Dan Rowden wrote:In my experience it's much harder to step in and break up a fight betwen women than between men because with the men you can toss a piece of logic in there and embarrass them into ceasing their violence (it may even just be "you're fighting like a girl, dude"). You can never do that with women, although telling them they were being "unlady like" used to work. Nowadays I think it would get you a blank stare.
I used to break up fights regularly in high school. Guys tend to still think when they are fighting, whereas with females it is more like the brain turns totally off. With guys, most of the time all I had to do was get in between them and it would stop - and the one time a guy knocked me down because I'd gotten in the middle, suddenly the fight stopped, he picked me up, handed me my books, then went back to punching the other guy. Of course I got right back in between them and he tried to ignore me and hit the other guy by reaching around me or over me but the other guy was bright enough to take off while I was blocking him. Anyway, the aggressor in this case was probably the one who had "lost it" the worst of all the guys, but he just looked angry while he was fighting, and after the fight was over most of the anger was gone and instead he became excessivly worried that he had hurt me (he hadn't, but I couldn't convince him of that).
In the one girl fight I broke up, I don't think the aggressor even noticed that her opponent had changed until I had her pinned in the closet. At that point she finally looked at my face, but I did not even see the amount of conciousness of a domesticated animal in her eyes at that point. I asked her if she was alright, and enough of the person came back that she started looking like an angry person and was able to throw a temper tantrum without hurting anyone. In contrast to the guy fight where both guys were pretty much okay after the fight (the other one showed up a little later to also check on me), with the girl fight, neither one was particularly calmer when the physical attacking was stopped.
One thing annoys me on those recordings is the crowd - sometimes a big crowd - egging them on, and not one person stepping in until someone is beaten down. All it takes is one person to step in and the crowd will recognize that the show is over, but they wait until someone gets hurt. That's disgusting.
Yes, Dan, in the clips girls were egging on girls "as well."
Dan: The way women tend to fight is really quite illustrative of the their minds function. It's more diffuse, wild, purely emotion driven with no strategy other than "lash out" however possible.
I think that because girls are not supposed to fight, they are not taught how to fight well, and as a result, they just don't know how and use more primitive methods. Very little boys will also bite, scratch, whatever - but they get privatly coached about how to make a fist and what "the rules" are. Girls are just told that ladies don't fight. On one of the videos, I saw what one of the guys in the video described as a "windmill" where the girl was making full circles with both of her arms and had her fists balled up. I've seen little boys try that, and they only have to try it once to realize that it is really ineffective. Even play-fighting (rough housing) teaches a certain amount of strategy, and little boys are allowed to do that from the beginning. Girls are only allowed to start rough housing as teenagers, and by then, most of them have bought into "ladies don't do that either." Although I never seriously fought, I did enjoy rough housing and did learn about fighting techniques in general from that. For example, I only had to be dangled by the ankle once to figure out that kicking was not very effective. I think much of the lack of strategy you notice is simply from a combination of lack of practice and lack of coaching.
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