Fight Club and Boy Culture: Teaching Men the Wrong Lessons

Salon.com Books publishes a trashy lovefest for Fight Club on the occasion of a convention in author Chuck Palahniuk’s honor at Edinboro College in Pennsylvania. In case anyone was still wondering whether Fight Club really is venomous Backlash purification-through-violence boy culture bullshit, this report will hopefully dash all doubts. What kind of enlightened critique of contemporary masculinity does Fight Club present?

In his presentation on Fight Club: Beating Men Out of Submission, Bowling Green State University graduate student Rafael Colon Gonzalez agrees: Tyler Durden’s role in creating fight club is to save these men who are controlled by capitalism. The violence that Tyler wants men to take hold of is normally only fed to them as spectators.

That’s right, boys: corporate capitalism turns us into passive women (We’re a generation of men raised by women; I’m not sure another woman is what we need, Tyler spews). Therefore, the way to revolution is to beat people into a bloody pulp. Meanwhile,

In Human Services and Their Failure as a Therapeutic Tool for Men, Oelke says that what makes men feel good about themselves is being able to look in the mirror and see a man they can respect — not a coward, not a slave, not a charlatan. This can only be achieved by the building of character. From a young age, little boys are taught that when they have a problem … they settle it like men. So they fight. This rite of passage has been taken away from today’s man, and we’re all suffering for it.

How shall I put this delicately? HORSE SHIT! We live in a culture where one out of every four women is beaten and/or sexually tortured by an intimate partner and over half of all people — women and men — suffer physical or sexual assaults. Almost universally this violence is committed by men. We have male cops that murder black people, male soldiers who torture fellow soldiers because they might be gay, male fraternity boys who gang rape women in order to prove their Brotherhood. And now you’re telling me that men are being emasculated, that we’re all suffering for it, and the way to liberate ourselves is to beat the shit out of each other? Take your Robert Bly and Cliff Notes Nietzsche, and go home. What we need is a world in which we don’t settle things like men and in which we no longer delude ourselves into thinking that men are liberated by exercising masculinity through brutality or sexual domination.

  • —Rad Geek

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39 replies to Fight Club and Boy Culture: Teaching Men the Wrong Lessons Use a feed to Follow replies to this article

  1. Imtiaz /#

    Hello Fight Club imagines a hysterical male response to the perceived emasculation in contemporary corporate society. Does the film’s representation of a crisis of masculinty serve to undermine a progressive politics of gender? Your answer should incorporate a detailed textual analysis of the visual style of this reprsentation. Could you please reply a.s.a.p

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  2. Pate /#

    Fight Club addresses far too many issues without any detailed consideration of any alternatives. Within much radical feminist thought capitalism was seen as a system that secured patriarchy. As in Fight Club, this movement understood masculinity as naturally violent and aggressive (rather than socially constructed and a product of discursive formations etc). Now the charge upon consumer society is that it emasculates men. Clearly this arguennt is not sustainable. Whilst identity politics remains flawed ( as the PM subject is fractured/decentred), there is still a great need to construct a workable and socially progressive model of masculinity which moves beyond this psychoanalytically influenced phallus/castration binary. Retreating to violence in an attempt to assert masculine power merely emphasises the insecurities and inadequacies of modern men.

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  3. imtiaz /#

    elaborate on the question pate

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  4. Charles W. Johnson /#

    While there is much I agree with in Pate’s post, I suspect that it raises at least as many questions as it answers, and surely goes astray at a couple of points.

    I certainly agree with Pate that Fight Club constructs masculinity as naturally violent and agressive, that it charges ‘consumer society’ with emasculating men, and that such a view is “not sustainable”—to say the least! The picture that Fight Club gives us, of course, is hardly anything new. It is merely a more violent and tasteless expression of the threads of misogyny running throughout certain varieties of Romanticism. (In particular, the charge that “consumerism” is emasculating and zombifying is old hat within certain wings of the so-called Left. cf. Ellen Willis, “Women and the Myth of Consumerism,” now anthologized in DEAR SISTERS.)

    But I can’t agree with Pate that radical feminism “understood masculinity as naturally violent and agressive (rather than socially constructed and a product of discursive formations etc). This is where I’m afraid that Pate’s postmodern / postcolonialist perspective may be limiting, because postmodern academics have never demonstrated a good grasp on radical feminist theory or practice. Radical feminists have never understood the ideology of male violence and aggression to be the product of some “natural” male tendency towards aggressive domination. Instead, radical feminists have always understood patriarchy as a class system. Male violence is the result of the material and cultural conditions in a male supremacist society. For precisely this reason, they have been sharply critical of any tendency to naturalize male aggression. (Which has been an unfortunate feature of some forms of “cultural feminism,” which radical feminists have always been sharply critical. Cf. the Redstockings, “The Retreat to Cultural Feminism.”)

