Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad — Episode 33 — Rewriting the Body's Response to Violence with Maren Forsberg
Matthew Remski: Hello everyone, this is Matthew Remski with episode 33 of Antifascist Dad podcast, Rewriting the Body's Response to Violence with Maren Forsberg.
Maren Forsberg: I'm convinced that for people who are under any sort of racial, social, or gender-based oppression, martial arts and self-defense can be tools for resisting fascism. Fascism at its core is about creating fear and control. It's about the idea that something about us — our country, our identity, our race — is threatened, and that someone else is to blame for that. And once you start believing in that, it's much easier to justify using force, oppression, or violence. And fascism is very present today. It just changed form since the Second World War. They just grew their hair out and learned how to navigate mainstream politics using rhetoric like "we're concerned for the safety of our people." Across Europe, including Norway, far-right parties are growing and seeing huge success in elections over the past decade. And at the same time we're seeing more targeted violence against immigrants, people with minority backgrounds, queer and trans people, and not to mention women.
Matthew Remski: So that's coming up. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and I'm on YouTube and TikTok as antifascistdad. If you'd like to support this show, the handle is antifascistdadpodcast on Patreon, where subscribers get early access to every second part of these main feed episodes, including this one — so it's up right now. Sometimes it's the second part of the interview; today it's a brief coda essay on the history of antifascist physical culture. And if you can afford to support the show, those Patreon episodes all eventually get unlocked.
Also in the show notes you will find a link to order my new book. It's called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. If you have the book in hard copy, ebook, or audiobook form, please consider reviewing it — that helps with visibility.
Today I'm joined by Maren Forsberg, a nationally ranked kickboxer in Norway who now works as a trainer in self-defense with a special focus on building antifascist courage and resilience for women, queer, and trans folks. I came across her work through that Instagram post I rolled at the top of the episode, and I immediately reached out to her and she got right back to me, and I'm really grateful for that for so many reasons. I'll list them here.
Women and minorities have always known that their safety is not assured in public spaces. But as economic conditions in capitalist countries deteriorate and the misogynistic resentments of fascism rise, we're now seeing a surge of fascist street-fighting training clubs pop up in major cities. In the US, the Trump administration is actively criminalizing and harassing anyone associated with antifascism. Also in the US but also in Canada, the UK, and the EU, the increasing criminalization of protest — especially in relation to the pro-Palestine movement, reproductive rights, and eco-resistance to data centers and pipelines — is bringing more and more leftists into contact with state violence.
One of the most crucial things to remember about the rise of early twentieth-century fascism was that it was built on street violence. In both Germany and Italy, fascist gangs were organized terror forces that attacked communist meetings, union halls, and leftist newspapers. They intimidated or murdered opponents while cultivating an image of masculine vitality that attracted recruits and intimidated liberal institutions into capitulation. Their appetite and zeal for violence demonstrated the weakness of the liberal state and how ready its leaders were to accommodate them. Paradoxically, the Freikorps and later the Brownshirts, and the Blackshirts in Italy, showed that they had the capacity to restore order amidst the chaos they themselves were creating. Paradoxically, the liberal elites turned to them as they sought protection from leftist resisters. So Mussolini and Hitler knew that street violence would always beat the ass of deliberative democracy, and that by asserting dominance in the streets they could capture institutions and suppress dissent.
So that's the macro picture.
On the micro level — the level of the tender animal body — the effects of fascist violence rewire the nervous system of its targets for freezing, folding, and appeasement. Or the tend-and-befriend response that could organically enhance solidarity within a group attacked from the outside is hijacked, causing a person to unconsciously bet that showing deference to their aggressor will keep them safe.
So what happens to the body of the woman, the immigrant, the queer or trans person who is constantly assessing and protecting their basic safety? In Maren's description, people can withdraw, become smaller, attempt to be less noticeable. And that's what she's dedicating her work to — resisting, one class at a time.
In our conversation, we talk about how fascist aggression is proactive, not reactive. It enters the room already carrying its agenda and seeking a target. And its vulnerability is the assumption that the target is already weak and won't defend itself. Another vulnerability is that it is performative — it requires witnesses to exist. If you remove the crowd or outnumber the attackers, a lot of it collapses.
But how to defend oneself? Maren says that meeting fascist attacks with equal aggression gives them what they want, while calm, ridicule, and the refusal to shrink shift the dynamic.
