Here are my thoughts on martial arts, toughness and how it all relates to attraction and quality of life.
I've noticed more than a few times over this forum and in various articles that the training of martial arts is considered not only useful but perhaps even quite necessary. I've personally trained in boxing and thai boxing for a short time until a serious injury caused me to take time off and I'm still recovering.
I'd like to emphasize that I'm not trying to dismiss martial arts or people who are very serious about them. I understand that there's nothing like getting to work on your punches, wrestling or what not and to share that experience in a masculine environment. With all that said, the world is full of fascinating things and that's why I'm going to play devil's advocate and address some pro-martial arts arguments or lines of thought here in a deconstructive manner.
While this skill can be helpful, spending several times a week going in and out of a gym can be counterproductive. You may never get into a fair fight and yet will accumulate small injuries training. I'm emphasizing the word "fair fight" because no style will make you grow eyes in your back or survive a fight where the odds are overwhelmingly against you due to weapons, numbers, size difference or environmental restrictions.
My personal belief is that fight training is most useful for traumatized men with hurtful experiences of bullying and intimidation; possibly dating all the way back to childhood or teen years. Combat sports can help these individuals deal with the feelings they've long suppressed and in earning a belt or holding their own in the ring they can feel a sense of accomplishment, which can be taken to symbolize their victory over a past foe. In effect, the person can play out a scenario of pummeling the abuser to a pulp in their head and refute the mockery that the bastard once used to fling at him.
If the guy is already doing fairly well inside his head and has built reasonable amounts of self-confidence succeeding in other pursuits and grown beyond his most vulnerable years, martial arts training may not appear nearly as tempting but rather simply another drop in a sea of attractions.
We rarely get the chance to help ourselves or save someone else's life by beating someone up and having training in psychology, basic people skills, first aid and assistance is far more important. There does indeed exist a major calling for all kinds of traditionally feminine volunteer and community work where a man can make a difference while the chances are that learning martial arts will never make any difference even in the lives of those closest to the practitioner unless he holds a high danger job or teahes self-defense himself, which is highly unlikely.
The fantasy of dishing out a beating to a deserving group of rapugees or thugs is something that will most likely only be lived out in a person's head while nurturing or nursing a harmless person or showing off some dance skills in a club are entirely tenable to pull off.
The big difference here between the usefulness or/and attractiveness of martial arts relative to some other pursuit is that martial arts appeal to the basest and lowest instincts of people and do thus serve as a kind of shortcut to confidence or so it is hoped. If you want to be a great sprinter for example, you need to be young and genetically endowed but the average man can learn to throw a knock out punch in months and if he obsesses about fighting, he can learn to fell the vast majority of people in a few years despite mediocre genetics.
In prehistoric times, a guy with very little going for him could presumably have simply clubbed another competitor over the head in the mating game and if he was not busy doing that, he presumably derived pleasure from the knowledge that he could intimidate a competitor who would be superior to him in many respects.
This mentality is still evident in children, people exhibiting jealous rage and is arguably an important root cause of interracial violence in America and Europe where people find that the only way to drag certain people to their own level is to hurt and injure them until they can no longer function at their god given capacity.
The difference between true savages and cultured ones is that the savages feel a need to live out their fantasy in reality, while most other people are happy "knowing" in their own head that "I could kick his ass" and this is what provides them with consolation when they feel intimidated by the gifts of others; this same mentality is also evident in some masculine women as exhibited in boasting statements like "I could kick most guys' asses". The reason martial arts are so attractive is because we feel that they transcend the gym in a way that tennis or football does not and do thus allow us to force our will on people in a universal setting or to intimidate them into respecting us; ideally in a way similar to a Hollywood movie where tomorrow's consequences do not constitute a reason to worry.
Thusly when a guy says that "I need to work on my ground game" or "I need to work on my boxing" what it does not mean is that he needs to train several days a week to learn those things to survive outdoors but it rather means that he's insecure about himself for one or other reason and he needs to get that training in so he can live out his fantasy in his head anytime he perceives a certain situation to be uncomfortable and emerge victorious in the movie scene that goes on inside his head when a red blooded young male gives him a funny look. A guy with a different outlook on life and a differently formed identity might rather get a black eye once in his life than spend years of his life sweating in the gym every other evening but for some men the feeling of emasculation associated with becoming a victim of violence, even in the absence of permanent injury, is so infuriating that they may actively obsess about such conflict situations and even end up spending a good amount of their spare time doing a thing that they do not truly enjoy and when people say that "men need to do martial arts" it is not overly hyperbolic to suggest that the person making the statement belongs to the subpopulation likely to obsess about such things to the detriment of their mental health. The older guys get the less they worry despite becoming increasingly vulnerable with age as they no longer allow the posturing to get under their skin, which is a skill that young men are capable of possessing as well.
In consequence it is my belief that most well adjusted men do not need to engage in regular martial arts training but having some exposure can be useful for men of small size and particularly men with traumatic experiences of bullying that largely do not go on in adulthood as the former bullies turn from objects of admiration into losers scared of their own shadow and many of the nerds go on to lead succesful lives, albeit with hidden trauma. In some cases the trauma may be related to very specific interpersonal connections and in such cases therapy or the disappearance of any influence on the part of the negative person/people can lead to complete or partial healing.