    I certainly agree with Pate that we need to move beyond a picture of masculinity of the sort portrayed in Fight Club. However, I don’t think the problem here is “the insecurities and inadequacies of modern men.” I don’t think that male supremacy is something to be psychoanalyzed in terms of some underlying male anxieties. Nor do I think that the solution is a progressive, secure, self-assured masculinity. What I want to suggest is that male supremacy is a system of very specific, concrete, material privileges. It is a system of sex-class. Because of this, I can’t help but think that the quest for a “progressive masculinity” is asking entirely too little. We should not be looking for a better masculinity, but rather the END of masculinity, the abolition of sex-class as such. I don’t want a better masculinity—I want a world in which a person’s virtue is not considered to be connected with their genitalia at all.

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· September 2003 ·

  1. Nobody /#

    this is so stupid, i cant beleive i am even writing a comment on a messageboard as stupid as this. if anyone read this then know that its just a freakin book there is no need to write paragraph after parargraph about how it causes men to gangrape women. the only thing that it would do is make people less obsessed about material objectes, like im sure all of you people should do

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· October 2003 ·

  1. Daniel thorburn /#

    Fight Club did not advocate violence, it advocated fighting. Whereas it is true to say that fighting is violent, the converse is not true. I would disagree with those who say that it is misogynous. I would describe it as afeminine; women and femininity were simply outside of Fight club`s scope.

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  2. Charles Johnson /#

    “Nobody” (a Homeric reference?) calls me to task for suggesting that Fight Club’s message about masculinity may be pernicious. He goes on to say that Fight Club’s only effect will be to divorce people from being “obsessed about material objects.” Daniel Thorburn, from a slightly different angle, avers that Fight Club is not misogynist but that “women and femininity” were simply outside of Fight Club’s scope. But their textual criticism would be aided if he had actually read the book or seen the movie. The whole discursive structure of Fight Club is based around the idea that consumerism is bad BECAUSE it emasculates men and makes them more womanly. (“We’re a generation of men raised by women,” &c.) It goes on to suggest that the way to reclaiming authentic masculinity is through a form of particularly stupid redemptive violence—i.e., beating the shit out of each other (an act lovingly eroticized by the film, using camera angles more or less identical to those portraying sexual intercourse elsewhere in the movie). Far from being outside of the scope of Fight Club, women and symbols of femininity are obsessively woven throughout the narrative, as objects of constant denigration and power-lust. It’s an insipidly common Backlash narrative: the Post-Feminist Man rising up from his boring flabbiness to take back male supremacy over women. The only thing that is boring and flabby in reality, however, is this well-worn narrative structure.

    Finally, Daniel Thorburn offers the clarificatory note that “Fight Club did not advocate violence, it advocated fighting.” Perhaps there is some subtlety that is being lost on me here. But it seems to me that if I said (for example) “MEIN KAMPF did not advocate violence, it advocated genocide” I should quite rightly be rebuked for speaking nonsense. Perhaps Daniel can explain better what he means to say in a follow-up post.

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  3. Daniel Thorburn /#

    You have just made my point for me. No one could conclude from the fact that MEIN KAMPF advocated Genocide, that it also advocated the rape of women on the grounds that:-

    Genocide -> Violence -> Rape

    My point was one of specificity and logical deduction.

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  4. Charles Johnson /#

    It is certainly the case, as Daniel Thornburn maintains, that it does not logically follow from “Fight Club encourages men to beat the crap out of each other” that “Fight Club encourages the rape of women.” (It does follow, as he earlier claimed it did not, that “Fight Club encourages violence.”) But this is no great loss for me to admit; I never claimed that Fight Club does directly condone rape.

    What I did say is that the book’s attitude toward men (and contemporary manhood) is a well-worn one which is really pretty awful. It seems to me that the idea that authentic manhood requires redemptive violence (“settling things like men”) ought to worry you when we live in a world where masculinity is already deeply tied to violence. It is the notion of “settling things like men” that encourages boys to spend their lives as cock-swinging commandos, proving manhood through violence and domination. It’s bloody obvious how this notion is tied to violence against women (and if it isn’t bloody obvious to you, I can refer you to a pile of studies that empirically confirm the point). My point is that Fight Club doesn’t have to explicitly encourage violence against women in order for it to be insidious—i.e., to contribute to a climate where violence against is prevalent. (For what it’s worth, Fight Club is far from being the only work that I subject to this kind of critique. Works that I have much more intellectual and aesthetic respect for - Frantz Fanon’s THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH is the most prominent example; it’s where I lifted the phrase “redemptive violence” from.)

    It’s not any less obvious, incidentally, that violence against women is never far from the surface in Fight Club—the obsessive use of denigration of women and femininity as a road to manhood, the eroticizing of beating the living shit out of another human being, and the portrayal of a dominating sexual relationship with a vulnerable woman as the natural reward of reclaimed manhood all have obvious and pernicious implications for violence against women. (Not just sexual violence—rape is atrociously common, but (as I said above) there are plenty of men who are just beating the shit out of women every day with plain old bare-knuckle “fighting.” There’s no reason to single out rape, as if plain old battery didn’t also exist.

