The Art of Manliness - #111： Why Men Fight & Why We Like To Watch With Jonathan Gottschall

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. So why do

00:00:20.080 men like to fight? Why do we like to compete? Whether it's boxing or MMA, football, basketball,

00:00:28.500 any other type of, we'll come up with a competition for anything. Not only that,

00:00:34.580 why do we like to watch other men fight and to compete? What's going on there? Well,

00:00:38.840 our guest today is an English professor that wanted to find the answers to those questions.

00:00:44.000 So he decided to train to become an MMA fighter. His name is John Gottschall. He's the author of

00:00:49.760 the book, The Professor in the Cage, Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch. And this is one of the

00:00:56.140 best books I've read so far this year. And one of the best books about masculinity I've read.

00:01:01.160 He weaves in a story about his training to become an MMA fighter with anthropological, biological,

00:01:06.520 sociological studies about male violence, male competition, and male status. And it just

00:01:12.180 provides a lot of fascinating insights to how these aspects of masculinity have shaped men throughout

00:01:17.720 time, throughout cultures. And he makes the provocative case that ritualized combat,

00:01:22.280 whether it's boxing or MMA, competition and, you know, violent sports like football serve a role

00:01:28.720 in society and actually a pro-social role. So we're going to talk about what role violence should

00:01:34.600 have in a man's life, even in the modern world. Again, it's fascinating, provocative argument and

00:01:40.620 discussion. I think you're really going to like this one. So let's do this. John Gottschall,

00:01:44.200 The Professor in the Cage. Jonathan Gottschall, welcome to the show.

00:01:53.220 Thank you for having me. I appreciate you having me on.

00:01:55.220 All right. So your book is The Professor in the Cage, Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch.

00:02:01.220 So the first question is naturally how you're an English professor by trade. How did an English

00:02:06.040 professor end up training to become an MMA fighter and explore violence and masculinity?

00:02:11.280 I guess three or four years ago, I was an English professor, but I was an adjunct

00:02:19.040 English professor at a small liberal arts school. And I had never managed to find my way onto the

00:02:26.140 tenure track. And I was kind of finally facing the fact that I was basically never going to.

00:02:31.540 So I was at midlife and I needed a new path through life, but I didn't know what it should be. And then

00:02:37.600 one day I was at my office hours and I was kind of pacing around. I look out the front window and

00:02:41.640 this new business had moved in across the street and it's called Mark Schrader's Academy of Mixed

00:02:47.280 Martial Arts. It's a cage fighting gym. And I could look across the street, you know, about as far as I

00:02:52.100 could throw a snowball. And I could see the guys in there in the cage and they're dancing around,

00:02:57.920 they're hitting, they're tackling, they're rolling. And I was just ambushed by this powerful sense of

00:03:04.500 envy. You know, I envy those young guys over there who seemed so alive in their cage while

00:03:09.420 here I was across the street, you know, rotting away in my office cubicle. And then I had this

00:03:14.820 kind of funny thought and the thought was, wouldn't it be funny if I went across the street and joined

00:03:19.900 them? Me, you know, this, you know, chubby 40 year old, never been in a fight, English professor.

00:03:26.540 And then my next thought was, of course, well, maybe that's my new path in life. Maybe there's

00:03:30.760 a book in that, you know, a sort of nonfiction fight club, a book about the allure of violence.

00:03:37.460 And so a couple months later, I worked up my courage. I crossed the street, uh, tried to learn

00:03:43.000 how to fight and, uh, wrote the book. What did your fellow colleagues think of this?

00:03:48.700 Um, you know, it's funny, you know, when I, when I said that my, I had this fantasy of crossing the

00:03:53.620 street to learn how to fight. And initially the fantasy was a career suicide fantasy.

00:04:00.180 I was hoping that my colleagues would see me, you know, fighting in the cage and they would

00:04:05.800 say, oh, this is beyond the pale of academic respectability. We must fire this guy. And

00:04:10.580 so it was kind of like this, uh, career suicide fantasy I was having, but my colleagues, unfortunately

00:04:15.860 were a lot more tolerant than I hoped. Uh, and, uh, they didn't, they didn't fire me over.

