I’ve seen this in a few movies and tv shows. There was a *Gunsmoke *episode where a son was expected to fight his father as a rite of passage to manhood.
The Quiet Man had a Irish father that demanded John Wayne fight him to marry his daughter.
If this happened at all I’d imagine the fights weren’t intended to inflict a lot of damage. Fight enough to show courage and earn respect. No doubt some injuries would occur.
Were these customs ever followed in real life? Particularly in European cultures? Or other cultures?
Of course in Hollywood, everything ends with a fist fight… Even if they have guns.
Look at Star Trek (The Original Series). They have the biggest, baddest-assed starship the universe can build (except for a few alien ships) and yet in more than half the episodes, it all boils down to Kirk in a fist-fight. Same with comic books - all the super-heroes and villains with all teh amazing powers basically bash each other in the jaw so they go flying through walls.
Plus, many commentators have said how unrealistic movie fist fights are. Boxers wear gloves because a bare hard punch to the skull would likely break the knuckles before the skull. One or two good punches and the guy wouldn’t get back up anytime soon either; too many fights and they’ll be moving slow.
So (Irish jokes aside) I suspect the answer has more to do with American writers’ feelings of inadequacy than any real cultural need to fight.
The father was dead - the jerk was Mary-Kate’s brother. And the fight was mostly about making the brother turn over his sister’s property (which as the “man of the family” he had had charge of); Wayne and the sister were already married at that point.
Will Danaher (Mary Kate’s brother) is initially pissed at Sean Thornton (Wayne’s character) for outbidding Danaher for Thornton’s family’s ancestral home, which is next door to the Danaher property. Because of this, Danaher won’t accept Thornton’s marriage proposal to his sister…but is eventually tricked into it.
When Danaher discovers that he’s been tricked (at the wedding reception), he refuses to part with Mary Kate’s dowry. Mary Kate wants her husband to confront her brother over it (which will undoubtedly mean a fight), but Thornton is a former professional boxer, who retired after he accidentally killed a man in the ring. Due to this, he refuses to fight, and Mary Kate believes that her husband is a coward.
The movie wraps up with the big, town-spanning donnybrook between Thornton and Danaher, but, as you can see, it has nothing to do with any sort of “coming of age” ritual, or having to fight for the right to marry.
Humans have developed some pretty bizarre maturity rituals. Especially among the Polynesians and Africans. Ritual scaring, tattoos, huge earlobe rings, lip rings and so on. Becoming a man in primitive cultures isn’t easy.
I did try Google to see if fighting was part of any maturity rituals or marriage requirements. Maybe it is just a Hollywood fantasy.
The Medieval Knighthood had a initiation “dubbing ceremony” which culminated in the colee, an hard open handed slap across the newly knighted’s face. It was meant to symbolically represent the last time a knight would ever allow his honor to go unchallenged.
IIRC in medieval Iceland it was considered an insult to call a young man a child and many saga heroes undertook expeditions or participated in fights to prove themselves as men (a medieval Scandinavian became an adult at 12.)