Now that women have jobs, men can’t control them with money any more: A MGTOW’s lament

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.