On the Good of Young Men Having Their Asses Kicked

I recently visited a martial arts school for kids, and was immediately impressed by - something. It took me a minute to put my finger on what I liked about the place. It was that they were serious, and firm. The instructors wanted these kids to get better, and they didn't need to crack a joke every minute to diffuse tension, or even be especially kind about criticizing someone's technique. And the kids responded well to it, and were focused, and improving. I found myself wishing to see more of this approach, and then wondering why.

Young men having their asses kicked by superiors genuinely interested in the improvement of those young men, is an individual and social good. I express my concern and record my defense herein because I think many young men today should have their asses kicked more. If you're a young man reading this, know that I was once a young man; also, that I should definitely have had my ass kicked more. Below I define ass-kicking, and explain why I believe this.

By "ass kicking" I don't mean physically, and I also don't mean pointless abuse. What I do mean is this - in second person to help you imagine and identify with it:

1. there is a person with higher status than you
   
   
2. they are training you and/or managing you, and they provide intense, frequent negative verbal feedback and potential consequences for underperformance...
   
   
3. for reasons in your best interest (this is critical)
   
   
4. who you won't avoid - because you recognize that tolerating their very negative feedback will help you improve as a person, at specific skills, and achieve your goals.

Expanding on each item above:

1. "Higher status" means the person has objective, measurable achievements that place them unambiguously above you - money, artistic production, athletics, climbing some ladder - that you are also in. If you're trying to be a better electrician, you don't care if an investment banker or mountain climber gives you critical feedback.
   
   
2. This intense, frequent, negative feedback is unpleasant for many reasons, among them that it concerns something you care very much about - some ability or position that you have chosen as part of your identity. The unfortunate paradox is that meaningful negative feedback hurts, and it has to hurt at least a little, if you actually care about the thing you're getting feedback about.
   
   
3. The person is actually trying to help you improve, often to very high standards - this is why it's not abuse - but their concern in helping you improve takes precedence over hurt feelings. Hurt feelings take time and attention to avoid, so by virtue of your superior not having to consider them, you improve faster. What's more, during ass-kicking, the atmosphere is serious. There is no tension release mechanism other than improving your performance. (As an aside, the ass-kickee often attempts humor is in these situations, to his detriment.)
   
   
4. You choose not to avoid the unpleasantness because you know this experience is in your own best interest, and therefore despite its unpleasantness, you choose to carry on; or you're in a setting you can't leave (e.g. the military) but fortunately your superior is trying to improve you rather than just abuse you.
   
   

Some examples of institutionalized ass-kicking are sports coaching, medical school, the apprenticeship process in certain high-performing high-status industries (e.g. high finance), and military training. (For a first-person account of a military boot camp, and interestingly, a distinction between cult abuse and military indoctrination, go here.) Near-universally, people who've been through an ass-kicking program express gratitude for the experience (after it's over) and recognize both the skills and personal transformation it imparted, but are quick to say they wouldn't want to do it again, possibly along with humorous stories of the most difficult superiors who kicked their ass particularly thoroughly.


Why is ass-kicking a good thing? And why am I focusing on young men?

Why am I specifiying young men? Let's broadly define "young" as 13-30. After this developmental window, it is very difficult to change identity and personality in the way that ass-kicking does, and in particular to obtain the benefits such experiences can produce. And I find that it's usually men who have a personality structure and defenses that most benefit from such experiences. A young man's psychological defenses involve a good deal of narcissism about how tough, strong, and awesome he is. When encountering situations suggesting otherwise, he rationalizes, avoids, or attacks. If anyone tells him he's not the greatest thing since sliced bread, he denigrates and/or retaliates and/or disengages. But when it's his superior (his supervisor in a job he wants to advance in) or drill sergeant doing it and he can't rationalize avoid or attack, he has three choices: a) fail b) be miserable because he can never understand that they're not just abusing him personally or c) he "gets it" and grows up and improves, not just in specific skills but in overall character.

It is my suspicion that, not only is ass-kicking happening less often, but also that option c) is being delayed in men's lives and more often happening during romantic relationships; and romantic partners are not enjoying the expansion of their near-parentified duties. Of course it's not only men who can ever benefit from ass-kicking, and certainly not all men will benefit from ass-kicking based on their constitution, but in my empirical observation, in general young men benefit most from ass-kicking.

