If you make a judgement based on gender alone, and treat men and women differently, that is sexism. It’s just the definition. The sole exception is in matters of attraction, because that is some biological crap we literally can’t control.
That doesn’t mean you have to treat any one man the same as any one woman. But it does mean you have to have other reasons besides their gender to make your decision.
Saying you treat women differently because they are women is sexism. Saying that you treat women differently because of size or average ability is acceptable, but then, why not pull out the gender from the equation altogether?
(And saying you treat them differently because other people treat it differently sucks, but I can’t really fault anyone for it. I can’t really ask you to do it differently to help end the sexism when your own wellbeing is on the line. Or, at least, I can’t tell you the exact tradeoff between those two.)
I don’t punch people in the face. I was just trying to illustrate that I consider an adult male throwing punches to be a potentially lethal threat.
I wouldn’t call it “proportionate” but I think the idea of proportionality, in war or fights, is silly and naive. I’d call it an appropriate response (assuming all three shots were fired in a single string, in an attempt to end my attack).
I’m not criticizing the guy. I think his action was justifiable self-defense. I might have chosen differently in his situation, but I don’t think his acts were criminal or worthy of punishment or even much condemnation.
Is it sexual assault to grab a boob in a fight? Getting kicked in the nuts or in the butt cheeks isn’t sexual assault is it? Self defense doesn’t normally include sexual intent even if a genital or breast is struck is my thinking.
If she fought a smaller than average male and was crushing him and he had to bite her breast or kick her on the left butt cheek to get away that wouldn’t be sexual assault. That’s just be plain self defense, correct? How’s that different from a woman striking someone’s nut?
Hey, I thought defending myself by punching back at someone punching me was kosher. I’m not now excluding weird thinking about what constitutes a valid boob grab.
Sorry for being unclear. I was just using the male’s punch from the video as an example of an adult male’s full-force punch. I consider those to be potentially lethal. Yes, in the video he was doing it in reaction to an assault, and I think he was acting justifiably. My comment was more about adult males throwing punches generally, not necessarily in the context of this specific video and his self-defense punch.
I’m disappointed at the sexism displayed in this thread. If the combatants were two men or two women there would be no debate. If the person who had hit the floor were the man there would be no debate. But because the person who came off worse is a woman, people are trying to blame the man.
I’m not looking to weaken his point, I’m looking for some valid data to base our arguments on. Evil Economist says he’s big for a man, and that might well skew his thinking. I’m stronger than the average woman my size and I’ve had some self defense training, which might well skew my opinion. Rinse and repeat for everyone else.
No one is questioning that a seven foot tall brawny man vs. tiny skinny woman is no contest. But that’s not the situation we saw in the OP’s video. In that case, the man and woman were more similar in size and thus the disparity was not as great. In a fair fight between two adults of the same size a man is almost always going to win against the woman, but this wasn’t a “fair fight”, it was an attack and a response.
To my mind, it’s ridiculous to assert that no woman could possibly cause serious damage to a man - men are not invulnerable armored hulks. A woman is less likely to cause serious damage than another man, but she’s not harmless.
Let’s look at the OP’s video again … the fella threw a right cross and it doesn’t look like he planted his feet. So, pretty much the force of the punch was just his arm strength. Upon impact, the force of the punch is divided between the girl’s skull and the boy’s fist. If we assume the mass of his arm is the same as the mass of her head, then we have the force being equally divided between the two …
… and this broke her skull …
The next step is the boy did plant his feet, thus putting much more of his body mass behind the punch. This will swing the proportion of force more towards her skull and the boy would have had more follow through …
… and this would have broken her skull even more …
The roundhouse punch is where the boy pulls his arm back and steps into the punch, and if co-ordinated correctly, we’ll have twice the force from the arm, the full force of his leg and his mass squarely behind the fist …
… so just how much can one break a skull and not cause death?
These gender rolls I’m using are strictly from the video … switch them around or mix them all up and I think we still have the same results … call it small person pokes at large person and then large person sends small person to the hospital. I’m guessing alcohol is involved, this might be outside a nightclub. The guys here would have noticed she’s wearing what amounts to just knickers, and women who show off that much inner thigh flesh may well believe in a certain amount of protection.
