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Many men are encouraged to believe that their masculinity is related to their aggressiveness and powers of domination and control. Such men honestly feel that they are only men if they are prepared to fight and act like men. The coolest men are the hard-and the hardest testing round is the world of the adolescent male. The coolest dude is the one who messes about and who bullies and belittles with the greatest impunity. If the assumption is correct, and this is the truest way for a man to behave like a man, then in order to for our species to survive, men will have to change or be made redundant-because it is this warrior class of man who is in danger of bringing our planet to the point of extinction. This includes the capitalist and entrepreneurs who are today’s warrior male-a term, which applies here to aggressive, driving, dominated energy. The fight to build empires in the business and economic world leads to exploitation and domination. The gap between rich and poor countries steadily increases, and the relentless consumption of the Western consumer societies are leaving us with the prospect of the exhaustion of the worlds natural resources. Behind nearly all the wars that are fought lies the power of the multinational conglomerates in their relentless efforts to accumulate wealth and territory.The film ‘Fight Club” is a brilliant example of the dichotomy in current masculinity, Jack (Edward Norton) is a dynamic young businessman constantly working to

improve his status, a slave to the consumer society. He tries to fill the void in his life with various forays into encounter groups which leave him more lost than ever until eventually the character of Tyler (Jack’s alter ego) manifests himself. He is all the things Jack would like to be, tough, confident, handsome, violent, sexually very virile, answers only to himself, despises the pointless accumulation of possessions and other ‘soft’ things and is completely in charge of his emotions.Deeply misogynistic overtones lurk in this film-the one female character is almost superfluous; she is always turning up uninvited into this masculine world and ruining things. Her sexuality is a trap and to be avoided and only handled by the alter ego who is ‘man’ enough to do so. The sex scenes are presented as a fight (as are the sex scenes between Close and Douglas in ‘Fatal Attraction)- a wild battle with the alter ego casually coming out and offering her on to the other persona Jack. She is referred to as weaker and best got rid of. In fact the only people the various men are at ease with in the film are other men. The blame for the feminisation of men is laid on the consumer society and its emphasis on the ‘feminine’ objectives of comfort, security and cosiness. But in their search for a real man Tyler and Jack find a destructive, regimented Fascist monster that finally turns on the society it helped to create-the film pushes the compulsive drive for masculinity, i.e. toughness, control, detachment of feelings to the very edge and in the bleak and hopeless ending of this film the audience is left with the grim realisation that until the heart and attitude of humanity changes, the world will continue on its helter skelter ride to oblivion.

Another film worth mentioning is the British film ‘Full Monty’. The film has an altogether more optimistic message although the film is set in a depressing dour small Northern City where the majority of the male citizens are unemployed as the local steel works have shut down; yet all the women are working in reasonably paid jobs. The men gather in groups to bolster their morale. After witnessing some women having a drunken night out in a club, Gary, (the lead character) says, “When women start pissing like us, that’s it. We’re finished. We’re not needed any more are we, obsolete, like dinosaurs, it’s all yesterday’s news…. you’re like the rest of us, on a scrap heap’.

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