By “little girls like me” do you mean little girls carrying knives, or willing to defend themselves? I can tell you that I was socialized to believe that girls and women did NOT fight in any way, and that includes defending themselves. Hell, little BOYS would have been in deep shit if adults had known that they were carrying knives, let alone little girls. I was brought up with the notion that females didn’t actually punch or kick to defend themselves, but slapped their attackers and screamed, and that was enough defense for any occasion. However, I was a roughneck of a tomboy, and I wrestled and played football with the boys in my neighborhood, instead of having teaparties and playing school with the girls, if I was given a choice. My parents were extremely worried about me. However, I think that because I was a little tomboy, I learned that I could pick myself up after getting punched and then keep playing football or wrestling. Of course, the fact that I was a tomboy was part of the reason that I was getting picked on.
Today, well, today there are as many girls as boys in beginning martial arts classes. I don’t think that martial arts classes even accepted girls back then. And today, my daughter is one of the top students in her dojo.
How? If fist-fighting is socially acceptable, how do you differentiate the guy who’s fighting for a reasonable cause from the guy who just likes to beat people up?
As a female who has been almost raped twice, that sounds like a great idea. But as a feminist, that’s a LOUSY idea. Men get sexually assaulted and just plain assaulted too, by both men and women. And there are plenty of women who are aggressive assholes, it’s not a character trait that’s purely male. I know that I’d hate to see one of my old bosses with one of those things in her hands, and free license to use it.
So I’m gonna vote no on that, even though I do occasionally have fantasies of having had one and using it back in the day. And yes, I know that it’s hypocritical of me, since I DID carry that knife. As I said, carrying the knife was the lesser of two evils, it wasn’t a GOOD thing to do.
Don’t tell me that you fail to see any difference between: Approval and acceptance. Even when it was socially acceptable to fight to defend your honor, it wasn’t really approved of. Fighting was still considered a brutish last resort of people who couldn’t sort their differences out. I’m not suggesting that it becomes a-ok to pop anybody upside the head for any perceived infraction; rather that such altercations not be a criminal offense.
I’m not certain how to deal with the issue of men fighting women. On one hand it is a biological fact that nearly any average adult male will be able to physically beat any average adult female despite some overlap. This implies that women, like children should be a protected class. On the other, this opens up a legitimate discussion on the “infantilization” of women as a whole. There is also the matter of our current situation which is equally poor though. because women are completely protected under the law that bears a double standard in enforcement, many feel just fine with taking the bad behaviour to it’s outer limits; secure in the fact that nothing can ever be done to punish them. I don’t think that this really is any better, since it’s the law that is providing the equality, and not societal norms.
People who act like assholes cannot do so with impunity just because society prohibits punching them. If somebody is behaving like an asshole you’re free to point that out - loudly and in mocking terms if you choose. That’s an option for retaliation that’s a lot more egalitarian that fistfighting.
In a controlled environment these types would be rooted out, and everytime they stepped out of line within the class, would be pitted against a much better fighter, preferably someone smaller than the potential bullying asshole, and they would be taught a brutalish lesson in humility. If they didn’t get the message, eventually, sheer embarrassment at getting so many beatings would discourage them from continuing their training, allowing the rest of the pupils to continue improving after seeing exactly how it is possible to defeat a bully.
Look, you’ve already allowed any insecure fuckwit without a criminal record - possibly someone who just hasn’t been caught yet - to purchase powerful handguns, so that horse has already bolted. All you can try and do now is shame people who bring weapons to fist fights.
I don’t know how many ways I can state this; because there is a significantly large, (and growing), proportion of the population that either does not learn from societal pressure, or does not care to accept these norms since there is no repercussions for doing so. Just the opposite in fact. Their rude behaviour more often than not results in an immediate gratification of whatever petty desire they wish to be filled.
Currently we have no tool in our toolbox to deal with people like this. They don’t care if other people look down on them, or shame them, or don’t really want to deal with them. We’ve designed our system to be so egalitarian that you can be sued for discrimination over nothing. Regardless of the legitimacy of the claim, it still will cost time and money to defend yourself against an asshole with an axe to grind, so most people either look the other way or roll over to their behaviour.
