The Sunday Times Magazine must have gone misogynist. Only that can explain the publication of “The Men Giving Up On Women,” a comprehensive, accurate, and non-demonizing profile of the “men going their own way” (MGTOW) movement.
The piece was written by the always-excellent Martin Daubney, who was recently a guest on Breitbart Tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos’ #BIGMILO stream. He interviews a number of members of the movement, which is often feared but is in fact a fairly benign and sympathetic subculture, with genuine grievances. It describes how the movement’s male members, feeling that both western norms of dating and the legal paradigms surrounding relationships, marriage, and parenthood are stacked against them, have decided to forego marriage, parenthood, and in some cases intimate contact with women altogether.
Milo Yiannopoulos has addressed the same phenomenon in his two pieces on the ‘sexodus.’ He discovered that the men giving up on women aren’t all losers who can’t get laid. Likewise, in a number of the cases described by Daubney, the MGTOWs are attractive and confident men who have had relationships before.
Though often conflated with MRAs, the Manosphere, or “The Red Pill” communities, MGTOWs are a distinct culture focused less on fighting women or feminists than on living separately, due to what they believe to be a rational assessment of the modern risks of male-female relationships. There is very little malice or combativeness to them. They don’t want to fight. They just, as they say, want to go their own way.
Martin has allowed us to reproduce portions of his in depth article, which can be read in full on The Sunday Times‘ website (paywalled).
They don’t want girlfriends, they don’t want children — they don’t even want to have sex. The secretive MGTOW movement is a fast-growing online community of disillusioned males. But are they misogynists or misunderstood? Martin Daubney tracks some of them down
David Sherratt, 18, is a chemistry student at Cardiff University. He has never had a girlfriend and isn’t planning on finding one. Not now. Not ever.
“Hook-up sex is too risky for words,” he says. “Girls can wake up the next day and claim you raped them. I’m genuinely too scared to go near a woman — just in case. At university, I’m made to feel like a rapist all the time… I’ve never had a relationship and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. It’s just too dangerous.”
Neither does he see the point of marriage, since half of them end in divorce. “Marriage is like playing Russian roulette with three bullets in the cylinder” he says firmly. “I’ve never been interested in having kids since I learnt about the lack of fathers’ rights. The whole system is stacked against men. Our generation has been screwed over by feminism. People might say it’s sad, but I’m checking out.”
It would be all too easy to scoff at David’s comments and dismiss him as just another angry teenager. But an increasingly militant anti-lad culture in our universities, complete with sexual-consent classes, is causing young men such as David great concern. Rather than risk an emotional battering, they are simply giving up on women.
Far from being an isolated loner, he is part of a growing, global army of men, young and old, who have had enough of women altogether — they even have a name: men going their own way, or MGTOW (pronounced “mig-tau”).
The article avoids journalists’ typical method of covering men’s movements, which is to cherry-pick the worst examples of comments and statements from manosphere blogs and online communities. Instead, Daubney conducts in-depth interviews with MGTOW members.
In common with many MGTOWs, Sherratt is the product of a broken home — his parents divorced when he was three — at which point he was raised by his loving mother, whom he adores. He totally rejects the accusation he is sexist, and instead based his decision to go MGTOW on hard-won life experience.
“When my parents split, although my mum was fair with my dad, she said, ‘I could have taken everything, but I didn’t,’ ” he says. “That resonated. I went to an all-boys school and, when I was 13, I was exposed to aggressive feminism during a debate on sexual consent at a nearby girls’ school. All these girls had been brainwashed to believe that all men are potential rapists, and it scared the hell out of me. I love women and had never even had sex — I’m still a virgin — yet I was being accused of being a potential sex criminal. It was insane.
“I started to learn how feminists have been controlling the law and state for decades. Women aren’t oppressed, they’re privileged. A new religion has taken over. Misogyny is the new blasphemy. Now feminism is backfiring.
“I’m in favour of long-term relationships, but I would be very, very wary of getting into one. You don’t know what could happen. I haven’t had a girlfriend. I don’t think that will happen. I’ve had no relationships and don’t go out. I guess I’m interested in sex, but I don’t even watch porn. It just doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve just started university, and the issue of sexual consent on campus really, really terrifies me. There are new police guidelines that mean you have to prove consent and now I’m genuinely afraid to even go near a woman.
