Punch, No Judy

After softball, and after pizza and beer at Ty's, I met up with the chair of GMSMA's Program Committee and a man we'll call Brawler of Brawler's Fight Club fame to discuss our program on Wednesday, June 25th, on punching.

Let me tell ya, it's really gonna be good. Sadly, PunchPig couldn't make the meeting. And he's iffy about making the program on June 25th. His mother had a heart attack recently, and she's in pretty bad shape. My thoughts and prayers go out to PunchPig and his mom. It became clear talking to Mr. Brawler that PunchPig is pretty integral to the whole thing. Brawler has been punchmeat, and PunchPig provided, in part, the inspiration to start Brawler's Fight Club.

The conversation we had was great. Brawler's was at an interesting intersection. Know what a Venn Diagram is? It's used in mathematics to provide a visual representation of relationships between sets. Each set is a circle. Circles can overlap. So for example, if you want to represent "Blond Men" with a Venn diagram, you would have two circles that overlap. One circle would represent the set of all people who are blond. The other circle would represent the set of all men. Where the circles intersect, you have s shaded area that represents Blond Men, but it is evident looking at the diagram that there are people who are blond who are not men (as in, women), and that there are men who are not blond. Okay, that was lengthy. But picture three circles that intersect. Each circle intersects with the two other circles where they meet, and all three circles intersect and overlap in the middle. One circle is the set of men who are into S/M. One circle is the set of men who are into fighting. One circle is the set of men who eroticize fighting. (So, for example, there are men into S/M who eroticize fighting, and there are men who are into S/M who like fighting but keep their dicks in their pants, and there are men into fighting and who get off on it but who aren't into S/M necessarily. In the area where these three sets overlap was Brawler's Fight Club. Brawler would get straight guys who were just there to fight, S/M guys who liked to tie up other men and use them as punching bags, and guys who would fight and then go into the backroom to take care of getting all hot and bothered by wrestling with each other. A beautiful thing, no?

Apparently a lot of gay men are drawn to this. After a story was published in HX magazine about Brawler's, the next week there were over two hundred guys who turned out, mostly, unfortunately, to watch. Brawler, Program Chair, and I talked about the possible roots of this fascination. The only conclusion we could draw was that it felt great for men who either were big sissies or who lived in dread of being sissies to have the opportunity to work out those issues in what is probably the ultimate arena of masculinity: going at another man with your fists while he's going at you. Brawler, in fact, was on his way up to Connecticut to wrestle with his boyfriend, whom he met at the Fight Club.

Most of what went on at the Fight Club was wrestling. The exception to that was any night that PunchPig happened to be in attendance. Then there was punching. As in, blows to the face.

Brawler mentioned at one point that he would really love to be PunchPig's punchmeat for the demo on June 25th. I don't know if he sensed my hackles going up. I wanna be the punchmeat that night.

Another thing that interests me about this whole scene is adrenaline. In the S/M world, endorphins get all the good press. After a good whipping scene, the bottom has this big goofy grin on his or her face. The endorphins are coursing through their veins. They're flying. Endorphins, after all, have much the same effect as opium. Feeling of pleasure, sense of well being.

And then there's adrenaline. If endorphins are opiates, adrenaline is speed. Adrenaline is associated with the Fight or Flight response. Your higher cognitive faculties shut down. You don't need to be focusing on details, and you're not gonna think your way out. Thinking will only get in the way. The blood flows out of your body core to your limbs, which will need the supply of oxygen. You have an incredibly enhanced sense of self-efficacy. In other words, you can do fuckin' anything. And, incidently, if you're really flying, your bladder and bowels will void by relaxing. That's why it's so much easier to get fisted when you're on crystal meth: your anal sphincter is very very relaxed, and there's not a doubt in your mind that you can, in fact, take that fist.

The adrenaline rush, which any athlete will tell you is a great and wonderful thing, is possibly viewed with jaundiced eye in the S/M world because of the faulty decision-making that goes along with it. But, perhaps, also because it feels a lot like anger. We as a society are afraid of anger. In Italy, I am informed, when someone cuts you off at an intersection, you get out of your car and start screaming, and the other guy gets out of his car and starts screaming. It's anger on display. Although this happens in NYC as well, you're likely to get disapproving looks from bystanders. Not so in sunny Napoli, where it's not considered to be inappropriate behavior. I don't think that S/M practitioners are immune to this bias.

In the world of competitive powerlifting, one trick of the trade is to have a buddy of yours punch you in the face before you go out and bench press several hundred pounds. The adrenaline rush gives you a competive edge.

Here's a scene I'd like to do. I'd like to restrain a man who is more powerful than me, and start beating him. And in not a nice way, with all the billing and cooing that Tops usually do when they're topping. I want it to be about brutality. Because what I want to inspire in the bottom is not "It feels good because I'm taking this for my Sir" but rather "I'm gonna kill that mutherfuckin sack of shit with eyes when these chains come off." I want to beat him and taunt him and really (really!) get his adrenaline flowing. To the point when after he pisses his pants, then I'll fuck him. At that point, he should be pretty loosey-goosey.

I wonder what the aftermath would be? I think if I did do this scene, I'd better keep him restrained awhile afterwards until he cools down. Then I'll ask him how that adrenaline rush felt.

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