I sometimes listen to documentaries while I work. One was about alcohol problems in Britain and it showed a guy lazing in a tube train seat telling the interviewer, “Yeah, goin’ for a drink, and maybe a punch up later…”
Excuse me, what? Are punch ups something that are planned in advance? Was he just playing for the cameras? As vicious as Americans are thought to be, I’ve never heard someone say, “Yeah, we’re doing a bar crawl and then maybe go beat up some people.”
Or is this something guys do that in my sheltered ladyhood I have not heard of?
Ehh, it’s not like there’s a formal agreement made in advance, but there definitely are places people pretty much only go to if they’re looking for a fight in some of the UK. Some pubs are known for it. Someone looking for a punch up can go there- with some mates- to get drunk, and be pretty certain of finding someone else who’s also looking for a fight. It can be based on location, sports teams, general individual rivalry or there’s always the old standby of ‘looking at someone funny’. So long as the fights don’t get too bad, so not much worse than bruises, and they fight outside, there’s a tendency to turn a bit of a blind eye to it all.
It’s a young, exceedingly dumb guy thing that does happen- I’m sure he was playing it up for the camera, but it’s not too far off the truth, and it is something I’ve heard idiots say.
Apparently many of them believe this demostration of excessive testosterone and insufficient brain will impress girls. I personally remain unconvinced…
They sure did and probably still do. I stayed out of it only because I wear glasses. My younger brother did anyway: he simply got glasses with pliable rubber frames that he had to soak in water overnight.
I have the appropriate pendulous gonads and the resulting endocrine chemicals in my veins, but they don’t seem to have ever elicited a desire to engage in the described behavior. I went nonviolent between 3rd grade and 8th grade because fighting was an element in what adults described as children’s immaturity. (Yes, they mostly meant boys, but the behavior of boys was used to treat all of us children as categorically immature). Boys are embarrassing when you’re male and not like them.
Mostly this is true of me as well, though I do remember play-wrestling and stuffed-animal fighting with my brothers.
Anyone who has had kittens or puppies (or, maybe, adult cats or dogs) has probably seen them play-fighting. It seems to be fairly common in the animal kingdom for animals, especially males, to engage in “recreational fighting,” which can be strictly playful and nonviolent, or in deadly earnest, or somewhere in between.
In college, through an inexplicable series of coincidences and accidents of fate, I found myself in a group of friends that comprised quite a lot of the football team. I had no official association with the football team or the university’s sports program at all, and if you were to look at me then, or even now, it would be plainly obvious that I did not “belong” with this group of guys, but we were buddies nonetheless (granted I didn’t really care for a lot of them). This was a tiny Division III school in rural Bumfuck, Maryland, but whether you’re at Alabama or Frostburg State, big dumb jocks are still big dumb jocks.
Anyways, the point I’m working up to is I personally witnessed multiple occasions when the plan for the night was, “Let’s get drunk and get into a fight!” Of course it usually ended up being between themselves because they were literally the biggest people in town, but yeah, that happened.
It’s common in the animal kingdom for males to get into extravagant displays and even potentially lethal fights in order to claim the attentions of their lady friends, who don’t seem appalled by this behavior. There are instances where women appear gratified by or at least tolerant of their boyfriends beating up on perceived competitors (a Forensic Files episode, “Pinned By The Evidence” covered this ground).
There is/was a bar here in town (called East Side Liquor) that my buddy and I would take other friends to when they came to visit; because you were GUARANTEED to see a fight break out at some point. And it wasn’t necessarily young people doing the fighting.
I often wondered if these people ever felt shame about these shenanigans.
I refuse to go to the bar; I’m past the point in my life where I want to even be on the periphery of such stupidity.
Preach.
I’ve seen plenty of “girls” (of all ages) that are apparently impressed by such behaviour… I find them even more repugnant than the idiots that do the fighting.
How do you know that the female bighorn sheep aren’t standing around while the males butt heads, filing their hooves and thinking what a loser species they’ve hooked up with?*
nods I had no brothers, didn’t grow up with close male friends, and my Dad wasn’t the “tussle with the kids as a method of entertaining them” kind of fellow, all of which could have been relevant to why it seemed foreign to me.
About 30 years ago in grad school I went out bar hopping with a few friends on a Saturday night in Madison, Wisconsin. Two of them (one of whom was English) spoke repeatedly about wanting to get in a fight. I thought they were just kidding around until near the end of the night when we were done drinking.
We got in line for some pizza somewhere and they started goading the guys in front of us, doing their level best to start a fight. They succeeded, and punches were thrown but I and one other guy in our group stayed out of it because these two guys were clearly the lunatic instigators. I never went out with them again.
How weird. I was mostly trying to get laid when I was younger and went out a lot. Getting in fights was pretty much anathema to that, so I never engaged.
Although in the UK on my summer abroad, I was constantly amazed at how many proto-fights I’d have to break up, or weird stares from other larger guys I’d get (bouncers always seemed to give me the gimlet eye for some reason). Seems that people there do fight more regularly than in the US- there was a guy who tried to pick a fight with a buddy because he had a US National Soccer Team jersey on. It was pretty funny seeing that guy scoot when I walked up and said hello to my buddy- I was probably 5 inches taller and at least 60 lbs heavier than that guy (I was 6’1" and 240 at the time).