Column: 30 Before 30: On cultivating a fighting face and fancy feet

Perhaps the hardest thing is that we’re lesser. We’re treated differently by society and by men, and it’s both a crime and a shame.

While there’s really no denying it, I’m not about to get up on a pulpit and rail that it’s unfair — it is, but 1) it’s been done, by people with much better arguments than I care to put forth and 2) it’s obvious.

Not satisfied with feminist diatribes, I chose to dispense with the how and why of female subordination and get right to the so what: While I can vote for change and protest chauvinism, what happens in a dark alley in the meantime? Can a woman be expected to fend off an attacker twice her size with anything other than the argument ‘it’s not fair?’

In my case, the answer was, sadly, no.

I decided that 30 years was way too long to leave such a staple of survival. Self-defense may be scary, inconvenient, even embarrassing — but it’s also one’s own responsibility. Take a self-defense class, at least once, and get the basics. Such was my argument when I invited five other ladies to come with me for a night of bracing interaction with would-be attackers.

Come the night, I went alone to a self-defense class taught by a Russian ex-military trainer. I considered my lack of backup fairly fitting and doubly terrifying. Upon parking in the Running Fit lot, I braced myself, prepared to get Unagi.

Lee Shaykhet’s class was, in a word, eye-opening. I was expecting some kind of karate moves — pressure points, using weight against your opponent, that kind of thing.

What I got was entirely different, and loads more effective: simple, three-seconds-or-less techniques, and a good dose of things to remember (what not to do, for example — which is a lot easier to remember than what to do).

After I put a six-foot-tall basketball player on the ground with barely any force, I decided the class had been worth it. (I apologized, of course.)

Although this poor man was the only male in the group, we all took a good deal of knocks — to the floor, in the head, on the leg — less soundly than they would be if played in real life, but enough to give us all a sense of what we could expect. We weren’t spared, not even the girls — and I appreciated it.

Post-toughening, I realized I had accomplished another goal on the list that spoke to hardness: my first tattoo.

Eschewing dolphins, tribals and various flora and fauna in the varied colors of a Lisa Frank notebook, I instead went with three hieroglyphs on my left back: truth, beauty and the symbol of life, the Ankh. I was 21, and those three symbols summed up most of my aspirations, as well as mitigating their naivete by being in a different language.

While I’ve occasionally regretted them, I’ve never been ashamed to show them — an embarrassment scale somewhere between a classic pin-up and Baby Taz.

While I wouldn’t classify physical confrontation or tattoos as male-only behavior, I realized I am more comfortable exploring ‘mannish’ (tire-changing, stick-driving) aspects of my list than those more ‘feminine’ in experience.

Makes sense: With my tendency to swear openly and fart in public, I am arguably more rough than ladylike. And I make no attempt to mitigate my behavior, but rationalize that minor steps to pretty the package may forgive a somewhat crass interior.

And so I received my very first pedicure. Without a doubt, it was much more embarrassing and more painful than the self-defense class (it took all my hard-earned Unagi not to kill an overzealous woman with her own pumice stone).

Drying under the UV light in disposable flip-flops, I felt tired and puzzled, like a bit of brick in a rock polisher, and amused myself with a quandary: Which is more likely to put me in the White House: the toes, or the tattoo?