'Boys will be Boys' (or 'Why Men Need to Fight')

It’s amazing how starkly obvious the gender differences are in aring environment. In the general flow of life in anindustrialised society men and women are mixed and mergedtogether in their daily routines, doing the same sorts of work,taking on the same sorts of responsibilities, etc. - barelydistinguishable. But in the environment of the ring somethingdifferent is going on. Here men are taking off their shirts,flexing their muscles, and getting physical with each other in avery primitive and very heterosexual way. Here we play roughlywith each other, in a way that inevitably excludes most women andchildren.

There is something very basic but very beautiful about the ring.The cries of the combatants echo back to a time when women andmen knew who they were and what was expected of them as membersof their gender. The fight club is a sort of physical probe intothe collective subconscious - giving embodiment to that repressedmemory of a culture where women fed and nurtured the communitywhile men fought to defend it.

That is why fighting is such a natural form of initiation ritefor young men. We modern Australians are in desperate need of aninitiation rite for our young people. Our nation continues to beswept by waves of adolescent boys who never become men. Theydevelop adult male bodies, but they are bodies that have neverbeen nourished with the ideals of a mature community - idealsthat are needed if those bodies are to be put to good use.

I do seriously believe that our community would be greatly servedif every teenage boy, when he reached the age of say 16 or 17 wasobliged to train for a fight.

That fight training would then be conducted by the boy’s fatherand by the older males in the family as well as by other selectedmen in the community. When the day of the fight came, the menwould gather together with all the boys who had been in trainingand tell them stories - stories of the great Australian men thathave gone before them; the men who stormed the beaches atGallipoli, the men who opened up the land for agriculture andindustry, the great Aboriginal warriors who fought and diedresisting the white invasion. Then the boys would be dressed intheir fight gear and led to the side of the ring where the adultmen would push the lads out into the centre. There they would beforced to rely upon their own resources for three rounds, afterwhich they would be welcomed back as men, and then perhaps takento the tattoo parlor to have etched into their skin the date oftheir fight and perhaps some emblem of courage and integrity thathad been chosen for them.

It’s all a dream of course, but it’s a great one. We come closeto it every time I lead a boy to the ring for the first time,with his dad at my side working his corner. We’ve had somewonderful moments like that - great fights fought by great boyswho show all the signs of going on to become great men.

I claim that we’ve had a 100% success rate in terms of guys whomI’ve got involved in amateur contests getting out of the troublethey’ve been in. By the time we get them to the side of the ringthey’ve stopped using drugs, they’re no longer in trouble withthe law, they’re not causing trouble at school, etc. Of coursethe difficulty is in getting them that far, and that’s where wecould do with more support from friends and family and lessinterference from the politically correct.

I am conscious of the fact that the focus of my work here is withboys rather than with girls, but I do believe that the crisis weare experiencing in our community is with boys. It is mostly boyswho are doing drugs. It is boys who are doing the break andenters and rolls. It is boys who are getting into trouble withthe law, and boys who are committing suicide. Of course none ofthis though should undermine the significance of initiation ritesfor girls, nor the significant effect that ring fighting can havein a girl’s life.

We do indeed have the occasional fighting woman join us, but sheis a special kind of woman - one who is able to go toe to toewith the men, who can take as well as give a solid punch in thenose, and who can thus demand the respect of the men.

In my time as a fight trainer I’ve had the privilege of trainingup one of my girls, Wendy, to win the Australian lightweighttitle in kickboxing. She was a special sort of girl though. Youdon’t get many like Wendy. For the most part, the girls just comeand sit near the side of the ring and look on wide-eyed whiletheir men beat their chests and flail away at each other.

What about this girl who’s joined us for the first time tonight.Could she be another Wendy? Not likely. She’s doesn’t look thepart at all. She’s a slender Vietnamese girl, with a sassyhairstyle and a T-shirt that prominently displays the words ‘Toobusy to Fuck’.

I told her that if she wanted to train with us at all that she’dhave to change into a different shirt. I offered her one of ourclub T-shirts - the ones with ‘Christianity with Punch’ displayedon the back. She was predictably reluctant to wear it, but sheput it on eventually. Once we had her in a different T-shirt shefaded from view as the centre of everybody’s attention. Even so,I suspect that the fine performance the boys put on tonight wasin part inspired by a desire to impress our visitor. You can’tescape the sexual dynamics in this game.

A friend of mine in the army told me that, despite all the talkabout equality of the sexes in the forces, the Australian armywas still refusing to allow women into the front line, and withgood reason. He said that the Israeli experience had been welldocumented (Israel being one of the only countries to put womenin the front line) and that they were experiencing enormousproblems. He said that for one thing, the statistics showed thatmen would always go back for a woman who had been shot, even ifshe was dead, and even if it put the rest of the squad in seriousdanger. He also said that the effect on morale of the death of awoman in the front line was far more serious than the effect ofthe deaths of any number of men (and morale is considered to be athird of any army’s fighting strength)! Gender differences justdo not seem to be able to be ignored in a war zone.

I’m a great supporter of women in the fighting arts, and indeedI’ve been in trouble with our state government on more than oneoccasion because of my role in promoting, training, andofficiating in fight contests between females (which is stillillegal in NSW). But I don’t do this because I think that there’sno difference between men and women in the ring. In the officethere might not be any relevant difference, and in the pulpit Ican’t see or hear any, but in the ring - in that most fundamentaland most primitive arena of human encounter - women are women,and men better bloody not be.