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EROS and AGGRESSION
10-15-11
Warrior NW: EROS and AGGRESSION
Intro note from Bill Weintraub:
Here are Four Emails from Warrior Naked Wrestler, aka Warrior NW, author of aggression and the beauty of guys and many other very important posts on this Man2Man Alliance site.
In the first email, he's responding to a gay-identified "friend" of his, who said, regarding the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell,"
You can't redefine words to fit your theory. They could not say in
court, "NW says gay means anal receptiveness and femminess, and I'm
not like that so you should let me stay in the military even if I like
guys and like to rub cocks with them."
This is NW's response.
First email:
"You can't redefine words to fit your theory."
Really?
The fags and the fems do it all the time.
In point of fact, the fags and fems and Feminists have done the defining for us. Rather, they have RE-defined the terms for us. And they are wrong. And we are forced to live with those fucked up neo-definitions of male-male eros.
Normal male-male attraction centers around aggression and manly behavior. (You can always see young, uncorrupted boys wanting to challenge each other to wrestling matches -- or maybe you DON'T notice stuff like that. Mammals in the wild do the same thing.)
Normal manly behavior INCLUDES having a disdain for femmy behavior in other males. In the new military, males will have to accept femmy behavior -- including butt fucking which they detest -- as "normal" behavior. That destroys the normal butch male, who really wants to give of himself in the military and serve.
SO Now....Normal Men who like manly men for their manliness and who DO NOT want to be feminized by other males through butt fucking and femmy behavior must suffer in silence. And it will be a terrible pain.
IT'S NOT JUST "NW." GET OVER THAT.
You live in the world of fags. And you can't understand the importance that manly males place on projecting manliness ALL the time. Manly Men do not want to slip into bars, or get married, or go to the "Gay Pride Parades," or watch dykes on bikes, or cross dress, etc.
The problem is now that the normal butch males who reject such submissive butt fuck femmy behavior in men, won't even be allowed to express their opinions. It's that way where I work. Femmy guys are everywhere, and no one can call them on it. No one.
Because you exist in a fag world you can't see it.
YOU are totally blind to that. Totally.
And it punishes manly-acting males.
You either understand that, or you don't.
You cannot learn manliness out of books.
You MUST experience manliness through fighting, and male nudity (the acknowledgment of the male genitals which make the Male). There is no other way to understand it.
30 + years ago, when I talked to a military recruiter in high school I was asked a very important question: "Can you handle yourself in a fight?" There was NO FUCKING WAY I was going to answer No to that question. Today the military will have to accept a limp wristed male who answers no to that same question.
Put another way: when you fight another dude in the school yard, on the street, in the fight school, on the wrestling mat, YOU BECOME A MAN. It is THAT simple.
There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight. And it cannot be learned through books. A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man.
It is NOT "NW's Definition." It is Nature's Definition. Look at Nature. Put the books down and LOOK at nature.
Put down all your books on the subject, go to a fight school and accept getting beaten up once in a while. And you'll also have some victories. There is NOTHING else like it. Nothing.
There is NO substitute for Male.
What fags hate is real manliness, because fags never really finished developing into fighter-males; they were not allowed to. It's usually because they did not have an older male tell them that it was OK to fight if necessary to establish their manliness. EVEN IF YOU LOSE THE FIGHT. These mentally under-developed males (fags) want their lack of manly development to now be accepted in the military.
What fags in the military really need is a few good fist fights to become Manly Men. It is NOT "NW's Definition." It is Nature. The Nature of the Male.
There is NO substitute for Male.
Second email -- this one's to Warrior Mike of Fight the Fight Now!, who's now going to Fight School.
That's cool that you are making fight buddies. I call it the sweet time. It's not that you don't love your wife and kids, etc. It is that man-fight time and all of that is a different space and time for males. Man2Man time is NOT in competition with your male-female time. It complements it.
When boys are growing up, they became manly-men by being around boys growing up.
The feminist movement has pushed and pushed to change all of that.
The Words: heterosexual and homosexual are less than 150 years old. Those words never existed in the time of the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Celts, Gauls, Nordics, Germanics, etc. In fact those words were never around when the Founders of this country, VERY Manly Males who pledged their Lives, their Fortunes, and their Sacred Honor to make this place we call the United States. In ancient Western times there were just Men and Women. Boys were expected to be Manly, and to develop into Manly Men. Fighting and Wrestling were part of that mental/physical development leading to the adult Manly Male.
Technology (Machines, etc.) took humans in a totally different direction. And here we are.
But that urge for manliness is still in our DNA. It's still there. Your testicles still make testosterone. And when you fight and grapple around, you make even MORE of it. You can't stop your chronological age. But if you notice, guys who fight and grapple, (including yourself) retain a certain physical youth. It's right there! And you are experiencing it.
I am 50 now. So I went to high school in the 1970's. The "Women's Movement" was just picking up steam in those days. (You went to high school before me. And you were most likely in a more man-centric environment.....in other words, it was OK to be a guy.) By the late 1970's it was becoming apparent that males needed to sort of apologize for being male. I remember it that way.
Part of that male-ness that "needed" to be apologized for was the normal need for males to just hang out in places like the wrestling room, half naked, wrestling around, shirtless and enjoying the feel of male muscles against muscles, sweat, aggression, hard-ons, testosterone, etc.
I remember feeling terrified by wrestling in high school. My family was SUPER homophobic, Catholic, anti-communist (believe it or not), and what I call today, forced hetero-sexualized.
I can recall the fear of being even associated with that "fag sport" or wrestling. It WAS painful. I desperately wanted to take part in that male-male world of aggression and male beauty in the wrestling room.
I've written about it a lot on Bill's site. It was a super painful time. I longed for wrestling for years. I did -- FINALLY -- wrestle in college for 2 years. I finally got to partake in it. Just briefly. It was testosterone-driven male magic. I will NEVER forget the Heaven-on-Earth that was that sweaty, hot, shirtless, muscled, aggression, full body contact wrestling room at college. Never.
We never wore shirts. (This was by then the early 1980's.) College wrestlers still went shirtless, for 2 hours every day. Almost every wrestler in there, including me, was ripped, lean and totally covered in sweat for 2 hours. It was the most amazing thing.
It was the Eros of Aggression.
And like you said, and I cannot agree more, it MUST be experienced to really know it. THAT is at the heart of the problem. Boys are more and more NOT experiencing the eros of skin-on-skin aggression as they grow up. They are growing up like girls. Young men are conditioned to act like girls if they want to be "acceptable."
The fight school is the flickering hope for the future.
So anyway, that hard-on from grappling and the clashes I have with folks related to it is related to my disdain for people who try to tag it as "gay." "Gays" are a distinct group of freaks who can't even hope to understand manliness, like the manliness of the fight school. That distinction MUST always be maintained.
Third email:
What was tough about the wrestling team in college was that I came to the realization that I was not going to "succeed" in wrestling at the University.
That's not defeatism.
It was reality.
You can't learn overnight the Muscle Smart part of wrestling that comes from YEARS of wrestling. College wrestlers don't "learn" wrestling in college. They already know just about every move there is by the time they get there. College wrestling is a time of wrestlers refining what their minds AND their bodies already know. Their bodies react in counter-moves like you cannot believe. I was NO match for them.
AND it was ruthless and brutal.
I had NO credentials in the wrestling room. None. No State Titles, no trophies that I had in my memories of wrestling. The other guys did. They talked about it. They knew I was meat to beat up on; it gave them confidence to beat up on me with. I knew it too.
In a college wrestling team you really have no friends. There can only be ONE guy in each weight class. ONE. The wrestling room is devided into about 4 groups, based on weight. You don't want the little guys (no matter how fearless they are) to take on the big guys. They WILL get busted up. And then the coach will lose his best guys. The wrestling room is like a gladiator school. Sooner or later, you're going to have to fight the guys you're training with. And there is no love lost between wrestlers who want that weight class on the team, when they have challenge matches. The college wrestling room, because it eventually only allowed one guy in each weight class (we live in a numbers world), was a selfish place.
I can remember sometimes in there, having no ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) left in my muscles. ATP is the last stage of the energy we get from glucose; it is actually what the strands of cells in your muscles use to "fire" to make your muscles move. I'd be COVERED in sweat, and totally bruised up fighting for my life against some dude in a 2 minute takedown drill. And my body would suddenly NOT respond to commands from my brain. It truly was wrestling to exhaustion.
Real battle.
There was nothing erotic at that point. Just survival. And the opponent would throw me to the ground face first. The saying that, "All is fair in love and war," applied in that wrestling room. Brutal was putting it mildly. The college wrestling room system is designed to make you want to quit, WHILE you're getting beaten up.
I have never known fighting to total exhaustion -- TOTAL exhaustion -- before or since that time in the University Wrestling Room.
