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On the first day of self-defense class, I learn to say “no.”
We’re in a Southern California martial-arts studio not far from an In-N-Out Burger. The space smells faintly of cooked meat. I’m one of six students, all women: four nurses, one flight attendant, and me. In this introductory session, we’re supposed to get a taste of what it means to protect ourselves—and, if necessary, to fight back.
For the longest time, I had wondered what it would be like to hit someone. Like, really hit them. I had grown up understanding that women aren’t supposed to engage in fantasies about violence, which is to say that we aren’t really supposed to think about it. But many of us do. All the time.
Violence can, of course, affect anyone. It is in our homes and neighborhoods and in the news; it is experienced person to person, nation to nation, directly and indirectly. But for women especially, even when violence is not an immediate physical reality, what is real is the constant threat of it.
In my experience, this sense of threat doesn’t change as time goes on. So in late 2023, I signed up for self-defense classes with a training program called Impact Personal Safety. I was working on a book exploring the ways in which women and girls are socialized not to say “no,” even to people who threaten them. But I also just wanted to understand what it is for “no” to be expressed in the body—what it means to feel the “no.”
Our lead instructor, Dawn Hofmeister, is in her 50s and petite. She stands straight and appears to glide through the air, and although I’m much larger than she is, I feel submissive in her presence. She teaches alongside a couple of female assistants and a male sparring partner, Matt Harris. A middle-aged man with doe-like eyes, Harris tells the assembled group that he will be playing the role of our assailant that day, a character named Billy.
Everyone likes Harris. Nobody likes Billy. Billy emerges after Harris slips on a padded suit and helmet. In the scenarios we’re thrown into, Billy is aggressive. He walks right at us, his voice raised. He can also be sneaky: Sometimes, he’ll sidle up in a bumbling, faux-friendly way before lunging. Other times, he appears to be severely mentally ill, or under the influence of drugs, or perfectly sober but intensely pushy. He asks for things (the time, a cellphone) or whether we need something—help with our groceries? A ride? When we rebuff him, he starts toward us with purpose.
“No!” we yell. This is supposed to come after some effort at placating him—I don’t need a ride, thank you; I think the person you’re looking for went the other way—a tactic that, in these scenarios, does not work, in that it does not thwart Billy from approaching, bull-like, with apparent malicious intent. Hofmeister explains that she teaches students to say “no” repeatedly and often because it helps strengthen a woman’s resolve to assert her boundaries and puts a potential assailant on notice that what he’s about to do is undesired. She adds that the word can increase the power of a physical blow and disrupt a freeze response, keeping the woman breathing through her counterattack.
Along with saying “no,” we’re taught the palm-heel strike—heels of the hands up and together, palms facing outward, ready to hit—the first line of physical defense in a sequence of moves and postures meant to end with Billy on his back or side, writhing. The second move is a strong knee to the groin. The third, once he’s down, is a knee or stomp to the head.
Billy takes a fair amount of abuse. Sometimes I worry about Harris, the human being inside the padded suit, especially when he is slow to get back on his feet. But feeling bad for Billy, I realize, is part of what I’m trying to undo: the internalized empathy response that can make people, especially women, afraid to hit another person, or lead them to give bad actors the benefit of the doubt even while the voice in their own head is saying danger.
When Billy advances toward us, my first “no” is the weakest. But then my hands go up and I yell “No!” with more force. Billy falls, and I jab my heel into his chin. My knee goes to his groin—another “No!” Soon the no’s are coming quickly and easily, and by the time Billy is splayed on the ground, I’m hovering over him—like Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in that famous 1965 photo—and practically screaming.
Contemporary self-defense courses recognize that protecting oneself involves a lot more than elbowing an assailant in the neck. As Susan Brownmiller put it in her 1975 book, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, telling women to kick a man in the groin or stick a thumb in his eye is not enough—because first, women must overcome an aversion to hitting. Describing her time learning self-defense, she wrote that this inhibition “was so strong in each of us that on the first try none of us could make physical contact.” What women need, she argued, “is systemic training in self-defense that begins in childhood, so that the inhibition resulting from the prohibition may be overcome.”