    But hell, say that none of this were true. Let’s pretend for a moment that Fight Club doesn’t encourage violent attitudes toward women and doesn’t encourage a climate where they’re common either. Would this make it any better? Is proving your manhood by beating the living shit out of other human beings really an enlightening way of spending your time? Is it really a desirable alternative to “consumerist” malaise? Is it an alternative to anything at all, particularly, or is it just savage, stupid, and brutal? Even if Fight Club did not (as it, in fact, does) have insidious implications for violence against women, I can’t see how it would offer anything worthwhile to any marginally civilized human being. (This is true on an aesthetic level as well as an intellectual one—one of the overwhelming facts about Chuck Palahniuk is that he sucks as a novelist, and reading just the opening page of any of his novels is a painful experience, let alone wading through the whole stupid, messy affair.)

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  5. Daniel Thorburn /#

    The argument we have before us can be expressed in fewer words than have been used so far. Only repetition and misunderstanding can cause this argument to be expanded beyond the size it deserves. I do not think you doubt this. So for purposes of efficiency I will proceed to give the full, undiluted sum of my argument in a single post. However, It will take me a while to compile this argument, so I would ask you kindly to wait a while.

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  6. Daniel Thorburn /#

    Note: For the purposes of ease, this argument assumes that everyone on this message board who argues against Fight Club forms a single entity called “you”.

    When a person exercises the function of evaluation, he filters his knowledge through something called a system of values. Sometimes this system, is taken so for granted that a person will not realise that it exists. Such people will state that the evaluations they make are “obvious”, and genuinly believe that any reasonable person, without impure motives will make the same evaluations they make.

    Following on from this, it is possible that a persons values can change with experience. You have based part of your criticism on the fight clubs themselves. What does a person gain at a fight club. You decided based on your model of the vulgar man what the fights are about. You said that it was about “proving yourself”. This of course, was a foreign idea, imported into the film yourself. The narrator told us that fight club wasn`t about words or ideas. So when you try to imagine what fight club is about you must instantly scrap every idea that you conceive that is based in words. Fight club is about participation. Your mind reinterprets your life in terms of the new experience. Your system of values itself changes.

    I also think that it is important to view everything in context. Your idea that fight club envisions a society of men being womanized by consumer goods, and then being masculanized by fight club is interesting. But that is all it is, an interesting idea. You can`t crucify a film on that basis.

    Tyler is an interesting charachter. He creates an organisation in which everybody works in teams and nobody has names. He continually emphasises that everybody is equal, and that the movement he creates does not belong to him. He is not the domineering patriach you make him out to be. Incidently, as fight club was created to question current ideals, by using those same preaccepted beliefs as your base your are effectively saying “Don`t you realise that those ideas are off limits”. In fact, you actually take the form of the opressive intolerant patriach you claim to despise.

    Now I would like to tackle the subject of pain, fear and modern values. The origin of “being offended by”, of being “repulsed by” is fear. Do you know why we vomit. We vomit to remove poison from our stomach. Or at least that is how it started anyway. But now we gag at the thought of eating things that aren`t poisonous but are still “disgusting”.

    So why do we abore fighting. The fear of being hurt, of being damaged. Of losing teeth, and suffering the loss of such a thing. Tyler durden tells us to accept loss, and exept pain. Thus he allows us to escape fear. Once you have accepted that pain is not something to be feared, you are truely free.

    Now I would like to finish by giving you my perspective on this argument. Fight Club is a work of genius. One of the few films that I can claim to understand completely.Fight Club is not something you would judge. In fact, one could use Fight Club as a standard of judgement; like that joke supposedly told to new students on a Cambridge campus such that if they get it they are deemed inteligent, and if they do not they are deemed not. My mother watched Fight Club, and wanted me to watch it. She is very sensitive to Mysoginy, and hated the film American phsycho for this reason.

    What do you think about that?

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  7. Daniel Thorburn /#

    That last post may have been a bit ad hominem, and I appologise for that.

    Just because something is stupid does not mean that it is bad. The word stupid is not a value indicator.

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· December 2003 ·

  1. MaJeSTiC /#

    What the hell is your problem? You bunch of feminazi fucks! Stop sissying around like the bunch of farie like pansy-ass poofs that you are. You obviously don’t understand society or how it is meant to work…all you live on is the prefabrcated ‘You be nice while I rape some 3rd world kids’ shit that is all that society is made of now-a-days.

