The reclaiming of lost masculinity in "Fight Club"

“Fight Club” is, at its core, a film about young men lashing out against a society that tries to restrain them. The narrator, and all the members of Fight Club, find themselves emasculated by modern American culture. Stuck in their suffocating office jobs, tied down by women – they cannot express themselves as men in these circumstances. The fights are an attempt to recapture the fleeting feelings of masculinity that these men have been deprived of. Their disdain for women is clear – the narrator pushes Marla away in favor of Fight Club, and his alter-ego Tyler even says how “We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”

It’s a rejection of women in favor of reclaiming a sense of masculinity that has been lost in our modern consumer culture. The fights that the members of Fight Club engage in are their way of breaking free from this oppressive culture and becoming “true men” again. Fight Club is, for these men, a place to express their masculinity in a world that tries to repress it. It’s a return to a “natural order” of sorts, a rediscovery of the violence and strength that made men what they were all throughout history, only recently (in the grand scheme of human existence) taken away from them so they could be shoved into cubicles in office buildings, “working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need”, as Tyler says. They’re fighting a “spiritual war” (Tyler’s words) against the women and culture that they see as emasculating them.