Our culture is saturated by an understanding, or rather, an acceptance that violence against women is a constant possibility. For some of us, it feels less like a fear of if harm will come to us, but when it will. Carrying self defense weapons is as much of an acknowledgement of this as it is a refusal of it; it proves that we understand the normalized violent state we exist within while simultaneously demonstrating that we decline submission to it.
Self defense isn’t a flashing of brazen violence. It is a reaction to all of the violence forced upon us—interpersonal violence, physical violence, sexual violence, violence from the state. The tools and skills we have to deal with such subjugation have to be inherently violent. Back against the wall, would you act civilized? Is there anything civilized about survival?
The following piece compiles interviews with three participants—Erica, Ellie, and Ella—who all own self defense devices. These conversations reflect on their individual experiences with safety and self defense, and the personal beliefs and fears that have shaped the way they move throughout the world as women. Although their experiences vary, they are all part of a larger tapestry of our cultural moment, and the ways in which we continue to respond to the world around us. Look for them. They are everywhere.
Erica (24)
The brisk, windy Chicago day kept us inside, lapping against the windows at my back. We sat in warm lamplight; a calico peered curiously down at us from a wooden ledge. In her cowboy-themed apartment, covered in streamers and stars, western hats and handpainted horses, Erica told me about her arsenal of self-defense weapons.
Her collection began in high school, before she left for an exchange program in France. Erica’s grandfather gifted her a miniature Swiss Army knife, hoping that the wisdom of such a compact craftsman tool could provide a modicum of safety or skill when needed. After high school graduation, instead of a ceremonious gifting of graduation pearls to one’s daughter, Erica’s father bought her a pepper spray gun. From her stepfather? Two sets of knives. An interesting pattern was emerging, and it was during this time of change, as she was preparing to leave home for college, that Erica was first formally introduced to self defense.
“My dad and my grandpa, they both sat me down and told me, ‘We’re going to teach you a couple of moves,’ and they taught me a couple of combinations,” Erica told me.
“It was always on the back of my mind that evil people were out there, you know. But it was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, they really do exist.’”
There comes a time in every young woman’s life when a grim realization falls upon them—that there are people in the world who want to hurt you. I remember at nine years old, as I prepared for a week-long beach trip with a friend’s family, my mother instructed me on what to do if my friend’s father tried to act inappropriately towards me. The cognizance that any man, not just some nameless masked figure, could be capable of abuse was enough to make me sick. It instantly complicated my existence. It thrusted me into an unknown plane of brutality that I had no way out of—forced to be victimized, forced to wait for something bad to happen. Man vs. Bear, which would you choose?
“One of the combinations that my grandpa taught me was poking the person’s eyes out with your thumbs. I remember that being just a super visual image in my head..very visceral.”
These offerings of lessons and weaponry bestowed upon Erica by her forefathers marked a subliminal message. Even though the men in her life were looking after her, a stark division was drawn in the sand between girl and boy, man and woman. They sovereignly dubbed her knighthood (or in this case, womanhood), a pocket knife tapped on each shoulder, these gifts of ceremony uttering Keep this, you will need it. Life will be harder for you. Life is always more dangerous for a knight.
Women carrying self defense devices seems to suggest a different connotation than men carrying them. Women aren’t painted as inherently violent or capable of harm. “Self defense” is always emphasized before the word “weapons”. Our involvement in this conversation is reactionary. I conjure Margaret Atwood, writer of The Handmaid’s Tale: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” We hope we will never have to use our devices, yet we carry them because we believe that chance is extremely likely.
Erica has had a couple violent experiences out in the city. At one, a guy in a mosh pit was purposefully trying to push up against her little sister. She remembers pulling her sister back, and being pushed, until everything went black. The next thing she can remember is looking down at her knuckles and seeing blood. Erica says for her, it’s not so much defending herself, but defending other people that matters.
Ellie (22)
Ellie walked me down the steps to her black Subaru Impreza. We climbed into the two front seats, the interior noticeably tidy. A Sex Wax surf wax air freshener hung from her rearview mirror, a reminder of her childhood in Los Angeles.
“I hit puberty at a super early age, at the end of third grade,” Ellie told me. “I didn’t have to wear a training bra. I just jumped right into the A’s. And so I remember being 11 years old and being like, ‘Okay, no more wearing shorts on the street when I’m walking home.’ Which is so crazy talking about, because it’s been like 15 years of that. You know what I mean?” I do.
“When it goes on for so long, I think you get sort of comfortable having one ear out of your headphones and holding onto your purse and walking under street lights, that it becomes normal, but that’s not normal.”