00:04:21.080 They thought it was kind of funny and, uh, they were pretty supportive in the end. I'm interested

00:04:25.040 to see what the rest of, uh, the sort of intellectual, uh, academic world is going to make of the

00:04:31.540 book once they get ahold of it. Um, whether they'll see it as sort of this, uh, I don't

00:04:36.700 know, glorification of barbarism or if they'll see it as a more thoughtful project that I intended.

00:04:41.520 Have you got any feedback from other academics?

00:04:44.200 Not yet. You know, the book has only been out for a few days. You know, I've had a few reviews,

00:04:47.640 but not from sort of the most pointy headed intellectuals. Sure. I'm sure that will come

00:04:53.140 soon. Yeah. Um, what did your wife think of this? You know, your, your dad, you got two 0.99

00:04:58.320 daughters, you're 40 years old. Uh, was she kind of worried about this? Well, yeah, you 0.85

00:05:03.640 know, at first, you know, I didn't even want to tell her. I was, I was embarrassed to even

00:05:06.540 confess this to her, but eventually I kind of had to. And I'm like, you know, well, you

00:05:11.280 know, I just kind of told her my whole dumb plan for trying to become a cage fighter. And 0.88

00:05:15.820 she said, no, first kind of wanted to see if I was joking or not. And then she said,

00:05:19.700 well, you know, you know, you don't have any skills. You'll be killed. Uh, she said. Um, 1.00

00:05:25.580 and it always hurts to have your wife question your skills. Uh, but, um, but eventually she 1.00

00:05:33.160 sort of, you know, came around to it and she got so comfortable with it. In fact, that it

00:05:37.980 depressed me. I'd be like, you know, I don't know how my shoulder hurts and I can't see

00:05:43.140 straight. I got hit so hard today. And I just, I'd want to whine about it or something.

00:05:47.060 And she'd be like, you know, did you want to go to the dishwasher? And I'd think, my

00:05:51.240 God, woman, don't you love me at all? Aren't you, aren't you worried about me at all? She

00:05:55.080 got, she got used to it. She was very supportive.

00:05:56.360 That's great. So did you have any assumptions about male violence going into this experiment?

00:06:03.260 Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I was going in partially to verify a theory that I have. And the theory

00:06:08.940 was basically that MMA was this metaphor for something really dark and rotten in human nature,

00:06:17.060 something black and violent, you know? Um, I had all the stereotypes that most people

00:06:21.680 had, uh, that the fighting was, was bad. Um, and that it, you know, that the fighters must

00:06:28.960 be, I don't know, bullies or sociopaths or sadists at the least. And I just didn't find that

00:06:35.580 at all. You know, almost all of my assumptions going in were overturned by the process of

00:06:40.380 doing the research of meeting the guys, fighting myself. And basically, you know, guys don't

00:06:46.280 go into mixed martial arts because they're dreaming of hurting people. You know, they

00:06:51.880 don't, they don't do it because they fantasize about, or they take some kind of pleasure in

00:06:56.820 doing violence. Most guys get into it, I believe, because they're attempting to defeat

00:07:03.260 a weakness and timidity inside themselves. And these are guys who are in need of a quest

00:07:09.720 and mixed martial arts gives them that quest.

00:07:13.360 Yeah. There aren't really opportunities for quests for men and like the traditional, we

00:07:18.080 think of masculine quest, right?

00:07:20.540 That's right. That's right. You know, if you have a world where the, the world is getting

00:07:25.220 safer and safer, you know, it's getting softer and softer, uh, and the traditional masculine

00:07:31.380 virtues are held in lower and lower regard. And there's very few places where a young guy

00:07:36.900 and overwhelmingly young guys that do this can go to get a sort of rite of passage, uh,

00:07:43.720 into manhood. And I think that's what a lot of these guys are seeking. They're seeking

00:07:47.300 some sort of test of their courage and their character. They want to know if they're real

00:07:52.780 men in that traditional sense.

00:07:55.780 Yeah. And to your point about, um, you know, MMA fighters, not being bullies, like my experience

00:07:59.960 with MMA fighters, like there's something like the nicest people I've ever encountered.

00:08:04.080 Totally.

00:08:04.520 Super friendly.

00:08:05.840 Yeah.

