Have You Ever Punched Someone in the Face?

I don't really know this guy and I'd like to just hit this guy cold.

He has a beard, which makes think the blow may be dulled.

(/flatliners)

Clint: I only came here to do two things tonight, Newton; drink some beer and kick some ass,

[glances over his shoulder]

Clint: looks like we're almost outta beer.

Then we'll STOP, DROP, SHUT-EM DOWN, OPEN UP SHOP, EWWWWW-OU.

Last person I remember hitting: DH - 1986 or 1987. He'd taken the stool I was about to sit on in the Chemistry lab at school which meant one of two things - either I would have to sit on one of the smaller stools which wasn't high up enough to reach the bench properly (uncomfortable and everyone would laugh at me) or I'd have to go into another room and get a stool from there. I hit him in the back as he sat down to face the teacher and to my surprise actually hurt him (he went "OOF!" very loudly). It got me some crewdibility n a strange sort of way - afterwards DH told several people that I "could hit hard if I wanted to".

if i was about 50 lbs heavier, more muscle-bound and w/ my temper, i reckon that i'd be in jail now.

Physical injury I feel worst about inflicting: I once went to hug someone and accidentaly put a cigarette out on their nose.

x-post.

*the second time i hit someone that night, actually.

Anyway, MarkH...in the BACK??!?

the twisted nadpunch0r (HEY HEY HEY!!)

The answer is no to both.

Normally I'm really chilled out, honest!

Once in junior school, some lad was hassling my girlfriend.
Once to my sister, who constantly bullied me at home.
Once when a gang of kids jumped me and tried to steal my bike, I decided to pound the living daylights out of the biggest kid there. they didnt get the bike.

I'll say this- The feeling I get after I have just been in a fight with someone is the worst feeling in the world. I have been poisoned and unable to hold down bottled water, I have been extremely depressed, I have been sweating and pale from fear plenty of times.

There is nothing that feels worse to me than the shakes and the sweating and the total emptiness after fighting someone. I cannot recall any altercation that I've been in that I "lost" in the judgement of anyone else present but I feel like I've lost every single one. It's just an incredibly horrible feeling and it takes forever to go away.

Anyway, yeah, I punched a guy in the face two weeks ago. Before that, I'm not sure I recall. Between ages 6-14 I was getting in fistfights all the time. I was short and myopic from an early age. How ya like me now etc.

i dont know, i mean, maybe theoretically, but the circumstances have never arisen where i have felt in the mood for it. it might just be something i'm not suited to (this doesn't mean i disapprove or anything, i just haven't felt like doing it yet)

xpost

i've felt like it often, but it hasn't come up, not in a few years.

i don't really regret slugging him because even he will admit he had it coming. some good came out of it because he finally admitted he had a drinking problem and that started him on straightening out.

unfortunately, logic is usually cast to the wind after you are punched. in my situation, not knowing this idiot and being largely unhappy with his behavior, i responded in a very survivalist manner.

i'm not saying it's right or wrong, but just that this is one playground brawler's tale.

I disagree, because "explaining" is not the same thing as "excusing". Furthermore, you still haven't shown why punching someone in the face is automatically a bad thing to do.

Haha N, somehow I think the poster who is cursing and flinging exclaimation points around willy-nilly is more likely to punch someone than I am (where that someone is me).

1. This kid did not really deserve what I just did to him.
2. He's still moving, let me go, I'm not finished.

Or sometimes both, maybe both all the time, I can't be sure. I know that I always generally feel completely washed over with rage after I've had to fight, and after everything's over with I just feel extremely nervous and anxious about it, the adrenaline doesn't sit well with me at all. I want it to be finished, done, over with, point made, no questions remaining, and that never ever seems to be the case, at least not in my mind.

There are certainly times when I've been spoiling for somebody to just throw the first one and get what's coming to them, but most of the time I've been in fights I was taken well off guard by the whole thing, which doesn't really add up to a wholesome experience at all.

I have only been in two or maybe three actual fist-fights though, so that's a bit different from punching people in the face I guess.

