Counter-Currents
2,024 words
Many organizations and movements on the Right can be construed as push-back against Cultural Marxism. While the Alt Right certainly does do this, I wouldn’t include it in this group. In a world without Cultural Marxism, you can still have an Alt Right (although at that point, we’d probably drop the “Alt”). This is because we stand for things more than we stand against them, for example, a positive white racial identity, peaceful ethno-nationalism, and more or less traditional, commonsense values beyond that.
But what about organizations that are almost entirely blowback against Cultural Marxism? I believe that folks on the Alt Right should foster positive relations with as many of these groups as possible. One such group is Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW.
Essentially, MGTOW consists of “meninists” or men who have to differing degrees checked out of traditional monogamous heterosexual relationships. This is in large part a response to the growing power and autocracy of the feminist left, which has, indeed, sabotaged the Western men when it comes to marriage and raising children. Some of these men belong in the manosphere and aim for little more than ephemeral dalliances with women. Others, like cynical, once-bitten monks, have sworn off women entirely. Furthermore, I detect little homosexuality in the MGTOW. As advertised, it is about men going their own way . . . but without women.
Here is their statement of purpose from their website:
M.G.T.O.W – Men Going Their Own Way is a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else. It is the manifestation of one word: “No.” Ejecting silly preconceptions and cultural definitions of what a “man” is. Looking to no one else for social cues. Refusing to bow, serve and kneel for the opportunity to be treated like a disposable utility. And, living according to his own best interests in a world which would rather he didn’t.
My first impression upon researching this topic is a feeling of solidarity with the men involved. Sympathy too, but certainly not of the condescending kind. (Lord knows, if a few things had not gone my way in life, I might be “going my own way” as well — I consider myself very lucky in that regard.) The MGTOW website provides a history of the movement, a nice round-up of the manosphere, a blog, videos, testimonials, links to books on Amazon, and, shockingly for me, a live chat(!).
Of course, the official literature of the movement clearly spells out what MGTOW is all about. All of it is reasonable and well-researched. Particular essays I liked included Schopenhauer’s take on women, the “Sexodus,” Parts 1 and 2, and one entitled “The Water Fountain,” which uses a playground as an analogy for some of the more self-defeating aspects of chivalry in the modern world.
But it is in the forums where one finds the quickest route to the Truth. Some conversation topics are quite positive and involve technology and gadgets and other cool things that men in general like to riff on. Others, however, include “Blue Pill Hell,” “Marriage and Divorce,” and the aptly-named “Relationshits.” In these, one will find the starkest anti-woman, anti-marriage pronouncements possible. A prominent warning reads:
The MGTOW Forums are for registered red-pill Men only. There are no exceptions. All females may exit immediately.
Not sure if this is meant literally, this being the anonymous internet and all.
Anyway, here is where men vent, and they vent a lot. A good deal of it is grotesque hostility towards women, yes, and fairly indefensible too. Here is a typically lurid quote:
So sure, get married and have four kids. BOOM you are now $1 million in the red and stuck with lazy, stay at home land whale with a vagina stretched beyond recognition.
Money gets brought up a lot as well. One poster’s signature reads “Marriage is grand. Divorce is 500 grand!” Another poster once posted a meme comparing over-the-hill Hollywood actresses when they were young and hot versus how they are now. No misogynistic epithet is off the table here, it seems. MGTOW also has derogatory terms for men who still adhere to the normative culture of marriage and kids and don’t realize they are being had, namely, “manginas,” “beta simps,” “white knights,” and others. This is similar to how some on the Alt Right disdainfully refer to mainstream conservatives as “cuckservatives.” When a professor named Brad Wilcox from Prager University tried to criticize MGTOW last May for its anti-marriage stance, the scorn and derision on the forums had no end. Most notably, they referred to him as a “turd-flinging monkey.” These are men who will not be swayed.