00:08:06.300 And just totally, I mean, it's not what you think you'd, you kind of think you'd have 0.96

00:08:10.620 these kind of just jerks, but they're just like the nicest guys in the world. 0.97

00:08:13.880 I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. I don't know if it attracts nice 0.99

00:08:17.020 guys. I think partly it's the culture of MMA. It's a martial arts culture, which is based

00:08:21.700 on respect. Um, but there's also something like, you know, inside the gym, it really pays

00:08:27.500 to be nice because if you're not nice, people be too up worse. You know, they don't want

00:08:31.480 to work with you. You, you, you, you would need to play nice inside the gym. And also

00:08:35.680 I think outside the gym, I think these guys are at pains to put people at ease. They don't

00:08:39.960 want, they want to, they want to make a very strong, uh, display of the fact that even though

00:08:45.520 I'm a mean person in that cage, I'm a very nice person outside the cage and you don't need

00:08:50.700 to be uncomfortable and you don't need to be worried.

00:08:52.900 Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the, um, cause you know, you, you, you weave in your 0.98

00:08:57.180 story about training with all this fantastic research about masculinity and, and particularly

00:09:03.620 how it relates to violence. And I love, you start off the book talking about honor and

00:09:08.580 it sort of underlies what violence, what role violence plays in masculinity. So what, what

00:09:14.460 role does honor play in male violence? And I guess the first thing would be, how do you,

00:09:18.600 how do you define honor in this sense? Cause I think most people have a definition of honor.

00:09:21.920 That's not what you're talking about.

00:09:23.340 Yeah. Honor is, is it, I think it's always been a sort of fuzzy concept, always been sort

00:09:29.020 of hard for people to put their finger on what they mean, but honor, uh, if you, if you substitute

00:09:35.420 the word respect, you won't be far, far wrong. Um, so, so a man of honor is a man who demands,

00:09:41.420 who demands to be respected. Uh, and you know, so the, the most, the most classic honor dispute

00:09:49.480 is the formal aristocratic European duel where a man feels dishonored. He says to his opponent,

00:09:56.240 you must apologize to that for this. If you don't, if you won't do it, we're going to have

00:09:59.920 a gunfight or a sort of fight at dawn. Now the classic European duel is dead. No one does that

00:10:06.820 anymore, but we still do. We still have the, the duel in a sense of an escalating dispute over honor

00:10:15.680 is still the leading cause of conflict and violence and even homicide among men. You know,

00:10:22.660 so for example, you're at the bar, some guy walks past you, you clip shoulders, somebody spills their

00:10:28.300 drink, someone insults someone. Um, and before you know it, it's escalated to, uh, beer bottles,

00:10:34.080 uh, to the top of the head. That is in a way, a duel in that, in that limited sense I'm talking

00:10:41.440 about. It's a, it's a, it's a dispute over honor that gets out of control. Gotcha. And I love how

00:10:47.120 you talk to, we've, we've had a, uh, a professor who specializes in like civil war honor and she

00:10:54.280 talked about the difference between, uh, like aristocratic duels and like the lower class duels,

00:10:58.720 like the rough and tumbles. I think you can talk about that. It's amazing. You talk about that in

00:11:02.380 your book, right? It's just no holds barred. Basically you're the whole point is to gouge someone's

00:11:07.780 eye out. That was, that was like the touchdown pass. Yeah. Yeah. It was called, it was called

00:11:12.560 feeling for a feller's eye strings. The idea was to, the idea was to, you know, get your

00:11:19.260 thumbs into the corners of the eyes and pop out the whole eyeball. So it's bouncing around

00:11:23.960 around the string. Man. Okay. Yeah. When I read that, it just made me wince in pain. But

00:11:29.340 that is an example of a duel, but for lower class. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So

00:11:35.160 the duel is dead, uh, people say, but the duel is only dead in that sort of stuffy, elaborate

00:11:41.500 aristocratic form. There's various other kinds and other forms of the duel, um, that, that,

00:11:47.800 that still exists today. You talk about how duels and the other forms that exist today

00:11:52.620 are basically ritualized violence. Yeah. And that these forms of ritualized violence, uh,

00:11:59.540 actually have a benefit society. So can you talk, explain what you mean by ritualized violence

00:12:03.320 and how does this actually keep violence in check? Sure. Well, you know, so again,

00:12:09.820 the history of the duel. So if you have historians talking about the duel, they usually go back 500

00:12:14.560 years or so, uh, in Europe, but they really need to go back millions of years. So if you've seen

00:12:21.040 a couple of elephant seals clashing in the surf on like a nature video or a couple of rams squaring off

00:12:28.980 and cracking skulls on the hillside in a nature video, that's what biologists call ritual combat.

