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.

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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…