Plague of Strength

I’d had the beginnings of a “chicks in fighting” series already laid down before this past weekend, and was working between that and what is turning out to be the most ridiculously in-depth treatment of Okinawan martial arts of all time, but after seeing The Fabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn I felt compelled to throw myself into this. In this I discovered a sick site called Rejected Princesses that is a mashup of Badass of the Week and Disney Princess shit, giving the vaunted princess treatment to every bad bitch you never heard of (without nerfing the history, painting everything the color of Pepto-Bismol, or bedazzling everything in sight). While I mooned over the incredible combination of camp and grittiness and the almost complete lack of “flying vagina” attacks that Hollywood seems to believe are the only plausible means by which a chick can take out a dude in the poorly renamed Birds of Prey flick, I realized this series would tie in nicely. Then, in an odd confluence of events I binge watched the 2018 season of DC Super Hero Girls (Cartoon Network), which is a perfect distance and subject matter splitter between television’s finest and most cerebral animated moment of all time, Teen Titans Go! (Cartoon Network), and one of the top three funniest (and definitely the goriest) cartoons in history, Harley Quinn (DC Universe).

Before you run off on a tirade about feminism or whatever, I’ve not changed my position on chicks one iota- I hold everyone to the same standards… and just about everyone fails to meet those standards. I point out the unnoticed, the forgotten, and the awesome, and chicks tend to fall into that category more often than not. Furthermore, this is an awesome pop culture moment that goes perfectly with shit I was already writing, so it’s a happy confluence of events rather than whatever weird shit you people are going to accuse me of having done.

As fighter-journalist-author L.A. Jennings aptly put it:

“During the past three hundred years, detractors have claimed that women don’t belong in fighting sports because they are male-dominated activities. Some critics have asserted that the female body is not fit for fighting. Others argued that boxing and wrestling had always been male sports and that women should stay away from those arenas. And today, many fighting commentators and Internet pundits continue to suggest that there is something unnatural or deviant about women in fighting sports, yet the history simple does not bear out that assertion. Women have been competing in fighting sports for thousands of years, despite perpetual claims by opponents of female fighters that they do not belong in the ring, on the mat, or in the cage. The convenient forgetfulness or misremembering of the past is a way to erase the history of female fighters and substantiate the inaccurate belief that women have never, and will never, belong in certain male spaces” (Jennings xii).

I am sure many of you take issue with the above statement, as I weirdly have a significant audience from the Manosphere segment of society in spite of my best efforts to encourage every group of self-loathing, weaksauce dipshits I encounter to shuffle off their mortal coils with maximum expediency. Tragically, I’ve not yet herded them into a massive cattle chute for an orderly mass execution, so I am faced with a world that believes that everyone who doesn’t want to hang a beating on a broad and chain them to a radiator somehow pines for a femdom universe in which men are neutered and enslaved.. I won’t suggest that sexual slavery in the Amazonian dimension lacks strong appeal, but one’s ability to read should not be in any way affected by their paraphilias, and mine remains blissfully extravagant provided I take ample breaks to “clear my mind” as I go.

Herein, I shall present you with the mostly-ignored and seriously badass history of women in fight sports, which are not, as 150 pound skinny-fat internet trolls are wont to claim, solely the domain of men. If I had to posit a guess as to why brawling is considered to be the sole purview of men in much of the modern world, it’s because the self-hating goofballs in the Muscular Christianity movement (for an explanation of that logically and spiritually unsound philosophy see Part 1 and Part 2 of my MC series, plus the adjacent Zuver’s Gym articles Part 1 and Part 2 for explanations) claimed men were physically weak, so they banished women to the kitchen to “prove” their superiority by disqualifying their competition. They based their reasoning on the fact that women were traditionally not combatants, which is true, though they failed to understand the reasoning behind their social norms due to their own personal weaknesses, ignorance, and general stupidity .

It’s not that women cannot fight- it’s that ancient warrior civilizations realized they could continue as a clan with one man and ten women, but would perish if the numbers were reversed. Men are expendable and women are precious baby-making machines, so men were thrown into danger while the women remained home to breed and raise more badasses.

