by Manon Soavi

Everyone experiences fear to varying degrees, but we do not all experience the same fears, and when we talk about fear in general terms, we tend to refer to it in masculine terms. While fear is obviously not exclusive to women, there are specific aspects to female fear in our world, and that is the angle I have chosen to explore here.

Women always face double or triple penalties. If you are a poor man, life will be difficult, but if you are a poor woman, it will be worse. If you are an immigrant, life will be difficult, but if you are an immigrant woman, it will be worse, and so on. There is always an accumulation, because being a woman is already perceived as a “handicap.”

The subject of fear and its relationship to martial arts was already not an easy subject for men. But for women, it is something else entirely. For women, fear is often a daily companion with many faces. There is a real education in fear in the education of girls. So while it may not be worse than for men, I believe it is absolutely necessary to hear this point of view as well, because as Howard Zinn says, ‘Until the rabbits have historians, history will be told by the hunters…’¹[quoted in 2015 French biographic documentary Howard Zinn, une histoire populaire américaine [Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States]] Women must tell their own stories. They must tell what fear does to their relationship with the world and what it does to their bodies.

To begin with, we need to look at, as philosopher Elsa Dorlin suggests:

‘What it feels like to be a woman’

Women are particularly familiar with fear because they grow up in a world that is rather hostile to them. The degree of hostility depends on the region of the globe where you are born. Of course, for each woman, it will depend on her upbringing and experiences. Nevertheless, we can identify broad outlines and societal trends.

As we know, it is from childhood that boys are able to develop and experiment with their agility, strength, bodies, and power. In contrast, girls’ space is very often reduced to static games and cute little toys. Their minds are preoccupied with concerns about appearance, which distracts and consumes their energy. Their bodies are not developed and they will rarely, if ever, discover their power. Added to this is a whole myth of male superiority that fuels a culture of submission and a norm of ‘defenseless femininity’. Philosopher Elsa Dorlin, who studies how the dominant classes ‘disarm’ the dominated populations at all levels, explains the policy of making it impossible, unthinkable, to defend oneself. She calls this phenomenon ‘the factory of disarmed bodies’. Or how ‘it is a question of leading certain subjects to destroy themselves as subjects […] Producing beings who, the more they defend themselves, the more they damage themselves.’²Elsa Dorlin, Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence [Defending Oneself. A Philosophy of Violence], pub. La Découverte (Paris), 2017

This is how fear is transmitted over generations. Being a woman so often means bearing fear. A fear that is disconnected from real situations, that becomes a background, like prey that is unaware of itself. Of course, it is so unbearable that many women fight against this fear. Some succeed more or less in escaping it. Nevertheless, although it is not very pleasant to look at or acknowledge, I believe we need to look a little more closely at this position of prey.

Elsa Dorlin dissects this cultural positioning of women as prey, which has been attached to them for too long. Through her analysis of a novel³Defending Oneself (op. cit.), an analysis of Helen Zahavi’s 1991 novel Dirty Weekend, she provides a striking demonstration of this, and I can only quote long passages to convey its meaning. The character in the novel is called Bella.

‘Like millions of others, Bella is an unremarkable young woman whom no one is supposed to remember. She has no ambitions or pretensions in life, not even the simplest, most stereotypical happiness. […] Bella is an anti-heroine, an anonymous character, a woman who passes by and hurries on, a shadow in a crowd. And Bella is so ordinary that she can represent all women. […] Who has not once felt Bella’s existential mediocrity, her own anonymity, the familiar fear that accompanies it, her dashed hopes, her exhaustion from fighting for her rights, her claustrophobia at living in her cramped space, at surviving in her body, her gender, her humility in enduring her social hardship, her only demand to live in peace? Because we experience, almost daily, in repetitive and diverse ways, this myriad of insignificant acts of violence that ruin our lives and constantly test our consent.

[…]

The first pages describing Bella’s life implicitly outline what could be described as a phenomenology of the prey. A lived experience that we try by every means to endure, to normalise through a hermeneutics of denial, attempting to give meaning to this experience by emptying it of its unbearable, intolerable nature. […] She tries to live as usual, to reassure herself by pretending that everything is fine, to protect herself by acting as if nothing had happened, by derealising her own apprehension of reality – across the street, a man watches her day and night from his window, but perhaps it is she who thinks that a man is watching her. Bella lives in a constant state of trying to attach little importance to herself: to her feelings, her emotions, her discomfort, her fear, her anxiety, her terror. This existential scepticism on the part of the victim stems from a generalised loss of confidence that affects everything that is experienced and perceived, the self. Then, when denial becomes impossible, Bella “takes it upon herself”: by curling up in her body, staying hidden in her flat, shrinking her living space which, despite all her efforts, is violated. She lives in the banality of the daily life of a prey who wants to ignore herself, arranging her life to save its meaning’.⁴ibid.

