That’s why our courtships are a dance, not a death match. Apes and elks battle for the right to reproduce and take multiple mates by force, but humans have a more runway-model approach: rather than fight, we flaunt. Men primp themselves up to look like hearty specimens and sturdy providers, then wait for the women to make their choices. That’s one of the necessities of monogamy: apes can afford to tear one another apart, since the alpha male ends up with a harem. But in a system of one-to-one mating, courtship can’t conclude with half the males on life support.
We’re creatures of restraint—of endurance and elasticity—and that’s where men and women, old and young, are most alike. When it comes to tests of endurance, like distance running and swimming, the performance difference between ages and genders is even smaller than the difference in our size: it’s only about 10 percent. A twenty-five-year-old man wasn’t the one who battled through fifty-three hours of jellyfish stings and bruising currents to become the first to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage; it was a senior citizen, sixty-four-year-old Diana Nyad. The fastest female ever to swim the twenty-three-plus-mile English Channel was just thirty minutes behind the fastest man, and a thirty-year-old bankruptcy lawyer named Amelia Boone nearly won the World’s Toughest Mudder obstacle race in 2012, covering ninety miles and more than three hundred obstacles to finish second overall and ten miles ahead of the guy in third. Middle-aged women are likewise no strangers to the lead pack in ultramarathons. Pam Reed was forty-one when she outran all the men to win the 135-mile Badwater ultra across Death Valley in 2002; the following year, she returned and did it again. Diana Finkel was just shy of forty when she led for the first ninety miles of the brutally hard Hardrock 100, finishing second overall.
With a little more practice, the same could be true for throwing. Anatomically, there’s no reason women can’t fire a ball as hard as men. Strength and physique aren’t the issue: when researchers tested Aboriginal Australian girls who grow up hunting alongside boys, they found the difference in top-end throwing velocity was only about 20 percent. Mo’Ne Davis, the thirteen-year-old South Philadelphia schoolgirl who pitched shut-outs against all-boy teams to lead her squad to the Little League World Series, routinely fires 70 mile-per-hour fastballs even though she’s only five feet four inches tall and weighs 111 pounds. Hip rotation is the key: whipping a rock is simple but sequential, so if you don’t practice the link between opening the hips and releasing the arm, you’ll lose the knack or never learn it in the first place. The reason women don’t throw as well as men, it seems, is because they don’t throw as much. But the raw weaponry is still there, and it’s the best weaponry we’ve got.
That was the Twins’ special talent. For men and women alike, they found a way to turn throwing into fighting.
What’s the worst fix you can find yourself in? Fairbairn asked Applegate.
Jumped from behind, Applegate replied. Someone gets the drop on you. Now you’ve got a gun in your back and your hands in the air.
Fine. Show me.
Fairbairn offered himself up as a prisoner, turning around and clasping his hands behind his head. Applegate approached warily. He pulled his sidearm, jammed it hard into Fairbairn’s spine, and—
Fairbairn helped Applegate up off the floor and handed him back his gun. Care to see it again?
For the second time, Fairbairn turned and put his hands in the air. He spun around more slowly this time, sweeping the gun away with his left hand and grabbing Applegate’s chin with his right, finishing him off with a knee to the groin and a shove to the ground. Even though Fairbairn was moving at demonstration speed, Applegate couldn’t stop him. “Strange as it may seem,” Applegate learned, “the gunman cannot think fast enough to pull the trigger and make a hit before your body is out of the line of fire.”
Now look right at me, Fairbairn ordered. Applegate stuck the empty pistol in Fairbairn’s belly and curled his finger around the trigger, watching Fairbairn’s eyes for a flicker of intent. Fairbairn twisted and slapped, knocking the gun away before Applegate could click the trigger. He bent back Applegate’s wrist, driving the big man to his knees and yanking away the gun. Fairbairn’s feet never moved. All he did was dip his knees, pivot his hips, and bend his elbow.
“The body twist is the basis of all disarming,” Applegate realized, but that was just the beginning: for the Twins, the body twist was the basis of everything. In the jungle, body twist is so potent that baboons use it as a white flag of surrender; to avoid a fight, they let their trunk and abdominal muscles sag, indicating their most powerful weapon has been deactivated.
Humans, Fairbairn demonstrated, come pre-equipped with the same primate power. Fairbairn ran Applegate through a series of gutter-fighting moves—breaking free from a stranglehold; recovering from a knockdown; bringing a bigger man to the ground; and, of course, the “Match-Box Attack.” All Fairbairn’s tactics had three things in common: they were quick, easy, and appalling. “Any individual in combat in which his life is at stake very quickly reverts to the animal,” it dawned on Applegate. “After a few seconds, and especially after he has been hit or jarred by his opponent, the blood lust is so aroused that from then on his combat is instinctive.”
Take the Match-Box. Once you know it, you can walk down a dodgy street at night or escape from gunpoint in the back of a car with nothing more lethal in your pocket than a cell phone—or, in Fairbairn’s day, a small cardboard box of matches. If you find yourself in an apprehensive situation, stick close to the walls on the right side of the street and casually slip your right hand into your jacket pocket. Wrap your fist around the phone, with the top just below your thumb and index finger. Damn! You were right to be nervous, because here comes trouble. Someone’s moving in fast with—what? a gun? a knife?—in his hand.
The phone will now save your life, but only because of body twist.
“Parry the gun away from your body with your left forearm,” Fairbairn instructs. Now bring out the phone; by clenching it in your fist, the bones in your hand compress into a hard block. “Turning your body from the hip, strike your opponent hard on the left side of his face, as near to the jawbone as possible.” You barely need to move your arm; keep your shoulder pinned to your side and come up hard with the forearm, letting your hips do the work. “The odds of knocking your opponent unconscious by this method are at least two to one,” Fairbairn adds. “The fact that this can be accomplished with a match-box is not well-known, and for this reason is not likely to raise your opponent’s suspicion of your movements.”
Applegate quickly grasped the power of Fairbairn’s discovery. Body twist, like instinctive aim, works for anyone and can be mastered fast: you can pick up the basics in an afternoon and perfect them with just ten minutes or so of daily practice. You don’t need years of training in a dojo and a drawerful of colored belts. What you need most, Applegate realized, is to remember what it’s like to fight for real. In our quest to become more humane, we’ve forgotten that self-defense is a survival skill, not a spectator sport. Fighting has been turned into entertainment and toned down so much, it’s more about what you can’t do than what you can: