The Feminist Defense: East’s Feminist Club organizes a free self defense class

East’s Feminist Club organized a free self-defense workshop on Dec. 14 to inclusively teach self defense skills in the case of a dangerous situation, receiving positive feedback from members and attendees. 

The club consists of four leaders — freshman Hartley Graham and seniors Grace McCamy, Ella Heide and Chloe Stinson — who plan and brainstorm ideas for meetings and ways to improve the safety of the school, for girls especially. Their latest idea being the self-defense workshop, upon request of their members who thought it would be useful knowledge.

“Since it’s such as big thing for women in general, like we’re always told not to go out at night or walk alone, we just thought it was such a good idea to go with the topic of feminism,” Stinson said.

The club meets every two weeks, inclusive to all genders and identities, and strives to make women feel safer in the school and to educate students on important issues that women face daily. 

“The club strives to empower the people at our school to feel independent and to better understand skills and knowledge required to feel safe and confident in this world where women still face widespread inequality,” Graham said. “As part of that, we want the people in our school to know what to do in dangerous situations to be, and feel, safe.”

In response to the self-defense workshop idea, Graham’s dad reached out to instructor and owner of Ninja Fit Martial Arts Club Jake Miesner to teach the workshop for free at the school. After contacting the administration to make sure that visitors would be allowed with COVID regulations and deciding on a time and day, the workshop was scheduled and members worked to make posters and preemptively educate themselves on self-awareness.

Miesner does outside classes, along with his regular hour-long sessions where he trains martial arts and self-defense. He estimates that anywhere from 90-95% of his mentors are women, learning to protect themselves when in dangerous situations. 

His passion for teaching these useful life skills to the majority being women began when he was in elementary school.

“I got into martial arts because of bullies in school, and I wanted to be able to protect myself and my friends against them, which has been my continuation for wanting to teach martial arts and self-defense,” Miesner said. “As things change, there’s new situations to talk about, and I just want people to be aware.”

He began teaching this awareness to the East crowd by having them throw out their own experiences during a conversation about situational awareness in the weights room, with one girl adding that she feels unsafe when going on runs by herself, and another saying how the construction workers near her bus stop make her uncomfortable. 

“We reviewed situation awareness and let them bring up examples from their daily life, when they’ve felt their ‘spidey-sense’ tingling or if they’ve felt something odd,” Miesner said.

While the class emphasized the importance of being aware of their surroundings — whether that be when pumping gas at the gas station or waiting in a checkout line at the grocery store — participants were also able to get out some energy by practicing physical defense tactics. 

“We did a couple of physical exercises, teaching them how to stand up for themselves and to fight some of the natural reactions they may have when someone tries to hurt you,” Miesner said. “I like to let people hit stuff hard and let their energy out.”

Frequent club attendee and freshman Ainsley Pyle attended the class and found it to be a great opportunity that she may have not been able to learn otherwise, especially since it was free and open to all students. 

“A class like this is necessary for everyone, especially teenagers, since it can be really dangerous when you’re out at night hanging out with your friends or walking alone,” Pyle said. “So I think the class itself can be very beneficial to have these basic self-defense ideas if you were to ever get into an unfortunate situation.”

Pyle’s also optimistic that if the club were to organize another similar event, there would be yet another decent turnout, as she knows other students feel that it’s important for them to know how to defend themselves.

“I really enjoyed it, I thought it was a lot of fun and a great opportunity, especially since it was free and it was open to all students,“ Pyle said. I think it would be beneficial for students who would want to go again or weren’t able to make it last time.”