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Why aren’t there more women in the martial arts?

I’ve mentioned learning Kung Fu to a few of my female friends recently, and their response has been overwhelmingly positive: “good for you”, “excellent”, and “wow, I’ve always wanted to do that” (surprisingly, this was the most frequent response). The lack of women in the sport doesn’t seem to be due to misconceptions or a negative view of martial arts among women, then (at least not in the tiny sample I spoke to). So what is the issue here?

While reading around the subject, I came across this article: On kickboxing, women’s aggression and self-defence. It talks about the subtle taboos in our society of viewing women as aggressive or violent, but most striking is the joy the author, Jessica Burton, finds in kickboxing. I recognised a lot of my own reasons for beginning a martial art in there, and was inspired by the rest.

I was also amazed at my body’s ability to respond to the demands the sport made on it. After three weeks, I no longer felt like I was about to die from exhaustion during class and after a year I had very well developed muscles all over my body. I was strong, fit and confident.

And this is one thing that I hadn’t anticipated: kickboxing made me enjoy my body as a sensuous and capable thing. Not only did I like being able to lift more shopping and open all my stiff jar lids, I realised I was allowed to enjoy my body, nurture it and its new demands (“Must have food! Now!”) and be proud of what I could physically achieve.

Makes it a thousand times more compelling than pilates, for me at least.

How much do you interfere when your kids have money to spend? Or, if you don’t have any children, how much did your parents interfere?

Whenever I take Akra Jr and Li’l Bhaji shopping to spend their pocket or birthday money, I really have to fight the desire to heckle. There is so much utter crap out there manufactured purely to part the naive with their cash – plastic tat that falls apart the moment you get it home, stuff that’s priced twice as much as equivalent toys because it has a film character on it, DS games that an amoeba would find hard to stay interested in after half an hour’s play.

I want to tell them to save their money for something really special, that they’ll appreciate and get a lot of play out of. My natural instinct is to point out each and every flaw in their prospective purchases. I confess that at the start of them getting their own money, I gave into that instinct a lot of the time.

However, I started to realise that my criticisms were completely poisoning the thrill of having money to spend – of being the proverbial kid in a toy shop. It’s their choice, their money, not mine. If I control every purchasing decision they make, how will they ever learn to look after their cash?

So these days, I’m doing my best to take a step back. I still have the ultimate power of veto on potentially dangerous or age inappropriate toys and games of course, but otherwise it’s their call. Which is why we ended up coming home from town yesterday with two packets of GoGos, two GoGo sticker books, two extortionately-priced Star Wars action figures and two DS games (one of which was discarded on the first day as “boring”) with only a teeny bit of heckling.

Please let them learn quickly, biting my tongue hurts.

As you may have guessed by my silence over the last few days, we’ve been away. More specifically, we have been back to Kingsbury Water Park, a Camping and Caravanning Club site up near Sutton Coldfield.

I have to say, that I think this is my favourite campsite out of all the ones we have visited (now we’ve sussed not to pitch too close to the playground!) and we were exceptionally lucky with the weather this year. Am really looking forward to some fantastic camping this season.

Don’t tell the folding camper though, but we’ve been sneakily coveting caravans… shh.

I’ve been having some great fun with the new computational knowledge engine, Wolfram Alpha. Despite some very misleading news headlines, this is not a search engine, but rather a way to access factual data quickly and accurately.

When you first look at the site, you can be at a bit of a loss to know what to do with it. To get you started, here are a few suggestions for you to try:

• ‘star chart’ – gives you the current sky chart for your location.
• ‘bagel + 10g butter + 15g nutella + banana’ – the nutritional information for my lunch today.
• ‘weather tomorrow’ – weather forecast for your location.
• ‘c major seventh’ – chord information.
• ‘today’ – or type a specific date: gives you significant anniversaries, daylight info, moon phase, etc.

I got my TAM London booking confirmation earlier today, so I’m feeling a bit more confident that the payment hasn’t got lost in the depths of Google Checkout.

So, I have been chatting to merialc and we have plans afoot for a pre-TAM mini meet on the Friday evening. She apparently knows the area fairly well, and is on recon duty to find us a suitable venue.

Would anyone else with TAM tickets like to join us for a meal before the event? It’d be nice to get to know some people before the start of the conference.

And a very happy birthday to Akra who is *mumble* 36 *cough* today!

For those interested, he got a camera bag for his birthday – and we went to Beefeater for our celebratory meal instead of McDonalds (phew!).

I’ve always assumed that the zonked spaced-out feeling I get with Nurofen Plus is one of the migraine effects that I get other than the pain.

Only, I feel like that now and there’s nothing wrong with my head – I’ve taken it to take the edge off muscle soreness from Wednesday night (even worse today than yesterday, ugh). That means it’s probably my body reacting weirdly to the codeine.

Oh well, something else to add to the list of things I’ve learned this week. Just goes to show that I don’t use painkillers that often to never have noticed before.

I have a mental resistance to writing here this week. It’s almost as if I don’t feel I have the right to blog if I’m not also reading – it’s not how the internet works normally.

It’s amazing how cut off this word deprivation exercise has made me feel, even when I’ve slipped up or cheated a little bit. For good or bad, a big part of my socialising and relationships are conducted through words on a screen. It’s really very lonely without that connection. I miss the random and spontaneous IM conversations, watching banter unfold on Twitter, and catching up with people’s thoughts on their blogs.

I never really understood the write-only mentality you sometimes get on message boards, where people reply without really reading what had already gone on further up in the thread. This experiment has just underlined how utterly futile it is.

I feel like I’m writing blind. What’s the point?

Being at a loose end without the escape of a book is a dangerous thing.

I decided to sign up for a martial arts course – first lesson was this evening. Akra Jr in particular was very excited and wanted to come too. He thinks I want to be a Panda, for some reason. He kept following me around waving his arms around and going “hi ya” type noises. Bless.

First lesson was a bit of an eye opener – it wasn’t going to be as easy as just waving my arms around and making threatening noises. I think I’ll be okay as long as my potential attacker stands still for a while so I can think through all the moves: “right, just stay there, that’s right. Now I’m going to push down on your arm and go for a palm strike, ‘k?”

There was only one other girl there, and she had been going to martial arts classes from the age of 3 so I felt particularly weedy. I was also paired up with a bodybuilder and possibly one of the toughest guys there. Fortunately a very nice and patient bloke who didn’t laugh at my pathetic attempts at co-ordination. In the interest of not building up fake confidence, he didn’t hold back (at least he said he didn’t) with the wrist holds – so I know I can get out of one now, regardless. However, can I just say …. OW!

Still, I’m going back again next week. Assuming I recover the use of my arms by then. Pass the Nurofen.