Rene Denfeld - Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall: A Closer Look at Women, Violence, and Aggression

I have tried to present as accurately as possible my impressions of the Grand Avenue Boxing Gym. I have modified certain details about some of the individuals in order to protect their anonymity.

Copyright 1997 by Rene Denfeld

All rights reserved.

Warner Books, Inc.

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

First eBook Edition: November 2009

ISBN: 978-0-446-57002-2

THE NEW VICTORIANS

For Jess

There are people who help you out over the years, and they deserve repeated thanks. Thanks go to the ReddensJim, Joan, and Tonyand my family: Elaine Appleton, Dennis Denfeld, Charles Denfeld, Nichole Appleton, Michael Appleton, Eldredge Appleton, and my much-missed grand-mother, Margaret Appleton.

My thanks also to Katherine Dunn for writing the foreword to this book. Katherine was one of the first writers to explore female aggression. She is a leading boxing reporter as well as novelist. I am honored by her contribution.

Doug Holm supplied valuable leads, while Bruce Anderson and Sparkle Fuller Anderson offered succinct boxing commentary. Promoter Mike Motormouth Morton was kind enough to answer my questions. There are many in the fight world here on the West Coast, including Steve Chase, Ray Monge, George Calderas, Richard Castro, Bob Jarvis, and Fred Ryan, whom I often watched, and listened to. Im sorry their names didnt make it into the text.

My thanks to Bill Redden, who has always given freely of his time, and of himself.

Most of all, I want to thank the trainers, fighters, and their families from the Grand Avenue boxing gym, past and present: Jess, Chuck, Ed, Fred, Mike, Bob, Isaiah, Miguel, Leon, Alberto, Javier, Lon, Tom, Billy, Anne, Johnna, Susan, Jose, Damion, Brad, Octavio, Isaac, Ron, Tim, and everyone else.

I hope they like this book.

In November 1993, when Rene Denfeld first walked into the Grand Avenue boxing gym in Portland, Oregon, she had written and published widely on various social issues and, at the age of twenty-six, had just finished writing her first book (The New Victorians, Warner Books, 1995). But in the small, distilled world of the boxing gym, nobody knew or cared about her professional accomplishments. Her significance to the fight guys in that one small gym was strictly her gender. She was part of the first generation of women who were allowed to train and compete against one another as amateur boxers. For many of the men immersed in this sport, she was the advance edge of an invasion.

Women had been forbidden to box as amateurs until just the month before, October 1993, when U.S. Amateur Boxing, Inc., the national organization that governs amateur boxing, had finally been driven by discrimination lawsuits to open the sport to females. The fight guys were scared and their fears boiled down to two fundamental questions: Can women survive the game? Can the game survive women?

Similar dramas were being played out across the country as women and girls trickled into boxing gyms. But at the Grand, the focus was on Denfeld. As a longtime boxing reporter, I frequented that gym. As a woman and a supporter of womens right to participate, I anxiously watched her entry into the gym. She began with much the same attitude a twelve-year-old might have, intrigued by the sport and curious about her own capacities. She found herself under a microscope. Her demeanor as well as her ability and desire to respond to the rigorous training were analyzed and dissected by coaches, other boxers, and even this female reporter, as an example of what could be expected from all those women who would, in the ensuing years, infiltrate the ultimate male preservethe territory of the warrior. It was an absurd and unfair burden to place on any individual, but there it wasinevitable.

Like most of the females who followed her into that particular gym, Denfeld was serious and eager. She was also a long-distance runner with enough stamina to impress the most relentless coaches. She didnt play coy or frail or ask that the game be changed to accommodate her. She asked to be allowed to play by the same rules as the boys. Given that chance, she proved her mettle. She changed a lot of guys minds and earned their respect, not as a woman or a writer, but as something far more important in that contexta fighter.

Thats how it looked from the outside, watching. But Denfelds book reveals her deeper interior struggle. In the personal essays and sketches that introduce each chapter, she examines her experiences with fresh eyes and a lean, lucid narrative. Here she reveals her self-doubt, fear, frustration, delight, and wry humor. While she was being watched and tested, she was assessing the watchers, coming to understand their fears and the sources of their prejudices, and to sympathize even as she fought to overcome them. These sections of the book provide a point of view seldom revealed in the literary and journalistic treatment of the sport. This is the boxers view. That this boxer is a woman adds complex new dimensions to an age-old experience.

Denfeld was not boxing so she could write this book, but the book was the logical result of her boxing. For Denfeld the writer, the ring becomes a lens to examine issues much larger than those surrounding one arcane sport. It exposes the cultural mythology surrounding women and aggression, and provides an opportunity to document the rich, multifaceted reality that flatly contradicts the myths.

As Denfeld makes clear, the same superstitions and preconceptions that prevented women from boxing have traditionally excluded them from many other activities. And these beliefs are still commonly held in far more sophisticated circles by women and men alike. The crustiest of boxings curmudgeons might well agree with some radical feminists and conservatives that women can be injured more easily than males, that they are dramatically weaker in physiological design and cannot develop strength. They would agree on the core belief that women do not possess the same aggressive capacity required for voluntary violence, that women are somehow further evolved, spiritually and morally superior to the crass inclinations to fight, more inclined to nurture and placate than to compete, and therefore more likely to be abused and exploited than to hold their own, to take care of themselves. Rene Denfeld says it isnt so, none of it. And she offers proof.

In 1960, just seven years before Denfeld was born, my high school physical education teacher gravely warned her female students that running too far or fast would render us permanently sterile. Believing her in those pre-Pill days of sketchy birth control, some of us took to pelting gleefully around the track at every opportunity. Now the women runners fly past my city windows at dawn, many of them mothers or future mothers, training for marathons.

Plenty of ignorance and fear, as well as outmoded tradition and misguided fantasy, are still tangled up in our thinking about human biology and behavior, and particularly about the limits of female ability. The last three decades have produced enormous progress toward legal and social equality for women in the United States. Still, at the brink of the twenty-first century, a major subtext for political and social debate is the physical and psychological difference between males and females. The presumption of significant differences between the sexes has traditionally affected our laws, social programs, educational systems, work opportunities, sports, and pastimes.

Denfeld explains that the old claims of difference have now boiled down to this most adamant corethe insistence that females are inherently less aggressive, less inclined to violence, than men. After introducing the reader to the gym and to amateur boxing through her own novice eyes, she considers the broadly defined concept of aggression and critiques the popular claims that females lack it. Armed with meticulous research, she discusses gender differences in terms of physical strength and the many social and environmental factors that influence them.