After a weird dinner at a remote roadside Vietnamese/Thai/Chinese restaurant a few miles outside Oaxaca City the other day, I received a black (black?) fortune cookie with the fortune written in Spanish. “You always know your heart through your words.” Well, I’ll see what writing my words here reveal to me about my heart.

I recently had a very long skype discussion with my oldest son, a 47 year old single serial monogamist (as I describe it), about the book and movie Fight Club. The book was written by Chuck Palahniuk, a Portland Oregon native. Interesting discussions can be found on THE CULT…the official fan site.

The book even though written 15 years ago, is significant because it has found an ear among thousands of younger men that is often referred to as the “millennials.”

Fight Club isn’t just about the fight but a metaphor for contemporary notions of masculinity, my son says. [At least Contemporary American notions. It would be interesting to do a cross-cultural comparison.]

The movie is about “emasculated” men “raised mainly by women” who grew up to fear violence…who were taught that violence was never right, (yikes!) my son says. Often women teach their sons to cower in the face of bullies. [“Turn the other cheek, the biblical christians say.”] When you teach a kid to never stand up for himself he becomes forever an internalized victim, my son says. Bullies think: Ok I’ve got you in my pocket now.

Tyler (Brad Pitt), the little voice (alter ego) of the protagonist Edward Norton, starts the Fight Club and is sick of being a victim. ” I’d rather lose a tooth,: he says.

At the premiere of Fight Club in Las Vegas: Pitt said the movie is about a generation of men who were taught to fear conflict. If you get into a situation take care of it. Whether it is conflict with physical threat or psychological.

At this point I start to wonder about the implications of this for a couple generations of young men who have grown up uncomfortable with conflict but then go off unprepared emotionally to fight unspeakable wars. And the military which then tries to undo it and force men to be men overnight. And the suicide rate of returning service men with PTSD and failed marriages and broken families.

But back to the movie. It is not about male machismo…that’s not what the author is saying, my son says. It’s not just about becoming a victim physically but in other ways too. “My mom says I’m special but out in the world I’m not automatically considered special.”

Then we talked about my middle son who beat the crap out of a neighbor’s son one day long ago because the neighbor’s son had bullied my son for years…with the neighbor son’s father watching. The father hadn’t controlled his kid’s bullying because he felt it was up to my son to learn to defend himself. (That was also my children’s father’s thought about controlling the fights between our 3 kids). But I usually interceded…perhaps a mistake). I was, after all, a child of the peace and love 60’s.
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