“I always say pain is the best teacher”, he grinned, as he twisted and compressed my wrist a little more. I laughed too. Although it hurt, he was kind and fully in control; and not inflicting anything dangerous or intolerable.
But after class, my female friend said: “This is such great training. Nothing ever hurts here! This is how martial arts should be.”
What was going on . . . ?
A graphic showing how masculinity is changing in the Western world . . .
Some uneasy issues came up in conversation. Why can fighting and machismo transfix even a cultured and sensitive man . . . ?
What’s really going on when guys torment each other in the name of friendship? I was concerned that some of the guys in my dojo were bullying a younger student – until I asked him about it, and learned that he actually saw it in a completely different light . . .
Here’s my latest article on the Good Men Project . . . it’s about martial artists training through severe injuries, when maybe they’d be better off just taking a break sometimes . . .
“I felt my life was two-dimensional and black and white, while I wanted three dimensions and full color. I wanted fun and adventure! The Kung Fu movies of my childhood offered that dream—that escapist experience. So I quit my job … Continued
So far on this blog, I’ve focused a lot on women’s participation and experience in the martial arts. This post however is for a site called The Good Men Project, which is “an international conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century”.
To me it’s a no-brainer – if you want to know about “good men”, just look inside many dojos. So this is the article I wrote for them, basically saying just that . . .