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Kickboxing, Rape, and the Myth of Self-Defense
When I was raped at age 16, I did not fight back. I knew how, yet all of me forgot.
I started kickboxing at age 14, long before I was raped. It was the culmination of years of desperate wanting, of needing to make my body into something good. When I was a child, I had strange idols. Bruce Lee. Chuck Norris. Jean-Claude Van Damme. Which is to say, I had strange idols for a little girl. Or at least, that’s what I often heard. I didn’t have crushes on these men, though that might have been easier for people to understand. I wanted to be them. These men-made-weapons owed their bodies to no one but themselves. They knew precisely how to make them do and be what they wanted. And what they could do was amazing.
The cologne in my first gym was tangy sweat and bleach. The decor, Muhammad Ali. The floor was concrete; we had no mats. I was neither fit nor coordinated when I joined. I didn’t have the stamina for a full kickboxing class. Or the muscles for a single push-up. Or the flexibility for a kick high enough to reach anything but a garden gnome. I was terrible. And I was in love.
I loved everything about it. I loved the swish sound of my silk pants when I kicked, the quick repetition of dun-dun-duh-dun-duh-duh as my fists hit the speed bag, the hiss of my exhales…
