21 Comments

1. Yolanda Carrington:

   Surprise, surprise…it’s all white boys in the Fight Club. Who the hell else has the time, inclination, and privilege to pull this shit off?

   Of course these “testosterone-soaked” boys will never have to worry about being labeled as inherently criminal and violent for the rest of their lives….no, not at all like their Black and Latino brethren who are regularly condemned for much less serious shit. And to top it off, there “won’t be any charges laid” either! No, we just want to talk to you, boys! We just want to understand you, dear boys! Why would good boys like you do such nasty things?

   Jesus Christ.

   21 September 2006, 3:39 pm

2. lapetrov:

   Too bad they’re not fighting to the death. Forget about the charges, then I wouldn’t have to worry about them growing up and reproducing! Jeez.

   I loved the movie “Fight Club,” but the main character was mentally ill. Seems like these boys didn’t catch that detail, or never made it to the end of the movie.

   Is there no limit to the stupidity? Our video/fame-obsessed culture only fuels the idiocy.

   21 September 2006, 7:16 pm

3. Required:

   To begin I’m going to come out and say that I’m a young white male. I realise that the reason why this post particularly interested me is because it related to me. I liked fight club. I have contemplated participating in fight clubs. I realise that there’s whole lot of gender issues tied up in this situation and hope that posting what I think about this situation will lead to something constructive. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

   Lapetrov. Do you think that the anti-consumerist message of Fight Club should be discarded as it was just the rantings of a crazy person? If not, then why should one dismiss the other practices/beliefs for that reason?

   I agree that these guys are protected by a privlege that allows them to be able to do this. I also think that nothing they are doing is particularly contructive or new. It is full of mysognistic insults and macho posturing.

   A lot of cliques of teenage boys are guilty of this.

   What is it about fighting in particular that is so stupid? Do people think that it is any more stupid than participating in organised boxing?

   I think there’s something in this topic that has yet to be said. Or at least made clear enough so that I can understand it. This may be a challenge .

   23 September 2006, 11:36 am

4. lapetrov:

   Required, please remind me of the anti-consumerist message of the movie. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. But, just because the main protagonist was insane doesn’t mean that the film itself wasn’t profound or that it’s core meaning should be disregarded. Not at all. I’m just saying that maybe imitation isn’t exactly where to go with it.

   And, it’s not fighting that’s stupid. One of the things I’m jealous of is the ability to just punch someone to try and settle things. Or punch someone just to make myself feel better. I’ve always thought fighting must be very satisfyingly cathartic.

   What’s stupid, to me, is that in 2006 the white male youth of such a “great power” as the USA is spending its time beating each other, and watching others beat each other, for entertainment. Black male youth is killing itself, and girls are busy worrying if they’re too fat or sexy enough. That is, when they aren’t self-medicating with beer, meth, vodka, oxycodone, tequila, heroine, crack, or whatever is the drug of choice in their circle of friends.

   Maybe stupid is not the right word.

   23 September 2006, 5:53 pm

5. skol:

   I don’t think I’m alone in seeing the irony of an “anti-consumerist message” in a film you’re essentially consuming, misogyny and all.
   A lot of discussion, especially in the culture thread, revolves around the solipsism of macho male culture. Solipsism, philisophically, is the belief/fear that you’re the only thing that exists. Normally this is ye olde existential angst, but more generally it’s the belief or mindset that “I’m the only thing that matters”; an “asset”, too, for rascists and misogynists.
   So Fight Club is a movie that both reflects and recreates a phenomenon of a bunch of guys beating themselves bloody for no apparant reason… ostensibly for fun and male bonding. How anyone could describe “bonding” as beating each other to a pulp is beyond me. How anyone could call fighting “fun” without that solipsistic mindset is also beyond me. Fighting, in and of itself, isn’t that much more stupid than boxing (imo), but in this instance, it’s wrapped in privilege and a total lack of reason. And guys can do better than this, right?

   (And even I liked Fight Club. This is my “good-faith?/bad-faith?” disclaimer. There’s a lot for me to wrap my head around, and I’m taking up your challange in part to condense a lot of this practically.)

