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Really, let's be chill on the language/intensity. I agree, I have to shake my head at that training stuff, but we want to keep the forum super friendly. So many places on the internet are really uncool. And yeah, people have different approaches.

I replied to this earlier but it disappeared. Nothing very intelligent, just that I appreciate your ongoing investigation of gender. I've been thinking a bit about the specifics of playful fight insults here in America ("don't be a little bitch", etc). These are obvious, broad sexist statements but there is also a lot of affection in them. Fear in other words is gendered female (at least in my American context), but there is also a playful understanding of the omnipresence of fear. I love these people tossing around the insults so I am not going to take them personally because why but.. its very useful to get a window into gender roles in two openly striated Thai zones, since things are ostensibly more "open" here (although they are not, really). SO interesting about the absence of roles for women in Buddhism, how their self-control is "unreadable". I love that formulation - it rings so true to me in many aspects of my own experience (and my work I've been told operates on a "dog whistle" level ie; its unreadable to many men )*#&*#%). This baroquely complicated relation of person to feminine is the subject of my work as you might know. I'm thinking about the renunciation of feminine sexuality that occurs when women train at a fight level here. Usually bustlines diminish from weigh-cutting and overall secondary sex characteristics (thighs and adipose tissue) diminish. Women are richly rewarded for this and a boyish figure is considered sexual here for women but its a boyish figure, not a maternal one or a zaftig 50's one. When I've trained hard in my life I cease menstruating which is about as rejecting of the female as I could get. I've had this exact discussion with a male friend who used to date a fighter but whose wife is not one, about how his eye and desire had to retrain from being attracted to a male type of female figure to adoring a female one. I feel the urge to dispense with my own adipose tissue and be as lean as possible is an internalized dislike of the feminine as I was taught it (at home, passive etc). But there are cultural prizes for doing so at least in a white American context! Clothes look "good" and all that. I have a heavy friend who tells me many men fear her extreme femininity (large breasts and hips) although of course culturally some men prefer it. Complicated stuff. Sorry if i have gone off the rails here. Thanks for your post. I will be thinking about it. Your second post - it make me really want to come to Thailand (impossible now of course) for the "chon". I love to watch anything, anything at all fight. My rooster turns and runs from my guinea fowl cock and I am out in the yard shouting at him to grow a pair (talk about gendered). Its inspiring how you use the concept of "chon" to describe how the male and female cultural differences are bridged. I'm also interested in the connection of self-control to masculinity in fighting (laughing off a blow rather than "beast mode"). Have to think about it more.

Ruup isn’t Ning... how? I’m confused... I really enjoy these terminologies the Thais have But what’s the difference here. or what’s your definition of the two.. Ruup is how you hold yourself? Ning is superhero business?

Copy that

I know you are being cheeky, but just to be clear, it isn't actually the adult language, it's the part that begins.... Usually, anything that begins "not trying to be an asshole" and then follows with profanity, well...you know, is lacking in tone. I'm just trying to keep it all cool. If you want to cuss, curse, bust out all kinds of language in a friendly way, go for it. Sylvie and I are pretty sailormouth when it comes to enthusiasm.

Ruup is literally the body as an object. Picture a doll, how it's posed, how it's positioned, posture, overall composure. It's physical. Ning is something that can be expressed through posture, but it's not the posture itself. It's being unmoved, unbothered, unaffected. If you get kneed in the guts and your body folds, your Ruup broke, but if you just carry on as if it doesn't matter and you keep coming, that's Ning.

He really is.. his wife is great too. Both badass and both very friendly with no ego

That looks very much like Staph. Allow it to get air (don't keep a bandaid on it when you're not training) and keep it dry. Warm compresses will help get all the gunk out, but don't squeeze it. Ever.

Agreed! I always pictured Dieselnoi as the archangel of Dionysus; this massive embodiment of pure, raw, ecstatic force of overwhelming (becoming!) that upon his inability to express the fabric of his being ceases to want to exist. No one rivals the active force of Dieselnoi; he is just undeniable in a way that has epistemological implications, as the dionysian does in The Birth of Tragedy. His body is the articulation of that truth that is active force and of which science and consciousness knows nothing: ''What happens is that science follows the path of consciousness, relying entirely on other reactice forces; the organism is always seen from its petty side, from the side of its reactions... The real problem is the discovery of active forces without which the reactions themselves would not be forces.'' This discovery (discovery is always epistemological) is possible within a dionysian framework, and the body of the fighting Dieselnoi would be the domain of that undertaking: ''The body's active forces make it a self and define the self as superior and astonishing.'' Dieselnoi is the agent of the kind of nature that Nietzsche conceives as dionysian in BoT, this active force. Dieselnoi in the ecstasy of his fighting lets us see the truth of the active force; this bodily self is expression of pure force that is just irrefutable and which is all Dionysus. I always thought a lot about something Sylvie has told of Dieselnoi, which is that he despised weakness of his opponents in the clinch, as if that weakness was something despicable in itself. To me this is also a declaration of his dionysian nature. The ''beast mode muay'' would welcome this as a break, a breather, a hole in the armor and thus an end to the burden of the fight and the reciprocal negation. But Dieselnoi hates this end to the chon, he hates the result; he wants the fight in its non-finality, in its becoming - the potentiality of the fight, the never ending waves of affirming life and active force. That is truly dionysian to me.