00:12:35.100 It's this way that many, many different species have evolved to decide who's the bigger, stronger,

00:12:43.560 fitter animal without the dangers of fighting it out to the death. And what I argue in the book is

00:12:51.200 that the same is true of people only more so. So yeah, humans are a complicated, complex animal,

00:12:58.420 but we're animals still. And the term I have for this is called the monkey dance. And the monkey dance

00:13:04.080 is my term for human versions of ritual combat. Everything from, you know, formal duels to dead,

00:13:12.420 like deadly duels, to verbal duels, to play fights of boys, to sports. But probably the best example of

00:13:19.180 this is again, going back to that bar. So if you have, uh, the choreography of a standard fist fight.

00:13:26.600 So a fist fight almost always goes the same way. It's been studied by sociologists pretty extensively.

00:13:32.700 And they almost always have the same sort of patterns. It begins with some sort of insult,

00:13:37.860 some sort of trespass. A man will feel dishonored, disrespected. There's a challenge.

00:13:43.220 They close the distance. There's a push. Uh, at any time, either man can call it off and sit and walk away,

00:13:50.520 say, I'm sorry. But if you won't, it'll escalate to a real fight. There'll be a push. There'll be a punch.

00:13:55.220 There'll be a tackle. They'll roll around the ground and gouge each other. So the choreography 0.90

00:14:02.160 of a standard fist fight, the back and forth dance of it, the moves that, that, that people

00:14:08.560 carry out seem to be about as hardwired into us as those two rams cracking skulls on a mountainside. 0.94

00:14:17.740 Now the key is that all this stuff looks silly. It looks ridiculous. It looks pathetic. And sometimes 0.99

00:14:23.860 it ends in tragedy. But for the most part, our monkey dances are a good thing. They keep our

00:14:30.940 contests civilized and without, without codes and rules and rituals to govern the way that men compete

00:14:38.180 and even the way that men fight, the world would be quite a lot more dangerous and, uh, dark.

00:14:43.440 Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like my next question I was going to ask you is like, are there downsides?

00:14:48.620 It seems like there's a lot of push, you know, everyone talks about it. We're becoming softer

00:14:53.460 and, you know, we're, we're afraid of that sort of monkey dance. And so we're trying to do things to

00:14:58.140 eliminate it almost. Uh, there's talks of getting rid of football. There's talks of regulating boxing

00:15:04.300 even more and MMA even more. I mean, are we opening up a Pandora's box by doing that?

00:15:10.280 I think arguably, um, I mean, one of the kind of cool, uh, things I've read and again,

00:15:16.720 in the work of sociologists, um, is arguments for the re-institution of a dueling culture,

00:15:24.280 for instance, in inner city neighborhoods or in, uh, prisons. And they're talking about

00:15:29.940 specifically a culture of boxing duels. And the point of this is that what you have in an

00:15:36.380 inner city neighborhood or many inner city neighborhoods, and certainly in, uh, serious

00:15:41.140 prisons are cultures of honor without dueling codes. And if you are going to have a culture

00:15:47.520 of honor, a culture where men are incredibly touchy about self respect, about disrespect

00:15:53.020 and willing to, uh, claim respect with physical violence, you don't want to have that kind of

00:15:59.520 honor culture without a dueling code. Because if you have that kind of honor culture without

00:16:04.440 a dueling code, then you get things like Hatfield, McCoy, blood feuds. You get things like prison

00:16:11.060 shankings. You get things like drive-by shootings. So the idea of a, of a, of a culture of boxing

00:16:17.960 duels would be that it makes those other forms of violence dishonorable. It makes it, you, you're

00:16:26.840 branded a coward and you have to eat a lot of shame if you go outside of the dueling code.

00:16:32.520 So I think there's at least an argument to be, to be made that in certain situations,

00:16:36.800 a reinstitution even of, of, uh, dueling codes could be a good thing.

00:16:42.400 Um, so I just had a question, but it left my mind. Okay. Yeah. I wanted to like hit the

00:16:47.820 point. So the big point here with like ritual combat or ritualized violence with, within humans

00:16:52.820 and even animals, the goal isn't to kill your opponent, correct? It's just sort of tough,

00:16:58.840 rough them up a bit.

