Kill the Body, the Head Will Fall by Rene Denfeld

Author:Rene Denfeld [DENFELD, RENE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446570022
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Eight

THE POWER OF FEAR

There are posters on the gym walls, which Jess pointed out one day. They are of his best-known fighter, Adofo Akil, when his name was still Mike Colbert. He fought against Marvelous Marvin Hagler for the middleweight title. Colbert, who now sits on the Oregon Boxing Commission, still shows up at local amateur fights.

When Jess tells the story about Colbert’s title shot against Hagler, he laughs and shakes his head. Colbert was ahead on the cards when, at the end of the eleventh round—some say after the bell rang—Hagler broke his jaw.

Colbert could have stopped the fight because of the injury, and perhaps won it on a technical foul. But instead, he returned to his corner, kept quiet about the injury, and went back out in the twelfth round to continue fighting.

All Hagler had to do was watch for his chance. He broke the other side. Jess says you could just see the hinges of Colbert’s jaw fall open and the blood gush out. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and Jess says it took awhile before he forgave his boxer for risking a career-ending injury.

But he tells the story with secret pride. Colbert had heart.

* * * *

The image of the boxer rising to meet his opponent again, injured and racked with pain, invigorates as it repels. I can see all too vividly the broken hinges of Colbert’s jaw. It amazes me how he continued to fight while experiencing such pain.

How little fear he must have had. Or how well he mastered his fear. What heart he had, to fight back.

For a lot of women, the idea of fighting back when injured, to walk into your opponent’s blows knowing you will get hurt, is foreign, nearly unimaginable.

Ours is a society that makes it hard for women to defend themselves. The same socialization that may make us less likely to commit crime also appears to make us more fearful—in negative, debilitating ways.

In the course of researching this book, whenever I told someone its subject was women and aggression, the person invariably thought I meant women as victims.

But most crime victims are men, preyed upon by other men. Over three times as many men as women are murdered every year, and thousands more are victimized in muggings, shootings, robberies, and assaults.

In fact, women and the elderly are the two groups least likely to be victimized by crime. If you are a white woman over the age of sixty, you win the bonus prize: Your chances of being the victim of a violent crime are substantially less than just about everyone else’s. Yet it is women and the elderly who fear crime the most, a situation some have termed “the paradox of fear.” 1

Professor Mark Warr is an expert on the subject of fear and crime, and he has published groundbreaking studies on the subject. I called him at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches sociology.

Warr told me he has found that in general people’s fear corresponds closely to the likelihood of victimization.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.