I admire that about them, even if I don’t quite agree with everything they say. Because behind all the cynicism and resentment is equal parts truth and pain. Cultural Marxism and feminism have enabled women to the detriment of men when it comes to marriage and child-rearing. And many of these women do not hesitate to use their ill-begotten power to the fullest. The MGTOW forums are rife with these kinds of stories: men dealing with divorce, separation from children, garnished wages, tax difficulties, and a general loss of rights and prestige in our society. I have personally known two men whose lives for a time were all but ruined due to the whims of unstable wives. I have no doubt there is much justice behind the decisions of the MGTOW crowd to simply say no to women, to “tune in and drop out” to appropriate part of a Timothy Leary slogan. Because feminism presupposes a class-like struggle between men and women, men are now actually starting to fight back. And according to some of them, it’s the best thing they have ever done. Once free from the matriarchy some of them find they are more productive, more active, healthier, and in general, happier. Furthermore, they are now untouchable by the enemy. How can a feminist attack a man who refuses to have contact with women?
Despite this, however, I find the rise of MGTOW troubling. I cannot speak for everyone on the Alt Right in this case (especially since there is some overlap between the two movements), but I would imagine that many would share my apprehension. Most on the Alt Right share a white racial identity and a concern for the future of whites as a race. If enough white men drop out of the gene pool, especially young men who are bright and literate enough to appreciate all the literature found at mgtow.com, then the race faces an additional threat to its survival.
There is something else, too. The MGTOW forum reminds me a lot of the 1980s television program Married . . . with Children, only without the laughs. The forum is not funny, of course, but the ignominious pratfalls from grace that many of these men have suffered coupled with the abject dysfunction of their former lives and the crude contempt with which they hold their ex-spouses is, by nature, comic.
Here is a snippet of dialogue from Married . . . with Children which I will take to my grave with me. After getting Husband to say something she wants to hear, Wife whines, “You don’t sound like you mean it.”
Husband then grimaces and says, “That’s because I don’t mean it!”
Cue the laugh track. You have the classic send up and smack down of a good joke. Wife fancies herself something special, then slips on a banana peel and goes splat on her bottom. It’s funny. But imagine actually living in such a circumstance. Imagine having such loathing for your spouse that you can’t even be bothered to conceal that from her. This is what it is like reading through some of the conversations on the MGTOW forum.
As I have written elsewhere, comedy as truth is a terrifying thing.
A 1950s science fiction author could do a lot worse for an apocalyptic novel than by making the very last men on Earth a Pythagorean cult of he-man woman-haters who categorically refuse to get busy. A plot could be contrived to have a some of the last few nubile women to infiltrate the cult and seduce the religiously reluctant men. Of course, one of the women falls in love with one of the men. They consummate, but soon a second woman falls in love with him as well and steals him from the first woman. The first woman, in a fit of jealousy, then becomes swayed by the idea that humanity needs to go extinct and works with the elder cultists to achieve this nefarious end. As a result, the adulterous couple and their sidekick robots must race out of Techno-City to the site on Venus where the computer-operated thermonuclear rocket bombs are programmed to . . . well, you get the picture.
I assume also you see where I am going with this. If taken to its professed extreme, the Men Going Their Own Way crowd must end up as villains, and not even charismatic ones. As intolerable and obnoxious as leftist, feminist women have become, we still need to ask the question: are we going to propagate as a race, or not? It seems that the MGTOW crowd already has their answer, and it is not yes. And that is terrifying.
Of course, I would not dare lecture any of these men on what they should do with their personal lives. If eschewing the company of women makes them happy, fair dinkum. But what I would like to do, as a person who hates cultural Marxism as much as they do, as an avowed enemy of their enemy, as a potential ally on the Alt Right, is to ask them something.
Is it really a good idea to proselytize? People in the forums have been exulting about how the MGTOW movement has been growing as of late, especially after their little dust up with Prager U. But perhaps the goose and the gander are a tad at odds here. I can see MGTOW as a necessary haven for some unfortunate men who’ve been married with children and then victimized by an increasingly anti-male and, let’s face it, anti-white society. But when they brand themselves as a positive alternative for the broader population of men, especially young men involved in the manosphere, that’s when they start to step on the toes of the Alt Right. They seemed more concerned with themselves in the here and now rather than the future. They’re defining themselves by the very thing to which they are reacting. They seem more anti-woman than pro-man. And the very idea of being in favor of both men and women is laughed out of the room. Good relations between the sexes is only way to keep the race going, and they don’t seem to care. It’s almost like they’re giving up.
