Henry David Thoreau, as anyone who read Walden in high school will remember, was a fiercely independent sort who valued solitude so much he literally lived in a shack by the side of a pond for a year (with regular visits to his mother’s for some delicious home-cooked meals). He’s precisely the kind of guy that the internet’s Men Going Their Own Way should aspire to be, but don’t.
Last night, while poking about in the archives of the MGTOW subreddit, I discovered a commenter who seemed, at least for a moment, to have a little bit of that Thoreauvian spirit to him.
In a post titled “Embracing solitude as a mgtow,” a fellow calling himself taewoodz reflected on some of what he had learned from his time as a MGTOW.
In my short experience of going my own way,I have realized one thing which is I feel is the hardest mental gap one must overcome, and that is not only embracing being alone. But enjoying and relishing in the freedoms of your personal decisions that make your life better for you. Once you can get past all of the opposition who will shame you into traditional acts.
Well, sure, he’s not exactly the prose stylist that Thoreau was, but it’s not a terrible start, as Reddit postings go.
But alas, after this sort-of-promising three-sentence intro, young taewoodz goes quickly off the rails, abruptly segueing into this toxic nonsense:
[W]omen have become parasitic organisms who won’t even s**k your d**k but won’t mind ducking your bank account dry on her lavish spendings. And men sadly have become progressively susceptible to the gynocentric nature of this society and curtail to females when they can do shit for themselves since their “independent”.
Damn it, taewoodz, why did you let me get my hopes up for a second before utterly dashing them like this?
I love my own company I love doing shit that makes me happy and not having to ask for approval like a f**king high school student asking their parents for the car for the weekend.
Ok, that’s a bit better. A little hostile, but better.
I refuse to ask a individual who brings nothing to this world more than a wet mouth and p***y for approval when as a man I form my own path and don’t have to apologize for sh*t.
So we’re back to this nonsense again.
Yes it can be scary having to accept being alone but what’s even more scary is being butt raped in divorce court when she takes you to the cleaners and your life is in shambles but hers.. Somehow turns out 2x better without you than with you.
Golly, how on earth could her life be better without you than with you? That’s a riddle for the ages, huh?
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau once observed, “except for those MGTOW dickheads, who are noisy as hell about it and should probably just shut their stinking pie holes until they have something worthwhile to say.”
Equating women’s worth to their ability to give someone else sexual pleasure isn’t misogyny it’s, uh…. It’s uh….
I can’t remember who said it, but “alone” is one of these words that only gets used by people who dislike it. People who actually enjoy it call it “some time to myself”, usually with the words “blessed” or “much-deserved” appended.
“Meglio da sola che mal’accompagnata” (better alone than in the wrong company)… why does that phrase inevitably come to mind when I read these MGTOW meanderings in the vale of unreason?
@ EJ
I’d never thought of ‘alone’ having any negative connotations. I’ve often distinguished between being alone and being lonely. But in isolation like that it does seem a bit of a sad word.
ETA: What’s the word for the phenomena that when you look at a word more than three or so times it suddenly stops making sense?
Semantic Saturation, I think.
I think if we’re going to compare MGTOWs to wilderness enthusiasts, I’d pick Everett Ruess: an entitled kid who made all sorts of demands on his parents while he was swanning around the Southwest and looking down his nose at anyone who didn’t want to do the same. Not to mention his rather overwrought poetry and prose.
For me (an introvert with social anxiety) I frequently say* “O, thank the gods, alone at last”.
*to myself, or the cats.**
**though even the cats can be a bit much sometimes, especially when they won’t settle down for cuddles and just want to bite my feet.
@ Orion
Near enough! Semantic satiation. But yours was enough to google 🙂
The other day youtube for whatever reason suggested one of these MGTOW videos to me. The topic was on how women destroy all civilization and every culture they are a part of, those evil creatures.
So I politely and helpfully suggested that these wise MGTOWs go found their own country with no women in it and good luck to them! Thus ensued a ban followed by a stream of incredibly hostile comments that have little to nothing to do with what I said.
Gee, I was trying to be agreeable!
Oh boy, another brave rebel against both language and reason! Let’s see what I can pry out of this muck…
Once you get past, blah blah…what? Don’t leave us hanging, dude! If you can’t do something useful with that participle, put it away and zip up your damn pants!
Dude, if you don’t give her access to your bank account, she can’t drain it. If you’re worried about your cash supply, don’t let anyone else at it. Simple!
And who’s the parasite here? I get the feeling it’s the guy who’s bitter that he can’t find anyone to suck his dangling participle for nothing.
What is “curtail[ing] to females”? And “their ‘independent'” WHAT? Dude, participles!
That’s nice, dear. Just a pity that you can’t make yourself happy by learning better English grammar. Because, you know, that still applies out there in lonely-man country.
Well, nobody cares if you ask for their approval. But could you at least ask your English teacher to sit down with you and help you learn to write good? I’m getting vicariously embarrassed for you here…
Oh look, the MRA Two-Dot Ellipsis. I was wondering when that little menzer-thing was going to put in an appearance.
And dude, while you’re busy learning better English grammar and usage, you might also want to employ a little google-fu on your divorce maunderings there. Because usually, in a divorce, it’s the WOMAN who ends up worse off, and her ex-husband is the one who drains the joint bank account and makes off like a bandit.
(On the other hand, I can well imagine that any woman who leaves a dude like this one in the lurch will be substantially better off emotionally, if not financially. At least she won’t be stuck trying to correct his shitty grammar anymore.)