I was pretty close to punching one of those dudes who ask you if they can talk to you about your hair, too, because he started just like wholesale insulting some high school nerd-type girl who turned him down but I restrained myself and just kind of told him off. I have some kind of weird complex.

xpost perhaps you should punch dave?

Cutting the morons down to size, when they deserve it? You're a New Yorker. Be proud.

I also cannot recall any incident in which I have actually felt, during the fighting, that I hit somebody hard. After the punch-up in London I felt like I only barely slapped the guy but according to Ally his face was quite red and swelling up before they even left in the cab.

I don't know. I think perhaps I am BERSERKER.

http://www.digitpress.com/dpsightz/atari5200/berzerk.jpg

Dude, I totally love you now.

you have been warned

JW: that Koons statue is at the SFMOMA.

I've never punched anyone. I have been punched though.

Last time I had a fight, it was my brother trying to convince himself he could still take me despite 20 years of evidence to the contrary. I took a punch from him and just wrestled him back. It probably looked ridiculous, like those cartoons where the bigger character holds the smaller one back by placing his hand on his head.

Every time he tried to punch me in the face, I'd duck and he'd break his hand on my head. (This happened more than once.)

I KNOW I saw this in a Brian Dennehy movie once. Don't remember which one, but that was a classic scene (Brian breaking his hand).

I did this once, wearing a trucker hat and eating mayo.

I also was posting a picture to ILX and typing in all caps, too.

TOMBOT's posts are fascinating. I never was in a situation where I had to fight growing up (except for choking a kid), and I don't think I've ever been angry enough to get in a fight since then.

My belief is that fighting should be avoided. Sometimes you witness someone attacking another person. People should do something in that situation, like calling the police. That seems like a more appropriate response.

Also, aren't you hitters afraid of being arrested? What if you hit the guy and he dies?

spent the remainder of the night in the hosptial but luckily felt well enough the next day to go home, have my friends up, drink beer, and play ping-pong all day and into the night. of course only having one eye to play ping-pong kind of threw my game off a bit but it was still a blast.

This weekend I watched Less Than Zero for the first time and the brawl in the art gallery at the end made me extremely, extremely tense. Contrast this with the fact that I can watch a drag-out shootemup warmovie gorefest like Black Hawk Down and feel almost empowered by the violence therein - what the fuck is going on here?

I think one of the things that appealed to me most about military duty, after I enlisted (and also disappointed me greatly in that I was never in any danger whatsoever, due to my choice of service branch and the fact that I am apparently too smart to carry a rifle for a living) was that I signed up to die when I got my uniform, and that my duty was effectively to go up against others who had signed up to die - clear cut, no rough edges, these are my fellow soldiers and I will fight to protect them, kill to protect them and myself, and go willingly into a firefight with no compunction as to whether or not what I do is "moral" since once you raise a weapon to me or one of mine, our intents are crystalline and there are no further questions, no after-the-fact discussions will alter the necessity of my actions or yours.

The first time I got into a fistfight, I was probably about 4 years old, dealing with the neighborhood bully and general-purpose bad boy of the Darmstadt officers' quarters. I remember returning uninjured to the picnic table where my parents and their friends were sitting afterwards, in tears, and being encouraged and cheered on because by all accounts the little motherfucker had it coming to him. Hooray for little Millar, he whupped the big mean kid! Great things in store for this guy.

That, and every other fight I've ever been in, was totally unjustifiable in any sense.

Every time I've had to put up dukes with some stupid bully or random interloper, it's never been because he made a racist joke about my dead brother, it's never been because he was smacking around someone smaller than him, it's never been because he was trying to do something bad to one of my friends and needed to be dropped. Every single brawl I've gotten into has been a game of machismo, a fight about who was tougher, no more, no less, the most pointless pissing contest sort of fight there is.

If I ever had real cause to fight someone, a convincing reason such as those listed above to go after somebody and put a stop to them, I am afraid, certainly, that I would kill them with my bare hands. I made a middle schooler who picked on me for one day too many wind up looking like Von Bondie because I was sick of his stupid chuckling face on the schoolyard and he wanted to fight me to prove something, I don't know what. His mistake, but all the same, what was the FUCKING POINT?