The Alt Right is concerned with white populations who are not producing at replacement levels and living in countries that are being swamped by waves of non-assimilating immigrants. This is a really important thing to be concerned about, and you don’t need a GPS to figure out where our future is headed. It’s bad enough that many young white men are effectively wasting time with sexual hijinks in the manosphere while their Muslim or Hispanic counterparts are busy having kids at age twenty. The last thing we need is for them to start spouting “marriage is slavery” or some other nihilistic mantra from MGTOW and effectively not having children.
Again, this is not saying that what the MGTOW crowd is doing with their own lives is wrong. Rather, it would be wrong if all or even most white men did what the MGTOW crowd is doing. I think this is a reasonable assertion. On the website’s history page, one can find the following pronouncement:
Great men of history have already given enough, so the modern man can afford to take a century off.
No, we can’t. At least the white ones can’t. If enough of us were to take this century off from reproducing ourselves, you can bet your $500,000 divorce we wouldn’t live to see the next one.
21 comments
The truly last-vestige of ‘Man only’ get-a ways is Freemasonry. The Lodge is sacrosanct and brothers gather to simply be Men. We cherish harmony and civility but we also have robust discussions on politics, religion and race – subjects taboo amongst the current matriarchy. The best part? Masons are direct descendants of the Knights Templar and our ‘secrets’ are still a threat to organized religion. Plus you can find a lodge that’s all-white, they’re all over. Blacks co-opted Masonry (of course) and have their own lodges under the auspices of Prince Hall.
Elks is about the same, as far as I’ve seen. YMMV.
Oh, I’ve never met anybody non-white in an Elks lodge. Zero.
@Rue
a)Regular Freemasons are prohibited from discussing religion and politics within the lodge. The only type of FM that allows that is Continental Freemasonry which is among the most subversive and left-wing institutions in the history of mankind. But I assume you mean you discuss politics and religion outside the lodge…
b) The Knight Templars are not in any way related to FM. That myth was propagated for quite sometime by naive and romantic Freemasons and anti-Masons (e.g. Augustin Barruel). No credible historian of Freemasonry takes such myths seriously. Not even Stephen Dafoe…
c) The Templars were not “heretics”, the Catholic Church admitted they were innocent as early as the 17th century. Only to repeat it in 2007. For the reasons the Templars were destroyed you should read Barber’s the Trial of the Templars, the best academic work on the subject.
d) There is no secret in FM, there never was any. As for the initiations, the handshakes, the passwords, the signs and grips all are published and I am not talking about the internet antimasons here, look at prestigious publishing houses which specialise in FM such as Kessinger…
Dalrock wrote an excellent essay on this subject:
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/more-ominous-than-a-strike/
This problem is as old as civilization. Patriarchy arises naturally in harsh climates where women simply cannot survive on their own, so they evolve into beautiful, chaste, obedient pets to compete for a limited supply of male providers. But patriarchy eventually generates so much wealth and security that women stop feeling the need to listen to their fathers and husbands. Men can delay this process by conspiring to keep women subjugated, or accelerate it by letting women vote themselves a welfare-state, but entropy always wins in the end.
Just a minor correction in your story. ““Turd Flinging Monkey” is the moniker used by a MGTOW content producer on YouTube who created a response video to Brad Wilcox’s Prager U video. Ultimately, Mr. Wilcox wrote a response to Turd Flinging Monkey’s video on The Federalist website where he specifically criticizes MGTOW.
The crucial question omitted from this article is: What is to be done? MGTOW’s didn’t arise ex nihilo. How exactly does one change society so that MGTOW is unnecessary? It’s easy to lament their existence. Solutions are nowhere on the horizon.
