Declare what you think of any high-profile act of violence—Luigi Mangione’s alleged act of corporate assassination, the death of George Floyd while restrained by police or even “the slap” at the 2022 Oscars—and it’s easy enough for someone to suss out your opinion, political affiliation, class and what kind of man you think you are.
The Daniel Penny case was no different. The incident was caught on a cell phone on May 1, 2023, and it involved a black man dying after being restrained by Penny, a white man, on a subway car. Like a magnet it attracted many elements of political arguments that had been raging for years. The arguments tended to divide into two camps, each one selecting its hero and villain in opposition to the other.
For the left, Penny was not only a racist vigilante who had executed Jordan Neely—yet another unarmed black man—but also, because of his former military service, an extension of the state. For the right, Penny was a hero, someone who was stepping up to help protect innocent bystanders from the chaos of contemporary urban life.
My husband, who is a jiu-jitsu blue belt, saw something else: a bad rear naked choke. It’s a standard move. Put compression on the blood supply, and the person you’re holding onto will be out in under ten seconds. Put compression on the airway, and there’s more time for the person being held to admit defeat and tap out, even if there’s greater risk for injury. Someone with martial arts training should know how to tell if an opponent goes limp, as that’s the difference between a friendly bout and criminal charges.
Penny didn’t seem to be following the rules of restraint, despite his self-professed military training in grappling. Keeping someone in a headlock for six minutes? Either the person doesn’t really know what they are doing or they are mucking about on purpose. Penny held Neely awkwardly. He mostly had control, but no discipline or follow-through. If Neely had been unnaturally strong, as Penny stated, he probably could have broken free. And if Penny was trying to hold onto Neely until the threat he posed was neutralized, then why did he continue to keep his grip on Neely even after he visibly went limp?
It was bad form, and it could explain why a hold that is supposed to lead to submission and not death went wrong. Nevertheless, my husband and the other grapplers in his social circle were hesitant to condemn Penny. They could see themselves in similar unfortunate scenarios and had empathy for a guy who maybe was just trying to do the right thing. A guy from the gym they went to had recently tried to break up a fight and ended up accidentally breaking someone’s arm.
More importantly, the aspiration to be a Daniel Penny—not the right-wing media hero but the brave bystander—accounts for why, in recent years, a lot of guys have gotten into grappling disciplines like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It’s about encountering a dangerous or tricky situation and having the willingness and ability to take control. As Elsa Dorlin writes in Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence about feminist self-defense classes during the suffrage movement, training “bodies that inhabit and occupy the streets, that move from place to place and find their balance … [opens] up a new relationship to the world, a different way of being.”
That “different way of being” was about preparing women who wanted to be involved in the suffrage movement to defend themselves against harassment or violence from counterprotesters or the police. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “respectable” female body was corseted, heeled, buttoned-up. Women’s “natural” realm was the domestic sphere, not the street. Yet by being taught how to move to counter an attack, women were also learning how to fight against social restraints and occupy space.
At the time it was not assumed that a man engaged in leftist political protest would need similar training and disinhibition. After all, the average man of the era had military training if not actual combat experience, as the United States and many empires and democracies in Europe had some form of compulsory military service. Men knew how to handle a gun or other weapon; they had the experience of inflicting at least simulated violence on another person. Their visible presence on the street was not an anomaly that needed correction.
As warfare in our time is outsourced to the disadvantaged and automated in drones and robots, as physical-education classes get cut from public schools, men’s relationship to violence has changed fundamentally. Men still experience more violence in their daily lives than women; they are more likely to be assaulted by a stranger or robbed or murdered. Nevertheless, it is no longer a given that men will have any sort of military experience, self-defense training or the ability or will to inflict pain on another human. While the slim-fit fashions of contemporary menswear cannot be said to be as constrictive as late Victorian dress, learning self-defense does seem to help the modern man attain a different way of being.
●
In their 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, the investor James Dale Davidson and the journalist William Rees-Mogg (father of the right-wing British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg) warned that the information age would usher in unprecedented levels of freedom and social chaos. Traditional forms of governance would fall apart. The institutions that allow for social cohesion, from the police and other emergency services to schools and governmental programs like Social Security, would be undermined if not entirely dismantled. And as society shifted from an “industrial age” to an “information age,” there would be spikes in violence.