I've noticed more than a few times over this forum and in various articles that the training of martial arts is considered not only useful but perhaps even quite necessary. I've personally trained in boxing and thai boxing for a short time until a serious injury caused me to take time off and I'm still recovering.
I'd like to emphasize that I'm not trying to dismiss martial arts or people who are very serious about them. I understand that there's nothing like getting to work on your punches, wrestling or what not and to share that experience in a masculine environment. With all that said, the world is full of fascinating things and that's why I'm going to play devil's advocate and address some pro-martial arts arguments or lines of thought here in a deconstructive manner.
While this skill can be helpful, spending several times a week going in and out of a gym can be counterproductive. You may never get into a fair fight and yet will accumulate small injuries training. I'm emphasizing the word "fair fight" because no style will make you grow eyes in your back or survive a fight where the odds are overwhelmingly against you due to weapons, numbers, size difference or environmental restrictions.
My personal belief is that fight training is most useful for traumatized men with hurtful experiences of bullying and intimidation; possibly dating all the way back to childhood or teen years. Combat sports can help these individuals deal with the feelings they've long suppressed and in earning a belt or holding their own in the ring they can feel a sense of accomplishment, which can be taken to symbolize their victory over a past foe. In effect, the person can play out a scenario of pummeling the abuser to a pulp in their head and refute the mockery that the bastard once used to fling at him.
If the guy is already doing fairly well inside his head and has built reasonable amounts of self-confidence succeeding in other pursuits and grown beyond his most vulnerable years, martial arts training may not appear nearly as tempting but rather simply another drop in a sea of attractions.
We rarely get the chance to help ourselves or save someone else's life by beating someone up and having training in psychology, basic people skills, first aid and assistance is far more important. There does indeed exist a major calling for all kinds of traditionally feminine volunteer and community work where a man can make a difference while the chances are that learning martial arts will never make any difference even in the lives of those closest to the practitioner unless he holds a high danger job or teahes self-defense himself, which is highly unlikely.
The fantasy of dishing out a beating to a deserving group of rapugees or thugs is something that will most likely only be lived out in a person's head while nurturing or nursing a harmless person or showing off some dance skills in a club are entirely tenable to pull off.
The big difference here between the usefulness or/and attractiveness of martial arts relative to some other pursuit is that martial arts appeal to the basest and lowest instincts of people and do thus serve as a kind of shortcut to confidence or so it is hoped. If you want to be a great sprinter for example, you need to be young and genetically endowed but the average man can learn to throw a knock out punch in months and if he obsesses about fighting, he can learn to fell the vast majority of people in a few years despite mediocre genetics.
In prehistoric times, a guy with very little going for him could presumably have simply clubbed another competitor over the head in the mating game and if he was not busy doing that, he presumably derived pleasure from the knowledge that he could intimidate a competitor who would be superior to him in many respects.
This mentality is still evident in children, people exhibiting jealous rage and is arguably an important root cause of interracial violence in America and Europe where people find that the only way to drag certain people to their own level is to hurt and injure them until they can no longer function at their god given capacity.
The difference between true savages and cultured ones is that the savages feel a need to live out their fantasy in reality, while most other people are happy "knowing" in their own head that "I could kick his ass" and this is what provides them with consolation when they feel intimidated by the gifts of others; this same mentality is also evident in some masculine women as exhibited in boasting statements like "I could kick most guys' asses". The reason martial arts are so attractive is because we feel that they transcend the gym in a way that tennis or football does not and do thus allow us to force our will on people in a universal setting or to intimidate them into respecting us; ideally in a way similar to a Hollywood movie where tomorrow's consequences do not constitute a reason to worry.
Thusly when a guy says that "I need to work on my ground game" or "I need to work on my boxing" what it does not mean is that he needs to train several days a week to learn those things to survive outdoors but it rather means that he's insecure about himself for one or other reason and he needs to get that training in so he can live out his fantasy in his head anytime he perceives a certain situation to be uncomfortable and emerge victorious in the movie scene that goes on inside his head when a red blooded young male gives him a funny look. A guy with a different outlook on life and a differently formed identity might rather get a black eye once in his life than spend years of his life sweating in the gym every other evening but for some men the feeling of emasculation associated with becoming a victim of violence, even in the absence of permanent injury, is so infuriating that they may actively obsess about such conflict situations and even end up spending a good amount of their spare time doing a thing that they do not truly enjoy and when people say that "men need to do martial arts" it is not overly hyperbolic to suggest that the person making the statement belongs to the subpopulation likely to obsess about such things to the detriment of their mental health. The older guys get the less they worry despite becoming increasingly vulnerable with age as they no longer allow the posturing to get under their skin, which is a skill that young men are capable of possessing as well.
In consequence it is my belief that most well adjusted men do not need to engage in regular martial arts training but having some exposure can be useful for men of small size and particularly men with traumatic experiences of bullying that largely do not go on in adulthood as the former bullies turn from objects of admiration into losers scared of their own shadow and many of the nerds go on to lead succesful lives, albeit with hidden trauma. In some cases the trauma may be related to very specific interpersonal connections and in such cases therapy or the disappearance of any influence on the part of the negative person/people can lead to complete or partial healing.
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