Now another point Maren makes is something I talked about with Muay Thai fighter and street rebellion researcher Ben Case back on episode four. Physical strength and a trained nervous system aren't the same thing. Your amygdala doesn't care how much you bench press, as Maren says. And there's a difference between hitting a bag and sparring with a person — and that's a difference you want to feel when you come across numbers like those Maren states in our discussion, which is that seventy percent of sexual assault survivors in a Swedish study experienced the freeze response, which the brain stores as success because it was associated with survival.
And I love where we end the episode — in our shared fandom of Japanese kickboxer Mona Kimura, who is undefeated because she can hop on one leg seemingly indefinitely and strike with her raised leg with impunity from a great distance, all while dressed like an anime character. Her opponents just can't get near her. And the vibe is that marginalization and queerness are also unique, and that can be a secret weapon in self-defense. Training those who already know they are different can turn difference into an unpredictable strength.
Here's my conversation with Maren.
Maren Forsberg, thank you so much for joining me on Antifascist Dad.
Maren Forsberg: Super, super excited to be here. I was really positively surprised when I received this transatlantic request. So yeah, it's really a pleasure to be here.
Matthew Remski: Well, I was really glad that you responded to me. I think that your message and your content on Instagram is fantastic. So let's get into it. And I wanted to do that by starting really early in your story. Your dad is a jiu-jitsu guy, and you describe play fighting with him as a kid. Did he help you develop a positive feeling about your own bodily boundaries and your strength?
Maren Forsberg: Yeah. So my dad, he practiced Japanese jiu-jitsu throughout the 80s and 90s with his grandpa as well.
Matthew Remski: Oh wow.
Maren Forsberg: So yeah, martial arts has definitely been a theme in our family through generations, and he definitely did help me build a positive relationship to my bodily strength, at least. I think my first memory of these living room play fight sessions was him helping or teaching me how to defend myself against someone grabbing my hair. And I remember myself twisting his arm and throwing him to the ground. And keep in mind that I was probably seven years old at this point, so he definitely exaggerated his movements to make me feel powerful. But it definitely worked because I felt like I was learning superpowers, and we were repeating these exercises over and over and it never got old. I loved it so much. And I have two older siblings, and for some reason they just never really cared about this. So my dad just focused on teaching me these skills.
Matthew Remski: He focused on you. Right. Okay.
Maren Forsberg: I was the one. I was the chosen one. He says it's because he saw something special in me. I guess you call it the fighter spirit. This concept of, you know, anyone can practice combat sports, but not everyone is a fighter. I kind of love this concept, and I think I see it a lot, especially when working with kids myself, that there are some of these kids who have some sort of hunger, extra hunger, or sparkle in their eyes when they enter this practice, and they meet it with a sort of presence and excitement that other kids don't. And I think my dad probably saw that in me. Thanks to my dad, I learned that being strong and brave and fierce are awesome qualities to have regardless of who you are, and not just something that the boys around me could project. And I'm just really grateful that I got to maybe bypass a little bit of that early socialization that often leaves girls feeling like they need to be soft and gentle in order to be loved and accepted. But whether that actually translated into me respecting my own boundaries, that's a different question. A more complex question, maybe. I think these sessions with my dad definitely planted something important in me — that I knew that defending myself was my right. But boundaries are deeply complex because so many violations are not directly physical or painful, like many of the scenarios that martial arts train you for. They're emotional, they're social, they're sexual, they're often quiet. And I think the hardest part is not necessarily defending yourself once you've recognized the threat, but it can be even harder to learn to recognize the threat in the first place. That's actually a big part of the work that I do today — I try to expand a little bit on the teachings from martial arts and work on building a deeper relationship to our inner signals and boundaries.
Matthew Remski: I'm going to totally pick up on that particular theme. But I just want to ask about this moment in which dad is obviously play acting getting defeated by the daughter. And it makes me think about how much of our current understanding of physical martial arts is also confused by the pro wrestling notion of kayfabe — making up the notion that you're actually in a conflict, making it look bigger than it is, and somehow gaining a sense of character and strength from triumphing in what begins as a fictional situation but can then translate into real life.
Maren Forsberg: Definitely. I think for him his main goal of doing that was to just make me excited about the opportunities I could find in this space, to motivate me to go deeper into it. Definitely worked. But yeah, martial arts provides exactly that space for you to expose yourself to scenarios that imitate these big, dangerous, real-life situations. And then you get to choose your response within that, which provides a lot of really exciting results.
