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I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.
Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.
I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.
Tyler Durden was a terrorist, also showcasing how some portion of the ‘incels’ or whatever the term is will turn to violence.
Seriously- mass shootings are pretty much all young males with no male role to fill.
It's almost always narcissism and rage, not lack of a role.
People who don't know what to do just stagnate, they don't lash out and kill random people.
Write it down: %favorite_demographics% Americans kill because of narcissism and rage, not because of poverty or systemic something.
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I'm curious why this got downvoted. I think people without direction could easily fall into either the "frozen in time" failure state or take the "nihilistic/solopsistic violence" route.
No idea.
In many case unless we're talking psychotics like e.g. Jared Loughner, perpetrators of mass killings of random people are narcissists who hate society and feel justified to do so.
It's not something any reasonably normal person would do. Absolute majority of aimless young men settle for at worst drugs & petty crime. To murder-suicide complete strangers you need a pathological personality or something driving you crazy. There's a suggestion that some school shootings are related to very rare SSRI side effects.
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When Brad Pitt is an incel, you know the word has no meaning whatsoever.
This seems like an inability to decouple. The story touched on modern alienation and how young men found some difficult to articulate lacking in modernity. The fighters were described not as incels but as "the middle children of history" with "no purpose or place".
Durden:
Incels:
Do you see the parallel now? Of course the original expectations were always an unrealistic lie. Most men historically have not reproduced. But that realization itself is deranging, it is liable to get young men's blood boiling. If all they've been suffering for is a lie then why suffer? Some may even lash out and punish whoever they've convinced themselves are responsible in misplaced but not misfelt rage.
Yes, it's about disenfranchised men. I'm disputing the claim that it's about incels.
I guess I don't think anyone is claiming it was written about incels, it's just addressing the same root thing that incels also feel even though it presents differently.
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Be more specific about what you take from the comment you're replying to?
Because if I take your comment literally... "a commenter on TheMotte used the word "incel" in relation to a character played by Brad Pitt [note - not Brad Pitt himself], and from this we see that the word "incel" is meaningless" seems difficult to justify.
Tyler Durden is played by Brad Pitt, an infamously sexually attractive man. He is the alter-ego of another man who, while less overwhelmingly sexy than Brad Pitt, is still a pretty good-looking dude. Both in-universe and out-of-universe, the men involved are not struggling sexually, nor suffering the world's disdain, nor would they even if they hit a rough patch.
That either one of them would be representative of "incel" culture, even in its early days, is ridiculous. Incel has become a catch-all term for "distressed and male", and that's really not a useful description. The concerns of the narrator are not the concerns of incels, as /u/FiveHourMarathon attempts to suggest. The narrator is influential, has status, has sexual success, and relative economic comfort. He's unhappy, but "incel" is not the same thing at all -- at least, it didn't used to be.
At this point, "incel" has become a new, fairly general insult. A socially acceptable replacement of calling someone "gay" in the old times. The literal meaning is different of course, but the underlying sting of the insult has a very similar source, namely that the person cannot fulfill the masculine role of seducing women and "obtaining" sex from them. When calling others "gay" (in the schoolyard sense) was not as taboo as today, it also referred to this: being passive, non-agentic, not being a go-getter.
Lame, loser etc. It doesn't mean "literally lives a zero-sex life involuntarily".
It's just part of the standard woke narrative. "Society's problems are caused by a group of men, and it just happens to be a group we despise."
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Brad Pitt was the mental image projected by the schizophrenic narrator of what he would be like if only he could bring himself to actually just fuck Marla the way he wanted to all along. Brad Pitt, within the universe of the film, doesn't exist, he's an idealization of the chaotic masculinity the narrator wants to access. (I'm using the actor rather than the character name "Tyler Durden" because whether Tyler exists is kind of complicated, the narrator is also Tyler)
Which taking the visual symbolism of the film seriously, presents us with two explanations.
Either the incel imagines that he must transform himself into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest in order to have sex with a woman. Or the incel thinks that if only he could have sex with a woman, the act of doing so would transform him into Brad Pitt at his absolute hottest.
I think it's one of the best commentaries on male sexuality in film. Probably alongside Eyes Wide Shut.
I prefer my third explanation: the movie is not about an incel.
Incel is kind of a loaded term, but the precipitating event of the narrator's split personality is presented pretty clearly as his meeting Marla, and being unable to fuck her as himself, needing to become free to have sex. So incel maybe not, but I don't think the work can carry a reading that isn't centered on sexual repression.
Repressed sexuality is absolutely one of the themes, as an expression of the broader repression of masculinity and purpose; the narrator is not an incel, he's a very traditional manosphere conception of a beta male. He has a comfortable job, and a comfortable life, but has no vitality or ambition or ways to really actualize and express himself as a man.
He's castrated by society and his own fear of rocking the boat. Tyler's an escape not simply because he has sex (the narrator isn't a sexual tyrannosaurus but there's also no indications I remember of him being an eternally blueballed virginal wreck), but because he's free in all ways -- he's free to fuck, he's free to fight, he's free to rebel and claw personal meaning out of a peaceful and atomized suppression of the self.
I definitely agree Fight Club's message puts it firmly in the manosphere wing of gender politics, but I reject wholeheartedly the idea it's about incels. Ennui with modern society firmly predates them. Uncle Ted's crazy, but he's not incel crazy.
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Brad Pitt wasn't the incel; Edward Norton was. Which is still pretty unlikely, though that kind of thing is par for the course for Hollywood.
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I think the term "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is particularly salient here.
Whether it's shooting up a shopping mall out of anger at [women/jews/whatever] or attacking an actively oppressive tyrannical government, it's young males who are generally willing to throw their life away in an act of supreme violence for a cause they believe in or at least against an enemy they hate.
So this factor of males turning to violence has both positive and negative valences depending on circumstance.
But yes, Tyler Durden is a terrorist.
I feel comfortable saying that lone wolves turning to killing is negative in most every circumstance.
Even if we impartial observers agree with the cause, labeling it freedom-fighting, the adage still holds. “Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.” Throwing one’s life away to hurt the “enemy” is rarely efficient. This is one of the big reasons why democracy, as a tool for suborning violence into coordination, is so useful.
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