   23 September 2006, 6:38 pm

6. Required:

   I just remembered something while contemplating this thread. Fight Club was one of the first maijor catalysts for my political radicalisation. Yes, there was stuff prior. And yes there were much more advanced things afterwards, but the thing that first got me involved in political activity, as undeveloped as it was, was Fight Club. So to me it will always have some merit..

   For lapetrov, and others who may not have seen it or read it, Fight Club centres around a nameless young professional working man. At the beginning of the film his apartment is blown up. He looses all his possesions. Out of desperation he turns to another man he met a few days earlier, Tyler Durden. Tyler says he can sleep at his house. It’s an abondoned building. Gradually, the main character becomes increasingly alienated from the corporate world and more excited by the world of Fight Club. Eventually fight club develops into an autonomous terrorist network that attacks (without killing) symbols of coperate power.

   Some quotes.
   “You are not the car you drive, you are not the contents of your wallet.”

   “deliver me from clear skin and perfect teeth”

   You really have to read or watch it to get a full sense of what it’s about. It seems like the nobsacks in the video above are basically using the films popularity to flog their shitty DVD, without much thought as to what the film was actually about.

   As far as the irony of an anti-consumerist consumerable… Well, welcome to capitalism. This is how it works. It is ironic that stan sells his books on the capitalist market when he is infact apposed to capitalism?

   In Fight Club the fights are not had to settle scores.
   Skol, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but I think you logic in dismissing the fights is faulty. First they occur for no reason. But then there are reason, but because those reasons are “beyond (you)” they are no longer reasons.

   It’s play, as far as I can tell. In Fight Club the deal was when you wanted to stop you said stop and the fight was over. Judging by the kid saying that often the fighters would shake hands afterwards it seems like they’re operating on a similar principal.

   I haven’t enaged in this particular type of play fighting, but it seems that many cultures have similar types of fighting for fun. Yes, you get hurt. But you get some pretty savage injuries from all soughts of sports that no-one is argueing are unreasonable.

   Yes, these kids are privleged but they are not priveleged BECAUSE they are play fighting, which seems to be what people are implying. Kind of like “how dare they employee tha privelege to not be harshly dealt with by the cops!” So should they not do anything that utilises their privelege? Pretty impossible given that doing any thing with skin considered White is a privelege.

   24 September 2006, 12:31 am

7. Required:

   Shit, that was meant to be “is it ironic…”

   24 September 2006, 12:32 am

8. James M:

   I don’t know how kosher it is to steer this into film critique territory … but hey, you started it …

   The major proposition of FC, which I think is worth discussion, is that its male characters have been “over-domesticated” (read: feminized) and need a channel for their “natural” male aggression. There’s no more clear-cut exposition of this than the scene where we see the protagonist going to a self-help meeting for testicular cancer survivors and meeting a castrated male (played by Meatloaf) who, due to a dropoff in testosterone, has developed “bitch-tits.” (The film’s wording.) The eunuch later joins Fight Club, presumably as a way of reclaiming his masculinity.

   I think the anti-consumerism that’s been mentioned could also be seen as an extension of this critique of over-domestication … the film could be intimating that the fixation on material acquisition is a feminine trait, and that adopting this fixation is form of capitulation to the “civilizing” influence of women, as opposed to the “natural wildness” of men.

   But the lead character is ultimately revealed to be schizoid, and his hyper-aggressive alter ego is shown to be a repressed shadow-self … his male side fighting to get out, in a very exaggerated way. In the end he comes to what the film posits as a kind of equilibrium, realizing that his belligerence has been a way of bending the stick too far in the opposite direction, an overzealous method of correcting his perceived disequilibrium.

   I think it’s safe to say that the film is essentially in agreement with the wild vs. civilized / feminized man theme … but seems to call into question whether affinity for sado-masochistic pugilism is what really defines “natural manhood.”

   FC was for me an enjoyable film, but its main theme is a great big open question. I don’t have any solid opinion on it, other than that’s it’s worth discussing. I’ve actually wondered what the thinkers on this site would make of it, so I hope the discussion continues.

   24 September 2006, 3:50 am

9. James M:

   BTW, I want to make it clear that I don’t think FC is in any way a valid rejoinder to the claims of feminism against patriarchy, (or for that matter, that its reason for being is even necessarily to serve as one.) By saying its theme is an open question, I’m only saying I’d like to hear other perspectives before I close the book on it.

