Is Fighting a Part of Manhood?

Robbie Dillon recently had an article at AskMen.com on "The Joy of Punching," in which he argues that fighting is a cornerstone of his masculine identity- that having beaten others and been beaten himself is a "badge of honor."

Interestingly, AskMen linked to another article from their site that outlines the Top Ten: Masculinity Myths, one of which is that "real men fight."

Real men fight 

We’re still not sure why some men resort to fisticuffs in order to prove their manliness. There’s perhaps nothing more barbaric than watching two boozy meatheads trade blows outside a club, usually for reasons as mundane as a scuffed sneaker. Don’t get us wrong. We’re the first to promote fighting as a method of defending yourself or the ones you love from physical harm. But punching someone in the face because you like the way spilled blood looks on the sidewalk or the way a shattered nose feels against your knuckles isn't manly; it’s moronic.

Dillon seems to take some pride in being a man who fights and who will always fight. Here is the beginning of his article:

You’re a nice guy. I get that. You think violence is stupid and unnecessary, and you’re right. But let’s play make-believe for a minute. It’s Saturday night. You’re walking out of the movies with your girlfriend, or maybe you’re in the lineup at a club. Some jerk eyes your date up and down and says, “Hey, baby girl. Where you goin' tonight?” She ignores him. So far, so good. Then he grabs her arm and pulls her toward him. You tell him to let her go. He shoves you away with his free hand and says, “Whatta ya gonna do about it?” 

So? What are you going to do about it?

I've been in a few scraps in my day. Some I’m a little ashamed of, a lot more I feel pretty good about. I once kneed a racist cop in his balls so hard that I lifted him three inches off the ground. His buddies gave me a good working over in the back stairwell of the police station, but hard as they tried, they couldn't smack the grin off my face. I laid another guy out with a single punch after he insulted my aunt and her girlfriend down at the local bar one night. People who were there still talk about it.

I've also taken my share of beatings, which, as far as I’m concerned, is a badge of honor -- no one can accuse me of picking my shots. I've been punched, kicked, slashed with knives and had guns pointed in my face. I once took a boot to the back of the head that put me in a coma and left me with dizzy spells and blurred vision for the better part of a year. Still, my biggest regrets are the handful of fights I've had to walk away from.

Don’t get me wrong -- it’s not like I go looking for trouble, but when it comes knocking, I don’t exactly bar the door. I’m not a violent person, but I know that fighting has always been, and probably always will be, a part of my life. The ability to defend myself and those close to me, to stand up for those who can’t protect themselves, is one of the cornerstones of my identity, inseparable from my idea of what it means to be a man.

Huffington Post does a podcast, HuffPost Live, and they tackled this article and the idea of fighting as an element of masculinity. One of the Good Men Project editors (Social Justice Editor, Cameron Conaway) participated, as well as GQ and Vice writer Gavin McInnes, and some others.

McInnes offered up the old-school tough-guy masculinity norm (read: bullshit): “You’re not a real man, until you've had your heart broken, you've broken a heart, you've beaten someone up and you've had the crap beaten out of you.”

Ivan "Doc" Holiday, who runs a bouncer school, is even more pugilistic than Dillon or McInnes.

Conaway (a former MMA fighter), along with the moderator, was the lone voice of reason, in my opinion. He argued that fighting to protect oneself is much different than fighting because you have a short fuse (like McInnes).

Here is the conversation from HuffPost:


The question asked at the Good Men Project is: "What do you think? Is Cameron right that there’s a big difference between fighting to protect oneself (as even the Dalai Lama said he would do, if necessary) and allowing adrenaline to shorten one’s wick?"

I have not hit anyone since I was in college (one punch to a drunk guy harassing a female friend). Before that it had been several years. However, when I was in 3rd-6th grades, I fought a LOT.

First, while I still lived in California, it was protecting myself and my friends from bullies. When I moved to rural Southern Oregon, fighting was how the boys established who was the alpha male, but this was not punching each other in the face fighting, it was basically wrestling each other into submission. Moving there in the 4th grade, I was the new guy, so I was challenged frequently.