It is strange, but I have no buddies from college wrestling. But I loved every minute of it. I would not trade that experience. I never competed in a match, obviously, since I could never survive the challenge matches. I experienced it; but I never really "made" it.
The ancient Greeks on the other hand, probably experienced great friendships from the Palaistra; they were not competing for slots on a team. They were just there to wrestle, box, and do pankration. They competed of course. But they were not into the rationalization that we are into today. In the Palaistrai of Ancient Greece, if you didn't win today, well you could always win tomorrow. Today, in our stats-driven world, if you don't win today, you're out tomorrow. Just like the business world. It's all numbers. I didn't fit into the wrestling numbers.
But that is why fight schools are so important. In the fight school you are not given 4 years to become a champion and then move on. The fight school is a club. A fun place. A place for man-fun. A guy is not driven-out because he doesn't win every match.
Fourth email:
The wrestling team at my University was shut down a year after I wrestled there. So it shut down while I was finishing up. I got my degree in English Lit. But I studied a LOT of History U.S. History, Greek History, Roman History), Liberal Arts/Humanities, Biology, Psychology. I just wanted to know a lot of stuff. I never really settled into anything.
In my college years, I was CONSTANTLY trying to figure out the connection INSIDE of me of male-male eros and aggression. It bothered me the entire time I wrestled. IT DROVE ME NUTS.
At that time (the 1980's) HIV was popping up. And it was a "gay" disease. And there was an attitude then that ANYONE who was attracted to the same sex for ANY reason deserved to die for it...So HIV was some wrath of God, or Nature. I felt SO fantastically alone keeping EVERYTHING to myself. There was NO internet, NO Man2Man Alliance, NO manly group to join that combined aggression/manliness and manly attraction for men. Nothing. I was SO incredibly alone.
I have been through a kind of journey....In Search of Manliness.
FINALLY I connected the dots....YEARS later through Bill's website.
I had also read a book, previous to knowing Bill, called Wrestling For Gay Guys. It was published in England I think. And I email with the author periodically. I can appreciate his book but I can't go along with it anymore. His book was a kind of stepping stone for me.
Manliness and aggression were the things I was REALLY looking for. And I found it in Bill Weintraub.
By the time I had done that little bit of wrestling at the community college (1979-1980), my local university had shut down ITS hugely successful wrestling program (and other men's sports soon followed). A woman had become the head of Athletics there in the late 1970's and she immediately began shutting down select Men's Varsity Sports to bring the numbers of men in athletics down to the level of the number of women in sports. She was using Title 9 as a weapon against men.
I went on to university finally in 1982, to try to go after the wrestling bug still in my head. It would NOT go away...
However, by 1984 the same Title 9 thing was happening to other universities, including my university, where I wrestled from 1982-1984.
Feminism is the systematic, intentional, super subtle, determined killing of manliness. Totally. And the Feminists seem to ally themselves with the fags. Getting fucked is something they have in common, and they need to work together for similar goals or something. You will hear women say that they feel "comfortable" around "gays" because they are not a "threat" to them.
Young males need to understand this threat to manliness clearly, in order to figure out why they can't get ahead.
As you look around your world, you will start to notice all of this.
You really see it on stupid TV shows these days. SOOO many shows now have assertive, big tit women in charge of wimpy men, especially on cop shows. It's just nuts. And it's really stupid. And it's all fabricated to train males watching it to live paralyzed lives.
VERY intentional.
The fight school and the amateur fight events are the last avenue for the normal male.
The fight schools are our last hope.
Reply from:
Re: EROS and AGGRESSION
10-15-2011
Thank you NW.
Guys, NW says,
No.
Actually, The Man2Man Alliance is your last hope.
Because the Alliance, like the palaistra -- the ancient Greek wrestling school -- makes EXPLICIT the relationship between Eros and Aggression.
Modern-day fight schools don't.
That's a huge problem.
So:
Let's look at some of the issues raised by NW and his correspondents.
First off, there's his gay-identified "friend" who said
You can't redefine words to fit your theory. They could not say in
court, "NW says gay means anal receptiveness and femminess, and I'm
not like that so you should let me stay in the military even if I like
guys and like to rub cocks with them."
Is that correct?
Is the "gay" boy correct that you can't differentiate between different types of male-male?
NO
NO
NO
Of course you can differentiate.
That's what they did in the ancient world.
Some expressions of male-male were acceptable.
Some were not.
The problem with our society's approach to male-male, which it calls "homosexuality," is that it doesn't differentiate.
It's all or nothing.
It's either all wrong or all right.
NO.
Some things are right; and some things aren't.
Ancient philosophers -- indeed ALL moral philosophers -- understood that.
They differentiated between necessary and beneficent pleasures; and unnecessary and malign practices.
They differentiated.
And they were clear that Manhood, Manliness, Manly Spirit -- were Good.
Virtuous.
And that anal, promiscuity, and effeminacy were bad --
Vicious.
They were VERY clear about that.
As is Warrior NW.
Who understands that words matter:
NW:
The fags and fems and Feminists have done the defining for us. Rather, they have RE-defined the terms for us. And they are wrong. And we are forced to live with those fucked up neo-definitions of male-male eros.
That's correct.
As I said in The importance of being out, you've allowed your enemies to define the terms for you.
And now you're being forced to "live" with those fucked-up-the-butt definitions.
As a consequence, your lives are hellish.
You need to FIGHT BACK.
NW:
Normal male-male attraction centers around aggression and manly behavior.
That's correct.
Males are attracted to Fighting Spirit -- Aggression -- and its concomitant Manly Behaviors.
MEN are ATTRACTED to MANLINESS.
Normal manly behavior INCLUDES having a disdain for femmy behavior in other males. In the new military, males will have to accept femmy behavior -- including butt fucking which they detest -- as "normal" behavior. That destroys the normal butch male, who really wants to give of himself in the military and serve.
SO Now....Normal Men who like manly men for their manliness and who DO NOT want to be feminized by other males through butt fucking and femmy behavior must suffer in silence. And it will be a terrible pain.
IT'S NOT JUST "NW." GET OVER THAT.
You live in the world of fags. And you can't understand the importance that manly males place on projecting manliness ALL the time. Manly Men do not want to slip into bars, or get married, or go to the "Gay Pride Parades," or watch dykes on bikes, or cross dress, etc.
The problem is now that the normal butch males who reject such submissive butt fuck femmy behavior in men, won't even be allowed to express their opinions. It's that way where I work. Femmy guys are everywhere, and no one can call them on it. No one.
Because you exist in a fag world you can't see it.
YOU are totally blind to that. Totally.
And it punishes manly-acting males.
You either understand that, or you don't.
You cannot learn manliness out of books.
You MUST experience manliness through fighting, and male nudity (the acknowledgment of the male genitals which make the Male). There is no other way to understand it.
30 + years ago, when I talked to a military recruiter in high school I was asked a very important question: "Can you handle yourself in a fight?" There was NO FUCKING WAY I was going to answer No to that question. Today the military will have to accept a limp wristed male who answers no to that same question.
Put another way: when you fight another dude in the school yard, on the street, in the fight school, on the wrestling mat, YOU BECOME A MAN. It is THAT simple.
There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight. And it cannot be learned through books. A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man.
"There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight."
"And it cannot be learned through books."
"A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man."
Let's look at an anecdote from the ancient world which illustrates that point.
It's about a fourth century BC Athenian politician and orator named Demosthenes.
In fourth century BC Athens, every boy was expected to go to the palaistra -- the wrestling school -- to learn Fight Sports there.
Here's the ancient Greek writer Lucian's description of the how and why of that process:
. . .
[Training in Fight Sport] creates two valuable traits in our young
men: it makes them brave in the face of danger and unsparing of their
bodies, and it also makes them strong and vigorous.
~translated by Sweet
So -- boys, from an early age, were taught to Fight -- Naked.
They learned Wrestling, Boxing, and Pankration -- what we'd call Mixed Martial Arts.
The purpose of the training was that they "become used to hard work, to stand
up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury."
And Lucian adds, that training "makes them brave in the face of danger and unsparing of their
bodies, and it also makes them strong and vigorous."
So -- boys were supposed to go to the palaistra to learn to Fight, and to Fight Nude.
To learn to stand up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury.
Such experiences, says Lucian, made the boys brave in the face of danger, and unsparing of their bodies.
But -- not every boy went to the palaistra.
At least not in Athens.
As we learn from Plutarch, who wrote a Life of Demosthenes.
Plutarch tells us that as an adult, Demosthenes consistently showed a
Why?
And how could that be?
Plutarch explains:
which was then mismanaged by his guardians, so he didn't have a good standard Greek education.
Moreover,
~translated by Scott-Kilvert
So -- the Greeks had a system of physical training in Fight Sport.
In most city-states, like Athens, a kid was expected to participate but didn't have to.
In Sparta -- he had to.
Demosthenes, unfortunately for him, was Athenian.
