I Love My Violent Urges

Twenty years of ambivalently watching, practicing, loving, and hating boxing

I’ve trained boxing on-and-off for almost twenty years, and at this point I’m embarrassed to like it. My boxing practice feels like an underdeveloped part of my personality. How can an enlightened feminist woman like me love a sport so patriarchal and brutish? It’s gauche. It’s immature. I discourage my friends from trying it, but I haven’t quit myself. If anything, I’ve gotten more obsessed, cruising r/amateur_boxing for shoe recommendations for my damaged, aging feet, and scouring Twitter for bootleg streams of Japanese pro matches.

Netflix has entered the world of live boxing, and they’re trying to make everyone care. In December 2025, the streamer hosted a bout between YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul and Olympic gold medalist Anthony Joshua. The fight was advertised heavily as “Judgment Day,” in which the influencer underdog would see if his recently-developed boxing skills could defeat an Olympic gold medalist with many inches and pounds on him.

Brash, adversarial Jake Paul started his influencer career on Vine in 2013 before turning to YouTube. His video portfolio includes hits like “YouTube Stars Diss Track (Official Music Video),” “I CHEATED ON MY WIFE PRANK (she freaked out),” and “I MADE MY LAMBORGHINI REMOTE CONTROLLED!! (INSANE).” Boxing is a keen pivot for a man who markets his dislikability. People want to see him get his ass beat. The more Paul avoids getting his ass beat—as he has done with a series of wins—the more spectators, me included, crave the sight of his blood on the canvas.

During the promotional lead-up, Joshua, a two-time heavyweight world champion commonly referred to as “the face of British boxing,” exuded the warm, patronizing calm of a cool older brother graciously deciding to take an obnoxious younger sibling seriously. In a pre-fight interview, hosted by Cam’ron for some reason, and posted on Paul’s YouTube channel, the two sat poolside in awkwardly deep chaises.

“If I can break his soul, and I can break his mentality, then I’ve broken Jake,” Joshua said, sunglasses and smiling. “That’s why it’s going to be an interesting fight. I don’t just look at it from a physical standpoint. I know the person that’s in front of me. I know I have to break him.” Looking at Paul, still smiling. “I gotta take your soul in the ring.”

“The only person that can do that is God,” Paul responded.

Joshua’s grin widened. He turned his ominously warm attention to Cam’ron. “I knew he was gonna say that.”

Publicly, I thought this bout was a corny, transparently obvious money-grabbing stunt. Privately, I wanted to see Paul get obliterated.

Joshua was the heavy favorite for the fight, not only due to the skill and size difference, but the “authenticity” advantage. He’s a “real” boxer. When we identify “authenticity” in another person, we’re recognizing a blend of charisma, confidence, and self-possession; the latter is the rarest and most elusive quality. Self-possession encapsulates self-agency, bodily autonomy, and emotional regulation. A self-possessed person is in control of themselves. They are confident, graceful, unflappable.

Boxing trains you in self-possession. It hones your physical body as it pushes the limits of your self-belief. You can only progress in boxing if you believe your actions, your personal power, is enough to defeat another. The improvement is addictive. Winning feels good. Hitting stuff hard feels good. It just comes at a high cost, physically and psychologically.

My gym inhabits a warehouse just north of downtown, in a district of other warehouses still mid-transformation. The gym’s neighbors are a classic car restoration shop, an architecture firm, and a construction equipment rental lot; traffic roars down the nearby arterial highway into downtown. The cinderblock building’s windows are papered over with sun-faded flyers for fights long passed and a few posters advertising the boxing film Creed (in 2015, the film’s marketing team interrupted a class to give us fighters all a bunch of free movie swag. I still have the shirt.).

Inside, the walls are unevenly-painted red and covered in pixelated fight photos and Muhammad Ali posters, which surrounded shelves stocked with mitts, gloves, cones, jumpropes, and all the fitness detritus necessary to try to build champions. Behind the front counter, the owner’s Cane Corso is often asleep in her crate in front of the vending machine that only sporadically works. The warehouse is one big room. Two dozen heavy bags hang on metal frames in front of an elevated boxing ring. The weights live in the back, a hodgepodge of powerlifting racks and free weights.

Summer, 2021. I showed up early to an evening class. I’d taken a few years off, which I had intended to be a full retirement from the sport, but it didn’t take. A familiar heavyweight was shadowboxing in the ring. White handwraps, black shoes, six-five, torso like a barrel, thick legs. I remembered his adorably quiet voice. We’d trained together for years prior to my unceremonious departure, and we had talked a lot in the gym. I had shared my ongoing career struggles: my exhaustion from working in the restaurant world, my fears of leaving it behind to pursue a career change. He had always brushed off my anxieties. “Hard work always pays off,” he’d said. A real boxing-style answer. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

The bell chimed, announcing the end of the three minutes, and he turned toward me. I smiled. We stared at each other. A long few seconds passed. Then, slowly, a smile spread across his face. “Hey!” he said. “Good to see you! Where’ve you been?”

We caught up. I had to remind him of my name. His soft speech was much slower than I remembered.