I agree with some of these guys that when there is no other option, it may be necessary to fight. But there are always other options. And if those fail, brawling is not the answer, either. If it comes to that point, ideally one should incapacitate the threat as quickly and efficiently as possible (knees, nose, eyes, and shoulders/elbows are the easiest ways to drop a guy). Exchanging punches is a losing proposition all around.

It was my father who taught me how to defend myself, but it was also my father who taught me that a quick mind is much more effective than a quick temper.

Personal Observation - Violent Instincts?

I tend to think of myself as relatively evolved, i.e., I walk upright, I speak in complete sentences (usually), and I do not solve problems with violence. Well, that last one should include "anymore" at the end because when I was young, I did solve problems with violence. Somewhere around the end of my teens and the beginning of my 20s, I stopped using my fists and began using my brain.

Looking back at my youth, I tend to see those violent days as a manifestation of being taught by my father that the only way to deal with bullies was to beat the crap out of them. BUT, I was never to be a bully myself - and no matter what she did, I was never to hit a girl.

There was also the serious influence of peers who fought on the playground to determine alpha status. We never really hurt each other, it was more like wrestling the other other person into submission. Violence seemed to be a cultural norm, even though I was suspended from school a couple of times for fighting.

As an adult, I thought I had outgrown that desire to hurt people.

Recently, however, a very unstable person has inflicted serious chaos and uncertainty (possible loss of livelihood as a worst-case outcome) into the life of someone I care about very much. And the unstable person has recruited otherwise sane people in the quixotic quest to hurt my friend.

I was rather disturbed that my first impulse was a desire to hurt this person. Obviously it's something I would never do, but the thought arose and sat there in my awareness almost mocking me. It seemed to be saying, "This is who you are - there is no escaping your true nature."

Before you conclude that I myself am less than stable, please be assured that I do not hear voices, nor do I see invisible people. But I do try to dialogue with thoughts and feelings sometimes, which is part of a psychological process called disidentification.

OK then, I was left wondering if the desire that arose in me is a leftover from my youth, or if it is something hard-wired into males as the "protectors" of the tribe. Are men, in general (and obviously not all men), hard-wired to protect those they care about with violence? Is this a part of our genetic heritage?

Perhaps.

But we also have the option to see these impulses as objects of awareness and not be identified with them, not be compelled to act them out. Clearly, evolution has endowed us with higher order functions.

I'd be curious to hear from any men who have thoughts on this issue. Does this happen for you? How do you make sense of it?

WTF? Raising Boys to Be Cage-Fighters

Jesus' General is a right-wing parody blog that has been doing the satire thing long before Stephen Colbert launched The Colbert Report. Writing as Gen. JC Christian, Patriot, he parodies wacky right-wing policies and beliefs - always using things they have actually done as fodder for his blog.

In this instance, he reports on fathers in England who are locking boys (as young as 8 years old) into a cage and encouraging them to fight each, bare knuckles, no head gear - and they are doing it in pubs, where the alcohol-fueled thirst for blood is likely to remove all lingering elements of common sense and humanity.

What the bloody fuck is that? To me, this is child abuse. At least the police are looking into it.

I have no problem with teaching kids to box - put the gloves on, wear some head gear, and help them learn to defend themselves. Worked for me. But bare knuckle brawling in a locked cage is not something children should be doing. Period. End of story.

Making Men

Posted by Gen. JC Christian, Patriot


It ain't easy raising a boy into manhood these days. Femislamunistofascism permeates our culture. Our boys are brought up to play soccer, to express themselves verbally, to resist bullying the weak and different, and to worship the foo foo Jesus of the Beatitudes.


Thankfully, English fathers are bringing traditional boy-raising techniques back. They're locking eight-year-old boys into a cage and making them fight each other, bare handed and without padding. Yes that's right, their making men out of their boys by entering them into bare-knuckled cage fighting matches.