Matthew Remski: So you continue on this learning pathway to the point at which you are nationally competitive in kickboxing, which means that you wind up in the ring doing it for real. And I want to ask about that transition. When I was a boy, there were several incidents in which I instinctively punched back at bullies. And whenever that happened — and it worked in terms of getting bullies off my back because the punches actually landed — I was filled with exhilaration but also this feeling of dread that I had done something I couldn't take back, something that could have really harmed the other kid. And so I never had any formal training toward the situation in which I would be allowed to strike someone within the rules of a match. And so I'm wondering how you got to that point, and was there a shock when you crossed over the line from pretending with your dad to actually hitting your opponent for real?
Maren Forsberg: First of all, bless little Matthew's heart. I think what you're describing is such a beautiful, complex human emotion — this mix of exhilaration and dread — because what it reveals is that as a kid you were able to separate the bully's cruel actions from their inherent humanity. You had the exhilaration as maybe a projection of relief that you were able to respond to that attack, and the dread as a projection of your empathy, and being able to hold and feel both of those at once.
Matthew Remski: I think you're being very kind. There is some empathy in there, but I also think there's a more raw fear: I really did something bad. I might get in trouble. I mean, yes, I'm thinking he could have hit his head on the concrete, he could be hurt. But I also feel like I violated some principle of manners and civil society. So I feel guilty, not just empathetic. I appreciate you calling out my gentle goodness, but it was a bit more self-interested, or shameful, than that.
Maren Forsberg: Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, I can definitely relate to that from my own experience. I think martial arts — maybe through my practice with my dad — was so normalized for me that I moved through these initial shocks quite quickly. And so when I started practicing kickboxing seriously around the age of fifteen, I got very quickly comfortable with contact and with impact. But I would spend entire sparring sessions hiding behind my boxing gloves. I don't remember the feeling of fear so much. I remember the feeling of impatience and frustration with my level, not being able to react quickly enough or find openings quickly enough. But the turning point for me happened a little later. I had this huge wake-up call in a match against a girl who was significantly shorter than me. We were in the same weight class, but bodies can look very different and still weigh the same. And I remember, I think due to nerves, I completely lost my ability to calibrate my power and I totally overran this poor girl. And I remember her in the breaks between rounds going up to her coach — she was crying, she was scared — but I was full of adrenaline and not really able to connect to the moment until afterwards. And I felt this enormous guilt. It was really horrible. And also realizing that this is not at all the type of winning I want for myself. But I had been given the perfect opportunity to prove myself to myself, to my coach, to my family. And I took that very unfairly out on her.
Matthew Remski: When you say that you failed to calibrate your own strength, are you saying that in the moment you should have been able to do that, or aren't you just in a situation in which you're supposed to fight to the best of your ability?
Maren Forsberg: I think learning to calm yourself down and regulate in a match is an absolute essential part of becoming a good combat athlete.
Matthew Remski: And that means not overdoing it.
Maren Forsberg: That means not losing contact with your power. It's not just in order to create a safe space, but also for you to be in contact with what you know — your knowledge, your techniques. If you're completely agitated and activated and you're basically in a fight response, then you're going to struggle to connect with all of your technique and your strategy. But yeah, this definitely taught me that dominating someone who is clearly scared is not a victory worth having to me. And I think that experience is baked into how I practice today and also how I teach. I'm definitely not interested in making someone dominant — I'm interested in making people feel capable. And there's always an aspect of consent in that. I think I've had many matches and sparring sessions where we've both gone full on until both our noses are bleeding, and it looks extremely brutal and intense from the outside, but we're both enjoying it so much and we're fully at peace with doing this in the moment and afterwards. Because there's consent, because we're listening to each other's needs, because we have chemistry. And that's the thing about contact in combat sports — it's not the impact that determines whether something feels safe or violent. It's that chemistry, it's the consent, it's the continuous reading of the situation.
Matthew Remski: It's so fascinating. And I'm wondering how this recognition of the need to maintain contact and a certain amount of discipline relates to how you go on to look at martial arts and self-defense in the context of defending people against bullies. In those childhood incidents I was talking about, I felt the instinct to hit back at the bully because they were bullying really deeply. And I still feel this today. If I see someone being physically intimidated or attacked, I want to immediately intervene, even if the situation seems dangerous. And I'm wondering if you have that same reflex as well, and maybe if you have to mitigate or mediate it through your training.
