Before you answer, please bear in mind what the question is NOT.’
I am not asking if you’ve ever punched anyone for insulting your mother.
I am not asking if you would punich someone for insulting your mother.
I am not asking if you approve of others responding with insults to their mothers with physical asking.
The question is exactly what it seems, but I’ll rephrase it to make it clearer.
During the time of your childhood and teen years, in the place where you grew up, would impugning the character of a boy’s mother in his presence be understood as at least a challenge to engage in violence, if not an deliberate provocation to do so, by your peers?
I wrote “boy” on purpose, by the way, because in my culture girls were not expected to be violent in the ways boys were thought likely to be. But I’m not trying to discourage anyone–male, female, white, black, even Etruscan–from answering.
In answering, please give your approximate age and the general area in which you grew up.
To answer my own question: I am a black man in his mid-40s. While I wouldn’t have been excused by my parents for punching a kid my own age who egregiously insulted my mother, my peers would pretty much have expected it and would probably have thought ill of me for forbearing. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee.
I grew up in Minnesota in the 90s and actually insulting someone’s mother (I mean beyond “that’s not what your mom said last night” type stuff) would have been unthinkable and if my peer group engaged in that behavior, they did it out of my presence. I don’t remember ever seeing a single schoolyard scuffle.
Most guys would consider it justification for violence assuming it was not consenual joking or jabbing.
A smaller number of those guys would actually act violently.
A much smaller number of guys were stupid enough to do it to the guys who would act violently.
Most of the guys stupid enough to do it to the guys who would act violently would be violent guys themselves and intended to provoke violence. The only case I can recall where there was real violence happened liked that. The insult was intended to start the fight.
I can’t really say because it never happened in the people I associated with. I was born in 1949, so I guess we’re talking about late 50’s and the 60’s. I guess I ran with a very polite crowd. For example, I was in cub scouts, and two of the mothers were the Den Mothers, and they made sure we were polite all the time they were around; and if we weren’t polite when they weren’t around, they would probably hear about it and give us what for. So I, at least, never thought about what I would do if someone insulted my mother.
If some schoolmate that I didn’t know well decided to insult me in that way, then I suppose they would have been trying to get me to fight them, but they would have had to try harder than that. Anyway, I was always tall for my age, so even though I would have been a pushover in a fight no-one started anything with me.
I must have led a sheltered childhood. To the best of my recollection, I never even heard the expression “son of a bitch,” much less heard it directed at another person, until I was in college.
And it wasn’t even until some time within the past five years that it occurred to me that calling someone that was essentially calling the other person’s mother a bitch.
I guess what it boils down to is that it would never have occurred to me to insult a person by insulting his mother.
35, male, grew up in logging territory in California.
It was reasonable for boys to fight in that area, but fighting was really for establishing your position in the pack and righting wrongs. If you couldn’t handle someone insulting you or your family, that’d just lower your standing, not raise it. Fundamentally, it’s exposing a weakness that can be exploited.
48 middle class white Australian suburb and you bet, say what you like about anyone except my mum. It would have pretty much guaranteed a stare down that would 9 times out 10 end up in a fight.
An real insult to someone’s actual mother (not something of the “Your mother wears army boots” sort) would likely get you a smack, if not something worse.
I’m a white guy from the midwest (the mean streets of Chicago), born in 1958. In my schoolyard days, insulting someone’s mother would be an automatic fist-fight. You had no choice; you had to defend her honor. End of story.
Considering that “Yo mama” jokes were generally the height of comedy when I was in 5th/6th grade, I’ll have to say not in that relatively generic context.
However, if say… someone’s mother had something unfortunate about them and was secretly mocked by classmates, then yeah, that was asking for a beat-down.
Early forties, male, grew up in south Florida. Joking about one’s mother was never an invitation for violence, but there was always that one guy who’d get totally bent out of shape over it
Born in 1961 and it depended on the whether it was a your mama joke or a real insult. A real insult called for an ass kicking. A your mama joke called for a witty response that sometimes led to an ass kicking.
My teen years were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and my answer to the OP is “hell if I know.” I remember all sorts of insults being thrown around, but I don’t remember anyone making wise about someone else’s mother. My fellow teens were pretty creative in their ability to insult their classmates directly.
Suburbs of Boston, growing up in the 70’s, pretty much nothing rose to the level of a fist fight. Not sure what you would have to do that would make people accept a fight was inevitable.
I don’t think the ethnic Swedes ever even got that it was meant to be an insult in the first place. “Wait, what? My mother? Why would you want to fuck her? But… She’s… She’s old, dude. Are you… Are you OK? You’re not feeling ill, are you? Want me to make you some nyponsoppa? You’ll feel better!”
The Iranians, Arabs, Kurds etc., however - for them it was most definitely fighting words.
No. It was a contest to see who could come up with the best insult of one’s mother.
There was one time where it stopped a potential fight. One kid came up to our group at lunch and started saying he was gonna kick this others guys ass. That kid said something like, “Man I can’t fight you your mommas so fat that if I bruised you up she’d think you were a chocolate chip cookie and eat you.” The other kid just said “Fuck you.” and stormed off.
A couple of days later those kids fought anyways but it wasn’t at school and I wasn’t there.
Born in 1949 Los Angeles,lower middle class neighborhood. It seldom happened but was well understould that this would be immediate fighting words. If a boy failed to respond to defend his mothers honor he would be at the bottom of the scale. I don’t remember actually ever seeing this happen though.