Demosthenes' father died, the estate was mis-managed, and his mother, faced with a child who was "delicate and physically under-developed," didn't force him, as she should have, to go to the wrestling-school -- the palaistra.
Instead, she discouraged him.
DIS-courage.
As a first consequence, he remained skinny and sickly, puny, and his peers mocked him with the sobriquet "Batalus," which Plutarch's researches found was associated with effeminacy, promiscuity, and -- the anus.
As a second consequence, Demosthenes never learned that he could -- physically Fight.
He never learned that.
And although as an adult he was good at Fighting with words -- he was an orator --
on the battlefield he was a coward -- he ran away, consistently demonstrating, says Plutarch,
And actually, the Greek word used, atolmos, translates as cowardly.
Demosthenes was cowardly.
Why?
Because he never learned the basic lessons of Fight School -- "to stand up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury . . . to be brave in the face of danger . . . and unsparing of [your] body."
In other words, he never learned he could take a punch.
The result -- he was laughed at as a child, taunted with being a femmy asshole -- and was a coward as an adult.
Now -- part of the problem was that he was raised by his mother -- because his father had died.
At Sparta, that wouldn't have mattered.
That is, at Sparta, the death of his father wouldn't have deprived Demosthenes of Male role-models and a Manly upbringing.
Because at Sparta, which was a highly communal state, Demosthenes, like all other boys, would have gone into the agogé -- and his upbringing would have been the responsibility of, ultimately, every adult Male Spartan -- who were all Warriors.
Instead of one father, he would have had a thousand Fathers, plus older boys, ManBoys, who would have mentored and taught him.
Under that Male and Manly supervision, the young Demosthenes would have learned to Fight.
And he would have gone from being sickly -- to being robust.
But -- he didn't.
As a boy he didn't learn to Fight;
and as an adult, he was a coward.
What, actually, did he do?
Well, Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, was attempting to conquer and thus unify the Greeks.
Through his oratory, Demosthenes rallied the Athenians and the other Greeks to resist the Macedonians, but when it came down to the decisive battle, Plutarch tells us . . .
[Plutarch continues:]
Demosthenes . . . could not be relied on when it came to fighting, nor was he altogether proof against bribes. He could resist any number of offers from Philip or from Macedon, but he not only yielded to but was finally overwhelmed by the Persian gold, which poured down from Ecbatana and Susa in a torrent. And so while he was admirably fitted to extol the virtues of former generations, he was not so good at imitating them.
. . .
[I]f only the nobility of his aspirations and the dignity of his words had been matched by an equivalent courage in war and integrity in other dealings, he would deserve to be ranked . . . with the men of Athens' greatest days. . .
. . .
[After his death, the Athenians erected a statue to him which read,]
~translated by Scott-Kilvert
If only.
Demosthenes' strength wasn't equal to his wisdom because his mother didn't let him go to Fight School.
Instead, she kept him at home, figuratively and literally DIS-couraging him, he remained sickly and puny, he was labeled a femmy asshole by his peers, and, above all, he never learned to Fight.
He never learned how to Fight.
And that had consequences.
Grievous consequences.
Not just for Demosthenes, but for the world.
For if not Macedon, but Athens, had succeeded in unifying the Greeks, it might have been an Athenian-led Greek army which took Persia, and then turned west to deal with Syracuse, Carthage, and Rome.
A northern Europe civilized by Greece -- rather than Rome -- would have made for a very different world than the one we know today.
Didn't happen, because Demosthenes, the foremost proponent of a free and self-governing Greece, while a great speaker, had, as a child, been kept out of Fight School.
As a consequence, he was a shameless coward, useless in an actual Fight.
Useless.
He was useless in a Fight.
So -- NW's telling you the Truth:
You cannot learn manliness out of books.
You MUST experience manliness through fighting, and male nudity (the acknowledgment of the male genitals which make the Male). There is no other way to understand it.
Put another way: when you fight another dude in the school yard, on the street, in the fight school, on the wrestling mat, YOU BECOME A MAN. It is THAT simple.
There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight. And it cannot be learned through books. A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man.
"You MUST experience manliness through fighting, and male nudity."
"There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight. And it cannot be learned through books."
"A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man."
Those are Truths which the ancients understood -- and put into practice.
As Lucian says -- first we strip the boys naked -- and then we make them Fight.
To learn to stand up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury.
Such experiences, says Lucian, make the boys brave in the face of danger, and unsparing of their bodies.
Such experiences make the boys -- MEN.
What else does NW say?
He says there's a
I remember feeling terrified by wrestling in high school. My family was SUPER homophobic, Catholic, anti-communist (believe it or not), and what I call today, forced hetero-sexualized.
I can recall the fear of being even associated with that "fag sport" or wrestling. It WAS painful. I desperately wanted to take part in that male-male world of aggression and male beauty in the wrestling room.
I've written about it a lot on Bill's site. It was a super painful time. I longed for wrestling for years. I did -- FINALLY -- wrestle in college for 2 years. I finally got to partake in it. Just briefly. It was testosterone-driven male magic. I will NEVER forget the Heaven-on-Earth that was that sweaty, hot, shirtless, muscled, aggression, full body contact wrestling room at college. Never.
We never wore shirts. (This was by then the early 1980's.) College wrestlers still went shirtless, for 2 hours every day. Almost every wrestler in there, including me, was ripped, lean and totally covered in sweat for 2 hours. It was the most amazing thing.
It was the Eros of Aggression.
And like you said, and I cannot agree more, it MUST be experienced to really know it. THAT is at the heart of the problem. Boys are more and more NOT experiencing the eros of skin-on-skin aggression as they grow up. They are growing up like girls. Young men are conditioned to act like girls if they want to be "acceptable."
The fight school is the flickering hope for the future.
So:
There's a "normal need for males to just hang out in places like the wrestling room, half naked, wrestling around, shirtless and enjoying the feel of male muscles against muscles, sweat, aggression, hard-ons, testosterone, etc."
NW says "half-naked" but, obviously, the guys need to be naked.
So we could put it like this:
There's a normal male need for guys to just hang out in places like the wrestling room, naked, wrestling around, enjoying the feel of male muscles against muscles, sweat, aggression, hard-ons, testosterone, etc.
NW continues:
"I longed for wrestling for years. I did -- FINALLY -- wrestle in college for 2 years. I finally got to partake in it. Just briefly. It was testosterone-driven male magic. I will NEVER forget the Heaven-on-Earth that was that sweaty, hot, shirtless, muscled, aggression, full body contact wrestling room at college. Never."
"We never wore shirts. (This was by then the early 1980's.) College wrestlers still went shirtless, for 2 hours every day. Almost every wrestler in there, including me, was ripped, lean and totally covered in sweat for 2 hours. It was the most amazing thing.
It was the Eros of Aggression."
So -- there's Eros -- Manly Love and Manly Life.
And there's Aggression.
And there's an EROS of AGGRESSION.
And, says, NW, the Eros of Aggression
"MUST be experienced to really know it."
And then he adds,
"THAT is at the heart of the problem. Boys are more and more NOT experiencing the eros of skin-on-skin aggression as they grow up. They are growing up like girls."
That's what happened to Demosthenes.
He didn't experience the life-giving eros of skin-on-skin aggression as he grew up.
And though he was a great orator, when it came time to actually Fight -- he was a coward.
Sad.
But what it tells us is there was a reason the ancients structured male education -- the way they did.
There was a reason they stripped their boys naked and made them Fight.
There was a reason.
And, as we'll see in a forthcoming post, that Fighting had an effect on them not just physically, but intellectually too.
NW then talks about the reality of the Wrestling Room at his college.
He says it was
I had NO credentials in the wrestling room. None. No State Titles, no trophies that I had in my memories of wrestling. The other guys did. They talked about it. They knew I was meat to beat up on; it gave them confidence to beat up on me with. I knew it too.
In a college wrestling team you really have no friends. There can only be ONE guy in each weight class. ONE. The wrestling room is devided into about 4 groups, based on weight. You don't want the little guys (no matter how fearless they are) to take on the big guys. They WILL get busted up. And then the coach will lose is best guys. The wrestling room is like a gladiator school. Sooner or later, you're going to have to fight the guys you're training with. And there is no love lost between wrestlers who want that weight class on the team, when they have challenge matches. The college wrestling room, because it eventually only allowed one guy in each weight class (we live in a numbers world), was a selfish place.
I can remember sometimes in there, having no ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) left in my muscles. ATP is the last stage of the energy we get from glucose; it is actually what the strands of cells in your muscles use to "fire" to make your muscles move. I'd be COVERED in sweat, and totally bruised up fighting for my life against some dude in a 2 minute takedown drill. And my body would suddenly NOT respond to commands from my brain. It truly was wrestling to exhaustion.
Real battle.
