Boxing and Masculinity: Fighting to Find the Whole Man

By Allen Frantzen

"Boxing and Masculinity" is organized into five parts. The first explores current disdain for masculinity and suggests how men can respond to negative views of manliness that we see in media and entertainment all around us. The second part explores sports psychology and exercise science, connecting new views of athletics to new views of masculinity. Exercise turns out to be good for the brain as well as for the body. The third part describes the various environments in which I learned about boxing, ranging from fitness studios to boxing gyms, and the fourth looks boxing as an agent of change and as a form of self-expression. This section also assesses fear, safety, and related concerns that you might have before you climb into the ring. In the fifth section I look at the boxing art of George Bellows (1882-1925), the most famous painter of boxing scenes in America. Five of Bellows's boxing pictures are reproduced in the book. Among his subjects was the great boxer Jack Dempsey, who was also a writer. "Boxing and Masculinity" concludes with a discussion of Dempsey's still-useful book about learning to box.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667851839

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Allen Frantzen reviews boxing books at allenjfrantzen.com.

Author of Modern Masculinity: A Guide for Men (BookBaby, 2016), he has written several books about the Middle Ages, including Food, Eating, and Identity in Early Medieval England (2014) and Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (2004).

© 2022 Allen Frantzen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 978-1-66784-412-1 eBook 978-1-66784-413-8

To Coach Izzy,

with thanks for 2,700 (and counting) rounds

of inspiration, education, and brotherhood

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Boxing as tradition, rebellion, combat,

and competition

Choose to compete

COVID-19 and the Great Reset

Progressives and masculine traditions

Part 1. Be the man in the arena

1. The Crusader

2. The wild man and the warrior

Masculine archetypes

From boyhood to manhood

3. Masculine wholeness

Biology and the "feminine side"

Culture and the "feminine side"

Men are wonderful too

4. Rites of passage and the honor group

Mentorship and honor

Rites of passage

5. Punched in the face

Mocking men

Men and work

Anti-masculine research about men

Qualifying masculinity

Part 2. Boxing and sports psychology

6. Move a muscle, change a thought

Inactive men

Warrior action

7. Muscle memory: knowledge in the hands

Embodiment

How to grow your brain

8. Primary experience and new-pain behavior

Thought and feeling

Action matters

9. Fear and the warrior

Reasonable fear

Do the thing you think you cannot do

Part 3. Boxing environments

10. Boxing as a social sport

The feel of a boxing gym

Team spirit

Boys who box

11. Boxing in a basement and in a fitness center

Ernie

Mike

12. One gym, two years, four coaches

Joe

Franco

Frank

Morey

13. Coach Izzy

Do it again

Más macho

14. Ten qualities to look for in a coach

Summary

Part 4. The rewards of boxing

15. Transformation

The economics of boxing

Contrasting cases: Tyson and Patterson

16. Compensation

Negative compensation

Boxing and social class

Why they box

17. Self-expression

18. Disposable warriors: boxing safety and bad intentions

Brain damage

Trust your coach

19. Warrior tradition and measuring masculinity

Medieval knights as worthy warriors

Manly competition outside the ring

20. The boxer’s kiss

Part 5. The art of boxing

21. Naked brutality: the boxing art of George Bellows

Boxing and public opinion

Boxing art and sex

22. Urban cowboy: Jack Dempsey and Dempsey and Firpo

The Champ’s rise and fall

Dempsey and the Old West

23. Fighter to writer: Dempsey as coach

Dempsey in the ring and after

Fighter to writer

24. Afterword

25. Works Cited

Illustrations

Plate 1. George Wesley Bellows, The Knock Out (1907, pastel). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Reproduced with permission.

Plate 2. George Wesley Bellows, Club Night (1907, oil). John Hay Whitney Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Reproduced with permission.

Plate 3. George Wesley Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s (1909, oil). Cleveland Museum of Art. Reproduced with permission.