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— 2004 —

  1. zharathustra /#

    The whole idea with the fightclubs are exactly that everyone are willing participants and that you have the right to stop the fight whenever you choose. Thus, while the fights are certainly not safe, coercion and domination are not involved. There is a huge difference between the warrior and the thug. It is just violence, purely instictive behaviour, beyond the realm of right or wrong. The fact that there are rules means that before and after the fight there are no moral doubts that might emotionally harm and corrupt the fighters

    That all men are suffering from the dislegitimisation of violence is in no way disproved by violent cops or husbands. Both are not fights but assaults, there is no fear involved for the perpetrator, only vileness, hatred, lust and guilt making it all the sweeter. It is the sickening display of a repressed instict and hardly an argument vs violence as such….

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  2. Eroch /#

    “We live in a culture where one out of every four women is beaten and/or sexually tortured by an intimate partner and over half of all people - women and men - suffer physical or sexual assaults.”

    Post sources please. Guesses carry no weight.

    “What we need is a world in which we don’t settle things “like men” and in which we no longer delude ourselves into thinking that men are liberated by exercising masculinity through brutality or sexual domination.”

    Way to stereotype. Because, you know, all men behave the way the psychos on T.V. do.

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  3. Rad Geek /#

    I wrote:

    We live in a culture where one out of every four women is beaten and/or sexually tortured by an intimate partner and over half of all people — women and men — suffer physical or sexual assaults.

    “Eroch” contributes:

    Post sources please. Guesses carry no weight.

    Patricia Tjaden and Nancy Thoennes (1998): Prevalence, Incidence, and Consequences of Violence Against Women: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey:

    The NVAW Survey used a modified version of the Conflict Tactics Scale to query respondents about a variety of physical assaults they may have suffered. Responses revealed that physical assault is widespread in American society: 52 percent of surveyed women and 66 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator.

    For both women and men, the most frequently reported physical assault was slapping and hitting, followed by pushing, grabbing, shoving, and hitting with an object. Relatively few respondents reported that an adult caretaker or other adult pulled their hair or threw something at them that could hurt. Still fewer reported that an adult caretaker or other adult choked or almost drowned them, kicked or bit them, beat them up, threatened them with a gun or knife, or used a gun or knife on them (see exhibit 1). (page 5)

    The NVAW survey found that women are significantly more likely to be assaulted by an intimate partner than men are. Twenty-five percent of surveyed women, compared with 8 percent of surveyed men, said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at some time in their life; 1.5 percent of all surveyed women compared with 0.9 percent of all surveyed men said they were raped and/or physically assaulted by such a partner in the previous 12 months. Based on U.S. Census estimates of the number of women and men in the country, these findings equate to approximately 1.5 million women and 834,700 men who are raped and/or physically assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States (see exhibit 7). (pp. 6-7)

    The survey also found that most violence perpetrated against adults is perpetrated by males: 93 percent of the women and 86 percent of the men who were raped and/or physically assaulted since the age of 18 were assaulted by a male. In comparison only 11 percent of these women and 23 percent of these men were assaulted by a female (see exhibit 10). Given these findings, adult violence prevention strategies should focus primarily on the risks posed by male perpetrators. (p. 8)

    Tjaden and Thoennes’s findings are consistent with a good three decades or so of social science research on the topic of gender violence. If you would like more references, get in touch and I’ll send you some more.

    I wrote:

    What we need is a world in which we don’t settle things “like men” and in which we no longer delude ourselves into thinking that men are liberated by exercising masculinity through brutality or sexual domination.

    “Eroch” contributed:

    Way to stereotype. Because, you know, all men behave the way the psychos on T.V. do.

    This has nothing in particular to do with television. It has to do with real life in a society where 1 out of every 4 women is assaulted by men who profess to love them. It also has to do with the way that male violence has routinely been culturally and intellectually excused, in politics, philosophy, and art. If you can turn off the television for a moment, you might find it in works such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Robert Bly’s Iron John, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, inter alia.

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— 2005 —

  1. Chris /#

    You are a complete idiot. Not only is your hysterical jabbering about “1 in 4” based on debunked research, but your analysis of Fight Club is pitifully shallow. If you honestly missed the Buddhist overtones (desire creates illusion, Durden was an illusion created of the Unnamned Man’s desire, and he had to fight against his desire in the end, not the illusion), the Christian allusions (Reversal of the Creation Myth of Genesis in “I ask you for one thing, one simple thing!”), or the ingenious subtleties (“Pearson Towers”, where the Unnamed Man’s condo was…Pearson was a famous statistician, thus U.M. was living “as a statistic”), then I feel sorry for you. You missed 95% of the meaning behind one of the finest films I’ve ever seen.

    But to boldfacedly discard all the depth and meaning in the film out of hand by trying to cram it into your procrustean bed of feminist delusions is just pathetic. Not all art needs to cater to the ravings about victimization that you and other idiots like you shriek about incessantly. Not every theatrical production needs to be another Vagina Monologue.

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  2. Stu /#

    Human history has been littered with horrific violence, perpetrated largely (though not exclusively) by men.

    If we can accept try to accept the fact that people are inherently violent to some extent, then the question is how we can best deal with this.

