This is a three part feature series written in response to the van attack in Toronto which killed 10 people. Part I. considers some of the male-centric identity groups that have appeared in the last decade. In Part II. the Toronto terrorist’s particular sub-culture – the “incel” movement – is explored in more depth. Part III. finishes the feature series with a demonstration of how orthodox Christian theology can answer objections, philosophically overturn the new morality, offer renewal to the damaged, and properly interpret the sociological forces at work in our time.

Unfinished Business: The Sexual Revolution Pick Up Artists (PUA) Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW)

UNFINISHED BUSINESS: THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

It may not seem that our society is lurching toward a crisis point when you are squirrelled away in a warm home on a rainy morning.

Life seems to trundle on with apparent normality; the sun continues to rise, the seasons come and go. And yet, for all of this, the substructure of our civilisation is being dismantled by the ongoing effect of the sexual revolution which in the past week has turned lethal. Within Western nations there are ferocious disagreements about the proper constitution of sexuality, gender, and family and since these things are so elemental to the human condition, everything is touched by the conflict – law, religion, sport, entertainment, and politics.

The upheavals in these domains have plunged Western society into troubled airspace. Issues of sexuality, family and gender are centrepiece moral and ideological conflicts. It is fair to say that an internal war is being fought over the regulation, identification and management of sex and gender. In the process, the foundations that have been taken for granted by Christian civilisation are being smashed apart along with the institutions that once adorned them.

Many examples could be provided to illustrate how far this revolution has spread. Just this week The College Fix published the findings of a video experiment. Students planted small yellow signs on the grounds of five Catholic college campuses that read: “God’s Marriage = 1 Man + 1 Woman“. The student researchers claimed that every sign they installed was vandalised or removed within minutes. Some were tampered with by college staff while others were interfered with by students, but none lasted longer than ten minutes. A couple of these signs were later replaced with pro-homosexual marriage signs which were, of course, left undisturbed.

The fact that this quiet tussle occurred within the institutions that the Roman Catholic Church charges with propagating a semblance of a Catholic worldview in their people, shows the depth to which the ideas of the sexual revolution have penetrated and how much further they have yet to run. University campuses are at the forefront of the cresting wave, breeding a new generation of radicals. What we observe is not encouraging and does not bode well for the future.

Conflict is the summary word. Far from bringing harmony, the sexual revolution has engendered vast conflict. Sexual and family conflict have exploded in severity and volume. Scandals in respected institutions are common. Worse, much of this is now aired publicly for broad consumption which exercises a further warping effect on people’s minds and hearts. The more people hear, see and read of sexual mayhem across the complex of human interaction, the more it encourages suspicion, feeds pharisaic codes of behaviour, and expands the appetite for pushing boundaries.

Revolutions have a habit of spiralling out of control. The sexual revolution, as a distinct cultural force, is no different which is why sexual issues are now among the most savagely fought over within our society.

As competing forces interact revolutions create enemies within and without. Factions coalesce, often implacably opposed to each other. Rivalries form; outcast villains reinvent themselves; schools of exclusive thought emerge; and enmities harden. For some people, the initial triumphs of the revolution are enough. They become the conservatives. In other circles, the boundaries are still too tight, too fuddy-duddy, and must be pushed even further. And so radicalism turns in upon itself, creating feverish hothouses of intellectual agitation. These, in turn, grow their own offshoots. As centres of agitation blossom they come into conflict with each other, a good example being the recent rivalry between lesbian feminist groups and transgender feminists.

Two weeks ago, we saw the dynamic of radicalism at work. The sexual revolution has bred a new and unique form of terrorism which targets gender.

Much of the world now knows the name Alek Minassian, who killed 10 people in Toronto by driving a van down a sidewalk. Minassian is the latest instalment in a list of young men who commit mass murder due to their sexual grievances which they have transformed into the manifesto of victimhood and oppression.

