Today I Learned...

Insurance cost for martial arts is vastly, vastly lower than that of dance or yoga. I knew that dance was horribly destructive mess, but the yoga thing surprised me. I put it down to a combination of bad teachers and "no one expects to pull something in yoga". You might get injured more often in martial arts, but you're not really in a position to sue if you break a rib when someone kicks you in contact sparring. You knew the risks when you signed up.

Warrior Girls brings up another possible explanation. All of the anti-injury programs focus on the following things: creating a balanced musculature, control, proprioception (knowing where your body is in space), developing the neuromuscular patterns to land softly and move deliberately. And what do you know, martial arts is all about all of those things. It even teaches you to do them at speed. Yoga does have the proprioception and control aspects, and I assume it develops muscles evenly, but it's easy to get lazy when you're moving so slowly.

This makes me feel substantially better for my tiny ninjas. I suspect a nontrivial number of them are, or will be, the highly focused one sport female athletes that are so prone to injuries. But not only are they getting cross training now (via the school's gym class rotation- which, coincidentally, also includes dance and yoga), but the things we're teaching them may be giving them the body and mind they need to prevent injury in the future. So there's another thing you can add to list of things I'm giving to the future.

As presented in Warrior Girls, the conversation on girls in sports goes something like this:

person 1: I am concerned about the higher rate of injuries in girls and women
person 2: The idea that sports are bad for a woman's reproductive system is preposterous. In fact, men get many more reproductive tract injuries on account of external genitalia.
person 1: ...but ACL tears.

And the thing is, they're both right. They're just not responding to each other. First, Person 1 is not suggesting that there are injuries that only occur to women, she's suggesting that there are injuries that occur in both sexes but more frequently in women. I think this is representative of a more general pattern in discussion of sex- and gender- based issues: confusing differences of kind with differences in amount. When popular articles come out saying that (straight) women value money and (straight) men value looks, feminists are quick to attack them as insane, or at best culturally based. The truth is that if you look at the actual data, you do see moderate differences in preferences- but in general, men and women have the same top five, and looks and money tend to be beaten out by things like kindness and sense of humor in both genders. It's inaccurate to say there are no differences, but it's equally inaccurate to describe women and men as wealth and boob seeking missles.

There's a really good metaphor for this in our endocrine system. We call testosterone the male hormone and estrogen the female hormone*, but the truth is that everyone has both, just in different proportions. And there are a ton hormones not affiliated with either sex, some of which have different distributions in men and women and some of which don't.

Secondly, Person 2 seems to be assuming Person 1 thinks the injury rate is a reason not to let girls play sports. She's not doing it maliciously, she's doing it because there are a lot of people who use concerns about safety as a trojan horse to getting their way, but in this case it's inacurrate. Person 1 just wants accurate statistics to make informed value judgements, and to minimize negative side effects. It's unfortunate that concern trolls will misuse this data, but you can't fight ignorance with ignorance.


*Which annoys me because estrogen isn't even a hormone, it's a class of hormones, and calling it a hormone allows people to market chemicals that match no molecule in the human body as estrogen. But this is not relevant to the story.