Clown World Chronicles: What Is A ‘MGTOW’?

In Clown World, relations between the genders are not as they should be. As everything in Clown World is a twisted, tragicomic imitation of how things would be in a normal world, so too is dating and romance. One of the phenomena that this has created is that of the MGTOW. This essay explains who these people are and what motivates them.

‘MGTOW’ stands for Men Going Their Own Way. The idea is that MGTOW is a rebellion against the expectations levied upon the average man by society. These expectations, MGTOWs contend, are that a man shall slave away for the vast majority of his life for the sake of providing for a wife and family, without any assurance that any of his work will pay itself off. It’s a raw deal, and so they reject it.

The average MGTOW has an extremely cynical attitude towards women. Their idea of the feminine is deceitful, manipulative, dishonest – women attract men like spiders attract flies. The attitude that women are evil underpins much of the MGTOW movement. After all, if it were true that women were evil, then it would make sense to avoid them.

MGTOWs speak of a time when the average man was afforded a lot more respect. During this time, marriages were stable and women were loyal. Men were not subject to “divorce rape” – in which a formerly happy wife betrays a man and then enlists a lawyer to take everything that man has in divorce proceedings. Cases like Jeff Bezos’s wife, who became a multi-billionaire through a divorce settlement, are emblematic.

The problem with today’s society, MGTOWs contend, is that women are no longer as they once were.

Women are no longer loyal – a combination of decreased social pressure towards loyalty, a legal environment unfavourable to males, and their own inner malice. Therefore, the old social contract, under which a man would labour throughout his productive years in exchange for a pleasant wife who would provide him a family, is no longer valid. Absent this, men are not obliged to be part of society. They can go their own way.

It’s true that the average Western man today has a much shittier situation facing them than the average Western man in the 1950s or 60s. Unlike his grandfathers, he has almost no chance of owning a home and raising a family on his wage alone. The average young New Zealander today has less than 40% of the house-buying power that his parents’ generation enjoyed. Being the breadwinner of a family is many times harder than it used to be.

It’s also true that the balance of power has shifted towards women in recent generations. Our grandfathers were able to literally beat their women into submission, knowing that both their neighbours and the Police would look the other way. Marital rape was legal in New Zealand until 1984. In the 21st century, however, women make up two-thirds of Bachelor’s degree recipients in New Zealand. It’s a woman’s world now.

Moreover, men today have to deal with the reality of hypergamy (all MGTOWs are familiar with this term). Hypergamy is the tendency of the female in sexually reproducing species to try to marry up by attracting the sexual partner with the highest possible social status. MGTOWs contend that the advent of online dating has exacerbated this tendency to such an extreme degree that, today, most women have no interest in the bottom 80% of men.

To many men, this makes the prospect of a fulfilling long-term relationship seem unlikely. MGTOWs will say “women are only as loyal as their options,” and because Tinder gives them effectively infinite options, women no longer have any reason to be loyal. Even worse, they don’t even need a man to raise children because the State will pay for it with welfare (there is great overlap between MGTOWs and the libertarian right when it comes to resenting welfare).

Because there is little reason to work hard and to hold down a job if one does not (or can not) have a family, a number of men have just said “fuck it” and dropped out of society in response to all this. They fill their time mostly with video games, Netflix and television. Others fill their time with pornography (see the Coomer meme). None of this is productive, but there’s no reason for a man who has abandoned (or been abandoned by) society to be productive.

There is a great overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and incels. Both of them share a deep frustration about their failed attempts to get what they want out of women. The difference, in theory, is that MGTOWs are no longer trying to find ways to co-exist with women, whereas incels are still trying but are getting rejected. The incel to MGTOW pathway is obvious.

Curiously, there isn’t much overlap between those who identify with being MGTOW and volcels. In theory, there ought to be, because a man who is going his own way is a fitting description for a man who is voluntarily celibate. But a man who is voluntarily celibate is probably doing so for spiritual or mental health reasons – a MGTOW, by contrast, goes his own way out of bitterness and resentment.

One of the main drawbacks of the MGTOW strategy is that most men can’t achieve anything by themselves. Like it or not, individual humans are interdependent with other humans and cannot exist in isolation. Even the greatest of men can’t achieve much without a network of people who make that man’s greatness known to the wider world.

Inevitably, such a network will include women. Therefore, a man who hates or who wants to avoid women is unlikely to also to be supported by a large social network.

If the MGTOWs themselves are correct, then the phenomenon ought to become more prevalent as the economic and social balance of power shifts further in favour of women. This could have social repercussions. If a large proportion of the men in a society are unwilling to act to preserve it then it may well collapse. The prospect of this is something that many MGTOWs look forwards to with joy.

Being a sick and insane circus, Clown World is inherently unstable, and the MGTOW phenomenon may be one that heralds its demise.

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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in the middle of 2020.

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