By David Futrelle
The good gentlemen who make up the Men Going Their Own Way movement talk about women rather a lot — mostly because they hate them so much.
Most of this discussion is rather theoretical — endless speculations on the evils of “female nature” and the devious plots by feminists and male simps to reduce men to chattel. That sort of thing.
But sometimes one of these female creatures impinges on the life of a MGTOW in an up-close-and-personal way.
Today, fresh from the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, I bring you the terrifying tale of one innocent MGTOW who has just learned that his until-now all-male sanctum at work is about to be invaded by … a female.
Well, he doesn’t put it quite so politely.
My work mostly revolves around maintaining records, preserving old books and documents. Our department is always swamped , with us 3 guys doing all the work but hr decided that we need a c*nt to bright up our days.
And now, he says,
I am afraid for my future.
My usual plan to deal with females is this..
1. Be Curt and to the point. No extra talking other than what is relevant to the work at hand.
2. Always in the view of a camera and other employees.
3. Maintain at least a furniture in between or wall or a distance of at least 3 feet. I get away with this by saying I have allergies to perfume and they don’t want to be the splash zone. Huehuehue
And it seems like a solid plan: act like a complete weirdo whenever a woman enters the room, rushing to find the nearest piece of furniture to hide behind like she’s some sort of active shooter, but armed with false accusations instead of an assault rifle.
But alas, it turns out he has to actually train her a little, which means he’ll have to enter inside the 3-foot female proximity danger zone — and he’s afraid the additional cameras he had his employers put up on a flimsy pretext won’t be enough to protect him.
I am afraid as this work requires to be in close enough proximity to the other person to show nitty gritties like applying wet tissue paper to the page and making it translucent with a chemical.
Please help. She starts working with us next week.
Had Mr. AndroidMetroid asked these questions anywhere else but an MGTOW safe space, it’s likely that his COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE CONCERNS would have been dismissed as “the paranoid delusions of a terrified, woman-hating baby man” or “the cringiest shit I’ve ever seen” or “what the fuck are you even talking about, dude, you’re going to be working with a woman, not a giant angry bear.”
But happily the readers of the MGTOW subreddit understand the grave danger that Mr. AndroidMetroid is in, and they’ve offered him many helpful suggestions that were definitely not hysterical and/or possibly illegal overreactions that could possibly get him fired.
“Bring your own camera,” one commenter suggested.
Bring a voice recorder. Who cares if recording someone’s voice without their permission is illegal. It’s better to be guilty of that than being guilty of rape.
Another suggested that he not allow her near him unless there’s someone else present who can vouch for him.
Never have any dealings with her without a witness present.
Document your encounters with her somewhere accessible only to you. (Time, place, duration, reason)
And watch out for her devious lady scheming!
Expect her to begin ‘grooming’ that is to say, she will attempt to cultivate one or both other males in the department as allies against you if she doesn’t perceive you as an available avenue to greater status or resources.
Still another helpful MGTOW Redditor, a fellow by the name of PressNeinForGerman, advised our poor soon-to-be mentor to make an effort to not appear human.
I suggest you pretty much act like a robot.
And not just any robot, a snooty robot, “cold and unwelcoming.”
The only danger here is that if you act too standoffish, she might end up falling in love with you, because women just love aloof jerks — as any Red Pill men man will tell you, at great length. So you need to go a little bit beyond aloof to “actively disgusted.”
Strait up ignore her. Ignore her in the way you would the homeless man scratching his asshole on the public bus; with slight disgust and haste to “get the ride over with and get out of there”.
I’m sure HR would be delighted to hear that Mr. AndroidMetroid has been treating the woman he’s been assigned to train like she’s a piece of shit on his shoe. Absolutely top-notch advice here.
PressNein continued, advising the future mentor-of-a-female that
anytime she has a question that’s not relevant to the job (ex. How old are you, are you married, hobbies, etc) shrug your shoulders and don’t say a word. Be completely disinterested, even slightly standoffish. If she persists, With a disgusted look on your face look her right in the eye and say: “That’s not appropriate, and I really don’t appreciate you asking”.
Say it with the same conviction that you would tell a child that you’re disappointed in for something. Really bear down with your tone that it is not okay what she is asking you.