The Sovereign Individual has long been popular in tech circles, with its most recent reprinting featuring a preface by Peter Thiel. The authors believed that the coming information age would create an intellectual meritocracy—people with good ideas would be rewarded with riches, and everyone else would struggle. Cyberspace would eclipse physical reality, and “there will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment.” The information age would create a strict divide between winners and losers, with the government gradually shrinking from any responsibility to level the playing field.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson predicted that violence both large-scale (nations battling it out over territory and dwindling resources) and localized (cities falling into chaos as the social fabric frays and services disappear) would arise from this shift. This prediction has made the book popular among some preppers, who stockpile guns and supplies in advance of a civil war or other political catastrophe, as well as with tech billionaires building apocalypse bunkers in places like Hawaii and New Zealand. But part of the plan for becoming sovereign has also involved training in jiu-jitsu, as both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have done.
One of the reasons Brazilian jiu-jitsu in particular has become so visible in recent years is that it has widely been accepted as the most effective and applicable martial art to the real world. There are two major forms of jiu-jitsu: the original, Japanese discipline that emerged around the sixteenth century among the samurai warrior class, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu or BJJ, which is the variation most prominently taught and fought in the United States. It developed in the early twentieth century in Brazil, from interactions between the local population and visiting Japanese judo practitioners, and focuses more on groundwork than throws. Unlike judo—which is often seen as the aristocratic martial art (the most famous practitioner at the moment is probably Vladimir Putin)—and unlike lifting (swole men are often derided in BJJ circles for being vain and having muscles for beauty and not practical strength)—BJJ is used to teach its students how to subdue and disarm, rather than overpower, an opponent.
Jiu-jitsu teaches a series of bars—which involve putting pressure on joints—and chokes that restrict blood or air in an effort to force an opponent to submit. Unlike graceful or performative arts like kung fu or capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, jiu-jitsu prioritizes swift, minimal actions. Unlike boxing, where participants in training will use padding and protective gear to reduce damage, in jiu-jitsu training participants will use real bars and real chokes on one another, trusting the other will submit—or honor that submission—before real damage is done. That is one reason the real-world applicability of jiu-jitsu is widely touted: in each session you are in a real struggle.
The hub that connects the jiu-jitsu community with the sovereign tech community is the BJJ black belt and podcast host Joe Rogan. In the recent past, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have all made appearances on Rogan’s show to discuss, among other things, the direction in which they want the nation to go. Much of what they say aligns closely with sovereignty doctrine.
One recent guest was Silicon Valley VC billionaire Marc Andreessen, whose firm Andreessen Horowitz is heavily invested in “public safety and defense” technologies. Since his November 2024 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he has been advising Donald Trump on tech policy—alongside, for a time, Elon Musk. Besides pushing policy to promote cryptocurrencies, a large part of Andreessen’s project has been to realize the dismantling of social welfare programs prophesied by The Sovereign Individual, which Andreessen once called “the most thought-provoking book on the unfolding nature of the 21st Century that I’ve yet read.” One of the recent hires at Andreessen’s investment firm is architecture student Daniel Penny, whose role, in Andreessen’s words, is to “build relationships” with “active-duty military, veterans, chiefs of police, [and] sheriffs.” Andreesen leaves unspoken Penny’s qualifications, other than the assessment that during the encounter with Neely in that subway car, Penny had acted with confidence and courage.
●
I used to hate MMA. John McCain once famously called the sport “human cockfighting,” which is in line with my own feelings about it. It’s gruesome in a way that boxing, wrestling, American football and other martial arts competitions are not. When watching an MMA match, you are consenting to see all kinds of bodily damage that is often hidden from the sports industry, from broken bones to prodigious amounts of blood to a person losing consciousness. While television cameras at blue-chip sports events like football and soccer now discreetly move away from the scene of a player’s broken leg or fifth career concussion, the UFC cameraman leans in.
Part of my reaction to MMA was squeamishness, but I was also worried about its associations. After Trump’s election in 2016, a prevailing question in the media was “What radicalized all these Trump voters?” It was, according to various sources, the YouTube algorithm, Reddit and 4chan, the manosphere, the UFC, Crossfit and other popular fitness fads. Any place or thing or activity that attracted mostly men, from the gym to podcasting, was immediately made suspect and problematic. But MMA and jiu-jitsu were subject to a heightened level of examination as think pieces probed, “Is this turning men fascist?”
