I Chose Violence — and She Liked It

We’re not officially dating anymore, but we’re still on good terms. Technically friends with benefits now, but more intimate than that. Seems like we’re both fine with how things are. No complaints here, especially considering that we only dated for a few months.

We were hanging out at some bars the other night with a few other friends. Of course, there were strangers there, too. Some more drunk than others.

I left to chat with someone in the smoking area for a few minutes. Coming back, I saw a drunk guy hitting on my ex, getting way too physically close as she looked visibly uncomfortable. From my brief prior interaction with him, I knew he alcoholically lost all sense of personal space. I had to do something.

I acted without thinking. I grabbed the back of his shirt collar and yanked him away from her, saying, “That’s my girl,” while I heard her shout to the drunk guy, “He’s my boyfriend.”

I know she’s not “my” girl and I’m no longer her boyfriend, but those labels were useful in that moment. I see no problem with using such heuristics to make a situation safer for her.

I pulled him to the side as I saw his body language drunkenly shift from angry to calm as I talked to him about her being “my girl.” He understood and backed off, though he strangely wanted to have a friendly arm wrestle instead, which he comically lost. I didn’t expect him to lose so easily since we looked to be about the same height and build. I think he lost on purpose in an attempt to signal a peaceful resolution. A little weird, but OK.

My ex later excitedly expressed that she was really impressed with what I did. Makes sense that a woman would generally like seeing a man protecting her so directly like that. Reminded me of a similar moment Emily Ratajkowski wrote about in her book My Body when her partner intervened when another man crossed her boundaries.

Yanking his shirt collar was technically an act of violence. It was to protect someone, but it was physical violence nonetheless. And it had been a long while since I got into a fight or resorted to physical violence of any sort. But it still felt as natural and automatic as riding a bicycle again.

After I pulled him to the side to talk, I didn’t just try to deescalate with diplomacy. My body language and tone were threatening escalation, though the content of my words were categorically diplomatic.

The result was a successful deescalation. And this path generally works with other men in these kinds of situations. It’s not a communication strategy I would ever use with women. Man-to-man, though, we were able to communicate well with violence as an overtone.

As a feminist, I want to pay attention to how these gender dynamics are shaped and interpreted in modern society. And, as a men’s dating coach, I want to find the hidden lessons in these kinds of moments when it comes to intersexual relationships.

In Never Lonely, I talk about violence and how it relates to masculinity. It’s a language that most men are intimately familiar with. We should be prepared to use it for the purposes of protecting loved ones when all other nonviolent alternatives have been exhausted.

But I didn’t exhaust all other nonviolent alternatives in that moment before I yanked that guy’s shirt collar and displayed intimidating body language. I could have simply tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to talk calmly. My instincts told me that resorting to light violence would achieve a quicker, more effective resolution given his state of inebriation, though. And prioritizing my ex’s safety caused me to choose that quicker path.

Did I make the right choice? Strictly speaking in terms of intersexual dynamics, it seems I made the more attractive choice. What about in terms of patriarchal deconstruction?

bell hooks (rest in power) speaks extensively on violence being baked into patriarchy in The Will to Change. In an ideal world, none of us should ever need to resort to violence. Dominance hierarchy, a social construct that doesn’t need to determine our norms, invariably normalized it.

Not only did it cause us men to grow up adapting to the language of violence, it also caused many women to culturally respond to some of these expressions of male violence in ways that reward and reinforce them.

Of course, many argue that these are simply innate phenomena that came about as a result of natural selection, but I know that sociological factors exacerbated many of these “natural” processes to an unnaturally harmful degree. When this happens for things like violence, our social systems rightly curb harmful actions with laws and cultural norms that protect social cohesion. After all, we can’t just let all our natural impulses run rampant lest we let society devolve into a libertarian dystopia like we see in the Bioshock games.

I didn’t end up in an actual fight this time. Even though my interaction with the drunk guy had overtones of violence that could have escalated into an uglier expression of patriarchal norms, we kept things within the confines of the socially acceptable. Striking that balance seemed to be optimal for the context of intersexual dynamics as well.

One thing that helped, I believe, was that I wasn’t making it about me. Yes, I did tell him that she’s “my” girl as a shortcut toward resolution in the moment, but I wasn’t motivated by jealousy. I wasn’t jealous that some other guy was threatening to “take” someone from me. It was about making sure she was safe.

What would you have done?