Records about sport fighting prior to the advent of the eighteenth century are incredibly sparse (pugilism was barred from competitive sports by the church), so there was little print media in which to record these contests or detail the combatants. Acknowledging that our knowledge of those past events is at best spotty, the earliest account we have of women in fight sports dates all the way back to ancient Sparta (900s BC-146 BC). Spartan women were expected, per their city’s constitution, to participate in the same violent, half-starved, hyper-hardcore athletic training that men did in their youth. That meant they competed bare-assed (just as the men did) until they completed their education, which was around age 20. At that point, they got married and abandoned sports for child rearing, but this was only after proving themselves to be fitter than fuck through constant, hard training and competition in pankration, wrestling, horsemanship, and track and field sports.

Spartans were such ferocious fighters in pankration that they were feared throughout Hellas. Sparta was the only city-state in which eye gouging was permitted, and the Greeks knew at least once judges had determined the winner of a fight to be the lone guy who could still see, and the Spartans eventually quit participating in that event because the other competitors would either refuse to fight or rely on the Spartans to disqualify themselves. That meant that Spartan women were likely harder in hand-to-hand than most, if not all, other people on the planet at the time who lived outside of their city.

Georgian Era Boxing and Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes

Between ancient Greece and the Georgian era (1714-1837), we have plenty accounts of female warriors (everything from Boudicca to the Scytho-Sarmatian Amazons to Joan of Arc to Viking shieldmaidens), but little on either male or female sportfighters. A German citizen travelling in England wrote in a 1710 book about his travels that female pugilists were common in that era, and that he’d hung out with a female at a fight who’d fought another woman earlier in the evening “without stays and in nothing but a shift [without corsets, as they lacked bras then, and in just a knee length slip]” and “they had both fought stoutly and drawn blood” (Jennings 2). An English traveler at the same time wrote that women in Paris regularly fought with their tits out likle they were working at the world’s most aggressive strip club, and that those fights were both serious and entertaining as hell.

Georgian Era boxing was already considered low class because it was a criminal activity, so toplessness likely didn’t bother the fighters all that much. They were serious athletes fighting where circumstances would allow, and were entertainers as much as they were martial artists. To allay any concerns about her pastimes or intentions, Wilkinson and her opponents fought fully clothed, indicating they were serious athletes rather than prostitutes.  That’s not to say the ones with their tits out weren’t badasses, though- they were basically incredibly dangerous strippers.

It wasn’t until 1722 that a female champion started gaining mention in periodicals, however, and that woman was considered at the time to be the most popular boxer of the 18th century- the “Invincible City Championess” Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes. Boxing was still illegal in the early eighteenth century, so it’s hard to find too much solid information on the woman beyond her epic, Mike Tyson-meets-Muhammad Ali shit-talking skills. Stokes was either the widow and student of a prizefighter who was executed in 1722 for murdering an elderly Londoner or she took his name as a pseudonym to avoid prosecution for engaging in illegal activities. If it was a pseudonym, she could hardly have picked a scarier one- it would be akin to claiming to be Carl Panzram’s widow two hundred years later.

“Joseph Blake and Jack Sheppard continue to be remembered as charismatic English 1720′s criminals, while the lesser known Wilkinson was the worst. He once attacked an armless man and threw him into a ditch. His comrades, Shaw and Burridge, pulled Wilkinson away as he strangled the disabled man. Wilkinson regularly robbed women, stripped them naked and then tied them to trees. His partner, Milksop, was an admitted rapist. While robbing an “F. Clarke” of his sword and money, they were spotted by a witness. Wilkinson fired a bullet which hit a wall near the window of the ducking woman. Wilkinson was such an awful person, that in a rare decision, the Ordinary of Newgate refused to administer the sacrament to him before his execution.

Wilkinson not only robbed men, but would unnecessarily bludgeon them with his fists or sword. The end for Wilkinson was the robbery and murder of pensioner Peter Martin. Wilkinson and his comrades demanded that he surrender his money and gun. Wilkinson was an experienced fencer, so he began to methodically stab Martin, to the back shoulder and butt, while Martin steadfastly refused to give them his pistol. Wilkinson plunged his sword nine inches into the pensioner’s back while he lay on the ground and then ordered him to stand. One of the men said, “How should ye expect the man to go forward when he is dead?” Wilkinson was arrested and offered information on everyone in exchange for freedom. Another member of the gang also informed on everyone so Wilkinson was convicted and hanged” (Shelton).

