That’s my point. I don’t think it’s OK. I had to do it to get some relief, but I don’t think that it’s an ideal solution. An ideal solution would be if I had been able to tell someone, and had that behavior stopped. Instead, when I told an adult, I was told that “boys will be boys” and to learn to deal with “a little teasing”, and to be more ladylike. However, I didn’t have that ideal solution available to me, so I chose to use a less than ideal solution that DID work.
I didn’t want the bullies to pick on someone else. I didn’t want them to pick on ANYONE. But I was sick and tired of getting pounded into the ground on a regular basis. As I saw it, the ONLY option I had was to be willing and able to inflict serious damage on them. And this was NOT a good option, it was just the lesser of two evils.
Well, we just had two boys at my work-HS find naked pictures of a girl on her phone, and they texted themselves the pictures, then blackmailed her into doing their homework. They admitted this to the administration, but apparently that’s not enough evidence to get some sort of records from the phone company, and of course they deleted everything before they got caught.
One of them is 18 and very nearly got himself expelled 3 weeks before graduating and placed on a sex offender list, both of which he roundly deserved, being the idea man, and which he avoided by destroying the evidence.
I would not be at all sorry to learn that she had an older brother who caught him one night and relieved him of a couple teeth. As it stands, this kid is an arrogant SOB who has openly flouted the admins and the law.
Thing is, when beating the living fuck out of someone carries no consequences, people who are good at fighting become the lords of the earth.
You and I have a fistfight, and I beat the crap out of you and leave you bleeding in the gutter. Everyone watches, but since fighting is tolerated, they do nothing to stop the fight. And that means that skilled fighters can insult anyone, and commit any offense they like, because NO ONE DARES TO FIGHT THEM. It enshrines the schoolyard bully as the ideal to which everyone should aspire, and if you’re not good at fighting, you better shut the fuck up and keep your head down, and agree with whatever the bully likes, because if he decides to kick your ass society has decided that’s between you and him.
And of course, it renders women as permanent second class citizens, except the extremely rare exceptions who are stronger than an average man. And even the toughest women are going to get their asses kicked by average tough guys. Action girls who beat the crap out of every man they meet are fiction. Women can’t fight on an equal basis with men, and so therefore women have no honor. And if a man smacks around his wife, well, that’s their business, isn’t it? Her only hope is to find a man willing to stand up for her, because the law won’t, and neither will her neighbors–after all, physical violence is socially acceptable.
What isn’t acceptable is assaulting a woman who is the property of someone else, because that other person might fight you. Unless of course you’re an expert killer, in which case her owner will have to back down. What is he going to do, call the cops? The cops will laugh at him, because physical violence is acceptable.
I’m imagining a society where people who like to inflict casual violence on those weaker than themselves, instead of being punished by the courts, are punished by people who can speak their lingo fluently. People flagged as bullies and far too handy at dishing out violence to the unsuspecting or undeserving, are reported to an organisation made up of mma fighters and krav maga experts. Then they are put under surveillance, have their hang-outs located and monitored, and the first time they are seen indulging their aggressive behaviour, are given a lesson in how proper fighting is done. Controlled, but punishing aggression, that leaves these arseholes wondering wtf hit them.
Some sort of professional force of ass-kickers, who will deal with anti-social assholes. And if there was trouble, you could call this organization, and they’d send someone right away? And so everyone knows exactly who these ass-kickers are, maybe they should wear some sort of distinctive clothing? A uniform of some sort? And distinctive vehiciles? And perhaps since these guys are professional full-time ass-kickers, people should all chip in a little bit to pay their salaries? It’s brilliant!
Yes, because a society filled with roving gangs of mercenaries is so much better then the one we live in now. And, of course, I assume you intend to be part of the group of enforcers? :rolleyes:
Because my worst losses came at the hands of people smaller and weaker (just much better trained and more willing to win) than I am?
Was 1960 more dangerous and unpleasant than today? It was less civilized but was it really worse? I guess it comes down to personal experience and personal preferences.
Dude, if I hit you with a newspaper in the wrong place, you are dead. Right then, right there, and you are shaking hands with Jesus. You can’t cast aside that possibility either. It’s knowing what you want to accomplish and how to accomplish it with the tools you have.
