The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

When Violence Happens and the Danger of Normality

I had a confrontation today. Nothing particularly serious, though it could have escalated to violence if mishandled.

For about a year I haven’t had my hair cut. It’s about shoulder length, and I wear it free, not in a pony tail. I don’t look normal, though I don’t go out of my way to look abnormal.

I was walking through a farmer’s market when I heard a man say to the woman he was with, “Avoid the weirdo.”

I immediately turned to him and said, “What did you say?”

He got right in my face and we stared right in each others eyes. I leaned in and said, “You’re an asshole”.

He said, “There you are.”

He put his fist against my chest and said, “Don’t touch me.” The woman he was with tugged his arm and said something about walking away which I didn’t hear clearly.

I called him an asshole again, and waited two beats. Then I turned away.

He said “weirdo.” I turned to look at him, we were about two paces away. He didn’t close the distance.

He said, “Have a good day weirdo.”

I said, “Have a good day, asshole.”

And that was the end of that.

It’s been a while since I’ve had this sort of confrontation, because I’m in my 40s and young men don’t usually bother older men with such posturing.

Of course, I should have just ignored him. One of the problems with socialization is that it teaches the wrong lessons. When you’re young, you deal with the same people over and over again. This was especially true of me, because I spent my teen years in boarding school.

With people you will see every day, you can’t let insults or threats pass. You must not let anyone push you around. It took me a long time to learn that.

But as an adult, with someone you don’t know and will never see again, you should just walk away.

Usually, in fact, I do. Today I didn’t, and an old reflex was triggered.

I tend to walk around in a state of general benevolence, regarding most people with good will, but for about two hours after my little confrontation I looked at people with threat goggles on: “Is this person dangerous?”

People who strongly identify as “normal” are very dangerous to anyone who they think isn’t normal. It’s old pack programming. Anyone who is not part of your band of killer apes is wrong, dangerous, a threat, and must be dealt with as such.

I’d lay long odds and real money that the young man today regards himself as normal.

Unless they’re broken, and a lot of “weird” people are, I feel much safer around freaks and weirdos than I do around norms. They usually have a live and let live attitude. This is true even in periods where I’m passing as normal, which I can do if I care to bother.

Consider, now, that I am a white heterosexual male. I’m not brown. I’m not gay or trans. I don’t have tattoos (well, that’s normal now, not freaky) or wear my hair in a mohawk and so on. Right now, I just have long hair.

So, normals, dangerous to anyone they consider not a normal.

Let’s discuss why I said I wasn’t in real danger, and neither was he.

Normal violence inside a society (and not including domestic violence, which has its own fucked up dynamics) occurs under two scenarios (and one failure situation).

Scenario One

Three or four men confronting one person. They are confident of victory, because they outnumber the person they want to victimize and they emotionally feed back to each other, convincing themselves they are in the right and that the victim deserves a beating.

Scenario Two

One man who has a good reason to believe he can win a fight and and has an onlooker or onlookers who urge him on.

Usually, this means a man who is bigger than his victim, or who is trained in violence. But it can also mean a victim who acts scared, who doesn’t face the other man (this is almost always about man vs. man) squarely.

I faced the man, I looked him in the eyes. I leaned in. I did not flinch when he put his fist to my body. I insulted him before I turned away and I gave him two beats to swing at me after I insulted him.

And the woman with him didn’t want him to fight. No one was egging him (or me) on.

I did not act like a victim. I acted like someone who thought he stood a decent chance if we fought.

I also fulfilled the requirements of the ritual. This sort of stuff is a ritual, and you must do what you are supposed to do. If you do not, you mark yourself as a victim.

That’s the failure state.

Note that this stuff scales. So if there are ten of them and three of you, you’re still in danger, and so on.

Humans are pack animals. Normal humans are dangerous when they identify you as not one of the pack or having violated the norms of the pack (pretty close to the same thing) and when they have the approval of the pack to hurt you.

If that’s the situation, it’s very hard to diffuse. Showing your belly might work, but it might not, and if they’re people you’ll deal with in the future, it makes you a permanent victim.

I learned all this stuff in boarding school, the hard way, by not meeting the ritual requirements for years. As a young man, I lived very close to the street, but I’d learned my lesson by then, and had learned how to meet the ritual requirements and fight if necessary.

I’m not a trained fighter, I never bothered. Instead, I’m a “flip”, which is to say, in a fight, all the normal social prohibitions turn off for me. Ordinary people treat fighting as a social event. I don’t start fights and if I wind up in one I feel completely justified in breaking whoever started the fight with me. I’m the sort of person you shouldn’t start a fight with unless you really know you can win.

