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darren_strangerSaw a fight in the city last night - not your usual spectacle of two drunks in a pub ineffectually flailing arms at each other, but a nasty bout of shoving up against a barrier, rapid-fire punches to the head and (what looked like) the guy getting stomped on the ground. Aside from hoping it was the actual fight it looked like, not an unprovoked random attack, it made me think how hard it would be for any amount of controlled self-defense practice to prepare you for an onslaught of pure, focussed aggression like that. Scary.
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Date: 2005-09-14 02:31 am (UTC)As bruce lee said and i know it's cliched
the art of fighting is to win without fighting
opposed to that hope to be the one with the pure focussed agression
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Date: 2005-09-14 03:05 am (UTC)Not to mention the best fight is the one that doesn't happen.
It was just quite confronting to watch the level of intensity with which this guy went about hurting the other guy. Way more than we could ever simulate in a class, on a psychological level especially.
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Date: 2005-09-15 07:00 am (UTC)Speaking of fight avoidance, i encountered one of those awkward situations this morning - the ones where some creepy guy is annoying a woman on the tram who's trying to ignore him. The sort where you know that he'll probably give up and go away after a while (which he did) and that if anyone says something it'll get ugly, but it still leaves a bad aftertaste of nobody doing anything to help someone.
It's unsettling when what you know is the sensible thing doesn't seem like the right thing.
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Date: 2005-09-15 07:11 am (UTC)backing down would, to them, have been a sign of weakness and a sure way to start a fight but arcing up and returning their insults would just give them the flames they needed to start something.
smiling nicely while looking completely at ease unnerved them enough that they didn't know what to do but is very difficult to pull off.
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Date: 2005-09-15 09:57 am (UTC)One of my instructors avoided a fight simply by realising he could easily take the two guys who were about to attack him. They saw his shoulders relax, came to the same conclusion and buggered off.
Neat.
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Date: 2005-09-18 04:41 am (UTC)I don't know why but that seems to scare the bejesus out of most people looking to pick a fight.
Haven't been been in a fight for over 5 years. The last guys who tried it threw a couple of punches that missed and then stood next to each other yelling insults and waiting for the other guy to move in on me. This was despite them being quite happy to try and kick the shit out of some arab guy who only tried to run away.
Personally I'd interfere if I saw some guy harassing a chick. It'd give the guy something to worry about next time they thought of doing that and I can't just stand around ignore someone in need. One day that might be me.
That and people like that guy get their power from being able to dominate someone. Having someone acting like they can squash them like a bug is like a bucket of cold water.
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Date: 2005-09-19 02:58 am (UTC)The difficult part is when you can tell someone would be more than happy to 'start something' but will probably go away if ignored.
On the one hand, if you say nothing, then you have a woman who feels that nobody stood up for her and, like you said, a guy who feels he can get away with it next time. On the other hand, you risk turning a situation that will probably end without incident into one that will quite likely turn violent and end in someone getting hurt (could be you, could be him or maybe someone else).
The tricky thing is deciding at what point one outweighs the other and exactly how to handle it when it does, both of which i'm thinking need to be thought about before such a situation arises.
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Date: 2005-09-19 06:30 pm (UTC)To be honest I just can't see you doing the whole I can eat you all for breakfast look that gets people desperately scrabbling for a way out of a fight... You're too cute and fuzzy :P
It's a pity that everyone on the tram doesn't just stand up and throw the guy off the tram... Was there ever a time when people would do that?
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Date: 2005-09-19 11:02 pm (UTC)Probably not, though i like to think there would have been a few other people also thinking the same "right, if he actually touches her.."
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Date: 2005-09-24 08:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-24 08:41 am (UTC)Martial arts, on the other hand, are. That's kinda the point of a martial art - to give you the capability to respond to any degree of violence as appropriate to the situation at hand. Generally they make the assumption of small hand-held melee weaponry as a maximum attacking force, but sometimes more than that. Of course, the problem is, with anything that's actually a martial art, attaining that degree of skill is going to take years of regular practice.
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Date: 2005-09-26 12:03 am (UTC)I was thinking specifically in psychological terms. In class we tend to fine-tune how aggressive we come on as 'attackers' in self-defence scenarios, depending on who we're working with. With teenage girls, for example, just being grabbed can be confronting enough to disturb their comfort zone, and though it is half the point, we tend to go carefully with how far and fast we push that. But even with black belt classes, i realised i've not seen that kind of explosive, in-your-face aggression simulated anywhere near what i saw in that fight (the main bit of which only lasted about 20 seconds). It struck me as a glaring deficiency that we don't tend to get any practise facing and dealing with that sort of thing.
Ironically enough, in taekwondo it's probably the 'sport' side of it where we get the most exposure to dealing with stress and reacting under pressure, but since most of us don't get much into that side, it's something that we need to encounter in other ways.