Leave out the MMA stuff and organized parts and you just (for the most part) described the coal fields when I was growing up and the cities once we moved there. God, do I ever miss it sometimes.
Actually I could argue that it is you who is saying women are worth less; that they must be sheltered and society itself made somehow feminine for them to survive. I have my doubts about that. Nobody needs someone else to protect them; they may want it and they may get it, but they will never need it. Give me about three hours and I can teach any woman to flatten the average NFL linebacker. If you stay up with it enough to actually use it - that’s up to you. If they will use it when needed, that’s up to them. But this “women are pitiful little flowers who can’t look after themselves against big burly men” thing died long ago and it isn’t ever coming back.
I guess. You seem really confident that you, personally, won’t get hurt in such a world. That’s my sticking point. I think you’re being overly optimistic about that.
The difference, of course, is that it’s much, much easier to kill someone with a pipe wrench than a newspaper. But you already knew that. If you allow fist-fights, then you have to be okay with a jump in accidental or intentional deaths from said fist-fights. Are you okay with that? Because I’m not.
Actually I got hurt in that world quite a bit; I have some interesting scars and x-rays to prove it. They don’t bother me at all. The scars from the mental abuse I received back then, the kind of abuse we’re all too willing to throw around in these much more civilized days we live in - those scars are another story for another thread. I just think that overall, for me and for most people in general, that that general form or format outlined in the OP as the Old Days is a better choice to what we have today.
It’s much easier for an untrained or inexperienced person to kill with a pipe wrench; for a trained or experienced person a newspaper or a set of car keys is just as good at ending your life and possibly better; at least today. Should you happen to get my car keys off of me I doubt you could use them as efficiently against me as you could a pipe wrench; 50 years ago that may not have been true. But I’m betting you knew that too.
A jump in accidental or intentional deaths? I wonder what good research would show? We could argue population and different aspects but I think, IMHO, that you were safer from accidental or intentional death in 1960 than you are today. Black eyes and a chipped tooth or three? Sure! But death?
We have a society today where an 11 year old can kill his dad’s girlfriend and her unborn baby. Where kids don’t have fistfights but kill each other in the streets. Where folks kill each other because traffic was bad that day or someone didn’t clean up after their dog. And it isn’t all guns; its tire irons, pipe wrenches, knives and anything else we can get our hands on. We could “uninvent” the gun and we would still be killing each other. Are you saying you are OK with that? Because I am not. And if it takes going back to when kids sometimes came home with a black eye or two guys squared off behind the neighborhood tavern to change some of that, again - as I have said before - I can live with that.
A great deal of that experience would be on your race, class, and sex. A woman of color would have a much more dangerous and unpleasant experience in that time than a WASP male of middle class or higher.
And around 1968, an 11 year old girl took to carrying a fixed blade knife in order to get relief from the gang of bullies that tormented her because she didn’t want to get groped.
All females should be issued with a taser and pepperspray*, with any inappropriate usage of them severely punished. I’m sure some smart person could invent a shock-giving glove of some sort, that females were allowed to use on anyone, male or female, who came within their personal space uninvited, and with bad intent.
No! Better still, a ring that squirts pepperspray! That’d be really cool.
No, 99% of society doesn’t do that. Because they aren’t insane. Or sociopathic. You are listing individual highly rare anecdotes and pretending that they are normal behavior for society. These things happened just as often in the 1960s, and they would happen just as often in our posited fist-fighting world. Fist-fights aren’t going to eliminate crazy people.
Why just females? Give everyone tasers and pepper spray. And whenever someone mouths off to you, zap 'em. If you’re going to create a world where it’s okay to smack people around and beat them up, why stop with fists?
I can’t speak to WASP males of middle class or higher (I was Catholic, very far Eastern and raised poor as dirt) but there you have stumbled onto the key! What we do is keep the current equality of all (such as it is) and build on it; in a manner of speaking make everyone a 1960s WASP male as you remember them. We bring back the social interaction including the odd fistfight here and there; we take greater effort to assure equal access under the law and within society. In other words, we hand folks a full box of tools to work with. We may not be the brightest animal out there but it is just possible that from that we could indeed build a better society.