Maren Forsberg: My closest friends describe me as very, very protective. And I think I've lived through enough in this life already. At twenty-six, both what you might call kind of low-level violations, but also on the more extreme side of this spectrum. And having experienced what this feels like, what trauma does to a person, how it reorganizes your life, your relationships, your sense of self, your connection to your body — I feel a duty to step in when I see it happening to someone else. So I completely relate to this automatic reaction. For me, practically, this shows up the most in nightlife. I used to be a big fan of dancing, but I've completely stopped going out to clubs, for example, because I become so hyper-vigilant. I spend fifty percent of my time watching out for men who look like they're about to cross a line, or looking out for people who might need someone to notice that this is happening to them. I've stopped countless drunk dudes approaching young women or girls waiting for their night bus on their way home, or people forcing themselves on my friends or on strangers. I know this sounds exhausting, being this hyper-vigilant, and it is. But I wish I could move through the world without knowing what I know. But my experience has taught me otherwise. And I've made some sort of peace with that. I think now this hyper-vigilance is not something I'm trying to get rid of anymore. It's something that I'm trying to transform — to take what has happened to me and to my loved ones and turn it into something useful. That might mean that other people get to carry a little less of it, which is, I suppose, why I'm here.
Matthew Remski: And it's also just something that you can't do all the time. Because nobody is paying you to be Spider-Man. In one of your posts on antifascist self-defense, your caption reads: "I often work with people with lived experience of violence, harassment, and discrimination. This form of oppression is not abstract and theoretical. It shows up in their body as feeling unsafe, hesitating, shrinking, going quiet." You're describing a lifetime of nervous system responses that have turned into a kind of habitus, a kind of way of being in your body within a particular space. And I'm wondering if you had to learn about that yourself, given the fact that it sounds like you had this fairly strong sense of confidence from early on in childhood. Did you have to get into or learn something different to be able to understand what types of defense people need?
Maren Forsberg: Unfortunately, I didn't have to learn it from doing research. I got to live some of it myself. So yes, and I say this without hesitation. And I think it's also important to me to not carry some sort of arrogance around the fact that I'm a self-defense coach. Training combat sports and self-defense for over a decade didn't reset my trauma or return me to some sort of state of blissful ignorance. Trauma changes you on a neurological level. And I can say that I carry this myself. For many years I lived as a shadow of myself. I was very, very anxious. I had health problems that nobody could explain. I had a horrible body image, and I spent time around people that made my stomach clench. And I stayed in intimate relationships that hurt me. And I had never really learned what it meant to hold or to set a boundary. This was not a concept that I had grasped in my life. And it is such a scary life experience to live like that, because if you never feel safe in your own body, then where are you supposed to feel safe? I think a lot of this changed for me over the course of the past five years, and there's a huge combination of aspects leading to that. But yes, the people that I work with definitely are not imagining a danger. And we know this because one in three women experience some sort of physical or sexual violence throughout their lifetime. And transgender people are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to experience violent crimes. And then you look at trans women of color, and it's even higher than that. It just adds on and on. So when I see women and queer and trans people in my classes carrying this quiet tension in their bodies, this hesitation, this shrinking, going silent — I know that it's not oversensitivity. I know that it's a completely rational response from their nervous system to a world that has given them very good reasons to feel unsafe.
What happens when this is your reality? I was reading a study from Sweden — I think it's from 2017 — with a large sample of women who were treated at a clinic for sexual assault victims in Stockholm. And researchers found that seventy percent of these women had experienced a freeze response during their assault. Seventy percent. And the uncomfortable truth about the freeze response is that once you have had an episode of high stress or trauma in your life and you responded with freeze, chances are very high you're going to respond again with a freeze response if you experience similar stress, because your brain has stored that as a success — because you came out of it and you survived. We see this very often: people get stuck in this loop of detachment and shutting down when they experience stress, which is a very scary place to be. You lose trust in your ability to defend yourself and in your body's ability to be there for you when you need it. And this is exactly where martial arts become so useful, because when we practice striking or kicking, defending ourselves, resisting within a safe environment where we're creating scenarios that imitate danger, we're giving the nervous system the opportunity to rewrite the story, to create options. And slowly the body also learns that it has more options than it initially thought. And I truly believe that this had an impact on me. I experience myself as much, much quicker to act, quicker to step in, quicker to speak up for myself. I carry myself with a completely different presence and confidence than before. And I know where I have myself. And I think this knowledge is what I want to give to other people as well.
