On punches

One thing that has really been irking me in the last few weeks is the negative stereotype that is getting peddled about the men who (accidentally) kill or seriously injure other men with one punch. I mean, I know, the media is telling us that it's only the other guy's story matters and the guy who threw the punch is a "coward", a monster, someone who should have known better. They call the punches that result in such grave injuries a "king hit", a "coward punch". Now, I believe, that had these punches not resulted in these grave injuries, they would have been called an "awesome hit", a "hero punch", a "champion move" or something positive like that. Why do I say that? Because the truth is so often we do glorify violence and displays of machismo like that. It's literally like that saying, 'it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt'.

Now is about the point where people tell me I've got it all wrong, that the men punching other men like this are thugs and demons and simply bad people. They're not people like us, they're different. You know, because the rest of us apparently don't delight in violence in movies, we don't cheer on contact competitive sports, and we haven't been responsible for making "ultimate fighting" so popular on television that we now want to enroll our children into mixed martial arts lessons so they can be the next cage-fighting champion. I know, I know, witnessing violence doesn't make people violent, right? Probably not, but the case is often that art imitates life and not the other way around. It's not that things magically appear on television and we want to do exactly like it; I think its more that television executives observe what the rest of us like and want to put that in television so we can relate and watch their shows (and buy advertised products, etc). Generally, we like to watch what we already like. But I digress... What I'm meaning to say is that the people punching other people are often regular people like us who make very poor decisions,and those decisions lead to poor consequences. These decisions themselves are often predisposed by (usually) alcohol and/or other drugs, peer pressure, and the other unique social pressures men in our society face.

I once heard a woman praising her child for having punched another boy in the abdomen. She was proud of him for having demanded his own respect via violence. She was proud of him because by his behaviour this boy had shown he was becoming a "man". And she was proud of him because  that other child was not her child. Now, this woman is an otherwise very well-intentioned human being and mother, but she has learnt to have the same expectations a lot of us have of how men ought to behave. Men do not sit down and talk about their indifferences, they should fight them out physically. Men should show their superiority and demand their pride be respected by physical displays of strength. Men need to consume as much alcohol as their bodies will tolerate so they are not thought of as "wimps" by their peers. Men should be muscular. Muscular and strong men have a right to pick on less muscular and physically less-strong men. Men in the company of others must always seek to be seen to be the stronger one. These are the kind of pressures men face most days. Even the female partners of men often demand this behaviour of them. For example, how many of us have seen a man who disrespects another man's partner, and then this partner demands that he "be a man" and confront the other man (usually verbally, but with the expectation that use of physical violence is acceptable too). And that's just it, we've created a society where people are taught that violence sometimes is an option, and that option is higher up in the hierarchy of options if you're a man.

The reality is that a lot of us have felt angry at times - and a lot of us have wanted to react violently at times when we were angry. A lot of people have also faced the situation where they were so intoxicated that their usual inhibitions were lowered, where they're more susceptible to make bad choices. Hey, some of these people sometimes punch others too. I'd say more often than not, they are barely thinking of the potential consequences of their actions. I mean, these are normal people making bad choices that are tainted as the big bad demons when one of their punches cause another person a serious injury. There is no point in ruining their reputation either or calling them a coward. But here is where I do lay some blame on the media.

The media knows what we like, what human beings are used to and expect. And we all love stories of villains and victims, of good guys and bad guys, of heroes and cowards. So that is what the media feeds us: a poor young innocent man being a model citizen who is randomly targeted by a devil who attacks him with superhuman strength and intending to cause maximum damage. I'd say that if a person gets punched while they're in church with their eyes closed praying, or while alone in a library, lost in thought, reading a book, then that's pretty cowardly - and, yes, that's exactly like the kind of the story the media sell to us... but it's not usually the whole one.There is never mention that these kinds of things actually usually happen in areas filled with intoxicated persons, in the late hours of night, and what other combustants for social disorder are about. I'm certainly not saying that you deserve to get punched in the head if you happen to want to have some fun out in the town at the early hours of the morning where others are consuming drugs or alcohol, I'm simply saying some situations are inherently more dangerous. This is why our parents warned us about these situations. It's not all about inherently-bad people and inherently-innocent people.

How about if instead of negatively-labeling certain men who get caught up in bad situations, we do something a little more productive?  I don't have the answers, but perhaps we need to start asking better questions. Something like what role does alcohol play in violence? what other factors contribute to violence? how can we better educate men about avoiding violence rather than retroactively calling them 'cowards' and 'thugs'? what would be some alternative/healthier measures of masculinity we can inculcate into our young men to aspire to? These are just my opinions and suggestions, but maybe it needs to be something more of us think about.