Introduction: ‘So… Do You Hit Girls?’

I am asked this question more times than any other when discussing the problems addressed by my research into mixed-sex martial arts. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the experience of mixed-sex training in combat sports, the ethical considerations and deliberations that surround the matter of men hitting women often present a personal conundrum for men involved in martial arts. For instance, is it wrong for a man to hit a woman while training? Or is it wrong for a man to think that hitting a woman while training is wrong? These questions are part of a broader study of the phenomenon of mixed-sex martial arts that I have been conducting over the past five years, and in this chapter I address these issues using a mix of auto-ethnographic storytelling, interview data and field notes, discussing how it is that training can affect the ‘habitus’ (that is, the ‘embodied history, internalized as second nature’ (Bourdieu 1990b, 56)) of participants in mixed-sex martial arts.

The rationale for asking such questions extends from an understanding of the ‘subversive’ significance of women's participation in martial arts and related combat sports, which has been well documented by feminist scholars researching this phenomenon over the past two decades (e.g. De Welde 2003; Guthrie 1995; Hollander 2004; McCaughey 1997, 1998).