Don’t trust the “womanish” liars who say MGTOWs can’t marry; they might get you KILLED, Dean Esmay warns

So it’s another day ending in “y” and our old MRA sparring buddy Dean Esmay has gotten himself worked up about something again. This time, he’s pig-biting mad at “paranoid … YouTube MGTOW Sectarians” who have had the audacity to tell him, a married man, that real MGTOWs can’t get married.

Given that MGTOW stands for “Men Going Their Own Way,” and that the main thing these guys want to get away from is women, you might wonder why anyone calling himself a MGTOW would get married to one of those awful lady things.

But it turns out that some self-described MGTOWs “go their own way” by marching to the chapel to get married to the women they are afraid will ruin their lives. 

And this has caused a rift in the MGTOW movement, such as it is, with a small number of “married MGTOWs” like Esmay facing off against those in the MGTOW world who think that men should totally separate from women … except if they want to date them, or live with them, but definitely not marry them!

Blimey, this “going your own way” thing is trickier than I thought!

Now Esmay has decided to throw himself into the thick of it by posting a rambling, furious 4100-word screed on A Voice for Men accusing those who think MGTOWs shouldn’t get married of spreading an “indefensible false allegation leveled at innocent men” that “just might get you imprisoned or killed.” (Emphasis in original.)

Yes, that’s right. Esmay thinks that those who disagree with him on just who can call themselves MGTOWs … ARE GOING TO GET SOMEONE KILLED.

Let’s try to unpack his, er, logic, shall we?

Esmay starts off by offering his own take on the little rift that has formed between the handful of self-described MGTOWs, like him, who have aligned themselves with A Voice for Men, and pretty much everyone else who calls themselves MGTOWs. As Esmay sees it, these other MGTOWs are indulging in

a conspiracy theory that goes like this: scheming MRAs somehow discovered that “men’s rights” was going down in popularity but “Men Going Their Own Way” was growing, so Paul Elam suddenly decided he cared about MGTOW and got busy writing about it, but in an attempt to make it more mainstream and palatable, Paul Elam tried to tell MGTOW they can be married. But thankfully, alert and vigilant True MGTOW On YouTube exposed the dastardly plot and now all know the truth: Marriage and MGTOW never! Can’t be done! Un-possible! Only that lying monster Paul Elam and his cult followers say different!

As someone who’s been watching all this on the outside for several years now, this doesn’t seem like a conspiracy theory in the slightest. If you set aside some of its hyperbole, it seems like a fairly accurate description of what has gone down. You may recall, for example, the outcry amongst MGTOWs when Elam and his pal Peter Wright self-published their own little guide on the subject this past March.

But to Esmay it’s all a pack of lies. Correction: a pack of WOMANISH lies.

To be blunt, all that is an incredibly womanish lie; it’s dense, multilayered, and carefully crafted so that every reasonable discussion of it can be torpedoed by changing the subject, shifting the goalposts, and other Rationalization Hamster moves. Those who defend this lie, this indefensible false allegation leveled at innocent men, are also guilty of marginalizing the work of other Men Going Their Own Way who are certainly not named Paul Elam, and some of whom can’t even stand Paul Elam.

Did I say “womanish?” I meant “girlish.”

I honestly suspect that most of those promulgating this conspiracy narrative are the products of single mother homes, because they’re such girlish brats so much of the time, and their narrative is such pathetic gossipy schoolgirl drama and backstabby lies.

As Esmay sees it, no furshlugginer YouTube MGTOWs are going to tell him and his pals what MGTOW is or isn’t! Instead, he’s going to tell them:

The goal of movement MGTOW was to help individual men find themselves and find what they wanted, and help that individual man craft the best way to get it—for himself, in his own way.

Really? That’s what MGTOW is all about? By this expansive definition, I’m a MGTOW, and so are my cats. (Well, they would be, if they were dudes.)

But never mind, because Esmay is working towards his crescendo. Take it away, Mr. Married MGTOW:

This idea—that a married man may not be MGTOW—is a lie. It is an abusive lie that is sometimes harmful to the men who hear and believe it.

Apparently, any time anyone expresses an opinion contrary to his own it is not only a “lie” but is actually a form of abuse.

It is also spitting straight into the face of those who first founded the Men Going Their Own Way movement on the internet, some of whom remain active to this day. It is a betrayal of MGTOW. It is a subversion and hijacking of it. It is a redefinition, and a toxic one. And it should not be allowed to stand.

Dean then turns his invective-o-meter up to 11:

Why should it not be allowed to stand? Why should we not just accept that the popular YouTube set have helped MGTOW “evolve” to its current state? First because the original MGTOW have yet to leave the stage. Second, because the YouTube Sectarians are misleading people, including themselves in some cases. And their advice is dangerous.

Yes dangerous. Not to society, but to themselves and their followers. They’re a bunch of damned fools who are going to get themselves or their friends killed. And yes, I do mean that literally.

I would repeat that last bit about people getting killed, and put it in bold. But I don’t need to, since Esmay has already done so himself:

Repeat: if you say that there is no benefit to marriage to men, you are a dangerously ill-informed fool who is likely to get yourself or others killed.

Repeat again: the man who tells you that there is no benefit or protection to the marriage license just might get you imprisoned or killed.

It’s rare to see an MRA actually acknowledge that there are certain benefits to marriage; they’re much more likely to be railing against it at the top of their lungs.

But how the hell could suggesting that “MGTOWs can’t be married” possibly lead to anyone getting “imprisoned or killed?” Esmay explains that even though

marriage is generally a bad deal for men, cohabiting with a woman without a marriage license frequently, and indisputably, reduces your rights and renders you more vulnerable than if you got the state-approved piece of paper.

Esmay tells the story of a friend of his who committed suicide after being denied access to the children he’d had with a woman he’d been living with.

It’s a sad story, to be sure, but how exactly Esmay figures that his friend’s suicide is somehow the responsibility of “YouTube MGTOW Sectarians” railing against the idea of married MGTOWs and not, for example, the result of MRAs railing against marriage in general, I could not tell you.

Esmay thinks that “if you are telling men there is never any benefit to a marriage license, you are lying to those men and may get those men killed with your lie.”

But the fact is that MRAs and others in their general vicinity make exactly this argument all the time. Consider, for example, the thrice-divorced Men’s Rights blogger who, several years ago, wrote an angry post titled “Gay Marriage? How About NO Marriage!”

Modern marriage, in case these Einsteins haven’t noticed, has all the sanctity of a ten dollar hooker. Matrimony has devolved into just another throwaway institution in a throwaway culture …  an institution that is currently the most prolific source of oppressive discrimination against them? …

What remains of marriage is not salvageable. It’s water that can’t be decontaminated; a cripple that can’t be healed. And the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery and start the whole shebang over from scratch. …

MRA’s should do the decent thing with marriage and pull the plug.

And who wrote that? A blogger by the name of Paul Elam, on a little blogspot blog that he later turned into the A Voice for Men that we know and loathe today. (And he was proud enough of this post that he reposted it on the new and allegedly improved AVFM.)

Dean, I hate to tell you this, but your former boss at AVFM seems to be one of the “abusive,” potential death-causing “MGTOW sectarians” you’ve just devoted more than 4000 words to railing against.