And it's not just about the beatings. The cage fights are held in pubs, where the fathers can model proper manly behavior by drunkenly cheering each cut eye and bloodied nose.


I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the OBAMUNIST USURPER'S America is getting it's butt kicked in the battle to raise boys into men, but it stings nonetheless.


We, not furriners, should be leading the way. We are the nation that raised Dick Cheney and Rick Perry. We're the nation that cheers for the death of the uninsured and boos homosexualist combat vets. We're the nation that values execution over life, and torture over justice. We should be the ones bringing our boys into manhood by locking them into cages and cheering as they beat each other to a pulp.


We shouldn't put on our Patrick Henry colonial costumes until that day happens. We don't deserve to wear tri-cornered hats and fancy short britches if we don't demand that our boys beat the tar out of each other.

The Good Men Project - Are Men Inherently Violent?

Well, hell, that's a provocative title. I'm not a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, but I think this is one area where that approach is useful. Men are not inherently violent, we're just better at it than are women.

We are bigger, stronger, faster, and have more testosterone - biologically, we are more suited to violence. So culturally, we have assumed that role within the family, the tribe, the community, the kingdom, the nation.

I think that we also have a natural tendency toward altruism - a willingness to sacrifice our own life to protect our DNA, our tribe, our nation.

On the other hand, when I was young (moving to rural Oregon as a 9-year-old), boys fought in school all the time (and we were not expelled). It was how we established hierarchy. The toughest guys picked the teams at recess, we got to be at the front of the line at lunch, and it's no coincidence that we were the first boys the hit puberty.

When I lived in California, the San Fernando Valley suburbs, this was not at all the norm. So what's the difference? The LA area was more liberal, more developed, and more culturally diverse than Southern Oregon. In Williams (the tiny town where I grew up), the "men were men and the sheep ran scared." OK, bad joke.

But seriously, this was a rural farming and logging community, all white, quite religious. Masculinity was very "primitive," for lack of a less offensive word, and very tied to Old West style masculinity norms. Fighting was part of growing up. Fortunately for me, my father had taught me how to fight and made me enroll in Golden Gloves. No son of his was going to be a wuss.

Anyway, so my guess it is a cultural construct that builds on innate male skills - not tendencies.

Are Men Inherently Violent?

January 7, 2011 By Tom Matlack

Is fighting an essential ingredient in manhood? Is violence a part of who we are? Guys weigh in.

One of the big issues surrounding manhood and goodness is the role violence plays in how we express our masculinity. Is violence innate, or is it learned? Even if we could unlearn it, should we?

I grew up in a household of Quaker pacifists. My dad taught me early on that civil disobedience is stronger than fists and guns. Gandhi and Martin Luther King accomplished what no army could. In Amherst, Massachusetts, where I grew up, there was an uncomfortable mix of rural kids and faculty brats—and as a brat who stood head and shoulders above the rest—six feet tall by the seventh grade—I became a natural target for bullies hoping to prove their mettle.

One particularly tough kid started bumping into me in the hall in front of all my classmates. When I wouldn’t respond, he grabbed my books and threw them down the hall, yelling at me for being a sissy. Finally, he figured out my schedule and waited for me outside each of my classes, pinning me up against the nearest locker to spit in my face.

I went to the guidance counselor’s office to use the phone so I could call my father: “Shouldn’t I fight back, Dad?”

As original Good Men Project contributor Steve Almond puts it below, “aggression is the means by which boys learn to share their feelings. Not even the most loving father can protect his son from the playgrounds, bars, and parking lots where bullies lurk, where soft emotions are hunted down and targeted, where fear becomes rage, and rage becomes violence.”

And for men, as much as we may not like it, violence is currency. When words and logic fail, when virtue isn’t shared, violence becomes power—in the schoolyard, among boys, or on the battlefield, among men. But just because it’s always been that way doesn’t mean we can’t help create a less violent world for our kids. Does it?

