If you’re anything like me, you default to your favorite weapons when you’re too drunk to work nunchucks. Enemies have blocked every exit. Your muscle memory takes over and without a conscious thought, your slightly engorged penis and a ropey braid of chest hair are in your hands, whistling through the air. But this is not an article about us, men. Our shit is together. This is an article about weapons for the ladies.
101 WEAPONS for Women by Rodney R. Rice is a manual for turning every object in your purse, car, or laundry hamper into a cause of death. And I know what you’re thinking, ladies: “This sounds like something my son’s tae kwon do instructor would write to trick me into choking him with my bra in a photography studio.” Well, fine, Ms. Genius. I guess you know one thing about Karate.
Before we talk about how to tear away a man’s flesh with your driver’s license (page 36, you just hit him in the arm with it), I want to talk about the book’s lore. I found this copy at a used book store whose slogan was “Childrens Books & Horse Sports A Specialty,” and it was previously owned by a woman named Kim Canavan. I know this because she wrote her name in marker on the inside cover WITH AUTHORITY. It’s about 15 to 20 times larger than a normal person would write their name. I’m no handwriting expert, but Kim Canavan labels her property like the only way you’re going to get it is if a horse book store pries it from her cold, dead estate sale after she gets convicted for killing nine men with a bra.
Kim’s signature took up so much space that when she had the author autograph her copy, which she did, Rodney had to scribble his name sideways on the last page. Rodney’s signature, in contrast to Kim’s, is weak and panicked as if he signed the book while his windpipe was being crushed by underwear. Look at this pathetic shit. This guy writes his name like he trained under Muhammed Ali only in 2015, and only in cursive. Rodney has the signature of a girl buying her first tampons with a check. Kim Canavan, you were going to learn how to murder someone with car keys from this fish-fingered dick nymph? Psh.
The book is outrageously comprehensive, covering so many household items Rodney actually runs out of ordinary things and starts listing weapons that are weapons. The last ten pages tell you to stab your enemies with knives or taze them with tazers. Page 108 is about throwing stars! Oh, you think I should maybe throw throwing stars at my enemies, Rodney? You know who puts throwing stars in a book about improvised weaponry? The kind of dumbshit who thinks you use throwing stars for cooking or for opening ancient temple doors. This foolish mistake has revealed you as the holder of Shadow Jaguar’s Golden Shuriken, Rodney! Where is the forbidden chamber, Rodney!?
To his credit, everywhere Rodney looks he sees weapons. It’s likely he can no longer distinguish between things that can be used as weapons and things that are already weapons and were never anything else. To a master of the martial arts, a rolled up floor mat is barely different than a box of hand grenades. But no matter what harmless object Rodney is telling a female student to lightly press into her attacker, he focuses on four main types of attacks.
#1: SAW THEIR FUCKING HEAD OFF!
Rodney opens his book with a story that seems both very made up yet also the defining moment of his martial arts career. He was preparing for a self defense demonstration when his tae kwon do master, without warning, slashed him in the goddamn eye with a magazine. As blood dripped down his face, Rodney R. Rice will never forget what his master said. “Anything is a weapon.”
So Rodney, let me get this story straight. This asshole was reading a magazine while he talked to you and suddenly cut your eye open with it right in front of a bunch of women? Women you were about to teach self defense to!? Rodney, if you spent all these years honing your mind and body to kick ass, what the fuck circumstances are you waiting on to do it? This is the most violently disrespectful thing I’ve ever heard, and I once saw my President call Meryl Streep “over-rated.” If your grand master cut your dick off, threw it into the crowd, and said, “Here, girls. Something this small won’t throw your diets off,” it wouldn’t have been any worse.
But whether it really happened or not, the event demonstrated to Rodney that the human body is a wobbling blob of jello easily cut into parts by flying paper. On page 55 he suggests removing your attacker’s head with a magazine. On page 56 he tells you to do it with a notebook. Page 93: push pin! On page 57 there’s a shot of him getting his throat getting sliced with some photos. Not secret spy photos with knives on the edges– just floppy keepsakes of treasured memories, tearing into his carotid artery. On page 60 it’s playing cards, like the kind you would trust a 3-year-old with. On page 39, a woman is cutting his eyes out and his head off with dental floss. Dental floss! This seems fact-checkable. You know when you’re cleaning your teeth and you wrap floss around your fingers too many times and they don’t pop the fuck off? Rodney doesn’t. If someone tells you you can take off a human head with dental floss their shitty skull is either attached to their torso with modeling clay or they have never flossed. Rodney’s gums still have rotting panties stuck in them from 500 panties strangulation demonstrations ago.