And nobody died as a result. I regret what you went through; I wish you had lived in Edwardsville instead of where you did - that may not have been necessary. And again it would be tough research to do - but I wonder if there are more little girls like you today or way back then? Or today do they just go straight to guns or having their friends beat their tormentor to death? We didn’t need to pass through metal detectors just to go to school or work, after all but they/we do today.
(And in case you are wondering - based on what I have seen in Pittsburgh Public, the weapons found are usually “defensive” like yours and not being carried by bullies. What that says I am not sure, but there it is.)
I remember seeing films of tests of a firearm built into a bra and a sort of “bank dye-pack” ladies could place on their person to trigger in the event of an attack. Now if we could just do something about the recoil or backsplash, THAT would be really cool!
My wife went to a Catholic all-girls school. As a regular part of phys-ed they had basic self-defense training. Judging from what she is able, I would say it was probably pretty darn good basic training. I wonder how something like that would do on a national scale? I have some doubts because, as others have pointed out, today actions don’t always have consequence people are able to act in an absolutely abhorrent fashion and get away with it. But its an interesting thing to consider.
If it’s normal to teach people the basics of fistfighting, then the assholes who punch people for no reason learn the basics of fistfighting too. If you give people weapons to punish the assholes, then the assholes have weapons too.
Look, what you’re talking about is decriminalization of assault and battery. As in, if you go around punching people, or threatening to punch them, that’s a private matter and something the cops and the courts shouldn’t get involved with.
If you legalize assault and battery, expect to see a lot more assault and battery. If you can go around punching people with no repercussions, expect to see a lot more people getting punched. And if you make it acceptable to use weapons against people, then you’re going to see a lot more use of weapons.
All this shows is that you have an overinflated confidence in your fighting abilities.
I find it hard to believe that you can teach other people to win fights when you admit you have difficulty doing it yourself.
And you don’t seem aware of how sexist your world view is. You seem worried that not being able to fight will make men just like women, which you see as a lesser status. And you seem to think you’re being open-minded by saying that a woman who’s willing to fight can be just as good as a man. So you still think “men” are better than “women” except you think people can choose which social gender they want regardless of their physical gender.
That’s because men aren’t allowed to beat the crap out of women anymore. If we allow a man to punch any woman who disrespects him, then we really are going back to the days when women were pitiful little flowers who couldn’t look after themselves. Because, fact is, men are a lot stronger than women, and if we reorganize society to allow anyone to kick anyone’s ass whenever they fell like it, that means that women are going to be on the recieving end of the ass-kickings 93% of the time.
In a world where your social status depends on being able to kick someone’s ass, women are permanent second class citizens. In a world where if someone kicks your ass, you call the cops and the asshole goes to jail, women are equal to men.
The level of truly anti-social people and physical bullies hasn’t increased, nor will it. What adding fisticuffs as an acceptable but rare tool would do is severely limit the number of casual assholes. The truly violent and sociopathic will always end up incarcerated as they do today. That type of training begins as a CHILD. It only takes one or two altercations to scare most people into accepting the cultural politeness that avoids them. That indoctrination then spreads to people being unafraid to break up a fight, stand up for strangers in distress etc. Most people don’t hang back because they are afraid of getting a pop in the nose, they are afraid of being arrested, sued, having their entire life turned upside down by an overly litigious society. The result is that those who are inclined to assholishness get to run increasingly roughshod over the rest of us because their behaviour is socially unacceptable but not criminal. Somewhere along the line, they discovered that they could benefit from hurting others because there is no real or immediate repercussion for their actions. A few wallops as a kid would have taught the vast majority differently, with the result of them toning down their impulses.
Luckily for me, as I’m probably weaker than 90% of men, the assholes are limited to cutting me off in traffic and saying annoying things, held back because they’re afraid of “getting arrested, sued, having their entire life turned upside down by an overly litigious society.” I’ll happily take those minor annoyances over men having the ability to pop me one if if I annoy them. Legalized casual violence is a terrifying prospect when you know you’re not in the top tier of fighters. Fortunately, as women have the vote now, I’m not overly worried about us legalizing assault.