It is an awesome thing to be really close to a pair of guys fighting on the ground when one guy starts to pound the other's face. Gives me quite the hard on looking at it, hearing the thud sound of leather on face, and the vibration of it, makes your heart pound.

If you're close enough, you'll get a close up of the blood. If you're lucky, you get some of it on you. A little sweet blood from a fight is like something sacred.

Fighters really do look each other eye-to-eye as they sock each other. It's love and aggression at once.

Sweet.

If watching it up close and getting a boner from it is cool, DOING the hitting is to enter THE ZONE...the Masculinity Zone. And strange as it sounds, GETTING hit like that is also being in the Masculinity Zone. It MAY be the feeling of losing the fight (only an idiot would WANT to get hit), but it IS being in that Masculinity Zone for the duration of the cage fight that counts...The feeling that you took it all the way to the end IS a male feeling of accomplishment.

It's the good fight.

Bill Weintraub

Re: The Masculinity Zone

12-6-09

Thank you NW.

We'll be re-visiting the question of what it means to give and take a punch in several forthcoming posts.

For now, here's something from Philostratos, writing in the second century AD:

The Spartans invented boxing, which was adopted by the barbarian tribe of Berbrykians, and Polydeukes was best at the sport; from these facts the poets made up their songs. The early Spartans began to box for the following reasons: They had no helmets, thinking it was not in keeping with Spartan ways to fight wearing one. But the shield is as good as a helmet for the soldier who knows how to use it. To protect themselves from blows in the face, and to be able to stand up under these blows when they did land, they worked at boxing and hardened their faces to take punishment.

~ translated by Miller and Sweet

So, the Spartans "invented" boxing.

And not surprisingly, given the importance of male Eros to the Spartans, they were also credited with inventing nudity in athletics:

The Spartans were the first to exercise gymnoi [nude] and to disrobe in public and rub themselves with olive oil after they had exercised while gymnoi.

~ Thucydides, translated by Miller and Sweet