Female Self-Defense: Fight Back! Bite to Bleed

Stand Up. Fight Back. Bite to bleed, if they attack. It’s not just vampires with defensive fangs!

When I create art, sometimes the visuals lead, other times the words lead - but the gut feeling is what’s underneath. There’s something I’m trying to communicate, and I’m trying to figure out how. I get lost searching for the right pieces to fit together the thoughts bubbling up in my mind. It can take me weeks, months, even years to complete a piece as I try my best to be thoughtful, balanced, and critical in my viewpoints.

By routinely reading different feminist women, I find inspiration and guidance to analyze the world through their work. I find it fascinating how overlapping our thoughts become in all the different echo chambers we inhabit. Just as I’m thinking of a specific feminist issue, another person posts a piece that perfectly encapsulates that feeling in my gut. Other times, their post is counter to my beliefs and helps me to either doubt or fortify my current views. Through such communities, we’re all able to expand ourselves and learn how to figure out and communicate what we think.

For example, I’ve been lucky enough to take an amazing self-defense course in the past that focused on targeting male perpetrators’ soft spots (nose, genitals, eyes, etc.). The course inspired several graphics, but I couldn’t find the words to express the sentiment behind the visuals. I saw one of radfemw1tch’s stories which was a repost from radfemalbian’s page. The words in this post hit on so many points I reflect on when I think of self-defense against male attackers. And I love how the words from radfemalbian’s (albanian.rafem) post call out male supremacy’s circle-talking, gaslighting, discombobulating propaganda that keeps all people from fighting back in whatever way will keep them safer.

Being able to pair my visuals with these words is one of the positives of social media. They allow us to weave together these amazing archives of knowledge on any subject matter and their many threads of interpretation. It’s these connections that keep me from fully deleting social media like Instagram.