Sihing Egemen Baranok Blog and FAQ

Claire and I were visiting the women’s groups here especially the ones who work with domestic violence. The aim was to get their ideas on how to provide martial arts classes for women who can’t afford to study martial arts.

Their response has been interested, positive and very encouraging.  Soon I’ll write a bit more about my experiences and what I’ve learned from them.

One response I’ve heard from them has been “We really want this, there is a huge need for it, but we want the classes taught by women for women only”.

This an understandable response, very understandable indeed. Given the fact that some of the students might have undergone some kind of traumatic experience with men. Physical and/or psychologically. And it may the best way for some women here to be introduced to martial arts and I am not dismissing this.

But if you want to make progress in martial arts, learn these skills and learn them in a way that they will be useful to you in an emergency women have to study and train with men, however psychologically difficult this may be for women with firsthand experience with violence it still is a must.

There are many reasons for this.

First, the most I mean MOST of the instructors in Turkey are men. This is something I want to see changed in the future but it won’t change until more women get involved with the martial arts here in Turkey.

Qualifications, experience and knowledge count a great deal in martial arts. People who have no experience of the martial arts may not realize just how much they count. Perhaps they think these skills can be learned quickly and easily and there are few simple tricks and secrets when you learn them you are bulletproof.

It’s not quite like that. It isn’t easy and it would be completely dishonest to pretend that it is.

Martial arts environments in Turkey are male-dominated, and often very macho. As women keep telling me it is a off-putting to them.

But a macho male instructor who really understands the stuff he is teaching, and has many years of realistic and rational training, teaching and fighting is more use to anyone –including women– who wants to learn self defense than a sensitive, kind and gentle female instructor who is unqualified to teach. Would you choose an unqualified surgeon or an unqualified airline pilot because they are nicer to be around? Nor should you choose a martial arts instructor on that basis. You are asking this person to teach you how to save your life. This is a serious thing– although studying martial arts can be a lot of fun.

Don’t get me wrong I am not saying there are no highly qualified female instructors in the world or women don’t make good teachers or fighters. But if there are any in Turkey, please get in touch with Claire. She has been looking for you and she hasn’t found you yet.

Even more importantly, women have to learn how to apply these skills against men. I still haven’t met the woman who doesn’t go out late at night because of the teenage girls who hang around in the corner and terrify her. Victims of domestic violence and honor killings are not killed or abused by their sisters. To learn how to defend yourself against a man, you must practice defending yourself against men. Regularly and realistically. If you can’t execute the techniques you’ve learned against men in your classes it won’t be realistic to expect to apply them against real male opponents that want to hurt you while you are panicking and lost in the chaos of the encounter.

You need to know what you’re studying really works, and to be experienced in applying it to people who are bigger and stronger.  ”You play the way you train” they always say in sports, and they are right. You need reflexes deep in your muscle memory and in your psyche and those reflexes have to say, “This is a man, he is bigger and stronger than me but I’ve dealt with it in the class, I have the confidence that what I trained and the way trained will work against this”.

So, for the first few weeks, single-sex classes might be fine. They might help women get comfortable with the idea of doing a martial art.

But ultimately, they are not what I advise. And I hope to create an environment in my classes that’s comfortable enough for women that they are not necessary at all.