Man controlling woman with money … or woman controlling man with sex? Only the MGTOWs know for sure
By David Futrelle
Searching through the archives on Yahoo Answers’ Gender Studies section — which, because the internet is the internet, has been completely overrun with angry lady-haters — I found one anonymous fellow asking a slightly ungrammatical but easily answerable question: “Why women hate MGTOW?”
I can’t speak for women, or even for that relatively small portion of women that even know what MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) means, but I’m guessing the first answer that pops to mind for most MGTOW-haters is: Because MGTOWs keep promising to go their own way, but they never seem to actually do it.
Our anonymous MGTOW friend doesn’t agree, though his attempts to further explain the question inadvertently provide an answer before he gets around to offering his own explicit answer (which happens to be wrong).
He begins by sketching out a vision of sexual and romantic relationships between men and women that is not only oversimplified to the point of absurdity but also rather chilling.
If women control men through sex and attraction then it could be said that men control women through access to resources.
Well, that’s a scary way to look at relationships — as a perpetual war for control in which women manipulate with sex and men with money. And if women control men with their sex appeal, what happens when they hit, say, age 80? Do their husbands cash in their remaining retirement savings to so in search of a younger model?
When women didn’t work men controlled women by controlling the purse strings. Now women have jobs so men can’t put money over women’s heads.
Women have always worked, of course, but apparently it’s unfair to men for women to earn their own money from work because then men can’t control them?
And society doesn’t accept and allow violence so men don’t really have control over women in modern society.
Fucking hell. Why does every MGTOW (not to mention every MRA, every incel, every Red Piller) seem to think like an abuser?
Women are free to do whatever they want.
The horror!
Women of course still use their looks and appearance to attract and manipulate men and society doesn’t see this as against the law. It’s just a harmless lie right?
Women’s “looks and appearance” (which are apparently different things) are a LIE? HOW? Because women wear makeup to look sexier than they “really” are? Because they wear clothing that doesn’t completely hide their body but don’t offer said body to every man who wants to have sex with them?
And how would one go about making it illegal for women to look attractive to men? Would especially “hot” women have to get plastic surgery to look worse?
But men are waking up to this and realizing we don’t have power in relationships and our dealings with women so why bother if all we do is give and all women do is take.
If this is how you think relations between (straight) men and women work. I’m pretty sure very few women will be terribly troubled if you stop bothering about relationships — or, more to the point, bothering them.
And why are many women in the western world unsatisfied what we men do every single time? If we reject a woman, her friends would also take it personally and attack the man.
Has this ever happened in the history of MGTOWism? I mean, for real, not in their fevered imaginations. It’s hard for me to imagine a woman who wouldn’t be relieved to be “rejected” by one of these creeps.
You know that if we go our own ways in life, you are no value to us. Of course, that is a threat to women.
Insofar as you guys pose a “threat” to women, this isn’t it. I’d be glad to see you guys truly go your own way — preferably far away, like desert island far — and so would every woman I know who even knows what you guys are. The only threats you pose to women is that you won’t go — that you’ll stick around to harass and threaten women online and off, to inflict violence on women, or ever to follow some of your incel brothers by outright murdering people.
Just please go already.
Perhaps even more chilling than this MGTOW’s weird little post is that fact that he has simply stated — albeit in a crude and overly schematic way — what many leading Men’s Rights Activists think. It was Warren Farrell, you may recall, who warned his fellow men of the “miniskirt power” and “cleavage power” women are said to have over even the most powerful men — and who put a naked women’s ass on the cover of the 25th Anniversary edition of his book The Myth of Male Power to remind men of the allegedly fearsome power of a shapely lady dumper.
These aren’t fringe ideas amongst misogynists. They’re central to their worldview. And that — not the attempts by a subculture of angry dudes to boycott the so-called sexual marketplace — is a real threat to women.
Same old, same old. It’s terrible for women not to work outside the home because she’s mooching off men. It’s terrible for women to work outside the home because then she might forget her place.
They say this like attraction isn’t a two-way street, as if hetero women are not affected by the looks and appearance of men.