Regardless of the provenance of her name, the woman was by all accounts a fucking animal on the stage (they hadn’t invented rings at that point)- she was so hyper-aggressive and ruthless in fights that she might as well have been a badger full of cheque drops and meth. Prior to annihilating her first publicly reported opponent, Hannah Hyfield, Elizabeth Wilkinson had only fought men and was capable of handling anyone from either gender who wanted to test their might. Lest you think that uncommon, one of the stars of the day (who once beat the legendary James Figg), Ned Sutton, often fought multiple women at the same time with swords as a regular attraction at James Figg’s Amphitheater.

Following her first fight, Elizabeth married a one-time opponent of Figg named James Stokes, and the two began training together and instructing Londoners in the fighting arts. Depending on which source you believe, Elizabeth Wilkinson learned to fence well enough to defeat women who’d been undefeated against men in under a year, in addition to cudgels, because unlike Stokes’ fight against Hannah Hyfield, as they usually consisted of three rounds, each of a different style of fighting, rather than one of nothing but bare-knuckle brawling.

Boxers from this era competed to be “champions” of three round contests of fighting prowess, each of which tested a different skill. This was no mere exhibition type of thing, either- maiming, crippling, and death were common features of early modern boxing, and one historian has posited that up to one in seven murders that were prosecuted in eighteenth century London stemmed from boxing matches or duels. This wasn’t Pride FC- if you shoved a heavily outweighed and out-favored fighter onto the stage, there was a chance they were coming off of it tits up and disemboguing blood back into the dust from which is mythologically came. The contests to achieve that goal were not regulated affairs, but they generally consisted of three rounds of action.

Round One: Swordplay. They would use a short sword or sword and parrying dagger (potentially deadly, unprotected fencing with 2-3 foot swords with sharp edges and tips).

Round Two: Fists (a round of no holds barred fighting that resembled old vale tudo more than modern boxing, included slapping, biting, eye gouging, stomps, kicks, and punches to downed opponents, and grappling was to be expected.

Round Three: Cudgels using a singlestick (similar to canne de combat without protection) or quarterstaff (think Donatello in Ninja Turtles, and was an important dueling weapon because it allowed “quarter” because it was not a knife or sword)) which was more or less kendo without protection until one person “broke the head” of their opponent by drawing blood on the head.

Of note is the fact that although they fought at Figg’s ampitheater, the Stokes did not train with Figg, because Figg was obsessed with restoring masculinity, which apparently always means disempowering women for some reason. Moving past the crushing self-loathing that must drive someone to eliminate competition rather than meeting them on equal ground, no one is certain how Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes ended up such a badass- there’s almost no information on her beyond allegations of being half Native American and her alleged tie to Wilkinson. She certainly knew how to brawl before meeting either Figg or Stokes (who’d fought Figg at his amphitheater and lost before he started banging Elizabeth Wilkinson), but prior to signing with Figg and training with Stokes, there is no indication of where she learned swordfighting skills.

And if you’re thinking about about swordplay like it’s fencing the way you see it nowadays, check yourself before you wreck yourself. This was decidedly not what you think of now as fencing- it was straight up sword fighting, although with something more akin to a three foot razorblade than the claymore I picture when imagining a swordfight.

“William Gill was a swordsman formed by Figg’s own hand” who constantly attacked the legs in swordplay.  “I never was an eyewitness to such a cut in the leg, as he gave one Butler, an Irishman, a bold resolute man, but an awkward swordsman.   His leg was laid quite open, his calf falling down his ankle.  It was soon stitched up; but from the ignorance of a surgeon adapted to his mean circumstances, it mortified: Mr. Cheselden was applied to for amputation, but too late for his true judgement to interfere in” (Godfrey).

After another surgeon refused to operate on such an advanced case, Butler died waiting for someone to just lop off his fucking leg already. And this was before they started rocking the protective gear people started wearing in the early 20th century- these maniacs were fighting stripped to the waist in street clothes. Even once they began wearing protective gear, they were still getting hacked to fucking pieces.

