Why did i write a paper on Masculinity in Fight Club? BECAUSE I CAN!

White, heterosexual men in America didn’t survive the 1990’s too well. On top of being accused attacked by feminists, gays, lesbians, and other groups for things they never did, the image of masculinity was being challended. The shift from a manufacturing base to an information-based economy, from the production of goods to the production of knowledge offered men, fewer meaningful occupations that they could be proud of. The new male work hero is no longer the industrious worker using his body and labor to create the necessities for everyday life; it is now the young computer whiz yuppie who has a life based on get rich before I’m 21 schemes and expensive, meaningless products. A average white, heterosexual working-class and middle-class man faces a life of increasing uncertainty and insecurity, the new millennium offers white, heterosexual men nothing less than a life in which ennui and domestication as their new existence. Fight Club tries to engage the boredom and emptiness of the consumer culture and change what it could mean for men to resist compromising their masculinity for a material item that matches their personality, and explore the possibilities for creating a sense of community in which men can reclaim their masculinity.
As a recall coordinator, Jack travels around the country investigating accidents for a major auto company. Alienated from his job, lacking any sense of drive, Jack’s relief comes from looking through and buying things from IKEA magazines. But it doesn’t seem to help and only emphasizes the emptiness in his life and lack of enthusiasm for being made into a corporate puppet. Tormented by the emptiness of his life and suffering from near terminable insomnia, Jack visits his doctor claiming he is in real pain. His doctor refuses to give him drugs and tells him that if he really wants to see pain to visit a local testicular cancer survivor group. Jack not only attends the self-help meeting, but finds out that the group offers him a perverse sense of comfort and community and in an ironic twist he becomes a support group junkie. At his first meeting of the Remaining Men Together survival group, Jack meets Bob, a former weightlifter who has enormous breasts as a result of hormonal treatments. The group allows Jack to participate in a form of male bonding that offers him an opportunity to release his bottled emotions and turns out to be a cure for his insomnia. Bob becomes a not too subtle symbol, describing how masculinity is both degraded (he has breasts like a woman) and used in a culture that relies upon the "feminine" qualities of support and empathy rather than "masculine" attributes of strength and virility to bring men together. When Bob hugs Jack and tells him "You can cry now," The book does more than mock new age therapy for men, it is also satirizing and condemning the "weepy" process of femininization that such therapies sanction and put into place.
Jack eventually meets Marla, a disheveled, chain-smoking, slinky street urchin who is also slumming in the same group therapy sessions as Jack. Jack thinks of Marla as a tourist, addicted the sight and show of the meetings. Marla reminds him of his own phoniness and so upsets him that his insomnia returns, and his only respite is gone. Jack can’t find emotional release with another phony in the same session. Once again, repressed white masculinity is thrown into a crisis by the eruption of an ultra-conservative version of post-60s femininity that signifies both the antithesis of domestic security, comfort and sexual passivity–offering only neurosis and blame in their place.
Jack meets Tyler Durden on an airplane. Tyler is the anti-Jack, a bruising, cocky, brash soap salesman, part time waiter, and movie projectionist with a whiff of anarchism shoring up his speech, dress, and body language. If Jack is a model of packaged conformity and yuppie, Tyler is a no-holds-barred charismatic rebel.. Tyler also creatively affirms his disgust for women by making high-priced soaps from liposuctioned human fat. Jack is immediately taken with Tyler, who offers himself as a personal guide to the pitfalls of consumer culture. When Jack returns home, he finds that his apartment has been mysteriously blown to bits. He calls Tyler who meets him at a local bar and tells him that things could be worse. Tyler then launches into a five minute tirade against the pitfalls of bourgeois life, mixing his own philosophical ramblings about the fall of masculinity into it. Before they go back to Tyler’s place, Tyler asks Jack to hit him, which Jack does and then Tyler returns the favor. Pain leads to joy they sit exhausted, blissful as Hindu cows after their fight. Soon Tyler and Jack start fighting repeatedly in a bar parking lot, eventually drawing a crowd of men who also want to fight each other. Fight Club, a new religion and secret society open only to males is born. Groups of men start meeting in the cellar of a local bar in order to beat each other’s heads into a bloody mess so they can get back their instincts as hunters and defy the society that turned them into repressed losers and empty consumers. The only way Tyler’s followers can become agents in a society that has deadened them is to get in touch with the primal instincts for competition and violence, and the only way they can get back their masculine identity is to destroy each other and their only way back to community is to do acts of terrorism aimed at corporate strongholds with the same men who destroyed them. Tyler ups the stakes of Fight Club by turning it into Project Mayhem, a nation wide organization of terrorists thugs whose aim is to wage war against the rich and powerful. One of the attacks is botched and a member is killed by the police. Bob, the oversized testicular cancer survivor who has recently reaffirmed his own manliness by joining Fight Club. Jack is shocked by the killing, which helps him recognize that Tyler has become a demagogue and that Fight Club has evolved into a fascist military group more dangerous than the social order it was set out to destroy. In a meltdown , Jack realizes that he and Tyler are the same person, signaling a shift in the drama from the realm of the sociological to the psychological. Jack discovers that Tyler has planned a series of bombings around the city and goes to the police to turn himself in. But the cops are members of Project Mayhem and attempt to cut off his testicles because of his betrayal. Once more Jack rescues his manhood by escaping and confronting Tyler in a building that has been targeted for demolition by Project Mayhem. Jack loses his fight with Tyler and ends up at the top of the building with a gun in his mouth. Jack finally realizes that he has the power to take control of the gun and has to shoot himself in order to kill Tyler. He puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Tyler dies on the spot and Jack survives. Marla is brought to the scene by some Project Mayhem members. Jack orders them to leave and he and Marla hold hands and watch as office buildings explode all around them.