The thing is, nearly every person that I’ve met who has been in a fight will tell you the same sort of things: They are scary, it is an experience they don’t want to repeat, they learned a lesson etc… This along with my own shared experience tells me that the occasional fight when young instills a sense of self-moderation that those who have never been physically punished for their behaviour possess. Not everyone needs to be in an altercation to learn this lesson, and they should be rare occasions. They should just be legal within reasonable limits.
Since this is the premise of this whole thread, I wonder if you can provide any citation for it? Frankly, there have always been assholes, I don’t see any real change in that. IMO, society is getting nicer in general, with the people who operate outside societal pressure in any meaningful manner getting fewer and less significant.
If the worse thing that happens to me today is that I have to tell someone off who cut in line in front of me I consider it a pretty good day.
I doubt there is any hard data on this as it is based largely on perceptions rather than objective standards. The best I could find with my limited google-fu was a poll by 20/20 from 2006 that asked people how often they observed bad or rude behaviour and how much that bothered them. Most people observed rudeness “very often” at around rates between 40 and 50%, with occasionally/often rates being in the 80% margin. About 80% of people also responded that they were “Very Bothered” by the rude and disrespectful behaviour. If we assume those numbers to be accurate then 1 in 2 people will be affected by, or observe such behaviour on a daily basis. The question though is how much of this behaviour is outside the range of normally encountered bad behaviour. How much of it is extreme. In my area,(central Florida), I’ve seen an overall increase in that type of behaviour over the last 5-10 years. I suppose we could take a poll here. I’ll see about setting one up.
This is usually caused by poor parenting. Specifically, it’s caused by parents who let their kids run wild, without trying to discipline them. I’m not sure that adults could be corrected by having an occasional fistfight. And if kids try to get into fistfights, there is bullying behavior (between kids) and child abuse (between a kid and an adult who is not a parent). I think that your arguments would be much more widely accepted if you argued for more discipline for kids, mostly by parents. Discipline doesn’t mean spanking, but it doesn’t mean absolutely no spanking either.
Kids have a limited window in which they can be socialized. There’s currently a thread about a 7 year old kid who doesn’t respect boundaries, and the way his parents (or at least his mother) does not enforce discipline. That kid is probably a holy terror at school and on the playground. If he continues like he is, just having a random other kid pound the snot out of him won’t do any good. Kids don’t really know the social rules. That little kneebiter needs to have his PARENTS discipline him, not the general population of kids.
That’s why western armies are always carrying out coups upon their governments… oh, hang on - no they don’t!
If bombs and tanks can be justified as a method of solving societal problems, I’m sure we’d be able to find a way to justify and organise a few fistfights.
No, that’s why western armies don’t carry out coups. Because coups are not the way we change governments.
But look at the Roman Empire. There you had a bunch of generals who used their control of some legion to take over the Empire. And what ended up happening? Eventually the troops realized they, not the generals, were the ones who were actually changing the government. And after that, the legions just started overthrowing the government for themselves and appointing somebody as a figurehead Emperor.
And that’s what would happen in your proposed society of designated fighters. At some point the fighters would realize that their fighting ability had become the basis of authority. So why do they need to fight at the direction of others when they could be fighting for their own benefit?
Couldn’t that much more easily happen when you sanction highly trained special forces operatives, with access to unlimited black budget funds and friends in high places? Can you imagine if all these guys in different country’s elite forces decided they had more in common with each other than they did their current paymasters?
No, really I can’t imagine that. Imagine tomorrow some Special Forces colonel appeared on all TV channels and said that his unit had seized control of the Washington, arrested Obama, Biden, Congress, and the Supreme Court, and were declaring themselves the new ruling council. Do you honestly think three hundred million Americans would say, “Well, I guess that’s that. These guys sound like they’ve taken over. Nothing we can do about it. Too bad about democracy but it had a good run.”
No, what would happen is that we’d ask “Who do these bozos think they are?” Then they’d all be arrested. Obama and all the others would be released from custody and go back to work. The Joint Chiefs would say “Sorry about that Mr President. We’re really embarassed about this. Colonel Smith’s been having some marital problems but we had no idea he was this far gone. He said he wanted to run some ‘special drill’ this weekend and we figured it would do him good not to sit around the house.”
