Quote:
Originally Posted by DouglasCole
That's over-broad. In collegiate wrestling, the goal is to put your foe's back to the mat, and so such wrestlers will do almost anything to avoid such. Including what's called "giving the foe your back," which is to basically turn face-down and "turtle up." In this sport, that's more-or-less fine (though disadvantaged) because the obvious move - a choke hold - is not allowed. In submission wrestling, going to your back is considered a neutral-to-good thing, depending on your style.
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Well, sure, but we aren't talking about combat here. We're talking about sport. Of course sport is culturally conditioned; it's a series of contests for conventional goals by conventional means. You could "win" a chess match, or a mixed martial arts tournament, by shooting or poisoning your opponent, but it wouldn't count as victory in the game or sport.
But if you're actually trying to defeat a foe by force, cultural conventions of this sort play a much smaller role. If you were trying to incapacitate someone who'd threatened the life of your children, let's say, and you were able to get him in a choke hold, I doubt you'd be thinking about whether that was a legal move! (This shouldn't be exaggerated; there are wars where certain weapons are avoided because neither side wants to be the target for the other side using them—poison gas, for example. There's a conventional aspect in that. But the conventional aspect is much less.)