Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote:
There's something odd about the tone (or even existence) of a thread like this one. I'm reminded of the saying by Simone de Beauvoir about what happens when women try to act like human beings. Specifically, I'm detecting a bit, here and there, of a tendency to treat women in the dojo as some kind of anomaly: there's the norm of practice, and then there's the question about whether women can practice in that norm or not, or if we need some kind of "special" accommodation. My question is: what makes the one thing the norm, and the other thing "special"? Women are always going to be marginalized in a situation that defines any concession to their existence as a special accommodation.
|
Well Mary, let's be realistic. Women are a small minority in the martial arts. Aikido probably has more women training than any other martial art except T'ai Chi Ch'uan, but it's still a minority. Even in the dojos here in Seattle where Mary Heiny Sensei raised up a generation of female teachers, the majority of the students at their dojos are men. At dojos run by male teachers this is even more true.
This isn't some "concession" to their existence, it's a fact. It's not a "special accommodation" to put some attention on how to ensure that each population within the whole is getting what it needs from the training.
Political correctness has taken us to the point at which we aren't supposed to even talk about the fact that men and women have differences when it comes to the martial arts. I was present at our police academy when the head of instructor training chewed out one of the master instructors for even mentioning that a certain technique was more difficult for the female officers to do because of the fact that it required more strength to pull off. Afterwards he privately apologized to the trainer saying that, while what he (the trainer) said was true, he was required to disavow the statement or be open to disciplinary action himself.
This is insanity. Men and women have very different dispositions, different strengths and weaknesses, different goals and aspirations on the average. Good training does not expect everyone to be the same because they are not.
The traditional model was that the style never changed and the student changed to fit the style. So what you ended up with was a group of people who were capable of adjusting to that style successfully. Everyone else washes out. When you decide to open up training to the masses and encourage wide growth world wide, then you darn well better adjust the training to the folks whom you've reached out to enlist.
Are there women out there who can go toe to toe with the men and play the man's game? Yes, of course there are. Patty Saotome Sensei, and Mary Heiny Sensei are two that come immediately to mind. However, both of them are really trashed physically from all that hard training when they were younger when they hadn't yet developed the skill to handle the superior power of the men they were training with. Neither one of them teaches the same way they trained. Mary Sensei has successfully developed a number of excellent senior women teachers, all of whom run their own schools now. She did this by making the training accessible to the particular needs of the female students. The number of women who would be willing to train the way she did in Japan is minute (Ikeda Sensei once said Mary was the toughest woman he ever met).
There is no question that discrimination has been and continues to be a problem world wide. But attempting to redress that fact by pretending that we are all the same is silly and ignores that facts. Men and women are different, period. Any training which ignores that fact isn't optimizing the benefits of that training to someone.