First, if the goal is to run away that doesn’t matter; getting a good head start and discouraging the guy from following is more than enough.
Also you ignore “stabbing” and “using anything as a weapon” from that list; if a woman guts a big strong guy with a broken bottle I kind of doubt he’s going to be beating anyone up anytime soon. He certainly isn’t going to get far trying to chase her.
Training is not what’s most important in a fight. It takes a tremendous amount of training advantage to overcome even a minor size disadvantage.
Being a female novice martial artist, intermediate fencer, and “free scholar” swordswoman, I’d love to see more situations where women would kick ass and take down names. Unfortunately, my guess is it’s going to be vanishingly rare where women will win against a larger, stronger, testosterone-charged male. It’s why I try to teach women self-defense with firearms, and why it’s so irritating when I hear anti-gun people on the SDMB snidely suggest women go out and get rape awareness training at a local community college to they’ll be untouchable…
My weapons master has been specifically training me on how to defend myself from men, including men with knives or improvised weapons. We both know, however, that I won’t win any fistfights with a man - he teaches me a technique of “block-distract-run like hell.” In a perfect setup I could punch someone hard enough to crush their windpipe, or kick hard enough to break bones before escaping. The thing about perfect setups is that they just don’t happen very often - if at all.
Give me some room - serious maneuvering room - and my master says I might be able to hold off a large man for a short time because I can move like greased lightning to dodge punches and knife thrusts. I recently had a crowd laughing at my master as he was chasing me around with a rubber knife and I was doing some incredible Matrix-type moves to dodge his stabs and punches. But my luck always runs out within 10 seconds, and once a solid blow connects with me, down I go. We train hard; I got a concussion recently, and I know that one punch, and I’m out.
The best situation I see for the woman is she’s a boxer and can take a punch, and has room to move. IME men can punch really fast, but trained women move our mass really fast, and if we can use that to our advantage…shrug. Who knows?
To me, it’s pretty simple. Bulk if important, but so is hitting power. A trained 100-pound woman can break boards with all four limbs. An untrained 250-pound bar brawler can’t even break one with his right hand(assuming he’s right handed) without breaking his hand. Who has the better punching power?
I’m no trained martial artist, but I’ve been in a few fights, and if a person can only strike effectively with his dominant hand, it becomes pretty easy to just respect that and nothing else. But if I was ever faced with a small woman with four limbs of fast, board-breaking fury, I’d think that would be much harder to deal with.
Killing a man bare handed is easier than beating him up, if you’re smaller.
There was a case in Sweden some years ago when a girl, who was out jogging, was attacked by a rapist. Little did he know that she was the national judo champion.
I strongly suspect that a 250 pound bar brawler can easily break boards if they are the kind of boards used for martial arts demonstrations.
But would his hand survive the effort, and could he do it with his weaker hand?
Do you happen to have a link to the news reports about this incident? I searched and could not find any.
Yes, I think so. The boards used for martial arts demonstrations are specifically set up to be easy to break.
Here is a Cecil article on the subject:
Anyway, I’m pretty confident that an untrained 250 pound bar brawler could punch with a good deal more force than a highly trained female 100 pound martial artist.
If that’s true, then the only thing the girl has going for her aside from skill is stamina. Fighting is VERY strenuous, so if she’s still standing when he runs out of gas, she can probably dodge him easily and hit him at will.
I suspect you are biased by your memories of fights you have seen on television and in movies, which typically last for at least a few minutes. Perhaps an expert on street fighting will correct me, but real life fights tend to be over much quicker.
Depends on the fighters. People who are very ineffective on offense can go until they collapse from exhaustion(which can happen within two minutes). Average people fighting rarely seriously hurt each other.
Do you have actual experience witnessing street fights? What is the source of your information?
But this isn’t a binary distinction. It’s a ridiculous thing to say, actually, because you haven’t defined your terms. What does “Trained” mean?
A professional boxer?
A professional MMA fighter?
A person with extensive jiu-jitsu training?
A person who has a blue belt from a McDojo?
A person who’s taken some self defense classes?
A person who took some hand to hand combat training in the Marines eight years ago?
“Trained” can mean “unstoppable” or it can be a technical term that means nothing. I weigh 210 pounds but have no training. A 120-pound woman who is a professional MMA fighter is going to kill me; I would have no chance. A 140-pound woman who takes a self defense class at the Y every second Tuesday is in serious fucking trouble unless she gets in a lucky nad shot and runs.
The AMOUNT of training here matters, as does the nature of the training. So do, for that matter, sheer luck - with nonprofessional fighters it’s opften a matter of who stumbles into whose punch.
Or, for that matter, sheer force of will. I believe it was **Sam Stone **who once commented how his brother could always kick his ass, and then Sam went and got a black belt in a martial art (don’t remember which one) and from then on his brother could STILL kick his ass seven days a week, because his brother had a ferocious fighter’s instinct that Sam just never had and all the training in the world didn’t matter. I’ve seen people like that; in a street fight it’s very often the person who wants it more and has that killer instinct. A woman can have training out the wazoo and still may never beat that guy.
It happened twenty years ago or so, I think.
You have some interesting ideas about how things would play out in real life no holds barred scrums that seem to be based on ring fighting, martial arts demonstrations, comic books, and movies. If an enraged person who is much larger and stronger than you gets their mitts on you are in very, very serious trouble regardless of your level of training. In close quarters fighting that goes to the ground with someone who is much larger and stronger than you and outweighs you by 100 lbs and is not playing by the rules there is no amount of king-fu magic that is going to save you. If you are strong enough and can get a grappling lock around their neck in spite of the punishment being doled out you might have a chance but most women are not going to be large or powerful enough to do this regardless of training.
Funny that Royce Gracie beat much larger, trained fighters, every time he faced them. I’d think it’s striking where the larger person would have the advantage, not grappling.
As for street fights I’ve witnessed, maybe I’m sheltered, but it’s always been between two other sheltered people, and two other well off, sheltered people “fighting” rarely results in any serious injuries.
In other words, if any of the 250 lb couch potatoes I knew went up against a well trained 100-pound female, they’d better get lucky in the 1st minute with a freak haymaker, otherwise it’s not going to be pretty.
Seems like something that would have been reasonably widely reported if it actually happened. I doubt it actually happened but I am open to evidence such as a report from a somewhat reputable newspaper.
Obviously it would depend on how well trained, and how much bigger. Depending on the two, we can make arguments going in either direction. The hesitant answer would be… yes… one COULD… but it’s not the rule.
FWIW, I think a 250 lb out of shape guy going up against a 100lb well-trained female would crush her quite literally.