Yes, it’s always good to respond to innocent questions about yourself as if you’re a serial killer terrified that the questioner is going to notice the pile of dead bodies you’ve got hidden behind your desk, with the feet of several victims sticking out on one side.
If she tries to be physical with you in any way like brushing you on the shoulder in conversation … [i]mmediately look at her and state that that is not okay. “DO NOT TOUCH ME”.
Take some inspiration from this guy:
Or perhaps this gal:
Well, maybe be slightly more subtle than that.
Say it loud enough so everyone in the room can hear it. It will embarrass the shit out of her and she will learn not to do that again because women hate to be rejected. Especially in public eye. Be as abrasive as possible without giving her a reason to send you to HR.
Boy, it would sure be terrible if some innocent fellow like our boy AndroidMetroid got sent to HR just because he went out of his way to create a hostile work environment for a women he was supposed to be training.
A commenter called n0x29a offered a different approach. Instead of acting like some weird, rude, vaguely hysterical robot, he suggested that our future mentor go all beta on her.
you have to make her lose interest in you by acting like a total cuck or a simp. Try to make her bored and lost interest very quickly in you.
Read about what attracts women and do the opposite.
Women are attracted to masculine men so act very passive and feminine (if you are ballsy)
I guess that could work, even though it doesn’t involve screaming at the trainee or treating her like she’s literally covered in shit.
Someone called Alexius_von_Meinong had a somewhat more pessimistic take, warning AndroidMetroid that he should be ready to run for the door as if there were a missile headed directly for his office.
Be ready to bolt if necessary. This is the employment equivalent of always having a mobility bag ready. While there are rational steps you can take, there are also situations in which your degrees of freedom will be severely limited. If that happens, assess the situation with a cold eye, and act to save yourself first, before anything else.
Alongside all this totally solid advice that couldn’t possibly backfire, there was one strange comment that struck a discordant note. A fellow with the hippyish moniker HaightnAshbury recommended that AndroidMetroid make an effort
to treat this human like a human, to treat her with respect, to maybe gain a friend, if not just a competent colleague.
Wait, what?
If you are a real person … it’s important that you either give this other real person a chance, or, that you go through the proper channels to have a superior or a colleague get her away from you.
Naturally, the regulars on the MGTOW subreddit downvoted this truly weird suggestion — treat a woman like a human being!? — down below zero to a -3.
Being a Man Going His Own Way means never acknowledging that women are from the same species as you.
H/T — a post in the Blue Pill subreddit
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Both of these (as well as the suggestion to yell “don’t touch me” if she gets within a foot of him) make me think they’ve encountered the terminology around sexual abuse and assault, and materials on self-defense against same, and are trying to weaponize it all against women who are not actually harassing them—possibly because they think it’s some kind of magic first-strike cursing technique, possibly with a longer goal of destroying the credibility of actual harassment victims by crying wolf every time a woman attempts an ordinary social interaction with them.
It absolutely boggles my mind to try and imagine someone like this trying to function in my workplace. For about 16 months I was the *only* male amidst about 14 female employees, now we have a whole two. On a fairly regular basis I have to be in contact with/occasionally literally squeeze up against my follow co-workers. I also am more than happy to join in with whatever raunchy humor they happen to be throwing around on any given day.
And yet, I have never once been accused of attempting to rape anyone.
OK, this is revealing – HaightnAshbury, the author of the one sensible response in the original Reddit thread, is presumably one of the three people who’s had their comments removed by a moderator.
Like what? America?
To be fair, my dad had ZERO idea he was coming off as an ass to his coworkers and underlings until mom pointed out she agreed with his boss that he had a bad habit of being rude when he thought he was being direct during a performance review. He took a couple weeks of seminars on it around the time I was seven or so and got most of it fixed, learning how to actually be direct without being rude. A lot of men simply don’t get the kind of social pressure to learn basic niceties that women do.
He actually got it from both parents. The first thing my grandma did when she met my mom was ask if her hair was its real color. Filters take extra work in my dad’s side of the family, for me included. The soft sell is something we need to be reminded to learn, while my mom is the freaking queen of it unless pushed to far. But it’s not “grooming” by any means. It’s having consideration for others and actually showing it.
Years ago, there was a recurring sketch on a British comedy show about a guy in an office job who mistook every interaction for flirting. A colleague would say something like “Ted, do you have the costings for the Frankfurt project?”, and he would earnestly reply, “Oh dear… look, I respect you as a coworker, but I’m just not attracted to you, ok?”, or something in that vein.
