‘His name is Robert Paulson’ – The Crisis of Masculinity and the Rise of Fascism

Article by Sarah Murphy-Young. Edited by Rosie Rogers. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard.

Robert von Dassanowsky presents Fight Club as an American film that examines the cultural and sexual politics of European Fascism through cinematic metaphor. Drawing connections between the paramilitary group ‘Project Mayhem’ and Nazism, Dassanowsky explains that they are both counter-cultural movements, attempting to reinstate the ‘masculine ideal’ in the face of the feminisation of America and the ‘decadence’ of the Weimar Republic. In Fight Club, Robert Paulson represents this crisis of masculinity. Submitting to the ‘feminised male model’, Paulson has lost his testicles, developed ‘bitch tits’ and become estranged from his family. Could this crisis of masculinity, personified by Paulson, mirror the rise of fascism in the post-war period?

George L. Mosse dates the birth of modern masculinity as occurring at the same time as the rise of bourgeois society. Largely defined through allusion to Greek principles, the ‘masculine ideal’ was one of strong willpower, moral fortitude, martial mobility and dynamic virility. Physical beauty was often considered an outward expression of these inner attributes while ugliness alluded to corruption and disease.

From around the 1870s to 1914, this new ‘masculine ideal’ faced its greatest threats: feminism, the literary and artistic Avant-Garde, socialism and sexual deviancy. Languor, softness and sexuality were ‘characteristic’ of these movements and they became exemplars of ugliness, effeminacy and discord. Increased hostility towards these groups was accompanied by a rapid growth of new and increasingly racial doctrines of anti-Semitism: Jews were now seen as a subversive anti-race of rootless cosmopolitans and quintessential materialists.

However, so seducing was the ‘masculine ideal’ that many ‘outsider groups’ in fact embraced it. The first and longest lived homosexual periodical, Der Eigene, frequently lamented the effeminacy of modern society and called for a return to militant masculinity. George Sorel emphasised the need for violence as a purgative and regenerative tool in the socialist revolutionary process. Likewise, in the mid-nineteenth century, the emergence of ‘muscular Christianity’ was proof that evangelicalism felt obliged to reconcile the Greek ideal of manliness with its own model of pious paternalism.

The First World War witnessed both a crisis in masculinity and strengthening of the ‘masculine ideal’. Eksteins describes that the burden of having been in the eye of the storm and of having resolved nothing often resulted in a rejection of social and political reality. What was true of the soldiers was also true of civilians: ‘the crowded nightclubs, the frenzied dancing, the striking upsurge of gambling, alcoholism and suicide, the obsession with flight, moving pictures, and with films stars’ was evidence of the drift towards irrationalism.

In fascist eyes, trench warfare created the amoral ‘men of steel’ (even second-rate poets were transformed into ‘real men’) and the trench community, both egalitarian and hierarchical, would become a blue print for fascist doctrine. The trench experience made concepts such as ‘blood socialism’ or trincerocrazia (trenchocracy) valid in the thinking of thousands of veterans, and many of them sought the comradeship and leadership that was offered by fascist paramilitary groups after the war. The direct action and propagation of fascist politics by many ex-veterans, provided the movement with support that no electoral propaganda could ever have achieved.

The implicit illiberalism of liberal European countries was fuelled by a World War of unprecedented ferocity. This distortion of the idea of democracy during the conflict established grounds for the appeal of alternative forms of government. While some turned to pacifism, internationalism and socialism, the strong militarism and moral clarity of fascism became popular in reaction to the chaos and inhumanity of WWI. The ‘politics-as-art’ philosophy, the taste for violence and the beautification of war became key ingredients to fascist culture and were successful in the post-war period for their association with the frontline experience, trench culture and the ‘war hero’.

Evidently, the crisis of masculinity was not the only reason for the rise of fascism. Political, economic and social dislocation in the post-war period allowed fascism to enter the European political stage as a successful, new revolutionary force. However, fascism was able to draw from the social and cultural insecurity after the war, a vast source of recruitment and support (this is similar to Project Mayhem’s employment of disenchanted men and primal male aggression). Using its formative war experience as the basis for its future society, Fascism provided veterans with a viable and desirable alternative to the materialist, pragmatic, liberal and feminine society of the West.

The ‘masculine ideal’ did not remain, like so much of fascist doctrine, abstract. We do not need to be reminded of fascism’s obsession with Aryanism, physical beauty, fitness, virility, self-sacrifice and the corrupted ‘other’. In Fight Club, Paulson is killed accidently while participating in one of Project Mayhem’s ‘urban terrorist’ operations. Through death, he becomes a mythical icon who receives his name back after having sacrificed it to join the group. In the post- war fascist movement, there was the same fetishisation of the ‘war hero’ and the ‘modern man’. Eksteins writes that ‘Nazism involved first and foremost, a love of self... This narcissism was projected into a political movement and eventually came to encompass an entire nation’. This narcissism eventually led to widespread misogyny and to the pathological hatred of Jews, communists, homosexuals and the racially inferior.

*****

“[W]ar is something sublime because it forces every man to face the dilemma of choosing between heroism and cowardice, between the ideal and the stomach, between the spiritual instinct to project life beyond the material, and the pure and simple instinct of animal conversation. It is the brutal discriminator that distinguishes man from man, character from character, constitution from constitution: on the one side the cowardly, the soft, the hysterical, the effeminate, the cry-babies, the mommy’s boys; on the other the strong, the aware, the idealists, the mystics of danger, those who triumph over fear and those who are courageous by nature, the hot-blooded heroes and the heroes of the will.”

Mario Carli, L’italiano di Mussolini (1930)

“The deviant male was above all a bourgeois, egoistic and unpatriotic as well as scarcely virile (because he was unfit or reluctant to repeatedly impregnate the female)l the deviant female was the too ‘modern’ woman, Americanized, independent and masculinized. The social damages provoked by these two converging deviants were most serious: a widespread and ‘excessive loosening of family hierarchical relations, a decline in the main of that robust virility that fascism, with much love and perseverance, pursues in other ways.”

Stato fascista e famiglia fascista’, Critica fascista (1937)

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