honkshu

America isn’t obsessed with sex and violence; it’s obsessed with authenticity (or avoiding it). It just so happens that sex and violence are the only two things that you can’t fake, and we keep coming back to them as the definitive “measures of the man.” We can fake wealth, intellect, status, kindness, political acumen, parenting, looks— there’s no objective measure of any of these things, a man can construct any identity he wants, people might not buy it but who are they to say? But a fight isn’t a matter of opinion, it is too real.