Alek Minassian belonged to a men’s movement known as the “involuntarily celibate” or “incel”. The incel movement is obsessed with sexuality and gender. It often lurks in cyberspace’s shadowy fringes where incels can connect with each other without too much scrutiny. Even so, their forums do get shut down sometimes. This is because incels have an uncomfortable tendency to sink into violent fantasies involving rape, murder, or the active harassment of women. They tend to encourage each other toward deviant or predatory behaviour that in some cases is criminal, and in other cases should be taken as a coded plea for psychiatric assessment.

But incels are not alone. Minassian’s vile act has caused the spotlight to fall more brightly upon a wide range of male-centric gender movements that are growing alarmingly across the world as the sexual revolution introduces more destabilisation into human relations. Each movement is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution in its own right, but interestingly, in some cases may be seen as a grotesque act of protest against it. It hardly need be said that each is putrid and vile in its own way.

This confederation of male movements – despite the fact they sometimes violently disagree with each other – do share a number of things in common. First, a negative view of women (and of modern society, supposedly run by and for women). Second, a distorted view of sexual intercourse. And thirdly, a putrescent view of masculinity that is strongly informed by Darwinian fantasy.

PICK UP ARTISTS

“Pick Up Artists” (PUA) or the “seduction community” consists largely of men who languish in the teenage fantasy that they can transform themselves into a living Adonis and have women fall at their feet left and centre. Whereas most teenage boys, even at their most hormonal, never lose the ability to distinguish between their fantasies of female availability and the stark limitations of reality, the men who are drawn into the PUA community seem to be locked into the fantasy with a childlike obsession.

The fundamental premise underpinning the PUA movement is the belief that women are susceptible a range of seduction techniques. You do need need to be particularly attractive for these techniques to work. They have a life and power of their own independent of the man wielding them. So much are these techniques regarded as a sovereign panacea that it forms the internal narrative of the subculture. The literature of the PUA community abounds with stories of fat, middle-aged, bald, sweaty men who walk into a bar alone at the beginning of a night, and leave at the end of the evening with one (or perhaps two) gorgeous women on their arms. The claim that men can obtain dating prowess through process alone is an article of faith within the PUA community. They truly believe that their techniques can more than compensate for kilos of extra flesh or sketchy personal hygiene.

The techniques themselves are risible. For instance, one technique called “negging” encourages men to subtly attack a woman’s insecurities with backhanded compliments that allegedly will then make her work for his approval. A PUA might look at a woman’s shoes, for example, and say, “Wow! Nice shoes. They look comfortable” or, “That’s a lovely dress. I saw a lot of people wearing that shade last year“. It is believed that negging makes a man more interesting to a woman. PUAs explain that the average woman is habituated to receiving flattery and compliments from men and associates this with weakness. Therefore a man who “negs” her will seem more interesting, less docile, and project the allure of confidence.

All this is based on the much-ballyhooed claim within PUA circles that women fall for jerks and predators while they merely “friend zone” nice guys. Street wisdom of this sort is the foundation for many PUA techniques. It’s the sort of conclusions one would draw if they observed merely a narrow slice of human interaction, such as the goings on in a rowdy bar. Such is the childish nature of the foundation into which the community places its faith. Nonetheless, the PUA community energetically asserts that these techniques work and, when properly applied, will enable a man to have sexual relations with virtually any woman he desires.

The Guardian, in its review of an expose of the inner working of the group, made this observation:

The jargon of the art, as explained in both The Game and The Layguide, is aggressive and militaristic. Going into clubs and deploying your newly found techniques is called “sarging”, supposedly named after someone’s cat but inevitably evoking “sergeant”. The woman you want to seduce is the “target”; her friend might be an “obstacle”; a male friend who accompanies you is your “wing”. These latter terms were taken by Mystery from the film Top Gun, in an apparently unconscious tribute to that film’s fervid atmosphere of homoerotic competition. The places in which seduction is practised are known collectively as “the field”, as though the protagonists were soldiers or spies. If they come home with a woman’s telephone number, a basic token of success, they write a “field report” and post it to the internet for appreciation and commentary. (“Sad sack artists”, The Guardian, 2005)

Give the character of the “seduction community” it is not surprising to discover that the PUA community consists of a few highly promiscuous men and many, many virtually celibate men. There is a smattering of men in between these extremes who can “pull” dates and have intercourse. They are involved in the community because they want to refine their abilities and pull better dates and have more intercourse.