Plate 4. George Wesley Bellows, Both Members of This Club (1909, oil). Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Reproduced with permission.

Plate 5. George Wesley Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo (1924, oil). Whitney Museum of Art. Reproduced with permission.

Acknowledgments

Boxing is a social sport, and I have found writing about boxing and masculinity to be a social experience. For their thoughts, their fights, and their love of the sport, I thank the many coaches, boxers, and boxing fans I have gotten to know.

To protect their privacy, I have assigned names to the coaches with whom I have worked most often. I trust that Andrian, Ewan, Jeff, Marco, Mark, and Peter will recognize themselves. I learned a lot from other coaches I worked with for shorter periods, including Dave, Mario, Marius, and Pete.

This book is dedicated to Coach Izzy (no assigned name for him), with lasting thanks for the brotherhood and excitement he has created in the rounds we have sparred, over 2,700 of them. I have lost most of these battles, but for me winning is not as important as doing my best. Coach Izzy is my idea of what a boxing coach should be—tough, patient, and demanding. Coach Izzy is driven by a life-long passion for the sport, a love of competition that has grown out of his own experience in the ring, and an unwavering commitment to do his best. Before we spar, he says, Vamos a ver quién es el más macho (Let’s see who is the more manly). I am always grateful for this reminder of what it means for us as men to climb through the ropes.

Home for most of my boxing experience has been Extreme Kung Fu in Chicago. I thank Coach Tony, both a fighter and a writer, and Coach Taylor, for running a first-rate gym and for providing a center for Coach Izzy’s boxing team. I have met many enthusiastic boxers there, including Jasmine, Leo, Oscar, Andrew, Shelley, and others who have fought at EKF.

My thanks to Joell M. and Carl T., who read early drafts and made useful suggestions. I owe special thanks to the remarkable Janice Fiamengo, who read the manuscript in near-final form. Professor Fiamengo’s leadership shines in The Fiamengo File and in Regarding Men, a stellar series of YouTube videos about men and masculinity she created with Paul Elam and Tom Golden, both powerful advocates for men (2019-2022). She is brilliant critic of feminism, and she commands tremendous knowledge of masculinity.

Much has been written about masculinity, but few books discuss boxing as a path to manhood. I recommend Elliot J. Gorn’s The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (1986), and, for perspective on sports and on shifting ideas of masculinity, E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (1993). Jack Donovan’s work connects the history of masculinity to manly strength and creativity with matchless punch and panache. I am greatly indebted to his cogent and insightful books and to his fearless example. I admire Chad Howse’s blog, which recounts his boxing experiences and emphasizes the link between physical activity and manly happiness.

The experiences of academics who, like me, ventured into boxing, have been recounted by three sociologists: Loïc Wacquant, Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (2004); Lucia Trimbur, Come Out Swinging: The Changing World of Boxing in Gleason’s Gym (2013); and Travis D. Satterlund, Fighting for a Gender[ed] Identity: An Ethnographic Examination of White Collar Boxers (2017). As an academic trained in another discipline (medieval literature) and as a man born in an earlier generation, I see things differently from these authors, but I value their points of view.

Everybody has something to say about boxing. Writing about boxing art is also plentiful. I was delighted to discover the boxing pictures of George Wesley Bellows, which capture both the magnificence of the sport and its mania. Bellows found new ways to represent what boxing says about masculinity. For permission to reproduce the works by Bellows included here I am grateful to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of Art.

Books, articles, and online resources used in the text are found in Works Cited. In the chapters, references are given by author and, for print sources, page. Titles are included if the author is represented by more than one work, as are Jack Donovan, W. C. Heinz, and a few others.

Introduction:

Boxing as tradition, rebellion, combat, and competition

Boxing and Masculinity supports tradition and rebellion, two chambers of the beating heart of boxing. For much of its long history, boxing has been seen as resistant to authority and social norms. It has been regarded as lawless and barbaric. Boxing is a martial art, a discipline that celebrates combat and competition. Essential to warrior culture, combat and competition form the other chambers of the heart that powers this great sport.