Why is ass-kicking good? Beyond (obviously) the specific skills and professional identities that are being quickly learned and grown, the general benefits come down to three factors.

• A. We learn to control our negative emotional reactions and decouple them from the person providing the feedback. This is necessary unless you plan to go through life always killing the messenger (which some men certainly try to do.)
  
  
• B. We learn to recognize our flaws and shortcomings and tolerate the distress arising from them, and to turn that energy into something positive by working on them instead of being angry about them, denying them, or avoiding them. We also learn that our position in a hierarchy is not the entirety of our worth and identity. (Note, both B and A are really both forms of "tolerating the distress of being at the wrong end of a hierachical disparity." This both makes young men better able to work in groups, and produces empathy which they might otherwise lack, when they are later at the top of such an imbalance, not to mention improving reality-based confidence.)
  
  
• C. Not only do we decouple our emotional reactions to the person and the message, we learn to respect the person and recognize that they are helping us, even if it wasn't fun at the time.

A, B, and C correspond basically to "I have a long way to go to be a badass, it's okay that I have a long way to go but it's up to me to improve and I can improve, and while it's not fun now, I recognize that my superior did me a favor and that they're in the position where they are for a reason so I will respect and defend them to others." It adds up to the cliche character-building as well as dealing with adversity, being able to function in authority structures and understanding the basis for legitimate authority, i.e. that authority is not synonymous with force. In terms of Kegan and Chapman's hierarchy, ass-kicking is a maturing process that helps young men graduate from level 3 into level 4, and failure to do so has predictable consequences for broader society (see last paragraph.)

To be clear, nothing herein should be taken as justifying abuse. In fact, I think outlining the characteristics of ass-kicking helps us draw a distinction between ass-kicking and mere abuse. And even when an ass-kicking superior intends the ass-kicking constructively to improve the ass-kickee, if the ass-kickee can't tolerate it, they should be able to quit (withdraw consent.) Abuse is non-consensual, and is about pleasing a sadistic abuser, rather than (in the long run) helping the recipient. And what might be intended by the superior as direct feedback to improve skills, might not be tolerable to the recipient - who then should have the opportunity to quit (withdraw consent.) And even those of us nodding along with this essay and agreeing that ass-kicking is a good thing and was a good thing for us specifically, are usually still able to look back and distinguish between a hardass who you maybe even hated at that time but for whom in retrospect you feel gratitude and respect - versus a bully with an anger problem. (Of course abusers try to trick us sometimes by pretending to be ass-kickers.) Many readers will by this point be thinking of Sergeant Hartmann from Full Metal Jacket (note these links are NSFW and contains slurs) - he is hard but he is fair, directly states you will not like him, but he is trying to help his recruits and he tells them so. He is clearly pleased when they improve. He is an ass-kicker. In contract, Alec Baldwin's character in Glengarry Glen Ross is just an abusive bully, and the ages of some of the men in the meeting suggest they are beyond the useful ass-kicking window anyway. He explicitly tells them he doesn't care about them, and just wants numbers for the company, figure out on your own how to do it or hit the bricks pal. Without Good Result A above, young men are more likely to keep thinking everyone who tells them something they don't want to hear is just another Alec Baldwin humiliating them.


Why did I write this?

It's my impression that opportunities for ass-kicking have decreased over the past half-century or so, at least in my country, the U.S. Why? I suspect it's a combination of our decreasing intolerance of direct-speaking authority figures, and constant consumer messaging: that you are special, you are the best, you should never be uncomfortable, don't listen to people who make you feel that way. Those may or may not be two different reasons. (I intentionally use "impression" and "suspect" not as weasel words but as clear signals of how you might weight these claims.) Therefore, as young men's opportunities for ass-kicking decrease, I predict America will face a worsening epidemic of narcissistic, oversensitive, immature, and adversity-intolerant men, who blame everyone else for e.g. why they couldn't finish college or hold down a job, and who can't tell the difference between bullies and legitimate authority. I leave it to the reader to decide if this trend is already visible.