In this passage, Elsa Dorlin demonstrates how this factory [of disarmed bodies] is being operated on women. Of course, this is a novel, but sometimes fiction is the best way to express reality: this paralysing fear, more or less permanent, that we try to deny in order to carry on living. It is an instilled, cultural fear that prevents us from acting and continues, time and again, to turn women into bodies of victims. We have all felt it to a greater or lesser extent. We have all fought against this fear in order to live anyway. To come home late, to travel alone, to accept an invitation, to work. We are forced to overcome this fear, otherwise we do nothing.

Unfortunately and paradoxically, this instilled fear and our efforts to overcome it short-circuit our instincts, including the necessary fear that allows us to sense danger and react to it in one way or another.

Phenomenology of the prey

The real prey, the animal hunted by a predator outside its species, pays close attention to itself and places immense trust in all the signals of instinctive fear. By refusing to pay this attention to themselves, women put themselves in even greater danger. Still following the analysis of the novel, Dorlin continues:

‘Bella’s story is also the story of a neighbour, an ordinary man who lives in the building opposite and who one day decided to assault her. Why? Because Bella seems so pathetic, so fragile, already such a “victim”. And if we are all a little bit like Bella, it is also because, like Bella, we first started to stop going out at certain times, on certain streets, to smile when a stranger spoke to us, to lower our eyes, to not respond, to quicken our pace when we went home; we made sure to lock our doors, draw our curtains, stay still, and not answer the phone. And, like Bella, we spent a lot of energy believing that our perception of the situation was meaningless, worthless, unreal: hiding our intuitions and emotions, pretending that nothing outrageous was happening or, on the contrary, that perhaps it was not acceptable to be spied on, harassed or threatened, but that it was us who were in a bad mood, who were becoming intolerant, paranoid, or that we were just unlucky, that this kind of “stuff” only happened to us. Precisely, Bella’s experience is a sum of commonly shared fragments of experience, but also a meticulous description of all these prosaic tactics, of all this phenomenal work (perceptual, emotional, cognitive, epistemological, hermeneutic) that we do every day to live “normally”, which amounts to denial, scepticism, and makes everything about ourselves seem unworthy.’⁵ibid.

This lack of attention to oneself and one’s feelings begins in childhood, which is when the distortion of perception occurs. How many little girls will hear, ‘He pushes you/hits you because he likes you. He’s a boy, it’s normal.’ Explicitly or implicitly, little girls are taught not to listen to themselves. This leads to a paradoxical situation in adult women, where they feel like prey and are afraid, but must constantly deny the signs. Because the predator, the enemy, is not of another species! A rabbit will never have the slightest doubt about a fox’s intentions. But for us, who are of the same family, he is both a potential enemy and a potential friend, lover, husband, father, boss, colleague… How can we maintain our discernment? These paradoxical injunctions poison the lives of most women in the long term. So we fight against fear with the energy of despair. We try as best we can to assert ourselves in this world. And one day it cracks, and rage replaces submission. Sometimes it allows us to react, but often it destroys everything around us.

What can Aikidō do about this state of affairs?

I believe it is possible to bring about change in this state of affairs through the body. For it must be said that this endeavour to dominate operates very deeply in the body: ‘The object of this art of governing is the nervous impulse, muscle contraction, kinesic body tension, the release of hormonal fluids; it acts on what excites or inhibits it, lets it act or counteracts it, restrains or provokes it, reassures or makes it tremble, causing it to strike or not to strike.’⁶ibid. In the education of girls, as with adult women, the long-term practice of Aikidō opens up a whole new perspective.

One day, during an Aikidō session led by my father, Régis Soavi, who has been teaching in Paris for fifty years, he said: ‘Before asserting yourself, you have to position yourself.’ This sentence struck me as the perfect definition of what Aikidō could be for women. Rather than trying to assert ourselves, to make demands on a society that does not listen to us or rejects our perception, we must first learn to position ourselves. Positioning ourselves in the martial sense of the term, therefore a question of Shisei. In the end, not being prey is a position, a posture. It is not about being a rabbit that arms itself to defend itself, but rather, through one’s inner posture, saying, ‘You may be a fox, but look, I am also a fox, not a rabbit.’ When we are positioned, self-assertion is there.

Position yourself before asserting yourself

Aikidō allows us to create new practices for ourselves that transform our reality and our relationships.