00:17:00.660 That's right. That's right. Normally with what happens with ritual combat among animals, for

00:17:05.860 instance, is almost always, it doesn't come to a real fight because the animals will pose at each

00:17:12.880 other back and forth. They'll puff up, they'll bluster and threaten each other. And one guy will look at

00:17:18.100 the other guy and say, Hey, you're bigger than me. You look like you're fitter. And I'm just going

00:17:22.320 to, I'm going to, I'm going to seed this territory to you. They only have a real fight if they're very 0.98

00:17:28.540 evenly matched. Um, and then at some point the weaker guy taps out, he says, okay, okay, okay. You

00:17:33.840 went, he backs down. Uh, and that's basically the way it is with people too. You know, there's,

00:17:38.300 there's, there's, there's systems built in, um, where we're able to determine who the better man

00:17:45.620 is without having to fight it out to the death. Gotcha. All right. So your book is called Why Men

00:17:52.040 Fight. Um, is, what does the research say about why men are drawn to violence more so than women?

00:17:57.460 Is it biological? Is it cultural? Is it a mixture of both? What's going on there?

00:18:01.140 I think it's, I think it's largely biological. Um, you know, we're animals. We seem to like to

00:18:09.380 forget that, but you know, the, the, the stallion differs from the mayor and the cow differs from

00:18:18.520 the bull and the female chimp or gorilla or monkey differs from the male version. And they differ not 0.79

00:18:25.360 only in their bodies, but they differ in their behaviors. And why should it be different

00:18:31.060 for us? So wherever you go around the world, you'll never find a society where men don't do 0.97

00:18:40.180 the lion's share of the violence. This is throughout human history. Uh, it's across cultures. I mean,

00:18:46.820 there's literally never been a documented example where women did most of the fighting, where they 0.82

00:18:51.660 did most of the warring and where they caused most of the social chaos in the group by, you know,

00:18:57.220 causing fights within the group. And human males have been shaped by this evolutionary history of

00:19:04.120 violence. It's why men are bigger than women. It's why men are faster. It's why even in trained 0.78

00:19:11.420 athletes, men have much higher cardiovascular capacity. It's why men are stronger. And it also

00:19:18.300 affected our behaviors and our psychologies. It's why men are more physically aggressive. It's why

00:19:25.220 men are more prone to taking really idiotic risks. And it's why men are more willing to resort to 1.00

00:19:33.060 physical forms of aggression. Now, all that said, this isn't to say that culture plays no role.

00:19:42.300 And it's not to say that everything about gender is biologically determined. But when it comes to these

00:19:47.340 questions, the questions that I'm looking at in my book, questions about, um, violence, about intensely

00:19:54.080 competitive behavior, about physically aggressive behavior, this is where the sex differences are

00:20:00.620 at their most massive. And it's where the biological roots of those differences are least controversial.

00:20:07.920 Okay. And so the second part of your subtitle is why we like to watch men fight. So why, why is it

00:20:13.340 everyone, I remember everyone's probably that moment in high school where, you know, there's like meat,

00:20:17.540 there's gonna be a fight after school. So you go to some undisclosed location, you form the circle,

00:20:22.800 and like, you get really excited. Watch this. I remember you get the chills, right? And you get

00:20:27.500 the hair lift up on your, but it's exciting. Uh, why do we like to watch men fight?

00:20:33.920 That's a great question. And that's a great example of it. And that really brought me back

00:20:37.480 to my own childhood. Um, yeah, I think, I think there's at least a couple of answers to this.

00:20:43.340 Uh, and I started thinking about this really intensely as I was working on the book and as I was watching a

00:20:48.620 a lot of cage fighting and I'd be thinking to myself, you know, I'm a civilized person.

00:20:53.320 I'm a peace loving person. Uh, I'm apparently not a sociopath. So why am I watching this?

00:20:59.780 You know, what's wrong with me and what's wrong with us all? Because, you know, even if you wouldn't

00:21:04.960 be caught dead cheering at a cage fight or a boxing match, almost certainly you consume a huge diet of

00:21:12.580 violent entertainment in your movies and your films and your books, your video games and so forth.

00:21:18.900 So part of the reason I, I mean, this is kind of an uncomfortable truth, but I do think it's a truth

00:21:23.740 is that we all claim to hate violence while we're just stuffing it into our heads at all times.

