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Comment by cdiamand | Hacker News Reader

Is it illegal, taboo, and bred out though?

We live in a culture of glorified violence seen widely in film, print, pop culture. We've got an enormous catalog of shooter videogames going back decades that our youngster clamor to purchase and play.

We've got a set of laws that allow you to take steps to defend yourself in your own home, with varying degrees of strictness and leniency.

Anecdotally, I know many people in the middle class who, while abhorring violence, would defend themselves and their families.

I'm not sure I agree.

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A gentleman's cane used to be a bludgeon in addition to being a fashion accessory.

Video games are the furthest thing from physical defense. They're amusement. Do you really think that playing video games leads to increased skill and confidence when engaging in a fistfight in the street?

In schools in the US, children are punished for defending themselves in a fight. There is a vanishingly small percentage of people who have the practical experience to be comfortable physically battering a stranger on the street corner to a reasonable degree.

I imagine that description will evoke the thought in your head that there is no reasonable degree, that physical violence isn't the answer, and that the right thing to do in a situation where you're physically accosted is to leave the area or call for security. Yep. That's what we're talking about. There's an amount of security provided by a man who's comfortable slapping another man in the head because the other man is being aggressive, if only because that comfort is communicated in non-verbal ways which subsequently make it unnecessary.

> In schools in the US, children are punished for defending themselves in a fight.

Not only in the US. In France, I had troubles in middle school because I reacted physically to bullying.

I dunno, I definitely feel like it's been drilled into me that in any kind of physical altercation, my duty is to escape and retreat, and that if I hurt my attacker in any way, that might be used against me in court. And even if I successfully press charges against my attacker, and they go to jail, if I hurt them in the course of their attack on me, I can probably expect to get sued.

I agree that many of the lawsuits are absurd. I also don't like the "duty" wording. Sure, you want to avoid, deescalate, flee, then fight. But codifying it as a duty seems to ignore just how messy and instantaneous those situations can be.

Maybe the comment refers to the changes in gender roles over the past decades. Our society no longer widely accepts the idea that women are fragile and men have the responsibility to protect them.

A bit of both. First, men aren't responsible for women, but also, the legal consequences for violence are aimed at punishing it for its own sake instead of recognizing that it is a necessary social deterrant, and removing it rewards certain kinds of predators.

The bred-out part is that administrative institutional jobs that make up the middle class select for traits that disadvantage the skills and traits of traditionally masculine roles like soldiers, builders etc, and so the odds of your partner in a middle class job relationship having the physical presence to fend off a safety threat are less than they once may have been. The best these guys can do is threaten to sue. Hence, this story about women taking on responsibility for their own protection themselves.

the legal consequences for violence are aimed at punishing it for its own sake instead of recognizing that it is a necessary social deterrant

Depends on where you live in the US; I don't think this is true for most of the country, but that's not clear to most people because the MSM is very anti-gun and very rarely reports on self-defense cases unless they're twisted into claimed crimes. Since there are millions of these every year, that statistic first gleaned from data collected by an anti-gun group....

"Is it illegal, taboo, and bred out though?"

One thing that comes to mind are the zero tolerance policies at schools. It's to the point where you aren't allowed to fight back in self defense. You just have to take the beating.

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