WHY WE NEED WOMEN-ONLY TOURNAMENTS
By Countess Signy Heri
(Kingdom of Atlantia)
I’ve been fighting in SCA armored combat for about nine years. There was a long hiatus between years three and four, but now I’m back, and working hard at it. I want to be a knight! I’ve always wanted to be a knight. Combat is just plain fun, and the thought of embodying modern Chivalric ideals makes my heart soar.
But my progress has been slow, which really bothers me. I’m a great athlete. I’ve excelled at a number of sports, including two martial arts, and some very physically-demanding jobs. Excellence in armored combat, though, has seemed to elude me at every turn. Years of practice only brought frustration punctuated by a few nasty sports injuries. I was consistently stalled in the low-mediocre range. Why couldn’t I crush this?
It wasn’t until a few crucial things came together, mostly through luck, that I began to feel some real progress. I landed in a new home that was square in the middle of a lot of talented SCA peers, and started training with the formidable Duke Anton Tremayne (who, happens to be a lefty, like me.) After several months of practice, and a lot of tweaking to my gear and armor, I entered and won the Iron Rose Tournament at our kingdom’s War of the Wings in 2016. The Iron Rose is a ladies-only tournament sponsored by Sir Christian Thomas and his household, Yorkshire Manor.
After that full nine years of struggling, a tournament win felt GREAT - I ain’t gonna lie to you. But great athletes need short memories, and the memory of winning doesn’t persist for very long. The tourney itself, though - that was something entirely different. I found that my morale, and my desire to keep driving forward on my path to knighthood, was entirely changed afterwards.
I’ve spent the last year thinking about WHY the Iron Rose Tournament made me feel like my ultimate goal, knighthood, was suddenly within my reach. After a year of pondering, I want to tell the Knowne World why women-only tournaments are important, and why we should support them.
Women Face Different Challenges Than Men
Before you ask, no, I have not read “The Armored Rose” by Tobi Beck.
I know that women are totally capable of excelling at armored combat. But we have some unique challenges in our paths to excellence. I’ve spent the better part of my nine years in combat chasing my tail and getting nowhere - that takes a lot of persistence. Or stupidity. Your average pursuant would be completely justified in throwing his or her hands up and quitting the field in that length of time.
But I didn’t HAVE to waste so much time and effort, and neither does anyone else.
I think a little awareness of the common pitfalls that stop women from making progress can make a big difference to trainers and trainees alike. If we want our sport to have a future, we absolutely need to be recruiting and retaining female fighters. I think that topic deserves it’s own essay - meanwhile, let’s just focus on what keeps women from feeling successful in combat.
Our first hurdle, as aspiring combatants, is simply getting into armor. It’s a size & shape thing - most women don’t fit into most loaner gear at practices. If an average-sized guy shows up to a fight practice, he will most likely be fitted out with enough gear to start fighting right away. Most of us girls? We have to be content with some verbal instruction, or hitting someone’s shield, or sitting on the sidelines watching, until we can cobble together enough custom gear to really start fighting. Think about what a significant barrier to entry this is - having to invest hundreds of dollars on gear, before you know if you even LIKE the sport. We typically waste a lot of time and money fighting with our armor before we can fight with anyone on the field. These economic and temporal burdens alone should answer the question of why women tend to migrate over to fencing instead of pursuing heavy combat.
Our second major challenge is finding competent instruction. After we finally manage to get into armor, women have a much longer and steeper road to initial success in combat than guys. We need to master better technique before we can even start getting our money’s worth out of a fight, and we need more specialized instruction to get to a level where we can effectively compete in a sport with no size or weight classes.
I’m not bashing on anyone here - I’m grateful for all the instructors who take time out of their busy lives to conduct fight practices all over the Knowne World. They schlep all the gear, welcome all the newcomers, try to teach everyone from the ground up, and absolutely keep our fun sport going.
And yet - women need individualized teaching. Once again, your average-sized guy can show up to practice, and see a whole bunch of other average-sized guys there waiting to teach him something. He’ll likely receive instruction from one of these guys, who will be able to teach him techniques that work for perfectly well for - you guessed it! - average-sized guys.
But women are generally smaller, and we have to move and throw shots a little differently than those ASGs. These differences are due mostly to physics and geometry. If you teach me techniques that don’t work for me, and then rationalize that they don’t work because I’m either not strong enough, or don’t work hard enough, or can’t follow instructions, or whatever - that significantly slows down my progress. And hurts my morale.
