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| 2008-05-03 - Weird News Amy Beeman - AHN Fight Club In Silocone Valley Relieves Tech Professionals Of Mundane Lives | ||
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Silicone Valley, CA (AHN) -- The 1998 movie, "Fight Club', based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk, published in 1996, may have seemed far fetched, but it struck a chord with men who say they feel emasculated by the mundaneness of the corporate, high-tech world. ESPN reported that since 1998, a fight club has been meeting once a month in Cornell educated software engineer, Gints Klimani's, garage. Fifteen men, mostly white, middle-aged technology workers meet to beat each other using fists, toilet seats, and cookie sheets. The group improvises weapons, even stabbing each other with dulled knives. Klimani told ESPN that they are looking for a way back to the "caveman." In a televised interview, he said, "It's everything that society doesn't want. More and more all the socialization ritualization of men have been purged, and what you have left is the homogenized corporate man. Klimani said men need something to make them feel like men again. "If everyone is just as smart as you are, how do you define yourself? Go back to your roots and fight. Pound each other to a pulp and see who stands up." While the men in the group make a good living, they have some resentment about spending countless hours sitting in front of computer screens instead of being physical. Marketing Assistant Ryoga Vee, who was filmed fighting with a computer keyboard as a weapon told ESPN that the keyboards are used because they "signify what we hate the most," adding that they are the "bane of their existence," and "represent our mundane lives." Lance Welsh, a software engineer, has been a member of the fight club since 1998. He said in a televised interview, "When you punch somebody or when you get punched there's a kind of grounding effect that really makes you feel alive." Despite the protective headgear the men wear, in 2006 Welsh took a blow to the head that fractured his orbital bone, resulting in the collapse of the left side of his face. He told ESPN, "I walked away from the fight club thinking, do I really want to do this? I always come back because the answer is yes." Michael Kimmel, author and professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook said to ESPN, "They need the visceral experience of flesh hitting flesh to dislodge a sense of numbness I think they feel." When the fighting is over, the men move inside for more male bonding. They drink a few beers and watch video of the fights they just fought. Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, said he wrote the book because he, like Klimani, sees the need for messiness in a world full of order. In an interview with DVD Talk, he said, "We need to be more comfortable and more accepting of chaos, and things that we see as disastrous. Because it is only through those things we can be redeemed and change. We should welcome disaster; we should welcome things that we generally run away from. There is a redemption available in those things that is available nowhere else."
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