YES, WOMEN HAVE A RIGHT TO SELF-DEFENSE TOO

The law recognizes that human beings have a right to defend themselves.  Using non-deadly force on another person is justifiable if:

(a) he or she is defending herself from what he or she reasonably believes to be the imminent use of unlawful, non-deadly force by the other person; AND

(b) he or she is using that degree of force which he or she believes to be reasonably necessary.

In my former life as a criminal prosecutor, I have assessed a number of bar fights to determine who should be charged with assault, if anyone, and who had a right to self-defense.  If a man repeatedly approaches a woman, repeatedly ignores the woman's request to be left alone, and then tries to touch her, it seems to me that the woman is within her rights to shove him up against a wall, jam her arm into his throat and say, "I have had enough of you being rude and disrespectful towards women.  The next time I see you, you will be polite and show respect."    That's what the fabulous Krissy did in this very situation.  (Don't piss her off.)  In fact, it turns out that the guy actually did touch her before she acted.  And, in case it wasn't clear before, she did not harm him in any way.  She simply defended her right as an adult human being not to be subjected to unwanted touching by a strange man in a bar. (And yes, in case it needs to be clarified, knowingly touching someone when they don't want to be touched as this guy did, is "unlawful force.")

Her response was eminently reasonable under the circumstances.  If she had grabbed him and shoved him against the wall as he was leaving the bar, it would not have been self-defense because at that point she would no longer have been warding off an imminent assault.  If she had slit the guy's throat, it would not have been self-defense because she would have gone beyond the degree of force reasonably necessary to protect herself. If (as in many bar cases I have seen), she had knocked him to the ground and then continued to kick him in the face while he was lying there helplessly, that would have gone beyond her rights also. But, after trying to ignore the guy and repeatedly using verbal means to defuse the situation, she simply used that degree of force necessary to get the message across to him, and without causing him any physical harm.

Amazingly, however, Krissy's reasonable, human, and may I say, very effective response to harassment has given Dr. Helen the vapors:

She decides that a man in an open public place just trying to touch her warranted shoving him against a wall and putting her hand to his throat.

(That's Dr. Helen's emphasis!!!!)  My goodness, the poor guy was just trying to touch her!  It's perfectly legitimate, isn't it, for a man to try to touch a woman after she has repeatedly made it clear that she wants nothing to do with him.  That's what women in bars are FOR!

Dr. Helen goes on to query:

Why is it that lefty bloggers can never understand the difference between self-defense and a bar room brawl? Could it be that in the former instance, a person is puting into practice their second amendment rights and in the latter one (at least in the above instance) a woman is humilating a man?

What an interesting view of the applicable legal standard.  It's not self-defense if a woman happens to humiliate a man in the process!  I hadn't realized that was an exception to the rule.  But, as I consider the matter, it makes sense -- because clearly a groper's dignity is far more important than a mere woman's right not to be touched by strange men against her will.  (In fact, lefty bloggers, unlike Dr. Helen, are proposing a gender-neutral standard of self-defense.)

Then (and I don't normally comment on this guy because he is so not worth it), we have Vox Day gloriously missing the point with this query:

However, remember that celebrating physical violence in response to unwanted physical overtures goes both ways. If Krissy has the right to "kick the ass" of a man who grabs her, so do I.  . . . And it means I also have the right to punch out every woman who grabs my arms, pats my pecs or whatever... is everyone okay with that, really?

No, Vox. The gender-neutral rules of self-defense are not a license to "punch out" gropey women. Krissy did not punch anyone out.  Punching someone out implies a use of force far beyond what Krissy used.  It may depend on the circumstances, but punching out a groper (whether male or female) may well go beyond the right of self-defense.  A man does have a right however to take physical steps to prevent a woman from touching him without his consent.  This could include slapping her, grabbing her hands, or doing exactly what Krissy did.  But I have noticed in these discussions that men frequently (and eagerly) go right to the conclusion, that hey if women have the right to self-defense, then I have the right to beat the crap out of any woman who touches me. But, alas, self defense does not equal "beat the crap out of." 

It is also worth noting that while Vox did not condemn Krissy's actions, he couldn't resist ridiculing her "silly little speech" and the likely defeat he assumes she would have suffered if the groper had failed to back down.

The attitudes of Dr. Helen and Vox and all their commenters capture perfectly the muddled attitude prevalent in our society when it comes to how women "should" respond to violence.  On the one hand, we have Dr. Helen tsk-tsking about how a woman engaging in self-defense apparently hasn't been taught proper "boundaries" the way men have. (I wonder who taught the groper proper boundaries?)  Then we have Vox ridiculing a woman's effective use of self-defense because he deems it too "dangerous" and "silly."  But then when a woman actually reports, say, a rape or other act of violence, the response is always, "Why didn't she fight back?" or "Why did she allow the situation to progress?"  I tell ya, if you're a woman, you can't win for trying.

Amanda already covered a lot of this ground in her impassioned plea (Please Won't Someone Think of the Gropers!), but I couldn't resist going over the whole thing again.  This kind of crap sticks in my craw, lemme tell you. 