And in the next breath they complain about how women are always drooling over Brad Pitt but won’t give them the time of day. Or was that incels? Or is there really a meaningful difference?
“Emulate Saudi Arabia” would seem to be the obvious answer. MGTOW heaven … if MGTOWs weren’t also uniformly Islamophobic racists.
Because anyone who isn’t an abuser, will take one look at these ideologies and keep walking.
I’m surprised they didn’t complain about women who make more money than men. Perhaps that’s next week’s rant. They have a schedule for recirculating this crap, don’t they?
Come now David! You can’t really expect MGTOWs to have a decent grasp of history outside of old TV and heavily doctored history textbooks! That’s tantamount to misandry! How very dare you ask the big strong mayunly men of the MGTOW movement (not much movement going on, but you get the idea) to do women’s work like research and a basic Google search! [/sarcasm]
For men who don’t need women in their lives, miggy toes spend an awful lot of time obsessing over women. They never really go their own way, do they?
Did these assholes accidentally be honest for once?
More women are remaining single (and in some cases celibate) than at any time previously in history, as far as we can tell from statistics. Because women can survive financially without a male relative nowadays, more and more women are choosing to… you could almost call it… go their own way… than deal with abusive men, or even men who are just jerks, or tie themselves to a man they don’t wholly love, because tea, knitting and cats are just better alternatives.
I’ve said it before: incels and MRAs and all think the sexbot arrival is going to save them. It’s not. It’s going to doom every man who isn’t Chris Evans. “Well I can date this unemployed jackass who thinks feminism is cancer and lives in a basement, or I can live with my best friend, adopt some puppies, and have sex with my handsome robot whenever I need it. Decisions, decisions.”
I’m honestly a bit surprised that the MGTOW didn’t also have a paragraph ranting about how rape is criminalized now (even within a marriage, the horror!), and that means that men no longer have any options to have sex on their own terms!
Though I suppose he kind of does, with that “men can’t use VIOLENCE to get women to be with them any more, waaaaaah!” whine. Just not quite as blatantly.
So, just in case anyone was thinking the US was going for the gold in the race to the bottom all by itself
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-roma/italian-interior-minister-wants-census-of-roma-communities-idUSKBN1JE2H0
So we’ve got at least two so called democracies showing signs of going down the genocide path and bringing back memories of the Holocaust and millions are starving in Yemen due to the Saudi/UAE/US blockade which is bringing back memories of the Bengal famine.
I think this gif sums up my 2018 mood so far
Since I’ve been too much of a Debbie Downer the past few days, have some corgis
Yes, same old same old vile, violent ultra-control freaks who are of course riech-wing, authoritarian and so pent up with violence, they cry at not being able to “express” themselves. And by that, I mean brutalizing their wives and kids and keeping teenaged girls in their basements as they brutally sodomized their crushed, broken corpses with impunity.
Of course. Also, can you believe that there are people out there who got a problem with us posting these realities of these people in the mainstream? Say it’s “bullying.” Like we should feel “pity” for them. Erm…. do these people have amnesia? Do they honestly read these posts and posts like them?
I am a woman and have every single right in the world to know of and expose these people. It’s my duty to let other women of the world know as well. I am the target of their ire, and to be in the dark about it is stupidity at best and self-sabotage at worst.
Let me say something, if we all were replying in fear, locking our doors, getting back to our “places”, staying silent and giving into their demands and wearing burkas while exposing these freaks of nature, they would smile all smug and righteous-like. They had accomplished their goal: Implanting fear.
The very nerve that we don’t pity them, don’t take them seriously, continue on with our lives and that we got their number and have no issue standing up to them and speaking about them boldly is what ticks them off to their core. They hate that not every woman in America knows of them, are living happily and are not in the corner in the fetal positions sucking their thumbs. They really aren’t even looking for pity, as these are the same people who sneer at emotions and pity. They want one thing only from us: FEAR.
We don’t give it, it’s all for naught and the angrier they’ll become. Underneath it all is not the need to be accepted, pitied, loved or whatever… they are sordid, vile, pent up time bombs who are angry they have nothing in their lives to grasp and control. The pleas for acceptance, pity and love and simply switched out for worship, unquestioning adoration and fear. Nothing to slap around, brutalize, and own in every possible way.