Matthew Remski: So I want to come back to this moment in which the training of oppression is somehow very mysteriously broken through, which must be a very individual experience for everyone. But I want to ask a few questions about what people actually face in terms of fascist aggression and how we understand it. My understanding is that fascist aggression revolves around grievance, white alienation, fear, and resentment of immigrants and the marginalized. So two questions: are you able to connect with those feelings and sensibilities in order to understand and predict what might happen in a conflict? And is the fascist physical aggression and pride that so many people end up facing in the streets ultimately fragile?
Maren Forsberg: I think it's really key to understand that not all aggression looks or feels the same. How I see it, to put it very simply, is that fascist aggression is something that happens when people are terrified of losing their power, and they take that fear out on anyone they've decided deserves less of it. And what I observe is that it's very often proactive — it's very rarely reactive. This is not someone who has been cornered and then lashes out. This is someone who is already carrying something when they enter the room. You can see it — they make themselves big, puffing up their chest. They seek out their target proactively, and often those targets are immigrants, or queer or trans people, or marginalized people. They move towards people, they stare them down, they shout slurs. There's an intentionality to it that reactive aggression — or what we call social violence — doesn't have. But what's happening underneath that performance is the opposite of strength and dominance, in how I see it. This is someone who feels small, someone who's terrified of losing status or privilege, or terrified of losing their place in a world that is slowly and rightfully giving more room to people who have historically been pushed out. Obviously, when difficult things happen in these people's lives — if they're losing a job or a relationship is falling apart — that latent frustration needs somewhere to go. If you've been fed a steady diet of content telling you that Muslims are the problem or that trans people are some sort of virus, then suddenly you have a target. And suddenly it doesn't even feel like hatred anymore. It feels like purpose. And this is the scary thing. This information is useful in conflict, not because it makes them less dangerous — and I think that's an important point, that fascist aggression is not something to just laugh at, because it can mobilize and escalate extremely fast. We see this in history. Understanding it maybe helps us understand how to meet it, because what we know is that meeting these attacks with the same level of aggressivity gives them exactly what they want. But if we meet them with calm, or with ridicule, or an absolute refusal to shrink, that's a completely different dynamic. But we can't do that alone. And this is again why antifascist self-defense is collective. It's so important that it is collective, because fascist aggression depends on people feeling alone and isolated. And I think the most powerful thing we can do is to make sure that they're not. And that's not just solidarity, but it's tactics — that we show up for each other and make sure that we outnumber them. To your second question of whether fascist physical pride is fragile: to pull a parallel to martial arts, we see that with serious martial artists, the higher the level, the more chill and sweet these people are.
Matthew Remski: Oh, really?
Maren Forsberg: Yeah. I mean, that's at least in my experience. I know that there are exceptions to this, and especially if you're into UFC.
Matthew Remski: Which seems to be its own category, because everything that I'm hearing from you — even with regard to the skill involved with maintaining contact with your training and not letting yourself become over-adrenalized — it really feels as though UFC is a scenario in which all of those rules or standards or pieces of discipline are consciously stripped away so that the spectacle of absolutely unbridled violence can be sold.
Maren Forsberg: It's a much more performative part of these practices. I really don't follow it, and it's not within my interest at all. But yeah, at least in my humble experience, the higher the level of people I practice with, the sweeter they are. And I think fascist physicality is almost the opposite of that. It's performed for an audience, and it requires witnesses to exist. And that dependence on external validation is exactly what makes it fragile. If you take away the group, you take away the audience, a lot of it collapses.
Matthew Remski: Well, in my book I made a study of Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who was punched on camera during an inauguration event by a Black Bloc anarchist. And it turned into this spectacle, an internet meme fest that celebrated his humiliation. And I think there are many drawbacks to that — there could be backlash, of course — but what was notable was that after that incident he really retreated from public life. The notion that he needed to not be seen as physically vulnerable in the space in which he was being aggressive was key to his identity. And I think maybe part of what goes on with the fragility of fascist performances is that they can't lose. They can't afford to lose or to be hurt. And I think antifascists from time immemorial have been hurting all the time. I think we're very used to it. And so I think there's a real difference there.
Maren Forsberg: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's a perfect example.
