Philip O'Connor: The best thing we can do to keep women safe is be better men
Maja and Philip in their Brazilian jiu jitsu class. If those classes give women a better sense of security and stop them freezing at the moment of attack, then that’s fine by me. But the best thing I can do to make the world safer for them is removing men's misogynistic language and attitudes.
The first time I wrestled with Maja she was 14 and fearless, which is no mean feat given that I was about three times her age and almost twice her weight.
As I tried to hold her down on her back during our Brazilian jiu jitsu class, she worked methodically, not put off by my bearded face and the closeness of my breathing. There was no fear. I was a puzzle to be solved, and shortly afterwards she had locked both my arms at the elbow joints and I tapped in submission.
A few minutes later she solved the puzzle a different way, her legs triangled around my neck, cutting off the blood supply and almost making me lose consciousness.
I thought, “wouldn’t it be great if all women felt this confident in these situations?”
For the last four or five years I’ve volunteered to help women learn the basics of self-defence in Stockholm where I live, busting the myths (forget the keys between the fingers girls, you’ll end up hurting yourself more than any attacker) and emphasizing the “soft skills” needed to avoid getting into these situations in the first place.
After a while, I realized we were teaching women things that they already know. From an early age, women know not to walk alone at night, not to dress too “provocatively”, not to leave a friend to get a taxi home from a nightclub on her own.
Women don’t get attacked because they park in the wrong place, or because they aren’t paying attention to their surroundings when out in public.
Women get attacked because men attack them.
They get attacked because we think we have a right to their attention, to their affirmation, to their bodies.
They get attacked because we – men – don’t say to each other that this is not OK.
I grew up in Dublin, in pubs and dressing-rooms and workplaces, for the most part surrounded by other men.
I said those things too. I laughed at the jokes. I made them myself. It’s not something I’m proud of.
When Donald Trump made his famous “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment and excused it as “locker room talk”, it was the final straw for some Swedish teenage lads.
They looked at the women and girls around them and decided that the time had come to change how we talk about women – in doing so, we would see them no longer as objects, but as people.
They set up an organization and went out to sports clubs to talk to young boys about how they talk about women.
They called their organization Locker Room Talk, and it can now be found all over the country, and it’s something I hope to see brought to Ireland.
I still volunteer for those self-defence classes, and it’s amazing the enjoyment some women get when I put on a head guard and a chest protector and they get to punch me in the face or in the gut as hard as they can.
Maja still comes to some of them too, and the girls and women marvel at her. She’s 18 now, bigger and stronger and an incredible grappler. I’ve become better at holding her down, but she still chokes the face off me the first chance she gets.
And if those classes give women a better sense of security and stop them freezing at the moment of attack, then that’s fine by me – punch away, girls.
But by far the best thing I can do to make the world safer for them is talk to other men about changing how we all talk about women, removing the misogynistic language and attitudes and our own sense of entitlement from how we speak.
That needs to be done in the waiting room and in the locker room and the lunch room.
And it needs to be done by every man.
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