   24 September 2006, 4:20 am

10. skol:

    >> It is ironic that stan sells his books on the capitalist market when he is infact apposed to capitalism?

    I made a dumb remark.
    I don’t trust most of mass-audience to consume it for any good, but I’m cynical towards mass-audiences in general.

    >> Skol, I’m not sure how to phrase this, but I think you logic in dismissing the fights is faulty. First they occur for no reason. But then there are reason, but because those reasons are “beyond (you)” they are no longer reasons.

    You’re right. It is beyond me, but in my head/heart it isn’t right. I’m thinking that there are better ways to spend one’s time, though, than hurting each other, but again, those reasonings stem from reasons that aren’t really reasons

    24 September 2006, 11:58 am

11. Required:

    Word, James. You got it. I’d had sought of examined it along those lines but never come to anything as coherent as that. I’ve got a friend who loves Chuck Palahniuk, she says that the book doesn’t play up the male-ness (what a crap use of words) so much. For instance a lot of Tyler’s rants that refer to only plight men in the movie, refer to both men and women in the book. Although there is never any mention of exclusively female plights.

    It seems to me that they played up the misogyny in the movie, perhaps to get it funded. I’ve noticed that when ever there’s a TV show or movie that’s “radical” for some particular reason (for example it contains characters of an ethnic minority that are usually not seen on TV) there’s a societal rule that it must attack women more vehemently than your average show. There have probably been a lot of cool

    To further back up what James said, the main characters in the film make their money by stealing liposuctioned fat from plastic surgeons to make luxury soap from it. The mysoginistic line from the film was “Selling rich women their own fat asses back to them.” Anyway, the poster showed the bar of pink soap (mimicked in the kids poster above) with tag line “wash your feminine side clean off.”

    Actually thinking about it, practically every aspect of the film is soaked in patriarchy. Wow.

    24 September 2006, 10:15 pm

12. Consumer:

    Hey all, long time no see.

    I liked FC too but like James M, I think its intended main theme is a big open question.

    Two points I think are not in dispute, points that probably appeal to the copycat boys:

    1) The domesticated cubicle drone played by Edward Norton subconsciously desires to be either more alive or more masculine or both. His mind creates Tyler and “they” begin the fight clubs.

    2) In the course of the escalation of scale and violence, Norton becomes disturbed and tries to stop things. He is almost powerless against Tyler until he realizes he controls him because they are one and the same. Norton’s series of self-flaggelating rituals throughout the film then climaxes when he kills Tyler by firing a pistol into his own mouth.

    So, 1) the desire to be masculine and alive (whatever those terms mean) and 2) purification of self through punishment of self. These are hardly new concepts, guys. And these boys are hardly the first to pursue these things. These motivations can arguably be found in a wide range of groups, from the ancient Spartans to the modern-day triathlete.

    So what’s the aberration here? Violence or the fact that nice white boys from the burbs create this atmosphere of violence?

    24 September 2006, 10:15 pm

13. peggy:

    This line from the article above caught my eye:

    “I doubt that there will be any (charges),” Davis told The Banner. “You can consent to a fight and that’s not breaking the law. Where it becomes an offence is when someone suffers bodily harm and this is just kind of walking that line. …”

    So, evidently, according to the police, these fighters are not causing each other bodily harm(???) Maybe the constable means serious bodily harm? Enduring bodily harm? Whatever.

    On the basis of the information given in the article, I cannot conclude that these boys’ fight clubs should be cause for serious concern. They appear less bad than the fraternity hazings that happened generations ago, and probably are still happening. They appear less bad than boxing, rugby, or American football. If the pictures are “graphic” I gather that means they show blood. But, so? If you get a small cut on the head you can bleed profusely and it looks awful, but it is really not that bad.

    The larger question here is – should young people participate in sports that entail some degree of limited violence? To be perfectly honest, I don’t see why not, if they really want to, and it really is voluntary and carefully limited.

    I saw the movie Fight Club, and thought it was a good movie. Politically controversial, sure, but that was one of the things that made it a good movie: hard questions were asked, for which no clear and pat answers were offered, or could be found.

