Putting It Down, Butt-Kicking Girls, and The Return of Samurai Jack

Last updated on: March 9, 2017 at 1:32 am by Tom Swiss

Putting It Down, Butt-Kicking Girls, and The Return of Samurai Jack 2017-03-09T01:32:39-04:00 Tom Swiss

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Another Wednesday, so it’s time for our usual set of three news bits.

Putting It Down

The Tattooed Buddha recently shared one of my favorite Zen stories on their Facebook page:

A senior monk and a junior monk were traveling together. At one point, they came to a river with a strong current. As the monks were preparing to cross the river, they saw a very young and beautiful woman also attempting to cross. The young woman asked if they could help her cross to the other side.

The two monks glanced at one another because they had taken vows not to touch a woman.

Then, without a word, the older monk picked up the woman, carried her across the river, placed her gently on the other side, and carried on his journey.

The younger monk couldn’t believe what had just happened. After rejoining his companion, he was speechless, and an hour passed without a word between them.

Two more hours passed, then three, finally the younger monk could contain himself any longer, and blurted out “As monks, we are not permitted a woman, how could you then carry that woman on your shoulders?”

The older monk looked at him and replied, “Brother, I set her down on the other side of the river, why are you still carrying her?”

Butt-Kicking Girls

In honor of International Women’s Day (originally, International Working Women’s Day, a socialist commemoration, but that’s a rant for another time), here’s something I wrote two years about about girls and women in the martial arts: Girls Kick Butt:

It’s true that on average, women have less upper body strength than men, and so at this early stage they might come to feel that they just can’t hit hard. But as someone who has been punched and kicked by quite a few women in the dojo over the years, I can attest that that is not the case!

As we develop our technique we learn to power our techniques through the legs, hips, and pelvis, using the “core” muscles to put the whole body into a strike. And there is less of a difference in raw muscle strength here — women may even have greater core strength. Also as we develop technique, flexibility comes more into play, the ability to relax one muscle while tightening its antagonist. And women may, on average, have an advantage in flexibility and coordination. They also seem to have sharper senses of vision and hearing, which can give an advantage in sparring.

We have to use a lot of “maybes” and “probablys” here, because for most of history boys and girls were socialized very differently, and still are to some degree. So even if they started with the same capabilities as babies they would develop them differently. It’s not easy to say what differences in athletic performance are entirely due to biology, and what might be due to the different ways girls and boys are encouraged to play and thus to develop their bodies early on.

Samurai Jack. Image from Turner via NPR, fair use

The Return of Samurai Jack

Speaking of martial arts, one of the great fictional martial arts heroes is about to return. Samurai Jack, last seen in 2004, is about to return for a fifth and final season.

It’s set to be “darker and edgier” than the first four seasons; in the series’s universe, Jack’s quest for a way back to his own time has continued for a fruitless 50 years, leaving our hero with a heck of a weight to carry. And the move to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block probably means that Jack won’t just be slicing and dicing the robots that kept the original series’s violence safely in the fantasy category. But I think Genndy Tartakovsky will do it right.

Tartakovsky’s influences include Kurosawas samurai movies, American westerrns, and film noir. At their best, all of these genres have the hero facing an ethical quandary, trying to behave with honor in a world that doesn’t always respect that. Unfortunately that seems a highly topical theme.

Random Wednesdays

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International Women's Day

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