So I get periodic visits here from hostile and uninformed visitors demanding to know just what I have against those Men’s Rights activist-adjacent fellows who have declared themselves to be Men Going Their Own Way. Surely, they sniff, I can’t be really opposed to men living the lives they choose to live, independent of women? Don’t feminists encourage women to be similarly independent? You go, girls, and all that?
As a fellow calling himself Praetorian wrote:
Why are women so bitter towards men going their own way, without them
“John,” meanwhile, thought he detected some hypocrisy:
So, if a woman says she does not need a man in her life, she is seen as a strong independent woman. If a man says he does not need a woman in his life, he is seen as someone who has a deep hostility towards and/or profound distrust of women.
How convenient and how logical…………….
Happpily, the commenters here always put these misguided souls straight: we don’t object , in principle, to men “going their own way,” if that’s what they want to do.
But in practice, the men who classify themselves as Men Going Their Own Way don’t go anywhere; they stick around and stink the place up with their raging misogyny.
If you go to MGTOWforums or any other popular MGTOW hangout, you’ll discover that the regulars there don’t spend much time talking about the fabulous lives they’re leading on their own — the things they’re learning, the hobbies they’re pursuing, the experiences they’re having.
Nope. They spend virtually all their time and energy taking about women, and how awful they are. The typical MGTOWer spends more time thinking about women on any given day than the president of Planned Parenthood does. And what they think about women is awful. Just go through my MGTOW posts here for example after example.
You want to see some men who are really going their own way? Watch the video at the top of this post. These are guys enjoying themselves and not giving a shit what anyone thinks. They are AWESOME.
That’s what Men Going Their Own Way should look like. And I’m not even joking.
NOTE: I think I’ve posted this video before. I don’t care. Some people might not have seen it. EVERYONE MUST SEE IT.
It’s not exactly a stretch to read Rand’s work as the bitter cry of someone who lost their privilege, so no surprise that it’s so appealing to white male adolescents who feel like they’re losing theirs.
vaiyt – Her treatise was Atlas Shrugged (and to a lesser extent The Fountainhead). She even said so several times. Something to the effect of “if you want to understand my philosophy, read Atlas Shrugged.” She did write ‘Principles of Obectivism’ later. I tried reading it but after reading Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, I had developed such a loathing for her philosophy, I couldn’t stomach it.
For kittehs, who doesn’t know the back story. Not only did Rand cheat on her husband for years, she made him leave their shared apartment whenever she wanted to fuck the boytoy, like someone putting the cat out because it’s getting underfoot.
I’d forgotten that she approved the boytoy being his own wife’s therapist, though. Professionalism, what’s that?
I knew she treated her husband like shit and cheated on him, but not the specifics.
What a lovely, lovely person.
Didn’t she and the boytoy call a meeting between them and their respective spouses so they could ‘splain to the spouses why it was “logical” that they should have the affair and how the spouses should be okay with it because they were pursuing their own happiness?
Yep! That’s the kind of thing that starts to make sense if you embrace the idea that kindness and empathy are signs of weakness that should be eliminated.
And I think the reason the affair was not only “logical,” but a moral imperative, is that they were the two most intelligent people in the world. Or so I’ve heard the story go. Which is just charming.
I bet they wouldn’t have been so happy if the spouses had had their own affairs. Suddenly there’d be a logical reason why it was all wrong for them to do so.
Pfffffffft oh right, they knew every single person out of the however many billion it was at the time, to make that call.
Damn, my eyes are somewhere under the desk again.
kitteh – if I remember correctly, Rand flipped out and excommunicated the boytoy when he no longer wanted to continue to affair (or start it up again). So yeah, you’re spot on there.
Nothing like being a super genius and Most Intelligent Person In The World for being totally predictable, eh?
@Fibinachi
This is the why I can’t stand Rand and why my half-elf Ranger was Chaotic Good in high school. Old-school D&D alignments FTW.
Heheh. They aren’t normally so useful for things in the world, but then there are the few cases where they just fit to a perfect t.
“vaiyt – Her treatise was Atlas Shrugged (and to a lesser extent The Fountainhead). She even said so several times.”
Atlas Shrugged is a fiction book. THAT IS MY POINT.
Proving Rand couldn’t be concise, either. Write a treatise or essay? Not possible! Write the same thing, repetitively and at great length, in the form of a fuckawful tedious saga? Way to go!
Lawful Evil is right, and part of what makes Randians so offputting. Not only are they vicious, selfish, unkind assholes, but the philosophy is also too restrictive to even be fun for assholes of the less regimented variety. They can’t even play the hell is where all the good bands and all the great parties will end up angle.