    The movie and the existing fight clubs that it has spawned may or may not be patriarchal and sexist. I am wondering if there are any girls’ fight clubs out there. I would not be surprised if there were. Would they be patriarchal and sexist, too? Why or why not?

    Required said he was looking for different points of view on this matter, so I thought I’d weigh in.

    26 September 2006, 6:32 pm

14. Required:

    I agree with peggy. I don’t really see a problem with them playing like this. Selling DVD’s of it is another story. I think it ties in with what Susan Faludi said in Stiffed: The betrayal of modern man (not sure if I got the subtitle right). She talks about how our public image of masculinity has shifted. While it used to be strongly linked to the ability to be useful, to produce etc. Now there has been a shift more to an image, media masculinity. It’s about how you look not what you do. She makes some interesting comparisons between this and the way that women sexuality has been defined culturally through the media.

    I’m butchering what she wrote, it was a long time ago that I read it, but good book. Deals with a lot of what the Fight Club movie dealt with. I think there’s even a reference to it in the collectors edition of the DVD.

    27 September 2006, 7:22 am

15. lapetrov:

    I find it extremely ironic how women have become the negative civilizing force upon men when it has always been men who defined themselves historically as the heart and soul of all things civilized. HA! Women have always been considered the “wild” creatures. Very interesting switch. Bullshit, but interesting. The job of socializing young men into being productive members of society has always been older men’s job. Is this a job now passed on to women because men are failing at it?

    Also, the deep-seated fear of being “feminized” is, to me, as repugnant as the fear white people have whenever a black person moves into their otherwise all-white neighborhood. Somehow they’re going to be “reduced” to a lesser form of being or life by association.

    Brings me back to the point that the main character in Fight Club and his behavior are not to be imitated. Again, that’s not to say the movie doesn’t have important things to say anyway.

    Thanks for reminding me of the soap, the liposuction fat and the hateful sentiment toward women it contained. Women get liposuction because (white) men insist that women have no fat on their bodies, contrary to what is perfectly natural for us. AND because (mostly white male) DOCTORS are happy to make a fortune off of their insecurities and dependence on male approval. Men, on the other hand are too homophobic to fuck a man, so they try to turn us into one. Faludi wrote a good book on that too, before _Stiffed_.

    Ahem. Sorry, but my blood gets boiling…

    Finally, I don’t understand how any of you can think this street/teen fight clubbing is “harmless fun.” We live in a violent enough society as it is, how can more violence bring us anywhere worth going? Aren’t we ignorant enough? Don’t we already watch enough tv? Now we’re going to be beating each other for fun? What is this, Rome?

    Young people are already extremely vulnerable. Some numbers (kind of old, but what I could find quickly):

    -In 1998, about a third of all victims of violent crime were ages 12 to 19 and almost half of all victims of violence were under age 25. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice)

    -Homicide is the second leading cause of death for persons 15-24 years of age and is the leading cause of death for African-American and Hispanic youths in this age-group (Anderson RN, Kochanek KD, Murphy SL. Report of final mortality statistics, 1995. Monthly vital statistics report 45, 11(2 Suppl) 1997).

    -In 1996, 6,548 young people 15-24 years old were victims of homicide. This amounts to an average of 18 youth homicide victims per day in the U.S. ( National Summary of Injury Mortality Data, 1988-1996. Atlanta, GA: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, November, 1998 (Unpublished)).

    Black and Hispanic boys kill each other, white boys beat each other –and this is going to take us where exactly as a society? What promise does it hold for us?

    27 September 2006, 7:35 pm

16. James M:

    You have good points, Lapetrov, et al — exactly the kind of perspective I was looking for. When we talk about the process of civilizing, I think we’re describing a process of ordering, of creating regularity and predictability out of what is considered chaotic and unpredictable. Women have always been considered the “wild” creatures … which brings us back to “a woman’s body is a foreign country” … to be conquered and “re-ordered” to mens’ liking. Maybe this relates to the stereotype of men as inherently more logical, hence “ordered,” and women as more emotional, more “hysterical,” i.e. chaotic.