If you want to stop MGTOW, then the following needs to be done:
1. Stop the government sanctioned divorce-rape of men.
2. Stop the government acting as surrogate father through welfare benefits that require no men in a single mother’s household.
3. Women need to stop chasing men away with their obnoxious behaviors (i.e., incessant nagging, pointless sh*t-tests, setting men up to fail, etc.).
4. End no-fault divorce. Marriage needs to be a sacred and purposeful decision, not a fly-by-night whim that you opt out of just because of your feelings at the moment.
Well, that’s just for starters. However, I don’t see any of these things happening any time soon, if at all. Therefore, you will only see MGTOW grow as men realize the untenable situation they are in.
–Every time a man gets a divorce, a new MGTOW is born.
I recently spoke with a half-Ukrainian, half-Russian girl, a quite attractive lady, who, as an interjection to my explanation of MGTOW (of which I’m not fan), said, “What does that stand for? Men Going Toward Outstanding Women?
I laughed, and realized that’s a much more apt title–should that not be what what we should actually do as men?
Problem: patriarchal oppression, inequality of the sexes.
Reaction: Cultural Marxism, feminism, state intervention to force “equality”.
Solution: MGTOW, widespread homosexuality, asexuality, etc. Low marriage & fertility rates. Destruction of the White race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pOMCmVc3wY
Good points here, anger is natural when there is injustice, and I can certainly understand that good men who have been brutalized by a dysfunctional, anti-family legal system would react against it. Hopefully this is a phase that some men pass through, as they grow into a wiser, more masculine, better educated male who can build strong relationships with women as an Alpha man.
” I would not dare lecture any of these men on what they should do with their personal lives.”
The nation (meaning the race) has every right to not only lecture but enforce the male obligations of society, which are to breed, defend and rule. “Dropping out” of creating families is a dereliction of duty that is completely unacceptable, destructive and immoral. We demand that they deal with their pain, use their intelligence to aquire the skills necessary to navigate the dangers of dating, marriage and family and succeed, and leave behind successors with European DNA to inherit a birthright. There is no excuse not to.
Thank you for the careful and observant reading of a still-misunderstood label and culture. Reactionary? Yes. Angry? At times, of course. Solutions? At least the advice is often good, rigorous in its critique of issues, and often a balm for those red-pilled and suffering. Whether explicit or implicit, there is alot of focus on uncovering painful truths and thrashing out inconsistencies, to come to an understanding without delusions. You want these folks as adjuncts to the Alt-Right; even if their pain can be unsettling at times, the phenomenon is still filled with people unsatisfied with the status quo, seeking answers to difficult questions, and natural allies in a red-pill sense.
Also, the common conflation of MGTOW with a PUA outside of the Manosphere is unwarranted and generally repellent to either side. There are many Monks Going Their Own Way as opposed to endless pick-up tactics. I see a natural tendency toward seeking balance after great upset in
MGTOW that reflects what many have gone through before finding the Alt-Right.
Kum-ba-ya. I’m in a bloody good mood tonight.
I have personally known two men whose lives for a time were all but ruined due to the whims of unstable wives.
No kidding. I’ve personally known a dozen women, or more, whose lives for a time were all but ruined by the spoiled-little-boy behavior of their husbands.
Someone mentioned that MGTOW didn’t arise “ex nihilo”. Neither did the feminist movement, irrespective of what it’s developed into.
Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan no doubt.
Dear Stronza
Your comment and your implicit defence of feminism proves something which has been obvious to most right-wingers for quite sometime i.e. that even right-wing females are not to be trusted or taken seriously when it comes to politics. It reminded me the articles written by J.Antas for alternativeright.com several years ago, luckily those articles had such a backlash that Jaenelle “I am not a feminist BUT plz gibs leadership positions to spoiled childless women” Antas was ostracised from the right blogosphere.
