Blood, Spit and Perfume

I was a boxing fan for many years and thought that being showered with blood, sweat and saliva at ringside was a sign of manhood.

I’d drink Budweiser beer out of plastic cups and shout obscenities and stagger home singing “Roll Me Over in the Clover” and demand that my woman bring me a mess o’ by God ribs.

Instead she’d say I was drunk and stupid to go to an event where men pounded each other into hamburger, and if I ever sang dirty songs in the house again she’d drop-kick me off the porch.

I continued going to boxing matches as an act of defiance, although the more I thought about it the more I began to agree that it was probably a pretty dumb way to spend my time.

So I gave up boxing, Budweiser and ribs about the same time, although I am still known to sing “Roll Me Over in the Clover” after a couple of scotches.

All this is leading to the fact that I had not thought about pugilism for a long time until a few days ago when I was informed by two different sources that boxing is making a comeback in L.A.

This time, however, it is not a sport of men pounding each other senseless in grimy arenas before crowds of shouting, cursing beer drinkers spattered with blood, sweat and spit.

It has become, God help us, an aerobic training exercise for women in mirrored salons where they drink Evian water and the only spattering is by sweat that smells like Giorgio.

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Boxing as a sport goes back almost 4,000 years and I am sure that during the passing centuries a woman or two has tried her hand, or her fist, at it, but never in such an institutionalized manner.

The post-feminist era has created a condition where some women are trying desperately to be like men, not only in terms of clothing and occupation but also in terms of stupidity.

They are smoking and drinking and cursing more, and now they are donning boxing gloves and learning how to duck and weave and punch the old bag. Can smashing each other in the face be far behind?

I had to see it myself to believe it, so I went to a couple of fitness places the other day and watched women work out the way models of human morality like Mike Tyson had worked out before them.

The studios were at the M.C. Cash fitness center in Pasadena and the elegant, celebrity-oriented Sports Club/LA on the Westside.

Women at both places are taught to bob and weave and jab and hook and to avoid oncoming punches by moving their heads at just the right time. They jump rope, punch both body and speed bags and practice whispering bribes into their opponents’ ears.

Cash, who owns the studio that bears his name, has originated what he calls hip-hop boxing aerobics, which one does to street-born hip-hop music; throbbing, high-decibel stuff like “Funky Child” and “U Don’t Hear Me Tho”--tunes I often hum around the house while doing dishes.

It gets a little more serious at the Sports Club, where Tom Patti, an ex-boxer, trains women in a more precise manner to harness what he calls their aggressive energy into solid, smashing, brain-rattling blows. Pow! Right in the old kisser.

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When I asked one woman being trained by Patti why she was doing it she said because it felt great, she loved it and she was doing something women didn’t do before. By “before” she meant prior to the time feminists began kicking open doors to the men’s shower room.

Her name, she insists, is Brenda Venus. I say insists because she’s a writer and her latest book is “Secrets of Seduction: How to Be the Best Lover Your Woman Ever Had.” It seems too convenient to me to be named Venus and have a book out about seduction, but hell, I don’t care.

I watched the women throw punches and duck punches for a couple of hours at both fitness centers, as they bopped about before mirrors that accentuated their femininity while perfecting their masculinity.

The whole thing offends me. Not that it is on a level of mud wrestling exactly, but that it dignifies a physical undertaking more suited to the Dark Ages.

I guess women have to learn the stupidity of boxing the way I did, by sitting through the sweat and blood. Toward that end, they ought to really mix it up and take a few hits until their noses are broken and their brains scrambled and they begin wondering why birds are always singing in their heads.

I used to think of women as restraining elements to man’s violent nature, but now that they’ve got the right to kill in combat and to smash each other’s faces, the restraint, alas, is going to disappear in a shower of blood.

You’ve come a long way, baby.