I really hesitate to jump in here because you and I have very different frames of reference, and a great deal of what you assert just doesn't jib with what I know and experience, but I might as well give it a try... this just isn't what padwork is, or is for in Thailand. Yes, gyms that handle a lot of westerns do start molding padwork as a kind of simulated fighting...because they are westerners, and they often lack basic rhythm or responses...and, importantly, westerners like it. But this just isn't what padwork is for in the building of Thai fighters. Padwork, originally, was designed to "charge the battery" (as Kaensak put it) leading up to a fight. It's pounding out fighting shapes, building endurance and explosiveness. It isn't really a "teaching" mechanism. It's kind of become one for westerners, because gyms are changing, but this isn't what it really is for. Thais don't need to "simulate sparring", well, because they spar. If there are any teaching, or leading aspects of padwork, traditionally, maybe for developing fighters its about rhythm, posture, constancy, spacing, in the exercise of power and endurance. No, padwork really isn't "simulated sparring", at least in the core of it. Westerners do experience this "simulated fight" quality in Thailand, and then bring it back to their gym and mark it as "very Thai". And, I do think that for westerners who do need a lot of developmental experiences, it's a very good thing to try and bring out the "fight" energy in their Thai trainer, who usually is an ex-fighter and probably pretty bored with their endless rounds. Its a very good thing. It's more fun, etc. But no, that isn't really the purpose of padwork, classically.

I really don't mind the turn to metaphysics here! And I like how you picture "beast mode" as a negation, while traditional Muay Thai as an affirmation. There is something genuinely Dionysian I think about Thailand's traditional celebration of the art (and I suppose something of Apollo of course). It is that ascending spark, through the hierarchies of Being, or at least it feels like that. It is no accident that a Muay Thai fight begins with a dance.

I got a few second hand ones and some online for 20bucks a sq metre, my heavy bag was more expensive. An old carpet will do the trick too if you’re on a budget

These reflections and the concept of Chon are at the core of what I love about muay thai. I believe it links to some of the ontology of Nietzsche that Deleuze lays out in Nietzsche and Philosophy. It is what separates the buddhist-traditional muay thai and the vulgar western beastmode muay thai, I believe. The beastmode fighter commits himself to a burden that is negation of both men within violence, and the winner only stands out as the ''least losing'' of the two. It is a scene of pure survival that reduces men to dying animals. What is at the core of this is negation, which is the opposite of affirmation. The nak muay of tradition could be said to embody the tragic of Deleuze; ''a logic of multiple affirmation and therefore a logic of pure affirmation and a corresponding ethic of joy. The tragic is not founded on a relation of life and the negative but on the essential relation of joy and multiplicity, of the positivity and multiplicity, of affirmation and multiplicity... Tragic - frank, dynamic, gaiety.'' What is at stakes in muay thai is the competing of two positives for the truth of their self-affirmation, and the result is determined by the excessive, overwhelming, truer, more beautiful and stronger nature of the bigger positive of the two. This does not mean that the ''loser'' is negated at all, however, for even the act of commiting oneself to the chon is indestructibly self-affirmative; 'In its relation with the other the force which makes itself obeyed does not deny the other or that which it is not, it affirms its own difference and enjoys this deifference'. Here violence, the most extreme of human phenomenon, suspends itself as the negating totality of the beastmode arena, wherein humans can at most survive, and is forced into an ontology of medium for the showcase of self-affirmation in the fighter. This muay is not the destruction of man, it is never animalistic survival. It is a competition of dance, joy and song where the negating force of violence reveals it's true poverty in the face of the joy of man. That is why muay thai is the most beautiful art of all, because it expresses the unity of aesthetics and ethics that is at the core of mans ontology, and this unity reveals itself as beauty and joy.