Reply to Female Fight Club

If Fight Club featured two women instead of two men, how does that change the film? In Female Fight Club, Zach Taylor claims:

people that could look past the gender role reversal would receive the movie just as well as the original because the message is so deep.

 First we must explore what the message is in Fight Club, and how the movie introduces and explores this message. First off we see an unidentified man (everyman? no man?) who creates an alter-ego "Tyler Durden", create a fight club and then reign destruction on modern day society. Human beings have existed more or less in their current recognizable configuration for millions of years, and we have been hunter gatherers for most of this time until about 5,000 years ago which was the dawn of civilization and agriculture. Adding a level of complexity to the mind/body problem that I believe is largely ignored is the fact that my mind (my conception of self, memories, ideas, language) are about 25 years old and my body (as the product of an evolutionary process) is millions of years old, and even more considering what went in to the evolution of a recognizable homo erectus. Arguably, using this definition, my mind is 5,000 years old as a product of western civilization.

Basically what I believe is that Fight Club is making the argument that civilization has virtually outlawed and ostracized  any sign of male masculinity or the natural urges of millions of years of evolution, hormones, and instincts to small, dark, out of the way "fight clubs." I believe the take home message of fight club is one man who discovers, reconnects, and then attempts to integrate the natural impulse of man with a modern feminized, bleached, and weak society.

So, we must now return to the original question whether or not fight club would stay the same if women were fighting. One of the most telling aspects of this question is during discussion in class the fact that most people could not imagine girls fighting or that it would be more verbal "catty" type fighting, but that fight club with guys caught like wild fire after this movie came out and now there are multi billion dollar industries dedicated to a very similar "No holds barred" type of fist-fighting (UFC). Clearly there is something repressed by the male psyche by an agrarian society. In conclusion I do not believe that if there was a "Female Fight Club" that it would have the same impact on society as fight club has since its release in 1999.

-Joaquin