They don’t use too many stitches, because in a duel for honor, the man with the most stitches loses.

As a Vice article recounted,

“There were many fatalities—typically caused by sword thrusts to the lungs or heart. The loss of eyes, ears, and noses was also common. In 1566, famed astronomer Tycho Brahe lost his nose to a fellow student’s sword. For the rest of his life, the Dane wore a brass prosthetic.

Heavy casualties led to the adoption of chain-mail suits, eye coverings, and nose sheaths. ‘Still,’ Hans said, ‘if a sword gets trapped under the nose guard, it’ll cut your nose to pieces. That’s not so nice. You can also lose a piece of your [scalp] with your hair on it. I saw guys faint.’

‘When the face is [lacerated],’ he explained, ‘they pause to stitch it without anesthetic. A doctor is always there. They don’t use too many stitches, because in a duel for honor, the man with the most stitches loses. Sometimes there are these huge cuts with only two or three stitches. It makes the scar a lot bigger. Back in the day, they ripped the wound apart, or put horsehair in it, so it would infect and be bigger. It was a big deal for men from the upper society to have a scar’” (Morin).

It’s unlikely that Stokes would have charged into that sort of a sepulchral fray with only a year of training under her belt, especially since she went undefeated for six years fighting with fists, quarterstaff, and dagger and sword. Whoever trained her seems to have been a master swordsman, because the man booking her was a master swordsman who only learned to fight as a sideshow to his swordplay exhibitions. The Joker to Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes’ Harley, Figg was the louder, brasher of the two, a consummate showman, and victor in over 300 fightsport contests (Figg only lost once), James Figg cast a shadow that loomed over almost every other fighter of the era.

That shadow wasn’t a bad place to be, frankly. Stokes ran a booming business training fighters for Figg’s amphitheater, and quickly became the second most sought after fight coach, male or female, in England at the time. She falls out of the historical limelight by 1730, after losing a fight that ended her fighting and possibly her teaching career (most local fighters were by this time training with Jack Broughton instead of Figg, anyway). The combination of illegality and the incredible newness of anything resembling a newspaper makes piecing together much more about Stokes impossible. She was hardly the first female fighter in England, but she was one of the most popular boxing personalities of the century in spite of the paucity of information on her life. Her example definitely paved the way for future female fighters, however, and “women continued to box during the eighteenth century, despite social strictures or a patriarchal assertion of machismo” (Jennings 11).

Conclusion

If you’re wondering why you’ve heard of Figg and not of Wilkinson (though you’ve more likely heard of neither), the reasoning is pretty simple- her tale became overshadowed by Figgs as the pundits all leaned into the Muscular Christianity movement. One heavily cited paper from an instructor at the New Mexico Military Institute suggests that “society purposely ignored Wilkinson’s story when her narrative no longer supported newly dominant notions of gender hierarchy” because

1. .Wilkinson’s career closely paralleled and even overshadowed Figg’s
2. Wilkinson received greater attention than Figg from authors for roughly one hundred and fifty years after her career ended,
3. Wilkinson was only forgotten when her story contradicted the new gendered vision of society.

As I cannot concoct a closing better than this one, I will end with this quote:

“In 1987, Joyce Carol Oates argued “boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world.” 160 Her statement was reasonably accurate for 1987; yet, the life of Elizabeth Wilkinson demonstrates that boxing was not always exclusively a masculine domain. She stood as European champion and provided evidence for observers determined to prove that the British were a tough and courageous people. Lamentably, we refused to write good history when the past clashed with our evolving notions of gender(ed) sensibilities. We sacrificed truthful recollection on the altar of cultural expediency. Today, we can make amends by the restoration of Wilkinson’s name to history books and by working to maintain a more truthful recollection of the past” (Thrasher).

Quickie Review- Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

I recently gave the first Michael Keaton Batman (1989) a rewatch and was shocked by how badly it holds up in the modern day- even against straight-to-video B-movie dreck the 1989 Batman‘s production quality looks bad. Throw on top of that the overacting and the fact that if you were to change Jack Nicholson’s look to Heath Ledger’s with CGI, Jack Nicholson would have made people piss their fucking pants in fear in that flick, and all you can think about is what might have been rather than appreciating it for what it is. To make matters worse, if you contrast that to the Christian Bale Batman flicks, the original two look hopelessly campy in an unintentional way- like an unfunny clown who thinks he’s Bill Burr but is a spitting image of Jeff Dunham.

