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Geekery Today: posts tagged Edinboro College
Fight Club and Boy Culture: Teaching Men the Wrong Lessons (posted 30 April 2001)
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 itlike 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.