At the time, this just seemed like absurdist humour. But now it looks kinda prophetic!
As someone who has worked in the preservation and conservation of historic documents and books, I’d like to point out that the field is (conservatively) 80% female. Either this guy’s workplace is a statistical anomaly or someone be lyin’ about their job
@ moggie
It’s interesting how many MRA tropes are the stuff of sketch comedy. When I first learned about PUAs and ‘negging’ I thought, this is just the “Cheque please” guy from Goodness Gracious Me.
@Alan, and then there was this one:
@ moggie
Heh, I first learned that trick at court. A mate locked her keys in the car so she put out a tannoy that there was a tenner for anyone who could get back in without damaging it “and no questions asked”.
What was a bit of a giveaway was the lad who did it had his own tennis ball.
So all I have to do to avoid miggies in my shop is hire women?
Right, let’s get on that!
Oh wait, I’ve already got one. Actually several.
Phew, I’m safe.
All good suggestions, thank you. My darling fiancee keeps my diet rich in garlic, so I’ll try the cattle prod first. If IT gets upset we’ll zap that bridge when we come to it.
@Cat:
JBP has always been a grifter. Notice his supposed free speech principles have never applied to leftists. He’s only recently getting good at it, though. Regardless, I appreciate lobsters self-identitying so we know who to boil.
I suspect this guy is lying. And paranoid. And a “s***poster.” And a Troll.
@Kiwiwriter – And? Do we ignore him?
Well, answering him only gives him what he wants — undeserved attention and fluffing up his ego. He also wants his targets — it’s not a “debate” — to undergo emotional angst from his trolling and mean-spirited “humor.”
(Notice that some of them post on their sites their great amusement at how their targets get “bent out of shape” by the cartoon of a frog’s head with a Nazi symbol on it. Of course, when someone does something similar to a neo-Nazi, they explode in rage.)
Trying to use reason, emotion, or logic to argue with such a person is useless as they are locked in their grand theory of the world, and anyone who is not an “investigator” of the conspiracy is a “shill,” an “agent provocateur,” or “sheeple.” They have a lot of contempt for anyone who does not have power. They are NOT interested in facts except tiny ones that fit their pre-arranged theory.
Ignoring them means they get an open platform on which to attract recruits, which is another purpose of their trolling, and their new adherents go out and cause chaos, as we see on a daily basis.
So the answer is, I don’t know. As Yogi Berra once said, “I wish I had an answer to that question, because I’m getting tired of answering that question.”
I mean, it seemed like you were saying we shouldn’t be interested in this because you suspect he’s a shitposter. Am I misinterpreting your remark?
@ Kiwiwriter
I don’t think this group is trying to engage the OP. If someone wanted to engage him or his peers, they’d have to go to the MGTOW site. This is more of a “Hey, be aware that there are horrible people like this out there and take care of yourself” situation. There’s also a bit of point-and-laugh.
From an HR perspective, this is Very Bad(TM) advice. I’d hate to be the person to deal with this nonsense when the inevitable and justified complaints come in.
@kupo:
No, I’m saying that I wish I could sit down and have a talk with this guy, to somehow give him an answer that could break through his evil and misogyny and enable him to break out of his self-created prison of hatred and bigotry and lead a happier life. However, I don’t have the training, expertise, and background in the fields of social work and psychology to be able to do so. So I understand some of the distorted theory behind misogyny from reading this page and other pages and the material these people write, I can’t create a cohesive answer.
This guy, at some levels, is asking for help for his real problems by disguising them as requests for help for his fake problems. I know what the answers are, but he has probably heard them before (from co-workers and family, for example), and I doubt he would listen to me. So…between that and my lack of training in this field…the Yogi Berra quote.
To Curious_Diversions:
“I don’t think this group is trying to engage the OP. If someone wanted to engage him or his peers, they’d have to go to the MGTOW site. This is more of a “Hey, be aware that there are horrible people like this out there and take care of yourself” situation. There’s also a bit of point-and-laugh.
From an HR perspective, this is Very Bad(TM) advice. I’d hate to be the person to deal with this nonsense when the inevitable and justified complaints come in.”
