Mister Donovan has just posted a very well-structured survey-style article of the masculine-enhanced female in modern life. If you are a sci-fi writer he tracks some basic trends that, if they continue, could very much change future human society in high tech habitats more than you might have imagined. If you are a coach who trains women there are also many implications here.
I would like to comment on one area in which he did not go into detail: women in the combat arts. As a coach and trainer who prepares men and women for combat I have made the observation that women have been done a disservice by the popular notion that they can defeat a man of equal proficiency, and also the notion that men and women should strive to achieve the same goals in combat training.
I like female boxing and MMA, but, for the vast majority of women who seek fitness and survivability in everyday life, these prize-fighting templates are poor models for combat training. If you were a military advisor training a small band of insurgents you would not teach them to go toe-to-toe with heavy armor units, but teach asymmetrical warfare. When I train women I bring them through the same basics as a man, but then immediately diverge methods in the realm of applications. When I train one of my ladies to fight with a knife, or a stick, or with her empty hands, I’m working on a slow featherweight versus fast heavyweight template.
There is a seduction in the training of a female, and it is this. Women are more readily coachable on a technical level than men. It takes a lot of work to break down psychological male barriers to learning combat proficiency. Basically, guys feel the need to pretend they understand combat even when they don’t. Women come in admitting they don’t know what’s up.
Women also become a motivational challenge for the coach, which again becomes addicting. All but the most freakish women tend toward a self-defeating mindset. When you coach your hundreds of aspirants you know in the back of your mind that you are practicing for that one phenom that might fall into your lap, that one chance to have a world champion. So shoring up a woman’s delicate psychology in the gym becomes a challenge on the motivational level that a coach will eagerly embrace in case he ends up in that mega-spotlight role where the technical game is so well established on either side that the coach becomes a functional psychologist more than a bio-mechanical trainer. So this desire by a fight trainer to treat his female fighter like a man is really selfish.
In the gym and the dojo we don’t have the men and women playing the same roles, but put them into a functionally segregated symbiosis. Refreshingly enough, of the handful of remarkable women that have stepped into our brutal world where 99% of male martial artist fear to tread, none of them have sought masculinity, but rather the preservation of their femininity in a world where men are less likely to offer traditional levels of protection and in which women have increasingly become violent towards other women. I feel, in my balls, that this is because Modern Agonistics is a cross-training format that is essentially a bullshit reduction matrix.
Below is the link to Jack’s informative and thought-provoking article.
Yes, very interesting observations. What he does not mention is what many of us learned as children: that if you don't include the girls in on your games when they want to be let in, they will go out their way to spoil your fun out of spite. They will complain so much that eventually Mom will force you to include them. Since women have the vote and have their own money now they can do even more to wreck your fun than they could say a hundred years ago. So now we can't even have a war without including the girls. But then again, since they won't cook, clean, sew, do laundry or even have babies anymore we may as well send their asses all off to war.
Yes, those Asian wives ads in the back of SOF were prophetic in an oblique way.
LOL! Well not so oblique James. In fact its a logical progression for some American men to seek out foreign mail order brides, since so many American women have made themselves unsuitable for marriage. They lack the skills for the job, which serves to make extra work for you as their spouse rather than relieve you of any chores. By way of example, imagine for a moment that you are a businessman and you decide to hire a chauffer to drive you around so you can read reports, phone your sales managers or even take a nap during your long commute to and from work. So of course you hire a chauffer who cannot drive because he looks so good, has a sunny disposition and is well educated. So you end up driving yourself everywhere and get no work done during your commute and all the while your chauffer sits in the back seat and works on his MBA while collecting a paycheck from you. So as you drive yourself to work and back each and every day, you scratch your head in bewilderment wondering 'how did this happen'?
Yes Jeremy, you have found the chink in my personal armor. I am exactly the business man that would hire a chauffer based on attractiveness, only it would be a she, of Swedish-Thai ancestry, and we'd both be in the backseat while my business empire went belly up...
I, a lifelong pedestrian with a wallet full of expired learners permits, have bought 5 cars for three women, and, look at this, not a wench on the premises to bring me a burrito! Never fear My Main Man [as the oppressed are want to say] I have replaced all three of them with this $60 microwave within dignified reach of my desk!
Oh poor James! I feel your pain! We've all been there to one extent or another. The promise of imminent and/or frequent sexual gratification always serves to cloud our decision making process, which is why I made the chauffer in my analogy male rather than a female in order to highlight that dynamic. But that promise of sexual gratification all too frequently turns out to be a bait and switch proposition, doesn't it? Like they say, the difference between your job and your wife after seven years is that your job still sucks.
Oh Wise One, let me spin a yarn of marital woe...
One of my friends married a beautiful woman who is a total bitch, often singing his woes to me, jealous of my non-committed relationship with a certain airline lady. The guy had not been laid in months. Then one day he is wearing half a smile. I said, 'Hey Bro, you must have had a nice night with the wife."
He kind of snarled, "It was my birthday—sex day. But its not like I get enough practice to make it last an appreciable length of time. And then James, when it was over and I'm looking at another year of dealing with this shit, all I could think was, 'If only she turned into a six-pack and a sandwich, than it might be meaningful.'"
LMAO! Indeed...a tale of woe! Ah... the pain of unrequited love...It brings to mind the proverb I once encountered written on the men's room wall: "Remember, no matter how good-looking she is, there is someone else who is tired of her shit!"