Original post:  20 May 2014

The views contained in this article are those of the author.

By Nula Para Nada

I play with swords.

I love the way a sword feels in my hand: serious, balanced and dangerous; almost, when I train hard and often enough, like a part of me.

I love the dance. Circle, step, feint; counter, strike; the musical ring of engaging blades, the beat of footsteps in advance and retreat. Until I’m pouring sweat and gasping for air and the muscles in my sword arm scream and burn; and still I just grin behind my mask and keep on dancing. I leave every session with a euphoric high that fades after a few hours and a constellation of bruises that don’t, but I don’t mind: I’m already waiting for the next time.

HEMA is a rich mix of experimental history and competitive martial art. It teaches me so much; I now know more than I ever thought I would about renaissance duelling, for example. But it’s the other stuff that compels me to keep coming back every week, to stick with it when it gets tough. It teaches me certainty and intention; direction and clarity. To know my strengths and my weaknesses and to make weapons of them all. To focus my anger and my fear down three feet of cold steel. To watch, to wait, and then to seize opportunity and drive the point home. It teaches me to let go of both my failures and my triumphs, to neither anticipate nor fear what is about to happen but to keep my head in the single sliding moment between one step and the next, one cut and the next, ready and aware and open to opportunity. It teaches me to trust the work, to keep putting one foot in front of the other; that if I build my strength, practice, drill and spar and drill, and drill and spar some more then when I come to fight my sword will know exactly what to do. It teaches me to always keep the pointy end towards the enemy.

As a woman I’m in a tiny minority in my school. I don’t know why this is, there’s no culture of sexism in my club, I’m not singled out, excluded or given special treatment because of my gender; if I was I wouldn’t be there. Sometimes it’s tiring, fighting people who are mostly bigger and stronger and more aggressive, better at hiding their hurts. Sometimes I feel like quitting, because it’s hard. Because there are days when the sword is slow and dull as lead, my arms are weak, and when I take a hit it shocks my bones so hard I want to cry.

But I’m not quitting. Because there are monsters in the world, lots of them. They’re old and they’re strong and they’re much, much bigger than me, they’re holding hands and dancing ring-a-roses with my own personal demons, the ones that have been hitch-hiking my psyche since childhood. I don’t know how to fight them; I don’t even know if I can fight them. But I’ve picked up a sword and I’ve begun to learn and every day it feels a little bit more possible.

Growing up with the Star Wars films I, like every nascent geek and budding nerdlet of my generation, played out faithful playground movie re-enactment games, defeating the Dark Side and rescuing the galaxy time and again; space battle by space battle, duel by duel.

While the boys argued over who had to be Chewbacca each time, I was always cast as princess Leia, by default. I told myself I should be happy. I got to be a Princess, after all. Wasn’t that what all little girls wanted? But waiting in my climbing-frame death star prison to be rescued I harboured secret, shameful desires. I didn’t want to be a princess. I wanted to be a space pirate. I wanted a pet wookie and the fastest ship in the galaxy. Most of all I wanted a light sabre. I wanted to be a hero, and the captain of my own spaceship.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew that in the narrow world of primary school gender policing this was the sort of thing that got you branded with the dreaded gay, so I kept my transgressive mouth shut and buried my desire for independent intergalactic freedom while I waited, bored and restless, to be rescued by the boys.

My seven-year-old brain had intuited something very important about stories and about women and especially about women in films. In too many of the stories that I absorbed as a child girls played a marginal role, they never got to be the heroes. The most important thing about girls, it seemed, was that they were very pretty, and that they fell in love with the heroes. Leia, like most other girls, spent a lot of time waiting to be rescued. Yes, she was feisty; she strangled Jabba the Hut with his own chain. But she had to do it in a bra.

I heard the same message again and again and again: Girls do not have their own stories. It doesn’t matter how strong and brave they are girls only count if they’re pretty. They can strangle as many Jabbas as they like but if they don’t look good in a gold bikini while they’re doing it no-one’s going to write them into the movie.

It sucks to grow up with that playing in your head, it really does. It sucks every bit as much as it does to be a little boy full of normal, human fears and anxieties and emotions and dreams, told again and again that to be a man is aggression and domination and power, and nothing else.

I first started practicing Martial Arts in my mid-twenties. A friend saw an advert for a kick-boxing class in our local community centre and persuaded me to go along with her. The next day I ached like I’d never ached before but I went back the next week anyway, and the week after that.

My discovery of martial arts was physically transformative in a way that remains difficult to explain. At the time I was reminded of an essay I’d read as an undergraduate called ‘Throwing like a girl’. The essay examined the results of a study in which girls and boys were given a simple physical task – throwing a ball — and had their performance analysed. The results are predictably depressing: boys tended to engage their whole bodies, to throw their will into the action, angling their bodies and drawing their arms back to arc the ball as far as possible. Girls though threw awkwardly, without commitment, from the elbow, falling far short of the boys’ efforts. Even allowing for the physical differences between boys and girls the girls under-performed far more than their bodies should have allowed. It was as if, the writer of the study observed, they decided before they even approached the task that they were going to fail. And then they did.

The essay writer compares this to her own experience of trying to jump across a stream. She clings to a branch, hesitant, watching her fellow hikers cross easily. I will fail, she tells herself. I can’t do it, she tells herself. Her body freezes, hostage to fear and self-doubt.

There have always been women of great physical accomplishment; athletes and explorers, duellists and pugilists, trick riders and trapeze artists; fearless, strong and expert in their fields. Likewise, there have always been men who fail miserably at getting a ball anywhere near a target (and consider playing with balls something best left to dogs and simpletons). These are generalities; it’s complicated. But the essay resonated with me when I first read it, and it resonates with me now.

