Perhaps it was that my father always wanted a boy as the eldest – and perhaps it was that he indirectly set up the conditions for me becoming one. When people call me “dear this” and “dear that”, I think, “that’s nice dear, but you do not know the thing that you’re addressing.” In fact, my life has been hard enough, on the psychological level. Most girls, apparently, are coddled by their fathers. That’s what gives them their Oedipus complex, and makes them ready and compliant to find a predetermined niche within the larger honeycomb of society. Nancy Chodorow says that women are more entwined in the identities of their mothers, and find themselves pulled in two directions of love – between the mother and the father. My own experience has been different – stand still long enough and you will be targeted, a principle I later transferred to the boxing ring.

I have been attacked by women because I don’t seem to understand the game of giving them reassurance through the kind of empathy that focuses on comparing insecurities – my own insecurities have been too real to me to indulge them in that way by making them a mechanism of common bonding. I don’t relate and pull free from the game, or in the past have played it badly, and with muddled fingers.

I relate to the absolute necessity of being physically and mentally tough, as if my life depended on it, because so often it has. When I got my first job, in the midst of a snowstorm of heavily allergies and general unwellness, as my body rejected the new Modernist and Modernising cultural organs it had been implanted with, my father didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he sat on the porch and pontificated about how “girls” were paid too much. It seemed to me that he always placed himself in direct competition with me, as if by any glimmer of success, despite the difficulties, I could be taking something from him.

And of course he had lost much. However, my compliance with what had been socially expected of me by the culture I was now in was only going to make things worse for him. I had to comply, but if I did, I was expected not to have. Rather, my father had to have me as a repository for his sense of failure, so that he might point to me, and say, “Look! This is a failure!” which would give him room and space to grieve about the way his life had turned out after his decent from his higher place of lecturer to factory man.

I, in turn, learned the ten year lesson, never to stand still psychologically in one place, enough for my father to get a mind lock on me. Keep moving, keep moving, keep your guard up at all times, jab, jab, jab, check the distance between you and your opponent. Final lesson of life and the boxing ring: It is either him or you.