There are particular genres of books for which expectations are continually and justifiably low. Romances come to mind, as do Star Trek novels, and one other category – women’s self-defence manuals. For a segment of the population who have such a clear need for proper training, it is amazing what pap is offered.

So, along comes another contributor to the already low status quo - Fearless: the Complete Personal Safety Guide for Women by Paul Henry Danylewich.

Fearless fails to live up to even minimal expectations. Although the author interviewed 50 convicted sexual offenders, and credits some 20 police forces, very little of the information gathered seems to have filtered through to the book.

The author seems uncomfortable, or unwilling to explain that self-defense is not easy or painless, instead preferring to give a sanitized, detached and almost institutional view of fighting. Here’s a representative sample: “In a crisis situation a victim should try not to allow feelings of helplessness to keep her from making important decisions on how to respond.” The woman is scared for her life, not experiencing “feelings of helplessness.” 

Danylewich’s love of the passive voice makes the whole book about as urgent as a VCR owner’s manual, and downplays the chaotic nature of fighting. 

Let’s state it plainly just to make sure everybody is singing from the same page. 

* Fighting is messy, scary and painful. 
* Nothing ever works the way it does in class.
* Women, with less mass, upper body strength and aggression on average, will be typically fighting someone physically superior to them. 
* The woman will absolutely, positively, without a doubt, be in extremely close quarters with her attacker, and most probably in body-to-body contact.
* She won’t be throwing groin kicks, she won’t be doing wristlocks, and she won’t be throwing her assailant without landing on top of him.
* The woman will be in a high-stress environment, possibly inebriated, possibly in a physically restrictive area (bed, car, couch), and might be getting hit. 

A glaring example of the author’s misplaced emphasis is in the paucity of the ground fighting section. More space and photos are devoted to getting out of a wrist grab than are spent on helping a woman on the floor deal with an assailant on top of her. In fact, the ground techniques presented are rather poor, and blatantly exposes the author’s lack of experience with this area of self-defence. He just seems uncomfortable with the whole business, hoping that it just doesn’t happen. (also, see weapons below)

Instead, the book assumes that altercations will otherwise take place standing up, with plenty of room to move. Apparently, no man has ever attacked a woman while seated on a couch, in a car, and rarely at close quarters. Rapists in Fearless’s world aren’t interested in knocking a woman to the ground. 

The chapter on kicking only reinforces his sanitized world-view. “It is not recommended that you attempt to strike at target areas on your opponent that are higher than the opponent’s mid-section with a kick.” Cute. He doesn’t say “don’t do it,” just that it is “not recommended,” much like using a low-quality head cleaner in your VCR.

Even the thoroughly useless back kick gets shown before the simple stomp or knee strike. Unfortunately, it seems the section on convincing your attacker to stand four feet away and announce his intention so the woman *can* back kick him was deleted by some shortsighted editor. If you have the time to back kick someone, you have the time to turn around and hit him properly.

It gets worse. Basic information like how to palm strike contains errors like this anatomically improbable advice: “For even better results consider shoving your palm heel into the bridge of the aggressor’s nose while clawing his eyes.” Unless the attacker’s eyes are located somewhere around his hairline, it won’t be of much use. One really must wonder how much thought went into the techniques if they can’t even correctly describe something so blatantly simple.

Another problem is that so many important things are glossed over. He talks about how to make a proper fist, but doesn’t show even one picture. He provides the briefest mention of using the hips for power, but doesn’t say how. Although strike combinations are mentioned as a good thing to use, only one example is given and it’s a pretty poor one – a double thumb eye gouge, followed by a front kick to the groin using the shin, ending with a knee strike to the face on the now doubled-over attacker. Go ahead and try it – it’s a clumsy one.

Would it have been too much work to provide a couple of choices? Here are a few off the top of my head:

* Knee strike, left elbow, right elbow
* Palm strike, hair grab with both hands, head butt
* Double ear slap (and not like Fearless suggests, with the woman throwing her arms as wide as possible), head butt, repeated elbow strikes

Here’s another one. When talking about defending against punches he states, “step back out of striking range to evade the full force of the blow,” before blocking. Unfortunately, since most women won’t be attacked in wide-open spaces, they won’t have that room to step out of range. Certainly it won’t work if the attacker is grabbing her right arm, shirt or hair with his left while he deals out multiple punches à la Hockey Night in Canada. Fearless gets half-marks for mentioning the possibility of the grab and punch, but can’t be bothered showing a picture of this incredibly common attack. 