What many people think of as women’s self-defense tends to go by the designation Empowerment Self-Defense, or ESD. Also known as “feminist self-defense” and “holistic self-defense,” ESD posits that teaching nonphysical strategies is as important as teaching physical ones—because if a woman can recognize and thwart an attacker’s verbal intrusions early in an encounter, she is less likely to need to get physical. Impact Personal Safety, Southern California, the program I trained under, says that it has taught assertiveness, boundary-setting, deflection, and de-escalation to tens of thousands of students—plus the skills necessary for what the organization’s late founder, Lisa Gaeta, described as “causing a scene.” (Essentially: raising your voice and shouting things such as “Get away from me” and “I don’t want this,” which is harder to do than you might think.)
That makes ESD different from mainstream self-defense, which “tends to be stranger-focused, sometimes fear-based, rather than empowerment-based,” Jocelyn Hollander, a University of Oregon sociology professor and self-defense instructor, told me. ESD’s emphasis on “internal” skills—emotional, psychological—is aimed at subverting behaviors that students might have adopted based on their gender or personal history, or in response to political and cultural messaging. Basically, Hollander said, the method gives women the tools they need to say no “to whatever someone wants to do to or with you.”
ESD is applicable not only in extreme interactions but also in what some might call the more routine situations that many women experience, such as being coerced into sex. In Hollander’s classes, she has students turn to each other with a simple question—“Can I borrow your pencil?” or “Do you want to go have coffee?”—to which the other person then has to respond “No.” Usually, there’s a lot of nervous laughter, Hollander told me. Many students realize that they never say “no” to anybody. Or, when they do, they qualify it, soften it, make excuses. But once they discover that the world won’t end when they say “no,” Hollander observed, it can be a “huge epiphany.”
Such training, Hollander’s research suggests, pays tangible dividends. Women who take ESD classes are less likely to be the victim of rape or sexual assault than women who do not. In a 2020 study of female college students involving nearly 300 women, Hollander found that those who had taken an ESD class had about 50 percent lower odds, on average, of experiencing any sort of assault over the one-year period following the course than those who had not taken a class. “I just have to point out that 50 percent is a huge decrease for an intervention,” she said. “Psychologists are usually happy if they get a few percentage points’ difference. Fifty percent is immense.” Her research has also found that many students experience increased “self-efficacy”—a sense that they can be effective in the world. And other research has found that this sort of self-defense training can reduce feelings of anxiety, depression, fear, and self-blame.
Hollander’s results have been echoed in the work of other academics, including Charlene Senn, a University of Windsor psychology professor whose research focuses on male violence against women. Senn was inspired by the academics Patricia Rozee and Mary Koss, who in 2001 published a paper titled “Rape: A Century of Resistance,” which synthesized decades of research on sexual violence. They translated their analysis into a series of recommendations, such as giving women cognitive and emotional education to defend themselves against assault. Senn took those recommendations and set out to make them come alive.
First, she created a program for university women called Enhanced Assess, Acknowledge, Act—a 12-hour, evidence-based training that, among other things, teaches women how to recognize a risk of sexual assault and then resist it. Then, from 2011 to 2013, she and a group of academics conducted a study of 893 female college freshmen in Canada, to test the program’s efficacy. Of the students, 451 were assigned to a “resistance group” and took EAAA classes, and 442 were put in a control group, which meant that they basically “went to a room,” Senn said, and read sexual-assault-prevention pamphlets distributed by their schools.
[Read: A recipe for sexual assault]
After the EAAA courses, Senn said, the resistance and control groups were given follow-up surveys at intervals of one week, six months, 12 months, and 18 months. The researchers found that one year after the EAAA training, the women in the resistance group were 46.3 percent less likely to have been raped and 63.2 percent less likely to have experienced attempted rape than the women in the control group. A later study by Senn and her colleagues, which looked at a broader, more diverse cohort of university women who took EAAA classes from 2017 to 2021, had similar findings: a 57.3 percent reduction in reports of rape and a 32.9 percent reduction in attempted rape six months after the training.