As you can imagine, speaking of underpants, Rodney also lets you know a bra is a great neck weapon. And it’s not a bad opportunity to ask your karate partner if it’s alright if you take your shirt off for a couple pictures. If you’re like Rodney, 95 pounds of tae kwon do in a 90 pound powder keg, she’s going to spell “yes” in ejaculate and saw your pussy little head off with her 34A balconette.
#2: DESTROY THE DICK!
Rodney is playing it pretty loose with this closely guarded secret, but there’s a little-known weak spot on men called the dick and balls. Others call it the groin. Hi, if you’re with me, you can call it Steel Paradise. The point is, Rodney has some ideas on things you can bash into it. If you’re okay with the ethics of stealing free tae kwon do, “Pick things up and pound them into my balls,” is the equivalent of 75 self defense sessions with Rodney. I’m not joking when I say during the making of this book he took pictures of himself getting hit in the dick by a comb, a calendar, a shoe, floor mats, yoga mats, a file box, hand weights, a cassette player, a gym bag, a phone, a picture frame, an umbrella a stapler, two kinds of punches, four kinds of kicks, a briefcase, and a cactus. Even if it only took him 20 seconds to set up each of these photographs, Rodney R. Rice has spent four human lifetimes getting hit in the junk. He has put his balls on more inanimate objects than a Taco Bell night shift employee.
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#3: MILDLY BEFUDDLE THAT SON OF A BITCH!
If you’re not looking to end your attacker’s life, try disorienting him with a sudden pillow to the shoulder or an unexpected hat in his field of vision. You never know which perfectly safe objects Rodney will decide are for maiming and which are only for distracting. Like what about a hat seems less deadly to him than a floor mat? What makes him think you can’t kill a guy with one, but you CAN make him say, “What happened!? She held aloft a trilby and my entire world turned to hat! And when again I could see, SHE WAS GONE! My sexual predation undone! Undone again by the blinding power of hat!!!”
I feel silly questioning the combat mastery of a man who has obviously spent more time thinking of ways to bewilder attackers with loose clothes than me, but Rodney writes like a man who’s never seen a fight and has maybe never even heard of fighting. This would normally be an empty insult impossible to prove, but on page 31 Rodney offers the advice of slapping your attacker with a glove. To be clear, he’s suggesting you use the gesture which has meant “I am declaring my intent to fight you” for centuries to end a conflict. Which means that even in this world of make-believe conflict with unlikely cottage cheese-necked fighters, Rodney has found the one single way to be objectively wrong. This is like a cookbook saying, “Hold a hat in front of a frozen chicken for two minutes or until Trevor. Serves 71.”
#4: PUNCTURE THEIR BITCH HEART AND WATCH THEM DIE.
Behind the flimsy, spongy bones of your chest lies another vulnerable area– the human heart. Students of Rodney are trained to attack this with any loose debris within reach. Page 91 shows you how to bonk it with a clipboard. Page 89 demonstrates how to poke it with an umbrella. Most of them are unpleasant ways to wrinkle a shirt, but some seem sort of serious like on page 82 when some lady picks up a fucking table and heart punches Rodney with one of its legs. And I don’t even think I should trust you with the lethal advice given on page 94. The power of life and death is about to be in your pocket, so anyone prone to rash decisions stop reading now. If you’re still here you’re making a very rash decision, so you can understand how frustrating this is for me, the man who just fucking said you shouldn’t be doing this.
Fine. Here it is– the ultimate lady weapon. You take your womanly hands that until this day knew only womanly things and use them to straighten a paper clip. Then, and may God forgive me for making this knowledge public, you stab them in the heart with the little wire.
I’ve never been involved in a lady slaying, but as a man whose breastplate is immune to paper clips, I’m skeptical pillows and hats would be an effective defense. If someone’s attacking and you have a pillow, sure, why not– give it a swing and add some whimsy to your murder. But putting the idea of holding up a hat into your brain is almost definitely going to make you easier to kill than someone freaking the fuck out like a person who reads normal books. You don’t have to take my word for it either. This book’s previous owner, KIM CANAVAN herself, took the “Are You a Target?” quiz on pages x-xi where she answered multiple choice questions about how bad ass she would be in a fight. And KIM, the woman who signs her name like a gorilla stealing a bulldozer, got a 13.
According to Rodney, a score in this range means “you probably tend to carry yourself with good confidence but perhaps not enough attention to the very real statistics on crime against women.” I have no idea what it means because Rodney left out some important words and he’s worse at writing than he is at killing women. The point is: after reading this book, even in her own street fight fantasies, Kim Canavan, the KIM CANAVAN, knows this shit isn’t going to work.