Birds of Prey solves all of those issues. Michael Keaton couldn’t fight in that movie and didn’t look as though he could as Bruce Wayne. Bale was marginally better, but his editors used the Steven Seagal special of fast cuts to make flurries of action seem like more than two idiots waving their arms at each other. The Harley Quinn, flick, while not perfect, splits the difference between the camp of the Batman TV show and that of the cartoon with the grittiness of the Bale era Batman to create a uniquely fun sort of superhero flick. It’s self-aware but not overly-wrought (like Watchmen was at times), cartoonish without entirely losing realism, gritty without being bleak, and technicolor as hell. The fight choreography was pretty goddamned good as well, though the execution in parts wasn’t John Wick perfect. In spite of the occasional whiff in early fight scenes, the choreography was reasonably believable while avoiding the flying vagina Brazilian jujitsu attacks they fucking love having Scarlet Johannson and other hot chicks do incessantly.

I mention the fight choreography because frankly, it’s what 150 pound dudes on the internet can cling to- the “girls can’t fight and here’s proof” type of shit. The issue is that none of them can fight convincingly or otherwise, nor could they even pretend to be able to do so while on roller skates. It’s not a fucking martial arts movie, and our standards on fight choreography are getting nigh on preposterous, so let’s all just keep our wits about us and enjoy movies in the spirit they’re intended (although I will never stop thinking about how crazy a Ledger-Nicholson Joker would be).

In closing, if you combine the best parts of Sucker Punch (2011) with the best parts of Suicide Squad with the occasional tip of the cap to Mystery Men (1999), you get this badass flick. They did, however, fuck up on the name, as the original one was apt and this one is a bit misleading. It seems as though this flick was supposed to be a prequel to Birds of Prey rather than Birds of Prey, and the studio panicked when opening ticket sales sucked.

And failing that, watch Harley Quinn on DCU- it is as fast-paced, violent, and acerbic as Guns Akimbo (which was crazy rad) in the style of the WB Batman cartoon, but with far more complexity.

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Sources:

Case, Roy.  The prize-fighter- Figg.  Playing Pasts.  20 Jun 2019.  Web.  26 Mar 2020.  https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/boxing/the-prize-fighter-figg/

Crudelli, Chris. The Way of the Warrior: Martial Arts and Fighting Skills from Around the World. London: Dorling Kindserley Ltd, 2008.

Ghose, Tia.  Oops! Etruscan warrior princes really a princess.  Livescience.  18 Oct 2013.  Web.  28 Mar 2020.  https://www.livescience.com/40530-etruscan-warrior-prince-is-a-princess.html

Godfrey, John.  A Treatise Upon the Useful Science of Defence: Connecting the Small and Back-sword, and Shewing the Affinity Between Them. 1747.

Hauser T, Wallenfeldt EC, Collins N, Sammons JT, Poliakoff M, Olver R, Krystal A.  Boxing. Encyclopædia Britannica. 19 Mar 2020. Web. 29 Mar 2020. https://www.britannica.com/sports/boxing 

Jennings, LA. She’s a Knockout: A History of Women in Fighting Sports. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Morin, Roc.  Fighting for facial scars in Germany’s secret fencing frats.  Vice.  18 Feb 2015.  Web.  30 Mar 2020.  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/av4bp4/frauleins-dig-them-0000573-v22n2

Shelton, Christopher James. 1720′s English MMA Fighter: Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes. Cyber Boxing Zone. 2 Dec 2010. Web. 23 Mar 2020. http://www.cyberboxingzone.com/blog/?p=7612

Thrasher, Christopher.  Disappearance: How Shifting Gendered Boundaries Motivated the Removal of Eighteenth Century Boxing Champion Elizabeth Wilkinson from Historical Memory. New Mexico Military Institute.  24 Apr 2013.  Web.  26 Mar 2020.  https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/pi/index.php/pi/article/view/19438/15049

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