use of weapons

My half of Engineering played paintball on Thursday! I need not say that running around a course shooting each other with guns appeals primarily to men, but the women engineers have fun too, if perhaps not quite at the passionate level the men get to. (Apparent consensus: "That was pretty fun, I guess.") As a broad generalization, maybe we can all accept "men usually enjoy simulated violence as a hobby, and women usually don't" as a starting point.

We can afford to enjoy it, of course: we don't live in a state of physical threat from the other half of the species. As Margaret Atwood formulated the power difference, men are afraid women will laugh at them, and women are afraid men will kill them. We've also had the luxury of not experiencing actual combat with real guns, like almost everyone we know. So, hey, acknowledging our extreme privilege, let's go have fun and shoot each other for the afternoon.

Paintball accurately mimics, at a low level, the basic things I know about being shot at:

1. If you are capable of executing some kind of organized military tactic, do that.
2. Otherwise, take cover behind something solid. If you have a gun, shoot back.

We did a bit of #1 (often directed by our former-Israeli-sniper VP), but mostly it was #2. This is a good quadricep workout, since you're constantly doing cycles of crouch-look around-shoot-crouch.

Paintball hurts, but not excessively. I'd compare it to getting with a fast tennis ball, but over a smaller area. Sharp stings that fade after a couple minutes. The worst are the paintballs that don't explode.

As with most things involving weapons, I am naturally better than average. My brothers are naturally gifted at sports; I'm naturally gifted at things like swords. I recognize what's in me and my history that makes weapons appealing, though I don't have an explanation for why my motor coordination is optimized for martial arts and not, say, soccer. Sometimes I feel like this:

It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that--by some criteria--a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

That's from Iain M. Banks's novel Excession. I don't typically find quotable introspective passages in his Culture novels, but I was quite struck by that one. I am who I am, and I have to be that, to the best of my ability; at the same time, I recognize that a way of life exists, or should exist, where warriorship in the forms we know it doesn't occur. If my childhood baggage--let's call it "karma"--leads me towards martial arts and weapons, I can't really deny that honestly.

To fully appreciate the beauty of the weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy. 

Instead, I practice a martial art focused on defense and protection, even the protection of the person attacking you. I learn how to use weapons mostly to feed my own inner requirements for a feeling of safety, with the hope that if needed, I can provide that safety and protection for others. I've been able to do that for people a number of times, and in general I feel like I am successfully being a man who can look the world in the face and construct a useful spontaneous response to help people, instead of panicking.

It's worked pretty well so far.