My father gave me three pieces of advice when I was a child, and all three are wise.
(1) Never pay for sex. There are enough people who will give it away for free that no matter what you look like, you will never need to pay for it.
(2) You don’t need to win every fight, but you do have to get a good one in. By that he meant, there’s always someone tougher than you, and you may be facing more than one person, which means you’re going to lose. But you have to make absolutely certain that even if it costs you a worse beating this time, you must get at least one good punch in to make them think about it the next time. If they know the cost of coming at you is 100% guaranteed to result in a black eye or a broken nose, they’ll probably go looking for someone else to pick on.
(3) Never wait for the other guy to throw the first punch. If you know there’s going to be a fight, don’t stand around and swap insults, don’t wait for the crowd to gather, don’t grab the guy and dance; haul off and sucker-punch him first and put him on his ass hard and fast. To quote Jayne from Firefly, “Hell, I’ll kill a man in a fair fight… or if I think he’s gonna start a fair fight.”
The latter two are probably what made me such an effective activist and organizer for 25 years.