It takes a competent, talented trainer to assess a specific fighter’s size and strength, come up with a training plan that is targeted to her, and ultimately enhance her likelihood of success. Most of us can teach someone what works for US, but not everyone can imagine how to overcome obstacles that we’ve never had to personally address.
For the record here - I’m 5’1”, 130 lbs, left-handed, and super-strong for my size. But despite my strength, I still can’t “muscle” a shot in with poor technique, nor can I be very successful at throwing blows way over my head. Because PHYSICS, dammit! And geometry.
Your average-sized guy can get lucky with a few shots early on in his fighting career - he can land a few blows thanks to his height and arm strength, even with poor technique, and feel pretty good about his potential to get better. But women rarely get those freebies at the start of our training, and it takes a lot of inner strength to keeping pushing through failure after failure before we can start feeling even mildly successful at this game.
To overcome limitations of size and strength relative to my male friends, I have to have great technique, and I have to apply it in some non-standard ways. It wasn’t until I met Duke Anton, a truly gifted fighter and trainer, that I started learning how to use my size to my advantage, rather than blundering through fights and wondering why nothing was working. Getting better at combat isn’t a matter of luck or sweat, it’s a matter of learning how to solve common problems in different ways. We can absolutely do it, but we need targeted training.
Women’s third major challenge is a lot messier to address, and I will likely get a lot of blowback for this, but in our path to excellence in combat, we face serious social, cultural, and emotional challenges.
Please calm down, everyone. Just breathe for a second, take a moment, and then try to hear me out.
Women are trained to put other people first. Yes, this is a generalization, but consider the concept of “emotional work”. This is a phrase that is relatively new to me, but in a nutshell, women are generally expected to bear the brunt of the emotional work in every relationship. If we don’t show compassion, or tend to other people, or bake cookies, or pretend to care about buying a gift for a coworker’s brother’s second cousin’s baby shower, we are called unflattering names.
We are also trained to over-apologize for basic things, for how we look, for taking up time, for taking up space, for asking for what we need, and even for being really, really good at something. We are trained to not hurt anyone’s feelings, and that being beautiful is more important than being smart. Maybe this sort of thing only applies to women of my generation - I’m 47 - but I think it affects women of all ages. You’re welcome to tell me if I’m wrong. (Believe me, I’d love to be wrong about this.)
So how does this affect our progress as fighters? Well - we apologize too much. (I do it! I reflexively say “Sorry!” if I hear someone grunt when I hit her. I have to tell myself to stop it.) We do not demand enough training time at practices. We feel bad about winning. We lose fights in our heads before they even start sometimes, because winning just seems….pushy? We are much too polite to that guy at practice who doesn’t fight, but who will steal all our training time mansplaining his theories on fighting, because he’s a guy, and obviously, even guys who don’t fight know more about it than girls, right? And we waste a LOT of time doing things that take time away from our fighting.
We tend to neglect to speak up enough about our needs, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for our accomplishments. And we don’t tell those chatty mansplainers to shut their pieholes (please!), because we’ve only got so much time to practice.
Another big social hurdle in keeping women on the path to knighthood is that we often put fighting aside to take care of things that have been historically designated to women. Lots of us drop out to take care of children, to support the other fighter(s) in the household, or to focus on other things that need to get done, like feeding people, making garb, teaching classes, or whatever.
Am I saying this is bad? No. But if we want to fight, we need to recognize that combat takes time away from other things, and we need to give ourselves permission to claim some of that time back. Atlantia has had several talented female fighters over the years who dropped out before they were knighted, whether for kids or relationships, or other real-world issues like job relocations. If we’d been able to speed up their progress as fighters, and support them socially for making the choice to keep fighting, we’d likely have female knights by now, and probably a lot more ladies in armor overall.
This paragraph doesn’t even begin to touch on ALL the variations of socio-cultural nonsense that women wade through. However, the fact remains that we, ourselves, often put ourselves out of the game before it even starts. We can fix this, but to address it effectively, we need to recognize it and talk about it first.
Now, my last category of issues that affect women fighters is the one we hate to discuss - that is, misogyny and harassment. Inside the fighting community in the SCA, I have occasionally encountered problems - sometimes, bad characters won’t take shots from me. (Yes, the answer is: hit them harder.) Occasionally, I’ve had people “helpfully” suggest other paths I can take in the SCA, because there are just so few female knights (i.e., you think my chances of success are low, thank you.). I have heard stories of women being derailed from heavy fighting by abusive and controlling men. Thankfully, those stories are rare. But all of these situations take a toll on my love of the game.