00:21:30.920 We were, we're spooning it up saying that we hate the taste of it. But the truth is that we seem to

00:21:36.560 like violence. You know, there's a creature in us that likes violence and likes it more than we'd like

00:21:41.780 just about anything else. But there's a other side of this, I think, you know, um, when it comes

00:21:48.740 to a fight, when it comes to a sport fight, I think what draws us in is not so much the barbarism

00:21:56.720 or the bloodbust. So I don't know about you, but I don't ever want to watch an ISIS torture murder 0.52

00:22:04.260 video. No, no. And I don't think most people want to watch it, but I find it very hard not to watch

00:22:11.060 men fighting. And I think because it's, because it's such an incredibly intense drama, you know,

00:22:17.520 it's such an incredibly intense spectacle and the men have so much riding on it and it's real,

00:22:22.680 you know, it's truly reality TV. And, uh, you know, so a fight will set up these conditions of 0.98

00:22:28.840 incredible adversity that allow the best elements of human nature to shine through. So talk about

00:22:38.100 things like courage and boldness and extremes of grace and endurance. So I think I will sound to

00:22:47.400 many people like an apologist for violence, but I think what draws us into combat sport as viewers

00:22:56.800 isn't that we're succumbing or we're reveling in the worst aspects of human nature. I think we go to

00:23:03.960 a sport fight to honor and to celebrate the best aspects of human nature.

00:23:09.100 That's kind of what, uh, Joyce Carol Oates wrote about.

00:23:12.680 Yes. Yeah. And that's a, she wrote a fantastic book. That's one of my favorite, really my favorite

00:23:17.180 book about fighting, uh, her book on boxing. Um, but she's, but she's, you know, like all of us,

00:23:24.300 uh, she's flopping around a little bit. She's trying to figure it out herself. What am I doing

00:23:29.620 watching this stuff? And I think she, uh, is even more ambivalent about it than I am. I mean,

00:23:37.340 she, uh, ambivalent is the proper attitude, by the way, toward, to a sport fight, I believe. I think

00:23:42.440 we should be kind of repelled by it. I think we should feel morally, uh, uh, compromised by it to

00:23:48.960 some degree. Um, but there's also something noble about it in my opinion. Yeah. You, you,

00:23:55.040 you quoted, uh, William James, that is the steeps that, uh, it's sort of like an anti-war, um,

00:24:03.000 essay, but he was basically making the case to, if we didn't have war, we'd sort of lose

00:24:07.320 those chances to display nobility and courage and I'd be kind of born basically.

00:24:12.560 Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. The steeps of life is a great line.

00:24:16.520 Yeah, it is. And that's, and that's, and that's, you know, once I read that line, I was like,

00:24:20.820 oh, that's what we're after, uh, in, in, in, in mixed martial arts. These are young guys who,

00:24:27.060 um, are a little bored of their, of their, of the flats of life, of these flat roads of,

00:24:33.040 you know, the softness and ease of life. And they want this steepness. They want this challenge.

00:24:39.040 They want this Everest to climb. That's the kind of quest that I was talking about.

00:24:42.720 Yeah. So I'd like to get your opinion on this after going through this whole experience. Are you

00:24:46.400 still training mixed martial arts? Do you still go to the gym?

00:24:48.720 Um, I, I, uh, I expected to fight for, to, to train for a year, have a fight and quit. Um,

00:24:57.920 I continued training, uh, for another two years afterwards. And then I had to give it up basically

00:25:04.120 because I was just too beaten up. Um, so I do kind of go, I do go back in now and then every

00:25:10.140 few months. I'm like, I get itchy for it and, uh, miss the guys and I go in. Um, but I'm just

00:25:17.880 not holding up to it physically. Like I used to. Yeah. So it sounds like you developed a

00:25:21.600 really great camaraderie with these guys. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like, uh, I, yeah,

00:25:28.440 there's something about, there's something, it's something weird that happens. This is one

00:25:31.920 of those things that I just wouldn't have known if I hadn't done it. Um, but there's something

00:25:36.060 about a sport fight and about sparring in particular that really draws guys close together. You know,

00:25:43.640 one of the things I, one of the lines I wrote in my mixed martial arts diary that I, that

00:25:48.060 I wrote in every night after training was that there's this weird paradox that, that nothing

00:25:54.200 makes men love each other so much as a good natured fist fight. It's kind of true. So yeah,

00:26:01.660 I, so that was one of the hard things about giving it up was I was giving up this, uh, the

00:26:07.340 physical challenge of it, but I was kind of also losing my peer group.