WHAT WAS THE FUCKING POINT? Why did that shitbag have to hit me out of nowhere in London at 3AM? Why did all those kids have to come up to me out of all the kids at school and pick a fight, just because they thought they could win against a skinny, underdeveloped kid with glasses who didn't like to play sports? Why did I have to do what I did to get them to leave me the fuck alone, and why did everybody else in the whole world seem to think that was A-OK?

Stupid macho bullshit. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. And for all the damage I've done to people who really were just harmless losers, no different from a troll on a messageboard, I've never once had the opportunity to stop a real bastard, I've never once raised a fist against someone who needed the living shit kicked out of them.

Once right before I was about to go to Basic, I was out in downtown Nashville with two other enlistees, just walking around seeing what there was to do, looking for trouble I suppose. We spotted a couple having a loud argument across the street from us, going the other direction. We backtracked, waiting, staring down the man, almost hoping he would just try something, take a swing at the girl. He spotted us, and I suppose he wasn't so inebriated that he couldn't do basic math in his head - he backed down and let her be, they went away, and nothing happened. I remember being quite disappointed in him, the coward. If you're going to call a girl names like that you might as well do something else stupid and get what's coming to you.

I think that if I ever got into a fight like that, one that felt even vaguely justified (ignore the whole 3-on-1 aspect of that anecdote for now) I might feel quite differently in the epilogue. It's simply that all the physical conflict I've ever been a part of has been for the most imbecilic of reasons, and there's no satisfaction in any of it, win or lose.

(Now that my "be a dick" impulse has been satisfied, I'd like to say that even after removing the "I know you" factor from that last post, that's probably one of the best things I've read on this forum in a really, really long time. Also, I wonder if I might not have similar stories if I'd been the oldest child rather than the youngest.)

Zoo loves the notion that all men are the same at heart: dirty and funny and fucked-up and violent, slaves to their needs and not ashamed - the articles about football brutality snuggle up quite naturally with 'The Ten Sexiest Rears in the World'. The editors borrow the notion of male universality from the spirit of Britain under Blair, but the unfunny barbarism of the magazine's content shows there are still differences between men, if only in degree.

You'll find that no pride is greater than the pride that comes with being thick. Britain is filled with people who are really proud of their stupidity. I'm surprised Nuts hasn't made this its rubric - 'We're Thick. And Everybody Else Is a Tosser'... A delicately positioned article called 'Please Smash Me in the Face!' accompanies photographs of a bloodstained skinhead with a face like a plate of steak tartare:

'Being thrown headfirst into a barbed-wire fence doesn't sound like much fun - but this senseless gibbon does it as his hobby. During a blood-spattered Backyard Wrestling match between shaven-headed fighter Karnage and his rival Sic, Karnage was repeatedly smashed in the face with a strip light then elbow-dropped onto a bed of barbed wire and cacti.'

Alas, poor Karnage. The popularity of Nuts is, in some ways, as hard to understand as the success of the Sun - unless you take it for granted that a frightening percentage of young British men are sociopaths.

Oh, how shocking, would that we were all well-heeled contributing editors with a deal with Faber...

The editors borrow the notion of male universality from the spirit of Britain under Blair

Now come on, any real editor would have nixed that sort of neo-Platonic bollocks.

I don't see how it's 'neo-Platonic' for O'Hagan to situate 'the notion of male universality' in so narrow and historically-specific a timezone as Blair's Britain. It's the opposite of metaphysical; he's saying that 90s Loaded culture constructed a particular myth of maleness, conflating it, weirdly enough, with the increasing feminisation of men (getting them to buy skincare products and follow mediated celebrity culture). Just as men in the 90s actually used sophisticated hair products to get that 'tousled, just-been-in-a-fight' look, so their embrace of a fantasy life of vile and violent hedonism corresponds with their enslavement to product cycles. Plato? Where?