The concern with what men were becoming was not limited to the right. In more liberal-leaning circles, “toxic masculinity” was being blamed for everything from sexual assaults to taking up too much space on the subway. The term came not out of recent feminist discourse but from the mythopoetic movements of the Seventies and Eighties. Built from the trendy self-improvement groups that were popular in urban, upper-middle-class circles at the time, much of the new men’s movement was predicated on the idea that one could transcend one’s failings and limitations. This included the aggression and violence—now defined as failings—that had long been central to the very definition of masculinity. The new man went to war on Wall Street, in the executive lounges, on sales calls—not on the battlefield.
Eventually, though, being overly aggressive on Wall Street could get you labeled as “toxic” too. In films like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street, the greedy financier became the new image of bad masculinity. Good masculinity was less about positive action than about avoidance and deferrals—don’t join the military, don’t be aggressive, don’t take up too much space, don’t enjoy the spectacle of violence, don’t denigrate women. Therapy, education and political organization were all meant to help the tainted figure transcend—rather than reshape—his problematic masculinity.
Traditionally, violence has been not only a natural component of manhood but also its contribution to society. Whether through the military, law enforcement or simply the notion of the man as a protector of the vulnerable, dealing with, doling out and enduring violence is a man’s duty. Even as gender norms evolve, this remains a useful notion to many. Yet from this perspective, any association of large groups of men performing or watching acts of violence becomes an automatic cause for concern.
There are things about BJJ that my friends complain about. It has a culty vibe. A fighter can only be promoted to a new belt rank by the black belt who heads the gym, rather than by meeting standardized criteria like performing well in a specific number of tournaments or proving competence in certain skills. Consequently, black belts behave like gurus, bestowing gifts to their favorites and punishing those who show inadequate deference. My BJJ friends also complain about how much of their life it consumes—going to practice, thinking about it, watching instructional videos, sending links to desirable gi jackets and pants to the group chat. They also gripe about how much they need it, and how much they miss it if they have to take a break due to an injury.
Rarely do they complain about the politics. There are bad gyms with ethically dubious leaders, and there are people who flaunt their politics in the gym, but what really matters is what happens on the mat. The gym they all go to has doctors, professors, kitchen staff, scientists, artists and students who train there, people who wait tables and people who take private jets to go to the Super Bowl. If they complain about anybody, it’s the people who don’t shower before rolling or people who come in with something infectious like ringworm or MRSA (a staph infection resistant to many antibiotics) and pass it along to the others. They complain about the guys who come in with a chip on their shoulder and roll rough, the big, lazy guys who just smother and incapacitate their opponents with their weight. They like the women who do train with them, as few as there are currently, and they are encouraged by the gender ratio being much closer to equal in the children’s classes. The black belt who makes insane videos on Instagram about politics and women and what the Constitution has to say about the obligation to pay child support—he’s a really great guy, always patient and willing to teach you a move or show you what you did wrong in the last round.
I haven’t completely overcome my aversion to BJJ. The last time I went to a training, my husband was rolling with a friend and got hurt so badly he bled. I found myself feeling shockingly, irrationally angry. It took me weeks to be able to make eye contact again with the friend who had injured him. But I do watch fights more now and see the skill and strength involved after years of seeing only mindless violence.
Much has been made over the past years about the loneliness crisis, which most profoundly affects men. The consequences of this sense of isolation are staggering, from despair to suicide to addiction. And while socializing, conversation and group activities are often cited as a way to fight loneliness, what is often missing from male camaraderie is physical touch.
Men don’t have a socially acceptable way to touch one another except through fighting and sport. That makes the intimacy of jiu-jitsu a paradoxical way of creating social bonds. Can you ever really know a man until you’ve had his crotch in your face while he’s pinning you to the ground? It turns out having someone’s arm wrapped tightly around your neck, cutting off your oxygen supply, still causes the body to release oxytocin, which imbues the body with a sense of belonging.
The statistics about boys’ and men’s failure to thrive, to reliably meet markers of success like educational achievement, marriage or financial stability, and to embrace political extremes and radicalization are real. The anxious rhetoric about the “crisis of masculinity,” however, just replicates the political polarization of our moment. There is a real fear that “the other side” is doing manhood wrong and that young, impressionable men will be swayed by a toxic message. But here on the mat, the other side is your friend, your opponent, your collaborator. You’re trying to work through something, together.
Art credit: Camille Henrot, Tuesday, 2019, König Galerie. Photo by Roman März. Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie.