There was nothing erotic at that point. Just survival. And the opponent would throw me to the ground face first. The saying that, "All is fair in love and war," applied in that wrestling room. Brutal was putting it mildly. The college wrestling room system is designed to make you want to quit, WHILE you're getting beaten up.
I have never known fighting to total exhaustion -- TOTAL exhaustion -- before or since that time in the University Wrestling Room.
It is strange, but I have no buddies from college wrestling. But I loved every minute of it. I would not trade that experience. I never competed in a match, obviously, since I could never survive the challenge matches. I experienced it; but I never really "made" it.
The ancient Greeks on the other hand, probably experienced great friendships from the Palaistra; they were not competing for slots on a team. They were just there to wrestle, box, and do pankration. They competed of course. But they were not into the rationalization that we are into today. In the Palaistrai of Ancient Greece, if you didn't win today, well you could always win tomorrow. Today, in our stats-driven world, if you don't win today, you're out tomorrow. Just like the business world. It's all numbers. I didn't fit into the wrestling numbers.
But that is why fight schools are so important. In the fight school you are not given 4 years to become a champion and then move on. The fight school is a club. A fun place. A place for man-fun. A guy is not driven-out because he doesn't win every match.
So -- the wrestling room was ruthless and brutal.
And NW, who, unlike the other guys, had NOT wrestled in high school and long before, was woefully under-equipped to compete.
Nevertheless, he says,
"I loved every minute of it. I would not trade that experience. I never competed in a match, obviously, since I could never survive the challenge matches. I experienced it; but I never really 'made' it."
And he adds,
The ancient Greeks on the other hand, probably experienced great friendships from the Palaistra; they were not competing for slots on a team. They were just there to wrestle, box, and do pankration. They competed of course. But they were not into the rationalization that we are into today. In the Palaistrai of Ancient Greece, if you didn't win today, well you could always win tomorrow. Today, in our stats-driven world, if you don't win today, you're out tomorrow. Just like the business world. It's all numbers. I didn't fit into the wrestling numbers.
Is NW right that the Greeks experienced great friendships at the palaistra?
Yes -- we know they did -- and you can read about those friendships in Sokratic dialogues like the Lysis.
At the same time, we should be clear that the Greeks
were a very competitive people.
As Erich Segal points out in his Foreward to Waldo Sweet's Sport and Recreation in Ancient Greece.
Segal, who died in 2010, is best known as the author of the saccharine Love Story.
But in real life he was a Harvard-educated classicist who taught at Yale.
In other words, a person of formidable erudition.
In his Foreward to Sweet's book, Segal notes that our word "sport" carries with it the sense of levity.
That's not true of the Greeks.
Their word, AGON, is the root of our word -- agony.
Which in Greek is agonia, and which means, first and foremost, a struggle for victory.
So an Agon is a Struggle, and the word Agon, says Segal, can "refer to encounters ranging from duels to debates."
Similarly, the Greek word athlos, from which we derive our word athletics, "could mean a contest taking place in a stadium or on a battlefield."
The Heracleitan idea of "Strife as the Father of Everything" permeated Greek life.
Segal:
So -- Greek life was highly competitive.
And the palaistra no doubt was too.
The guys would have competed in athletics.
And they also competed for Lovers -- Male Lovers.
And once they had those Lovers, they competed among themselves -- in Valour -- in bravery.
Eros and Ares.
Male-Male Love ; Male-Male War.
As classicist J E Lendon points out in his Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity:
A peculiar quality of the Theban Sacred Band helps to explain this wider move towards training: the corps of three hundred, we are told, was made up of one hundred and fifty pairs of male lovers. Among the reported advantages of this arrangement was that of exaggerating competition among the warriors: lovers competed with each other and dreaded to be shamed in the presence of those they loved. Once again the competitive ethos of the hoplite emerges. But using such relationships between men as a font of military excellence is a transparent borrowing from Sparta, where such relationships were institutionalized, played a large role in the training of boys, and were thought to contribute to bravery in combat. At Sparta lover and beloved stood beside each other in the hoplite line; before battle the Spartans sacrificed to Eros, to love.
The idea for the trained Sacred Band, then, came from Sparta. "You'd think everybody else were mere improvisers in soldiering, and the Lacedaimonians the only artisans [technitai] of war," said Xenophon. Not only were the Spartans the most practiced in war, he is saying, but they seemed to him to envisage war as a techne, a learnable craft. . . . In Athens the legacy of Spartan success was experts in hoplite technique for hire; in Thebes, it was the trained Sacred Band of three hundred lovers.
. . .
. . . Spartans were open to the possibility, radical in the fifth century [BC], that physical courage itself was a consequence of training, rather than inborn. "Man differs little from man by nature, but he is best who trains in the hardest school," Thucydides has a Spartan king say. It is probably from the Spartans that intellectuals of the fifth and fourth centuries got the idea that courage was a function of experience or a mixture of training and inborn quality, an idea elaborated in philosophy into the doctrine that courage was a function of knowledge. . . .
. . .
[O]ne thing that set the Spartans apart from the other Greeks was their belief that many noble excellences could be taught, and their public care to see to it that they were. At seven a Spartan boy was taken from his mother and raised in barracks, beneath the eyes of older boys. Boys were whipped to inculcate respect (aidos) and obedience; they went ill-clad to make them tough; and they were starved to make them resistant to hunger. They were schooled to silence and taught to look at the ground while walking to train them in the supreme Greek civic virtue of self-control (sophrosyne). The cruel Spartan regime was believed to make Spartans brave. In short, as a frantic Athenian admirer of Sparta put it, "more men are excellent [agathos, the Homeric term] from practice than from nature."
. . .
To the Spartans hoplite training was not a low techne, but rather training in the secret craft of warriorhood. . . .
Spartan training in bravery, hoplite drill, and hoplite skill-at-arms was merely a subset of Spartan education of boys and young men, the old system of public upbringing (at whose origins we cannot guess), that notoriously set the Spartans apart from the rest of the Greeks. But being wrapped up tightly within that system, Spartan military training was not easy to imitate. . . .
So, guys, let's take a closer look:
First of all, as much as I like Prof Lendon, he refers to the Theban Band as "peculiar," and says the Spartan form of training was "cruel."
Neither is true.
The Spartan training was communal, public, and obligatory, it was severe, certainly, but no more "cruel" than training elsewhere in Greece.
Don't agree?
Read Lucian, who describes the training in Athens:
Others are acting in the same way in the open part of the courtyard.
However, these are not in the mud, but they have this deep sand in the pit which they sprinkle on themselves and each other, just like roosters, so that they cannot break out of their grasp, I imagine, since the sand decreases the slipperiness and offers a surer grip on a dry skin.
Others also covered with dust are standing up straight and striking and
kicking each other. See that one there! Poor fellow, he seems to be ready to spit out a mouthful of teeth considering how full of blood and sand his mouth is; he has got a blow to the jaw, as you can see for yourself. But the official there does not separate them and stop the fight -- at least I assume he is an official from his scarlet cloak. On the contrary he encourages them and cheers the one who struck that blow.
And Lendon himself says that the stationing of Lover next to Beloved, and thus the use of male-male bonds to create a competitive ethos of male-male Valour, was normative:
A peculiar quality of the Theban Sacred Band helps to explain this wider move towards training: the corps of three hundred, we are told, was made up of one hundred and fifty pairs of male lovers. Among the reported advantages of this arrangement was that of exaggerating competition among the warriors: lovers competed with each other and dreaded to be shamed in the presence of those they loved. Once again the competitive ethos of the hoplite emerges. But using such relationships between men as a font of military excellence is a transparent borrowing from Sparta, where such relationships were institutionalized, played a large role in the training of boys, and were thought to contribute to bravery in combat. At Sparta lover and beloved stood beside each other in the hoplite line; before battle the Spartans sacrificed to Eros, to love.
So -- Male Love -- Manly Love -- was institutionalized at Sparta.
As it was in other Greek city-states.
"As a font of military excellence."
Lendon:
"Once again the competitive ethos of the hoplite emerges."
Prof Lendon is talking about the essentially competitive or agonal nature not just of the Hoplite, but of Greek life in general, and saying that it can be applied -- as does Werner Jaeger -- to male-male love.
Lendon:
lovers competed with each other and dreaded to be shamed in the presence of those they loved.
Jaeger:
It is, after all, easy to understand how a passionate admiration of noble bodies and balanced souls could spring up in a race which for countless years had prized physical prowess and spiritual harmony as the highest good attainable by man, and which had striven by grave and ceaseless rivalry, by exertion involving the utmost energies of mind and body alike, to bring those qualities to the greatest possible perfection.
Men who loved the possessors of those enviable qualities were moved by an ideal, the love for areté. Lovers who were bound by the male Eros were guarded by a deeper sense of honour from committing any base action, and were driven by a nobler impulse in attempting any honourable deed.
The Spartan state deliberately made Eros [male-male love] a factor, and an important factor, in its agogé.
