Another day, another garbage self-defense video getting way too much traction from unsuspecting people who don’t know any better. In this case, it’s a video from a channel called “5-Minute Crafts” that has racked up nearly three-million views (at the time of this post’s publication) in less than one day.
The video lists “30 easy self-defense tips” in fifteen minutes, and a large number of them are, for lack of a better word, crap. Some of them rely on pressure points that might help you win a play-wrestling match with your boyfriend (but that’s it), others involve “punching” your attacker in the face with your purse. The video also gets into things like how to escape a fire and how to tend to a wound, and a large number of the “tips” don’t actually fit into the category of what we’d consider “self-defense,” but hey, it’s better than thirty clips of a woman “fighting back” against a non-resistant opponent.
This isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last video like this to go viral, but I’m going to extend my plea into the internet universe again anyway: stop making “quick fix” self-defense videos. Instead, encourage people to get actual training from someone who actually knows what they’re doing. The false sense of confidence people get from thinking they know how to defend themselves is actually going to get them hurt or worse.