Declare what you think of any high-profile act of violence—Luigi Mangione’s alleged act of corporate assassination, the death of George Floyd while restrained by police or even “the slap” at the 2022 Oscars—and it’s easy enough for someone to suss out your opinion, political affiliation, class and what kind of man you think you are.
The Daniel Penny case was no different. The incident was caught on a cell phone on May 1, 2023, and it involved a black man dying after being restrained by Penny, a white man, on a subway car. Like a magnet it attracted many elements of political arguments that had been raging for years. The arguments tended to divide into two camps, each one selecting its hero and villain in opposition to the other.
For the left, Penny was not only a racist vigilante who had executed Jordan Neely—yet another unarmed black man—but also, because of his former military service, an extension of the state. For the right, Penny was a hero, someone who was stepping up to help protect innocent bystanders from the chaos of contemporary urban life.
My husband, who is a jiu-jitsu blue belt, saw something else: a bad rear naked choke. It’s a standard move. Put compression on the blood supply, and the person you’re holding onto will be out in under ten seconds. Put compression on the airway, and there’s more time for the person being held to admit defeat and tap out, even if there’s greater risk for injury. Someone with martial arts training should know how to tell if an opponent goes limp, as that’s the difference between a friendly bout and criminal charges.
Penny didn’t seem to be following the rules of restraint, despite his self-professed military training in grappling. Keeping someone in a headlock for six minutes? Either the person doesn’t really know what they are doing or they are mucking about on purpose. Penny held Neely awkwardly. He mostly had control, but no discipline or follow-through. If Neely had been unnaturally strong, as Penny stated, he probably could have broken free. And if Penny was trying to hold onto Neely until the threat he posed was neutralized, then why did he continue to keep his grip on Neely even after he visibly went limp?
It was bad form, and it could explain why a hold that is supposed to lead to submission and not death went wrong. Nevertheless, my husband and the other grapplers in his social circle were hesitant to condemn Penny. They could see themselves in similar unfortunate scenarios and had empathy for a guy who maybe was just trying to do the right thing. A guy from the gym they went to had recently tried to break up a fight and ended up accidentally breaking someone’s arm.
More importantly, the aspiration to be a Daniel Penny—not the right-wing media hero but the brave bystander—accounts for why, in recent years, a lot of guys have gotten into grappling disciplines like Brazilian jiu-jitsu. It’s about encountering a dangerous or tricky situation and having the willingness and ability to take control. As Elsa Dorlin writes in Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence about feminist self-defense classes during the suffrage movement, training “bodies that inhabit and occupy the streets, that move from place to place and find their balance … [opens] up a new relationship to the world, a different way of being.”
That “different way of being” was about preparing women who wanted to be involved in the suffrage movement to defend themselves against harassment or violence from counterprotesters or the police. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “respectable” female body was corseted, heeled, buttoned-up. Women’s “natural” realm was the domestic sphere, not the street. Yet by being taught how to move to counter an attack, women were also learning how to fight against social restraints and occupy space.
At the time it was not assumed that a man engaged in leftist political protest would need similar training and disinhibition. After all, the average man of the era had military training if not actual combat experience, as the United States and many empires and democracies in Europe had some form of compulsory military service. Men knew how to handle a gun or other weapon; they had the experience of inflicting at least simulated violence on another person. Their visible presence on the street was not an anomaly that needed correction.
As warfare in our time is outsourced to the disadvantaged and automated in drones and robots, as physical-education classes get cut from public schools, men’s relationship to violence has changed fundamentally. Men still experience more violence in their daily lives than women; they are more likely to be assaulted by a stranger or robbed or murdered. Nevertheless, it is no longer a given that men will have any sort of military experience, self-defense training or the ability or will to inflict pain on another human. While the slim-fit fashions of contemporary menswear cannot be said to be as constrictive as late Victorian dress, learning self-defense does seem to help the modern man attain a different way of being.
●
In their 1997 book The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, the investor James Dale Davidson and the journalist William Rees-Mogg (father of the right-wing British politician Jacob Rees-Mogg) warned that the information age would usher in unprecedented levels of freedom and social chaos. Traditional forms of governance would fall apart. The institutions that allow for social cohesion, from the police and other emergency services to schools and governmental programs like Social Security, would be undermined if not entirely dismantled. And as society shifted from an “industrial age” to an “information age,” there would be spikes in violence.