What do you think? Are men inherently violent?

♦◊♦

We nerds and sissies disprove the notion.

—Bennett Schneider

Read the whole article.

(Webinar) This Emotional Life: Arguing for Intimacy: How to Fight Fair and Feel Closer

This is a cool "webinar" from PBS, associated with the This Emotional Life series.

Both men and women can benefit from learning how to argue/fight fairly. We need to be able to fight fairly in relationships - the couple who does not fight is doomed.

In my opinion, learning to argue from a place a compassion is the key to a healthy fighting, which means never forgetting that the person you are arguing with is the person you love, not the enemy.

On March 31, 2010, This Emotional Life hosted a relationship webinar featuring Dr. Amador, an internationally sought-after speaker and relationship expert who has over 25 years experience working with adults, families, and couples. Topics include: learning how arguments can be healthy and bring your relationships closer, recognizing whether you have bad arguing habits and how to break them and learning how to argue to get what you need, whether with a loved one, a boss, employee or even a stranger."

Tags: Webinar, This Emotional Life, Arguing for Intimacy, How to Fight Fair and Feel Closer, Xavier Amador, psychology, relationships, fighting, intimacy, compassion

The Normal Male by Dr. Rod - The Saturday Two-Step

A lot of very wise couples counselors have said that those couple who know how to fight are the ones who have the best chance at long-term happiness. Sound like a contradiction? The reality is that if we cannot express our disappointments and frustrations in a fair and honest manner, then they seep out in passive-aggressive behaviors that undermine trust and intimacy. And likewise, if we cannot be open to when our partner is frustrated or angry with us, and really hear what needs to be said, then we damage openness and sharing in the relationship.

In this cool post, Dr. Rod calls on men to be mature in our relationships - to open ourselves to the perspectives of those we love, and those with whom we sometimes quarrel.

The Saturday Two-Step

The exploration of manhood often takes us over vast topography and under deep, dark skeletons and secrets and can leave one feeling like a dog trying to navigate the waters. Communicating with your loved one during an argument provides Normal Males the perfect stage to display our revolutionary approach to ending “grunt” stereotypes.

Easier said then done. Right? I know for me it is a constant struggle to remember how so many women have experienced men and how those experiences impact current circumstances. Many women have experienced men who were bad listeners, verbally abusive, insensitive, childish, and sometimes down-right mean. These are the stereotypes that fill our airwaves, television sets, and movie screens…not to mention those in our homes and surrounding communities.

Arguments or disagreements, if you will, between a man and woman can look like a great standoff like the Bay of Pigs…sound like a classic country song…and even resemble an episode of Cops (though that doesn’t help anyone).

And the “beauty” is that each combination of man and woman argue and disagree in their own unique way. Substitute another for your spouse and a different sequence ensues. Add money, kids, cat litter, bills, and bloating and you can have a grand ole’ tango that leaves both parties without any “hand”, as Costanza would say, or power.

We are each presented with opportunities to squelch the argument…apologize…and make-up the way they do in movies…even though the implication is that sex will cure a relationship more than communicating-a post for another day

But too often we drop our personal opportunity like an advertiser drops Tiger Woods and we take the bait of the other like a silly mouse who thinks they can outsmart the cheese trap. I try…you try…we need to keep trying. Communication in the form of an interested and thoughtful adult trumps posturing any day.

“Normal Males of the universe”….hear the trumpeting in the background ….”I call on you to think twice during an argument…exercise caution…employ poise…and think of the issue at hand from ALL sides. Your spouse will appreciate you…your kids will understand that you are more complex than a set of socket wrenches…and we all win.”

Alright, now where did I put that remote control?

Have a great weekend everyone and take advantage of the precious time we all have with those you support and love us the most.