00:26:10.740 Yeah. Yeah. I call it aggressive nurturing. It's what guys do.

00:26:15.960 Yeah. Yeah. I think it's right. I think it's right. And there's some, there's this weird,

00:26:19.920 I call it this weird, pathetic alchemy whereby guys transform aggressive words and aggressive 0.70

00:26:28.540 actions into terms of endearment. You know, I punch you in the shoulder and I, you know, it's, 0.96

00:26:35.140 it's violent, but it means I love you. Yeah. You know, I call you some name, but it means

00:26:39.300 I care for you. You know what I mean? And there's this weird process of translation that,

00:26:44.220 that men are able to, um, automatically translate. Whereas I think women are like, what, what are 1.00

00:26:50.520 they mad at each other?

00:26:51.700 Yeah, they shouldn't do that. Let's stop that. Um, so through your experience, your training,

00:26:57.400 I mean, okay, we live in a society where effectively we've outsourced protection to the state. You know,

00:27:02.520 we have police officers, we have a military that 1% of the population serves in, and most,

00:27:07.020 for the most part, society is safe. It's not a very violent world, despite what the

00:27:11.980 news says, but at least in the United States. Um, I mean, is there any reason a man should 1.00

00:27:16.940 like be capable of fighting and being tough and strong? I mean, should a man strive for

00:27:22.700 that for any reason?

00:27:26.080 That's a good question. Uh, I guess there's a couple ways looking at this. First off, you

00:27:32.560 know, I'm 40 years old. I live in a suburb, uh, middle class. Um, violence is, you know,

00:27:38.920 less and less likely to occur, uh, to me. You know, I'm less likely to get into a monkey

00:27:44.640 dance with somebody. I don't cross paths with, with violent men on a regular basis, but not

00:27:51.620 everybody lives in a neighborhood like I live in, you know? Um, and for young guys, especially,

00:27:56.600 I think it's, it's, it's much more likely that you'll find yourselves in these monkey

00:28:00.680 dancing situations. Uh, so yeah, I, I feel like there's a, still a role for self-defense,

00:28:08.020 practical, uh, self-defense, but I think more than that, there's a self-respect angle to it.

00:28:15.020 Don't you think? Like, I think that whether or not you're going to be violent or face situations

00:28:20.300 of violence, you still, in order to sort of respect yourself as a guy, you want to be able to feel

00:28:27.360 that you're capable of handling yourself and you're capable of defending yourself and defending the

00:28:32.480 people that you love and you care for. So I, I do think that there's a sort of, even though that

00:28:38.200 this, this, I don't know, we're less, we're less likely to need it. It still is part of our makeup,

00:28:43.800 you know, to, to want to be able to handle ourselves. Gotcha. Uh, yeah, I agree completely

00:28:51.420 with that, uh, sentiment. Um, through your training at MMA, did you find that it provided benefits in

00:28:58.940 other areas of your life? Did it like, was there carryover? Yeah, yeah, I do. Um, you know,

00:29:06.200 part of, part of what I was, I was after was self-respect. You know, I, I, you know, part of my,

00:29:11.660 my own personal history of violence was I'd never been in a fight and I had dodged, uh, quite a few

00:29:18.200 fights in my adolescence. And it's weird how much psychic weight that put on me, you know, like even

00:29:25.600 as a 40 year old, I'm still able to look back at how I behaved when I was like an undersized,

00:29:31.200 you know, 15 year old getting pushed around by bullies. And it still has the power to, to fill me

00:29:36.880 with shame. Weirdly, man, you know, weirdly, all, all I've accomplished, the things I've done,

00:29:44.340 they matter, but, but still that stuff makes me blush. So, um, part of, so there was carryover.

00:29:52.100 Yeah. I, I was, I was, I wanted to know whether or not I was a coward, you know, I wanted to know if

00:29:58.680 I was capable of doing something brave. And for me getting into the cage and fighting was scary

00:30:06.220 and it did take bravery. And so I was able to kind of prove to myself that I, you know,

00:30:11.280 I'm not the bravest guy in the world or the toughest guy in the world or anything like that,

00:30:13.940 not even close, but I was able to do what was for me a brave thing.