That is at the base of it. In their minds, women are the key to more future boys who think and act like them and they are the key to the world they want. Take women out of the equation and from under their thumb and brainwashing system…they truly got nothing. Just a pile of hate and broken dreams of egotistic grandeur, destruction and glory.
Another example of why appealing to the manosphere is a waste of time. Damned if you do damned if you don’t by the misery addicts.
@ooglyboggles
Misery addicts sums them up perfectly
When women didn’t work [outside the home,] men [who were power mongers] controlled women by controlling the purse strings. Now [many] women have jobs [outside the home,] so [these abusers] can’t [hold] money over women’s heads.
@Ooglyboggles, @Miss Cobalt
The expression Misery loves company seems to have been coined for them.
They’re miserable.
And they want us to be miserable.
So they hatch their miserable plans for violence (which are usually just hot air but sometimes they carry out) on the Internet. I’m sure they’re hoping that feminists and so-called normies (snort) will read their odes to misery and mayhem, and freak the hell out. That way they won’t be alone in their misery.
Sad!
You are right, David, my first thought about MGTOWs is indeed ‘Why are they still here? Can’t they just go already?!’.
They’re a textbook case of aggrieved entitlement…
@Knitting Cat Lady
I’d go say something like “jeez dude get a dog or something.” But that would mean subjecting a poor animal to the whims of these people. And frankly I wouldn’t trust them to take care of a pet rock.
@Ooglyboggles
There’s at least one incel who should absolutely not be left alone with an animal, and I suspect he’s unusual only in that he publicly admits what he wants.
As I’ve told you before, now when I’ve gotten a job with tenure and a high salary, Husband is gonna quit his old job that makes him miserable and instead study literature and creative writing at the university. He doesn’t seem to worry about the fact that then I’d be holding all of the power!!!!!!!
But Dvärghundspossen, how will he work in the bonbon mines when he’s busy studying creative writing?
Hey, everyone, who wants to help me start a crowdfunder to buy MGTOWs their own island??
Far, far away. With plenty of seagulls
@Violet the Vile
Can we just give them a few million plastic bottles and tell them to make their own? I could see fair to giving them milk jugs and suchlike too.
The Great Pacific Plastic Patch would make a suitable MGTOW country, now that their chatter about “depopulating part of Puerto Rico” has become deeply unfunny in hindsight.
Doubtless, without the distractions caused by the presence of women, they’ll be able to work on the real problems that society faces, such as how to get internet in the middle of the Pacific.
@Dvärghundspossen I am delighted (and a little jealous) that that’s a possibility for your husband. I’d be stoked about it if I were in his shoes too.
Isn’t this like the misogynists’ idea of utopia? Seems like a pretty established fact to me…
Women have never worked? Tell that to my grandmother, if she hadn’t died 23 years ago. In the US at least, working class women definitely worked outside the home. She was a beautician in the 1930s, then later worked on an assembly line putting together small electronics.
On top of this, she maintained a home, and gave birth to four children.
I guess these fools have never seen photos of women and children working in the mills.
I remember seeing an episode of the talk show Donahue in the mid 1980s. Anyway, there was a proto-MRA guest who insisted he wanted women to have good jobs and be able to support themselves, because he “didn’t want to be their wallet.”.
I remember him, because he was wearing a long skirt under which his wingtips peeped out. He also had shoulder length red hair. An odd combo of traditional male and female attire, to say the least.
This part is especially wow. It’s such a brazenly open admission that the system they desire can’t work so long as our consent is allowed to factor in. And that’s supposed to be a problem.
How very awful it must be for you when other human beings’ freedom of choice presents an obstacle to your power fantasies! That darned female autonomy, man.
@Dalillama
A wonderful idea. It’ll solve the plastic problem AND keep them out of our hair. And I can’t wait to watch their superior masculine brains solving all the engineering problems in seconds /s/
@Dormousing_it
The “woman as homemaker” trope is actually very much a middle-class thing. Working-class women have always worked. Even in the Victorian era, which fetishized the domestic goddess to an extreme, married working-class women worked in mills, took in sewing, were maids…the class element of this never gets discussed really, but supporting a wife who was not earning was reserved for a man with a middle-class income.
