about that sexism question

This is something I've been thinking about for a few weeks.

Last month I did a self-defense workshop at Emerald City Steampunk Expo in Wichita, Kansas. How to defend yourself with a parasol, to be precise.

The concept was both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious. I've been studying martial arts for 15 years, and I've been involved with cosplay and scifi fandom for almost as long, but this was the first time I've found a way to combine my two interests. I did it partially because I've seen historical ads and magazine articles about "Bartitsu," the real martial art that enjoyed a brief popularity in the late 19th century (Sherlock Holmes' fighting style was apparently based on it), and because steampunk women tend to be a feisty lot and I thought they'd get a chuckle out of bashing bad guys with their parasols.

But the moves we did were serious. Three simple maneuvers, emphasizing short, quick movements, and using the parasol to put distance between yourself and your attacker. You can do them with any cane-length object--umbrella, stick, pipe, tire-iron, pool cue, etc.

At the end of the workshop we had a Q&A session. Most of the questions were easy for me to answer:

Q: What inspired you to teach this?
A: Recently I read a story of a woman being attacked in a parking garage. Even though she'd only had one self-defense class in college, and her attacker had a knife, she resisted being forced into her car, and fought him off for more than three minutes, even with a cut-up hand and stab wounds to her abdomen.
As the bad guy walked away he said to her, "You're lucky you're a fighter."
The victim, I'm glad to say, made her way to safety and medical attention and recovered. Her attacker was caught and she helped put him behind bars. But the takeaway here is that the victim was willing to defend herself. She didn't have years of study. She didn't have a weapon or a lot of fancy martial-arts moves. She just had the indignation to stand up to the asshole's extreme effrontery and say "No, you're not dragging me off someplace where you can torture me at your leisure."

Studies suggest that any type of resistance is good enough--screaming, fighting, hitting, kicking, thrashing. A bad guy has a limited window of time in which he can work in public before someone notices; your best bet is to cause him so much trouble he gives up. So my goal with a workshop like this is to impress upon you that you CAN and SHOULD fight back with whatever resources you have.

Those kinds of questions are easy for me. They're easy in part because the concept of being physically assaulted with a knife is pretty black-and-white. (At least it is to me. If you're one of those pacifist types who'd rather die horribly than raise a hand in your own defense because you won't "stoop" to violence, I don't want to hear about it.)

But one attendee asked a question that was not so easy. She asked me about sexism in fandom. What did I think about it, what should be done about it.

Now my first response is, and was, "Ignore it. If you're doing what you enjoy, to hell with people who try to hold you down."

But I didn't think at the time that there were two possible interpretations to that question.