The Rules of Fight Club

1. You don't talk about fight club.
2. You don't talk about fight club.
3. If someone says stop, goes limp, even if he's just faking it, the fight is over.
4. Only two guys to a fight.
5. One fight at a time.
6. They fight without shirts or shoes.
7. The fights go on as long as they have to.
8. If this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight.

These are the rules, as established by Tyler Durden in Fight Club. There should be one more:

9. If you are a bunch of stupid teenagers beating the crap out of each other, don’t upload it to YouTube.

A bunch of kids at a school outside of Toronto filmed themselves smacking each other around in front of a cheering crowd and posted it on the web. Now everyone is falling over themselves, trying to figure out what’s these little brain-damaged freaks problem is.

I don’t care if they pound on each other – turns out that if a fight is consensual it’s not illegal. Sick, weird and disturbing, but not illegal. What bothers me is when this dumbass behaviour gets blamed on pop culture, often referred to as “the media.” When I saw the story on tonight’s newcast I knew someone would go after Fight Club before it was over. Sure enough, there was Brad Pitt all bloody and sweaty, with a cop blaming it all on what teenagers see on TV and the movies. Shades of last year, when a cabbie was killed by a couple of street-racing idiots in Toronto and video games took some of the blame.

Of course I’m sure those teens were just making a statement about the dehumanizing nature of modern society... oh who am I kidding? The sad-but-true fact is it’s not what teenaged boys are watching, but that they are teenaged boys. I can’t even begin to count the stupid, dangerous things I did in my high school days and it had nothing to do with what I saw on TV.

Teenagers will continue to do harm to themselves. What they are watching will make little difference.