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If Henry David Thoreau had been a MGTOW, he might have written something like this

Henry David Thoreau: The original neckbeard
Henry David Thoreau: The original neckbeard

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.”

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otrame
otrame
8 years ago

Well, that was pitiful.

My speculation:

This is probably a fairly young man. He grew up with some really toxic ideas about his place in the world and what his relationship with women was supposed to be. Then came real life.

He’s still in shock.

He is also a young man who has never read much more than what he had to read. He’s more used to hearing words spoken than seeing them written and makes the mistakes that such people make when they are trying to sound more refined than the sort of discourse you hear in a bar.

As for what he had to say, I have always needed a lot of time alone. I love my family and friends, but I am pretty sure I have never been bored a moment of my life when I was alone. I divorced after 32 years of marriage, and yeah, not having to share preferences with someone else was very cool. I understand how he feels about that.

But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it. His insistence that it is great to just be alone and do what he feels like doing sounds like he’s protesting too much. That’s too bad, because if he doesn’t get his pointy little head out of his ass and look around, he is going to be spending a lot of his life “enjoying and relishing in the freedoms of your personal decisions that make your life better for you*.”

*Ack. I agree with @Bina. Whoever taught him English needs to refund their salary.

Victorious Parasol
Victorious Parasol
8 years ago

The average MGTOW keeps missing their ride away from it all, it seems.

sevenofmine
8 years ago

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.

*deded*

Wwaxwork
Wwaxwork
8 years ago

Having no one that cares what you do, no one that will call you out if you want to do something stupid or dangerous means you have no one that cares. How is that a good thing?

Victorious Parasol
Victorious Parasol
8 years ago

@ otrame If his teacher was a woman, and if he’d already decided women weren’t worth listening to, the fault may lie in the student. Judging by what David has quoted here, this guy doesn’t really seem to want to learn anything that would contradict his worldview. He’s missing out on some pretty great parts of reality, but that’s his choice at work.

theluckyfrog
8 years ago

Alan, re: gunshots, I’ve got a guess though it’s not very good.

I would think it might have something to do with attention/prioritization. I don’t know what it’s like to believe you’re about to die, but it’s got to be utterly overwhelming and your brain is probably ignoring every single thing it can justify. Humans are, for the most part, more visual than hearing dominant, so maybe the brain neglects hearing in favor of sight and movement?? Of course, if people in extreme fight-or-flight become abnormally aware of any other sound, or something unimportant like taste, that would seem to disprove that theory. Again, haven’t had the experience.

ETA: I wonder how you’d test this theory ethically? Maybe replicate the sound of a gunshot for people who are bungee jumping. That seems like it has the potential to be scary enough.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ theluckyfrog

Actually what you’ve described is common. There are all sorts of psychological distortion and generally you can see the evolutionary usefulness behind them. Slow motion time is the most common. Tunnel vision also occurs a lot. And both of these can be an advantage (although the tunnel vision can cause problems of a target steps sideways, they essentially become invisible). Diminished sound also occurs (although sometimes heightened sound does; it’s a complex phenomena). These are all psychological effects though. The big question is, how does the brain overcome the almost visceral effect of a gunshot noise. That’s like filtering out a smack round the head!

(Although of course people can even filter out stab wounds, so who knows? Bet Scildfreja does though 🙂 )

theluckyfrog
8 years ago

Alan,

Well I was taking the brain’s ability to filter pain into account as well. I undersold my expertise; while I’m NOT an expert, I’ve had a good 3 years straight of psychology and neuroanatomy classes. I do hope Scildfreja answers, but either way I may take this question to the neuroscience professor I’ll be seeing this afternoon. He seems like the type who might even know from experience. Lots of weird injuries from bar fights and the like. Last week he explained that he sometimes slurs his words because he sliced some cranial nerves going through a plate glass window.

NiOg
NiOg
8 years ago

Alan,
To steal a phrase from movie-making, gunshot noises and other sensations might be getting edited out in post.

That is, you hear it at the time, but the memory is instantly discarded as no longer relevant to the (emergency) situation. The brain edits sensations all the time – that’s why you don’t feel the weight of your clothes constantly, and why the walk to the park is always longer than you remember it being.

There are some theories that posit dreams are like this too, that a dream is actually experienced in a single burst, and we only edit it into a (sometimes nonsensical) narrative on waking.

Brains are weird. Memory is even weirder.

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ theluckyfrog

I’d really appreciate that; thank you! Any thoughts you have on this would be very welcome.

