I Like To Fight

I learned something important about myself at an event last month, the annual convergence of a men’s organization called the Sacred Sons. Though I was there as a speaker, I decided to experience it from the vantage point of a participant as well. That is how I found myself in a circle of men that Friday afternoon, being asked if I wanted to put on boxing gloves and fight another man.

Sacred Sons is dedicated to the reclamation of a healthy masculinity in service to life. This is a bold ambition, when so many in the culture have, understandably, repudiated masculinity either as innately toxic, or more recently, as half of a false and outmoded binary, a mere social performance. To hold masculinity as real, essential, beautiful, and necessary is already these days a bit politically suspect. Yet this is no right-wing organization, nor is it left-wing.