So -- Jaeger speaks of Greek Men who had "had striven by grave and ceaseless rivalry, by exertion involving the utmost energies of mind and body alike, to bring those qualities [of physical prowess and spiritual harmony] to the greatest possible perfection" -- loving each other.
And says that Greek athletics are about "Men Struggling to bring their Manhood to Perfection."
Which strongly suggests -- and as you'll see if you read, as you should, Prudence or the Pill, Xenophon confirms this -- that for the Greeks, as for all MEN, the beauty of guys was always tied and indeed should always be tied to aggression.
Let's get back to Warrior NW:
But that is why fight schools are so important. In the fight school you are not given 4 years to become a champion and then move on. The fight school is a club. A fun place. A place for man-fun. A guy is not driven-out because he doesn't win every match.
And NW's correct about that.
The Fight Schools are important.
Finally, NW tells us that
In my college years, I was CONSTANTLY trying to figure out the connection INSIDE of me of male-male eros and aggression. It bothered me the entire time I wrestled. IT DROVE ME NUTS.
At that time (the 1980's) HIV was popping up. And it was a "gay" disease. And there was an attitude then that ANYONE who was attracted to the same sex for ANY reason deserved to die for it...So HIV was some wrath of God, or Nature. I felt SO fantastically alone keeping EVERYTHING to myself. There was NO internet, NO Man2Man Alliance, NO manly group to join that combined aggression/manliness and manly attraction for men. Nothing. I was SO incredibly alone.
I have been through a kind of journey....In Search of Manliness.
FINALLY I connected the dots....YEARS later through Bill's website.
I had also read a book, previous to knowing Bill, called Wrestling For Gay Guys. It was published in England I think. And I email with the author periodically. I can appreciate his book but I can't go along with it anymore. His book was a kind of stepping stone for me.
Manliness and aggression were the things I was REALLY looking for. And I found it in Bill Weintraub.
"Manliness and Aggression"
NW titled his post Eros and Aggression.
But you see guys, Eros is Male-Male Attraction, Male-Male Love, and that Attraction and that Love are predicated upon Manliness.
Manliness is what makes the Male a Man.
And Manliness is what makes the Male attractive -- to other Men.
And what is Manliness?
It's Fighting Spirit.
Warrior Spirit.
Aggressive Spirit.
Aggression.
So it becomes a mystical and magical male tautology:
The Greek word andreia, which derives from the Greek word for Man -- andros --
The Greek word andreia is defined as
And what is Manly Spirit?
It's Fighting Spirit.
Warrior Spirit.
Aggressive Spirit.
Aggression.
Which is Manliness.
As NW well knows.
Because it's WARRIOR NW who first told us that True Manliness is the Male's Willingness and Ability to Fight:
True MANLINESS is the ability and willingness to FIGHT.
That's what it has ALWAYS been.
MANLINESS is the ability and willingness to FIGHT.
MANLINESS is the ability and willingness to FIGHT.
If -- and when -- you take from Men their ability to Fight --
and denigrate, as our culture does constantly, their willingness to Fight --
you destroy not only what is best about them --
but you destroy them.
You destroy Men.
Men cannot exist without Manliness.
Can't be done.
Again, "Manliness and Aggression" is a magical, mystical, and uniquely Male -- tautology.
Because Manliness is Aggression.
That's why MEN are into Cock Against Cock.
Because we don't want to fuck our male partners.
We want to FIGHT them.
MEN are AGGRESSIVE.
Phallus Against Phallus is Aggressive.
And it's another tautology.
Because another meaning of that same Greek word, andreia, is, in Latin, the membrum virile -- the Virile Member, the cock.
Phallus is Manhood.
Manhood is Man.
And Phallus Against Phallus exalts and celebrates Manhood.
Again, Warrior NW knows all this.
He titled another post The Manliness of Aggression.
Which, of course, is another way of saying, that
And if Manliness is what attracts Male to Male --
then EROS and Aggression are also intimately related.
Something else the Greeks understood, because in Greek myth, Eros is the Son of Ares -- War -- and Aphrodite -- Love.
EROS -- Male-Male Love -- is the son of War and Love.
Ares -- War -- is Ares.
But Aphrodite has at least two manifestations -- the vulgar Aphrodite, the Goddess of Sex; and the Heavenly Aphrodite -- the Goddess of Love.
EROS, clearly, in the Greek conception, is the son of the War God -- who is really War itself -- and the Goddess of Love.
And Ares -- the War God -- is the source of another Greek word for Manhood -- Areté.
And that being the case, guys, we can say that EROS is the son of MANHOOD and LOVE.
And without question, that's true.
Eros and Aggression, Eros and Manhood, Eros and Ares.
Plato wrote a long and very important and influential dialogue about Eros.
It's titled Symposium and you can find it online -- here.
I doubt that even one of you has read more than a few lines of it -- if that much.
Your loss.
Because, for example, Symposium is the source of this line:
There's no Valour more respected by the Gods than that which comes of Manly Love.
And in the Greek, the word for Valour is Areté:
As I said, the word areté derives from the name of the War God -- Ares:
Ares is the God of Manhood.
And Areté *is* Manhood.
Which means we could say:
Remembering that for the Greeks, as for us, Manly Love is an expression of an Aggressive Ethos.
Like NW says, Eros and Aggression.
And we arrive at another Male and Manly tautology.
Because in the Sokratic dialogue Cratylus, Sokrates says that the name Ares derives from the word arren, meaning Virile, Male, Manly -- and arratos -- meaning hard and unbending.
So:
Arren (Manly, Manliness) → Arratos (Hard and Unbending) → Ares (War, Battle, Fight) → Areté (Virtue, Excellence, Manhood) → Arren (Manliness)
And really there's a synergy between and among these words -- which are actually not just words, but Male realities:
Arren (Manly, Manliness) ↔ Arratos (Hard and Unbending) ↔ Ares (War, Battle, Fight) ↔ Areté (Virtue, Excellence, Manhood) ↔ Arren (Manliness)
That synergy -- that intense feedback loop -- is what creates the Manly Ecstasy of the Fight.
It's why Fighting -- Man2Man Fighting -- is an Ecstasy, an Inebriation, of the Male:
Those are Men in the Presence of Ares.
Those are Men -- in the Warrior Kosmos.
Fighters in the Warrior Kosmos.
Warriors in the Warrior Kosmos.
In a very fundamental way, their Manhood has been fulfilled --
and they've been filled with Manhood.
So:
Not surprisingly, and given that Manhood is Ecstasy;
Manhood, Manliness, Manly Spirit --
whether the Greek word is andreia -- or areté --
in ancient Greek literature, Manhood, Manliness, Manly Spirit are ALWAYS positives.
And not just positives.
They're GOOD.
Indeed, more than Good.
Because the Greek Lexicon says they're the first notion of Goodness:
Manhood, Manliness, Manly Spirit are the first notion of Goodness.
Which means they're inextricably intertwined with -- cannot be separated from -- Virtue -- The Good.
Once again:
Manhood, Manliness, Manly Spirit, Manly Aggression -- are Good.
Of course Aggression -- Manly Aggression -- has to be CONTROLLED.
As you know if you've read Prudence or the Pill -- which is MUST reading -- don't skip it -- READ IT --
Sophrosyne -- Self-Control -- is a HUGE Greek value.
Central to Greek Life.
A Man controls his passions.
They don't control him.
He controls them.
Thus the Palaistra -- the Fight School.
What's taught there is CONTROLLED Aggression.
Lendon quotes King Archidamus of Sparta on the value of that training:
"He is best who trains in the hardest school."
Look at NW's description of his own training in the Wrestling Room -- "ruthless and brutal."
"He is best who trains in the hardest school."
There's not a wrestling coach, nor a boxing coach, nor a teacher of MMA, who would disagree.
"He is best who trains in the hardest school."
Demosthenes didn't have that training.
He missed out on it.
What was the result?
Plutarch:
[I]f only the nobility of his aspirations and the dignity of his words had been matched by an equivalent courage in war and integrity in other dealings, he would deserve to be ranked . . . with the men of Athens' greatest days. . .
[BUT:]
Demosthenes . . . could not be relied on when it came to fighting, nor was he altogether proof against bribes.
. . .
[I]n the [decisive] battle of Chaeronea, so far from achieving anything honourable, he completely failed to suit his actions to his words. He left his place in the ranks and took to his heels in the most shameless fashion, throwing away his arms to run faster, and he did not hesitate to disgrace the inscription on his shield, on which, according to Pytheas, were engraved, in letters of gold, 'With good fortune.'
Demosthenes had, as he saw it, a noble aspiration -- the freedom of Greece -- but he failed in that aspiration, in no small part, because it was NOT "matched by an equivalent courage in war."
He was a coward.
He hadn't trained.
And he was a coward.
And let's be clear about how critical the TRAINING -- years and years and years of training -- is.