Your professor sounds ace by the way; that’s real Indiana Jones stuff 🙂

ScarlettAthena
8 years ago

I think it’s telling that there are two mentions of asking for approval. This is an overprivileged wanker who wants to just do whatever he feels like without explaining or checking if there are potential conflicts.

This “checking in” part of relationships can be annoying sometimes. It can be a hassle to coordinate schedules (compounded when there are children to shuttle around), and there *are* indeed times when adults are not having a blast doing whatever makes them happy -with or without kids.

There’s also the issue of knowing where your partner is. I mean, when you love someone, you might worry if they are not home when expected and they haven’t called. Accidents are a thing, and I know my husband and I always have approximate arrival times and know generally the other’s schedule. This isn’t a control issue but a reassurance. We care about each other and know that bad things can happen. With cell phones, you can shoot off a quick text to let someone know you’re running late.

But these guys don’t think they need to be considerate. They don’t think they should have to compromise anything. They think life should be fun and rewarding 24/7 and that they never have to explain themselves.

theluckyfrog
8 years ago

NiOg,

That’s essentially the same as what I said, but more detail, I think. Basically the physical experience is intact (unless eard canals do contract), but your brain discards it as Not The Point Right Now. I don’t know if that fully accounts for the lack of noticing gunshots specifically. But memory is funky. I remember when I was doing some hospital shadowing and the anesthesiology people explained to me that sedation doesn’t keep people from *feeling* what happens, it keeps them from storing the memory. If they don’t remember it, it effectively didn’t happen. Even though you saw them reacting to the pain. Wild.

weirwoodtreehugger
8 years ago

But he doesn’t seem to be enjoying it. His insistence that it is great to just be alone and do what he feels like doing sounds like he’s protesting too much. That’s too bad, because if he doesn’t get his pointy little head out of his ass and look around, he is going to be spending a lot of his life “enjoying and relishing in the freedoms of your personal decisions that make your life better for you

Exactly. I’m fine being single because I like the complete freedom it gives me. The difference between me and MGTOW, I’m not all angry and bitter over it. Someone who truly delights in always getting to hog the covers and decide what goes on the Netflix because there’s no one there to object wouldn’t be typing screeds about parasites who won’t do oral.

Why would you even want a parasitic organism to give you oral? That sounds dangerous and painful!

I don’t think MGTOW necessarily want to be single. It’s just that they’re so self absorbed that they only want a partner who exists merely to please them and has no desires or needs of her own. They’re outraged that women are people and we don’t mind asserting that. Thinking Housewife excepted. They blame this on feminism or gynocentrism or whatever because they’ve deluded themselves into thinking that before feminism all men were kings and all women were submissive subhumans.

Button
Button
8 years ago

Just my opinion, but I can totally see HDT as a MGHOW. Dude was a privilege-blind prick even by the standards of the day. Walden is essentially poverty tourism – “I’m gonna go live the way poor people do because it’s so much more real and authentic than modern life, but I’m going to stay near town and continue drawing income from my dad’s pencil factory.”

He made his views on the Mexican-American War known by throwing a “I’m not gonna pay my taxes if I don’t like the way you’re using them!” temper tantrum that didn’t actually accomplish anything except get him attention, and didn’t actually hurt him financially in any way (since he didn’t have a proper job, just lived off his family’s investments); wrote a godawful rambling essay about how great a thing it was for him to go to jail for his convictions; and then let his mom bail him out of the consequences of his principled stance.

His writing style was so purple that if you tattooed Walden on Barney the Dinosaur, no one would ever know it was there. I’m not just saying that because I don’t like the style of the day, by the way – I love Lewis Carroll and Arthur Conan Doyle, his contemporary and rough contemporary, respectively. It’s Thoreau specifically whose writing I can’t stand.

Perhaps most MGTOWy of all, though, was his overinflated sense of self-worth/how much people cared what he had to say – to the point that, the story goes, he had so many unsold copies of his books that he was using them as kindling.

tl;dr Thoreau would totally be an MGTOW because he too was a whiny jackoff.

weirwoodtreehugger
8 years ago

I’m still always baffled about what world MRAs and MGTOW are living in that all divorced women are living large off of alimony. I don’t think I know a single divorced woman who is getting alimony payments and I don’t know a single divorced man who is paying alimony. Why do they think that divorce always results in men making huge alimony payments?

Do they get all of their information about the way life works from manosphere websites.