When I began to apply myself to the physical challenges of martial arts a choir of voices in my head piped up to tell me I would fail, and why I should give up. You’re uncoordinated, they said. You’re no good at this, they said. You’re going to look stupid, they said. You can’t do it, they said. But I learnt, gradually, not to listen. I switched them off, let myself flow through siu lim tao on trust and muscle memory alone and broke through a barrier in my mind that I’d never even known it was there. I no longer said to myself: ‘I can’t do it.’ Instead, I asked: ‘how will I do it?’

I felt more powerful, confident and comfortable in my own skin than ever before. In martial arts I learned the value of patience, humility and hard work. My training became a much-needed source of focus and calm. I loved it. It lit me up from the inside. My friend and I analysed the fight choreography in every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and attempted to replicate it in the local park. We considered ourselves trainee slayers. We scared the crap out of some dog walkers.

When I’d been training for a year or so my teacher suggested I enter a tournament to improve my sparring. I told my boyfriend at the time, expecting him to be as thrilled as I was.

‘I don’t want you to do it,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t want to be in a relationship with that sort of girl.’

It felt like he’d slapped me in the face, hard. Only worse. ‘What do you mean? What sort of girl?’

‘I don’t want to be in a relationship with the sort of girl who beats people up. It’s not attractive.’

Dear reader, I wish I could tell you that I laughed in his face and didn’t bother to slam the door on the way out, but I didn’t. I suppose the primary school gender police were still living in my head; I don’t know if those bastards ever quite go away.

My experience of martial arts was one of camaraderie and dedication and of hanging out in community centres with computer programmers arguing Donnie Yen versus Jet Li. But the question people always asked me, like I’d become a testosterone fuelled meat-head itching to test my bare-handed killing skills, was always: ‘So, do you reckon you could beat someone up?’

I turned down the tournament. Honestly? I was scared anyway. Scared I’d end up spitting teeth and gobs of my own blood onto the mat; scared I wasn’t any good. That time, the monsters won.

Ever since my Han Solo/Princess Leia epiphany I’d been seeking out stories of heroic girls and women. Some of my favourites live in the Irish myths; riotous, powerful and even down-right nasty. Queen Maeve the cattle raider, Scathach the weapons master in her island fortress, teaching the secrets of the salmon-leap and the dreaded Gae Bolg; the war goddess Morrigan; the terrible, the three in one.

A few years ago my warrior women began nagging at me. They whispered geasa, demanded tribute. Not enough stories told of us, they said, not enough songs sung. They poked me with their bony fingers. Your turn, they said.

I began researching, looking for the right story to tell. I wanted to find some evidence of real Celtic warrior women, discover how they lived and why they died. I scoured the archaeological record for the tracks of their chariots and the marks of their weapons but I found nothing.

The consensus was that beyond a few stories told by medieval peasants to the monks who transcribed them and some untrustworthy anecdotal evidence from contemporary Romans there was nothing to suggest that women in pre-history had ever borne arms. In the re-enactment community, an inspirational source, ever helpful and full of detailed practical knowledge, someone even suggested that women shouldn’t be ‘allowed’ to fight in demonstrations of period warfare even if they wanted to, because it would be misleading. Boudica, it was suggested to me, had been only a figurehead. Just like Princess Leia she didn’t get to be the hero in her own story; she might be leader of the rebel alliance but when it came down to the final battle the boys moved in for the kill and Admiral Akbar took the helm.

Archaeologists say that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’; I refused to give up. And while I never found the hard evidence I was looking for – a manicured, skeletal hand still clutching a sword hilt, perhaps? – I did discover why they might be so conspicuously absent.

In September 2013 archaeologists discovered the 2,600 year old body of an Etruscan Prince laid on a slab in a tomb in Italy, clutching a spear, with the cremated remains of another body (his wife, the experts surmised) at his feet. A month later the bone analysis came back with surprising results. The Etruscan Prince was, in fact, an Etruscan Princess; and her ‘wife’ was actually her husband. The experts changed their story. The spear was not, as they had previously suggested, an indicator of high status and military prowess. It was there to ‘symbolise the strength of union’ between the woman on the stone slab and the man at her feet.

Accurately determining the sex of skeletons has only been possible in recent times. Before DNA testing, the gender of a skeleton was determined by the objects it was buried with. If these were cookware, bowls, jewellery or mirrors, the skeleton was classified as female. If it was buried with axe-heads, shields, spear points or swords then it was declared male.

For hundreds of years archaeologists have re-written the past according to the stories they were told, when they were growing up, about what girls are and what boys are. How many warrior women’s stories – or those of men who divined in looking glasses and wore amber beads in their hair – were lost to us?

I kept practicing martial arts. It gave me something too precious to lose; I couldn’t walk away from it. And I kept looking for my warrior women. And I found them, all over the world. I kept thinking about stories, about how our lives are stories that we tell each other and ourselves, how we grow up turning the stories we’re told into what we believe about ourselves and the world, and so we make them true. When I discovered HEMA it felt like the beginning of a new story. It’s a quest story. It’s a hero’s journey; it’s a tale of rags to rapiers. I don’t know how it ends yet.

I’m telling new stories. They’re for me, and my monsters. They’re for my nieces and for the daughters of my friends because I don’t want them to grow up worrying whether they’re pretty, I want them to grow up knowing that they’re beautiful. I’m telling stories about a sword-wielding auntie who salmon-leaps over great rivers in one bound. About an Iron Age boy with a magic mirror and amber beads threaded in his hair. About a roguish space-pirate who answers to no-one and drives her spaceship like she stole it.

I play with swords. Because I’m not waiting around to be rescued.

I’m slaying my own damn dragons.

Original Post: http://esfinges1.wix.com/e/apps/blog/fighting-like-a-girl