“Sex is too dangerous. I’m afraid of false rape allegations. I’m really into the individualism of MGTOW: not getting married or having kids, and the state generally deciding what you do with your life.”
Of course, our own Milo Yiannopoulos, now a leading voice on gender relations, was included in the piece:
Milo Yiannopoulos, a British columnist for the conservative US website Breitbart, sees the MGTOW movement as a reflection that young men are in a crisis.
“There are hundreds of thousands of smart, creative, sensitive, fascinating, attractive young men who have given up entirely on girls,” he says. “I wrote about it early this year and called it the ‘sexodus’: boys who retreat into porn, video games and, in some cases, horribly, suicide, because they have no reasonable prospect of a normal, healthy relationship.
“These kids aren’t dorks or losers or ‘manbabies’ or angry men’s rights activists. They’re normal young men whose lives are being destroyed by wacky feminist orthodoxy and the hostility toward young men at college and in the workplace”.
The article also includes the following graph, which really illustrates how quickly interest in the MGTOW community has increased:
Another interesting feature of Daubney’s piece is the women who support the movement. One of these is Erin Pizzey, the veteran campaigner who pioneered “refuge centres” for domestic abuse victims in the 1970s. Feminists turned on her after she insisted on taking female-on-male domestic abuse seriously, and she has since became an active voice on men’s issues.
“MGTOW to me is a healthy movement,” she says. “It’s men taking power back because they have been rendered powerless in the past 50 years. There is a generation of men saying, ‘I’ve been burnt, I’m dropping out.’ We are in uncharted territory. As women made war with men, men are beginning to say, ‘Maybe this war is liberating me. I don’t have to be a wage slave in order to have a relationship with a woman.’ ”
She believes campus life is so hostile to young men that it is putting them off going to university (another explanation is that boys are outperformed by girls at all levels of British education).
Karen Straughan, co-founder of the Honey Badger Radio podcast and a leading critic of feminism on YouTube, was also interviewed.
“MGTOWs are resisted and hated because they represent a completely new paradigm where men’s needs, interests and desires matter — because they do,” she says. “We should protect men from exploitation by unscrupulous women and the system that enables them, not just because doing so is necessary to convince them to get back to the grindstone, but because men are part of the human community and deserve this protection from abuse and exploitation.”
The piece also goes a long way towards dispelling the myth of MGTOWs as losers, dating failures, and awkward shut-ins. Many MGTOWs have had relationships, and in rare cases, are still in relationships.
“You can be a MGTOW and be in a relationship,” says Ciaran, who also has a YouTube channel, Bread & Circuses. “I’ve been in a relationship for seven months and my girlfriend’s OK with MGTOW. We have sex. I love her. It’s not currently favourable for men to have children. If we split up, I would almost certainly lose my child, and if I couldn’t afford to pay for it, I could face jail. Men have historically been seen as workhorses. We’re disposable. Now we have the opportunity to reject that — to not be society’s bitch.”
For some MGTOWs, however, a lifetime of enforced solitude is the only way to answer the rise of empowered women. They are the disciples of the outer reaches of the movement, called “true forced loneliness” (TFL).
It’s a fascinating read, spending time on both the positive and negative points of MGTOW, and I recommend reading the whole thing. It leaves the reader if not in agreement than at least much deeper sympathy for MGTOWs than how they’re typically painted by the media.
The MGTOW message is raw, visceral and, ultimately, heartbreaking. How did we get to the point where men want to retreat to caves and have sex with robots? Yet what amazed me most while researching this article was that every time I explained the MGTOW concept to a friend, they all knew one — they just didn’t know they were called MGTOWs. One woman said: “I’ve got a male mate, a good-looking, well-paid accountant. He’s athletic, a good catch, but he’s given up on women. He reads about false-rape cases and he thinks sex isn’t worth the hassle.” Another added: “I know gay guys and women who do this, too. People are dropping out everywhere. Is there any wonder we’re all single?”
You can read the full article on the Sunday Times’ website. Breitbart Tech thanks both Martin and the Sunday Times for allowing us to reproduce the material.
Follow Will Ross on Twitter @SawmillLoris