Matthew Remski: I wanted to also mention this beautiful Quebecois film from 1992, Léolo. The protagonist is this young boy who has an older brother who, in one pivotal moment, gets beaten up by skinheads on the street in Montreal. And so the older brother commits himself to heavy weightlifting to build up this kind of physical armor. And then there's a film montage tracking a couple of years of time — he's bench pressing as a slender sixteen-year-old, and then he's eighteen and he looks like a huge bodybuilder. But then the next scene is that he's confronted by the same bullies again, and he has a freeze response and he gets pummeled. And it's devastating. I think this is the most clear depiction I've seen of what you're talking about — you can begin to train yourself, you can begin to think about taking back your own space, but if you have an embedded freeze response, you will still have a lot of obstacles. Can you talk about how that particular threshold gets crossed?
Maren Forsberg: I haven't seen this film, but it illustrates this very important point that is often misunderstood, and that is that physical strength and a trained nervous system are not the same thing. You can build armor on the outside and still freeze when it matters, because your amygdala definitely doesn't care how much you can bench press when the threat is too much to handle. And this is exactly why sparring is so impactful — because when you spar, you're learning to stay present and functional while someone is actually coming at you, which is a completely different skill than just hitting mitts. One thing I've noticed very clearly in my own experience of sparring for years is an extreme tolerance for impact and pain. I very rarely flinch when I get hit, and I genuinely think it's neuroscientific: when you expose your amygdala to stress that looks like violence but happens within a safe container, you develop a very refined ability to differentiate between discomfort and actual danger. And a lot of what we experience as pain is actually danger amplifying a lesser sensation of pain. So when you remove the danger, the pain becomes something that you can stay present with. And that translates into other stressors as well — your body is essentially better at differentiating between stress and danger, so it can stay present and functional for longer.
Matthew Remski: I don't think there's a lot of difference between what you're describing and what somebody like Alex Honnold does when he's free climbing a mountain face. He can distinguish between what's dangerous and what's not dangerous, and there's no way that any of us watching can make that distinction. He might have a very unusual amygdala, but he's also incredibly trained.
Maren Forsberg: There are many ways of doing this. It's called stress inoculation. Even cold exposure — jumping in ice-cold water, or high-intensity training — provides some level of stress inoculation. But obviously you're not going to become a great fighter from jumping in a pool of cold water. And also no amount of sparring can guarantee that you're not going to freeze in a stressful situation. I really don't think the freeze response is going anywhere. So it's not a conversation of removing the freeze response — but what we can do is definitely reduce the likelihood of it taking control, dramatically, by giving the nervous system enough experiences of acting under stress that it has something to reach for.
Matthew Remski: It's so amazing to think about all of this extrapolated out into the larger political body as well, because I think all of these principles are applicable to activists, to people who are doing electoral politics, to people who are facing fascist trolling as content creators — talking about a skill set, an inoculation to stress that, if a person has access to it, would be applicable in many different areas.
Maren Forsberg: I say at this point that self-defense is like my lifestyle, my life philosophy, because it stretches across so many aspects of my life. And I think on this topic specifically, I'm far less likely to freeze if a stranger tries to punch me than if someone I love crosses a line. And this is again a very important aspect of this — social dynamics change everything. You're naturally more reluctant to hurt someone that you love. And if you add aspects like power imbalances, emotional abuse, financial dependence, or gray zones of intimacy into that, suddenly this physical training becomes almost beside the point. So for those situations, we need to approach self-defense from a completely different angle than just the physical training. It's also about learning to listen to our body's inner signals of danger, of comfort and discomfort, to practice the daily, non-glamorous boundary settings of choosing what to eat for lunch, or choosing to stay home to rest. There are so many angles to approach this.
Matthew Remski: Zeroing in on this threshold question — the person who has been habituated by physical intimidation and oppression to a kind of retreat, the queer or trans or marginalized person who has never trained but is now making their way towards more physical confidence with the help of others. What thresholds do they encounter and cross? And maybe more importantly, what does it feel like for them when that crossing over happens?