NW:
You can't learn overnight the Muscle Smart part of wrestling that comes from YEARS of wrestling.
The guys with whom NW was training and against whom he was, in theory, competing -- had trained, LIKE THE GREEKS, since they were little children.
NW hadn't.
Which meant that NW was way, way, way out of his depth.
Nevertheless, he learned something absolutely vital:
I can remember sometimes in the wrestling room, having no ATP (adenosine tri-phosphate) left in my muscles. ATP is the last stage of the energy we get from glucose; it is actually what the strands of cells in your muscles use to "fire" to make your muscles move. I'd be COVERED in sweat, and totally bruised up fighting for my life against some dude in a 2 minute takedown drill. And my body would suddenly NOT respond to commands from my brain. It truly was wrestling to exhaustion.
Real battle.
It was "real battle."
But NW SURVIVED it.
And that's what you learn.
That you can Fight -- ruthlessly and brutally -- to exhaustion -- and still survive.
The Greek kids who went to the palaistra day after day after day from childhood forward -- learned that.
Demosthenes didn't.
And he grew up -- a coward.
And the Greeks of his day understood that.
One of his Athenian political opponents -- Phocion -- also the subject of a Life by Plutarch --
Phocion, who had both wisdom and strength -- that is to say, True Virtue -- sent his own son to Sparta to be raised and trained in the agogé --
to be brought up, day after day after day after day, in an Austere and Aggressive -- Fighting -- Manliness:
[At Sparta, the boys] lived together and were brought up together, playing and learning as a group. The captaincy of the Troop was conferred upon the boy who displayed the soundest judgement and the best fighting spirit. The others kept their eyes on him, responded to his instructions, and endured their punishments from him, so that altogether this training served as practice in learning ready obedience. Moreover, as they exercised, boys were constantly watched by their elders, who were always spurring them on to fight and contend with one another; in this their chief object was to get to know each boy's character, in particular how bold he was, and how far he was likely to stand his ground in combat.
~Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus
NW:
You cannot learn manliness out of books.
You MUST experience manliness through fighting, and male nudity (the acknowledgment of the male genitals which make the Male). There is no other way to understand it.
Put another way: when you fight another dude in the school yard, on the street, in the fight school, on the wrestling mat, YOU BECOME A MAN. It is THAT simple.
There IS an eros and an aggression that a male experiences in a fight. And it cannot be learned through books. A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man.
So:
Eros and Aggression.
Eros and Manhood.
The Eros of Aggression.
The Eros of Manhood.
We can think of Eros and Thanatos as opposed forces.
Thanatos is the God of Death.
Eros is the God of Love -- the God of Love between Men;
and Eros has contained within him a strong sense of being the God of Life as well.
That's discussed in Plato's Symposium -- Eros as the God of Love and of Life.
So to me, the contest, the battle, the division, is between the forces of Love and Life -- and Death.
Throughout my life, I've tried to serve the forces of Love and Life.
And to resist the forces of death.
Manliness -- Aggression -- is an integral part of the Life Force.
An integral part of The Good.
It's as my partner Patrick has said:
"It's the Manliness of Men which makes Life possible on this planet."
"It's the Aggression of Men which makes Life possible."
That's not something the fags, fems, and feminists are going to ever understand or accept.
But it's the Truth -- and a Truth which we must speak aloud.
I thank Warrior NW for his post.
And this core point:
The two key words are "MUST" and "experience."
And for most of you guys, that means making the effort to go to Fight School.
Which, of course, is an effort you'll never make.
So you'll never be -- a Man.
But what the fuck.
NW has spoken from the truth of his experience, and I have from my mine.
And I've also gone to the trouble of searching out for you true stories like that of Demosthenes.
Doesn't matter.
You don't want to learn.
You want to lurk and jerk on the net.
And that's all your "life" will ever be.
Lurking and jerking.
NW:
Thank you NW.
Bill Weintraub
October 15, 2011
© All material Copyright 2011 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.
Guys, Naked Wrestler, aka NW, has wrestled and trained in mixed martial arts, and has many very important posts on our Man2Man Alliance sites, including:
aggression and the beauty of guys;
We Are Men. We Have Balls. Fighter Beauty, or, A True Test of Toughness;
It takes Balls to be a Warrior;
my first shirtless wrestling opponent;
to be One with the Man I wrestle;
Forced Hetero-sexualization and the death of Man Space;
Becoming ONE in the FIGHT: The Intimacy of Aggression;
our American forced Hetero-sexualized society;
Fighting is part of the Human Condition;
Wrestling Rides -- Get to know your man;
MANPHOBIA -- Fired for being into UFC;
The Ultimate in Man to Man; and
Plus replies to many posts, including
and AND
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It was my own innate understanding of the essentially Combative and Aggressive nature of Men, and my own instinctual relating of that to the testicles, which produced those fantasies and gave them so much power in my life.
In this Dialogue, written in the first century AD by Lucian but presenting an imagined conversation between the *sixth century BC* Athenian lawgiver Solon and a Scythian visitor to Athens named Anacharsis, we get some idea of what that training was like -- starting with Athenian kids, and then progressing to Spartan youth:
Anacharsis: And another thing, my dear Solon, why are those young men
acting in this way? Look, some of them are grappling and tripping each
other, others are choking their friends and twisting their limbs, rolling about in the mud and wallowing like pigs. But before they began to do this, I noticed they first took off their clothes, then put oil on themselves, and in a peaceful fashion took turns in rubbing each other. But now, experiencing some emotion I do not understand, they have lowered their heads and are crashing into each other, and butting their heads together like rams! And look! There is one who has just seized the other by the legs and thrown him down; then he flopped on him and did not allow him to get up, but shoved him down into the mud. And now he is finally twisting his legs around the other person's waist and choking him with his arm under his throat. The other is slapping him on the shoulder, trying to ask him, I suppose, not to choke him to death. They do not avoid getting covered with dirt even to save the oil, but on the contrary wipe it off, and smearing themselves with mud and rivers of perspiration they make themselves ridiculous, in my opinion, by sliding in and out of each other's hands like eels.
Others are acting in the same way in the open part of the courtyard.
However, these are not in the mud, but they have this deep sand in the pit which they sprinkle on themselves and each other, just like roosters, so that they cannot break out of their grasp, I imagine, since the sand decreases the slipperiness and offers a surer grip on a dry skin.
Others also covered with dust are standing up straight and striking and
kicking each other. See that one there! Poor fellow, he seems to be ready to spit out a mouthful of teeth considering how full of blood and sand his mouth is; he has got a blow to the jaw, as you can see for yourself. But the official there does not separate them and stop the fight -- at least I assume he is an official from his scarlet cloak. On the contrary he encourages them and cheers the one who struck that blow.
All around different people are all exercising: some raise their knees as if running, although they remain in the same place, and as they jump up they kick the air.
What I want to know is, what reason do they have for doing this? It seems to me these actions are almost insane, and there is no one who can easily persuade me that people who act like this have not lost all their senses.
[Solon explains that customs differ from one land to another. He then explains to Anacharsis what is happening.]
Solon: This place, dear Anacharsis, is what we call a gymnasion and it and is sacred to Lykeian Apollo. You can see his statue, leaning against a stele, holding his bow in his left hand. His right arm is bent above his head as if the artist were showing the God resting, as if he had completed some laborious task. As for those exercises in the nude, the one done in the mud is called wrestling. Those in the dust are also wrestling. Those who strike each other standing upright we call pankratiasts. We have other athletic events: we have contests in boxing, diskos, and the long jump, and the winner is considered superior to his fellows and takes the prize.
Anacharsis: These prizes of yours now; what are they?
Solon: At Olympia there is a crown of wild olive; at Isthmia, one of pine; at Nemea, one woven of celery; at the Pythian Games, laurel berries sacred to the god, and here at home at the Panathenaic Games, oil from olive trees which grow in the sacred precincts. What are you laughing at, Anacharsis? Do these prizes seem valueless to you?
[Solon explains the symbolic value of the prizes, justifies the pursuit of athletics, the education of the citizens. Then Anacharsis asks Solon to explain the government of Athens.]
Solon: It is not easy, my friend, to explain everything at once in concise form, but if you will take one thing at a time you will learn everything about our belief in the gods, as well as our attitude toward parents, marriage, or anything else.
I will now explain our theory about young men and how we treat them from the time when they begin to know the difference between right and wrong and are entering manhood and sustaining hardships, so that you may learn why we require them to undergo these exercises and force them to subject their bodies to toil, not just because of the athletic games and the prizes they may win there, for few of them have the ability to do that, but so that they may try to gain a greater good for the entire city and for themselves. For there is another contest set up for all good citizens and the crown is not made of pine nor of wild olive nor of celery, but is one which includes all of man's happiness, that is to say, freedom for each person individually and for the state in general: wealth, glory, pleasure in our traditional feast days, having the entire family safe from harm, and in a word, to have the best of all the blessings one could have from the gods.
