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Agreed, and with this freedom of choice also an individualization and a deritualization and decommunization of muay thai. If the fighter is a cartesian island from whose mind the body obeys, there is no participation of the audience, no participation of the community of trainers, training partners and gym. It becomes pure efficiency and no soul.

One thing I wanted to mention is also us women understanding how much power we have and how hard we punch. I might be mistaken, but I feel sometimes women tend to go pretty hard because guys we spar with never want to admit when hurts. So we don't learn to assess our own strength in strikes.

This Cartesian instrumentalism I think has vast overlay on our experiences, not only conditioning how the art and skill is learned/practiced, but also how it is experienced, what it means to us, and how we relate to ourselves through it. If our bodies are only instruments that obey or fail us this is a very different world to live in, and likely holds a very different set of capacities or ceiling. But the concept of instrumentation also runs out into the very way that Muay Thai is disseminated (or even appropriated) outside of Thailand. It involves our mechanization of its parts (moves, strikes, techniques) the broken way one might Frankenstein parts together (for instance in MMA), and also the way it goes out across the Internet in "breakdowns", which literally "break" "down" the living experiences, often rationalizing it into constituent components and "reasons". The instrumentation of our own bodies, experiencing our bodies as tools or mechanized actions holds its parallel in the commercialization of the art, and a pedagogy of mechanization as well. It all seems to flow from a Cartesian World, one ultimately balanced on the knife-edge of a mythologization of "freedom of choice".

My experience as a female who has trained in a variety of western gyms is as follows: 1. Being paired with men who will decrease their intensity too much out of fear of "hitting a woman" which hurts both of our training but is especially frustrating to me. I have to ask them to go harder, the coach has to tell them to go harder and sometimes they will and sometimes they still won't. 2. Not being taken seriously, left out of the gym "community" which usually consists of the coach and his best male fighters. 3. Sexual harassment or unwanted attention from other members; same age, older, single, married. It's demoralizing but women are sadly used to being in spaces that are not friendly to them. The gym owner and staff need to be in charge of establishing and controlling the gym's culture. There should be an anonymous complaint box, established rules and no tolerance for sexual harassment. If possible the gym staff should take interest in all its members and try to understand why they are there and how they can support their goals.