Maren Forsberg: So many thresholds, and each one is very significant on its own. I think the first threshold I often observe with my participants is using the voice. In my sessions, we do a lot of vocal work — setting short, firm boundary statements like "go away" or "don't touch me," or raising your voice, saying an assertive "stop." And people cringe so much from this in the beginning. They whisper, they laugh nervously, because the sound feels so strange coming out of their body. So when finally they open their mouths and they say it and they really mean it from somewhere deep inside their body, it can be overwhelming. And I've had people cry just from the relief or the release of doing this the first time — not from sadness, but from some sort of recognition of a part of themselves that they had forgotten, that just suddenly showed up. It's really fascinating and beautiful. And then I think comes the first time that they use real force with their bodies. And that's where things get really, really interesting. I had an example from a couple of months ago. I was wearing a full protection vest to one of my self-defense courses for women — a small workshop — so that they could practice going with full force and striking and pushing and kicking into my body without holding back. And one of the participants, who I know carries trauma, she was kicking with all her body and pushing me away. And as she was doing that, she started crying. So she was tearing up and shaking a little bit, and her breath was short. And I asked her gently if she wanted to have a break. And then she responded — and this response still sits with me to this day. She responded: "Fuck no, I want to go again." And then she went again, and again, and again. And this stayed with me because what happens in that moment is not just someone learning a new technique — it's someone getting to respond in the way that they didn't back then. It was someone getting to have that experience that they were denied. And the first time someone really goes for it, they go into this strange state of excitement, relief, rage — everything all at once. And once you've had that experience a couple of times, something genuinely changes. You start feeling bigger and more secure. And it's not that you've learned intellectually how to protect yourself — it's that your body has felt it. And that's a completely different thing.
Matthew Remski: That's an amazing moment. And it's also complex because it's able to happen because you are a safe person to be hit. You've invited it, you've said they can use force on you, and they know you're not going to hit back. And so there's a therapeutic process that you're talking about that allows the person to be physically activated for the first time. And then the question is: how do you carry that out of the room? So is that another threshold?
Maren Forsberg: That is definitely a different experience. Because as you're saying, we were practicing in a safe space. They've already had the time to get to know me and feel safe in my company. That's not the case with an actual predator. It is true that just because you've had this experience in class, it's not a guarantee that when this happens — or if this happens — in real life, you're going to have the same mobilization of your body. But you're increasing the chances. And that's what it does. It's just slowly, slowly recalibrating things in your nervous system.
Matthew Remski: I've got kind of a funny question before we wrap up, which is: you're a kickboxer, and because you're a kickboxer, I'm sure you're aware of Mona Kimura, and I feel like she shows something super interesting and useful — that being odd or eccentric or training in some unique way, and showing up like an anime character, can be really effective. And so I'm wondering whether there's something about what she does that's inspiring in some light-hearted and confident way.
Maren Forsberg: Totally. Yeah, I love Mona. She's absolutely fascinating to watch. I came across her not too long ago, but yeah, I think what her style illustrates so perfectly is that there's no one recipe.
Matthew Remski: Well, I think we're both laughing thinking about what she does — let's just describe for the listeners what she actually does. Is she on her right leg or her left leg?
Maren Forsberg: She's on her right leg, but I don't remember exactly. But yeah, she's basically just jumping on one leg and flipping out her other, and it's just so precise and always seems to work.
Matthew Remski: Yeah. And so her striking leg, the left foot, is basically coming out at an upwards angle. And she can bounce back on that right leg in full balance endlessly, like through an entire round. And then have you seen her train where she's bouncing on that right leg on a treadmill, going backwards and then forwards and then sideways? She has some sort of immaculate balance. If you're watching that as a kickboxer, are you asking how is she doing that?
Maren Forsberg: You have no idea how impressive this is. It's insane. Absolutely insane. I used to practice taekwondo and she has a very taekwondo-esque style, which is also a lot about the kicking, the high kicks, and being very bouncy on your feet. But yeah, it's extremely impressive what she's doing. And I think what it shows is that there's really no one recipe on how to be a fighter. And the people who try to fit the mold are usually less effective than the ones who fully commit to their own weirdness. I experienced this — I really believe this. I have a pretty funky style. I'm known for having this very dancy monkey style where sometimes it's ridiculous, I almost have zero guard, but because this is how I function and I became so used to it, it's what makes me feel big and unpredictable. And yeah, I leaned into that completely and it worked really well for me. It probably looked chaotic at times, but it was mine. It was different.
Matthew Remski: That is wild. I'm wondering, is this a common thing amongst higher-level fighters — that there is some kind of unpredictable uniqueness that throws expectations off balance and becomes a kind of signature self-expression?
Maren Forsberg: Almost everyone has their own signature moves or signature pattern of movement that is specific to them. And yeah, I really love this. And I think also it's important for self-defense and for adapting to your body and your capacities that you work with what you have. A lot of self-defense is about acknowledging what your strengths are. If you are someone who's small and fast, then maybe focus on precision and speed. If you're someone who carries more mass, then use that to your advantage — you probably have a lot more force and strength. All of it is valid and all of it can work. I think the worst thing you can do is try to fight like someone you're not, because you're always going to be a worse version of them than you are of yourself.
