Michael Marshall Smith on being a male in our culture:

On the other hand, anyone who gets to their twenties or thirties before they get thumped has had it pretty easy, violence-wise. It’s still wrong, but basically what I’m saying is: try being a man. Being a man involves getting hit quite a lot, from a very early age. If you’re a teenage girl the physical contact you get tends to be positive: hugs from friends and parents. No one hugs teenage boys. They hit them, fairly often, and quite hard.

So true. So fucking true.

And this also reminded me of my childhood and adolescence in rural North Florida, from Joe R. Lansdale:

Where I had grown up, in Mud Creek, violence simmered underneath everyday life like lava cooking beneath a thin crust of earth, ready at any time to explode and spew. I had been in fights, been cut by knives.

By the time I was 20, I’d been in hundreds of fights, had my nose broken, been beat up more times than I can count, been bashed over the head with a large tree branch, had a gun pulled on me, been threatened with a hatchet, and had experienced one attempted stabbing (by my own mother, no less).

When you’re a man in such places, you’re either violent or toast. As we’d say where I grew up, ain’t no two ways about it.