I was just 19 years old when I first wanted to fight someone over some girl. I can barely remember his name, or the details of the clumsy, adolescent messages he sent. But I recall how his persistent attempts to woo my girlfriend ignited a rising, hostile burn in my gut, and I had daydreams of running into him outside of the local food joint down the road. She, wisely, demanded I calm down. In turn, I felt a twinge of annoyance at her for denying me a chance at some small semblance of justice.
The notion that men can, and should, fight for respect is a seductive idea, at least in pop culture. Heroic figures have long been painted in film and television as using physical violence as a response to disrespect, whether it’s in the American West or Napoleon-era France.
Naturally, women have been portrayed as a common trigger for a fight over honor, whether they’re insulted by another man or outright assaulted. Modern films like the Liam Neeson beat-’em-up franchise Taken owe much to a long cultural history of “don’t touch my woman” a concept that, in reality, seems to influence male-led societies all around the world, despite so many differences in race.
A 2008 study from Durham University even posited that men fought each other to the death over women as far back as prehistoric eras. I can100%assure you that this is something that feminist won’t do anything to alter this sense of comfort that seems like protection for them. If you go back a couple of hundred years, we used to talk lot about people’s honor. And insulting someone’s wife, fiancée, sister, daughter that was an honor violation. And if it was sufficiently severe, then we might be talking about a duel. So this is a thing that has been with us for a long time in our culture.
