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To Mosh or Not To Mosh

To Mosh or Not To Mosh Think about it, one hundred sweaty men bunched together in an area usually no bigger than someone's living room, pounding their bodies against one another. Holding on for air and sometimes grasping for life. Almost anything goes: kicking, punching, maybe even biting, but no weapons. Tempers boiling in temperatures over one hundred degrees. This is what goes on in a mosh pit. Everyone practically joined at the hip jumping, and swinging at one another, all for total enjoyment. Who knows why people "mosh"? Is it for fulfillment? Is it to vent anger, or is it just fun? Paul Tough wrote an article that appeared in New York Times Magazine on November 7, 1993, entitled "Into the Pit." He tells a story about his own experience in a mosh pit. At first he was reluctant to enter the pit, but by pure curiosity he decided to join. Tough was a man in his mid-twenties when he entered the pit. He states that he "Is not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to find in the pit" more of one of those "New York Review of Books-subscribing relationship-discussing, National Public Radio-listening guys." Simply put, a man like him usually would not take on the pit. So what was different about the night he describes in his passage? Tough, curious about the mosh pit decided one night to venture where few dare to go. He decided to take on the pit. On a brisk night he chose to go to a Helmet concert at the Roseland Ballroom in mid-Manhattan. Tough entered the building wondering why he was going into the pit, but by the time Helmet took the stage there was little time to wonder. He found himself being pushed toward the stage by a mad mob of teenagers. Mostly everyone had earplugs, and almost no one was listening to the band. The people in the pit were more interested in pounding into one another. Tough at one point was asked to lift a man up. Tough bent down and braced himself while he launched the man over his shoulders onto unsuspecting moshers. When one man's shoe became untied, he yelled "SNEAKER!" and everyone around him dropped what they were doing and gave way so this man could tie his shoe. This amazed Tough because one minute everyone looks like they are going to kill one another and the next minute everyone suddenly stops because a shoe was untied. Tough experienced violence like he never saw before. Not the kind of violence that a 911 call is needed for, but a kind of controlled violence that can turn into something nasty if it happens to get out of control. While Tough's own experience in the mosh pit was an eye opening one, others have their own opinions on violence. Sigmund Freud, K.E. Moyer, and Eldon E. Snyder and Elmer Spreitzer each have their own theory of why violence occurs. All different, yet, somewhat alike. Using each of these theories I will relate them to Paul Toughs article "Into the Pit" and give examples of how Tough himself can relate to the theories of violence given throughout my paper. Freud's theory is one of instinct. Freud mentions in his theory, Homo homini lupus, which when translated means mans inhumanity to man. Freud backs that up by saying that man will use someone he knows as a way to satisfy his anger with out being tempted to do so. This means that man will act upon another man with out being provoked to do so and that this is an instinctual behavior that all of mankind has. Freud's theory, which comes from a book entitled Civilization and it's Discontents, is a valid one that can be tied into Paul Tough's article. In accordance with Tough's experience with the mosh pit, Freud's theory can be related to the people in the pit by the way that they act. When Helmet takes the stage someone starts pushing for no reason what so ever. Whoever was doing the pushing was not provoked to push, but by instinct they did. Also, no one in the pit is being violently provoked to attack one another, and yet everyone in the pit is showing their true aggression by slamming into one another and physically abusing their own bodies. K. E. Moyer has a somewhat different theory on how violence is provoked. Moyer states in the book Violence and Aggression: A Psychological Perspective that there are a half of million people with brain disorders that lead to violence. With the vastly growing population Moyer states that there will be an increase in the absolute number of biologically violence-prone individuals. Meaning that more and more people will be born with brain disorders that relate to violence. Moyer's theory can be tied into Tough's passage on the mosh pit through the minds of the teenagers in the pit. Everyone in the mosh pit in Tough's article is acting with the same basic demeanor. The moshers may all have a certain brain disorder that they can not control which makes them want to vent their anger through body thumping. Although most moshers may have a brain disorder that makes them violent, not everyone might have this disorder. Other teenagers in the pit may just like moshing for the thrill, and as Tough shows, people may just be curious. Eldon Snyder and Elmer Spreitzer wrote the last theory I chose to tie in with Paul Tough's passage; it is called Social Aspects of Sport. Snyder and Spreitzer wrote about how the thousands of people