The first step is to rediscover, not an illusory neutrality, but the indeterminate, the sensation of life before separations. In our school, the Itsuo Tsuda School, we begin with meditation, then spend about twenty minutes practising movements and breathing exercises which, although they may resemble warm-ups, are not. One could say that it is a communion with space, with the life that surrounds us. It is a moment when each person is within themselves and with others in a common, indeterminate breath. Ueshiba O-sensei said: ‘I place myself at the beginning of the universe.’⁷[see for instance Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, Chap. XVIII, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 148, as well as (same author & publisher) The Way of the Gods, chap. XIII, 2021, p. 101 (1^st ed. in French: 1976, p. 132; 1982, p. 96)] This statement, although it may seem far-fetched, actually gives us a much broader perspective than a simple exercise. Forget who we are, where we are, and simply breathe. Gradually, the breathing deepens and calmness arises, and we begin to rediscover the individual, before categorisations, separations, and culture. It is a bit like blowing on embers to rekindle a dying fire.

As we practise alone or in pairs, our bodies become freer and our movements more fluid. Regular practice, daily if possible, over a period of time, is necessary to gradually reshape our relationship with the world. To rediscover a body that inhabits its space, that occupies the street, that establishes a different way of being. As I said, it is not about becoming superwomen, capable of defending ourselves like heroines. It is not about fighting back blow for blow. It is about re-educating our bodies and minds in order to have a different Shisei, a different positioning in our lives. It is about no longer finding ourselves “prey” while ignoring warning signs.

The teacher’s role is to act as Uke as much as possible to help practitioners feel all the possibilities available to them, the Atemis, the Ma-ai, the Hyōshi, everything that will make a difference before they are completely blocked. If fear overwhelms us, we will overestimate the attacker and, paralysed, the situation will worsen. With practice, we can keep our breathing calmer and, without overestimating ourselves, position ourselves. This is why the attack must be committed, representing a certain danger without completely blocking.

This will also enable us to stop stagnating in a situation before reacting to it, whether it be at home, at work, or elsewhere. At the same time, we will no longer be polluted by unnecessary fears and anxieties that do not correspond to the situations that make us cower. Please note, I am not saying that victims of assault should have reacted. We know that shock is a human protective strategy and that sometimes the best thing to do is not to fight back in order to stay alive. My point does not necessarily concern extreme situations of great violence, but rather those that are mundane, supposedly “minor”, but which we have been taught to fear and which, when accumulated, are devastating.

It is not easy to change, to break out of the dualism of submission or rage. That is why it is through practice that the body rediscovers its capabilities and the mind calms down and finds peace. In the story I mentioned, Bella’s story, the novel only really begins when Bella reaches a turning point, when she finally decides that enough is enough. So she grabs a hammer. She is surprised to find that she finally has the strength to lift it, surprised that it has always been there, within reach. And the game of massacre begins, to the point that this novel caused a scandal in England because of the violence in the second part.

I am not trying to legitimise the violence in this novel; that said, how many great works, from historical novels to Westerns, from Ben-Hur to The Count of Monte Cristo, have made revenge the driving force behind men’s actions… But let us move on. I believe that we can have this revelation of our own power long before we reach the extremes of destroying ourselves or others.

As we practise Aikidō, which reconciles us with ourselves, we can rediscover a sense of power. Not a power that crushes others, but the power that comes from the hara, the centre of the human being. It is a centripetal process sometimes referred to as empowerment, when people take hold of ways of being, of self-practices, to unravel the domination exercised over them and regain power over their own lives. In the 1960s and 1970s, American feminists used this term to promote a form of liberation that was not dictated from outside – where women would once again be told what they should be, what a “free Western woman” is – but rather a centripetal emancipation, relying on the means available to each woman to respond to problematic situations themselves.

From this perspective, Aikidō can be a process of empowerment that allows us to revive our own internal resources and minimise the “radio interference” of cultural fear. Then our Shisei, our attitude, will be like that of the bird in the saying⁸[This saying can be found online verbatim in French. It may have been inspired from Victor Hugo: Be like the bird, who Halting in his flight On limb too slight Feels it give way beneath him, Yet sings Knowing he hath wings. (1836, Songs of Dusk, ‘In the Church of ***’, VI). Another possible source is José Santos Chocano: The bird sings even though the branch creaks, because it knows what its wings are capable of.]:

The bird does not fear that the branch will break, because its confidence is not in the branch, but in its own wings.

Manon Soavi

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Article by Manon Soavi published in January 2022 in Self & Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 22.

Photo credits: Paul Bernas