'GQ, like the others, always has a glossy girl on the cover, but the magazine is actually quite gay, at least in the sense that the late Ian Hamilton used the term. Hamilton thought it was gay to look left and right when you crossed the road, and he thought it was gay for men to blow-dry their hair. This went on for a while until one day he made the point to Martin Amis that it was actually quite gay to sleep with a woman.'

weren't most of them "just got out of bed", that's the most shameless and goofy alteration of reality for the purposes of argument I've seen in quite some time.

Just got out of bed (tousled by pillow)
Just had hair ruffled by patronising adult or mate
Just been in kiddy fisticuffs
Just been to Clerkenwell hairdresser and spent £70

You can also get special pinched cheeks makeup.

Does that make me a bad person?

At the age of 11 I once deliberately threw a cricket ball in a kids face during games. Amazingly I didn't break anything, but I felt fucking terrible afterwards.

That's for damn sure.

ILE being ILE, I just knew that within minutes of me appearing on this thread, this would get posted. If I were as violent as some of the people on here, and had posted various accounts of how I'd attacked people physically, along with regretful, apparently self-deprecating remarks about how violence is never justified, I would no doubt be being carried shoulder high at this point through a tickertape parade.

the psychology of it all was fairly strange.

The funny thing is everybody who's met you in person or spent any time around you says nothing but nice things and they all keep telling me you're good people. And these are people I like and trust! And they all say when they read you on ILE they understand what you're doing and then they admit you can be annoying at times. So, what drugs have you been dealing?

Wow.

I think overall the feeling of powerlessness is better than the feeling of several thumps to the head.

being irritating

I've punched lots of people, mostly as a result of being attacked and defending myself or getting involved in drunken disputes. I've been the victim more often than not, many times in seemingly 'Random Bastard' attacks.

that makes it sound like you do in fact take pleasure from violence momus, but only when it is visited on other people. quite gloating.

Not at all. I'm probably the only person here who refuses to see Kill Bill because it glorifies violence as a spectator sport. However, I would be rather glad to see George Bush killed, or rather, hear that he'd died, prematurely, of natural causes. That's about the sum and total extent of it.

I think having gone to boarding school, I developed a certain body language which says 'Don't attack me'. It's mostly a question of walking briskly, giving a basic minimum glance as you pass someone, just enough to say 'I'm not ignoring you, but neither am I engaging with you', and being pleasant and humorous in manner. If I could be Lou Reed for a day in some kind of VR video game, though, I might find it interesting to try being randomly offensive. As long as I had an Escape / Save Game control to hit when I saw the punch come flying. Oh, I guess that ILE, isn't it? (Ducks.)

Maybe Dublin is just full of violent drunks. I don't think body language would have made much difference in any of the situations, except perhaps the one I detailed above where I told the guy to fuck off. But then once you're physically grabbed I guess it's difficult to keep the pleasant and humorous manner.

I was once knocked to the ground walking near Victoria Bus Station in London, but it was more of a collision than a punch. And that's it. In New York or Berlin it just isn't cool to threaten or attack strangers. I really think it's a question of what's seen as cool, and that's why a certain tolerance of violence on this thread worries me. It lowers the punch threshold just as the neocons have lowered the war threshold ('he might possibly have been thinking about punching me, or developing a punch program, at some point in the future, so of course I punched him').

This is probably a more foolish and wistful attitude than one of wishing you could punch that guy who kicked sand in your face.

I've never been to either city but I'm 100% sure random acts of physical violence on the street have absolutely fuck all to do with fashion.

Maybe in your New York, but this still exists in the real, non-Momusian world.

The closest I've come to a physical fight was when a high school student tried shouting racial slurs at me a few years back. I did nothing because I knew that A) I would get hurt, and B) the very act of calling me a nigger had abdicated the fool's right to live in my book and if anything had started I would have done everything I could to kill him. And for once, this is not hyperbole. I wanted toblind the asshole, break his bones, and then fling his whimpering body at his dipshit girlfriend who was bouncing up and down with glee and grinning during the entire exchange. He really needed to die and therefore I couldn't let myself get involved because I really don't want to go to jail.

i have been randomly punched once or twice by strangers: these things tend to happen late at night when everyone concerned is very drunk. on both occassions it didn't hurt cos i was numb with booze and i immediately gained the high ground and the concerned sympathy of everyone in the kebab shop.

