Now to answer the original question…I believe that the larger untrained man…has the size and the strength to his advantage…on the other hand…the well trained smaller woman…has the skills…and the endurance to her advantage…if she can overcome his strength…it will take her a few deadly moves…for him to be knocked out…or submitted…
I read that in the voice of Christopher…Walken.
Speaking of training, you sound like you’re really short of breath.
Last week, a woman chased off four guys, at least one of whom was armed with a pistol, simply by opening a door. There’s got to be more to this story.
Police blotter (PDF) for that day, report is near the top of the second page.
I’m 6’6" and I’ve been dropped to the floor unconscious by a smaller boxer with superior experience. It is totally possible. The important part to remember is that I’m talking about professionally trained athletes here… I don’t want any random novice to read my post and then walk into a fight thinking their superior kung fu skills will carry the day for them. The odds are still stacked against you, and there are never any guarantees.
Were they female?
Regards,
Shodan
20 years ago is 1993. Hrmm… Uhm, most newspapers did not have an online edition. Did any? I do remember the “internet” as it was and the very beginning of it and incredibly simple web pages that people wowed at. Mostly email, WWIV boards, primarily defense and education type stuff. Shortly there afte it did expand exponentially.
Aside from larger publications, like NY Times, Washington Post, etc, I doubt most papers would be willing to spend the time archiving everything online. Plus, you have to maintain that archive. We’re also assuming another two things: 1) the paper is still around, 2) their archive is searchable via a public search engine like Google or Bing, etc. A lot fo time, those papers want you to pay for access to their archives and you search there. They don’t want zillions of hits from non-paying people taking up their bandwidth.
Also, don’t forget, the “internet” state of things where a story “trends” was very very brief back then. It also required greater momentum in order to bridge certain boundries such as geographies and viewer demographics before a news agency (or what have you) would republish a story.
Check out the Google News Archive Search. For example if you search the phrase attempted robbery from 1/1/1993 to 1/1/1994 you will find lots of news articles from such sources as the Baltimore Sun; the Miami Herald; the Wichita Eagle; the Palm Beach Post; and so on.
IME, usually the way it works is that you can search for free and then you pay to actually retrieve the article.
Well where did Floater read about this story? You might have a point if Floater is Swedish and he read about it in the local newspapers there.
Anyway, the bottom line is that Floater has the burden of proof. Insisting that a newsworthy event happened 20 years ago without any reference, cite, or link to a news article does not come anywhere near sustaining the burden of proof.
Especially if it is a story where a bad person meets up with instant karma.
Lol, touche. (I am still skeptical of course based on the lack of references; lack of evidence; and the ULish nature of the story.)
I’ll give my best attempt to answer the question that was asked, “Could a smaller, trained female realistically beat up a large male?”
Yes, under the right and fairly unlikely set of circumstances. There are a multiple factors that remain open that could be determinative. Among them:
- How much bigger is the male?
- What is the trained female’s skill level? Trained in what?
- How aggressive is the male? What is his motive in fighting the female?
- How prepared are both parties for a blow?
I’ll try my best to construct a scenario that would similar to the what the OP’s gf may imagine:
- the women weights 140 pounds and man 200.
- She is not a professional fighter but have taken self-defense classes for several years. Caveat: A lot of self-defense classes from what I can tell are bullshit. They teach fancy disarming moves only a very few people with the strongest nerves could perform under pressure while assuming the aggressor attacks in the specific way the class prepares for.
- The male is of above average aggression, since I assume anyone who would pick a fight or cause bodily harm to anyone would tend to be. He has no qualms about hitting a woman.
- The male says something offensive to the female at a bar. She says let’s take this outside. He agrees they go outside, a fairly wide open area without any blunt or sharp objects within reach. They are both prepared.
She’s dead meat. Kick to the grown? Too obvious. Counter his attack? Is he going as slow and predictably as her instructor? Does she have nerves of steel? She can counter only if the answer to the above is yes. OR he grabs her hair which would turn even uglier because she can’t get knocked off her feet, which would presumably make him stop.
A scenario in which the female can win:
- Same as above, why not.
- A professional MMA fighter/boxer.
- Average aggression.
- He mouths off, not necessarily expecting to be assaulted.
Well placed hook to the chin (a sucker punch, essentially), she throws her weight on it, he’s knocked down. She starts stomping (which is always the part people get the most hurt in the fights I’ve seen, at least).
Of course this is all conjecture and I could be talking out of my ass. But I’ve been in a couple of fights growing up and seen a lot more. Took Taekwondo for most of my youth, but that means shit in a real fight beyond added confidence and physical fitness perhaps. I also box, have sparred extensively, and as an adult have been in one bar fight. Sort of. I got jumped by 4 men outside a bar which left me with a fractured orbital bone.
Usually when a fight breaks out, everything goes out the window. No one can even place the simplest kick effectively (and I’ve seen many that try), unless the other guy is already on the ground. The winner is almost always that can land the most punches the most effectively OR can wrestle the other guy to the ground.
So could a smaller woman get real lucky and land a debilitating blow to an attacker? Yeah, stranger things have happened. When she does, she can make the local news.
Could a smaller woman win a legit fight? She’d have to be close to a professional.
IMHO, of course. Holy shit this is a long reply.