    I personally doubt that repression is the answer - I believe it will just make things worse, more extreme.

    Not sure that meeting up in a parking lot and beating the shit out of each other is the answer either…

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  3. Stu /#

    I think there are some very simple facts to consider here:

    1) Throughout all of history, and across different cultural settings, men have behaved more violently than women

    2) Men have higher levels of testosterone than women

    3) Both men and women, when given doses of testosterone, begin to behave more violently

    4) Even in very young children we can see males behaving more violently that their female counterparts. Of course, even at a very young age it’s hard to rule out cultural influence, but I think if you ask any parent or person who spends a lot of time around young people, they will say it seems to be a sex-trait - independent of cultural context

    Why are people so reluctant to deny our basic biology? We are animals - animals with big brains - and the male of the species is more violent than the female (as is the case with most other mammals)

    The interesting questions are - how do we try to cope with this in our modern society, where violence is less relevant and acceptable than it was in our evolutionary past? And what are the effects (good and bad) of our current attempted solutions?

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  4. L. /#

    Chris: It’s probably worth pointing out that a film can be just bursting with literary and cultural allusions and still fail to be a work of genius. That Palahniuck and the screenwriters took a humanities class in college is no guarantee that their insights into the human condition are going to be any better-observed than the caterer’s. Pseudo-erudite name-dropping— which is what most of the film’s “philosophical” content amounts to— will get you about halfway to nowhere with me. All the cleverly-named highrises in the world don’t amount to more than a production-team injoke when stuck in a script as shallow and self-important as Fight Club’s.

    Pointing out that a film has some pernicious views on masculinity isn’t philistinism and it isn’t whining— it’s just part of what good cultural critics do. Pointing out that the film that OMG CHANGED YR LIFE might actually be somewhat less wise than you thought when you were seventeen isn’t “pathetic”, nor yet an example of trying to “cram it into [one’s] procrustean bed of feminist delusions”, whatever that means. It’s criticism. It’s drawing out some elements that were always present, but which you may not have noticed the first time around.

    Not all art needs to cater to the ravings about victimization that you and other idiots like you shriek about incessantly.

    If you mean “not all art needs to be about victimization,” you’re right, of course, and I’m sure the OP would agree with you. But I’m not at all sure what you mean about the “ravings” that “idiots like you shriek about incessantly.” You talk about “victimization” — by which the OP means real violence: petty, brutal, non-redemptive, everyday violence inflicted on real people, by real people, in their real homes and lives— like it was a mosquito bite the OP couldn’t stop complaining about. You talk about “feminist delusions” like you could make this violence go away, or make it somehow not matter, by closing you eyes and not caring as hard as you can. It isn’t working.

    Stu:

    How about no longer making excuses? The roots of violence are deep, sure, and they tangle into everything; you can’t just lay the blame on testosterone and shrug your shoulders at the ruin of history. That the roots of violence are everywhere makes the matter more difficult. It doesn’t make it impossible. Europe today is a much less violent place, on the whole, than it was in the fourteenth century. Violence in the home— wife-beating and child-beating— while still a reality and a serious problem, is neither as widespread now nor as widely condoned as it was just a century ago. I don’t see this trend as a dangerously repressive one, any more than I think I’m more “repressed” now as a peaceful undergraduate than I was as a compulsively fight-picking fourth-grader. I didn’t have to forget anything terribly important to get from there to here. I just grew up.

    I’d like to believe we can all grow up.

    We need to stop talking about violence as if it were an indispensable element of human nature. Mostly, it isn’t. Mostly, it’s just sad and stupid: misguided kids, frustrated parents, thugs who call themselves “warriors,” criminals and petty tyrants. It’s easy to do a quick survey of human history and conclude, “Yeah, we really are just a violent bunch of bastards,” but if you take a look at just about any individual cases, it ends up being a lot more complicated than that. It’s a knot, sure— an unbelievably huge, crusty knot— but we’re not getting anywhere by staring at it and saying, “No, it can’t be undone”. Violence is an epidemic, but it isn’t quite congenital; it isn’t carved indelibly into all of our chromosomes, and one of the many very small things we can do to help improve the situation is to stop insisting that it is.

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  5. Jennifer /#

    There’s such a thing as a socially effected numbness, which seeps into one’s psychology, making one feel numb. As a female who was brought up in a more vigorous (some might like to read: “masculine”) society, I have certainly found my interactions in the first world to be generally tainted with a kind of repressiveness which invokes numbness.

    What is depicted in Fightclub has less to do with the western symbolic dichotomies of masculine and feminine and more to do with this state of numbness itself, in my opinion.

    It is this state of psychological benumbing which requires the extreme means of a punch to the face, in order for individuals to snap themselves out of it. Have you seen the teenage movie, THIRTEEN, about a similar psychological dynamic? The self-infliction of pain is an attempt made, by already damaged people, to awake themselves to something which has more reality than this sense of being numb.

