Old School MGTOW

Despite all assertions to the contrary, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) was never specifically about the "marriage strike" nor of swearing off all women and subsequent society in favour of fleeing into the bush to live like Dick Proenneke.

 In fact, the MGTOW Manifesto makes no mention of a marriage strike even though many also supported it; myself included to a degree. No, MGTOW was, as is stated in the manifesto, about instilling masculinity in men, femininity in women, and working toward limited government! Go ahead, read the whole manifesto. It is not long. You won't even find the word "marriage" mentioned in it. So much for MGTOW being about the marriage strike and lowly deviant "omegas" hiding out in their basements, preferring internet porn to flesh and blood sexual interactions.  Many old school MGTOW's were actually married themselves, making the marriage "strike" a completely irrelevant point to identify them with.

One of the biggest underlying reasons to create MGTOW, however, was not even close to women and feminism, but rather as a response to other men. Yeah, yeah, women are weird and illogical, but men are only marginally better - and I really mean marginally - although our quirks are unique to ourselves.

When I started learning about men's issues several years ago now, there were very few places on the internet to go to. I believe back then there was Stand Your Ground, Men's News Daily, NiceGuy's, and one of the variations of the Don't Get Married boards which got blown up annually like the 1st of July.  (Sorry, 'Mericans. The fourth is just another working day for the schlubs up here). Anti-Misandry hadn't started yet and of course, there were zero MGTOW sites going. All of these sites were "forums" and at the time, there were very few independent bloggers... Eternal Bachelor, Angry Harry, Captain Zarmband, Fred X and Gonzo's Bar and Grill were the main ones, and if I recall them correctly, that list makes up about 75% of the total sites available for men to go to and learn only six or seven years ago. If you listed every men's site available on the sidebar of your blog, you would be lucky to come up with fifteen links in total.

But, too few sites weren't really the heart of the problem.

The men at those sites were!

A wiZE olD owl once told me that I will find that the vast majority of men will use whatever power they gain not to benefit other men or their cause, but rather to push other men down in order to protect their positions of power. And this is exactly what happens, over and over again, within the Men's "Rights" Movement. In many ways, I suppose it is natural behaviour, but, that still doesn't make it beneficial to men.

One of the worst aspects of this, however, is that the men who rose to "own" these forums were automatically considered "leaders" within the MRM, and thus, their opinions and statements were above reproach. Many, if not most of these men, were in no way "top shelf" MRA's because of their ideas, understanding, or activism. They became "leaders" simply because they started up a free website where they invited frustrated men to "talk." Usually, in the beginning, the "cutting edge" MRA's would show up to the new but slow board, so that they could have the opportunity to relay the information and theories they had discovered. This, of course, attracted other readers, who wanted to read something different than the same old same old. But usually after a year or so, the membership would grow to such a size that the cutting edge guys weren't necessary anymore to generate traffic, and with the owner of the "free" board getting much undeserved praise for spending 10 minutes a year ago to simply start the site, leaders with very low IQ's were created who used most of their "power" to make sure other men didn't gain any. (Sound familiar?). In fact, I even had a board owner once send me a private message "requesting" that I stop posting such lengthy and detailed pieces - not because people didn't like them, mind you, but specifically because they were liked. After a few months, the top three rated posts on his forum were penned and defended by myself, and this owner "requested" that I desist because he was the top writer on that forum, not me. (Today, he gets less hits than a newby's blog, but, at least he is the top writer there, eh?). Here is a good thread to illustrate (from a different forum) that shows exactly how difficult it was for a man to even get the most basic concepts out there to discuss. (It is long, but it illustrates so well the struggles men went through within their own ranks). 90% of the men commenting on today's MRM sites would not have lasted in such an environment... and 90% didn't. Most of the MRM back then was simply complaining that men weren't getting their fair share of equality. But God help you if you bad-mouthed women (a subjective term) along the way... because if you say something that offends people, mister, an 85 IQ forum owner will show up and punish you for your insolence. (I've never met an influential man in the MRM yet who bothered to start up a forum, even though lots of ill-proclaimed "leaders" have them).