Dr. Rod

Rod Berger, PsyD The Normal Male

Tags: men, masculinity, relationships, fighting, Dr. Rod, The Normal Male, The Saturday Two-Step, perspectives, quarreling, maturity, intimacy, trust

Kim Morgan - "Fight Club" Ten Years Later

One of my favorite all time films - and one that my friend Kyle and I spent a couple of hours discussing over beers right after we saw it. Not too many films I've ever seen have inspired that kind of discussion. Hard to believe it's now been ten years.

I thought then, and still think, that the film captured a degree of how lost so many Gen X men were in the 1990's (and may still be lost today). However, rather than posing an evolutionary perspective or a new masculinity, it shows men reverting to a more primitive version of masculinity - when you've been emasculated by your culture, you fight and f*ck and stage a revolution against those by whom you feel betrayed.

The solution is not the answer, but it makes for a thought-provoking film. And, by the way, there is also some meditation on the nature of the self in the "relationship" between Tyler and Jack.

Fight Club Ten Years Later

Kim Morgan

Film and culture writer

Posted: November 19, 2009 06:43 PM

If any picture was the movie to usher in the new millennium, it was David Fincher's Fight Club. To me, it was the movie of the 1990s -- as prescient as Network was in the 1970s towards the future of "news," and as equally misunderstood. As Fight Club revealed and essentially, proselytized, we live in a world where we seek to express ourselves, either through conspicuous consumption, or following philosophies for supposed betterment, or to simply remember what it was like to actually feel like a man after the world has feminized us so (something as a woman I find frustrating and heartbreaking -- let men be men again).

But Fight Club isn't saying something as simple and inane as men are pussies. It's not a dumb jock statement of being a "man." Rather, it shows how through the alienation of social institutions, and the de-masculination of culture, the rugged individualist is rare. How to tap into being a man, fast? "Punch me as hard as you can."

Based on the diabolical novel by Portland's Chuck Palahniuk (skillfully adapted by Jim Uhls), Fight Clubis a multifaceted satire. It attacks not only the dehumanizing, corporate Starbucks/Ikea world we inhabit (and still inhabit -- even more), but also self-help philosophies, men's movements, commercials, TV and, interestingly, movies, but oh-so cleverly. The way cinema is blamed for contributing to real-life violence is not only woven into the picture, but it became a reality lobbed at the movie upon release. Like A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club was considered fascist by some critics, that it would encourage men to fight (not always a bad thing), and that it might actually create fight clubs (which it did -- not always a good thing).

A movie that ends on man and woman watching two high rise office towers tumbling down from the skyline before the World Trade Center's collapse is creepy, scary prophetic. As Tyler Durden proclaims: "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." And...then through the 2000s? A war. And an economic crisis.

Then, to a certain extent, Fight Club took on Generation X, but it also applied to the onset of the next generation. Challenging so many silly articles, books and movies that have attempted to label "Generation X" as listless, flannel-wearing, grunge-listening slackers, the film argued that it's not a lack of passion that kept those in their late twenties to early thirties befuddled, but a lack of personal power, a lack of freedom -- the impotence of not knowing your real soul.

Revealing the absurdity, hilarity and sadness of the type of man who, for example, would sit at home and listen to self-help Guru Anthony Robbins instructing him on how to "awaken the giant within," then go through the motions, and achieving nothing -- Fight Club asks: Do you want to awaken your giant? Do you really want to look inside yourself? What if your giant turns into a monster?

Fight Club begins with a character who is always awake (in fact, he can never sleep) but is certainly no giant --not yet, anyway. The film's insomniac narrator, "Jack" (Edward Norton), like so many of his generation, is full of cynicism but mild-mannered and desperately searching for something -- anything. When he becomes fed up with sleepwalking through his job at a major automobile manufacturer (where, he says, everything looks like "a copy of a copy of a copy"), Jack finally goes to a doctor and begs for sleeping pills. The doctor tells him to quit his whining -- if he really wants to see suffering, he should go to a support group for testicular-cancer survivors. Good idea? Not really for Jack. He soon becomes addicted to every support group he can locate. They become the outlet he's needed for his confounded emotions; he does receive the attention he craves, and he can finally sleep, but he's really just a support group tourist.