    Turning the movie into a means to just reply a stupid gender question is quite superficial and displays a keen lack of engagement — something which is likely to replicate the very numbness of sensibilities which this film attempts to critique.

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— 2006 —

  1. Brett /#

    Fight Club was the outsource of aggression cuased by Man being told who and what to be, when and where to be, and what to buy. It was a place where men could build camaraderie and lasting friendships with the people that feel the same. If anything, fight club would prevent rape and beatings. If a man got mad at his sig. other he could just go to fight club and kick the shit out of one of his friends who would greet him with a hug afterward. Its no wonder you cant grasp the concept as a women, as it doesnt pertain to your primal instincts. Henry David Thoreau, Chuck Palahniuk, and even Ted Kaczynski all conveyed a message of man returning to a state where he could be the man he yearned to be on the inside. A guy who could hunt for his food, protect his family and have a true feeling of self worth. Its nothing more then a message of understanding the frustrated feelings every man feels. Autonomous Decisions and Surrogate Activities like fighting can draw us away from our depression of going to home depot on saturday mornings or taking it up the ass(and for Fucks sake that was figurative so take it as such) from our boss m-f but that only lasts so long. Thus came Project Mayham. Reduce the world to a primitive state and return humanity to a balance with nature. Anyway, thats just what i grasped from it. My advice would be to be less angry and find the Fight Club in your everyday life. And please, stop fearing everything, cus its all gonna be ok. Love ya all ;)

    Brett Brett@thegbook.com

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  2. Rad Geek /#

    Brett,

    Just so we’re clear, I am not speaking here as a singular woman, let alone as a women. I am, in fact, a dude. I’m also familiar with the theories of violent masculinity, repression, and displacement that you’re referring to. I disagree with the theories: I do not think that rage or violence naturally exhaust themselves when given free reign, even in safe, displaced environments; rather they feed on themselves and work their way into your view of yourself and the world around you.

    I also think you ought to speak only for yourself about what primal instincts you have. You may think you have the authority to speak as a men, and send out messages of understanding to your brethren whether or not they actually are in the predicament you’re claiming to understand. But you can hardly expect me to agree with you.

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  3. Sabrina /#

    Aside from much of the biological essentialism comments of men having whatever physical differences biologically or psychologically that they have differnt from women, I think the point is that we need to be aware that we are ‘programming’ boys who grow up to be men in world society to believe that they are more privledged and that their behaviors that support this believe that they are better than women, is making it a disadvantaged one for everyone, both female and male. Masculinities are by no means predetermined biologically nor are they fixed socially prior to social interation. The point is, is that we are looking at this ‘problem’ from the wrong end and we need to be aware that books/ movies , whatever are not the only problem but how we socialize young boys from the get go is what the issue is, irregardless of what culture they become exposed to.

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  4. Laura J. /#

    My “primal instincts” tell me every now in then that it would be remarkably satisfying to remove a source of irritation from my immediate environment with a series of well-placed blows from my fists and feet. Nonetheless, I do not generally do so, as society has taught me that this is generally not the best course of action when the source of irritation is another sentient being, and as an adult, I suspect it was for the best that society told me so. It’s frustrating at times, but part of not being a squalling 2-year-old all your life is learning to deal with frustration in a manner that is not destructive to yourself and other people.

    It would be nice if society were more expressive in conveying this nugget of wisdom to EVERYONE, rather than selecting by reproductive equipment who shall and shan’t be taught more insistently about this matter.

    Follow Up

  5. Rad Geek /#

    Recent comments on this thread reminded me that I had not yet replied to a particular claim made by Chris. Besides wanting to associate myself with what L. said above, there is also this:

    You are a complete idiot. Not only is your hysterical jabbering about “1 in 4” based on debunked research, […]

    Since Chris does not cite the sources which debunk the research behind my hysterical jabbering, I can’t be certain of just what he’s referring to. Maybe there are serious objections to Tjaden and Thoennes’s research in the NVAWS, which I quoted above (1998; cf. also the full report published in 2000). However, I am not aware of any, and he doesn’t cite any to back up his claim. The strident tone and the immediate focus on the ratio of 1 in 4 women leads me to suspect that he’s actually referring to the controversy over Mary Koss’s 1985 study on sexual assault amongst college men and women.