It’s really OUTSIDE of the SCA that we get our heads twisted. That’s where women learn the painful double-standards and social punishment that accompany being a strong woman - did anyone refer to Bernie Sanders as “that nasty man”, for daring to believe he could be president? We tell women that they can do “anything” with one side of our mouths, while neglecting to tell them with the other side of our mouths that the price is high, and that it involves a pound of flesh exacted by a thousand cuts. We become wary of speaking out or standing out. Ugly attention from the worst kind of trolls can make some women shun becoming leaders, and this resistance to being in the spotlight bleeds over into our hobbies as well.
Mundanely, I worked for several years as the only woman smokejumper (*elite wildland firefighter) in California. Despite being a standout achiever in my rookie class, I got noticed more for unflattering photographs or what I was wearing than for my work. I had to change how I spoke and how I stood (power poses, they work!) in order to be heard in meetings. I nearly came to blows with a coworker when I was promoted over him - he loudly proclaimed that the promotion was due to my gender rather than my far-superior qualifications, and I had to shout him down in front of my boss, who remained silent. (Rather than getting arrested for assault, later that day I stapled a copy of my resume to his locker…with a LOT of staples.)
So I’ve learned to be wary of the social cost of promotions…does this affect my performance in combat? Do I try a little less hard to win? Maybe. Do I fear people whispering in the future that I only got knighted because I’m a girl? Yeah. Do I imagine people saying that I won a fight or a tourney because someone went easy on me? THAT keeps me awake at night. It takes some joy out of the pursuit, believe me. I don’t just have to be good….I have to be excellent, or I’ll never believe I’m good enough. Thanks, Misogyny. Thanks, Harassment.
Let me state once again, though, that I’ve generally run into more problems with misogyny/harassment in the world outside of the SCA than inside of it. I think the armored-combat world overall is welcoming to anyone who shows the motivation to enter and progress in it. In my experience, combatants usually have a good “dojo mentality”, where what happens on the field, stays on the field, with no hard feelings. We have no weight classes or gender divisions in most tournaments - if you can land a good blow, you can win a fight. But misogyny exists, and if there are problems somewhere, we need to listen attentively, raise our awareness, and root it out. Maybe the chivalric ideals to which we aspire in the SCA can inform our behavior everywhere. And maybe, we can help our female fighters to trust that we won’t punish them for success.
Now let’s get back to my original assertion - that We Need More Women-Only Tournaments.
Why? Because they will help women to be more successful, more quickly. The inaugural WoW Iron Rose tourney in 2016 introduced me to most of the active female fighters in our kingdom, and a few from outside of the kingdom. For the first time in my life as a fighter, I was able to actually measure my progress against my real peers, people who looked and fought like me, and who had faced the same challenges to get onto the field and keep fighting.
And afterwards, I’ve stayed in touch with most of those same women. We can recognize each other on the battlefield. We talk online. We troubleshoot problems. We give each other props and recognition. We trade training advice, and talk about armor. Most importantly, we encourage each other to keep going. Sharing information, ANY information, that can help us all spend more time moving forward and less time problem solving, is imperative for retaining women in heavy combat.
It wasn’t until after the Iron Rose tourney that I realized the value of having a community of women fighters, and how isolated I had been previously. It takes a lot of persistence to keep plugging away at this game, reinventing the wheel at every step - once again, our obstacles are not common to the armored-combat community as a whole. And it takes some serious mojo to keep wading into terra incognita - there are no female knights in this kingdom (yet), which means we’re breaking trail at every step.
Chatting around the metaphorical water cooler with other women at these tourneys gives me valuable information, gives me a place to share what I’ve learned, and heartens me on my path to knighthood. It also gives all of us women some language and insight for talking to our trainers, and a platform for discussing our obstacles and avenues to success. Squires have squire’s tourneys. Novices have novice tourneys. Unbelts have unbelted tourneys, and knights have tournaments of chivalry. We want to measure ourselves against our peers. Women’s tourneys need a place on the same table, folks.
Which brings me to my central thesis here - IF WE WANT MORE WOMEN TO PARTICIPATE IN HEAVY COMBAT, WE NEED TO BUILD OUR COMMUNITY OF WOMEN FIGHTERS. And the way to build that community is to bring us together for tournaments. Let’s continue to make these happen, continue to urge our sisters to come out for them, and support them like our hobby depends on it….because it does.
(*Thank you, Sir Christian Thomas, and thank you, Yorkshire Manor, for sponsoring the Iron Rose Tournament at WoW in 2016 and 2017.)
Dana M. Lucas (ska Signy Heri)
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