His warm fuzzy, self help universe spell is broken when another tourist enters. That's Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking accidental-overdose-waiting-to-happen who attends meetings because (as she says) "it's cheaper than a movie, and the coffee is free." Jack sees himself reflected in her perverse presence; he hates her, which means he hates himself. They are both fakes.

And then the epiphany: During a plane trip, he meets eccentric soap maker Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), he returns home to find his condo has blown up and, desperate, he rushes to, of course, Tyler. He lives in the "dilapidated house in a toxic-waste part of town" -- and never leaves.

In Tyler, he finally finds the "power animal" that his original cancer-support group instructed him to get in touch with. Tyler teaches him Nietzschean ideals of freedom and puts him in tune with his manly center -- his hunter. And even more importantly, Jack and Tyler fight: Their fights are sweaty, bloody, I want-to-throw-my-desk-at-my-boss releases of rage, submerged eroticism and enlightenment. And men are intrigued. Watching Tyler and Jack's parking-lot brawls creates a new form of therapy for men, and as we well remember, they organize their beat-downs into the movement and philosophy of "Fight Club." As members grow and chapters sprout up in different cities, the club morphs into something called "Project Mayhem" -- a terrorist revolution that encourages members to spread to the outside world -- vigilante/philosophical style with charismatic Tyler as leader of the revolution. In Tyler they trust. His leadership, their trust and their acts become morbidly funny, increasingly frightening and oddly inspiring.

Fincher's brilliant fusion of style and substance created an exciting, thought-provoking, bloody experience that was worshiped, studied and criticized for its controversial takes on moviemaking, manhood, violence and corporate culture. Again, like Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Fight Club articulates the darkness (and humor) of those who don't want to feel numb anymore while, simultaneously, commenting on the powers that made them numb in the first place. And like Kubrick's film, Fight Club was considered dangerous, a film that incites violence or promotes nihilism.

And this seemed to be exactly what Fincher wanted. The more fingers wagged at him, the more his point was proven: It's easier to pin society's ills on entertainment, then look out into the real world or (gasp) within oneself. (Even if our therapist continues to say: "you're doing great....you're doing great.") Fincher's other masterpiece, Zodiac, also touched on this -- defying what was expected of him, Fincher made a movie about obsession and didn't simply satiate our desire to watch yet another serial killer movie.

But, like all of Fincher's movies, the picture also works as supreme entertainment -- especially because master prankster Tyler is "form of"... Brad Pitt. Does the picture take Tyler's side? In many ways, yes. Though the movie pokes fun at the men who join Tyler, it understands their pain, and it understands that their pain has been sold out to self-help groups that do them no good. In the transformation from "Fight Club" to "Project Mayhem," the members merely shift their anger from each other to the outside world -- the soul-deadening culture that has merged New Age spirituality with consumerism, hiding dehumanization behind politically correct calm. As Tyler explains, "Self-improvement is masturbation...self-destruction might be the answer."

And yet, the picture understands that the answer is too simple; it can only lead to further confusion. Because Fight Club is essentially a satire, it knows that though Tyler's eloquent assertions make sense, and are emboldening, they will become borderline fascistic and not entirely reliable. Still, I couldn't help feeling moved by its muscular assertions. When Tyler declares to a terrified fat cat, whose face has been duct-taped courtesy of Project Mayhem: "We are the people who take out your garbage...we watch over you while you sleep...DO NOT FUCK WITH US!" I'm all Kick-out the-Jams-motherfucker, Fight-the-power exhilarated.

What I admire about Fight Club, is that it never denies that violence can be glamorous. Fincher shows that a fight can be a vital part of life, that a violent act can be horrifying, but weirdly fun and sometimes necessary. It can be a soul-altering experience, it can liberate. But it can also, as the picture artfully complicates by not strictly advocating violence, destroy and entrap one with feelings of paranoia and pain.