    Koss surveyed male and female students on college campuses around the country. She found that 1 in 4 women on college campuses had been the victim of at least one sexual assault, or attempted sexual assault, in her lifetime, and that 1 in 12 men on college campuses had attempted, or committed, sexual assault in his lifetime. It also revealed important new information about sexual assault, especially that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults were committed by men that the survivor knew, or was dating at the time. Her findings were published in essays in Psychology of Women Quarterly (Vol. 9, 193-212), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (Vol. 53, 422-443, Vol. 55 162-170), and several edited anthologies. Reports on her research were also published in Ms. magazine, and galvanized attention and activism on the issues of date rape and acquaintance rape. Since the early 1990s, Koss’s methods and conclusions have been furiously attacked by a series of anti-feminist writers, and criticism of her work occupies substantial parts of Katie Roiphe’s The Morning After, Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism, etc. The criticism has since been taken up by groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

    Critics claim that Koss’s methods were sloppy, and focus a great deal of fire on her definition of sexual assault. They believe that the definition is too lax, and inflates the statistics by allowing many regrettable but uncoerced sexual encounters to be counted as rape. I think that most of the criticisms are unfounded, and even if they were well-founded Koss’s own research provides the resources for taking them in stride. For a good on-going discussion, you might check out Alas, A Blog’s Mary Koss controversy posts. Robin Warshaw’s book I Never Called It Rape includes a good systematic discussion of Koss’s finding, a methodological essay by Mary Koss explaining how the survey was conducted, and the second edition includes a Foreward that discusses the backlash against the study, especially in Roiphe’s book. I think that Koss’s research is solid social science, and a uniquely valuable source of information both the women who suffer sexual assault and the men who perpetrate it.

    But, setting all that to one side, I never cited Koss’s research in my comments above. I cited a different survey, conducted ten years later, under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Justice. The survey used a different (more conservative) definition of sexual assault. It surveyed a much broader national sample, using different means to conduct the surveys and asking different questions. And, while we’re at it, the statistic that I cited was a statistic on a different subject. What the CDC/NIJ study found is that 1 out of every 4 women in a nationwide sample had been sexually assaulted or beaten by an intimate partner (date, boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, husband, or ex-husband) at least once in her lifetime. The statistic is not about sexual assault alone, but rather about violence broadly; and it is not about violence in general but about partner violence in particular. The only thing that it has in common with Koss’s findings on sexual assault is that the ratio 1 in 4 is involved along the way.

    I conclude that Chris’s attacks on the statistics I employed are unfounded. Also, Fight Club is still a worthless waste of film.

    Hope this clears some things up.

    Follow Up

— 2008 —

  1. Deek /#

    Why does nobody wish to add to Chris’s comment on other meanings behind this novel/film?

    The gender roles in this book are evident but nobody other than Chris can see the other meanings?

    Follow Up

— 2010 —

  1. ForYourMommyyyyy /#

    Honestly, I have to do a media presentation based on this dumb thread thanks to you guys…..

    Follow Up

  2. drooling /#

    It’s not that we can’t see any other meanings, but feminine plight illustrated in fight club seems to be the focus of the blog. There’s enough additional messages to last you a life time. Not that it’s a good thing, I’m sittin here drooling reading through all the essays that expand on the religious motifs and philosophic aspects of the novel/film.

    Follow Up

  3. Jeremy /#

    As I saw it, Fight Club was about men voluntarily choosing to beat each other up. If a bunch a guys want to pummel each other in the wee hours somewhere underground, who are you to condemn it? Hell, who are you to try to associate them with rapists and bullies?

    Fight Club had a lot of messages, not all of them pleasant, not all of them literal. Perhaps listening to men and women and understanding them and their experiences means more than just hearing what we want and judging what we don’t. It’s a shallow gender identity politics, Charles, that reflexively rejects aspects of maleness simply because they’re distasteful. “Violence is bad, mmmkay?”

    Follow Up

  4. Rad Geek /#

    Jeremy,

    If a bunch a guys want to pummel each other in the wee hours somewhere underground, who are you to condemn it?

    Dude, really?

    If a bunch of feminists want to voluntarily issue critiques of pop culture in the wee hours somewhere on the Internet, who are you to condemn it?

    If your argument against my critique is a good one, so is my argument against your meta-critique — which seems awkward for said meta-critique. If, on the other hand, answering the question of whether or not people are acting within their rights of voluntary association does not automatically settle the question of whether or not what they are doing is intelligent or stupid, wise or foolish, exalting or degrading, ethical or unethical, humane or brutal, then just saying Well, it’s voluntary and they likes it is not some kind of peremptory decree against thinking about what sort of picture of humanity, and of masculinity, is being indulged in; or questioning whether that sort of picture might have broader effects outside of the ring.

    Perhaps listening to men and women and understanding them and their experiences …

    Mighty white of you to include the women in the listening along with the men.

    Perhaps it may have occurred to you that the thoughts on Fight Club (and on the critical reception of Fight Club at the convention in question) that I wrote down 8 years ago might have been informed by what I’d heard from women who have had some experiences with men who believe in settling things like men.

    It’s a shallow gender identity politics, Charles, that reflexively rejects aspects of maleness simply because they’re distasteful.

    I’m sure that would be a shallow gender identity politics.

