The Professor in the Cage: Why We Can't Stop Watching Men Fight

How many fights to the death will you see this weekend?

Probably none. But if you were a citizen of the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, the answer would be very different. We live in one of the most peaceful periods in human history, and we witness far less violence than our ancestors did.

That doesn’t mean violence has stopped being the substrate of society — go to an MMA event and you’ll see. Violence is a human impulse, written deep into our DNA. Modern people have simply learned to channel it somewhere safer and more controllable.

Jonathan Gottschall is a literature professor. To work out why men fight and why we like to watch, he actually walked into a gym, trained, stepped into the cage and wrote this book.

From Stone Axes to Duels: Writing Violence into Rules

Some people fight for revenge, some for reputation, some purely for fun. But one thing is certain: humans have been fighting for as long as there has been human history.

What changes is the method. The way men fought in the past looks barbaric today: crushing a rival with a stone axe, chopping a man to pieces with a sword, burning people alive.

The reasons look strange too. Honor, for instance, was once a major motive — a man’s ability to defend his honor determined his social standing, and without standing you were nothing in other people’s eyes.

Our past was indeed violent. But over many generations, humanity learned one thing collectively: let society codify violence as a way of controlling the impulse.

Duels are the example. Rather than letting conflict erupt at any moment, the duel caged violence inside strict limits and rules: both parties had to agree on a time and place, and could use only “civilized” weapons such as swords or pistols; if you could make your opponent back down without a fight, you won before anyone drew blood.

This thread of endless codification runs right up to today. MMA barely restricts how you actually fight, but the fighting itself is heavily regulated: a fixed time and place, a referee watching throughout.

Bullying and Ritualized Combat

Everyone meets a bully at some point — usually on an elementary-school playground.

But bullying goes far beyond the playground. It exists in societies everywhere because it works: pushing down the weak raises your own status, and victims have almost no way to retaliate.

Because bullies exist, many people want to learn self-defense. As long as a bully thinks he might not win, he won’t pick on you so readily. That is one reason MMA is popular — it is among the most effective forms of self-defense, and top athletes rarely take part, so even people in poor shape can start without being scared off.

But self-defense isn’t the only reason. These combat sports are textbook ritualized combat: clear rules fixing when, where and how the fight happens, settling a winner while lowering the risk of serious injury.

Its roots run deep. Our nearest animal relatives, chimpanzees, use it to establish social rank too: chests out, screams rising, trying to bluff a rival into retreat. If no one backs down, the ritual becomes a real fight — until one side surrenders, or is badly hurt.

Ritualized combat is strikingly similar across species. It usually begins with a stare: humans and chimpanzees alike fix their eyes on an opponent to apply pressure. Boxers use the same trick before a fight to dismantle the other man’s confidence, and Mike Tyson was a recognized master of it.

Why Men and Women Fight Differently

In recent decades, gender stereotypes have been crumbling. But one thing really does separate the sexes: the knot of competition, violence and masculinity.

The cause is clear — reproductive asymmetry. A woman releases roughly 400 eggs in her lifetime; a man produces about 3.6 billion sperm in a single ejaculation. That means a man can potentially leave far more offspring than a woman, and a woman cannot conceive while pregnant or after menopause.

The result: at any given moment, more men want to reproduce than women. Competition for women follows, and violence with it. This also explains why most violence in society is committed by young, unmarried men — they sit at the point of fiercest competition.

Male bodies carry the same bias: on average, men are only 20 percent heavier and 10 percent taller than women, yet carry 60 percent more muscle.

Don’t assume women don’t fight. They lean toward indirect aggression: destroying a rival’s reputation, spreading rumors. In doing so, they actually reinforce traditional feminine norms — fidelity, modesty, honesty.

Conversely, the masculine code of dominance and honor encourages men to take risks — to fight even knowing they may get hurt. That risk bias shows up elsewhere too: men are more often killed by lightning because they are “brave” enough not to seek shelter.

From the Playground to the Track

Watch boys play and it is usually some kind of fight or contest; girls tend to play together rather than against each other.

The difference shows up early. Play styles are simply incompatible, so the sexes separate from the start: preschoolers are three times as likely to choose a same-sex playmate, rising to eleven times by age six.

Boys’ competitive games evolve over time into ritualized forms of combat.

Girls compete in sports too, but differently. Modern women are no longer excluded from competition by serial childbirth and a patriarchal culture that said they belonged at home, yet they are still drawn more to cooperation and connection than to competition and victory.