The section on defending against hair grabs is elsewhere, and is so unbelievably passive and detached it would be laughable if it weren’t for the possibility that women might be taking this seriously.

Wait, wait, head butts are lumped into the “dirty tricks” section towards the back of the book, and more space is devoted to the outward wrist lock (two complete pages) than to head butts (three paragraphs).

Another bit that shows an utter lack of comprehension is the all-too-brief discussion on weapons. It starts with this coffee-snorted-out-the-nose provoking comment: “It would not be appropriate to discuss weapon defences in great detail.” Shades of Kim Campbell’s ill fated “elections are not the time to discuss the issues,” gaffe.

Great, so women get to have their arms broken or slashed to rags as they hope to block a club or knife. Assailants with weapons are a reality. Give the women the tools to deal with it, or admit that you don’t have a clue how. Empty hand versus weapons is a staple of the Filipino Martial Arts, and a woman’s time and money would be well spent in such classes.

His best recommendation for a woman’s weapon? A can of mace. This would be great, assuming it wasn’t a) buried under a ton of stuff at the bottom of a purse and b) was likely to incapacitate an angry assailant. He does at least mention that it might get blown back into the woman’s face, and that pepper spray is illegal in some areas.

Try a knife instead. A small, discrete tactical folder can be clipped just about anywhere, is legal to carry anywhere in Canada, and has many uses outside of self-defence. How is a woman, or for that matter anyone with less mass or strength, supposed to deal with a big, angry, strong man? It ain’t with back kicks, I can tell you that much. More glaring, just before the section where he doesn’t recommend women use weapons, he advocates the use of makeshift weapons. Great, so a woman can try and deter an attacker by stabbing him with a ballpoint pen, but a Spyderco Delica or other knife is “not recommended since there are many cases in which the aggressor ends up using the victim’s weapon against her.” Oh really? I’d like to see some statistics on that.

He makes no attempt to give readers even the most minimal ability to deal with a weapon even though odds are about 50/50 that a woman will face a weapon in an assault. Spend four pages showing how to get out of every wrist grab conceivable, but God forbid we show a woman how to minimize damage from a club.

Let’s talk about the author’s background… Actually, that’s a fairly short conversation, considering only the briefest mention is made of his training. Although it states he’s been teaching self-defence for 10 years, it doesn’t mention what or how much training he did previous to this. Who gives a damn if he spent his time doing tai chi at an old age home? We can surely assume whatever he did had no grappling or weapons component.

The chapter on selecting a school elicits a laugh. Among his recommendations is his own organization, although no mention is made of his connection to it at that point. In the biographical blurb on the author, it does state that he runs this group but this is perhaps mildly disingenuous. Nobody begrudges making a plug for your school, but be up front about it.

This isn’t even the worst women’s self-defence manual I’ve ever seen. There was the one where the woman in the photos had nails so long she couldn’t make a fist – God help anyone who tried to emulate it. No, the reason I don’t like Fearless is because it could easily slip past someone’s bullshit detector. It’s an attractive book with high production values, and as mentioned earlier has dozens of interviews with offenders and police, giving it an unearned authority. The cachet of being published by University of Toronto Press gives more weight to the misinformation too. One wonders why a university press decided to publish a trade book in the first place.

So how would I do things differently? Well, first of all I wouldn’t be sugarcoating the title (I know, cheap shot – editors decide titles, authors don’t). “Fearless”? “Complete Personal Safety Guide”? Nah, something more like “Badger’s Uncomfortable Guide to Surviving an Attack.”

* It would take into account that attackers usually have physical superiority over their intended victims, but expect a compliant victim, or ineffectual resistance.
* It would provide weapons training, and training to deal with facing a weapon. 
* It would recognize that ending up on the ground or being in a physically restrictive place is the norm, not the exception.
* It would not tell women that fighting off an attacker is easy or painless, or that accomplishing a technique is “simple.”

Okay, everybody go and buy a thousand copies when it hits the shelves.

Onto Fearless, the Next Chapter

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