May 30, 2006
Fight Club for Nerds
"This is as close as you can get to a real fight, even though I've never been in one," the soft-spoken Siou said.
Broken teeth and bones; bruises and lacerations about the face and neck; scarred knuckles. Siou, these are all signs of a real fight. If you are walking away with these then you've been IN A FIGHT.
Siou is one of a growing number of former math nerds in Silicon Valley who evidently didn't get the trophy wives, exotic cars, massive homes and phat ESOP's that some of the higher level nerds received during the dot bomb boom. These guys got the shit end of the stick and crave something real... man on man contact, but with fists instead of handjobs.
They are part of an adult 'fight club' that's formed up in Menlo Park, a suburb of San Francisco. When gaming is no longer enough, they turn to violence but not to solve disputes. They want to beat each other up which is cool since it makes things easier for the jocks in sales who every once in a while like to pound a little nerd ass.
Men involved in fight clubs often carry bottled-up violent impulses learned in childhood from video games, cartoons and movies, said Michael Messner, a University of Southern California sociology and gender studies professor."Boys have these warrior fantasies picked up from popular culture, and schools sort of force that out of them," he said. In these fantasies, "The good guys always resort to violence, and they always get the glory and the women. Math nerds, even the ones who grow up to be huge in the software industry, don't get the women. Unless they pay."
There is also a sadomasochistic thread running through underground fight clubs, said Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University in New York.
"Real-life fight clubs are the male version of the girls who cut themselves," he said. "All day long these guys think they're the captains of the universe, technical wizards. They're brilliant but empty. "They want to feel differently. They want to get hit, they want to feel something real. At the very least, for an hour or so, they won't feel like a math nerd."
According to the founder, the movement is really akin to something spiritual.
Gints Klimanis, a 37-year-old software engineer and martial arts instructor, started the invitation-only "Gentlemen's Fight Club" in Menlo Park in 2000 after his no-holds-barred sessions with a training partner grew to more than a dozen people. Most participants are men working in the high-tech industry."You get to be a superhero for a night," Klimanis said. "We have to go to work every day. We're constantly told to buy things we don't need, and just for a couple hours we have the freedom to do what we want to do."
DUDE... you are SOOO cribbing from the fucking movie.
One last time for the math nerds who didn't get the fucking memo: FIGHT.CLUB.WAS.LAME. Helena Bonham Carter was the love interest for fucks sake.
Posted by mcblogger at May 30, 2006 05:06 PM
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Comments
Wasn't there one of these in Austin that got broken up by the police a while back? I think there were Austin Westlake students participating too. I really don't understand how people want to do this.
I did like the movie, but that was a movie. This is real life. Obviously these people can't tell the difference.
And I thought Brad Pitt was the love interest... at least, that was where my interest was...
Posted by: abramcf at May 30, 2006 07:13 PM
Westlake. It was the high school math team getting prepped for their post college move to Silicon Valley
Posted by: McBlogger at May 30, 2006 08:06 PM
The first rule of Slide Rule Club is DON'T TALK ABOUT SLIDE RULE CLUB!
Posted by: Thank you for not licking toads at May 31, 2006 06:35 AM
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