Yeah, I know she’s lying there unconscious with maybe some brain trauma but the testosterone says she’s got sexy legs …
I skipped a couple pages but do we know if her skull injury was from the punch or from hitting the ground?
It’s one thing to expect the defender to calibrate his/her response to the size, skill, etc., of the assailant. It’s quite another to expect the defender to consider all the possible downstream ramifications like what if the assailant then hits their head on the ground, has a heart attack, falls into a hole, ends up on train tracks (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=807900), etc.
Calibrating a response to the former is a bit of a reach for responding to a surprise attack. Calibrating to the latter is Hollywood fantasy.
I’m pretty much with the consensus:
Don’t start something you’re not prepared to finish.
Gender is irrelevant in grownups.
Society discourages violence for many good reasons. One of which is the unpredictable and sometimes permanent nature of the consequences.
I’m honestly not sure what you’re trying to say here, and as LSLGuy points out below its more likely the impact with the concrete after falling is what ‘broke her skull’, not the impact of the mans fist itself, though it likely did knock her unconcious.
By testosterone I’m referring to the various comments of what, mostly male, posters say they would or would not do in a fight, smashing a woman’s jaw through her brainpan etc
I think we can agree that people shouldn’t use violence on others regardless of gender.
Nobody said they would do that. They said that would be the consequence of a trained heavyweight male punching a woman’s jaw. If anything it was a cautionary post.
Perhaps, it was rather unpleasantly descriptive, though I may just be being overly sensitive.
On a sidenote I was reading the user comments on the youtube video linked to (yes, I know) and several people were stating that the incident started when the man and his friends were taunting and insulting the woman and her friends because of the revealing outfits there were wearing. Not an excuse but perhaps an explanation for what happened, and while it doesn’t justify physical violence if this is indeed an accurate description of events then he has some responsibility for what occurred by starting the incident in the first place. I realise this is an unpopular opinion but I believe ‘s/he started it’ should be taken into consideration, if someone didn’t start things there would be no incident to discuss in the first place and the world would be a much more pleasant place.
This thread has also reminded me of an incident I saw which occurred on the road outside a night-club a few years ago. The club was closing for the night and people were exiting, one man was standing with his back to the road cupping his hands trying to light a cigarette, another man with a group of friends were walking past when without any provocation at all he turned and struck the first man with a straight punch to his head, he fell backwards like a log onto the road, very nearly having his head run over by a passing car. The assailant just casually walked off into the crowd. It was completely and totally unprovoked and I could barely believe what I had just seen. The smoking man was not badly injured but he could quite easily have been killed, he was knocked unconcious by the blow and couldn’t remember anything about the incident at all. You hear about unprovoked attacks, they really do happen.
If this were a video clip of a man who threw the first punch at a woman – and, in the user comments, folks claimed it was because she’d been insulting him – then I doubt that we’d be debating whether or not she has some responsibility for what occurred; I hope we’d simply be saying he should be locked up for quite a long time.
Well in that scenario I would say she has some responsibility for starting a needless encounter, yes. But then I think a lot of difficulties and problems in the world could be avoided by being pleasant to each other instead of acting like jerks for no reason.
True, but IMO that mostly falls into the “go pick on somebody your own size” rule.
In the vid, she’s pretty slight and he’s not much taller, but has a thick chest and arms. IOW, she hit somebody with WAG 3x the meat above the waist. Picking on people bigger than you is what we used to call in the service “self-critiquing behavior.”
OTOH, had he been the aggressor he’d be catching a lot of shit for attacking somebody smaller. Not necessarily because his target was a woman, but because she’s evidently a lot smaller / weaker than he is. Nobody is happy to watch a bully.
These crowd vids always confuse me because as they’re shown to us they usually start way late in the setup but then run on for long minutes of aftermath. This vid was being shot because somebody thought there was something interesting happening or about to happen. So the footage exists. Why don’t we see it?
Looking at the vid a few times it appears she went down right at a curb. Which curb edge caught her on the back of the head / neck. A rabbit punch as it were. Real bad luck on her part.