This produces a group dynamic in which the majority lovelorn defer to the promiscuous, who represent (in their eyes, at least) the apotheosis of the art of seduction. The most promiscuous PUA are held in awed reverence. They take pretentious nicknames like “Mystery” and are attributed nearly mystical powers by the men in their orbit. The writings and media materials of these “seduction artists” form the basic manifesto of the group. In some cases, having sexual intercourse with multiple women and then writing about how they did it seems to be their full time occupation.

Such an obsessive focus on sexual intercourse suggests a severe dysfunction. This is confirmed by one former PUA by the name of Neil Strauss. Strauss became an iconic figure within the community and his writings continue to form the backbone of PUA techniques. Nonetheless, he has since abandoned the community and published an expose of it. He describes the way his mind worked as a PUA:

While waiting for his drink, Strauss falls into conversation with a group that includes two middle-aged tourists and a young woman. The woman is in her 20s – tanned, blond, wearing denim short-shorts. Game-klaxon! I watch to see how Strauss will react to her, only he doesn’t. He chats with the tourists, about nothing much. Then he chats with her, about nothing much. And then he walks away. “The old me would have been performing everything for her attraction,” Strauss says when we’re out of earshot. “Thinking of sex with her. Or how to lure her away from her boyfriend, what have you. Even in, like, a work meeting – if there was a woman in that meeting, everything I said was for her, to get her phone number afterwards.”

If this seems abnormal, it’s because it is. It represents the substructure of a mental disorder, perhaps several. Interestingly, the dysfunctional nature of this behaviour was apparent to Strauss while he was still a practitioner of “the art” and a luminary within the PUA community.

Yet even when he reached a point where he wanted to pull away from the community, he was unable to disentangle himself. The inability to stop a destructive pattern of behaviour is usually a criteria for a psychiatric disorder.

Strauss reflects on this period of his life with a classic illustration of addiction:

He kept on spending, by his reckoning, “thousands of hours, thousands of dollars” in bars – preying. It was a lifestyle, Strauss says, that fast became “a recipe for self-hatred”.

Ultimately, Strauss discovered that a lifestyle built around radical promiscuity – both the practice of it and the teaching of other men to behave in this way – was neither healthy nor satisfying. He realised that the lifestyle was actually the external projection of a troubled and unstable psychology. The uncomfortable boundary line between his personality and the techniques he promoted is a topic addressed by several feature articles written on him by magazines and newspapers.

It is remarkable to consider that the fevered jetsam and flotsam of a troubled psyche can constitute the lifestyle advice pursued by thousands of men in the PUA community. It is a little like following the lifestyle advice of a doctor who is a cocaine addict and a kleptomaniac: the dysfunction of the expert tends to invalidate the advice he offers because it calls into question its true genesis. Nobody wants to (or ought to) base their life on the outflow of another person’s psychological disorder. That’s a recipe for making the madness spread.

By opening up his psyche to trained therapists for the first time, Strauss learned he had quite an assortment of mental and emotional conditions. In short order, he was diagnosed with anxiety syndrome, depressive disorder, two forms of sexual disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. “It was like a hammer hitting me on the head,” he says. “I really thought I was normal.”

The misogynistic qualities of this community are self-evident insofar that even to subscribe to these ideas requires a degraded and monochromatic view of women as a mandatory prerequisite. The average PUA views women not as people with their own inner life but primarily as a means to his own gratification. The PUA is seeking gratification of sexual desires as much as the gratification of his ego and pride, and it often seems this latter distinction means more to them than sexual release itself. Having sex is an accomplishment that attracts a certain status within his circle. It’s not dissimilar from a group of hormonal teenage boys who boast to each other about the girls they’ve kissed.

The female quality that matters most within the PUA subculture is physical attractiveness. In fact, it is quite normal for a PUA to refer to women as numbers on a sliding scale ranging between 1 and 10. “I saw a 9.5 talking with an 8 the other day, and I went straight in to get numbers from them both“. Women are viewed essentially as disagreeable and evasive robots who will, nonetheless, dispense the desired action if you punch in the right programme.