Fincher reached new levels in filmmaking, not only by his wink-wink take on violence, but also his wink-wink take on exploiting his own arena of expression: cinema, or rather the corporate world of cinema. Like the pranksters he's chronicling, Fincher had bitten the hand that fed him. He knows the commercial Hollywood system. He knows how to take a successful franchise like Alien, or an ideal hunk like Pitt (something he also deconstructed in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and turn it into something subversive, because, as much(or more) than any traditional "indie" director would, he understands the system he mocks. When Tyler yells at his Project Mayhem recruits that they will never be movie stars, the scene works as both a hard truth and as a deconstruction of the movie ideal. Tyler/Pitt is the ideal movie star we all want to be, but should we listen to him?

Yes and no. The film is cynical enough to show that a New World Order like Tyler and Jack's can lose control of itself. Yet the movie doesn't deny that such a "second coming" is attractive and, in ways, beneficial. After all, what is more powerful: movie stars putting knuckles to skin, or fleshy nubs munching scones and itemizing reports? And watching Fight Club, ten years later, with all that we have available to us, it seems even more prescient. For better and often for worse, we've become even more disconnected from ourselves. And even more narcissistic. People text, they twitter, they communicate online instead of talk on the phone or in person. They create alternate identities and pretend to be tough in, of all places, chat rooms, and blogs. Can you imagine a flame war in a biker bar? It's no surprise Fincher's now making a movie about the social networking site Facebook. Tyler Durden would now be a viral creation.

Filled with so many potent comments on society that it demands more than one, two, three viewings, Fight Club is a challenging and powerful work of art that sticks in both the primal and the intellectual parts of one's brain and, for many of us, will never be dislodged -- not even by a sucker punch.

Read more Kim Morgan at her site, Sunset Gun.

Tags: masculinity, film, culture, fighting, books, Kim Morgan, Fight Club, Ten Years Later, David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk, consumerism, men, identity, Tyler Durden, Jack, Ed Norton, Brad Pitt, support groups, Ikea

Humor - Never Judge a Man by His Clothes

This video gets interesting at about the 1:10 mark, so be patient - and watch for two the transvestites. Never judge a man by his clothes.

Thugs attack two transvestites... who turn out to be cage fighters wearing fancy dress

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 5:31 PM on 07th October 2009

Two thugs who attacked what they thought were a pair of transvestites picked on the wrong men - when their intended victims turned out to be cage fighters on a night out in fancy dress.

Dean Gardener, 19, and Jason Fender, 22, singled out the two men walking along a street in wigs, short skirts and high heels.

Bare-chested Gardener was caught on CCTV confronting one of the men in a pink wig, black skirt and boob tube - then seen swinging a punch, a court heard.

Taunts: Dean Gardener, 19, and Jason Fender, 22, are punched to the ground after attacking two cross-dressing cage fighters

But the other cage fighter, wearing a sparkling black dress and matching long wig, sprang to his friend's help, delivering two lightning-quick punches to the two stunned yobs.

The cage fighters were then seen teetering away in their high heels, stopping only to pick up a clutch bag they dropped during the melee.

Gardener and Fender were left dazed and seen staggering to their feet after their failed attack.

Knockout: One of the cross dressers casually feels for his clutch bag before walking away

CCTV cameras followed the pair as they weaved along The Kingsway in Swansea, South Wales, before being arrested by police.

Mark Davies, defending, said: 'You know it cannot have been a good night when you get into a fight with two cross-dressing men.

'Unfortunately they were extremely drunk.

Dazed: The two cage fighters teeter off on their high heels as their two attackers struggle to get to their feet

'They had been out drinking jugs of cocktails and Fender had drunk at least 10 pints of cider.'

Police later discovered the two drag queens were cage fighters on a fancy dress stag night out with other friends.

Both Gardener and Fender, from Bonymaen, Swansea, pleaded guilty to using abusive words and behaviour.

Read more.

Tags: humor, transvestites, fighting, cage fighters, England