Boxing was never genteel, even as a sport for aristocrats in the eighteenth century. Boxing seems especially out of synch with the kinder, gentler world taking shape for men today. With his boxing brothers, the fighting man pushes back against the conformity demanded by big tech and by the government, seen in its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that political mandates and media censorship have diminished individual freedom, boxing seems more rebellious and anti-social than ever.

Numerous studies have established the harm caused by the government-ordered shutdowns of 2020. Yet progressives continue to defend these measures, which were often no more than well-intentioned failures. We know that those states with the toughest restrictions incurred the worst damage (in Works Cited, see Kerpen, Moore, and Mulligan). Yet we are not permitted to ask about the origins of the pandemic or about the long-term consequences of pandemic-related policies. Big tech justifies the government’s demands, silences critics, and censors discussion. Ours is not to question why. Instead, we are supposed to put up and shut up.

The politics of big tech and of the nation’s Democratic leaders, amplified by mainstream media, are overwhelmingly leftist and progressive, which is also to say feminist. Polls taken in 2022 showed that more women than men favor restricting free speech (although surprising numbers of men also do; see Carender).

Progressives interpret strength in others as aggression aimed at them. They want to silence independent men and soften the masculine so that it resembles the feminine. Progressives boast about their own resistance but expect compliance from others. They demand that men shun strength, accept pacifism, and retire to the safe space of the man-cave. They don’t want us to square off in the ring, which has never been a safe space.

Boxers are independent men, and independent men know that the chief benefit of strength is deterrence, especially deterrence of coercion. Independent men don’t live in fear. We aren’t afraid to be challenged and don’t need to hide out. We know that strength earns respect.

Squaring off in the ring is a constructive and creative way to express yourself as a man, and that should always be the goal. Squaring off in the ring is also an effective way to resist conformity and social control, another worthy aim. If you want to fight for yourself in a world that wants to keep you in your place—that is, if you want to deter those who want to manipulate you—then you should take up boxing. Boxing can’t do much to change the world, but it can do a lot to build strength and independence, one man at a time. That can only make the world better and safer.

Boxing is traditional, and so are calls for rebellion. For a pragmatic view of conflict we have no greater authority than Thomas Jefferson. Writing to James Madison in 1787, Jefferson weighed democracy against monarchy. He defined democracy as a form of government in which the will of every one has a just influence. He allowed that it could be turbulent, but he accepted a little turbulence as the price of liberty and happiness. Turbulence is productive of good, he wrote. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. His view has been traced to the Roman historian Sallust, who linked freedom to danger and associated peace with slavery (Sallust died about 35 BC). Like Jefferson, Sallust preferred the risks of freedom. I agree. It’s time for a little rebellion.

I jumped into boxing a few years ago. Through my experience in the ring, I discovered what it meant to be a whole man outside it. A man is whole when his body and brain work together to express his full masculine potential. In The Fighter’s Mind, Sam Sheridan writes that fighting creates a sense of worth, makes you a better person, and can make you whole (pp. 282-83). Wholeness and a stronger sense of your worth are within reach when you start to box—to fight, to get into the ring and spar, not just do cardio-intensive workouts in a boxing class. I wrote Boxing and Masculinity to encourage you to discover how fighting can build strength and promote manly virtue through tradition, rebellion, combat, and competition. They form the whole heart of warrior culture, and boxing needs each one of them.

This book traces my mental and physical journey through boxing classes, boxing gyms, and sparring matches. Boxing helped me stretch my limits. I started at 63. The sooner you start, the faster you will grow. Be prepared, for it may be an uphill battle, both against your body and against popular opinion, which is dominated by big tech and the government. Your body won’t always want to work hard, but you can fix that. Your brain will have to respond to social and political objections to boxing, and that is much harder to do. It is unusual, today, to find anybody discussing the positive side of fighting or defending the traditions that help men live well, but that’s what I do here. I view boxing as the key to a happier life.