These aren’t equivalent forms of control. Being temporarily mesmerized by a shapely butt isn’t even remotely on the same level as being confined to the house and having to get your partner’s permission for every little expenditure. Men can survive just fine without sex and attraction. Women can’t survive without money, shelter, food, or the means to find employment. They don’t have the option to walk away.
These guys have such a twisted idea of what constitutes oppression.
You know, there’s a direct line from this type of thinking to immigrant children crying in cages. Trump’s official domestic policy, as formulated by Miller and Sessions, can be described as incel nationalism (not my phrase, but it fits). The rage of the rejected, anti-social male. Women and children must suffer as an expression of power and dominance. Normies (ie, people with functioning human decency) must be shocked, terrorized, and traumatized into compliance. Burn it all down, and salt the earth.
Trump approaches negotiations the same way. In deals, as in transactional relationships, there always has to be a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. If the other side gets even 1/10 of what they want, then the deal is a failure and Trump will walk away.
Financial independence gives women more leverage to say “no” to bad deals, and these guys can’t stand that. Like the OP says, why bother if it isn’t clearly apparent to the world that you’re “winning” the relationship?
How is it a threat to women to no longer be of “value” to sex extortionists…who themselves have nothing to offer in exchange for this “value” except violent abuse and degradation? Or is he implying, incel-style, that now that women no longer have value as hostages, it’s open season?
“Let us kill you, or else we’ll kill you.”
y’know, I bet there are some unihabitated islands in the Aleutians … they could go their own way, live with like-minded men, show how self-sufficient and independent they are AND celebrate their (I assume) nordic heritage, all at once
@EJ damn we didn’t think about that!
@Jarred yeah a lot of his colleagues are jealous too!
So, men used to be controlled sexually so women could get access to their money, and now they’re controlled sexually so women can get access to their…what exactly?
How can I be outraged when I don’t even know what I’m being exploited for? Or conversely, what am I supposed to use to control women to get access to their sexuality? There must be something, because otherwise women would’ve already lost interest in having relationships with men.
As Buttercup pointed out above, money is something you need, while sex is more like just something you want. I guess the issue is that modern women in modern relationships are getting something they want, rather than something they need. Men haven’t lost control in mutually controlling relationships (as one apparently might put it), they’ve lost a relative advantage in the level of control.
“Shapely lady dumper”? Great, now I’ve got this Peaches song stuck in my head. Warning: NSFW, or polite company
*Downs glass of water and two Advil*
@Violet
I think we can get one of those Antarctic icebergs for a little bit of money. We’d need some convincing and misleading advertising to get them there– which seems to be the kind of advertising they go for, anyway.
I like the iceberg idea. I have a couple of books by a dude who’s really into the idea of living on desert islands and/or other weird secret places. One is a bool with descriptions of various uninhabited islands (and they’re all uninhabited for good reasons). In his other book he encourages people to live in secret houses underneath their real houses, in holes, in the brackish lagoons inside atolls (hey, it’s almost like land) and on icebergs. He figures you could ride them until they got close to land and then make big money selling the ice to the locals. He’s serious.
“Seafront property. Large basement area. Local celebrities include Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett”
These are the same people who complain that women are turning ugly because of feminism. You’d think they’d be happy women are giving up their power over them.
Re: iceberg habitability
During WW2 there was a thing called Project Habbakuk. That was a plan to build a number of huge aircraft carriers that would be permanently stationed in the mid Atlantic. They were to be built from a material called Pykrete. That’s basically just ice with shredded paper in it. It takes ages to melt and is incredibly strong. At a demo to the war office, the guy proposing the project shot a bullet at a piece. The bullet ricocheted off and hit one of the army top brass. Luckily he was too impressed with the demo to make a fuss about the bullet in his leg.
They got as far as building a test section at a lake in Canada; before changing fortunes for U-Boats meant the project was no longer necessary.
