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Boys must be boys

By Dave Smith - posted Tuesday, 29 November 2005


What about this girl who joined us for the first time this particular night. Could she be another Wendy? Not likely. She didn’t look the part at all. She was a slender Vietnamese girl, with a sassy hairstyle and a T-shirt that prominently displays the words “Too busy to fuck”.

I told her that if she wanted to train with us at all she’d have to change into a different shirt. I offered her one of our club T-shirts - the ones with “Christianity with Punch” displayed on the back. She was predictably reluctant to wear it, but she eventually put it on. Once dressed in a different T-shirt she was no longer the centre of everybody’s attention. Even so, I suspect that the fine performance the boys put on that night was in part inspired by a desire to impress our visitor. You can’t escape the sexual dynamics in this game.

A friend of mine in the army told me that, despite all the talk about equality of the sexes in the forces, the Australian army was still refusing to allow women into the front line, and with good reason.

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He said the Israeli experience had been well documented (Israel being one of the only countries to put women in the front line) and that they were experiencing enormous problems. He said that for one thing, the statistics showed men would always go back for a woman who had been shot, even if she was dead, and even if it put the rest of the squad in serious danger. He also said the effect on morale of the death of a woman in the front line was far more serious than the effect of the deaths of any number of men (and morale is considered to be a third of any army’s fighting strength), Gender differences just do not seem to be able to be ignored in a war zone.

I’m a great supporter of women in the fighting arts - and indeed I’ve been in trouble with our state government on more than one occasion because of my role in promoting, training, and officiating in fight contests between females (which is still illegal in NSW). But I don’t do this because I think that there’s no difference between men and women in the ring. In the office there might not be any relevant difference, and in the pulpit I can’t see or hear any, but in the ring, in that most fundamental and most primitive arena of human encounter, women are women - and men better bloody not be.

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Article edited by Leah Wedmore.
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This is an excerpt from Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist by Father Dave Smith. It was first published on Father Dave's website.



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About the Author

Father Dave Smith is Parish Priest, professional boxer, human-rights activist and father of four. He was part of the Mussalaha (reconciliation) delegation to Syria in May 2013. Join Dave's mailing list via his main website - www.fatherdave.org - and read his updates on Syria on www.prayersforsyria.com.

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