To me, these results were nothing short of stunning. I wondered why data like these hadn’t been publicized more widely. Jill Cermele, a psychology professor at Drew University, told me that this was partly because of ideology. Cermele co-authored a 2022 paper with Martha McCaughey, an academic specializing in women’s studies and the author of Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense, about the ways in which the efficacy of self-defense has been neglected or ignored by both public-health officials and anti-rape activists—some of whom contend that emphasizing the need for women to learn self-defense serves only to put the onus on them, rather than on men.
Cermele said she believes that this logic is misguided—that no matter people’s views on blame, anyone who cares about women’s safety has “a professional and a moral obligation to pay attention to the data.” That said, “one of the things that psychology tells us is that people are not convinced by data—they’re convinced by stories.”
During my next set of self-defense classes, things take a darker turn.
The 16-hour “basics” training unfolds over the course of two weekends, with a new cohort of students. Our lead instructor is Dani, a young woman who took her first Impact class when she was only 6. Our padded assailant is Michael Peñafiel, a middle-aged father of a young son. Like Harris, our attacker from the intro class, Peñafiel has an alter ego: Kane.
On Day 1, we hit, we kick, we send knees into Kane’s groin. Yet the stakes feel somehow lower. Partly, it’s the absurdity of Kane’s outfit—a suit of hard plastic, foam, and duct tape, with a harness-like thing slung between his legs and around his waist. His helmet makes him look like a bug. The padding forces hims to move around the studio with his hips thrust forward.
But then comes Day 2: what we glibly call “sexual-assault day.” Our instructors teach us how to fend off an assailant who approaches while we’re lying on our side, and demands that we get into positions that could—quickly, disturbingly, unmistakably—leave us open to assault. We get down on hands and knees. We lie flat on our backs. Today, our attacker is closer, the interaction more intimate. This makes everything scarier and can provoke a freeze response that feels impossible to overcome.
[Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong]
Kane gets behind me, clutches my arms, and pins me to the floor. He crouches on his knees, breathing heavily over me. I think: Maybe if I just lie here, he will go away. I’m surprised at how heavy he is and how difficult it is to imagine freeing myself from his grasp. He hisses instructions. “What’s going on?” I ask him. We’re supposed to say this phrase out loud, not so much to prompt a reasonable answer but to remind ourselves that we are being attacked in the first place. He merely mumbles. Dani tells me to roll onto my back, which is the last thing I want to do. “Be patient,” she says. “He’s going to make a mistake.”
And make a mistake he does. As Kane tries to position himself directly on top of me, he releases one of my arms and up it goes, my fingers in a beak-like shape, directed at his eyes. “Eyes! Eyes! Eyes!” everyone yells. I stab at the netting on his padded helmet, and Kane falls backward. Then I get into a kick position, leg in the air and ready to strike—his head, his torso, his groin, wherever I can find a target. After a few kicks, Kane finally goes down, at which point I pull myself up and run around to the top of his head to assess that he’s indeed knocked out. Finally, I run away, keeping in mind the final step: go get help.
I should acknowledge that self-defense techniques may not help in situations when it is impossible or dangerous for a woman to fight back—such as when she is incapacitated, or when an assailant is armed and threatening deadly force. And it is fair to argue that the potential perpetrators of violence, not their victims, should be the ones subject to intervention and training. But Impact’s founder, Gaeta, who died last year, had no patience for the argument that to avoid victim blaming, women should not be taught to defend themselves. People say, “Well, we should make men be better,” she once told me. “How the fuck am I going to make men be better?”
[Read: Not all men, but any man]
The point about responsibility is not a new argument. In the ’80s and ’90s, for instance, some feminist activists began to express concern that teaching women self-defense was akin to engaging in victim blaming—so the practice became “unfashionable in a way,” Hollander told me. She added that yes, ideally, more men would move through life with the explicit understanding that they should not assault women, “but from a researcher’s perspective, we have no clue how to make that happen.” No intervention has been shown to meaningfully reduce perpetration. “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Hollander said. “Just sit around and wait for the revolution?”