OT:
Here’s a list of organizations that are mobilizing to help immigrant children separated from their families
@Dormousing_it:
Heh…I remember him, too! An angry, defensive, mean little mofo, as I recall. I had the feeling he wasn’t doing it to liberate men from leechy women so much as to rub women’s noses in something. Exactly what that might be, I’m not sure…because any woman making her own way would probably be glad not to be in a position of dependency on someone like him. Believe it or not, most of us LIKE to work, provided we find something meaningful to us that also pays decently…and for women, being financially emancipated from potential abusers is just the icing on the cake.
So of course we don’t like menzers, or migtoes, or incels, or whatever else they might call themselves. They don’t really give a shit about any actual issues that might concern men. They only want to keep us balled and chained, and it’s all one big transparent abuser’s lobby!
You know, if there’s anything that just screams “I’m blatantly avoiding responsibility for my own actions” it’s either this idea or “This is why Trump won.” Honestly, if an attractive woman paraded herself naked before you, whatever you do in reaction to that is on you. But let’s be frank here: where do you think the manipulation is really taking place? Is it the woman who maybe puts on make-up to look as good as she can before a night out, or is it the marketing department of Calvin Klein or Victoria’s Secret or any number of fashion or fragrance vendors out there splashing conventionally attractive people on posters and ads? It’s the latter, no question.
Men are not slaves to their hormones. I know this because I’m a guy and as much as I might indulge myself in the more adult corners of the web, I do so knowing full well that even that must be done responsibly. So stop abdicating all free will just because you’re too cowardly to look yourself in the mirror.
@Alan Robertshaw:
I remember hearing about Pykrete long ago. (My grandfather was stationed out in Vulcan, Alberta during WWII as part of the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, teaching navigation, so he wasn’t all that far from some of the tests. Well, ‘not all that far’ in Canadian terms, at least.) Fascinating idea for a self-healing material ship, but not really practical anywhere other than the North Atlantic or Arctic, and barely so even there. The Wikipedia page mentions that at least one modern test had to be stopped because it was taking on water around the engine mounts; that makes sense, given that the engines are probably the biggest source of heat.
Otherwise in general… yeah, MGTOW dude, the fact that you believe you are absolutely helpless against being controlled by sex says more about you than it does about the rest of humanity, even the half you claim allegiance to.
And if the ‘absolutely helpless’ part pisses you off, maybe you should stop and think about what you’re saying, because that IS what you’re saying.
Of course, these guys know that perfectly well. After all, if we were, the whole “going your own way” thing would be impossible.
Well, *something* keeps MGTOWs sticking around.
Yeah, when I read something oddly specific like ‘women are never satisfied’ and ‘if you reject a woman her friends hate you too’ it strikes me as he just dumped his GF (for continually calling him on his BS) thinking he had other options and was surprised to find out that no, none of her friends are the slightest bit interested in getting with him. The solution is, obviously, to simply whine about women as a homogeneous hive-mind to dehumanise them and act like it they’re an entirely alien species that you can’t possibly understand or get along with. I mean, if only he could have controlled her financially or physically he wouldn’t be in this mess!
Fishy Goat
I just read on Pharyngula that someone on Facebook set out to raise $1,500 to help the children and got $7.5 million in 4 days!
Read blf’s post (#19). S/he lists many things that will give you hope, including Fox producers turning against Fox News commentators.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/19/what-would-liam-neeson-do/#comments
Mostly I hope this has broken Trump’s impervious barrier (based on his popularity with Repub voters) that has shielded him from criticism, especially by the Repubs in Congress.
Trump started out signing THEIR legislation; now he is bypassing them and writing his own legislation through executive orders (his China tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods was an executive order).
Trump has kicked Congress to the curb & the spineless sycophants take it because they are afraid that criticizing him will cost them votes.
@Susan
The far north has lots of little islands. Most of them don’t have trees either, so these guys can prove how manly they are.
@Hypatia’s Daughter
They’re past 15 million now.
Dalillama
I hope I’m not breaking any rules if I say “Holy Fuck!!”