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Tyler Durden was right.
Something has been bothering me ever since reading the Chuck Pahluniuk novel Fight Club. What's been bothering me is the state of the world. The cutsie dubbing "Generation X" and "Generation Y" are what I'll be using throughout this article, only as a reference point to label the 25-33 and 18-25 groups, respectively. In Fight Club, Tyler Durden refers to the value of commercialism in society today; the "IKEA generation", a group of people raised by women are now being forced to find more women. Are women the answer the "Gen X" needs? Is a television that can flip through 500 channels, unlimited technology and purchasing power, and underwear with someone's name on it really what they need?
Of course not, that's the idea. Durden was right, and it's only later he starts to take it too far. It's when he takes it too far that Project Mayhem starts killing people in the misguided effort to set them free. It's good to know when you're right, it's even better to not take it too far.
What's been bothering me is the fact that this is not something that only afflicts those in that age group. Those people "without a time or place" are homeless essentially. This is true. However, I'm going to complain about the problems afflicting the generation behind them, the "Gen Y". We're given the same problems, the constant push to buy buy buy everything; to live our lives to become good consumers. We were a generation of men raised by women, raised in the midst not of a sexual revolution, but in its aftermath. We were born into the world of mindless consumerism, hopeless political correctness. This is not something we can see around, because we were never around to see anything before this. Instead of remembering a time when what we see as the norm WASN'T the norm, we can only remember being pushed into this hopeless legacy of cleaning up after the world. Now that we're old enough, we're expected to fall into rank behind all the Gen X'ers and clean up all the shit that was laid out before us.
We're taught from birth not to hit, that people like a man in touch with his emotions. We're told that domestic violence is wrong, and they're right. Our elders and parents tell us from an early age that it's OK to cry, but it's not OK to hit. The 90's man can cry, the 90's man doesn't want to hit. The 90's man knows it's OK to let loose his emotions once in a while, even in front of other men. The 90's man is not only a pussy, but an undesirable pussy. Women hold us to an ideal that we'll be sensitive to their needs, and they claim they want a man like what we're raised to be. And they'll stick with us…they'll stick with us until a strong man comes along.
I say "90's man" not because we were even adults in the late 80's-early 90's. I say this because the ideal was set up in this period, and to this day that's what we're brought up to use as a model. Support group shit all over the place teaching us to cry. TEACHING us to cry, as if our tear ducts don't work unless we're properly trained.
Men aren't the only ones affected, of course, by this coddling 90's nature. Men are only people, and what affects us will affect the other sex just as surely. Like us, women are taught that the ideal man is in touch with his feelings, that the man will know when to cry and will be sensitive to the feelings of the woman. They're raised through therapy and support group nonsense to believe that any man not like this is a pig, unfit for humanity. Women are also taught to believe that they are empowered. The aftermath of the sexual revolution has given them the feeling that they deserve everything that the man deserves. This is true. However, women also know when to play their cards…just like men. But I'll get to men later. Women have been taught that no man will hit them, because it's just plain wrong. As a result, we get women willing to poke and prod at the egos of their other halves because they know that when they finally piss that man off just enough to smack her in the jaw, she can run to the police and have that man thrown away for a long, long time. The reasoning for this is because women are so small and cute, how can they possibly be the instigators of domestic violence? That kind of reasoning doesn't seem to have any place in this world where "women are equals." Indeed, women ARE equals. They can piss a man off just as bad as a man can piss a woman off. They can start a fistfight just as effectively, but because of this training over the years they're taught that they don't have to take responsibility for it because they couldn't possibly be responsible for it. Oh no, men are sensitive nurturing creatures now, they're told. Men wouldn't hit you, and if they did they're not worth your time and it's not your fault. Apparently a bust in the chops can be deserved, but in the Gen Y world it's not legal any more.
Of course, I'm speaking as if this were the norm. Everyone knows it's not. There are plenty of households where an essentially good woman is punched in the jaw every night for no good reason. I agree, some men are like this. So are some women, and this is a fact that is brushed under the table in the Gen Y world. Let's remember Phil Hartman. This was a real tragedy, and I'm saying this as a person who watched CNN during the whole Columbine incident and laughed my ass off. Phil Hartman was blasted in the head by his cokehead wife, and said wife then killed herself. She left the bodies so the kids would find them. A man who was, by all accounts, a great human being overall was killed by his bitch of a wife simply because she wanted to show that she had the cock of the family. But let's say something had happened weeks before. Let's say all her years of criticism and cajoling of her husband had led him to finally snap one night and bust her in the mouth. This would be right. She certainly would deserve it. But guess who'd be spending the night in jail? Guess who'd have to look the judge in the eye the next morning? Guess who'd be ordered on probation and psychiatric counseling?
If you said the woman, I'm going to kill you.
