I am going to the raw edge of relevance to seduction, by recommending this strange article, "Lessons from Bar Fight Litigation." Many of us do bar and club game, and sometimes questions appear about the risks of drunken bar fights. This article attempts to explain the circumstances where a fight may start. Let's call this "environmental awareness." I will cite some of the more interesting findings here, and recommend you read the entire article. It will be as amusing as it is informative.

Violence Must Be Fun Somehow

Now, this may be the result of witnesses trying to rationalize why a fight broke out. And by “rationalize,” I mean “speculate.” But based on what I heard from dozens of witnesses, those bar fighters who initiate confrontations with other patrons (as opposed to reacting badly to being 86′ed by the staff) do so as a substitute for obtaining sexual release. Dozens of witnesses over multiple cases reported to me that the person they identified as the assailant had either recently suffered a romantic reversal or had recently struck out when trying to hit on a member of the opposite sex.

This suggests at least some substance to the trope of a link between propensity to violence and sexual frustration — the woman (or man) with whom the drunk was flirting is already spoken for and uninterested in extra-monogamous play, typically. “I’m not very likely to get laid today, so instead I’ll fight with someone,” seems to be roughly the thought pattern here. I speculate that this means on a neuro-biological level that engaging in aggression and violent behavior produces a feeling of satisfaction, which in turn triggers a release of endorphins or other similar hormones that the fighter’s brain craves...

Women are Quite Capable of Initiating Violence

When these cases first started coming to me, my understanding of women engaging in violence was colored by the idea that a woman would be aggressive in cases where she felt an emotional and personal provocation — if she thought another woman was trying to poach her man, or if her man had cheated on her, or something like that. I admit it, this way of looking at the world was quite sexist of me, and rather patronizing towards women.

But sometimes, a woman just gets drunk and doesn’t like being cut off by the bartender, just like her male counterpart. Or she responds disproportionately to a trivial miscommunication as though it were an intentional insult or a challenge, just like a drunk man more stereotypically will. Conquering my prejudice that women are disinclined to violence as a means of conflict resolution was an uncomfortable bit of growth I had to go through, in part because I didn’t think that it was a very complimentary sort of thing to observe.

Women were faster to employ weapons, whether prepared (the knife) or improvised. Improvised weapons are almost always thrown, and have included highball glasses, pool balls, bar stools, knives, and in one notable case, the assailant’s own feces. Male bar fighters used weapons too, but in my experience less frequently. Male fighters use environmental objects to assist in their hand-to-hand combat (slamming an opponent into a wall, bashing an opponent’s head into a parked car).

Neither male nor female assailants seemed to care all that much about the sex of their co-combatatants. The men seemed to think women were perfectly appropriate targets for violence based on their behavior (e.g., cutting in line ahead of them for a bathroom, pushing and shoving, and/or slurred insults and challenges); female bar-fighters did not demonstrate any particular concern about perceived imbalances between their own physical abilities and that of the men with whom they were fighting. I’m reluctant to call this phenomenon a triumph of cultural progression towards gender equality, so you can make of it what you will.