Of course, we’re not trying to engage him on this site, he’d never go near this site. But you do bring up an interesting point: the mere fact that he acts this way is a red flag to his HR folks, who will probably start receiving complaints either from him or his colleagues about his behavior.
Particularly if he really does some of the crazier stuff he’s talking about, like videotaping his interactions with female co-workers.
I don’t seem to be posting very well on this site…I’m not trying to cause chaos, but everything I write is a total disaster. Maybe I should stick to World War II and baseball. Those are subjects I know pretty cold.
@kiwiwriter – I think the confusion here could have been avoided if you had explained what you meant a little more thorougly, to begin with.
If you didn’t have the energy for that, perhaps indicating that you weren’t just re-iterating the tired “Why are people feeding the trolls! Don’t feed them, and they will leave”, but rather expressing frustration on the difficulty of breaking through someone’s chosen brand of radicalisation, I would have been able to understand what you were going for.
Not @kiwiwriter, just musing.
It seems to me that the adage “don’t feed the trolls” really removes the opportunity for people to vent and heal from the horrible things that trolls (online and IRL) do. It isolates people, because if they discuss like we do on this site, they are then ‘feeding’ them.
I hadn’t thought about that before.
@kiwiwriter;
I understand your troubles. Sometimes it feels like the thing we’re trying to say and the thing that we actually say is light-years apart. Communicating is tough. It’s important to really listen the the replies we get when this is happening – they’re clues about what we’re actually saying and not what we think we’re saying. Because what we think we’re saying doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Not suggesting that you aren’t listening to the responses, incidentally! Just talking about the process of it. It’s a tough thing to do sometimes, but it’s rewarding.
Why do you think he’s lying, s***posting, trolling? He’s obviously paranoid, but why do you think he’s being hyperbolic? We’ve seen more than enough people who say these things on the regular – they say them regularly, and act like they believe those things, too.
We have to stop dismissing these people when they say terrible things. You’re right that ignoring them gives them an open platform, and that no amount of argument will budge them from their beliefs. I think we’ve got the right idea here at WHTM. We mock them, we point at them and talk about how terrible they’re being, we circulate their awful behavior so others see it. We can’t make them change their beliefs, but we can make expressing those beliefs socially repugnant. I think that’s the only real way we can fight back. Shoo the beetles back under their rocks.
Having the training, expertise or background won’t be enough to help this guy. He has to want the help first. More generally, the only people that can actually change his mind are people that he trusts. If you don’t have his trust, nothing you say will have the impact to change him. People develop very good defensive mechanisms for their beliefs over the course of growing up, and the number of people who can actually breach that defense is very small for most of us.
It has nothing to do with being smart, either. I frankly find that people who value smarts are especially vulnerable to close-mindedness. They learn really, really airtight mechanisms for defending their beliefs. If they aren’t coupled with a strong sense of doubt and self-criticism, they’ll quickly find that no one can change their minds on things.
Having empathy for them is good – practicing empathy in general is a good emotional exercise. But don’t couple it with thinking that you’ll have a good chance at changing them. Plant seeds of doubt instead. Give a good argument, expect them to refute it, and hope that they’re self-critical enough to do the rest themselves. There’s really no other way to change minds with these guys otherwise, in my opinion.
… also re-reading my comment, it comes off as kind of mean. Sorry! I meant the tone more to be “maybe this is how you can post a little clearer”.
Since I was the one who asked a question first, I wanted to explain where my sticking point was.
@kiwiwriter – I think the confusion here could have been avoided if you had explained what you meant a little more thorougly, to begin with.
@Rhuu
Well, I may have an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School for Social Research, but I am extremely aware that I’m actually a pretty lousy writer, so I’m not offended that you didn’t understand what I said. An MFA and $2.75 gets you a ride on the New York Subway.
In all seriousness, I’m more upset that I worded my message so badly.
Dealing with trolls is pretty complex, which I think is what I was trying to say. Sometimes you can’t break through at all. All the troll wants to do is feel important and powerful from having anonymously “Busted the chops” of his antagonist.
I have met one extreme example of this on another website and I won’t give his name to avoid fueling his ego. This fella was exactly what we have to deal with — a misogynist who objectified women. Worse, he was a Wotanist, a neo-Nazi, a convicted felon (violent armed assault with a knife), and was now busily stalking underage girls.