The Sovereign Individual has long been popular in tech circles, with its most recent reprinting featuring a preface by Peter Thiel. The authors believed that the coming information age would create an intellectual meritocracy—people with good ideas would be rewarded with riches, and everyone else would struggle. Cyberspace would eclipse physical reality, and “there will be no cyberwelfare. No cybertaxes and no cybergovernment.” The information age would create a strict divide between winners and losers, with the government gradually shrinking from any responsibility to level the playing field.
Rees-Mogg and Davidson predicted that violence both large-scale (nations battling it out over territory and dwindling resources) and localized (cities falling into chaos as the social fabric frays and services disappear) would arise from this shift. This prediction has made the book popular among some preppers, who stockpile guns and supplies in advance of a civil war or other political catastrophe, as well as with tech billionaires building apocalypse bunkers in places like Hawaii and New Zealand. But part of the plan for becoming sovereign has also involved training in jiu-jitsu, as both Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have done.
One of the reasons Brazilian jiu-jitsu in particular has become so visible in recent years is that it has widely been accepted as the most effective and applicable martial art to the real world. There are two major forms of jiu-jitsu: the original, Japanese discipline that emerged around the sixteenth century among the samurai warrior class, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu or BJJ, which is the variation most prominently taught and fought in the United States. It developed in the early twentieth century in Brazil, from interactions between the local population and visiting Japanese judo practitioners, and focuses more on groundwork than throws. Unlike judo—which is often seen as the aristocratic martial art (the most famous practitioner at the moment is probably Vladimir Putin)—and unlike lifting (swole men are often derided in BJJ circles for being vain and having muscles for beauty and not practical strength)—BJJ is used to teach its students how to subdue and disarm, rather than overpower, an opponent.
Jiu-jitsu teaches a series of bars—which involve putting pressure on joints—and chokes that restrict blood or air in an effort to force an opponent to submit. Unlike graceful or performative arts like kung fu or capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, jiu-jitsu prioritizes swift, minimal actions. Unlike boxing, where participants in training will use padding and protective gear to reduce damage, in jiu-jitsu training participants will use real bars and real chokes on one another, trusting the other will submit—or honor that submission—before real damage is done. That is one reason the real-world applicability of jiu-jitsu is widely touted: in each session you are in a real struggle.
The hub that connects the jiu-jitsu community with the sovereign tech community is the BJJ black belt and podcast host Joe Rogan. In the recent past, Musk, Zuckerberg and Thiel have all made appearances on Rogan’s show to discuss, among other things, the direction in which they want the nation to go. Much of what they say aligns closely with sovereignty doctrine.
One recent guest was Silicon Valley VC billionaire Marc Andreessen, whose firm Andreessen Horowitz is heavily invested in “public safety and defense” technologies. Since his November 2024 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, he has been advising Donald Trump on tech policy—alongside, for a time, Elon Musk. Besides pushing policy to promote cryptocurrencies, a large part of Andreessen’s project has been to realize the dismantling of social welfare programs prophesied by The Sovereign Individual, which Andreessen once called “the most thought-provoking book on the unfolding nature of the 21st Century that I’ve yet read.” One of the recent hires at Andreessen’s investment firm is architecture student Daniel Penny, whose role, in Andreessen’s words, is to “build relationships” with “active-duty military, veterans, chiefs of police, [and] sheriffs.” Andreesen leaves unspoken Penny’s qualifications, other than the assessment that during the encounter with Neely in that subway car, Penny had acted with confidence and courage.
●
I used to hate MMA. John McCain once famously called the sport “human cockfighting,” which is in line with my own feelings about it. It’s gruesome in a way that boxing, wrestling, American football and other martial arts competitions are not. When watching an MMA match, you are consenting to see all kinds of bodily damage that is often hidden from the sports industry, from broken bones to prodigious amounts of blood to a person losing consciousness. While television cameras at blue-chip sports events like football and soccer now discreetly move away from the scene of a player’s broken leg or fifth career concussion, the UFC cameraman leans in.
Part of my reaction to MMA was squeamishness, but I was also worried about its associations. After Trump’s election in 2016, a prevailing question in the media was “What radicalized all these Trump voters?” It was, according to various sources, the YouTube algorithm, Reddit and 4chan, the manosphere, the UFC, Crossfit and other popular fitness fads. Any place or thing or activity that attracted mostly men, from the gym to podcasting, was immediately made suspect and problematic. But MMA and jiu-jitsu were subject to a heightened level of examination as think pieces probed, “Is this turning men fascist?”