    Yet women are of course also traditionally associated with domesticity, and domestic order, in the form of being the ones responsible for housework, etc. For “keeping up appearances.” For taking the beastly edge off the unruly male. I just came across a sentence somewhere else which read, “His apartment was meticulously well-kept, especially for a bachelor.” We are used to these kinds of statements, because we’ve bought into the notion of women as civilizing influences on males, at least in terms of their outward appearance and behavior. And that’s what FC is going after, imho.

    Seems we have a paradox here. I can’t go any further with it because it makes my head hurt.

    But I want to ask another question, which may go back to the original intent of the post, and it’s a kind of nature vs. nurture, as well as chicken-or-the-egg, riddle: How do we explain the seeming “naturalness” or casualness of violence among boys? These things which shock us adults, don’t seem so shocking to kids. For instance, I can recall as a boy of about 8 years old, taking offense to something my neighbor said and punching him so hard in the mouth that I knocked out his front teeth. (Teeth come and go pretty easily at that age.) I didn’t think about it, or question it, I just followed an impulse. That sort of thing seemed common among my peers, until as we grew up our punches had more weight behind them and hurt a lot more, and fighting started to only seem like a good idea under the influence of alcohol.

    Was I socialized to punch my neigbor by things like G.I. Joe cartoons and Hollywood, or was it a testosterone-fueled, natural impulse? With the TV as my primary parental figure, was I just re-enacting the violence I saw onscreen, at an age when the consequences weren’t as severe? Or is it merely that “boys will be boys?”

    This is getting back to the gender question that Stan brought up in the first place.

    28 September 2006, 12:07 am

17. lapetrov:

    The use of domesticity and women’s association with it as a social positive was a 19th century project; one that obviously succeeded. Women are/were supposed to clean up everything –from dirty dishes to dirty politics. This of course is absurd as women are no more “naturally” clean (ie. morally good) then men are “naturally” violent (ie. protectors against “bad” others). It’s all Christian bullshit.

    The bottom line is we are all violent. We are all strong and all weak. We are all clean and all dirty. It’s just that when girls are violent or strong they are actively discouraged from it (especially white girls). AND boys, well weakness is beat out of them and too many have moms that don’t make them do a damn thing for themselves so they just grow up assuming there’ll always be some woman to pick up after them, and too often there’s a woman who, happy about it or not, does just that. I could go on and type out a long-winded exposition of all the variations and reasons why, but why bother? I think my point is clear. Humans are all things, not just gender stereotypes. It’s time we (as a world) took that truth seriously and considered it our point of departure.

    What interests me is not so much the chicken or the egg line of thinking, though I can totally see why one might want to resolve that. In the end however it won’t really make much of a difference if it’s more biology or more socialization. We can’t change our biological impulses. We can only change the way we socialize ourselves and our young. That has to be where we aim our attention and our efforts. Social change won’t come from manipulating our DNA. At least I don’t think so, but I’d welcome a rebuttal.

    What I want to know is WHEN are we going to get past biology as some kind of determinant, or (more truthfully) as an excuse for our basest actions? That is, when are we as human beings going to demand from ourselves more? When are we going to say, so-the-fuck-what my instincts tell me to obliterate my competition by any means possible? And say instead to ourselves, we are all one, made of the same flesh and blood. What is the best we can wish for ourselves and the future of humanity and how can we achieve it?

    Just because we are “naturally” fascinated by death (it is our greatest unknown is it not), doesn’t mean we should live so that death is the only reasonable result we can expect from our efforts.

    Ultimately, I think we have to come back to power. Those with power and influence have the most to gain by interfering with the unification of the mass of us with little to no power. It suits someone’s purposes for these boys to waste their time video taping and watching each other beat each other silly. They never achieve any consciousness of how they are pawns in someone else’s game that way. They live and die for nothing except to make someone else money, or even to make their own money, so they can spend it on someone else’s products. At least that’s what my not-so-humble opinions are at this moment, after a day of grading papers.

    28 September 2006, 3:48 pm

18. James M:

    Well said. You’re right — it’s not terribly useful to entertain desert-island scenarios about whether I would’ve delivered that blow to my neighbor’s face in the absence of socialization; it’s more important to understand that the behavior, regardless of its ultimate origin, was encouraged by a social setting, and that it can and should be discouraged by the same.

    Do you have any references to this “19th century social project” you mentioned? Victorianism, perhaps?