*

Violence is an effective and common method of enacting your will upon the world. Many are comfortable using this method, like it, even, and line their path to power with bodies; others shun violence and choose cooperation and interdependence; mostly, we shift between these options as a spectrum. Some people in our lives are deemed worthy of mutuality and others are handled more brutally.

Boxing combines play and violence to make both perfectly palatable. The stakes of enacting violence are lowered, because both parties consent and are fighting as equals. The violence becomes a fair and just power struggle for dominance. At the same time, play—which adults need but is typically relegated to the realm of childhood—is elevated in stature. Playing together becomes a respectable way to prove one’s self-efficacy.

When I was a teenager, boxing was my way of exploring my own violent urges. I was mad at the world. I expelled my anger by burning out on the heavy bag. I was used to ignoring, denying, and repressing my anger. It flowed out in the gym and was alchemized into a positive force, no longer aggression, but ferocity and grit. The training transformed my body—a teen girl’s, then a young woman’s body—and my relationship to it. Before I boxed the body was a thing to be ogled, or managed, or shrunken. In the gym it became a tool to hurt. Maim. Win. Things women were not supposed to do. Things I had wanted to do to every man who had catcalled or belittled or patronized me. Boxing became the playground in which I could explore that desire.

The me-who-fights was a fantasy self, but the more I trained, the smaller the distance grew between the fantasy and the reality. Drills on the heavy bag made me strong, but hitting a bag is not like fighting a person. The more I began to understand that, the more I wanted to develop “real” boxing skills, and play with violence more closely. Boxing is about dominating your opponent, and the drills are meant to be in service of that goal.

Could I even call myself a boxer if I didn’t really fight?

Boxing differs from other sports because it requires a blood sacrifice very early. In order to learn how to not get hit, you must get hit. Getting hit releases a surge of emotion, fear or rage, that often leads to wild brawling in newbies. To outclass an opponent you have to feel that surge and not let it affect your performance (a neat little skill called emotional regulation). Wounds become markers of commitment: bruises, nosebleeds, swollen knuckles, cut eyebrows, shiners, concussive hit after concussive hit. Through getting hit you build tolerance to those emotions, and expand your capacity for exhaustion. Just because you’ve learned to fight, my coach says, doesn’t mean you’ve put in the work.

Play is practice for living in the world, and excellence in boxing is play in its highest form. It can symbolize the real world, but its outcomes are enacted with real consequence on the boxer’s body. Boxing plays with inflicting and experiencing violence. Training it teaches endurance: commitment to a practice with no guarantee of results, or even improvement. It teaches you to keep your head together when external circumstances could have you falling apart. Hard work pays off, but the benefits may not be what you imagined when you began. Once you’ve boxed, everything else seems easier.

Me-who-fights is my ideal self. I love how I look in the mirror shadowboxing, big-shouldered and bent-kneed. I love how the balls of my feet feel on the canvas. I love the snap of my leather glove against my coach’s mitt. The complexities of the world fall away. There’s no spectrum between violence and cooperation. In a fight, they’re the same thing.

If I refuse to spar, I remove the heart of the sport. I’m just conditioning. I might as well hit the OrangeTheory instead. The purpose-giving in boxing comes from the challenge, from testing yourself, and celebrating the simplicity of that test. Can you defeat your opponent? If you can’t, can you bear it?

*

Winter, 2024. My ambition expanded with the size of my gym bag. The big one fits the ring shoes and the running shoes and the training shoes and the towels and the handwraps and the gloves and the mouthpiece and the headgear.

I started sparring regularly again. I had low risk tolerance. I set boundaries. No sparring with men. No sparring with newbies. Keep it light, technical, skills-focused. Re-learn the rhythms of a fight. Remember what it looks and feels like to see a fist coming toward my face. Manage energy and emotion in the ring. Get comfortable enough to think creatively and move quickly. “Flowing,” my regular sparring partner called it.

In December, Coach invited a few women from a gym across town to join our session. Mix things up. Get some new partners. “I got someone for you!” Coach announced when I arrived. “She’s tall!”

She was, as promised, taller than me—a novelty. And she was broader. Big shoulders.

I introduced myself as we wrapped our hands. “I’m not a serious boxer,” I said, in what I considered to be a show of great maturity and self-awareness. “I don’t have any intention of competing. I just think it’s fun. Are you cool to go easy?”

My sparring practice had lulled me into a delicious delusion. I had thought I could box without injury. I had thought I could practice a version of the sport that had everything I wanted—challenge, camaraderie, skill development—and that the inherent antagonism of a fight could, with a few shared words, be transformed into cooperative dance. I had thought I had learned to control the risk. I had been so concerned about delivering my little speech that I didn’t pay close enough attention to the actual response.

I climbed up the stairs and stepped between the sagging ropes. My headgear comfortably squeezed my skull and limited my peripheral vision. Women surrounded the ring; the gym was noisy with chatter between spectators waiting their turn, thumping music, and brusque notes from coaches. A rope cut the square ring diagonally, so two pairs could fight at once. My opponent looked a lot bigger with all her gear on.

