There are many quote tiles going around saying that the memo shouldn’t be “protect your daughters” but it should be “teach your sons how to not be abusers”
And whilst I agree with this, it doesn’t change the reality that this issue is not going away, and that we also need to protect our daughters.
Get them enrolled into martial arts. Getting my black belt as a teenager was the best thing that happened to me, to learn how to access my power and meet my fight response when I needed it.
Admittedly, i’ve always been fiery and always able to meet any moment of combat required of me — I actually used to get into fights as a teenager and learning martial arts for me was about learning how to channel my rage into clean disciplined power.
Men need this too. I believe all men should learn the humility of “taking it to the ju jitsu mat” or the equivalent. They need to learn how to run their life force energy cleanly. They also need to learn how to sit with their impulses and desires and not act on them. Traditionally elder led rites of passage were what taught men this.
Traditionally, elder-led rites of passage were what taught men this. A boy would be taken out of the village by the men who had walked the road before him, and he would be tested. He would meet hunger, fear, pain and his own wanting, and he would discover that he could feel all of it and still choose. He came back with a body that knew the space between impulse and action, and with a circle of men who would hold him to it.
We have lost almost all of this. Most boys now come of age through porn, gaming, the gym mirror and the algorithm, with no elder in the room to show them what power looks like when it serves life. That life force has to go somewhere. Unguided, it turns inward as numbness and depression, or outward as dominance and harm.
The mat is one of the few places left where some of that initiation still lives. You get choked out by someone half your size and humility enters your bones. You learn to stay calm under pressure, to tap when you're beaten, to respect the person across from you. You learn to hold another body in a position of total vulnerability and then release it. That is consent, learned at the level of the nervous system.
So yes, teach your sons. Teach them with your words and your example, and then put them somewhere they will be humbled by men steadier than they are. And protect your daughters too. Let them feel what it is to have a fight response that is trained, clean and available, so they know their bodies as capable of defence long before anyone tests it.
Both are protection. A generation of men who can hold their own fire, and a generation of women who know how to use theirs.
