When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male...
When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they’re quoting Fight Club, a satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized, and that Tyler Durden isn’t the hero but a personification of the main character’s mental illness, and that his “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.
So basically people who say “snowflake” as an insult are quoting a domestic terrorist who blows up skyscrapers because he’s insecure about how good he is in bed.
The thing about this is – to write a good satire you need to make it close to reality (in some ways, to some extent). Which means you run the risk of creating something that your targets still find appealing.
Every other argument about the quality of Fight Club aside, I think it’s an important movie because it captured a thing that’s out there, which appeals to a certain large subsection of the male population. The fact that this subsection celebrates an ambivalent-at-best depiction of the thing suggests that there wasn’t anything else out there crystalizing the same thing with as much accuracy – if there were more unambiguously positive depictions of the thing, you’d think their popularity would have swamped Fight Club’s.
Yeah, maybe it’s making fun of guys who like the thing (and maybe without their knowledge), but it also revealed that there are a lot of those guys, and showed us exactly what it is that they like. (I’m not saying there weren’t other movies about masculinity; as I said, FC crystalized something more specific.) Even if you think the movie’s a satire, the humor of “these guys misinterpreted a movie, lol owned” is outweighed for me by the gravity of the realization “these guys exist, they aren’t going away, and they do unironically want the thing.“ Feels like they get the last laugh, here.