Think about it – how long have human females been set about to be less active than human males? Now compare that to how long they’ve actually been set to be *active* through serious sports and weight lifting – anything organized for them has been developed in the past two hundred or so years.

You’re all settling on women’s performances today after they’ve essentially only been able to develop themselves for about a fraction of the time that human males have.

It’s the biological conditioning of gender. Women keep training, they’ll get better and strong, or society can keep selling them the anorexic female image, to be a child for their male daddies, and keep getting weaker. Men can keep hiding their insecurities by developing muscle mass over them, and lord over their little codependent girls.

If you’re a woman – get stronger, physically and mentally. Or, like some of the posters here, you can settle for things as is and live in a world where your daughters always have to depend on someone else to be their ‘daddy’. How disgusting is that?

I actually think women should train with men, so that the conditioning goes even faster. Yeah, you’re going to get hurt and whatever, but that’s how you adapt, not by staying in your safe zone.

However, I do completely understand when African descendants in the US want to learn this African art form from African mestres and with their African brethren.

It is a value you may never understand, judging by the propaganda tone of your comment. It does not deal with reality.

The reality is that this is a fighting form that came from the African continent (with forms spanning from the African-American population of the US to even the Caribbean – that although these particular islands and the US did not have traffic with each other that was in any way significant, they did have a common ANGOLA/KONGO root.

This martial art was used in Brazil as a means of defense from the white captors/terrorists who held Africans in bondage and tortured and raped them literally to death. How ironic that now, this very same group/descendants now wish to adopt something this SACRED as their own, claiming (with all out propaganda/manipulation) that it’s for “everyone”. that’s a part of cultural appropriation and it’s nothing new, unfortunately.

You have no concept of what’s sacred, and frankly, in Brazil, the Portuguese are easily able to impose themselves on the Africans of Brazil. This is also done in the US, but not as easily – especially because they have Black Consciousness in the US, and understand limits/when something is SACRED GROUND. This is something you cannot understand.

This is why their sacred music is not “for everyone”, just because you like it. This is why their burial customs are not “for everyone” just because you like it. Equally, they feel that a sacred African art of fighting is not “for everyone” just because you like it.

By Americanized, at least when it comes to the Black population of the US, I assume you mean Capoeira is meeting Black Consciousness in the US. If so, then this is a very good thing. You’re attempting to justify the continued theft of Black bodies, souls, and now cultures because of your own agenda. But I’m here to let you know, your motives are transparent.

I’m still confused as to why anyone of European descent would not be interested in their own traditional music, dance, and fighting. I don’t understand at all the insecurity necessary to drive one to reject their own native culture and adopt a bastardized african one, under the guise of being “global”. There’s plenty of European folk, etc. that remains ignored dancewise, musicwise, and fighting wise by whites. I will never understand that insecurity.

My interest isn’t in absolute or even relative strength, but functional /dynamic strength. The competitive strength-based examples given by previous posters generally are hyper-focused on a few aspect of strength, such as absolute power or explosive speed. In these areas men do have an advantage. Not only due to muscle mass or twitch fibers, but also because of the propensity of men to use their brains in more compartmentalized ways. Women have advantages with regards to agility and balance, which relate to our propensity to use both sides of our brains more in unison. Evidence for this includes women having a thicker corpus collosum, the central region of the brain that connect the right and left hemispheres.

Part of what I love about capoeira is that to be effective requires dynamic, spontaneous movement that comes out of energy transference. Brut strength, power, bendyness, flow, and strategy separately aren’t enough. It’s about the synthesis of these (and more).

Personally, my goal is to get strong enough to move through any movement my body is compelled to go, functional / dynamic strength. I believe that once I can do this freely, then it will open up the game in a whole new way. Like when a child goes from crawling to walking, there is an accompanied developmental explosion in other areas, physically, cognitively, and socially. I guess in my case i also include persistence, and adaptability in my definition of strength. These last two seem to be increasingly influential as i get older, and yet still try and increase my abilities.

Safira xaxa

It’s not just physical strength either. Men are also faster, have more stamina, faster reflexes, are more explosive, and even a much higher tolerance for pain, all of which are very important factors in a fight.
Men also (usually) have the weight and reach advantage, which are also important.

Women can be stronger than most people believe them to be, but most women are still pretty weak. I see this on a daily basis at work, where most women can’t even handle doing a lot of the semi-heavy lifting that even the men who weigh much less can do. Less than 0.1% of women can be considered “strong” by a man’s standards of strength.