'Christianity with punch' - using martial arts to save lost boys

What about this girl who’s joined us for the first time tonight. Could she be another Wendy? Not likely. She’s doesn’t look the part at all. She’s a slender Vietnamese girl, with a sassy hairstyle and a T-shirt that prominently displays the words “Too busy to Fuck”.

I told her that if she wanted to train with us at all that she’d have to change into a different shirt. I offered her one of our club T-shirts - the ones with "Christianity with Punch" displayed on the back. She was predictably reluctant to wear it, but she put it on eventually. Once we had her in a different T-shirt she faded from view as the centre of everybody’s attention. Even so, I suspect that the fine performance the boys put on tonight was in part inspired by a desire to impress our visitor. You can’t escape the sexual dynamics in this game.

A friend of mine in the army told me that, despite all the talk about equality of the sexes in the forces, the Australian army was still refusing to allow women into the front line, and with good reason. He said that the Israeli experience had been well documented (Israel being one of the only countries to put women in the front line) and that they were experiencing enormous problems. He said that for one thing, the statistics showed that men would always go back for a woman who had been shot, even if she was dead, and even if it put the rest of the squad in serious danger. He also said that the effect on morale of the death of a woman in the front line was far more serious than the effect of the deaths of any number of men (and morale is considered to be a third of any army’s fighting strength). Gender differences just do not seem to be able to be ignored in a war zone.

I’m a great supporter of women in the fighting arts and I’ve been in trouble with our state government on more than one occasion because of my role in promoting, training, and officiating in fight contests between females (which is still illegal in NSW). But I don’t do this because I think that there’s no difference between men and women in the ring. In the office there might not be any relevant difference and in the pulpit I can’t see or hear any, but in the ring - in that most fundamental and most primitive arena of human encounter - women are women and men better bloody not be.