    28 September 2006, 6:41 pm

19. DeAnander:

    off the cuff…

    The relationship of constructed “Womanness” and Order is arbitrary and inconsistent because it’s an instrumental construction by a higher caste (men) that serves the ideological purposes of that caste rather than describing reality. Woman is whatever Man needs her to be from one moment to the next to bolster his own ego and secular power.

    Similarly whitefellas constructed the indigenes they were destroying as (a) ruthless bloodthirsty savages like wild beasts and (b) innocent pacifistic and pure children of Nature — depending on the argument the whitefella was making that required a symbolic indigene as a cartoon illustration, bogeyman, or whatever. The American Black slave was either a dear old harmless teddybear of an Unca or a Mammy, or a sinister ticking time bomb of sexual predation and mass violence, again depending on what Massa needed him/her to be for instrumental/rhetorical/self-justificatory purposes from moment to moment. Children are routinely caricatured by adults, in literature and in life, either as evil little monsters (Lord of the Flies) or darling little cherubs. These grotesque cartoon dichotomies imposed over the existence of real 3d human beings are one “tell” or hallmark of the oppressor class’ fantasy life, which is populated with malleable symbols rather than with real perceptions of real human beings. Virgin/Whore. The “ignorant dirty backwards Arab” who is somehow simultaneously the mastermind of globe-spanning, intricate and lethal conspiracies against the entire project of Western Civ.

    The thing about being the Uebermensch is that your brain gets to have its cake and eat it too, since lower caste people are not allowed to interrupt, disagree, buy airtime, or (heaven forbid) roll about laughing.

    Not that people don’t cherish similar dichotomous, deeply dissident visions of them(our)selves, but the most patently ridiculous contradictions usually indicate we’re being used in someone else’s memeshow as paper cutouts, without any reference to our real gnarly selves.

    And so of course women are guardians of Order and civility within the confines of male authority — home, scriptural marriage, the private sphere, where men want the toilets scrubbed by someone else — yet all of a sudden we are too “unstable and emotional” or “weak” to be guardians of order in the public sphere. Women are “naturally” wild and animalistic when men want to objectify us sexually or deny us education, but “naturally” repressive and moralising and prudish when we resist male sexual predation.

    Women are “naturally” whatever men need to project onto women from moment to moment — either a civilising foil for their fantasies of Iron John burly manhood, or a “wild and mysterious” Other for their fantasies of conquest and exploration, or a nurturing Mommy when they want sympathy or a hot meal. What most women are not, for most men, is friends: people whom one tries to perceive clearly, understand compassionately, and in turn be perceived by and understood, with mutual respect.

    28 September 2006, 7:24 pm

20. lapetrov:

    Well put De. Clear as ice. One of the most frustrating things for me is that here we are, still today, after thousands of years mostly defined by another. What is beauty in women, what is a woman’s worth, and what our purposes may be are still things male dominated society considers within its domain to determine for us, and consistently tries to do just that. Of course, the key is dominated by males and that is what has to end.

    James, the interesting thing is the 19th century project I mentioned turned out to be feminism itself. Yes, Victorianism had a role, and there’s more to it too. The women who were desperate to make positive social change (Christians, abolitionists and temperance movement members especially) realized that their most effective argument for power capitalized on the view of women as more atuned to proper morality, for the family, and thus for the greater social family. Read anything about first wave feminism and you’ll get the picture. A quick google search yielded the following; I think they will help give you a general idea:

    http://www.enotes.com/feminism-literature/women-19th-century

    http://www.connerprairie.org/historyonline/1880wom.html

    http://home.earthlink.net/~gfeldmeth/lec.reform.html

    29 September 2006, 10:04 pm

21. Tabster:

    I don’t know if this fact has been commented on or not, but there were no ‘ODSS Fight Clubs.’ It was nothing more than a blown out of proportion situation that the media was all over.

    Firstly, in response to the comment of what Constable Davis said about not being able to charge them, is that, if they were willingly consenting to participate in such activities, they cannot be charged for causing harm to each other, unless it becomes fatal.

    As for the fights themselves, most of the fights were over three years old, and were nothing more than your regular high school fights that someone happened to tape.

    14 December 2006, 4:16 pm

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