Research shows the difference persists in professional sports: male athletes value competition more than female athletes do. Even in a local five-kilometer race, men outnumber women three to one among those finishing within 25 percent of the world record for their sex. In other words, men run to win.

That drive doesn’t stop at sports: from physical scuffles to verbal debate, men want to win every kind of conflict, and so they grow odd rituals. Rap battles are one — improvising to see who can insult harder. It looks absurd, but the function matters: ritualize conflict and society can enforce rank and roles while limiting violence — keeping the hierarchy intact without leaving citizens injured or dead.

Sports Are Ritualized War

Watching a game, have you ever wanted the other side crushed?

That is because many sports are ritualized war.

For a long stretch of history, fencing, boxing and chariot racing were war preparation. Medieval knights honed killing technique in tournaments, sometimes fighting to the death.

Today that link is less obvious, but look deeper and the root is the same.

Look at the vocabulary: American football still runs a blitz, and a lopsided win is a massacre.

Look at the fans: wearing jerseys, roaring fight songs, demanding that players give everything for the team. Being a fan has an even older tie to war — throughout history, people who couldn’t defend themselves sided with the strong, supporting them with gifts and praise, and receiving protection if the strong man won.

Sports aren’t only preparation, either. They let groups compete for advantage in a milder way than full-scale war.

Native Americans, for example, invented the ancestor of lacrosse, with teams ranging from a handful of players to thousands, letting tribes in the same region see who was strongest without actual bloodshed.

But sometimes even sport can’t stop war. In 1790, the Creek beat the Choctaw in a lacrosse game; the next day, furious Choctaw warriors attacked and killed some 500 Creek.

We Never Lost Our Appetite for the Spectacle

Seen Gladiator? Then you know how obsessed the ancients were with violence.

Romans watched gladiators fight to the death in the Colosseum, watched prisoners of war grapple with beasts; in the Middle Ages, even children were taken to public executions — to see convicts burned or buried alive.

We are much more civilized now, aren’t we? Not necessarily.

We are less violent than our ancestors, but we have by no means lost our appetite for violence as entertainment. Look at today’s popular culture: violence sits at its core.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is page after page of rape and murder, and it sold enormously; the Saw series is practically an elegant hymn to torture.

The biggest difference between then and now: real suffering has been replaced by fictional violence in books and on screens.

So why do we love to watch?

Because it shows human nature at its most thrilling and its most horrifying at once.

Watch an MMA fight: it is a stunning display of raw force and a brilliant performance in which two people use everything — technique, strength, even grace — to gain the upper hand.

That excitement is often compared to sex. Some soldiers who have been to war say they both hate and love it: war is hell on earth, and also the most physically exhilarating thing they have ever experienced. It doesn’t arouse them sexually, but many do compare war to the intensity of sex.

MMA: The Sport Closest to a Street Fight

MMA is the most brutal, most hierarchical and most honest of modern combat sports. Don’t be fooled by the name — when some people hear “martial arts,” they picture choreographed routines that look good and hurt no one. MMA is another world.

One force behind its birth was the wish to recreate those old contests built as war preparation: fighters from around the world, trained in a dojo or on the street, meeting in ritualized combat to see who was best.

And in MMA, the strong usually do win. Unlike sports that regularly produce a David beating Goliath, MMA is closer to reality: it is rarely a fair contest, and the best fighter usually overwhelms everyone.

Another motive was to let each style prove itself. Every martial art claims to be the best, but its believers never fought each other, so there was no way to test the claim.

To hold all those styles, the rules had to be extremely loose. At the beginning there were no rules and no weight classes; biting wasn’t banned, merely “discouraged.” Today there are some rules: gloves are mandatory, and weight classes keep a Goliath from winning every night. Even so, MMA remains the closest thing to a real, anything-goes street fight.

It also differs from most Asian martial traditions in lacking a religious element. MMA accepts no religious authority or precepts, and doesn’t talk about ancient rituals or “purity of the art.” A gym is more like a laboratory: styles are tested, taken apart and recombined into the most effective way to fight.

Closing Thoughts

Violence is a fundamental part of human nature. Over time we have learned to control these instincts better. By channeling the violent impulse into sports, martial arts and fiction, we built organized societies that don’t tear themselves apart.

In other words, we never killed the beast — we just built it a cage, and sold tickets.

Further reading: our review of The ADHD Advantage explores another way of “re-reading a trait”; for a longer historical view of human behavior, start with our classics reading guide.