Some researchers argue that when it comes to men, self-defense training for women can move the needle in an important way—by shifting men’s own understanding of their place in the world. “Changing men does not necessarily entail intervening directly with men,” Hollander wrote in a 2018 article. Quoting a paper by the masculinity researcher Michael Flood, she added, “Empowering women may transform gender relations by ‘shifting the wider conditions within which men make choices about violence and non-violence.’”
The third day of basics class is the day I start crying.
We’re learning how to react defensively and offensively: Many of the techniques involve moving toward our assailant, not away from him. This is counterintuitive—instinctively, one wants to retreat from danger—but being able to inflict real damage and disable an attacker means having to get up close.
The disabling doesn’t go well for me. About three hours into the class, I’m thrown to the mat and pinned. Kane is on top of me and feels stronger and heavier than usual, more hell-bent on restraining me. Just when I think I’ve started to get away, he grabs me again and pins me on my side, my back to him, my arms folded in front of me. I freeze. The instructors and other students yell words of encouragement—“He’s going to make a mistake!” someone calls—but I can’t move. The words are meaningless. Adrenalin is making me tremble.
After what seems like an eternity, Kane seems to ease up a bit, and I’m able to turn toward him, hit him, and stumble away. I make my way to Gaeta—present that day, watching from a table at one end of the studio—who asks, “What happened?” The question is part of the drill. After the fight, we’re supposed to describe in as much detail as possible what occurred and what our attacker looked like, to practice how, in the real world, we might give specific information about an assault to a friend or law-enforcement officer.
I’m not sure what to tell her, but I try: “He attacked me. He threw me to the ground. I tried to get up and almost succeeded, but he pinned me back down.” I feel shame and embarrassment rising, and I begin to cry. I run to the line of students assembled against a wall. One says, “Good job.” The others don’t know what to say. Neither do I. I just stand there with tears streaming, my heart thumping.
Two weeks after my graduation from the class, I’m stuck on that memory, of an encounter that felt like failure. Peñafiel has since clarified that he did not, in fact, ease up on me. He also said that my reaction—freezing, crying—is not uncommon.
Driving home from that class, shaken, I had called my friend Nancy, a documentary filmmaker whose work has focused largely on sexual assault. She tried to put what had happened to me into perspective: I got scared, she said, and felt shame and embarrassment, which came not only from being scared but also from my sense that I hadn’t fought back in the “right” way. About a week after the class, I also spoke with one of Impact’s assistant instructors, Amanda Hall, who is also a reality-TV producer. She told me that she has seen this sort of response many times. She herself cried during the opening drill in her first class. The adrenaline can be “really activating,” she said. “It’s scary no matter what.”
I try to give myself a little grace. After all, I was able to finish the fight. This reminds me of something that Cermele, the psychology professor, told me: Many people mistakenly believe that once an assault happens or starts, you have to somehow wait until the assailant is finished. This is not always the case. “Unfortunately, assaults take time,” she said, which means “multiple opportunities for resistance. And if I couldn’t organize myself to resist in the beginning, if I was too drunk, if I was too afraid, if I was whatever, there might still be a moment where I can do something with that. And I think we miss that by not talking about resistance. It’s very all-or-nothing.”
She told me about a student who, after learning self-defense techniques one semester, was assaulted by a male friend’s roommate at a college party. During the attack, the woman was able to summon her skills and fight him off. “We would call that a success story,” Cermele said. “The assault ended because of what she did, not because he decided it was over.”
I now know what it feels like to hit someone. I also can’t stop thinking about how different the world might be if more girls and women were taught to defend themselves. We might see the number of assaults against women cut in half. We might see more teenagers like a self-defense student who told me that now she knows how to use her voice: “I feel like I’m a powerful person.” We would see more women learning to shout “No!” and enjoying, with much less fear, what one instructor called “a bigger life”—the kind of life every one of us deserves.
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