Of North and South

Pan-Galactic illustrates the reluctance of the Southern man to hit back:

She punched him the face.

He took it. I’d seen him fight. I knew he knew it was coming, and he could’ve blocked it, dodged it, or simply beaten her senseless before she even threw it… but he didn’t. He just took it.

“Look… calm down. I don’t fight girls. It ain’t right.”

She punched him in the face again, then started cussing him. She said everything you can imagine. She even started calling him a coward, too scared to fight a girl.

“Don’t hit me again. I’ve already told you, I don’t fight girls. It ain’t right.”

Red faced and seething now… she punches him again, and then she cusses him, and his family.

“You need to go home. That’s three times you’ve hit me. You ain’t gonna do it again.”

Perhaps because I was raised in the worker’s paradise of Minnesota, I’ve never understood this Southern reluctance to unleash physical force on women. How is a girl or a woman supposed to learn to control her tongue if no one is going to administer the correction that is often so desperately called for? I’ve just never had a big problem with allowing someone of either sex to experience the reasonable consequences of their actions.

In the dojo, of course, this gentlemanly behavior isn’t possible, given that the whole point of the training is to teach one to react prior to thinking. If you’re reacting to a flash of movement or the glimpse of an open window, the thought of your target’s sex isn’t going to enter into the picture until afterwards.

Outside the dojo, I’ve only hit a woman once. I’d been arguing with this psycho at a college party, a girl I later learned actually ended up in the loony bin, when she leaned forward and bit me in the chest. It was almost summer, I wasn’t wearing a shirt, and she actually bit through the skin on both sides; I could feel her teeth meet.

I was in an odd position, because I’d just been turning away to get away from her when she lunged, so my right hand was across my body and under her jaw. I threw a backhand uppercut as I rotated my body back to the right, and she literally flew up, up and away. She was laying there about five feet away, stunned, as everyone whirled around to unleash their righteously indignant wrath on a despicable girl-beater.

Of course, as soon as they saw my bleeding chest, their disapprobation immediately shifted from me to her. Some of her friends helped her exit the premises in disgrace while I endured rabies jokes and having my wound washed out with vodka. I’ve been smacked around rather thoroughly on plenty of occasions, had bones broken and been KO’d, but I’ve never experienced sharper pain than that psycho’s bite. It hurt for three days.

I’m no Southern gentleman. My only regret is that I didn’t go with my left instead of the backhand.