Which is to say, the kid was right, sort of–I am a weirdo. I’m not normal. He was also wrong, of course, because I’m not dangerous at all to anyone who isn’t dangerous to me. It is in this way that most weirdos and freaks are different from normals, actually. They aren’t dangerous to other people who leave them be.

Let us discuss the really dangerous people now. Not precisely sociopaths, though most are sociopaths, but people who are dangerous alone.

When I was a teenager there was one kid in school who liked tormenting me when no one else was around.  He was the actual dangerous one. All the other bullies were just pack animals. Most were actually nice to me if we were alone together.

This kid, he was broken. He was really dangerous.

Anyone who likes hurting people when no one else is around, and this includes enjoying hurting animals, is truly dangerous. Get away from them, or break them, there are no other solution to such people.

Now note that while a lot of these people are sociopaths, many aren’t. And many sociopaths are actually great people. Two of my closest friends were sociopaths, one is even clinically diagnosed, the other I’m just sure he was. Sociopaths can be wonderful. They just don’t feel your emotions. If you’re happy or hurting, they don’t get emotional contagion. That’s why they’re dangerous outside of packs.

But they don’t all like hurting people, and there are entirely “normal” people who do. After all, you can learn to like the emotional contagion of other people’s fear, pain, terror, and humiliation.  Sociopaths can be frightening, but normals make the best torturers because they can feel your pain, and they like it, and when a normal learns to operate without pack approval, you get the most depraved of monsters.

I generally like humans. But I’m very aware that humans are killer apes who are barely capable of rational thought and who, when they are, mostly use it to get what their emotions tell them to get and those emotions often tell them to hurt, kill, and rape, especially anyone who is “other.”

Now this conversation is from the point of view of a man. Women face different challenges which I’m not entirely competent to speak to. The permanent perception of weakness, of every man believing he will win a fight with any woman, leads to some really unpleasant consequences. When added to the fact that for many, perhaps most, men, women aren’t part of the pack, unless they are family, the consequences can be horrific.

Women aren’t men, and men often don’t see them as human. And when that happens, and it often happens for millenia at a time, well, you get history.

Humans. Love them, care for them, but treat them like tigers. No matter how much you think a tiger is domesticated, it never is. That may not be true for some individual, decent humans, but for humans as a group, it is always true.


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27 Comments

  1. It was a big shock to go on the internet and discover I could force men to back down, that I could safely go on the attack. That’s something that never happened in “real life.” On the internet, men expect women to follow certain rules of behavior, ones they follow in real life. They expect women to react in clichéd way. I don’t follow those rules and the difference is astonishing.

  2. markfromireland

    Oh come now Susan in these enlightened times most of those men realise that women are people. Well almost people. Well alright not exactly people but they can be almost as good as people if they try…

    There’ll always be some but based on my own experience the more you refuse to buckle under the better for you, for other women, and the rest of us in general.

    It’s the unthinking assumption that they’ll get away with it that needs to go. At present all too often they have the all too justified belief that the only consequences for them will be a slap on the back from likeminded assholes.

    That being said I don’t know anything about what part of Texas you’re in (nor is it any of my business) and what if any are the risks you face for standing up for yourself. The balance you strike between not putting up with being put down and being foolhardy is one that only you can strike.

  3. RJMeyers

    For a short time, in my mid-20s, I sported a mohawk. I’m a big, white, straight male who is generally liked by most people I meet, or at least treated neutrally. The mohawk changed that quite a bit. Random hostile comments from strangers, cold looks from the elderly, shouted at by two local street punks who seemed to think that the mohawk was not a hairstyle for me, almost disinvited from a friend’s wedding, disinvited from Christmas with my family unless I shaved it, and an hour long call with my sobbing mother who asked if I was “rebelling against her” and kept saying that she “didn’t know who I was anymore”–keep in mind, I was in my mid-20s, had a career, and was living independently on the other side of the country quite successfully.

    All that because I shaved 90% of my head. I shaved the remaining 10% so I could go home for Christmas–it was just a fun haircut, so who cares? Turns out, people do, even about little things like that.

    (My in-laws have a similar interesting story. They’re Italian, from Long Island, and my father-in-law has always had long hair, usually in a pony tail. They took a cross country trip in the late 80s and stopped in Cheyenne, Wyoming to get dinner. When they entered the restaurant, everyone glared at them until they finished their meal and left. The local sheriff and his deputies had coincidentally been sitting in a booth nearby, and they tailed their car all the way to the county line before turning back. My in-laws have assured me that they only reason they weren’t physically attacked was that they had their young kids with them.)

