Happy “MGTOWs kvetch about sexy Halloween costumes” Day

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Adults tend to celebrate (non-pandemic) Halloween in one or more distinctly different ways. They may dress up in elaborate costumes and go to parties. They may stay at home to provide candy to all the miniature goblins that wander by — or take their own miniature goblins out on a candy-collecting mission. Or they might turn off all their lights and hide in the dark until trick-or-treating is over.

Men Going Their Own Way have a different way of celebrating: going online to complain about women dressed in sexy costumes.

No MGTOW seems to have complained quite so loudly or longwindedly on this subject as one YouTube MGTOW called sunrisehoodie, who delivered up a more than 2000-word manifesto on the subject several Halloweens ago (but which I just ran into today; if it’s new for me it’s probably also new for you.)

Sunrisehoodie starts his pronouncements with an attack on a USA Today piece from 2017 on the omnipresence of sexy costumes for women. While some women see donning a sexy nurse outfit as liberating, a way to show of the sexuality they normally repress, the story notes,

others say sexy Halloween is a farce, something that tricks women into thinking they have choices, but which shamelessly pressures them into parading around as debauched nuns and doe-faced dolls for men’s enjoyment.

It’s a complicated question because, on the one hand, women are making the choice to see and feel sexy but on the other, as sociologist Lisa Wade notes in a piece quoted in the USA Today article, they’re making this choice “within a system” of patriarchy that objectifies women. Neither choice comes without sexist baggage. “Every year,” the article concludes,

women all over America are faced with an absurd choice and find themselves in yet another double bind: Dress sexy on Halloween and risk being judged or harassed, or forgo the fishnets and risk being ridiculed or ignored.

Sunrisehoodie barely seems to comprehend the argument, though he agrees with one thing: the choice is being made within a system. But for him that system isn’t patriarchy but “gynocracy.” As he sees it, women dressing in sexy costumes are exercising power over men.

“[W]omen that are wearing these costumes are on a power trip,” he complains.

Regardless if they’re attractive or not, they know that they will get attention, good or bad, from men when they dress up as a provocative schoolgirl on Halloween. …

When women get attention from men, their brains code it as sexual worth and sexual power – which has value because it means that they have a man that is willing to use them to pass on their genes.

It always comes back to half-baked evo psych for these guys.

Sunrisehoodie then tries his hand at metaphor:

Women are putting things on the shelves for sale and they want us to be interested in the discount pricing but when we bring it to the register they are giving us a different price than what it says on the shelf and then they won’t ring it up. They dismiss you and they laugh at you, all for a rush and all for praise.

Sunrisehoodie’s argument is more than a little reminiscent of Men’s Rights guru Warren Farrell’s comments about the “miniskirt power” and “cleavage power” that secretaries supposedly have over their bosses. Indeed, Farrell was so taken by this notion of his that he chose to represent female power in the form of a nude woman on the cover of the e-book version of his Men’s Rights bible “The Myth of Male Power.”

“Women actually possess the control,” sunrisehoodie asserts.

The shame is that … the media, the education system and bar culture continues to make the claim that they don’t have the power. We are living in an age when the woman … flaunting her body has more power than it has ever had before. It’s going throughout the corners of the earth and is stalking us to claim the newest man and to assess its power over morality, over wholesomeness and over society.

A halloween costume is doing all that?

The shame is that these women that are complaining over the inability to be sexually liberated fail to realize that they already have been sexually liberated. They have already been freed, and they are continually asking for something that they already have. Men are giving women jobs over their lack of clothing …

Wait, what? Women are showing up for job interviews nude now?

[W]omen are making millions every day as models on Instagram, Flipagram and every other gram out there. The fact that their sexual marketplace value isn’t having value and isn’t being recognized as something that they own is a lie and it is creating entitlement for women and confusion and destruction for men.

As histrionic as he sounds already, he’s just getting warmed up.

This is not sexual liberation. This is not liberation at all. This is imprisonment, and if that is what society continues to want and asks for with each year’s new edition of the sexy nurse, then let them have it, get your candy bar, which I prefer a protein bar anyway, and walk far away.

Sunshinehoodie concludes that men should spend Halloween all by themselves, hidden away from these power-hungry women in their sexy costumes.

[O]n Halloween, on Friday nights when girls are going out on the town, stay in your apartment, your home, your car, wherever you live, and be at peace … Don’t invest and pour out energy into that which will rot, which are these women that are expecting praise on this dark, Halloween night.

I would suggest that MGTOWs do this every other day of the year as well — really, any strategy that involves them not coming into contact with the rest of us is a good one in my book.

Happy Halloween to the rest of you!

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