    Come on, dude, really? You’re not ignorant of the kind of facts I have in mind when I suggest that violent masculinity is a problem. Facts about statistical tendencies, and also facts about my own real-life experiences with the business end of patriarchal masculinity, and the real-life experiences of more close friends and loved ones than I care to tally up right now. The notion that feminist critique is reflexive rejection is a silly attempt to erase the amount of thinking, questioning of received facts, and hard self-criticism that goes into it; the rewriting of this critique (which is, remember, a critique dealing with the fact of pervasive sadism, physical battery, and sexual torture) as a matter of mere distaste for aspects of maleness is minimizing, callous, and insulting.

    Follow Up

  5. Jeremy /#

    If a bunch of feminists want to voluntarily issue critiques of pop culture in the wee hours somewhere on the Internet, who are you to condemn it?

    I don’t condemn it. I just don’t understand it. I thought the point of critiquing society was not to arrive at an up or down vote on every single aspect, but to understand those aspects. I run into this again and again with my fellow anarchists, and I just expected more nuance from you, more willingness to listen to something in spite of it being harsh and ugly.

    Fight Club didn’t convince me to go beat up my friends any more than 24 convinces me to support the War on Terror.

    Perhaps it may have occurred to you that the thoughts on Fight Club (and on the critical reception of Fight Club at the convention in question) that I wrote down 8 years ago might have been informed by what I’d heard from women who have had some “experiences” with men who believe in settling things “like men.”

    It did occur to me. What didn’t occur to me, and I don’t mean this in an insulting manner, was to just stop there.

    facts about my own real-life experiences with the business end of patriarchal masculinity

    I’m actually not aware of your story there.

    If it is callous, insulting, and minimizing to suggest that there’s another way to look at a work of art, then I’m guilty. But when the “mighty white” phrase is whipped out, I tend to think this has less to do with critical thinking and introspection and more about political correctness and making sure we look sympathetic to the usual list of victim classes. I’d rather understand than appear sympathetic. You don’t have to change your values to simply open up to another side to the film and book.

    In other words, you and your beliefs, especially the strong feelings about distorted masculinity and pervasive brutality that we share, don’t have to be wrong to be insufficient. That you take as an attack any effort to widen the conversation just means you’re likely missing things about the issue that might be informative. We’ve conflicted before about whether the anarchist should assign greater primacy to understanding or judging, and I think this is another episode in that ongoing conversation.

    Also, disappointment in a friend’s post should not be construed as disrespect, and I hope it wasn’t.

    Follow Up

    • Pokemans /#

      Fight Club is a good book and all but really calm down.. no need to go so deep into this shit.. thanks to you people kids like me have to do stupid projects about blogs like this.

      Really…. thanks alot….. Fuck me… wow..

      Follow Up

  7. JOR /#

    This post is indeed ancient, but I’d just like to say that the romanticized violence of modern conceptions of “manliness”, featuring ideals of fairness and mutual respect between men brave enough to risk pain and injury to validate their fragile egos, have nothing to do with real world historical violence and the ideals of masculine virtue that accompanied it. Deception, treachery, domination, brutality, humiliation, and ruthlessness verging on cowardice are the things central to whatever violence we “evolved” to engage in. Modern mock-violence games have their athletic virtues and perhaps even ‘build character’, but to the extent that they do that they deliberately discourage many of the attitudes that enable the kind of (real) violence that was actually adaptive for our ancestors (e.g. violence aimed at robbing, terrorizing, enslaving, raping, or simply exterminating competitors, rather than emotional validation).

    Follow Up

  8. Bob Kaercher /#

    Interesting thread. I’m always heartened to find someone who detests that overrated hack Palahniuk as much as I do. In addition to being just plain bad, most of his stuff is warmed over Marxist garbage. Fight Club has the extra added tumor of the whole dubious men-as-emasculated-victims meme, making it doubly odious.

    Follow Up

    • Roderick T. Long /#

      I actually liked the movie quite a bit — but (rightly or wrongly) I didn’t interpret it as endorsing Tyler Durden’s ideology; on the contrary, it seemed to be portraying that ideology as a form of insanity.

      Follow Up

    • MBH /#

      Roderick’s definitely right.

      Follow Up

    • Brian N. /#

      It’s a curious thing…deconstruction of a trope is such a hard thing to deploy in any work. It seems that there is the tendency to assume that if the camera is pointed on something for the majority or entirety of the movie, it must be endorsing it. Perhaps that is because it is often the case. We develop that expectation out of habit. It is true, we listen to Durden’s words, see his deeds and so on. But think about what comes of it. The promise of freedom and independence through violence is never realized. People are hurt and even killed. Those who follow Durden are bound in heavier servitude and dependency than they ever knew before. My interpretation is that Palahniuk, and by extension Fincher, is holding up the essence of the psychological appeal that fascism, among other authoritarian political cults, can have to a man. It explains how an idea so rancid did so well - not magic, not hypnosis nor mind control - its salesmen knew who to pitch and how. As Konrad Heiden put it, “propaganda is not ‘the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.’” It seems that Palahniuk understood this and what it can continue to mean.

      Follow Up

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