  4. markfromireland

    Goodness Ian your view of humanity and what we’re capable of is almost as dark as mine. We’ll turn you into a good conservative yet.

    In my schooldays for a variety of reasons including parentage I stood out from the crowd. One boy in particular used to lie in wait for me. On one occasion he got me alone in a part of the school where we wouldn’t be heard. I found that picking up a chair and hitting my persecutor with it worked admirably. The fact that once he was down that I kept on hitting him may have had a lot to do with my being subsequently left in peace.

  5. Ian Welsh

    My view of humans, MFI, is as follows:

    90% or so of humans are weak. They are good or bad depending on circumstances and on how the pack’s leaders behave and what the pack’s leaders approve of.

    About 5% of humans are bad and will be bad pretty much no matter what.

    About 5% of humans are good, and will be good pretty much no matter what.

    The more refined view adds 10% as “weak bad” — they prefer being bad, but strong leadership or pack pressure can get them to not act like it, much.

    It also adds 10% as “weak good” — they prefer being good, but if scared enough they can be coerced to look the other way or go along half-heartedly.

    (percentgages are not entirely pulled out of may ass, but are based on how hard it is to get people to shock strangers if told to do so by an authority figure. Normally about 15% will not do it, but if you finangle the circumstances you can get it down to about 5%. Those people won’t no matter fucking what.)

    Life, in general, has taught me that there really are truly good people in the world. It has also taught me that there aren’t many of them. They include the only people I would take a bullet for.

    (Aside: I was a member of the old Progressive Conservative party before they got eaten by the Canadian Alliance, who then became the “Conservative” party (minus the progressive part.) IOW, I was a red Tory. I’m much more radical now, of course, but as many have said, Conservatism left me, I did not leave it. They decided their number 1 value was being mean fucks, rather than being small c conservative and looking after everyone, as any decent human being who is in politics should do.)

  6. steelweaver

    Susan’s point actually provides a pretty good explanation for much of the online ‘anti-feminist’ pushback of recent years – men used to operating in a certain network of social responses (including, unbeknownst to them, women habitually backing down and deferring to them out of fear of physical confrontation) in the physical world are suddenly confronted by ‘armies of uppity women’ online. Baffled and confused, they say to themselves: Where did they all come from? Why are they all suddenly so hostile? It must be teh Feminizm.

  7. Guest

    Just because it didn’t end in a fight doesn’t mean you handled it well. He was looking for trouble or at least a reaction from you, and you at least gave him part of what he wanted. He didn’t deserve anything more than a rolling of the eyes and a pffft or derisive chuckle. The bigger the talk and the louder the engine, the smaller the penis (you can take that from a gay man who knows whereof he speaks). I can almost hear that Midwestern/Canadian accent spitting out “weirdo” like it was a devastating put down. No doubt his wife would have been just as ashamed of him either way.
    Besides that you should ask yourself why you felt so compelled to teach this guy a lesson. Let him continue his asshole ways until he alienates some one important to him. He wasn’t worth it.

  8. Ian Welsh

    You seem to have missed the point where I said I should have walked away, which is what I usually do. I agree with you on that.

    However, once the confrontation was under way, I handled it just fine. I wasn’t teaching him a lesson. I doubt he learned a thing from it.

  9. Peter*

    Ian, there is not enough information to make judgments from this incident. Perhaps you could post a picture of yourself as you looked when this happened and we could comment on how your appearance might affect hotheads such as this fellow. When I was in Canada in the ’70s long hair and shabby clothing didn’t seem to produce much if any reaction from anyone, it was a welcomed relief after the violent attacks, even with cars, I experienced in the US.

  10. Erin Gannon

    I got sexually assaulted a LOT when I was at school in Belfast. Having gone to a hippie school in the US, I was not used to the “I saw and I grabbed it” mentality. It would make me SO MAD for days. Finally, I started kicking ass back, the final incident involving me kneeing someone in the balls and then pushing his head into my other knee and breaking his nose. Maybe that dumbshit learned to think twice about sexually assaulting another woman, maybe not. But I sure as shit didn’t spend the next three days irritated about the fucktard and he no longer had the power to mentally assault me well after the physical assault. And that’s all that matters.