I like being alone, generally. It takes a lot of that before I get lonely. I’d take a shack by a pond by myself over having to spend time with these doods, any day of the week.
I believe the term is Semantic Satiation. It’s an interesting demonstration of how our thoughts have a biological foundation! The sounds (and meanings) of a word are represented by specific neuron structures. When activated in quick succession, this structure experiences fatigue (a refractory period) and becomes unable to transmit the signal along to the rest of the brain. The word loses its ability to stimulate thought until the neurons are given a chance to re-uptake their neurotransmitters.
I get this a lot. Frankly, when I’m tired it’s almost like Wernicke’s aphasia – sentences just turn into a phonetic mush.
http://i.imgur.com/ANbT31I.gif
Thoreau may have valued solitude, but he also valued humanity, which is a vibe I don’t get from MGTOW. At one time, Thoreau fell in love and proposed to Ellen Sewall, but was rejected because her father objected to the union. Instead of spending the rest of his days locked in his cabin penning bitter screeds about parasitic byotches, he carried her memory for the rest of his days and, towards the end of his life, told his sister Sophia “I have always loved her”. He also developed great affection for the other women in his life.
Walden, by the way, is still a lovely spot, despite being surrounded on three sides by a commuter railroad, a 4-lane highway, a public beach, a landfill, and (back in the 70s) a trailer park. I grew up a stone’s throw away from there and spent many lazy afternoons and evenings hanging around the back shore with friends. When I was a kid, the playground rumor was that Walden had the highest urine content of any pond in Massachusetts, but that never deterred us from swimming in it.
MGTOW remind me more of Dean Moriarity and Sal Paradise: snowflakes too special to taint themselves with such mundanities as jobs, stable addresses, and social responsibility; addicted to their own pleasure; utterly allergic to commitment; viewing women as objects to be consumed and discarded. (I tried to reread On The Road recently, and loathed it – I couldn’t get past how unlikeable, aimless, boring, and shitty the whole cast of characters were. They really used other people horribly.)
Huh? Why would you even want someone to soak your duck?
Yeah, I thought ducks were self-soaking.
I am today walking The Earth three feet taller, knowing that in any given situation my life is at least 2 x better than if I was chained up to this Honeybunny.
Soaking in his bank account, obviously.
That is an awful lot of projection. Who asked for his approval? The women who won’t fuck him?
Who asked for his money? Who cares where he goes?
No one asked him for any of those things. That’s why he is so bitter.
He’s all, “Women don’t like me and they are happier without me than with me. Wah! Wah!”
Dude, get a hobby and go be happy. Nobody is stopping you.
@ scildfreja
Here’s something I’d be interested in your thoughts on, gunshots. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a gun go off, but they’re really loud; almost painfully so. Hence ear defenders etc. But the weird thing is, in a life or death situation that’s not the case. It seems there’s a psychological effect that just screens the noise out. It’s also been suggested that there’s a physical effect where the ear canal constricts too. But these effects have proved impossible to replicate in simulation. People have done excercise to the point of exhaustion to replicate some of the heart rate and blood chemistry factors and they’ve tried having loud random noises and strobes etc to try to create stress. But to no avail, the guns still sound loud. Put someone in a situation where they think they might be killed though and they don’t even hear the gun. The phenomena is well recognised but nobody seems to have done any real research into why. Any thoughts?
And I thought women were so desperate we were fucking house pets and we are supposed to be hypergamous or rewarding feminist men with sexual favors or whatever the accusation of the week is this time. Now we don’t do that and it is bad? I thought it was bad we were such sluttly sluts? Damned either way, I see.
Also, if we’re only good for sex and we are happier without it and anger him and make him jealous by being happily independent how does any of this make sense to him?
He could at least try to be consistent within his rant.
And who wants to bet most of the men complaining that women are after their money don’t actually have any?
I have to ask – why do these guys always assume they’ll get divorced? I mean, sure, there might be some women who would leave them for someone with more money, but for the most part people don’t get divorced because the other person farted too loudly one day.
”I’ll never get married, cause she’d divorce me!”
I can only make two assumptions here:
1. They know to some degree that they kind of suck and get that no sane human being would want to spend their life with a whiny manbaby.
Or the more plausabe assumption:
2. ”I’m so awesome, but those feeeeeeemales are just so stupid that they’d never get my awesomness and they’d probably leave, cause they couldn’t handle it.”
That part, at least, is pure, unvarnished, truth.
I gotta say, since my husband split and I took over the household finances, my credit shot way up. If there is a downside to singlehood, I can’t find it.
@Carr
option 1 requires more self awareness then most MRA/PUA/MGTOW have so I would so I would agree that option 2 is the more plausible one.
I’ve always wondered where wealthy women land on their theory of WWWWW (=What Women Want Wah Wahh)?
I mean, of course the hypothetical woman could not have gained worldly wealth on her own, she obviously married a very old millionaire and inherited the bunch. But why is she dating anyone after that? To take other mens money too because nothing is enough? To make some beta cry because she’s fucking someone who lifts? Or if she’s dating a beta, to make him miserable when she leaves?
Who am I kidding? Answers are yes, yes and yes. So long as she’s a woman and not a human being.
Why can’t these heroes separate their own grievances and I-wannas from other living human beings? Why do they think that their unfulfilled desire of having their cock sucked is the same thing as “OTHERS are evil”?
How do they all have this IDENTICAL problem? Is anyone looking into this? I mean yeah, we mock them but this is so common and so definable that there must be a root cause.