Lisa Wade claims there’s a strong societal prohibition against hitting in the groin. She doesn’t really cite evidence for this claim, except to speculate that, in street fights, men rarely attack each other this way.

I seriously doubt that she has access to data of this sort. If she does, I would LOVE to see it; I look for data of this sort as much as I know how to. My guess is that this impression comes maybe from observing fictional fights in popular media.

Her rationale for why there should theoretically be more of this kind of attack is that, if men hate each other enough to hurt each other, why not hurt each other more? I do think there is a kind of interesting question here that could start with a crude question like “why isn’t all human conflict murder and nuclear annihilation? Why are there grades of conflicts, and how do those grades work?” Assuming this is the kind of question she’s asking here, I’ll assume she has in mind something like “attacking a man’s genitals is prohibited by society to a disproportionate degree.”

(Obviously I disagree with this claim; I think attacking a male’s genitals is disproportionately allowed and encouraged, that males who have been hurt this way are disproportionately ignored, mocked, shamed, and misunderstood, and that these attacks are disproportionately invisible to society, especially the parts of society that claim to protect the invisible and wronged)

She mentions that there are rules in sports against hitting in the groin. While she doesn’t dispute that allowing attacks of this sort would radically change the nature of those sports, she does seem to imply that those prohibitions as well are…disproportionate, motivated by a desire to protect and bolster the patriarchy, etc.

While I feel like I have overwhelming evidence that there is relatively little societal prohibition against attacking men’s genitals (relative to all kinds of prohibitions around sex and violence), I’ll spend some time on her claim.

It is true that, generally speaking, sporting contests contain rules prohibiting attacks on the genitals, including combat sports, even mixed martial arts contests that allow a variety of kinds of violence. The early Ultimate Fighting Champion events forbade only eye gouging and biting; then they added fish hooking; eventually forbidding attacks to the groin.

I THINK Wade’s position would be that, while some prohibition against attacks on men’s genitals makes sense in sports contexts, the amount that we have is in excess of what is rational or necessary for those games (I’m putting arguments in her mouth here; just reacting to the fact that she includes mention of those prohibitions in an article whose main gist is that we have an irrational aversion to attacking men’s genitals). I would argue that the prohibition in sports is much weaker than that. It’s not even commensurate to the PHYSICAL CONSEQUENCES of getting hit in the groin, let alone buffered to account for a societal prohibition.

There’s the Rules and then there’s the RULES – YouTube

In this video, Dewey is painting a picture of how fight combat rules do not punish fouls (or some fouls, most fouls, it’s not an extensive or exhaustive video) sufficiently to be a disincentive. His main example is groin strikes; he asserts that groin strikes are not sufficiently penalized in order to make them disadvantageous. It makes sense for a fighter to use groin strikes, accept the consequences per the rules of the game, and go on to win the fight against the injured fighter; at the very least, the fear and pain caused by the groin strike will serve as an inhibitor to the victim’s game.

In mma, there’s a 5 minute break given to the victim of a groin strike, and the offender loses a point. Dewey points out that no one who actually takes a hard strike to the groin comes back to win a fight, AND that (interestingly) the fighters feel a strong pressure not to take the whole 5 minutes.

So we have in Dewey’s video a compelling argument for exactly the opposite of what Wade asserts; we aren’t nearly averse enough to a man getting his genitals attacked for sports competitions to make sense. This kind of foul is “broken;” when a man is fouled this way, it reliably hurts him in the game, more than the penalties assigned hurt the perpetrator. As an aside, this feels like a ratification of one of my theses; genital assault on men has become close to invisible in terms of it’s harm. We couldn’t wrap our minds around stiffer penalties for groin strikes, which would balance properly against the actual consequences of those strikes. To clarify, i don’t mean “properly” in moral terms, I simply mean that, as Dewey points out, mga is currently a reliable way to cheat and win.

Sports, rules in sports, game theory in sports are outside my area of expertise. I don’t have a great way to evaluate Dewey’s assertion. I do assume that he knows more about rules, consequences, and data in MMA than Wade does, and I also notice that her evidence is nonexistent. She doesn’t really make an argument for her assertion that there is a strong prohibition against mga; she mentions the sports thing, and that’s it. No examples, no comparison, no analysis. Dewey’s video is a compelling argument with evidence and so forth.