00:30:18.880 Would you recommend other men do this?

00:30:20.900 Um, the Dutch translation of my book, the title that they didn't consult me on at all,

00:30:29.160 it's called real men fight, which is a horrible title, you know? So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not

00:30:36.040 saying that you have, in order to be a real man, you have to fight. Um, I'm not saying that,

00:30:42.340 you know, I'm not suggesting that every guy in order to feel like he's truly masculine, uh,

00:30:48.360 has to be a, uh, you know, a trained killer. Um, but I think a lot of guys are attracted to it.

00:30:54.520 You know, they, they, you know, we've watched these, you know, we watched Bruce Lee movies as

00:30:58.220 kids or John Claude Van Damme movies, and we've wanted to be that guy. And so for guys who are

00:31:04.980 interested in it and do have, uh, and do lean in that direction or have wondered about it,

00:31:09.720 I would definitely recommend doing it. I think the main reason people don't do it more often,

00:31:14.100 or most guys don't do it more often is because they're afraid of it. They're afraid,

00:31:18.360 excuse me, uh, they're afraid of the violence, but also afraid of walking into the gym for the

00:31:24.340 first time and what it's going to be like. And I know that because I was too, and everyone who

00:31:30.080 goes into the gym for the first time is scared. But if you go in there, you know, you're not going

00:31:33.420 to get, uh, you know, beaten up on the first night. You're not going to get strangled to death

00:31:37.840 on the first night. Uh, it's a pretty nice and nurturing atmosphere. So yeah, I'd recommend it.

00:31:45.380 I mean, if I could just say one more thing, there's a political scientist who had this

00:31:50.340 little phrase that I liked and he had visited West Point, uh, the American, the, uh, the military

00:31:56.340 academy at West Point. And he described West Point as a little taste of Sparta or a little

00:32:02.720 touch of Sparta in the midst of the American Babylon. Cause you have this society that is sort

00:32:10.020 of, I don't know, it's soft and it's, uh, it's all iPhones and Twitter and consumerism. And then

00:32:17.400 you go to the MMA gym and it's very gritty and it's very real. And you're doing things that are

00:32:23.500 very gritty and very real. You're kind of back in Sparta and you're with your, your friends,

00:32:28.800 you're in a sort of warrior band and you're working to make each other tougher and stronger.

00:32:35.560 You're cooperating and beating the fear and the timidity out of each other. And, uh, it was just

00:32:42.700 a really positive experience for me. So yeah, um, I have a bit of a convert zeal for MMA, you know?

00:32:48.880 So I, yeah, I recommend it to everybody if you're interested, but if you're not interested,

00:32:53.540 I understand that too. Sure. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I, we just, we really did

00:32:58.360 just scratch the surface of what, what's in your book. Um, but where can people find out more about

00:33:02.980 your work and about the book? Um, they could, uh, Google me. Oh, I have my website. It's

00:33:09.240 Jonathan Gottschall.com or they can just Google me. Okay, great. Go check that out. Well, Jonathan

00:33:14.480 Gottschall, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Well, thanks for having me on. I

00:33:18.700 really appreciate it. And I, uh, I'm a big fan of the whole art of manliness project. Thank you.

00:33:25.040 My guest today was Jonathan Gottschall. He is the professor of the book,

00:33:28.120 the professor in the cage, why men fight and why we like to watch. You can pick it up on amazon.com.

00:33:34.160 I recommend you go out and get it. It is again, one of the best books about masculinity I've read

00:33:38.760 in a while. And it's just really, it's got a great story because you get to see what happens to him

00:33:42.720 when he finally fights and enters the cage. So go get it today, amazon.com, the professor in the cage.

00:33:48.600 Well, that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice,

00:33:53.360 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com. And if you'd enjoy our

00:33:57.800 podcast, I'd really appreciate it if you'd go to iTunes or Stitcher, whatever it is you use to

00:34:01.700 listen to the podcast and give us a review that would really help us out a lot. Also recommend

00:34:05.900 this to your friends. It's one of the best compliments you could give us. So until next

00:34:09.080 time, this is Brett McKay telling you to stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - April 24, 2015

#111： Why Men Fight & Why We Like To Watch With Jonathan Gottschall

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