The concern with what men were becoming was not limited to the right. In more liberal-leaning circles, “toxic masculinity” was being blamed for everything from sexual assaults to taking up too much space on the subway. The term came not out of recent feminist discourse but from the mythopoetic movements of the Seventies and Eighties. Built from the trendy self-improvement groups that were popular in urban, upper-middle-class circles at the time, much of the new men’s movement was predicated on the idea that one could transcend one’s failings and limitations. This included the aggression and violence—now defined as failings—that had long been central to the very definition of masculinity. The new man went to war on Wall Street, in the executive lounges, on sales calls—not on the battlefield.
Eventually, though, being overly aggressive on Wall Street could get you labeled as “toxic” too. In films like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street, the greedy financier became the new image of bad masculinity. Good masculinity was less about positive action than about avoidance and deferrals—don’t join the military, don’t be aggressive, don’t take up too much space, don’t enjoy the spectacle of violence, don’t denigrate women. Therapy, education and political organization were all meant to help the tainted figure transcend—rather than reshape—his problematic masculinity.
Traditionally, violence has been not only a natural component of manhood but also its contribution to society. Whether through the military, law enforcement or simply the notion of the man as a protector of the vulnerable, dealing with, doling out and enduring violence is a man’s duty. Even as gender norms evolve, this remains a useful notion to many. Yet from this perspective, any association of large groups of men performing or watching acts of violence becomes an automatic cause for concern.
There are things about BJJ that my friends complain about. It has a culty vibe. A fighter can only be promoted to a new belt rank by the black belt who heads the gym, rather than by meeting standardized criteria like performing well in a specific number of tournaments or proving competence in certain skills. Consequently, black belts behave like gurus, bestowing gifts to their favorites and punishing those who show inadequate deference. My BJJ friends also complain about how much of their life it consumes—going to practice, thinking about it, watching instructional videos, sending links to desirable gi jackets and pants to the group chat. They also gripe about how much they need it, and how much they miss it if they have to take a break due to an injury.
Rarely do they complain about the politics. There are bad gyms with ethically dubious leaders, and there are people who flaunt their politics in the gym, but what really matters is what happens on the mat. The gym they all go to has doctors, professors, kitchen staff, scientists, artists and students who train there, people who wait tables and people who take private jets to go to the Super Bowl. If they complain about anybody, it’s the people who don’t shower before rolling or people who come in with something infectious like ringworm or MRSA (a staph infection resistant to many antibiotics) and pass it along to the others. They complain about the guys who come in with a chip on their shoulder and roll rough, the big, lazy guys who just smother and incapacitate their opponents with their weight. They like the women who do train with them, as few as there are currently, and they are encouraged by the gender ratio being much closer to equal in the children’s classes. The black belt who makes insane videos on Instagram about politics and women and what the Constitution has to say about the obligation to pay child support—he’s a really great guy, always patient and willing to teach you a move or show you what you did wrong in the last round.
I haven’t completely overcome my aversion to BJJ. The last time I went to a training, my husband was rolling with a friend and got hurt so badly he bled. I found myself feeling shockingly, irrationally angry. It took me weeks to be able to make eye contact again with the friend who had injured him. But I do watch fights more now and see the skill and strength involved after years of seeing only mindless violence.
Much has been made over the past years about the loneliness crisis, which most profoundly affects men. The consequences of this sense of isolation are staggering, from despair to suicide to addiction. And while socializing, conversation and group activities are often cited as a way to fight loneliness, what is often missing from male camaraderie is physical touch.
Men don’t have a socially acceptable way to touch one another except through fighting and sport. That makes the intimacy of jiu-jitsu a paradoxical way of creating social bonds. Can you ever really know a man until you’ve had his crotch in your face while he’s pinning you to the ground? It turns out having someone’s arm wrapped tightly around your neck, cutting off your oxygen supply, still causes the body to release oxytocin, which imbues the body with a sense of belonging.
The statistics about boys’ and men’s failure to thrive, to reliably meet markers of success like educational achievement, marriage or financial stability, and to embrace political extremes and radicalization are real. The anxious rhetoric about the “crisis of masculinity,” however, just replicates the political polarization of our moment. There is a real fear that “the other side” is doing manhood wrong and that young, impressionable men will be swayed by a toxic message. But here on the mat, the other side is your friend, your opponent, your collaborator. You’re trying to work through something, together.
Art credit: Camille Henrot, Tuesday, 2019, König Galerie. Photo by Roman März. Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.