Comments

[Pips]

Brilliant post, Happy. What the arguments seem to come down to is that women shouldn't go to bars without men to protect them and if they do, they should accept harassment as part of life.
Simply - that women have no right to make a rational decision to assert that their body if THEIR body, if they put that body in a public space.

[The Grouch]

Oh, I'm so glad you wrote about this. What utter bullshit these wingnuts spout.

As for poor little Vox--judging by his picture, my wheelchair-bound grandmother could kick his ass. So it's no wonder he feels the need to project about Krissy's ability to fight back.

[the15th]

I like the response at Dr. Helen's where someone argues that she was actually depending on other men at the bar to step in and protect her. If you think that you have the right not to be sexually assaulted, you obviously think of yourself as having the same rights as men, so it's TOTALLY HYPOCRITICAL to accept help from a man. Which you're doing even if you don't actually accept help from a man, because by defending yourself, you create the possibility that some man may try to help.

[beth]

I'm reminded of what Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz said in the 17th century: "Critics: in your sight no woman can win: keep you out and she's too tight; she's too loose, if you get in."

Nice to see how far we've come since then.

[Pips]

Of course, if she was in a bar full of women, none of them would have stepped in to help, as that is action only men can take.
And let's not imagine that people might treat each as just people, and help each other if they saw one person being severely hurt by another. That would be too crazy.

[Tell me yiur ideas]

"And let's not imagine that people might treat each as just people, and help each other if they saw one person being severely hurt by another. That would be too crazy."

To most patrons in this bar, their attention would not have been drawn to this conflict until Krissy pinned the guy. That was the big physical move, and I don't see any description of other patrons pulling her off the guy in her hubbies story. Apparently what you take for grated shouldn't be.

[Lamont Cranston]

You guys still haven't figured out yet that the picture of Vox is about 15-20 years old, have you?

[Aideen]

Wow, that's pretty cool. I did something like that once and it was my proudest moment. Some guy came up behind me and felt my ass prolongedly at a club, and I turned round and punched his beer out of his hand and said "who told you it was okay to do that?". Unfortunately, the last time I was harrassed I did nothing, just ignored it, and felt shitty about it afterwards. The worst thing was, the boy doing the harrassing couldn't have been more than thirteen. Makes you despair for the next generation, doesn't it?

[Cassandra]

Last night I briefly attended a party at college and wound up sort of dancing with this really sketch, irritating, weird-but-not-in-a-cool-way guy who was also very touchy-feely with my arms. It was sort irritating but I'm a pretty touchy-feely person so I didn't say anything. He brushed against my breast but it was very brief and it was crowded so I let it go.

The next time there was a definite moment of cling, and he was straight on my chest (he'd been leaning forward to try to get me to "loosen up"). I grabbed his arm and said "That was my breast you just touched. If you do it again, I'm going to slap you across the face." He was all "I'm SO SORRY, it was an ACCIDENT, really, I'm--I'm not LIKE THAT" and I was like "uh huh. whatever. Just watch it. Because I'm serious about the slap."

I would've done it too, but I didn't need to--nothing happened after that. But I felt pretty good about myself afterwards.

[Chris]

I disagree with Dr Helen's take on the situation — I applaud what Krissy did — but you're micharacterizing what Dr. Helen was trying to say.

Now, there's a certain amount of fairness in that, since her post (as she somewhat indicated in updates) was based on a misunderstanding of what happened. She seems to have taken the account to have been something to the effect of the guy trying to talk to her and getting ignored, then touching her on the arm or shoulder (or something) in a fairly standard and socially accepted method of getting someone's attention, at which point Krissy threw him against a wall and hit him in the throat. I think that this is partially based, as well, on the poster which was linked which indicated that Krissy would beat people up with a bat for not "respecting" her.

I think that part of the problem is that as a psychologist, and especially with her background in dealing with violent people, she's used to threats of violence for not respecting someone to be the sort of thing where a psychopath threatens to brutally attack anyone who might look at them the wrong way. Whereas the poster seemed to use the word respect a lot more along the lines of "don't assault me".

But Dr. Helen's point was that, given her interpretation of what Krissy did, the response was a substantial over-reaction that, had it been perpetrated by a man, would have gotten him arrested. (She's not the only one to think so.) The point of her post was that women should not be able to use violence as a reaction in the exact same circumstances in which that violence would be condemned if performed by a man.

When she said to, "Could it be that in the former instance, a person is puting into practice their second amendment rights and in the latter one (at least in the above instance) a woman is humilating a man?" I don't think that it's supportable, given her blog as a whole, that she objects to women defending themselves. She's very much in favor of it, on the whole. Which is why she feels it important to differentiate that from what she perceives as someone using excessive violence to assert their power over someone and enjoy the feeling of making someone else feel helpless.

Now, I think that Dr. Helen pretty clearly misunderstood what happened in the story, but it's also a misunderstanding of her post to characterize it as espousing the idea that women have a duty to put up with assholes. She was addressing what she thought was a double-standard regarding the rights of people to employ violence. Her main point was that women should not employ violence anywhere that a man shouldn't. But she also seems very supportive of the idea that a woman should employ violence anywhere that a man should.