This book has five parts. The first surveys modern disdain for masculinity and suggests how men can position themselves to exploit this contempt. The second part explores sports psychology and exercise science, connecting new views of athletics to new views of masculinity. In the third, theory meets practice as I describe environments in which I learned about boxing, from fitness studios to boxing gyms.

The fourth section looks at the side effects of boxing, including ideas about boxing as an agent of change and as a form of self-expression. Boxing has a distinguished history as both a professional and an amateur sport. With a focus on the long and honorable warrior tradition of guts and glory, I connect boxing to forms of competition that were prized by gladiators, knights, and other warriors who are often cited by boxers as role models. Those warriors measured their accomplishments according to scales of masculinity. These scales included honor as well as strength and assessed fair play and sportsmanship. Boxers need scales of masculinity too.

In section four I also assess fear, safety, and related concerns that you might have before you climb into the ring. If you are age 40 or over, get a medical exam before starting to box. Insist on a stress test and echocardiogram, not just a doctor’s quick listen to your ticker. Countless otherwise-fit men have congested arteries that routine physicals do not detect and, unfortunately, that doctors do not suspect (Neugeboren). For a man who is 40 or over, it is possible to look and act too healthy, as I found out myself.

In the fifth section I look at the boxing art of George Bellows (1882-1925), perhaps the most famous painter of boxing scenes in America. Bellows saw boxing as anti-heroic and ignoble. He belonged to a world that was losing its understanding of what honor meant (Bowman). I include a chapter about Jack Dempsey (1895-1983), an all-American icon memorably seen in Bellows’s painting, Dempsey and Firpo. A writer as well as a fighter, Dempsey wrote a useful book about learning to box.

Choose to compete

Every section of this book emphasizes the benefits of competition. In 2016, in Modern Masculinity: A Guide for Men, I urged men to embrace competition. Our culture regards competition among men with disapproval and dismisses combat sports as mindless violence. As Jack Donovan points out, men are encouraged to enjoy athletics as a form of entertainment and to substitute video games for physical activity (Fire in the Dark, p. 168). Tucked away in man-caves (an insulting, patronizing term), men are supposed to sit back and relax, not to exert themselves, and certainly not to fight. Man-caves are about isolation, retreat, and hiding out. It is no wonder that many writers today see men as stuck. Even reading becomes a dead end. It seems to be enough to pick up a book about self-improvement. We don’t actually—actually means pertaining to action—have to get around to improving ourselves.

Don’t wait until you feel ready. Get started immediately. The more you plan, the less likely you are to act. Start boxing, and turn your manhood into a work in progress. Search for a new and better you. You will realize more of your masculine potential when you start to fight.

Tradition tells us that fighting is natural to males. That’s an argument made by the great Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong. In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, Ong argues that fighting goes beyond violent conflict. It has a more generalized sense, which is to put forth an effort against odds (p. 42). You put forth effort against odds when you defend something that you believe in, starting with your freedom and independence. Dictionaries remind us that to fight is to contend, strive for victory, struggle, engage in conflict (Oxford English Dictionary). Men don’t stand on the sidelines. We test our mettle. We strive for victory: we fight.

Not me, you might be thinking, I’m not a fighter. But maybe you are. The more you look around, the more you see that everyone is fighting something, Sheridan says (Fighter’s Mind, p. ix). We fight something, but we also fight for something. We fight our inner demons, including fear and cowardice. We also fight for freedom and independence; we fight for dominance in strength and strategy. Whether we are fighting something or fighting for something, we put forth effort against odds. Chad Howse argues that nobody is a fighter all the time. He notes that adversity brings out the fighter—and the manly man—inside him. Manning up, he says, is really fighting (Are you a fighter?).

