OSD 277: The arms of a woman, part two
Bullshido by gender.
(A few weeks ago we ran “OSD 271: The arms of a woman”. This week is a continuation.)
This image came up on /r/Firearms last week:
The gist is “Why do men have self-defense tools that work while women get sold bullshido?” Let’s examine that.
First, is it really true that men don’t get fake techniques marketed to them? We wrote an edition of this newsletter about the fact that they do:
The difference is not quite that men don’t get sold bullshido, it’s that men don’t get sold exclusively bullshido. There’s fake stuff out there, but it’s counterbalanced by plenty of real stuff. Whereas for women, that counterbalance is mostly absent.
That’s driven by three things.
The first is cultural. There’s a stronger cultural stigma against women carrying a gun than men carrying a gun. That stigma can be reinforced by women themselves, or by well-meaning husbands who insist on personally shouldering all of the self-defense thinking for the house. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem — women have less experience with guns, so of course they’ll be less comfortable with them. And that discomfort risks nipping any curiosity about guns in the bud. So if a woman is out to lunch with a few friends and mentions she’s thinking about carrying a gun, at least one or two friends are going to be shocked by that. There are stock lines here — “Your risk goes up just by having a gun in the house”, “They’ll just take it away from you and use it on you”, etc. They might be easy to debunk, but that doesn’t matter. A newfound interest is incredibly fragile. Offhand comments like that from a friend are enough to kill the interest.
The second driver is products. It’s hard to carry a gun comfortably. As a shortcut, you’ll hear advice like “buy pants that are one size too big” or “dress around the gun”. That’s a non-starter. To generalize, women care a lot more than men about what they wear and how it fits. For all but the most dedicated women, their clothing choices are not going to bend to their gun. The gun has to fit into their existing fashion, quickly and comfortably. The carry equipment ecosystem just isn’t at the point yet where that’s easy. That leaves purse carry (which is probably better than nothing, but comes with its own risks since a purse is the first thing a thief would grab) or mace. All the other bullshido tools don’t work, but they sell because they are feasible to carry. Lifestyle compatibility matters.
The third and final driver is subtle but important: modern ad tech tools. See this comment from the reddit thread:
As a 5’2” woman, I get a lot of targeted ads for self defense gadgets like those pictured on the right, rarely ever am I actually advertised to by actual gun companies. I’ve seen numerous tiktoks of women showing off their elaborate self-defense gadgets and techniques and it’s like okay, now where's your gun?
There’s a simple reason she doesn’t get targeted ads for guns: all the big ad networks ban guns. But they allow fake self-defense tools, so that’s what women see. So if you make an effective self-defense weapon and want to use industry-standard ad tools to tell new people about it, you’re stuck. You’re confined to the people who find out about your product organically, and that will have status quo inertia to it. (Side note, we recently invested in Armanet, which runs an ad network that does allow guns. They’re fixing this problem. See more in “OSD 264: Fully ad-o-matic”.)
These three things are interrelated. So there are no magic bullets to fix them, but there’s a flip side to that interconnectedness — any improvement to one will help improve the others. That’s good news. Keep working on it.
This week’s links
“Don’t be a tactical hobo”
A classic video from Lucky Gunner about fashion and concealed carry. On-topic for the essay above.
.38 TPC
A new cartridge from Taurus. Brazil banned 9mm last summer, so this is designed as a workaround. h/t Discord moderator @JM for flagging this.
More about Open Source Defense
Merch
Stickers for your safe or your Pelican cases.
OSD Discord server
If you like this newsletter and want to talk live with the people behind it, join the Discord server. The OSD team is there along with tons of readers. See you there.
It's a pain knowing I'm not the only one who's experienced this pearl-clutching from others when I casually say I want to get a gun license. Holding keys when I walk at night won't keep me safe. Putting a gun in my purse is a liability issue.
It's almost like people think women are just gonna shoot themselves they moment they get a gun.
This is a tangent completely unrelated to guns but it's one of my Big Ideas so I have to soapbox
> “Your risk goes up just by having a gun in the house”,
This is one of the dumbest classes of argument that people have ever come up with. You see it happen a lot and it seems to specifically happen in the 'professional managerial class', the white collar bureaucrats and corporate people who run most stuff.
They're always reading this or that social science study, and taking the conclusions way too seriously. They'll read a study that shows (assume for sake of argument it's real; I assume it's not) that, _correlatively_, people with guns in their houses have a higher risk of gun violence than people who don't. And then they'll commit the fallacy of division and assume that the results of that study are applicable to their situation.
But they literally never are! Because that's not how statistics work. The study is aggregating over all Americans. But the hypothetical woman saying that line in this example is not _all_ Americans. She is _one_ American. She has additional information that gives her a better picture of her risk than is possible for the study to have, namely, knowledge about herself.
Assume for sake of argument that whatever study that shows that gun ownership = increased risk, is _true_. That's a statistical aggregate. It will _always_ be overridden by the direct information that you have about the specifics of your situation.
To frame it another way: Let's say hypothetically that there is a study that shows that gun ownership = increased risk of suicide. Maybe the average suicide rate in gun-free households is 1% and the average rate in gun households is 2%. YOUR PERSONAL RISK OF SUICIDE IS NEITHER OF THOSE NUMBERS. Your _personal_ risk of suicide is either 0% or 100%, and, critically, you know (or should know) yourself well enough to know which bucket you fall into. No study should ever change your mind on this.