We touched gloves. I stepped forward and threw a jab, light, tapping her forehead. The returning jab was hard. Much harder than I anticipated. Much harder than I thought we had agreed to. Had we agreed, or had I just made my statement? Surge of emotions: frustration. I had asked to go light, and she had agreed—she’d nodded? Had she?—so what the hell was this? She stomped forward. Body shot, another, block, another. Pain. I turtled, hiding defensively in the shell of my arms. Three minutes of this?

I felt betrayed. I had been creating my own boxing practice, balancing play and violence to my standards, disregarding the reality that my rules won’t change the wider rules of the culture. When my rules were ignored, I didn’t stop the fight. I adjusted, almost immediately, to the rules of violence I had been trying to bypass. Surge: fury. I wanted to punish her for her flagrant overstepping of my treasured limits. I moved in to attack.

Jab Jab. Straight right. One of my strongest punches. I was confident. I don’t even know if it landed.

She countered with a huge overhead right, her height sending it easily over my outstretched arm, and it connected directly into the side of my head. I backed up, hit the ropes, and stopped the fight with my arms crossed in an X in front of me. Down the stairs. Stumbling. People talking to me. Dizzy, deafened, as if underwater.

The heavyweight appeared in my muddled thoughts, the slowed-down smile of recognition, the words chosen carefully, uncertainly. Surge: self-loathing, humiliation, terror. Stupid, stupid—emotional, impulsive—inviting the very consequences I had tried so hard to avoid—my brain, my brain, what am I doing to my brain?

*

In the trailer for a Netflix documentary about him, Paul is painted as a man adrift. “I wasn’t happy,” he says of his life as an increasingly rich, chaotic, and disliked YouTuber. “Boxing made me feel alive again.” Boxing has high, controllable, legible stakes; a clear path for improvement and its measurement; ritualized, respectable violence; the development and experience of self-possession somatically, and a spirit of camaraderie within gyms. Is it any surprise the sport is purpose-giving to the point of religiosity?

When a self-possessed boxer fights well, a viewer can parse that excellence, even with no knowledge of the rules of boxing at all. Their skills, and the way they market and display their craft and personalities, allows viewers to see fighters are fighting for more than just personal glory. Joshua positioned himself as the master craftsman stepping off the Olympic podium to put an obnoxious kid in his place. (Paul’s ring name is “Problem Child.”) Paul was the fool who disrespected the glorious legacy of the sport and profited from it.

Joshua dogwalked him in round six. Had Paul staggering around, falling to his knees, sweating and gasping, while Joshua floated. In the sixth round, Joshua corralled a cowering Paul into the corner, who wore a desperate expression that became extensively memed. Paul attempted a clinch, and Joshua avoided it with a sharp step back. He threw a wide hook, lifting Paul’s chin, a straight left to the body, then a hard right directly to Paul’s undefended jaw. Paul slumped down, bleeding, mouth hanging open. If you look closely you can see his lower jaw is misaligned, because Joshua broke in in two places.

Before landing that soul-taking right hand, Joshua smiled.

It was a moment when years of hard work and skill development came together to unlock an opening. A moment when you know you’re about to win. The breath and the smile before you hurt someone who deserves it. I want that feeling—I’ve wanted it since I was a teenager. That’s the humiliating part. That wanting has never gone away, but the cost is so high, feels so impossible to pay, that I deny wanting it at all.

Performers and spectators alike crave the exhilaration of the violence, and can’t admit the joy of playing. Can I chase that high while avoiding brain damage? Can boxing be “real” while still being playful? How might the sport change if the cooperation was forefronted, rather than the violence? Or am I stuck wishing boxing could transform into something it can never be?

The concussion I earned sparring temporarily broke my emotions and made them wild and unwieldy. At urgent care the next day I wept hysterically over the doctor’s estimated recovery timeline, certain I’d idiotically sacrificed my writing career for a sport I wasn’t even good at. It took me six months to fully recover.

Brain injuries change you. And if you box a lot, maybe the violence infects you. I wonder if my boxing practice didn’t process those teenaged violent urges, but developed them and shaped them into something tamer, but stronger. Maybe I want the sport to become more playful, so I can convince myself the benefits outweigh the costs. I can tell myself it’s making me a better, more capable person. I can argue that there’s a way to love it without admitting a certain level of bloodthirst, without enjoying watching influencers get put in the hospital. Is it good to play as a person who enacts their will upon the world through violence? Does the violent urge thread through us all like sex or hunger, and I’m just lauding myself for acknowledging and experimenting with it? Am I trying to integrate something innate, or am I strengthening something better left in my past, feeding the beast, making it stronger, drawing it away from the safe world of fantasy and closer to my lived reality?

I got catcalled on a run recently. A guy followed me for a few blocks on a bicycle, shouting for my headphone-narrowed attention. When I noticed him, he got closer and smiled, friendly yet lecherous. For that type, my attention is something to which he’s entitled, and my acknowledgment is an opening. He disrupted my version of our social contract—that of minding your own business—and imposed his own. Surge: disgust. I wanted to hurt him. If he takes one step closer, I’m beating his ass. I was confident I could. I could see it in my mind, feel it itching down my arms.

In the end I kept running. But I had experienced violence, and by ring rules, it should be my turn to inflict it.

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