>>81330009>satire in works like A Modest Proposal or Fight Clubthis meme about how all these 'literally me sigma male' books/movies like Fight Club or American Psycho (I dunno about A Modest Proposal, I never read it) are ackshually about 'le toxic masculinity and is making fun of the men all along' is such bullshit
it's pretty obvious in works like that that, while the male protagonists are supposed to be morally bad and not aspirational and 'toxically masculine,' it's still also supposed to be where the books/films really are about some of the themes that you think they are and the real criticism is still at the environment that created such men
Just because terrorism and masucline violence is meant to be bad, doesn't mean that Fight Club isn't still about about a guy descending into psychosis because of his subservient, domesticated and monotonous life suppressing his masculine nature and expressing male Gen X angst and ennui
Just because hyper consumerism and the rich being able to do whatever the fuck they want without consequence is bad doesn't mean American Psycho isn't still about the existential breakdown and alienation of a man paradoxically lashing out and trying to fit in because society has made him completely interchangeable and invisible and this is at odds with the male psyche
What people don't seem to get is that just because these works depict the reaction of the males to their situation as bad doesn't mean the whole point is just some moralizing karmic thing of 'don't react like that chud, just don't act toxic or you won't gete a happy ending;' this assumes that these works are operating on the normal standard mode of storytelling where this a moral being normatively preached and they are cautionary tales; this is not the case.
Works like Fight Club and American Psycho are not supposed to be normative, they are DESCRIPTIVE of the current situation and are actually even way more nihilistic than people assume they are (like a lot of postmodern edge kino fiction from around the time they were written was). The whole point is that modernity and current consumerist society is so fucked and nihilistic that these men who have been domesticated and societally erased act in 'toxic masculine' violent ways - not as ways of lashing out in rebellion against the system but as a symptom of it. An office wagie having a breakdown and inviting a LARP Redpill persona to cope or some yuppie dork who no one notices or cares about being a serial killer are the system working as intended, a natural consequence.
And this is why the autists relate to the characters and lionize their suffering as iconic and 'badass' in a knowingly ironic way because they know everything is fucked.