  11. Ian Welsh

    No, I won’t be doing that Peter. The post is not intended as a “judge how Ian looks” post. It is a segue into rather more important issues than “how weird is Ian”.

    As with most places, stuff varies in Canada. I very rarely have any problems at all, today was something of a surprise. I note that in the post, actually.

  12. Bill Hicks

    I’m a white guy in my early 50s who wears his hair short (not to be conformist–it just feel better that way), so I haven’t had a potentially physical confrontation in many years.

    That said, it seems like there is always the potential for confrontation whenever I am out driving. That’s where a lot of people lose their inhibitions and act like assholes. One rule I always observe when driving is to never pull over or get out of the car to confront somebody. That is just asking for major trouble.

  13. Thomas

    just my 2cts. for what it’s worth…
    Ian, only you have been in the situation, and only you can decide if your (re-) action was adequate or not; I would only suggest that very very few people are worth to maybe get into a fight with them, which one never knows how it will actually turn out… as a rule, one gives some asshole much too much honour in taking him serious enough (at all).
    As to your “general declarations” – I am saddened to have to declare that I agree with you; my 71 years of service in this body 🙂 have not been able to teach me any better than that,
    and that is pretty disheartening, after all!
    Anyway – A great Weekend / Sunday to you all !
    Thomas

  14. Mary M McCurnin

    The older I get, the better I am at picking who I will confront. I did make a big mistake recently and I knew it was unsafe. I still cannot believe I did it.

    A car blew down the street driven by a young man. He went right through the stop sign. I was just getting in my car when he went past.

    It so pissed me off, I went after him in my car. When he got to the next stop sign, he did a donut and circled back in my direction. I had time to put my car across the entire street to block his.

    I was angry and somewhat scared. It was irrational. My brain was going WTF?

    He was able to get around me. I turned around and went back home. I saw him down the street from my house. He had pulled over and was talking to men who were working on the house next to mine. When he saw me he drove away. The guys doing the work had been very friendly and my husband and I often talked to them. At that point I was not afraid that the young man would come back. I was more afraid of my own stupidity. Also, there was a level of excitment to it. And it was a confrontation that I created. I am a 66 year old granny. He must have been as confused as I was.

  15. “The permanent perception of weakness, of every man believing he will win a fight with any woman, leads to some really unpleasant consequences. ”

    And yet, men are 55% of violent crime victims and 75% of murder victims. In the USA, anyway.

  16. guest

    Sorry, I guess I did miss that part. tl:dr carefully enough.

    The other thing was this guy was obviously used to doing this sort of thing. He put his hands on you and then told you too keep your hands off him. That was for potential witnesses. I would bet he was a cop, or at least a lawyer, or some other form of professional lying scum who expects to get away with assault and having his victims take the heat for it.

  17. Ian Welsh

    A good point.

    I was somewhat surprised that he escalated so fast, in that he got right into my space the second I said “what did you say”. His level of aggression was high, it’s why I escalated as well: I felt that any show of weakness on my part would lead to violence. Thus he got that close, so I leaned in, insulted, etc…

    You may well be right that this is a pattern with him. There were a lot witnesses, too, and that may have made him unsure about what people had seen, no matter what he said in an attempt at witness leading.

    Ah well, hopefully I won’t be stupid enough to let it get to that point ever again. Getting too old for this sort of shit.

  18. Francois Tremblay

    “Goodness Ian your view of humanity and what we’re capable of is almost as dark as mine. We’ll turn you into a good conservative yet.”

    Well, you’re kinda right about that. Conservatives believe man is innately evil and therefore must be subdued by threat or force to go along with some benevolent social order where those who can use threat or force most effectively get the most benefits. They are sick people who rejoice in other people’s suffering. I think Ian describes that very well in his entry.

  19. someofparts

    Looks like I wandered into the corner of the internet where the serious bad-asses hang out, including the ladies. No wonder I feel so comfortable here. Add me to our list of women who take fighting back for granted.

  20. Douglas McElroy

    Ian, the ‘flip’ attitude towards fighting is very much what they teach in a decent martial arts school. I studied 3 styles over the course of 1o years before a back injury precluded continuing. A good instructor will tell you 2 things about fighting: your best defense is to run (because you don’t know how good a fighter the other guy is or if they have a weapon) but if you do fight, fight to win (for the same reason). It’s in for a penny in for a pound. My instructors recognized that their more thoughtful senior students would feel a responsibility to not brutalize their opponent. Once you get to a certain skill level you realize how badly you can hurt someone. But the hesitation that sort of restraint incurs, as you sort through different techniques to respond with, is the moment in which you get your ass handed to you.

