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Old 07-Jun-21, 11:13
Elbow Escape Elbow Escape is offline
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Default Re: News From YouTube

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bevvie97 [Only Registered Users Can See LinksClick Here To Register]
O.K., it’s so much better now that I have to start with apologizing for being rude at the beginning.
Perhaps as being a chemist I like to be precise with measures and I found your quoted sentence too excessive. Although I agree with you that a higher ratio of males are interested in combat sports, I think the gradually increasing part of women doing or at least showing interest in martial arts should not be dwarfed any more.

Unfortunately I do not know statistical surveys except for one published by the International Judo Federation years ago, in which the global percentage of women within active judoka was 24%. That means a 3:1 ratio between men and women doing judo, which I already find impressive. Sadly, multiple national federations didn’t bother with participating in that survey. All in all, I think even exact numbers are not utterly bad concerning female participation.
But again you are right that gender equality is still far away, that’s why IJF launched multiple programs to encourage girls to start doing judo.

And yes, it seems we have different experiences to certain extent. Probably you know that the Netherlands is one of the “judo countries”, and in the previous decade (when I actively did judo) I already saw at least half as many girls in our dojo as guys (1:2 ratio I dare say) and several others clubs I knew were in similar situation. These are all big clubs in big cities, I admit. Perhaps it’s because of school judo in NL or because we have many female judoka idols and plenty of high-qualified instructors (male and female) respecting women in the dojo.
And I experienced many times that we girls tend to like very much competing against vincible opponents. You know, not those much bigger male fighters toying with us very carefully to protect us from getting injured.
It’s a problem because global statistics shows you guys are taller and heavier by more than 10cm and 10kg in average (and this difference doesn’t seem to decrease considerably).
As you said many girls are intimidated by mixed sparring and would prefer all-female classes. Women often have to face other problematic issues in mixed classes, you know. So I think with improving conditions for us girls, hopefully we can make you surprised in the upcoming decades with our increasing presence in martial arts clubs.

I don’t want to make it much longer under a thread addressed to videos, so let me close with a less specific thought. I feel a big difference between what we girls would really like to do and what we actually do or show/pretend. I guess there is still a large number of latent fans of martial arts among women. But gender roles are changing and women already show high activity in roles previously considered as male tasks/positions. 50 years ago how many girls went regularly to gyms, and you can see throng of us there by now. Deep inside many women would like to be strong and competitive until it doesn’t influence her feminine identity/attractivity in a negative direction.
I agree that part of the reason is cultural, the reason why few women are interested in figthing is also because society tend to discorauge them from being interested in it.
Like you said thing are gradually improving in the last few decades, society is starting to be more accepting about strong women and female fighters instead of ostracizing them and labeling them as "unfeminine", altough the issue is still far from being completely resolved, and more girls are practicing martial arts than before.

And yes, the experiences are different for sure, I was very surprised to hear that the ratio was 1:2

I live in Italy and in the judo club near where I lived, where an ex girlfriend of mine started training at one point, there were only three girls including her out of around 20 students.
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