Your comment also implies that even right-wing females will use all the weapons the gynocratic state provides them against their husbands if necessary…
There is a reason why all successful societies have kept females out of politics and totally subjugated to their closest male relative only for that to change through jewish influence and the agitation of rich spoiled upper middle class females…
Maybe you could drop Ursula Haverbeck a note and tell her to keep her nose out of politics. She could always find purpose in life spending her remaining days fetching beer for some worthy right wing fellow.
Thank you for your comment and I agree that feminism to the degree that it coincides with personal responsibility has moral validity in advancing humanity overall. Sadly postmodern feminism appears to have regressed into an ironic form of misandry in which its most militant proponents hypocritically strive to emulate those same masculine behaviors that they simultaneously denounce in men.
I used to consider myself a MGTOW. I can’t consider myself as that 100% anymore. Although I’m Polish I live in Sweden (was born in Sweden) and I’ve seen the effects of that multicultism (apparently multiculturalism is called multikulti both in Polish and German, which is a more fitting name) and die-versity in Sweden and it’s not pretty. Within a few decades Swedes will probably become a minority in Sweden if things keep going like this, even if mass immigration stops entirely. At this point there is pretty much no other option than deportation of non-Europeans. Sadly most Swedes are not strong-willed enough to do that. The multicultism and die-versity mentality is still very strong. Sure, many Swedes want reduced immigration but as I said that’s not enough. Either way, I’m planning on working a couple years in Sweden and maybe pay a bit back to the system that paid for my education etc. (although I’m very unhappy to support a system that is performing white genocide on its own population) and then move to Poland and stay there. I don’t see a future in Sweden and besides my homeland is in Poland. In the meantime I will support efforts to get the most nationalist party into power. If I would able to keep my Swedish citizenship after moving I would still support the most nationalist party in Sweden.
Either way, back to the MGTOW topic: Yes, the big issue is that the white birth rate needs to increase. I hope to contribute in that way but I don’t see a future for raising children in Sweden and besides I would like to keep my children ethnically Polish and thus would want a Polish woman. However, there’s always risk of bad consequences due to marriage and divorce even in Poland, even if the risk is not as bad. There are a few things that can be done to avoid such risks, such as finding a woman with libertarian, traditional, conservative and nationalist values, finding a woman who’s a virgin (actually that seems help a lot in keeping a stable marriage (although it may be the other way around, i.e. that the woman is virgin until marriage because she’s a good woman)) and a woman who has good relation with her family (especially her father) etc. Now is not the time to go MGTOW for sure, too much is at stake. However, it’s important to keep these things in mind when looking for a partner. Ideally I would like the marriage to be a church marriage only and with no state involvement but I’m not sure how the options look for that in Poland (in Sweden it seems like common-law marriage is in place no matter how you do it).
“So sure, get married and have four kids. BOOM you are now $1 million in the red and stuck with lazy, stay at home land whale with a vagina stretched beyond recognition.”
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What a disgusting, shamelessly self-centered remark. Those concerned with the health of Europe have *nothing* to learn from people like this.
As I see it, there are two ways to end one’s time on this earth contentedly: be a (wo)man of such import and impact as to have created a legacy that will be remembered for generations or have children. A childless “MGTOW” whining on a forum is most likely not a particularly consequential individual and in no way a positive model.
Anyone who has had kids wouldn’t trade a single one of them for a million dollars. Not even ten million or ten billion for that matter. No amount of money can replace a child. And if anyone disagrees than they deserve to be gassed.
That’s why I don’t like these MGTOW idiots. They are so self-centered and ungrateful.
“oh my god, I got four stupid children and a fat lazy wife. My life sucks!”
“shoulda gone mgtow, dude.”
“Yeah I know.”
It’s good these people won’t be having kids if that is the way they feel.
Hypothetically speaking would you rather white people marry, procreate, and divorce while ending up very unhappy or white people neither marry nor procreate and be happy?
Utilitarianism and racialism cannot entirely be in accord. there’s got to be some point where one makes a marginal gain against another and there must be a limited zero-sum game between the two. So what’s the case for subordinating utilitarianism?
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