Oh. I just answered my own question, didn’t I?

Viscaria
Viscaria
8 years ago

I’m still always baffled about what world MRAs and MGTOW are living in that all divorced women are living large off of alimony. I don’t think I know a single divorced woman who is getting alimony payments and I don’t know a single divorced man who is paying alimony. Why do they think that divorce always results in men making huge alimony payments?

Alimony is so bloody rare it’s ridiculous. I think they’re often conflating 3 different things: 1) alimony, 2) child support, 3) division of assets.

To Red Pillers, child support is the same as alimony, because they think children are solely the responsibility of women. They never consider that, if they were the custodial parent, they would receive child support themselves… because it never occurs to them that they could be the custodial parent. That’s a lot of responsibility that, by The Natural Order Of Things, belongs to women. I think that’s also why they seem unable to understand when they’re told that child support is typically less than half of what it costs to raise a child. Maybe it is, sure, they think, but raising a child is what women are for, so reimbursing any percentage of that cost is unfair.

A pretty typical division of assets is half of what was earned within the marriage (not before) goes to each spouse. Since men typically earn more money, in m/f divorces generally some of “their” money ends up in their wife’s hands. If this pisses RPers off so much, I recommend they work to address the wage gap. Or, you know, sign a damn prenup.

guy
guy
8 years ago

But memory is funky. I remember when I was doing some hospital shadowing and the anesthesiology people explained to me that sedation doesn’t keep people from *feeling* what happens, it keeps them from storing the memory. If they don’t remember it, it effectively didn’t happen. Even though you saw them reacting to the pain. Wild.

From what I’ve heard, they actually use several different chemicals with different purposes. Apparently they use the one that removes memories because giving people enough of the ones that dull pain is perilously close to enough to stop their heartbeat and they’d rather screw up in the other direction.

Amused
8 years ago

Gosh, I do hate to quote “Family Guy”, but:

Peter Griffin: I say, Quagmire, it seems to me we’ve each made another $500 million dollars.

Quagmire: Good thing we swore off women so we wouldn’t be distracted and unable to accumulate this vast amount of wealth.

Peter Griffin: Yes. You watch the ticker. I’m gonna microwave a bagel and have sex with it.

Quagmire: Butter’s in the fridge!

EJ (The Other One)
EJ (The Other One)
8 years ago

The “Truest Thing Said On The Internet All Day” award goes to:

A pretty typical division of assets is half of what was earned within the marriage (not before) goes to each spouse. Since men typically earn more money, in m/f divorces generally some of “their” money ends up in their wife’s hands. If this pisses RPers off so much, I recommend they work to address the wage gap. Or, you know, sign a damn prenup.

Pie
Pie
8 years ago

Just out of interest, is there any evidence that any MGTOW has actually gone his own way?

Alan Robertshaw
Alan Robertshaw
8 years ago

@ pie

I suppose theoretically there could be gazillions of real MGTOWs, but by definition we wouldn’t know about them.

Pie
Pie
8 years ago

Ahh, the good old “silent majority” gambit 🙂

Ashara Payne
Ashara Payne
8 years ago

My son is kind-of sworn-off women. I think this is largely due to the fact that he is mildly autistic, and doesn’t have the social skills to befriend anyone, really. He lives with his dad and says he never wants to marry. I think this is largely due to his aversion to being a father. Whenever his dad needs to do anything that is part of parenting his two younger sisters (e.g. if I asked him to involve himself with hands-on parenting), he usually delegates it to him. I think it’s unfair, and that he should only ask him for help when he needs it, rather than because he’d prefer to be doing something else.

Matt
Matt
8 years ago

@weirwoodtreehugger – see also the thread of the manosphere that obsesses over the prospect of “sex robots”, and the even nastier section that believes finding a sufficiently desperate “non-Western woman” is a reasonable substitute…

theluckyfrog
8 years ago

guy,

Yeah, that’s my understanding too. I’m not very informed on actual surgical anesthesia, but I’ve always figured there was more than one chemical. I think for less major procedures they have options for how much of each they want to apply. For example, dude I saw did get some painkillers, but not enough that he didn’t notice a big fucking tube going through his chest into his lung.

Alan,

Sadly, I did not get to ask off-topic questions of my professor today, because t̶h̶e̶ ̶l̶e̶m̶m̶i̶n̶g̶s̶ my fellow students only wanted to ask midterm-related questions. (Jk they’re not lemmings. They’re probably going to do better than me with that ability to actually focus they have.)