All this happiness is woven into the crown to which I referred and is acquired in the contest to which these exhausting exercises lead.
[Solon goes into more detail about the training of young men and about the responsibility of the citizens.]
Solon: As for physical training, which you particularly wanted to hear about, we proceed as follows. When the boys reach an age when they are no longer soft and uncoordinated, we strip them naked. We do this because first, we think they should get used to the weather, learning to live with different seasons, so they are not bothered by the heat nor do they yield to the cold. Then we massage them with olive oil and condition the skin. For since we see that leather which is softened by olive oil does not easily crack and is much stronger, even though it is not alive, why should we not think that live bodies would benefit from oil? Next we have thought up different kinds of athletics and have appointed coaches for each type. We teach one how to box, another how to compete in the pankration, so that they can become used to hard work, to stand up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury.
This creates two valuable traits in our young men: it makes them brave in the face of danger and unsparing of their bodies, and it also makes them strong and vigorous. Those who wrestle and push against each other learn how to fall safely and spring up nimbly, to endure pushing, grappling, twisting, and choking, and to be able to lift their opponent off the ground. They are not learning useless skills but they get the one thing which is the first and most important thing in life: through this training their bodies become stronger and capable of enduring pain. There is another thing too which is not unimportant. From this training they acquire skills which they may need some day in war. For it is clear that if a man so trained grapples with an enemy, he will trip and throw him more quickly and if he is thrown he will know how to regain his feet as easily as possible. For we prepare our men, Anacharsis, for the supreme contest, war, and we expect to have much better soldiers out of young men who have had this training, that is, the previous conditioning and training of naked bodies, which makes them not only stronger and healthier, more agile and fit, but also causes them to outweigh their opponents.
You can see, I should think, the results of this, what they are like when armed, or even without weapons how they would strike terror in their enemies. Our troops are not fat, pale, and useless nor are they white and scrawny ... enervated by lying in the shade, simultaneously shivering and streaming with rivers of sweat, gasping beneath their helmets, particularly if the sun, as now, is burning with noontime heat. What use could people be who get thirsty and cannot endure dust; soldiers who panic if they see blood, who die of terror before they come close enough to throw their spears or to close with the enemy? But our troops have skin of high color, darkened by the sun, and faces like real men; they display great vigor, fire, and virility. They glow with good health, and are neither shriveled skeletons nor excessively heavy, but they have been carved to perfect symmetry; they have used up and sweated off useless and excess flesh, and that which is left is strong, supple, and free, and they vigorously keep this healthy condition. For just as the winnowers do with wheat, so our athletes do with their bodies, removing the chaff and the husks and leaving the grain in a clean pile.
Through training like this a man can't avoid being healthy and can stand up indefinitely under stress. Such a man would sweat only after some time, and he would seldom be seen to be ill. Suppose someone were to take two torches and throw one into the grain and the other into the straw and chaff -- you see, I am returning to the figure of the winnower. The straw, I think, would burst into flames much more quickly, but the grain would burn slowly with no large flames blazing up nor would it burn all at once, but it would smoulder slowly and eventually it too would be burned.
Neither disease nor fatigue could easily attack and overcome such a body or easily defeat it. For it has good inner resources which defend it against attacks from outside, so as not to let them in, neither does it admit the sun or the cold to its hurt. To avoid yielding to hardships, great vigor springs up within, something prepared long in advance and held in reserve for time of need. This vigor fills up at once and waters the body in a crisis and makes it strong for a long time. For the previous training in bearing strain and hardship does not weaken their strength but increases it, and when you fan it the fire burns stronger.
We train them to run, getting them to endure long distances as well as
speeding them up for swiftness in the sprints. This running is not done on a firm springy surface but in deep sand, where it is not easy to place one's foot forcefully and not to push off from it, since the foot slips against the yielding sand. We train them to jump over ditches, if they have to, or any other obstacles, and in addition we train them to do this even when they carry lead weights as large as they can hold. They also compete in the javelin throw for distance. In the gymnasium you also saw another athletic implement, bronze, circular, like a tiny shield with no bar or straps. You handled it as it lay there and expressed the view that it was heavy and hard to hold on to because it was so smooth. Well, they throw this up in the air both high and out, competing to see who can throw the longest and pass beyond the others. This exercise strengthens the shoulders and builds up the arms and legs.
As for this mud and dust, which originally seemed so amusing to you, my
friend, listen while I tell you why it is used. First, their fall will not be on unyielding dirt but they will fall safely on soft ground. Next, their slipperiness has to be greater when they sweat in the mud. You likened them to eels, but the facts are neither useless nor humorous: it adds not a little to strength of the sinews when they are forced to hold firmly to people in this condition when they are trying to slip away. Do not think it is easy to pick up a sweaty man in the mud, covered with oil and trying to get out of your arms. All these skills, as I said earlier, are useful in combat, if it were necessary to pick up a wounded friend and carry him easily to safety or to seize an enemy and bring him back in your arms. And for this reason we train them beyond what is necessary, so that when they have practiced hard tasks they may do smaller ones with much greater facility.
We believe the dust is used for the opposite reason than the oil is, that is, so that a competitor may not slip out of his opponent's grasp. For after they have been trained in the mud to hold fast to something which is escaping from them because of its slipperiness, they then practice escaping out of the arms of their opponent, no matter how impossibly firm they may be held. Furthermore when this dust is used liberally it checks the perspiration and makes their strength last longer and furnishes protection against harm from drafts which otherwise attack the body when the pores are open. Besides, the dust rubs off the accumulation of dirt and makes the skin gleam.
I should dearly like to stand one of those white-skinned fellows who live in the shade beside one of our boys who work out in the Lykeion, and after I had washed off the dust and the mud, ask you which one you would like to resemble. For I know that you would choose at first glance, without hesitation, even without putting either through any tests, the one which is solid and hard rather than soft, weak, and pale, because what little blood he has has been withdrawn into the interior of his body.
[Anacharsis then ridicules the idea that athletic training could be useful in war. Why not save your strength, he asks. Solon explains that strength cannot be saved like a bottle of wine; it must be constantly used.]
Anacharsis: I just don't understand what you said, Solon. It is too intellectual for me and requires a sharp mind and keen insight. But above all, tell me this, why, in the Olympic Games and at Isthmia and Delphi and elsewhere, where so many competitors, you say, assemble to see these young men compete, you never have a contest with weapons but you bring them before the spectators all naked and exhibit them getting kicked and punched, and then, if they have won, give them berries and wild olives? It would be worth knowing why you do this.
Solon: My dear Anacharsis, we do this because we think that their enthusiasm for athletics will increase if they see that those who excel at them are honored and are presented to crowds of Greeks by heralds. Because they are to appear stripped before so many people, they try to get into good condition, so that when they are naked they will not be ashamed, and each one works to make himself capable of winning. As for the prizes, as I said earlier, they are not insignificant: to be praised by the spectators, to be a recognized celebrity, and to be pointed out as the best of one's group. As a result of these prizes, many of the spectators who are of the right age for competition go away completely in love with courage and struggle. If someone should remove love of glory from our lives, what good would we ever achieve, Anacharsis, or who would strive to accomplish some shining deed? But now it is possible for you to imagine from these games what sort of men these would be under arms, fighting for fatherland and children and wives and temples, when they show so much desire for victory in competing for laurel berries and wild olives.
Furthermore, how would you feel if you should observe fights between
quails and between roosters here among us, and see the great interest
which is shown in them? Wouldn't you laugh, particularly if you should learn that we do this in accordance with our laws and all men of military age are instructed to be present and to see these birds fight until they are exhausted? But it is no laughing matter, for eagerness for danger creeps insensibly into their souls so that they try not to seem less courageous and bold than the roosters nor to give in too soon because of injury or fatigue or any other distress.
As for trying them in armed combat and seeing them receive wounds --
never! It is brutal and dreadfully wrong, and in addition it is economically unfeasible to destroy the bravest, whom we could better use against our enemies.
Since you tell me, Anacharsis, that you expect to travel to the rest of
Greece, if you get to Sparta, remember not to laugh at them nor think that they have no purpose when they compete in a theater, rushing together and striking each other, fighting over a ball, or when they go into a place surrounded by water [known as Plantanistas, or Plane-Tree Grove], choose up sides, and fight as if in actual war, although as naked as we Athenians are, until one team drives the other out of the enclosure into the water, the Sons of Herakles beating the Sons of Lykurgos or vice versa; after this contest there is peace and no one would strike another.
~ translated by Sweet.
The great Greek philosophers Sokrates and Plato spent a lot of time debating and defeating the hedonists of their day.
Plato wrote three very powerful books detailing that debate, beginning with the Protagoras, continuing in the Gorgias, and culminating in the Republic, one of the most important works of Western literature.
