A boxing gym can be an intimidating place for a woman. Boxing, of course, is a man’s sport. It’s about violence, science, physical strength, brutality, comradeship, aggression, honour: all those things we associate with masculinity.
As a woman, finding your place in the ring is tough. I’ve observed many women come and go from my gym, and I’ve seen all of the different ways they approach it.
The most common way is to try to bring those societal virtues of femininity into the ring: being “nice”. Not rocking the boat. Did I mention being “nice”? None of these have any place in boxing. I see women throw a punch that connects—then apologise to their opponent. Often. I mean, like, every day.
“I’m sorry that I just did the thing that is the whole point of the sport, because it wasn’t very nice!”
The ingrained pressure these women feel to not be aggressive, to get along with everyone, blinds them to the degree that I sometimes wonder if they’ve forgotten what boxing is. It would be the same as scoring a goal in netball then scrunching your face up and apologising to the opposing team for scoring against them.
I call bullshit on this. It’s not like they just woke up and randomly found themselves inside a ring—they chose boxing, and they chose it for a reason: because they were drawn to the sport. If someone was really the type to feel bad about landing some light punches on another person, they wouldn’t be drawn to boxing in the first place.
What the problem really is, is fear of being seen as not nice. They can try to land a shot, but they need to apologise after they do, to save face, to make sure everyone knows that they’re still a nice girl.
Like I said, finding your place in the ring can be tough.
Personally, I’ve never felt bad for landing a shot on anyone (apart from one time, when I accidentally hit a friend right where she was recovering from an injury). But that doesn’t mean I’m immune to the female-in-a-boxing-gym issues.
I’ve had men have mini-tantrums at partnering with me for pad work or drills, because partnering with a woman is beneath them. I’ve had men wander in for their first class and try to train me by “correcting” my technique, because it breaks their brain that a woman who has been training for 3 years might be better than they are in their first class. I’ve been told that I’m too aggressive (yes, too aggressive for boxing), that the other girls are intimidated by me.
My answer to that last point: so? I can’t control how other people feel. I don’t intimidate in a mafia-boss-collecting-protection-money way—I’m just being myself. I take the sport seriously: I try to land shots, I try to beat my opponent, to outsmart and outbox them. And I never apologise for that.
MAN VS WOMAN
Last year I had the great pleasure of having a conversation with actor and martial artist, Austin St. John, about boxing. It was the first time I’d ever heard someone articulate the difference between male and female fighters. As he told me, and as I came to observe myself, when you watch men spar or fight, there tends to be a lot of ego involved—it’s about winning, trying to get the best shots in and generally devoid of any emotion.
Women, on the other hand, bring all their emotions to the fight. I’ve witnessed far more women than men get angry in the ring and fight from that anger, or burst into tears at the end of a sparring session, just from the overwhelm of emotion running through them.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with either approach. Men fight the way they fight, women fight the way they fight. Of course, it’s a generalisation and there’s some crossover between the two.
The only time things go wrong is when women are expected to train and fight in the same way that men do. When women are trained to leave emotion out of fighting, to switch off and fight like a man.
But just like with anything else, that’s not going to work. That’s not where the strength of a female fighter lies. Their strength is in being themselves, in using what they have and honing it to become the best they can be.
HOW BOXING TAUGHT ME TO ACCEPT MYSELF AS I AM
I used to cry after almost every sparring session when I was starting out. It wasn’t because I was particularly upset about anything (well, maybe once or twice!) but more that my body and my nervous system were working out how to cope with being punched in the face repeatedly.
I would always get embarrassed—you’re not meant to cry in a boxing gym! But even though the crying eventually went away, I never became like one of the cool, collected guys I’d watched spar so many times.
I’m emotional in the ring, more often than not. I bring anger into the ring, I bring embarrassment, pride, sadness: whatever I’m feeling, I take in with me. I’m emotional in the ring because I’m an emotional person.
I used to think that was bad, that I needed to work out a way to shut all those emotions off, and just be like a punch-throwing robot. That was until two things happened: the first was my conversation with Austin. It was Austin talking about how women fight from the heart, how we leave everything in the ring, and how that’s a strength, not a weakness, that made me start observing the different styles of fighting in the gym.
The second was an incident during a sparring session in preparation for my last fight, when one of the trainers stopped us in the middle of the round to tell me that I looked like a zombie, that I wasn’t thinking, that I was just going through the motions.
He said I looked like a Terminator and I was like—that’s what I was trying to do. All this time, I’ve been trying to switch everything off and be a robot, because I thought being emotional—being myself—was a weakness.
Since then, I’ve worked to undo my robot approach. I let myself get angry, but I try to channel that anger into useful energy. If I need to cry, I just cry, even if it’s in the middle of the gym. If it makes other people uncomfortable, so be it. I let myself feel embarrassed if I do something stupid, or if I get hit by a punch and everyone cheers for my opponent: but instead of letting it blind me, I give it a second and think: alright, now what are you going to do about it?
It’s easy in a male-dominated arena to try to emulate the successful males you see every day. It’s easy to be intimidated into being less than who you are, because who you are is different. What’s not as easy is to accept yourself for who you are, to draw strength from the things that society has spent your whole life telling you make you weak.
I’m still not the whole way to where I want to be. It takes time to undo conditioning like that. I have days where my emotions get the better of me, when I get too angry or too upset and it overwhelms me. The difference is, now I forgive myself for it. I’m human, after all, not the Terminator (frowny face).