On reclaiming childhood accomplishments, my black belt, and self-defense.

By Rachel Desmond ‘22

CW: Graphic descriptions

I'm a first-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do. When I tell people this, they sometimes ask when I got it. For a long time, it felt like they were checking to see if it was a "real" black belt or just one of those kiddie black belts that they hand out without any regard to how much martial arts knowledge you actually have. Of course, it doesn't help my cause that I'm skinny and femme—I look cute, not tough.

So I got my black belt at fifteen. Do these things have an expiration date? Because now, at twenty-two, it feels like mentioning my black belt might be irrelevant. It might not matter anymore—I might have forgotten too much. So does my black belt still count? Can I still claim it?

As I've gotten farther and farther away from that accomplishment, I've found that I’ve been distancing myself from that title. I’ve told myself my childhood accomplishments have no bearing on my adult life. My idea of self was discontinuous. But recently, I've decided to revisit this stance.

In fact, I think my fifteen-year-old self getting a black belt says a lot about who I am as a twenty-two-year-old.

That black belt says that right as I was hitting puberty—a time when many girls have to relinquish the safety of a prepubescent body—I was learning how to take a punch. When I started to get curves and attract strange men's leering gazes, I was learning how to scramble my way out of choke holds and disarm people with knives and guns. Right as I entered a body that some adults viewed as a threat to my safety, my instructor gave me my black belt.

We think in patterns. Once we learn how "things work,” we arrange them into models and let our subconscious handle all the thinking for us. This can be useful—often, we take in too much information to consciously examine all our thoughts and decisions. My day is more efficient when I don't spend time stopping to wonder why I wear socks with my tennis shoes and instead just put them on. These patterns can also be harmful. A lot of racism can arise from letting our subconscious go unchecked, operating on discriminatory narratives we learned from a prejudiced society.

Getting my black belt right when my father started to worry about how men would treat me meant I didn't have to establish thinking patterns based on feeling unsafe in the world. Getting a childhood black belt rather than an adult black belt was advantageous because it meant I never thought of myself as weak or vulnerable. I have never thought twice about going for a run at night. I have never pretended to be on the phone with someone so that a man would leave me alone. When drunk frat boys yell at me, I yell right back. I do not worry about how revealing clothing might attract the wrong attention. I do not carry pepper spray—just a part of that feral, fifteen-year-old black-belted self with me.

And when my friends ask, "Aren't you scared? Aren't you worried?" The answer is, honestly, no. While it's been years since I stepped into a sparring ring, I remember the most important lesson from that childhood black belt: I am ferocious. So if some man wants to try and mess up my night, I dare him to try me. I've been carrying around this black belt swagger for seven years—that's what a childhood black belt says about me.

Other, occasionally graphic, lessons from a childhood black belt:

Don't get into situations where you need to defend yourself. Walk with confidence. Learn how to say no firmly enough that people leave you alone—boyfriends and strange men included. If things start to get violent, run. If you can't run, attract attention. Scream like you mean it. Better yet, ask specific people for help: "Hey, you in the blue shirt! Call the police!"
Know your enemies. Statistically speaking, the men in your life are much more likely to hurt you than a stranger. I've heard a lot of safety advice about dealing with a strange, violent man, and it involves me modifying my behaviors for safety: don’t go out alone at night, tell your friends where you are, etc. To me, this seems like a way to use the threat of violence against women to further control what they do. Instead, we should be talking about what to do if your pastor makes an inappropriate advance towards you or what to do if your boyfriend keeps trying to have sex with you after you specifically said you did not want to have sex with him.
Not to suggest you modify your behavior, but alcohol is the most common date rape drug. If you're in a sketchy situation—like you know you'll be walking home from the club alone later that night—alcohol is not your friend. Being intentional about where you drink and how much you drink is a pretty good piece of self-defense advice.
Go for vulnerable parts of your attacker’s body. If they mean business, they’re wearing a cup, so groin strikes are out. Similarly, you're probably not going to have a lot of luck punching someone in the chest/abdomen. Try these three moves instead:
1. “The Van Gogh”: Ears are handy because of how they stick out of a person's head—they're easy to tear off. Grab, get a good grip, and go! You can also break someone's eardrums by forcefully clapping your hands over their ears.
2. “Eye Mean Business”: Your eyes are very sensitive and very poorly protected. Eyeball scoops and eye pokes are fair game. For the eyeball scoop: Take your thumb and jam it into the outside corner of their eye, and then scoop/pop their eye out. There's not a lot of connective tissue keeping your eyes in their sockets; this move doesn't take much strength.
3. “Snap, Crackle, Pop”: If someone grabs you, focus on attacking one finger instead of their whole hand. Direct all your attention to their pinky and bend that finger back (fast) until it breaks or your attacker lets go. Repeat as needed, up to 10 times.
Self-defense means no holds barred. Nothing about this is a fair fight, so using your nails is a go, as is biting. Draw blood. When you bite, think about tearing meat off the bone. You don't just want to bite and clamp down; you want to bite and focus on tearing that chunk of flesh off their body. That's your meat now.

Rachel Desmond ‘22 (rdesmond) has never outgrown her violent teenaged ways, and has no plans to. From the December 2021 issue.