Father absence key to male masculinity crisis

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 10, 2002 | by C.T. Rossi

Luke Helder knows the first rule is "don't talk about Fight Club". While Helder has not acknowledged drawing any inspiration from the 1999 movie of that name, circumstantial evidence points in that direction.

Helder has confessed that the goal of his mailbox pipe bombings in the Midwest was to create the pattern of a "smiley face" on the map of the United States. The smiley face is the same pattern used in Fight Club when Brad Pitt's legion of anarchical terrorists commence Operation Mayhem, a series of terrorist attacks designed to topple modern American society. If Helder was copycatting to create his own version of Operation Mayhem, then what at first glance seemed to be a senseless spree of violence by an unlikely perpetrator slowly begins to make sense.

The story of Fight Club revolves around an unnamed narrator (portrayed by Edward Norton) and tracks his transformation from a Milquetoast, cubicle-bound, 98-pound weakling into a steel-willed Nietzschean ubermensch. This rebirth is brought about through his association with the Pitt character, Tyler Durden.

Durden reveals the secret frustration behind the nihilistic frenzy he has fomented when reminding the men, "We've all been raised on television to believe we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact, and we're very, very [ticked] off."

Durden attributes the missing value system in the lives of these men to poor male role models: "Your father was your model for God. And if your father bails out, what does that tell you about God?" He further elaborates on the possibility that "God doesn't like you," but that "His hate is better than His indifference."

Aside from a missing father and a hostile God, Durden laments that the men are a "generation of men raised by women."

So all this means that Helder is a mixed-up kid in a movie-fueled fantasy world a la John Hinckley and his Taxi Driver fixation, right?

Maybe not. In 1999, author Leon J. Podles warned in his book, The Church Impotent, that the feminization of Western Christianity would have dire consequences. Podles astutely observes that the psychological composition of young males requires them to undergo certain rites of passage initiated by mature males in order to achieve a healthy maturity. Failure to experience this initiation leaves the young male in a state of restlessness and revolt that Podles calls "hypermasculinity," which necessarily "ends in nihilism, in a worship of the void and death." The most unfortunate of these misshapen men eventually come to worship power in crime, Satanism, fascism and Nazism--all of which are practical forms of nihilism. Others will succumb to moral relativism, which Podles calls" a disguised nihilism."

While The Church Impotent was a clarion call at a time when the full extent of the problems with the Catholic clergy (numerous pedophiliac and/or homosexually active priests) was not known, the absence of masculine religious role models is only part of the problem--the other being the absence of fathers in the lives of too many American sons. Credit this to America's staggering divorce rate and to a family-court system that does not fully recognize the need for a masculine role model in the development of a well-adjusted male.

Ultimately, Helder must be held fully responsible for his actions, even if he fits a profile of a young man denied of proper male role-modeling. But his personal culpability should not dismiss from our minds the fact that a serious societal problem exists in the form of a "mature masculinity crisis." The slide of young men into hypermasculinity is preventable. But if the forces of radical feminism and political correctness continue to deny the grandeur of true masculinity and the need to nurture it in young men, the problem will worsen.

Being robbed of healthy masculine role models, young men will find surrogates. While a few will fall prey to fringe forces such as neo-Nazism and street gangs, most will turn to the world of entertainment in search of an answer to the question "What is a man?"

And so they will chase after the media-induced fictions of what a real man is, but to no avail. Could it be that Helder came to see through the pop-culture lie as well--that he will never be a millionaire or a movie god or a rock star? The tongue-in-cheek nihilism of Fight Club seemed to help form his way out. How many more might turn to something worse?

C.T. ROSSI WRITES ABOUT CONTEMPORARY CULTURE FOR THE FREE CONGRESS FOUNDATION.