The thing about Ayn Rand that those who adore her don’t understand is that she suffered, life-long, a sort of PTSD created by terrible experiences. It’s not hard to read her as someone who lost privilege – but in her case losing privilege meant losing somewhere to live at all, with her entire family. At several points, her family nearly starved to death – quite literally. She was in Russia at a time, at a university she’d fought to get into, when she was purged from university shortly before graduating for being ‘bourgeois’.
So yeah. Her life was shit. She took those assumptions with her to the United States, and constructed an elaborate revenge fantasy over her whole lifetime. She was able to use her force of personality to create a cult-like group around her, and partly because her views were very much supported by experience of suffering – which she had, and those around her did not.
Liberatrians basing themselves economically off her are people taking the work of someone who had completely warped views about life due to horrific experiences, and believing that those views are generally applicable to life. People who are like myself, comfortable (enough), middle class, and white, who use Ayn Rands views as a valid series of ethical rules, are doing it with no context.
She was horribly treated, at an awful time, and processed it by writing those terrible, badly written works of fiction. And yes, it really does remind me of lawful evil – Ayn Rand really is a cartoon villain who had This Bad Thing Happen so She’s devoted her entire life to DESTROYING THOSE PEOPLE AND RULING WITH AN IRON FIST BECAUSE I’M OWED IT NOW.
And then Libertarians tell me it’s all so rational…it’s not. It’s someone who’s response to real, intense, suffering was to hope everyone else had it too.
RE: theladyzombie
I knew some pagan/Wiccan men who would have an all men camping retreat where yeah, they’d go off in the woods to commune with what they saw as the masculine part of nature.
I’ve heard of that, and I guess that’s why that rhetoric never worked for me. Masculinity always seemed like some elite club that I was barred from, and if I were accepted, I’d still feel like I was sneaking in or something. (I don’t really feel feminine either, but I don’t seem to really feel comfortable in any of the categories.)
RE: Sam
So in other words, MGTOW behave like feminists.
ZING! Only no. Try again, newbie.
RE: Ayn Rand
Uuuuurgh. Never read any of her books (even for me, that length was daunting, and I hated the dense mummery I associated with philosophy) but I kinda believed a bunch of that shit. The worst part is, I didn’t see myself as the top. I saw myself as the bottom, the whining cowardly parasite, and that I deserved whatever happened to me, because if I couldn’t protect myself, what use was I? It was a pretty dark period of my life. Objectivism is hell when you’re mentally ill.
Also, true fact: Ayn Rand needed public assistance near the end of her life! She was actually willing to die rather than take the public healthcare, but her medical team pretty much said, “Fuck your morals, just LIVE.” This, of course, did not change her mind about the evils of public healthcare, only seemed to boomerang into self-loathing. What a sad piece of work.
@ steampunked
There’s also the fact that she was raped, by a peasant, and how that plays into both her philosophy and her messed up ideas about sex. I agree that my comment about loss of privilege was a bit flippant – her early life wasn’t easy. The idea of her as a person from a good family who lost her rightful place in society is a big part of the reason people responded to her the way they did, though, given the whole Red Menace thing that was floating around in American society at the time she started writing.
Rand treated her husband awfully. He was an artist, but she didn’t really have much respect for that – she centered her interests first every time. As she centered her needs, her suffering, and her interpretation. She could justify taking land from the American indigenous population, because PROGRESS. She hated homosexuality because IMMORAL. Anything she believed was perfect, because she was ‘objective’. So she could justify anything to herself.
When her husband developed dementia, Rand seemed to think she’d developed it AT her somehow – she’d force him through lessons to try to ‘fix’ him. She didn’t expect his death, even when it occurred, though it would be obvious to most people that his pronounced illness was going to inevitably go there. She just couldn’t project enough even to realise someone was ill and dying.
” She was actually willing to die rather than take the public healthcare”
Posturing. Nothing more.
“There’s also the fact that she was raped, by a peasant, and how that plays into both her philosophy and her messed up ideas about sex.”
What were ideas about sex, dare I ask? I’ve not read her books. Just a few articles online by her, a few about her, and saw some pretty damning video footage. She never looked happy. Not once.
Scroll up, people were talking about it upthread.
@cassandrakitty – Yeah. I admit a lot of my: WHAT THE?! reaction to objectivist thought is this whole…you guys are basing EVERYTHING YOU KNOW off someone who had extremely specific experiences of the worst extremes of a group during war. Experiences that clearly led to personal coping behaviours that were amazingly destructive to the person herself. I mean…I can’t see Rand often talking about feeling happy.
And people want to use this as a basis for modern economic and political thought? For what point? Like, even if it could possibly function, why on earth would it be worth doing even assuming you were on top? Does make it easy to see why some MGTOWers love it though.