I am going to do my best to not seem anti-woman here because that is not my objective at all. I do however have a very strong opinion about when it comes to potential fights between men and the women that attempt to get in the middle of them to prevent them: They are not helping. If anything, I feel like the presence of the woman attempting to de-escalate a potential fighting situation actually makes the situation much worse and increases the chances of a fight actually happening.
I have a couple of recent examples to back up this claim and a ton of memories from the past about however well-intentioned your inserting yourself into a potentially violent situation is, that your presence actually makes things a lot more likely to kick off, not the other way around.
src
It has been my experience throughout my life that fights often happen in bars because believe it or not, alcohol makes people do things they normally maybe wouldn't do. They are the stupidest kind of fights because it is normally over something very trivial and often it is between two people that given a different situation would probably get along with one another.
I also have seen with my own eyes that most people who get mouthy in a bar aren't actually interested in a fight, they just want to talk big and the other person doesn't want to give ground so they do the same thing. In a normal situation this tends to fizzle out as other people in the bar get involved and tell the people to chill the hell out. In the western world we have bouncers that prevent this sort of thing from happening at all. However, here in Vietnam there are rarely any sort of anti-fight staff on hand and when fights start to kick off it is left to the patrons to decide whether or not they are going to allow it.
Twice recently there was a couple of guys in two different bars that started having words with one another and these words lead to threats. I was there kind of minding my own business but was witness to both of them. I honestly don't think that anything would have happened with either of these situations if it wasn't for one common denominator. In both situations a drunk woman, the same woman actually, got in between them and started belittling both of them, telling them they were too drunk and to "stop it!"
Here's why this is an absolutely terrible tactic. Men, particularly drunk men, don't like being talked down to or treated like children. When a woman steps in between, and in this situation it was tiny woman with a big mouth, it emasculates both of the men involved and this is one thing that almost all men really hate. This actually drives their anger even higher because now they feel as though they have to prove their "manhood" even more than previously.
In the first situation that I witnessed, the two guys were not even in striking range and were just saying mean things to one another. I have no idea what it was even about and they were running out of mean things to say to one another. I truly believe that this situation would have simply resulted in some "fuck you's" and one of the two guys just leaving the bar but instead, this tiny woman with a big mouth stepped in between them, like some sort of referee or authority figure and started berating both of them. It was less than a minute after she interjected between them that they were throwing fists at one another.... poorly I would say too as it was clear that neither one of them really had any experience in fighting.
The point here is that when a woman steps in between two men that are arguing with one another and attempts to shut them both up and tell them what to do, that this will actually drive their anger meter through the top whereas if she were simply to not get involved and mind her own business, the situation likely would have been stopped by them either coming to their senses or other men getting in between them. I have been in very few potentially violent situations in my life but when some of either my friends, or his friends, or even innocent bystanders who were also men encouraged us to calm down, we did so. A loud woman berating both of us would have made me more likely to have gone through with coming to blows as well.
src
In this and the second fight that she attempted to and failed to break up almost exactly the same thing happened. Keep in mind that in both situations she did not know either one of the people involved. If she did, her efforts might have been effective but I think the worst thing she could have done is what she did do in both situations. She stepped in the middle of something that had nothing to do with her and attempted to act like some sort of authority figure. In a psychological sense, this may actually trigger memories in the men's mind of being berated by their mothers or teachers or something like that and this again will escalate the situation, not calm it down.
Plus since this woman is physically incapable of preventing them from doing anything, her presence in the middle of them is extra stupid and in both of the scenes that I saw i honestly believe it would have been better if she had just gotten out of the way.
So at the risk of sounding misogynistic I am going to say that women, if you see an altercation that is potentially going to turn to fisticuffs, I really don't think your presence or attempts at breaking it up is going to help at all. Maybe mind your own business if you don't know the people involved because they aren't going to listen to you.