Matthew Remski: It strikes me that if you are teaching self-defense to queer and trans people, you have this great demographic who already can probably connect to the idea that there are unique features about how they are in the world, and they can actually make those features strong.
Maren Forsberg: Absolutely.
Matthew Remski: So that's a secret weapon, actually.
Maren Forsberg: Exactly. That is the secret weapon. And I mean I apply this to not just self-defense, but movement in general. You've got to find your own groove.
Matthew Remski: What is your best antifascist self-defense advice for, let's say, ten-year-olds?
Maren Forsberg: I would say: don't make yourself smaller to make anyone else comfortable. You belong here exactly as you are, and so does every kid that looks different, or who prays different, or who comes from somewhere else. And that's not a threat — it's just the world being full of people. And if someone tries to hurt your friend, the most important thing you do is just to stay. You don't have to be loud, you don't have to be violent, you just have to stay with the kid who is being left out. Stay. And when everyone else looks away — because, as we've been talking about, fascism depends on people feeling small and alone — just by refusing to let that happen, you're already doing something radical.
Matthew Remski: Maren, thank you so much for your time and all of your wisdom. It's really incredible to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Maren Forsberg: Thank you so much for inviting me. I had such a nice time.
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CODA
Matthew Remski: So before wrapping, I've got one little postscript for you about an assumption I made in interviewing Maren. I hadn't heard about her own experience with endangerment prior to the interview, and from her social media content I hadn't seen it there. And so I made the false assumption that she had had some rare and uniformly body-positive experience of her own agency. But then, as she alluded to, she knows the danger response personally. Her training didn't fully protect her from it, but it sounds like it did maybe help her recover.
And so there's a variation on a blind spot here for me, where I went into the interview with the unconscious impression that this person had learned to be in the world in somewhat the same way that I had — and across a gender and privilege dividend, this would almost never be true.
So it's taken me a long time to sort this out in my life, and I still have a ways to go. So here's a little story.
About ten years ago I had a disagreement with my partner about how I was going to get to a bus stop at three-thirty in the morning to catch the bus to the airport for an early flight. So this is a fifteen-minute walk, but it's on a desolate thoroughfare passing under a kind of forlorn bridge. Now the bus stop itself is on a corner that can sometimes feel sketchy, and my partner suggested I book a cab for that walk, and I thought that was unnecessary. But more than that, it made me irritated in a way that I couldn't quite understand.
Now I did understand that we were different ages, we came from different approaches to personal safety, different histories in the city. I also understood that we were having a gendered moment and that her access to freedom was narrower than mine, and that this was about body size and the constant possibility of sexual assault. So I had all of this cognitive stuff, and it was well and good, but the embodied reality of it didn't hit me until I really sat with how indignant I felt at the mere idea that I shouldn't be able to walk freely in my own neighborhood at the time of my choosing, that I should feel more as she did in the world — more vigilant — that I should pay a cabbie to protect me. This felt wrong to me. Obviously I should be able to come and go without fear, or at least with reasonable confidence that I would be able to defend myself if I needed to. So the very thought that I should be afraid kind of enraged me.
And at one point my partner just paused and gave me this look. And the look showed me that this limit on freedom that was so chafing to me is an hourly reality for women, trans people, queer people, to the point at which the outrage has to be normalized and carried around like a dead weight.
So from there I could begin to feel into a new and terrible thing: to know that my gender, like my whiteness, makes my basic comfort in the world seem like it is the natural order. And its invisibility to me — until something sort of brushes up against it and irritates a bit — is at the root of my entitlement. And it may be why I haven't agitated harder for justice, because I've assumed everyone feels or should feel as I do in the world.
So that was just a first step toward an antifascist relationship to public space. And so I'm grateful to Maren for walking with me, and with us all, a little bit further on that path.
Up on Patreon now, but released to the wild in a few weeks, is a brief coda to this interview in which I dig out the history of antifascist physical culture, which arose a century ago at the same time and in opposition to the body fascism that pushed the Freikorps into dominance. The essay is called Antifascist Body Culture: A Brief History. It's up on Patreon now. Maybe I'll see you there, maybe back here on the main feed. Until then, take care of each other.
