the arts that we do, how they extend into our lives and how they help shape the world we live in, it’s easy to see why intergender fights remain taboo. They’re simply not representative of the kind of society we want or the kind of people we want to be. (To read more Way of the Warrior, a monthly column by Keith Vargo, check out Philosophy of Fighting or the newest issue of Black Belt.) |