    I met a number of masters over the years, and the really good ones demonstrated a certain bi-polar behavior. They would be very mellow and easy going in personal interactions, but when they went to demonstrate a technique the would switch on a level of intensity that was intimidating. It was understood that you needed to bring that intensity to a real fight. In some cases, being able to project that sort of energy can stop a fight before it begins. Certainly it will stop the bullies or the sorts who read body language to select victims. This is where the self confidence that martial training brings bears real fruit – the fights that never start.

    As someone who was bullied a fair bit (fortunately only verbally and emotionally, not physically), I took this to heart. Fortunately I passed fairly quickly through a phase common to young men studying martial arts, where my study was a tool towards projecting masculinity. Some men never get past this (including one master I met). These practitioners are very dangerous. But even the most ‘responsible’ martial student knows to turn it on when a fight starts.

    Over time I’ve generalized the idea of the ‘flip’ a bit. I tended to think of it as a violation of the social contract. Having broken the agreement, I am no longer bound by it’s conventions. If you come at me physically, you have entered (implicitly) into a new contract, one where severe bodily harm is possible. It’s not my responsibility to shield you from those consequences, at cost to me, if you haven’t thought it through fully. The same principle applies to lesser social conflicts. Bullies always are relying on the people around them to adhere to the social contract, even as they violate it. So whether it’s a physical or a social assault, they are hoping you will shy away from responding in kind.

    You’ve already recognized that the best option was to not engage. We all have our off days though, where some asshole being an asshole is just one straw too many. I would say that was the other benefit of ongoing martial training – keeping up that sense of ‘rising above it all’. It was a lot easier to let this sort of bullshit male posturing roll off when I was studying actively, to just look for the active threats. In this case, having engaged him, I’d say from then on you did handle it correctly. Once you engaged there was no backing down. There are times when an old fashioned silver-back gorilla stare down is the best way to actually avoid violence.

  21. karenjj2

    ;o)

  22. karenjj2

    “;o)” was my reply to someofparts

    As the only “lady boat carpenter” in Ft Lauderdale for 20+ years, I really never had any confrontations with the men I worked with tho I did experience harassment from some guys who were insecure little dicks that weren’t worth giving a response.

    I respected most of the men I worked with and they did the same to me; I strongly suspect that my lack of encounters could be some of the men cueing new hires not to mess with me.
    My favorite compliment was from a boat captain who’d just told a mate on the boat to do anything I asked and then said to me that another captain we both knew had said, “that ole gal don’t say much, but when she does, you better pay attention.” Hence, my smile.

  23. Jaimie

    Hey Ian, it’s taken me a bit to formulate my response. This explication on male vs. male violence … thank you. It takes me into uncomfortable territory in trying to understand why I’m constantly singled out by men, though, and how I’m to respond. (It just happened again. I didn’t respond this time. I was meditating outside during a monsoon storm, and misogyny fueled by Trumpism found me. Fucking hell. I just observed it and myself. But I’m feeling the feelings still. Yeah, let’s target a woman with our rage and pain who doesn’t conform to normative fucking behavior.) Got any book recommendations on the sociology of violence?

    I had to reread MarkfromIreland’s response to understand him. I was so triggered when I read it the first time I misunderstood him completely. Awesome fucking response, MarkfromIreland (who will never read this because I’m commenting on a dead thread. Yeah, look at my nonconformist behavior! 😉 )

    By the way, I’m not reveling in your experience. I am learning from it and your choice to make a “teaching moment” out of it. Thank you.

  24. Ian Welsh

    Jaimie,

    yes. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but when I see the shit women have to put up with, I am often glad I was not born a woman.

    Randall Collins wrote a book which is good, though it’s fairly heavy on the theory.

    http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8547.html

    It’s always hard to give general advice on these things. Often a flat response or no response (observing, as in mindfulness meditation) can de-escalate, but sometimes it eggs them on. I’m with the martial arts guys who say to just walk away (or run) when it’s feasible.

    I don’t know what makes some women a target. For men, I can sometimes pinpoint it.

    In general, looking like “not part of the tribe” can be an issue. But sometimes it’s “easy target”. And I’m sure there are other reasons.

    I do think some martial arts training is a really good idea, and especially for women.

  25. Hvd

    I suppose that for every cunt we encounter there is bound to be a prick. Or not depending on ones preferences.

    I am proud to be a vulgarian.

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