In the Gorgias in particular, Sokrates identifies hedonism with those who in his day, engaged in anal.
And since anal was proscribed -- forbidden -- by the Greeks, he uses that fact to defeat the hedonists.
Here's the debate -- the hot-headed hedonist is a guy named Callicles, and he's debating Sokrates:
Socrates. Come now, let me tell you another parable:
Consider if each of the two lives, the temperate and the licentious, might be described by imagining that each of the two men had a number of jars; the one man has his jars sound and full, one of wine, another of honey, and a third of milk, besides others filled with other things, and the sources which fill them are scanty and difficult, and he can only obtain them with a great deal of hard toil. Well, one man, when he has taken his fill, neither draws any more nor troubles himself a jot, but remains at ease on that score. The other, in like manner, can procure sources, though not without difficulty; but his vessels are leaky and unsound, and night and day he is compelled to fill them constantly, and if he pauses for a moment, he is in an agony of extreme distress. If such is the nature of each of the two lives, do you say that the licentious man has a happier one than the orderly? Do I not convince you that the opposite is the truth?
Callicles. You do not convince me, Socrates, for the one who has filled himself has no longer any pleasure left; and this, as I was just now saying, is the life of a stone: he has neither joy nor sorrow after he is once filled; but a pleasant life consists rather in the largest possible amount of inflow.
Soc. Well then, if the the inflow be large, must not that which runs away be of large amount also, and the holes for such outflow be of great size?
Cal. Certainly.
Soc. The life which you are now depicting is not that of a dead man,
or of a stone, but of a plover [a bird thought to drink and then to eject the liquid]; you mean that he is to be hungering and eating?
Cal. Yes.
Soc. And he is to be thirsting and drinking?
Cal. Yes, that is what I mean; he is to have all his desires about
him, and to be able to live happily in the gratification of them.
Soc. Capital, excellent; go on as you have begun, and have no shame; I, too, must disencumber myself of shame: and first, will you tell me whether you include itching and scratching, provided you have enough of them and pass your life in scratching, in your notion of happiness?
Cal. What a strange being you are, Socrates! a regular stump-orator.
Soc. That was the reason, Callicles, why I scared Polus and Gorgias,
until they were too modest to say what they thought; but you will
not be too modest and will not be scared, for you are such a manly fellow. And now, answer my question.
Cal. I answer, that even the scratcher would live pleasantly.
Soc. And if pleasantly, then also happily?
Cal. To be sure.
Soc. But what if the itching is not confined to the head? Shall I
pursue the question? And here, Callicles, I would have you consider
how you would reply if consequences are pressed upon you, especially
if in the last resort you are asked, whether the life of a catamite is
not terrible, shameful, and wretched? Or would you venture to say, that they too are happy, if they only get enough of what they want?
Cal. Are you not ashamed, Socrates, of introducing such topics
into the argument?
Soc. Well, my fine friend, but am I the introducer of these
topics, or he who says without any qualification that all who feel
pleasure in whatever manner are happy, and who admits of no
distinction between good and bad pleasures? And I would still ask,
whether you say that pleasure and good are the same, or whether
there is some pleasure which is not a good?
~translated by Jowett and Lamb
So: Socrates asks, "Is there some pleasure which is not a good?"
And the word "catamite" in the original Greek is kinaidos, that is, one who is anally passive, and/or who participates in anal penetration.
That is, an analist.
"Is there some pleasure which is not a good?"
Anal.
The life of an analist, says Sokrates, is "terrible, shameful, and wretched."
And Callicles doesn't dare disagree with him.
Because the cultural prohibition against anal is too severe.
I have no question that privately, Callicles thinks anal is okay.
That to his mind, "If it feels 'good,' do it!" and "It's all sex and it's all good!" -- are imperatives.
But he doesn't dare say so -- regarding anal.
Because again, the cultural prohibition against anal is too severe.
As it should be.
In the protection of your Manhood.
In the safeguarding of your Life.
Recently I've been reading John Milton, the great English poet and defender of the Puritan and Parliamentary Revolution.
I've been reading his prose pieces -- which were written to advance that Revolutionary cause.
If you think I'm dogmatic and militant -- you should read Milton.
But his militancy helped bring about the freedoms we have today.
As Warrior Brian said to me in an email regarding the need to organize:
And Militancy is vital -- to organization.
A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man
testosterone-driven male magic
sweaty, hot, shirtless, muscled, aggression
the wrestling room
manliness and aggression
The fight schools are our last hope.
A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man
When the boys reach an age when they are no longer soft and
uncoordinated, we strip them naked. We do this because first, we think
they should get used to the weather, learning to live with different
seasons, so they are not bothered by the heat nor do they yield to the
cold. Then we massage them with olive oil and condition the skin. For
since we see that leather which is softened by olive oil does not
easily crack and is much stronger, even though it is not alive, why
should we not think that live bodies would benefit from oil? Next we
have thought up different kinds of athletics and have appointed
coaches for each type. We teach one how to box, another how to compete
in the pankration, so that they can become used to hard work, to stand
up to blows face to face, and not to yield through fear of injury.
lack of courage in the face of war or physical danger
Demosthenes' father died when he was seven, and left him a considerable inheritance
[B]ecause he was delicate and physically under-developed, his mother discouraged him from training in the wrestling-school and his tutors did not press him to attend it. He was a skinny and sickly child from the beginning, and his companions made fun of his puny physique by christening him Batalus. According to one account, Batalus was an effeminate flute-player, who was caricatured in a farce by the poet Antiphanes. Another story has it that Batalus was a poet who wrote voluptuous lyrics and drinking-songs, and yet another that the word was used as slang at that time for the anus.
lack of courage in the face of war or physical danger
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Up to this point, then, Demosthenes acted like a brave man, but in the battle of Chaeronea, which followed, so far from achieving anything honourable, he completely failed to suit his actions to his words. He left his place in the ranks and took to his heels in the most shameless fashion, throwing away his arms to run faster, and he did not hesitate to disgrace the inscription on his shield, on which, according to Pytheas, were engraved, in letters of gold, 'With good fortune.'
Never would Greece have been ruled by a Macedonian Ares.
normal need for males to just hang out in places like the wrestling room, half naked, wrestling around, shirtless and enjoying the feel of male muscles against muscles, sweat, aggression, hard-ons, testosterone, etc.
ruthless and brutal.
Indeed, to some historians -- notably the Swiss Jakob Burkhardt (1818 - 1897) -- this "agonal drive" was the key to understanding an entire mentality. In his unequivocal words, "All Greek life was animated by this principle."
Why are those young men
acting in this way? Look, some of them are grappling and tripping each
other, others are choking their friends and twisting their limbs, rolling about in the mud and wallowing like pigs. But before they began to do this, I noticed they first took off their clothes, then put oil on themselves, and in a peaceful fashion took turns in rubbing each other. But now, experiencing some emotion I do not understand, they have lowered their heads and are crashing into each other, and butting their heads together like rams! And look! There is one who has just seized the other by the legs and thrown him down; then he flopped on him and did not allow him to get up, but shoved him down into the mud. And now he is finally twisting his legs around the other person's waist and choking him with his arm under his throat. The other is slapping him on the shoulder, trying to ask him, I suppose, not to choke him to death. They do not avoid getting covered with dirt even to save the oil, but on the contrary wipe it off, and smearing themselves with mud and rivers of perspiration they make themselves ridiculous, in my opinion, by sliding in and out of each other's hands like eels.
manliness, manhood, manly spirit
There's no Valour more respected by the Gods than that which comes of Eros.
goodness, excellence, of any kind, esp. of manly qualities, manhood, valour, prowess, Hom., Hdt. (like Lat. vir-tus, from vir).
There's no Manhood more respected by the Gods than that which comes of Manly Love.
An Ecstasy, An Inebriation, of the Male
From the same root [ARES] comes areté . . . the first notion of goodness being that of manhood, bravery in war; cf. Lat. virtus.
Man differs little from man by nature, but he is best who trains in the hardest school.
A Male MUST experience Fight to be a Man
Most guys will never know that feeling of skin on skin, muscles on muscles, sweaty aggression. You can literally feel and hear the other dude breathe while thinking through and acting out the aggression. The Male heat of the other sweaty, breathing, fighting body is something you can only experience first hand. You can't "read" about it.
Balls Make You Fight. Fight Makes The Man.;
who reject anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy
among men who have sex with men
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If an army went into battle without proper training and organisation they would lose. Historic example, in the English Civil War (1642 to 1646) the army of King Charles 1st was better organised and won most of the first battles; however Oliver Cromwell trained and organised the men fighting on Parliament's side into the New Model Army, and they won! If they had not been so organised the King would have carried on as the dictator he had been. Maybe eventually we would have got the freedoms that we enjoy now but it would have come more slowly and the monarch would have given them very grudgingly; so organisation is as you say vital to winning.