Let's get back on subject now for a moment. An essentially good woman busted around by a man. Why did she stay with him long enough to marry? Why is she still with him? Threat of death? Not likely. The reason is because a "90's man" is just plain boring. That brutish man is an exciting man. Like Tyler Durden, that brutishness it taken to an untasteful extreme to say the least, but the idea is sound. Hopes that he'll change are in reality knowledge that he'll never be boring. If he does by some odd chance become a reformed abuser he will become boring. A sensitive 90's man will have a woman until that woman finds a stronger man. A man who doesn't give a shit if his needs are being met. A low-maintenance man who just wants food and sex, and perhaps good conversation if he happens to be smart enough.
Women today don't seem to know what they want. They want a sensitive man they can corral and piss on daily, but that man is boring. She'll ditch that man as soon as a better one comes along. A man who shows he can defend himself is a man who could hurt her.
Men, for their part, don't seem to have any idea what they want either. They're told that an assertive female is what's right. All we want it to fuck. Hell, it's genetically pre-programmed in us to screw and move on. I'm not saying we should, but it's important to take this into account when realizing how contrary our teachings are. We're told to care about a woman's feelings, to be in touch with the world around us. As a result, we have no clue what's going on because we're trying to cope with a set of information that exists completely contrary to the real world. I know I don't know what I want, I just know something's wrong. I keep my trap shut and all I hear is how I need to be more open. I open my mouth and I get dumped. The deck is stacked against us. In a world where we're taught that everyone is equal, we're also taught that we can't hit the weaker sex. We're taught that we can't hit them simply because they are weaker. Who cares if someone may actually deserve it, if you knock out a tooth and bruise a jaw you're looking at prison and heavy fines.
This isn't to say we're completely without a hand to play. Just as women know when to play their cutsieness for the authorities, we know when to play out our strengths. We don't know what we want anymore, 20 years of fucking with our heads has gone completely in contrast to a million years of hard wired instinct. But we know that sometimes you gotta hit someone. Man or woman, sometimes an adult does something knowing that they deserve to get hit. We just happen to know who will and who will not tell on us. Like 8 year olds on a playground, we're forced to slink around and pick the people who aren't going to tell teacher.
Tyler Durden was right, the Gen X people are without a time or a place. But we're worse off. We had a place, and that place is being destroyed. It's fraying at the seams and falling apart. Hypocritical political correctness, sexual equality; all of this is full of holes that are causing the entire structure to fall down around us. Courtesy of our elders, we have this world where nothing makes sense, and what makes it worse is that it used to make sense. We were raised in a world of unlimited power, unparalleled equality, and now that we're actually capable of living in that world and using that power it's all being flushed down the toilet in front of us. We're reaching an age where we're expected to be mature, and just like everyone before us, we're expected to clean up the mess that was caused long before we ever got here.
For three pages, I've been talking about violence as if it's something we should aspire to. Of course, this isn't the case. I use it as an example; sometimes people deserve to be hit, whether they are men or women. The problem is that our society has turned this into power plays.
Gen Y men aren't only lost on the sexual battlefield, we're lost in the world at large. We were born just in time to see economic boom. The recession of the late 80's wore off just as we began to realize that there is a world out there, and as a result we were given unlimited power and technology at our fingertips. This isn't something we were able to see the evolution of, this is something that was dropped into our laps as a finished product. We don't remember a time when being a good consumer was not the norm, and so we don't think about it. And now shit's hitting the fan; we're just beginning what looks to be a recession once again, and here we are stranded on the empty beach. Three cars in every garage and a computer in every home was once the norm, and now it's all fading away, leaving us figuratively homeless.
Of course, these are just things. Part of the problem is that so many people are dependent on things as if they defined them as people. It's not the possessions that are leaving us despondent, it's the way of life. It's the knowledge that we once were told that we had choices, and now that we're grown up we find out that those choices just went away. Of course, the by-product of the 90's, the caring sensitive male, has no way to enact how he feels about this. We're taught to cry, and when we cry nothing changes. What the fuck's the point? We lack the tits of a woman, and so crying isn't getting us anywhere. It's not even getting us laid, because when we finally cry we're called pussies.
Despite my very valid frustrations with the world that we've been given, it's obvious that the world is not my biggest complaint. It's the fact that we were raised and taught that it's important to pair up with someone of the opposite sex as soon as you can, and make sure to nurture that woman and care for her and be able to show you can cry. Fuck that. We're a mess at this point, and it's becoming obvious that the only woman that's going to help us is a woman who understands that the 90's turned out to be a big crock of shit. Technological advancements excepted, we were really fucked.
So where does the answer lie? It can't be totally hopeless for the man who became a man in the late 90's. At least, I hope not. Find some woman, find some man, whatever, and just connect. There has to be something out there resembling true love, something that will make the dark evil world seem a little bit less dark and evil. And I'm not talking about just anyone. Find someone like you. I've often been a herald of the whole idea of "find someone just as dumb as you", and that's only part of it. Find someone. We live in a world of vicious wolves, and the only thing that'll get us through it is someone to empathize.
That, and some good sex occasionally.