SEXISM AND HOMOPHOBIA
Aikido is a non-fighting martial art. Doing aikido means letting go of the desire to use physical strength in response to an attack. This can be very difficult for males to do since they are usually more used to using muscle power than females. They're usually more used to fighting with physical force. This can put many female trainees at an advantage since they're less likely to use brute force to apply a technique or to rely on physical power to prevail. They're more likely to use movement itself, that is, to use aikido. On the other hand many females lack body- confidence as a result of years of learning inhibitions and of being taught to defer to men. I'm over-generalizing now, but many females, after a life-time of being conditioned to submit and defer, find it hard to feel very sure about their personal power. They find the language of attack and defense intimidating. They find it very difficult, at least in the beginning of their aikido training, to move freely. They feel clumsy having to tumble and they may give up before they learn that aikido is a joy. Women bring their inhibitions onto the training mat with them. They seem to find it hard to let go of the awkwardness that a male-dominated society has encouraged so many of them to feel. Men bring their inhibitions onto the mat too, of course, and this doesn't help either. These inhibitions are of a different sort, though. They may, for example, bring their ideas of male dominance into the training hall with them. They my try and police on the mat the sort of power they have in society at large. Letting that inhibition go can be very difficult for them. Some of these men can find the liberating effect aikido has on female students too much to take. They start attacking too hard, ostensibly to help their female partners to respond more positively, but really to intimidate them. They often aren't even aware of what they're doing. The females in the class will know though, - often painfully so. Males like this don't want to think of females as equals. They're threatened by the democratic way in which aikido gives everyone the chance to be truly free and strong. The "ukemi" these men give can be competitive and awkward and down-right unhelpful to female partners. The existence of sexism in aikido is hardly surprising. Male domination is universal. In principle aikido should have nothing to do with sexist discrimination at all. In practice men are often highly discriminatory which is why an awareness of the pervasiveness of sexism is necessary to give aikido students the best chance possible to confront it in a constructive way.
The issue of sexism is compounded by that of homophobia. Aggressively heterosexual aikido students can feel disconcerted or threatened, for example, by partners who are homosexual, whether they are female or male. In principle there is only the training. In practice personal 27