Boxing at any level is fighting, and fighting is part of our DNA. Yet fighting is discouraged at an early age, and many men accept the view that all fighting is violent, dangerous, and irrational. Males are taught that we should settle our differences by talking about how we feel. Boxing is not about settling differences. Boxing is about testing strength and strategy. Matches show which man is the better boxer. The sport is intensely competitive, but usually collegial. Even before the decision is announced, boxers embrace. They did not go into the ring to settle their differences. They went into the ring to discover them. They were there to test their strength and skill and to find out just how good they were.

Boxing was a good choice for me. I’ve written this book to explain why it could also be a good choice for you. You might be a student hemmed in by papers and classes and wondering what comes next. You might be working in the service industry and looking for advancement. You might be a skilled worker, earning good money as a painter or carpenter but hungry for adventures that never seem to fit into your schedule. You might have an IT job that leaves you feeling nameless, faceless, and unrecognized. Or if, like me, you are retired, you might be looking for a new you. Building a new self-image leads to a happy retirement. Boxing will give you both.

Boxing brings out a man’s competitive best. In the ring, and everywhere else, boxing will help you create a new version of yourself and live well. A seventeenth-century proverb reminds us that Living well is the best revenge (Herbert). For a masculine man, living well doesn’t mean living easy. Instead, it means stepping up to physical and mental challenges and buckling down to what Theodore Roosevelt called the rough work of a workaday world. There’s no better way to prepare for the rough workaday world than by learning to box.

You don’t need to become a professional boxer, a goal that is beyond most of us. Your aim is reasonable and modest: to train hard and experience the thrill of head-to-head, toe-to-toe competition with other men. You will share their passion for improvement and enjoy their brotherhood, the powerful support system that is built into boxing.

Women have benefited from a support system that was established decades ago, Douglas Belkin points out. There are over 500 women’s centers at schools in the U.S.; there are almost no men’s centers. Media and the arts have showcased—that is, supported—women for decades. At the same time, men have been steadily undermined, first by the feminism of the liberal establishment and now by the radical forces of progressivism. In response, men have retreated. As Belkin shows, men have abandoned higher education and shunned leadership positions. Higher education has been no friend to men’s studies, whereas women’s studies have been promoted for decades (Smiler).

It is up to you as a man to help yourself. I see that as a benefit. You don’t need a men’s studies program to get you moving. Don’t turn away from risks. Take them on your own. You can box. You will quickly see how boxing builds you as a man from the outside in and the inside out.

People skeptical about boxing usually emphasize its physical risks. Boxing experts are honest about them. Read Damage, Tris Dixon’s book about boxing and brain trauma. Sheridan sees prizefighting as a life-and-death struggle on demand. Prizefighters ask for damage, he says. He sees boxers’ battles taking place on the dark fringes of the sporting world (Fighter’s Mind, p. xii). The great writer Joyce Carol Oates calls boxing the cruelest sport, not a mere game but instead a powerful analogue of human struggle in the rawest of life-and-death terms (Cruelest). Like Dixon and Sheridan, she is describing boxing at the highest levels of competition. Most amateurs are cautious and are happy to box at a humble level. For most of us, sparring in local boxing clubs and gyms is challenging enough.

New risks for boxers appeared with COVID-19. The virus affected contact sports—wet sports—more than others (JohnWallStreet). However, boxing organizations set up safety guidelines, and their measures provided a path to reopening gyms and clubs and restarting competition. Individuals also took responsibility. When my coach and I resumed sparring in mid-2020, we wore double masks and modified our routines for extra safety. We thought we had seen the worst of the crisis, but we had not.

COVID-19 and the Great Reset

As the pandemic slowly became endemic, independent people began to realize that the greatest danger of COVID arose not from the virus itself but from the social changes it created. Progressives and cultural elites were eager to tighten their control over the lives of ordinary people. Masks and shutdowns were ordered with no thought to their consequences. Harsh controls over face and place benefited social elites and punished those who could not work from home. According to Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities, working from home was a fairly elite phenomenon. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nearly 70% of those with advanced degrees worked remotely by mid-2020, whereas 15% of high-school graduates and about 5% of high-school dropouts could do so (Varadarajan).

