Moments where somebody complains "I Was Beaten by a Girl" in Literature.
- Ananda's Fall: Izumi punches out two boys of similar age, and even takes down a grown man at one point.
- Beast Tamer: Rein and Kanade meet Tania because she was obstructing a bridge used to travel by challenging anyone who tried to cross to a fight. Once that is settled and she's part of Rein's group, Rein opts to keep her true identity quiet so she won't be arrested and deported. This prompts Rein to ask Tania if she did anything to her previous challengers to keep quiet, since nobody else ever revealed her identity previously. Tania assures Rein she didn't, and Rein is dismayed to learn that it was most likely because, according to Tania, they were all depressed because they lost to a girl.Rein: Did they all keep quiet for such a stupid reason...?
- Chronicles of the Kencyrath. In an undeclared trade war, a rival tavern owner is provoking the staff of the tavern Jame is staying in. Jame finally loses her temper and knocks out the teeth of the tavern owner's son, who eagerly rushes to get his dad with evidence of this 'unprovoked' assault. His dad returns with the city guard, catches sight of Jame and storms off in a rage that his 'spineless' son let a girl beat him up, knowing this trope would hardly make a good Pretext for War.
- Gerald Tarrant, Villain Protagonist of Coldfire Trilogy is not remotely pleased to learn that the Evil Sorcerer who defeated him in the first book is actually a woman using a masculine title. Of course, the fact that he's a vampire who normally prefers to feed on young women makes it a particularly galling role reversal for him.
- Discworld: Comes up a few times in Monstrous Regiment. After one of Polly Perks's fellow girls-disguised-as-boys clobbers one of a pair of guards (while disguised as a washerwoman no less), the other guard asks if they could knock him out too, so it doesn't look like he didn't put up a fight against a bunch of women. When asked why he doesn't put up a fight, he simply states that he's not stupid.
- Earth's Children: Clan of the Cave Bear had this as a running subplot. Justified in that to the Clan, what Ayla does and is able to do is literally inconceivable.
- In the Encyclopedia Brown series it is a constant source of embarrassment for Bugs Meany that he got beat up by Sally Kimball.
- In Edward Eager's Half Magic, Katharine wishes to beat Sir Lancelot in a joust, and then has to unwish it when Lancelot is mocked by the other knights because he was beaten by a girl.note Though in this case it's more that she wished to be five times better than Sir Lancelot at fighting without also wishing to not be, to all appearances, an untrained child.
- Hurog: Averted in Dragon Bones: After he is beaten by his aunt Stala, Ward is proud that he lasted so long. As Stala is the head of the guard and taught Ward everything he knows about fighting, that's hardly surprising.
- Mistborn: The reason why Elend refuses to spar with Vin. Though this has less to do with Elend being macho (he's not, particularly) and more to do with the fact that he's king and Vin is tiny. Knowing full well that she'd beat him, he'd rather not get curbstomped in front of his subjects by someone who's barely five feet... and his girlfriend.
- In The Overloaded Ark by Gerald Durrell, local boys whom Durrell was paying for catching animals often brought them badly wounded. It took a lot of lecturing to teach them better, but the case that finally worked was when, right in the middle of such a lecture, a girl brought him three birds in pristine condition. Durrell then proceeded to invoke the trope by explaining this girl is a better hunter than the boys, since these are birds he would buy, and at a very good price. Once they saw how much he paid the girl, wounded catches became a rare exception.
- Arthur Conan Doyle averts this in "A Scandal in Bohemia" when Sherlock Holmes finds out that the adversary who managed to tail him home and escape from him is a woman named Irene Adler. Despite his Victorian chauvinism, Holmes considers her quite the Worthy Opponent.
- In Silicon Wolfpack, Murgatroyd gets KO'd by an Action Girl because she thinks he's trying to steal her car. His friends naturally think this is hilarious, and one of them points out that speed and flexibility count for more than power.
- A Song of Ice and Fire. An Invoked Trope by Brienne of Tarth. The Old Soldier who taught her combat knew that her male opponents would try for a quick victory so no-one could say they found it hard to defeat a woman. So Brienne has been trained to fight defensively and wait for her opponent to exhaust himself first, then attack.
- When Margo and Malcolm spar in Time Scout, their first two bouts go to Malcolm. The last two go to Margo. That he, an experienced guide twice her age, got manhandled convinces him he hasn't been spending enough time at the gym. That she, too, is spending time there is just a bonus.
- A non-physical example in the Piers Anthony novel Prostho Plus. The female lead character had been dating a guy who was unable to sell his science fiction stories to magazines. She explains that it was simply a matter of studying what the editors have already published. To demonstrate, she writes several stories, and even sells a few. The guy starts dating someone else. (To be fair, this may have been a blow to his writer's ego, not his male ego.)