Ellie grew up boxing, and is confident in the fact that she knows how to throw a punch. Her dad taught her never to punch first, but always to hit the hardest back. Action vs reaction. Similarly, a former boyfriend of my mother’s taught her to strike a punch with her thumb outside her other fingers so as to not break it—a tip she passed on to me.
Like Erica’s pepper spray gun, Ellie was gifted a self-defense device by her father. Walking in Chicago’s Chinatown with her parents, she came across a pair of nunchucks, which she begged her father to buy her. She eventually won him over by promising she would become proficient in them.
Like Erica, Ellie doesn’t believe her responsibility ends at her own personal safety. “The amount of times that I’ve been in an Uber with [a friend], and it’s a two-stop Uber, and I’m like, ‘Okay, is Shawn waiting up for you? Yeah? Your 200 pound football playing boyfriend?’”
Ella (23)
Ella lives close to the water, and the walk to her apartment feels about 20 degrees colder than anywhere else in the city. Her place is bright and tidy. The walls are covered with framed floral embroidery stitched by her grandmother and printed photos from her several-month-long solo trip abroad last year. Despite the cheery atmosphere, Ella shared her cynicism about self defense with me readily.
“It’s just an illusion,” she said with utmost assurance. “Having a gun makes you feel more powerful and it makes you feel more in control of your situation. The thing that makes me feel powerless is the government, and everything they do. There is no way that me with my .22 rifle could go against the police, the army, any unit of the government…It is really just about trying to feel in control.”
She isn’t speaking in hypotheticals. Ella, despite being a queer, anarcho-communist in her early 20s, owns a gun. In fact, she owns two. Her grandfather left them to her when he died; a .22 rifle and a shotgun. They are both back home in Ohio, but she got her Illinois Firearms Owner Identification Card a few years back. “My grandpa was a gun collector and also the treasurer of his gun club…He taught me how to shoot. My parents did not like it,” she laughs. Ella talks about her high school feminist awakening and her love for guns in the same breath; she feels as conflicted about gun ownership as much as anything else. “A lot of gun restriction legislation just makes it impossible for poor people to have guns, but rich people can have all the guns they want.” Due to Illinois registration law, you can’t buy a gun in Chicago, meaning you have to get to the suburbs to purchase a firearm. You also can’t take firearms on public transit— “Who can’t have a gun in Chicago? Anyone who doesn’t have a car.”
She clarifies, “I know why the laws are that way, ‘cause there is a history of bad gun violence in the city, so I’m not really proposing what the right thing to do is, but I will just say that it is…interesting,” she laughs again.
Ella’s catalyst for learning self defense, in the form of Krav Maga classes, was the summer of 2020, amidst violent police activity at Black Lives Matter protests across the country. “It was that violence that made me want to be able to fight,” she says, pulling at the threads of her jeans as she talks.
“I’m gay, I had at the time a trans girlfriend, I now also have a trans girlfriend,” she giggles. “But you know, you worry about the people in your life. I was like ‘Oh, I want to be able to protect my community.’”
The violence Ella fears is the same evil under a different name. The patriarchal macrocosm of the American government and all of its institutions—the police, the military, the justice system—allow the minute and major run-offs of ingrained prejudice against women and queer people to germinate into all aspects of our lives. Since the beginning of 2025, the concern for community safety against such institutions has been exasperated by the violent nature of ICE raids in cities like Chicago. Ella doesn’t necessarily fear personal violence as much as systemic violence.
We Must Protect Each Other
The impulse to protect each other is like an evolutionary instinct. We’re bound together through similar personal experiences of fear and harm, like a piece of red yarn that tethers us through trials of bad dates, catcalls, and terrifying encounters. Perhaps just like trauma can be passed down through generations or stored in the body’s nervous system, it feels as though sisterhood has been bred through legacies of prejudices against women. We retreat into one another, we relate to one another, and in our most dire moments, we protect one another.
These interviews are likely the most these women have talked about self defense before. We understand that this is the way things are. We are reserved to accept our weapons of choice by our fathers and grandfathers and to wander around in their world, clutching them desperately. Women are tired of expecting the worst. Men should be tired of retiring to the institutions that uphold their most perverted and harmful interests.
And so, I implore you to look for them. Hanging from keychains on bag straps and carabiners clipped on belt-loops. Clutched tightly in fists stuffed in deep jacket pockets or jingling around in the bases of purses. Look for them. Every single person who keeps one of these things on them has a reason. There was an impetus.