The OP was could the woman “beat up” the man, which to me says someone gives up or is knocked out (or killed I guess). Lets say the woman is ~ 5’ 4" (averagish in North America across some common “races”) and weighs around 125, which is “correct” for a fit woman at that height. The male is described as “large” so lets go a little taller and bigger than average, say 5’ 11" and 190 lbs.
I wrestled in high school at 178 when I was ~ 15 and was demonstrably terrible. The 148 on our team was really good, would take our district, go to state (think he took 3rd or something) etc. He hated wrestling me in practice, because despite his superior speed and vastly superior skill, my strength and size gave him fits.
This was 150 vs 180, both male (with associated upper body strength etc.) and he was a significantly more skilled combatant. Granted this is high school wrestling, not an all out fight to the finish.
If its 125 vs 190, I would say its possible for woman that size to “beat up” the guy with some (a lot of) luck, but extremely unlikely. If we start getting into her being a top flight professional MMA fighter or Mossad agent territory then the woman’s chances spike significantly, but that goes above just “trained” in my opinion.
Actually, I’m guessing that the OP’s girlfriend didn’t have a scenario like that in mind at all. You just described an honor fight/monkey dance. GF probably was thinking of something like this:
Why do you think that? Four burglars break into a home and are discovered. So they attempt to escape and are later caught by the cops. Happens all the time, I would think.
I know a short untrained (at the time) female who with her friend kicked an intruder’s ass. If by “Kicked his ass”, you mean “Yelled, screamed and jumped on top of the guy so that he decided to flee.” Scary situation: stranger-danger attempted sexual assault on my friend’s friend in a shared apartment.
I know another short untrained female who chased off a robber. If by “Chased off”, you mean, “Stared at with bleary eyes at 6AM in the morning.” The guy was removing stuff on the window sill and preparing to enter the apartment. When discovered he smiled, waved, and ran off.
Bad guys often flee when they think the cops might be summoned.
Um… Doesn’t the title of the thread read “Could a smaller, trained female beat realistically beat up a larger male”? The question wasn’t “would a criminal flee if he feared the victim could call the authorities.” The answer to that question is probab-fucking-ly.
The OP only posted once on the SDMB so I get the feeling he’s not going to come back to clarify but judging from this comment
I tend to think my “honor fight/monkey dance” scenario is probably closer to what they were discussing. It was my best attempt to create a semi-realistic scenario in which people might fight no-hold-bars.
Your dismissive tone is appreciated though.
Sorry for the tone. The OP was written by a guy, and I speculated that GF may have had a somewhat different scenario in mind than he did.
Most of this thread has been devoted to honor fight/monkey dance situations, so I trust your audience is larger than mine. If you found those terms dismissive, see post 118 for more elaboration: I consider them technical terms. Seriously.
As I said earlier, women conceive of self defense differently than guys do, if we’re discussing the first thing that crosses minds. See post 104 for an example. Those challenges simply do not involve 2 parties squaring off.
I’m amazed at the people in the thread thinking that men will more or less always beat women. When I was young I did quite a bit of martial arts. I was training judo (regional championship level), and we also did some sessions with other MA clubs, so we definitely weren’t purist WRT style and techniques allowed in a street brawl or similar situations.
Anyway, in my club we trained co-ed. The guys benefited because we got to fight against faster and more agile girls, and the girls benefited because they got to fight against stronger and heavier opponents. And man, did I get my ass handed to me by some of those girls. Granted I wasn’t big guy, competing in the -65kg and -71kg classes, but some of the gals beating the heck out of me were easily 15-20kg (30-45 lbs) lighter than me. One of the gals I’d never want to get in a tussle with had been training ju-jitsu before switching to judo. Jeez, those ju-jitsu techniques were nasty :eek:
So, based on my own experience (even granting that anecdote ain’t data), I firmly believe that a woman with good MA training would beat the heck out of a bigger, untrained man. Particularly if she’s been training a grappling type of MA.
I distinctly remember that story making the rounds in the Scandinavian MA clubs around that time. Also practically no Scandinavian news outlets were online at that time (and the archives from that time won’t be easily searchable even today).
How closely do real life bar fights or rape attempts etc. and structured judo matches correlate in terms of the judo skills being real world useful in no holds barred confrontations.?
In my experience, pretty well, providing you train specifically for it. That includes no-gi, defending against strikes and kicks, etc. But the kinds of things you practice in randori are the kinds of things you want to do in the street.
That was the genius of Jigoro Kano, the inventor of judo. Jujitsu used unlimited techniques, but you couldn’t practice them all-out because people got hurt. Judo limits its practice to things you can do relatively safely. Because then you get invaluable practice bringing off your techniques against a resisting opponent, and wind up overall better prepared for actual combat.
It is not a perfect match, of course. The best martial art for self-defense is a martial art that concentrates on training for self-defense and nothing else. But judo randori is the equivalent of full-contact sparring. Thus, IMO, “street-oriented” judo is one of the best martial arts for the average person.
YMMV. Note from the screen name that I am far from un-biased.
I still say a woman is going to lose to a larger man much more often than not, unless the skill disparity is very extreme, or the woman is very lucky. But almost all my instruction of women in self-defense was concentrated on how to escape undamaged rather than how to beat someone up. You usually don’t get the one without some of the other, but that is not the focus.
Regards,
Shodan
I’d like to see actual references. Even if the story is based on an actual account, I would want to know what the evidence is. Is it just this girl’s word that she fought off her attacker? Is there corroborating evidence?