Yeah, right. I wanna get into a rumble.
-Jerry Seinfeld

According to thesmokinggun.com, last Saturday morning a woman from Florida was arrested for assaulting her boyfriend with a plate of tamales after he called her a bitch in front of her one-year-old son. Police allegedly burst in the small suburban home to find Ms. Sanchez’s boyfriend standing in the middle of the couple’s kitchen with tamale sauce covering the front of his pants. Sanchez was booked for domestic battery in front of her son and her butthole boyfriend.

Now come on. Tamale sauce could never cause more than minor crotcheal discomfort. I’m not about to claim that these are symptoms of a healthy relationship, but there is something to be said for letting off a bit of steam. The problem here is that these two are clearly not models of mature, sensible, loving adults, as evidenced by their name-calling and tamale throwing, so they probably didn’t get anything useful out of the experience, not to mention the whole thing is obviously the tip of a very scary domestic violence iceberg.

But imagine if a perfectly well-functioning couple did the same thing. Everybody knows that communication is key in any relationship, romantic or otherwise, and when words fail us maybe a little tamale throwing can be a healthy recourse. At the very least, it’s something that can be laughed at later if one is mature enough.

Of course, it would take a certain kind of romantic couple to use this technique without risk of backfiring. Historically, it has worked best in same-sex non-romantic relationships, most commonly between two males. Men are physical creatures. Our chemicals make us so. Many of us take issue with our chemicals, but none of us can ignore them, and that’s why video games are so popular and why Quentin Tarantino has a job. Plenty of studies have been done to show positive correlation between violent video games and actual violence, but could a less biased study prove the opposite? Do grown adults actually throw down anymore? Maybe the rise of a new release for our violent tendencies has led to a decrease in man-to-man fistfights. Think about it.

Then again, there’s something about physical fisticuffs that can’t be replaced by any other method for blowing off steam. It’s a practice that served our grandfathers well, and they all lived nice long lives. Everybody should have a grandpa who can tell a story about the good old days when that sonovabitch Jimmy called his father a carpetbagger, so he met him behind the old barn during recess and gave that mama’s boy a shellacking.

This particular scenario is ripe for observing the many benefits of straight up fisticuffs. Jimmy learns not to be disrespectful to people who don’t deserve it, and your grandpa feels like a hero, which boosts his confidence and decreases his wishy-washiness and maybe even gets him some attention of the female variety.

Both parties benefit. What’s more, now the issue has been permanently settled. The psychological damage this episode could have caused both Jimmy and your grandpa if they had let their pissed-offedness go unmanifested is avoided and converted into physical damage, which heals relatively quickly.

Now, obviously this only works when there can be mutual maturity and respect between the parties involved. That’s why it works best with grown men. Ideally two friends. A friendship can survive a headbutt, but it rarely survives an unspoken grudge. It needs to be done in a responsible way, of course. Take off your coats, establish rules of combat (Irish, barroom, etc.) and have a referee around. And maybe a girl or two, just to make sure any potential badassness doesn’t go unwitnessed. End that violent political debate with a punch to the ribs instead of an ad hominem argument. We liberal arts college students are far too civilized to stoop to logical fallacies.