So, back to the point of MGTOW.

Back in those days, Men Going Their Own Way meant actually going your own way - from the MRM, and from the boards and forums run by men with big egos but little intellectual clout to back them up. It meant, "don't think you need to be at this board in order to get your ideas out." There is nothing stopping you from starting up a free blog, or a free forum/board, and getting your own ideas out there.

And not only did this strategy free up the bottleneck of having too few forums managed by too politically corrected men, but it also expanded activism a great deal. You see, forums don't get picked up by Google search as much as blogs and websites do. One forum I frequented had the owner boast of 800 hits a day. That is not too bad, eh? Not great, but not bad either. However, when you take into account that there are hundreds of members on that board, and that most of them, after posting "this is the BEST article I've ever read... those women will die old with cats!" and each time they make such a post, they check in two, three, or four times to see if they have been responded to or upvoted in popularity, well, the bloom kinda comes off the rose, doesn't it? However, even with my own humble blog, I can shut it down (and have) for sometimes years at a time, and I still consistently get around 300 hits a day from varied sources and search queries even without posting at all... for years! This is certainly better than posting all of your work on some obscure thread on some echo chamber forum, to be buried under thousands of subsequent posts, resulting in nobody being exposed to them.

So, that was one of the main "hidden" goals of MGTOW. Activism by flooding the internet with "our message," and the way to create that impact on the internet was the concept of MGTOW, with individual men creating their own websites, and speaking their fricking mind without the ban-hammer being wielded above their heads.  Hell, we didn't even care if you could write two words coherently. Just start up a website and link to us so our web-rankings will rise... and please, don't delete your blogs if you get tired and quit, because it harms the rest of us in web-rankings and internet exposure.

That was old-school MGTOW. 

Had nothing to do with the marriage strike!

How 'bout that?

However, men are men as much as women are women, and after a period of time, it appears that men have again forgotten the lessons of the past. After "de-centralizing" the MRM, the MRM picked itself up, dusted itself off, and decided the best line of action was to again "centralize" everything under a big tent - a clearing house, as it were. And again, we find ourselves in the same place we were in less than a decade ago... albeit, we are slightly, and only slightly, further down the road.

I cannot stand the idea of bigger government as the result of MRM whining. Anyone whose ever read this blog before knows that this has been a major theme of this blog, if not of the MGTOW movement itself (given it's prominence in the manifesto, and the research and articles of my fellow MGTOW'rs). And yet, as we again all agree to convene under "the big tent" and succumb to silencing peer pressure while elevating the less educated again as leaders over the better equipped, we are heading exactly into the same quagmire we only recently un-stuck ourselves from. The only difference this time is that men are actually paying people to run these free, or relatively free, websites - this was something that would have made you an instant pariah only a few years ago. And I agree with the sentiment. I have no desire to build "organisms" which is what monetary funding does. (You have to justify your existence to justify the money... and that just becomes a self-feeding loop, like feminism is - plus, you have "customers" and can't speak The Truth as freely as before, lest you lose your livelihood). Don't talk to me about the "time." I have spent so much "time" on this subject, free of charge, that I can't even comprehend what would be owed at half the minimum wage! Many men have! I do not weep for those who write without adequate financial renumeration. Sorry. Welcome to the club.

But, as it sits, all I can really observe in the MRM over the past years has been a sleeping, an awakening from MGTOW, and a drift back to sleep by accepting the same premise as the pre-MGTOW MRM did. Aside from the MRM being bigger than before, I think it has come full circle back to where it started. We are back to the ridiculous "big tent" ideology, and further, although lots of men talk about restricting government, it is half-baked, as at the same time they also believe the government ought to solve many of their problems with more government - shared parenting being my absolute number one pet peeve about this.

I am a Man Going His Own Way (MGHOW). I agree with MGTOW in its original form. I don't agree with the premise put forward by the "full circle MRM."

I will elaborate in future articles, of course. But as a Man Going His Own Way, as I have always been, which has not always been congruent with the mainstream MRM. And thank God!