He got into an argument with some friends of mine on various DisQus sites, and decided it would be jolly good fun to harass them through imposture and fake identities. One of them was a fake lawyer, who was hurling threats at them by necroposting on old DisQus threads, accusing them of plagiarism and child molestation, and threatened them with both civil and criminal legal action. The threats of the latter leaned heavily about how the defendants would “enjoy” prison conditions and even face the gallows. He promised in April 2018 to put one “defendant” in prison by Memorial Day 2018. He was ultimately silenced when the FBI had a chat with him. In this case, pure terror probably did the job. He issued a final note saying that he’d “had fun” irritating his targets, but was done now, and vanished before his Memorial Day prison deadline. I was impersonated myself — I was supposed to be testifying that one of the targets had molested another target’s son (who didn’t exist in the first place).
On the other side, I have read accounts of junior fascists and racists who have been able to escape their living hells and talk about what was really troubling them — ghastly family situations, no education, drugs and alcohol — and they got intervention (Derek Black) or realized this was no way to live (Harold Covington’s wife, Kirsten Kaiser). Once they chose to break, they got more help and have written and spoken about their former and present lives.
If I had the power, ability, and training, I would like to find a way to help some of these misogynists out of their hole. How many massacres could be prevented if some kid reads “Letter from Birmingham Jail” instead of “Which Way Western Man?”
You can tell that some of these folks who spout this drivel and cause the chaos like we have seen in New Zealand are poorly educated just from reading their “manifestos” — disorganized, poor English, filled with jargon, buzzwords, and clichés. Compare that with the front-rank philosophers and their writings: Kant, Descartes, Bertrand Russell. If these misogynists and racists really understood anything in the first place, they wouldn’t come up with such stupid ideas. But so many of them seem locked into them.
Now I’m rambling. So much for that MFA, I guess….
@ Scildfreja Unnyðnes:
Something about the issues he’s having at where he claims to work just don’t ring right to me…if he has these kinds of problems with women, how come they’re only just showing up now? He’s never worked with women there or any workplace before? This kind of attitude should have manifested itself at some levels at his workplace, even if it’s just the stickers on his desk. It just doesn’t ring right…I think it comes from my background as a writer.
As for you points that follow:
No argument here…ridicule is always a great weapon. I always quote “The Producers” at neo-Nazis. It enrages them.
Absolutely true. Holocaust deniers are the most intractable of such people. Even if you present them with the vast Nazi records, the testimony at Nuremberg, the engineers’ reports on the efficiency of the Auschwitz crematoria, they will dismiss them with the wave of a condescending hand, treating you like an eighth-grade teacher reproving a recalcitrant student, and once again, demand “just one proof,” not being satisfied until they have “elicited the desired answer” in best middle-school teacher fashion. Their idea of a “debate” is one that they “win.”
And now we have the “flat earthers” making a comeback, too.
That’s a good idea. One point I like to raise, when dealing with such folks is to ask them what have they, personally, gained, from X number of years of hating Jews/blacks/women/Latinos? Not for their “cause,” but for themselves, personally. Did they get a better job? Better home? Advanced degree or trade certificate? Family of their own? Did they actually achieve their desire to live off the American grid in a nation of their own filled with men and women who all look like Curt Jurgens? Have they ever been truly happy from any of this? Of course not. There’s a doubt…I hope…
@Moon_Custafar
I was more saying that they see the process of making friends and forming social bonds as some kind of witchcraft. Which of course they have to, since to make friends you have to be a likable person, and they pretend it’s impossible to be likable.
But the idea of “Don’t touch me!” as a magic curse instead of a request does track with men’s complete refusal to acknowledge women’s autonomy.
So if we assume he’s being sincere about the basic details — currently working in an all-male team, assigned to mentor a new female colleague, works in archival tasks that require close proximity to the mentee — it’s possible that it’s been a while since he’s worked closely with a woman, and perhaps between then and now he’s swallowed the red pill and with that new ideology has not needed to have close professional contact with a woman to date. It’s believable. I was part of a team comprised of mostly women in a male-dominated field before, so it’s plausible. Also I think he’s looking to rant and to get validation for his feelings more than to get help from the group. So it’s not so much he doesn’t know how to navigate working with a woman, but he wants reassurance that he’s right in his aversion to it.