that cheer, jeer, panic and riot at a sporting event all felt as if they were one. Snyder and Spreitzer's theory is broken down into 3 parts. The first part of the theory is the "Contagion Theory of Collective Violence." The theory says that if one person in a crowd at a game is doing something, then it may cause others to join in and do the same thing. The spreading of violence is totally random. For example, one person starts chanting for his team, then another joins in. Maybe five rows over someone else joins in, and so on and so on. This can go on until everyone is infected or until only a small percentage is infected with the chant. In Tough's article the contagion theory is shown when everyone starts moshing. When the band came on, everyone started moving toward the stage, most likely one person recognized the band was coming on and everyone else caught on and gathered closer to the stage to begin to mosh. The second part of Snyder and Spreitzer's theory is called the "Convergence Theory of Collective Violence." This tells us that although the Contagion Theory of Collective Violence is correct, it does not fully explain why some fans at a game become infected and some do not. The Convergence Theory suggests that only a small group of people (that does not represent the entire crowd) are drawn together by common qualities. The example that Snyder and Spreitzer use is a high school athletic contest. Teenagers, angry, and possibly drunk, attend their high school's sporting events: they have some of the same traits, such as age and sex. These traits are part of what can cause a person to become violent if someone in their age group is doing the same thing. In the mosh pit everyone is probably in his late teens to his mid twenties, most are male. Each man in the mosh pit may have a short temper and they can possibly be drunk. In Tough's article he is at the Roseland Ballroom. When the band takes the stage only the brave are moshing. Everyone else is probably gathered outside the pit, dancing, talking or having a drink, but they aren't banging heads. The moshers only represent part of the crowd, now everyone else that is at the Roseland Ballroom. The final part of Snyder and Spreitzer's theory is the Emergent Theory of Collective Violence. It suggests that the crowd does not act as one, in general, but the crowd acts on norms or standards that are implied and usually followed to an extent. Some norms generally found in mosh pits are the rules that no one brings a weapon in and uses it. There are other norms that can vary from one mosh pit to another. One example in Tough's mosh pit article is when a man's shoe becomes untied. When the man yells "SNEAKER!" everyone stopped what he or she was doing. Another norm in the article can be the moshers clothes. Tough describes what everyone seems to be wearing: torn flannel shirts, baggy shorts, black concert T-shirts, high-top sneakers or Doc Martens, and baseball caps worn backward. These are implied standards in a mosh pit and are not always followed, but usually are. In conclusion I can relate one of my own experiences to some of the theories of violence. I remember playing high school football my senior year. In our very last home game, against our rivals, it was the fourth quarter and we were winning by a lot, when someone on the other team started pushing our quarterback. Our quarterback, not being the type that lets someone push him, pushed back. A few players on both teams were trying to break the fight up when someone took something the wrong way. This started an all-out brawl. The players on each of the benches charged the field, ran into each other with brute force and started swinging. Me, feeling sympathy for the other teams loss only hurt a few of their players, but more the a few players from each team came out hurt. The referees were powerless and so were the coaches, the only thing that was tearing our two teams apart was serious injury. After about five or ten minutes or brawling everyone started slowing down and dispersing, but by this time half of the crowd was on the field with us fighting. This provoked the fight to last longer. Overall the fight lasted about fifteen minutes and the police were called and rushed to the field. Some police were already at the scene but who ever called the rest of them didn't underestimate the fight. When I read Snyder and Spreitzer's theory I was able to relate to it. The Contagion theory can be linked to everyone getting infected by the fighting that started with our quarterback. When people saw him being pushed around they naturally started to fight. My experience also coincided with the Convergence Theory part of Snyder and Spreitzer's article. Everyone that was fighting shared the same qualities. We were all in our late teens, all waiting for a fight with our rivals and pumping ourselves up for a possible fight. Even the fans shared these traits, and half of them were drunk which made everything spread faster. Overall it was a pretty sick event to attend if u weren't in the middle of everything. Over ten fans got arrested for disorderly conduct. None of the players got arrested though, since fighting is just part of the game, but that's a whole different paper. Bibliography:

Word Count: 1870

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