Meanwhile, peple I knew would occasonally get their asses kicked, normally unprovoked, and people I didn't even know died.

my girlfriend was with her mate when they came across a vicious argument between a woman and a burly bloke which looked set to turn violent at any moment. she insisted her mate stepped in despite his reluctance. eventually he grabbed the bloke spun him round and made to punch only to discover it was a woman. cue both women shouting variations on "that's right - like to hit women do you?" while landing punches on him; crowd gathering; my girlfriend laughing very much.

As I said upthread, this happened to me a couple of years back

I was about 12 years old, no actually I was 12 years old, on the playground at school when some girl, this girl from the neighborhood who I didn't know well, she was a bit creepy and kept inside a lot, starts making quite rude comments about my tits (overdeveloped for 12). So I turned around, called her a stupid cunt, and walked off with my friends. She suddenly flies screaming at my back, scratching and hitting me. So I turned again and punched her square in the face.

I found out approximately 5 seconds later that, unbeknownst to me, the girl had a bum eye. I never lived down punching the half-blind girl.

Still don't feel bad about this. Stupid bitch shouldn't have flown at me and my mates.

Take story as you will.

BUT NO ONE AT ALL QUESTIONED ME HITTING A GUY IN THE GROIN.

I dropped that post in for a reason. The lack of horrified responses/leg-crossing interests me.

(NB I am not suggesting going for the groin is kosher in any situation - its a powerful tool though. Er, no pun intended.)

also hitting someone in the nads is a perfectly reasonable way to fight. cf Indiana Jones' pistol. Same difference, I have no less respect for that than I do for a headbutt.

As a self defense thing for women especially I like to think of it as quite justifiable.

Ive never been attacked or had to defend myself to the point of punching someone though - but I never put myself in a situation where it might happen (or try not to anyway), eg walking alone at night, whatever.

Even when I was slapped in the face in class once I just sat and cried, rather than hitting the guy. Except I then smacked him about with my wooden ruler but um, I dont think that was very effective.

Did you ever hear of the religion of Borstenanity? It had ten commandments, and people decided to follow them to the letter. As a result, after a while the religion vanished completely. (It went through a few different stages. At first it was 'Oh, I agree that's wrong.' Then 'That's too obvious to mention'. Then 'Murder, what is that?' Then 'What did you say the name of that religion was again? Nope, never heard of it.')

Ha ha - I wonder if anyone has made it 'mandatory' for prospective partners to answer YES.

This is the THIRD time in the last three years I've intervened on someone getting a doing in the street... in broad daylight (tho this time it was only an old man and not a woman for a change). So what I want to ask fellow London-dwellers is does this sort of thing happen to them too or does trouble just follow me around?

I have actually lost count of the amount of times I've intervened in a fight situation. It's generally people twice my size having a go at someone about my size, which kind of offends my sense of fair play. Or it's drunk people caterwauling at each other when I'm sober. My strategy is simply Young Lady, Do You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth? What's funny for you and shocking for them is to just suddenly SNAP fingers right in front of their eyes inna Miss Thing stylee, as a personal space violation it's pretty abrupt and startles the average doofus bully well (as does 'oh, go felch your boyfriend' if there's two of them). NB this strategy for BRITAIN and other non-firearms countries.

I was working 10 hour days, starting at 5 in the morning at a giant CVS distribution factory and it was the most draining experience of my life. I got home one day and had a water bottle in my hand. Completely exhausted I threw it on to the ground (I was in the front yard) and without knowing it had hit my little brother on the back. He was having a rough day himself, and as I was entering the door he punched me in the back. I had absolutely no patience (and I hate waiting) and I was one step up the deck that lead to the door so when I turned around to punch my brother in the shoulder, I hit him directly in the face. Square in the nose. It took a while to register what happened, but when I did, I was so tired that I didn't say anything and went to my room to pass out. Needless to say my brother exploded and ran around the house attempting to destroy anything he knew was mine.