In her book Beauty Bites Beast: Awakening the Warrior Within Women and Girls (1998), author Ellen Snortland asks rhetorically “How come females of every other species on the planet are fierce, regardless of size, and are the ones who train their offspring, male and female, in defense and hunting? How come most women wouldn’t ever think of themselves as potentially dangerous toward an assailant?”

Self-defense training doesn’t provide women with the strength and skills to hunt down men and beat them into total physical submission. It teaches them how to protect themselves from a male aggressor. Women can hurt men in a fight. A woman’s goal in a fight is to injure and disable a male attacker so that she can escape to safety. Quite often the act of fighting back is enough to end the attack since male attackers are bullies and cowards who want to physically dominate, not fight. Women have the element of surprise in a fight in that men underestimate or don’t expect a retaliatory response. Women also have the advantage of being in a defensive position. By being in an attack mode, male attackers leave themselves open and vulnerable to counterattack. Any hunter will tell you an animal is most dangerous when it is cornered.

Women and girls can defend themselves against men. The biggest obstacle is getting women and girls to believe it. Writes Snortland, “Society has forced women to believe that they can’t fight back; there’s no use even to try. The myth that Beauty is defenseless has become a reality because every structure has been designed to enforce and reinforce women’s weakness…”