Social control widened economic disparities. Masks made it easier. If you worked at home, you didn’t wear one. If you worked outside the home, you had to. People hate them because they’re so personal, writes Jeffrey A. Tucker. They are depersonalizing, which is precisely how the lockdown period of American history has felt the entire time: we hate them because they are dehumanizing. They make us tools and pawns, lab rats for their experiments, he says. The mask has a very long history as a tool of subjection and enslavement. That history includes us. We’re in this together, cheerful pop icons kept reminding us, but we were not, in fact. We were not all equally inconvenienced by the mask mandates and social distancing.

As small businesses closed because of COVID-related restrictions, many forever, vast corporations like Meta and Amazon greatly expanded their reach, enriching their owners and widening their political power. Mark Zuckerberg spent $400 million to influence local elections in 2020, hiding behind an ideological non-profit group that was set up to benefit Democratic candidates. Meta has been particularly useful to the government in censoring ideas that the administration deems harmful to the population, for example arbitrarily blocking disinformation that might point to uncomfortable truths about our forced nation-wide compliance. To be charged with spreading disinformation, all you have to do is disagree with a left-wing piety or point to data that the left wants to quash. Profit and politics drive big tech. Amazon and Meta promote businesses and institutions that are friendly to left-wing causes and isolate and destroy those that are not (Rectenwald).

COVID-19 launched what became known as the Great Resignation. Many men preferred to get paid for staying home and not working. Some left the labor force, although many others took the opportunity to move up to better jobs (Strain). More damaging is the Great Reset. Propelled by COVID-19, the reset was already underway before the virus. This term comes from Klaus Schwab’s 1971 book, Modern Enterprise Management in Mechanical Engineering, which argued for systematic change in the world’s economies. In a subsequent book Schwab advocated stakeholder capitalism. The economic system should not serve shareholders (those who own corporations) but rather stakeholders (those who are affected by corporate policy). After the financial crisis of 2008, his argument was taken up by Richard Florida in The Great Reset (2010), which argued that financial crises were opportunities to engineer social change on the broadest levels.

Schwab and his followers spread their ideas through the World Economic Forum (WEF), a little-understood group founded by Schwab that is composed of the world’s richest people. Elected by nobody, they have developed social and economic policies designed to rule everybody. They seek to replace existing social structures and to manage the world as if it were a single community. The COVID crisis was just the launching pad they needed to transform the Great Reset into the Great Takeover. In 2020, Schwab and Thierry Malleret published The Great Reset. The book, which is free online, spells out plans for a more inclusive, resilient and sustainable world going forward.

The WEF is a group of plutocrats, people whose power derives from their wealth. We are familiar with the plutocrats of big tech, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and others like them who are focused on progressive causes. When Elon Musk set out to join the tech superpowers by proposing to buy Twitter in April 2022, indignant leftists began to fret that the voice of their monoculture might be muted. Having falsely claimed that they had not been censoring others, they quickly presented themselves as potential victims of the censorship that they had used against millions. They blocked Musk, banned Donald Trump, and hid the story of Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop, all in the service of progressivism. Having suppressed free speech for others, they asserted their own right to it.

Like the plutocrats of big tech, the plutocrats of the WEF deny others what they themselves enjoy. The WEF meets annually in Switzerland, its members arriving on private jets so they can lecture the rest of the world on environmental damage and inclusivity. In 2019 it was reported that 1500 private jets had flown to Davos. Blind to their own consumption, the plutocrats were reportedly stunned by a Swedish teenager who, in her address, told them that they profit by degrading the environment (Baker). No doubt she arrived in Davos on her bicycle. Stung by this criticism, the WEF insisted