In the world of the Pick Up Artist, men must take their cues from nature. They must be dominant and in control of conversation, since women (even if they deny it) have an innate evolutionary desire to be dominated. They must also be flashy and showy, like a male peacock. Indeed, “peacocking” is a term they use to describe wearing some distinctive article of clothing or jewellery – perhaps a feathered hat or an oversized skull ring – in order to stand out from the crowd. They are inspired by apes and lions and the dominant postures these display to assert themselves over females. They attempt to practice the same subliminal body language cues which allegedly make women swoon in submission, or at least, make them unconsciously more susceptible to submitting to a sexual advance. Thus it is that relationships, according to the PUA community, are not about the love and delight a man discovers in a woman – her mind and spirit as well as sexual intercourse – but about sex and the techniques required to get it.

Strauss, in an interview with The Atlantic, give some insight into how extreme it gets:

It’s true, that’s when I went to such an extreme that everything’s a technique. The guys would practice taking photos with each other to see how they could look more dominant in a photo. They engineer their behavior to such an insane degree.

It is a sub-culture that is so lunatic in its method – like the formulas of a mad scientist who thinks he has cracked the secret to immortal life – that only a particular kind of person could ever be drawn into this sub-culture. The requisite quality is a simple faith in techniques and programmes to penetrate the mystery of relationships, which nobody illuminated by real world experience could ever maintain with a straight face. But an attendant quality within the PUA community is either a severe lack of social skills or personalities that approach sociopaths where manipulation and power are the keys to the entirety of the human existence. Worryingly, their own materials seem to testify that the closer to true sociopaths a PUA approaches the more successful he appears to become. It does not say much for the community at large.

The “game” appeals to the mindset that supposes everything can be reduced to a technology, a program to follow. “Think of tonight as a video game,” Mystery instructs his students before taking them out sarging. And so it attracts the kind of men who are super-analytical but interpersonally hobbled. As Strauss wryly notes of the eventual population of the dream Los Angeles seduction house: “The point was women; the result was men. Instead of models in bikinis lounging by the Project Hollywood pool all day, we had pimply teenagers, bespectacled businessmen, tubby students, lonely millionaires, struggling actors, frustrated taxi drivers, and computer programmers – lots of computer programmers.” The sell is that, with the special techniques they learn from Mystery and other gurus, the ubergeeky can often give a convincing simulation of being a regular human being, even if, like one sarger in this book, they are in fact near-sociopaths.

MEN GOING THEIR OWN WAY

“Men Going Their Own Way”, usually abbreviated MGTOW, is another sub-culture that has congealed in the “manosphere” over the past decade. Unlike the PUA sub-culture which consists largely of the would-be promiscuous, this community consists of men who commit to living a life without romantic obligations, without children, and without strong attachments to society and the national community.

Adherents of the MGTOW lifestyle claim that society has become so feminised it is now actively hostile to men as a deliberate policy of administration and governance. This hostility toward men is primarily seen in the uneven sentencing between genders who may commit similar crimes (judges and courts come under special censure by the MGTOW movement), but these men also decry the gender ideologies pumped out by universities as well as the generalised marginalisation of male pursuits in modern culture. They argue that the Western world was built by men, yet has now embraced a feminine ideology that leaves no room for full-blooded male expression and identity.

Like many social protests, there is a kernel of truth behind the trappings. There is merit to the argument that the roles of men as fathers, workers, builders, creators, and leaders are no longer really honoured and supported. Unfortunately the MGTOW movement goes much further than this to assert that the remedy is to abandon society altogether. Many MGTOW will claim that any man who does not identify as part of the MGTOW sub-culture has become a useful idiot of the social feminisation programme. Furthermore, the men who defend the social system and the place of women are “white knights”. A white knight is any man who has become docile and deferential to both women and the feminised social system.

MGTOW claim that men have been emasculated across a range of domains. Sadly, it is not difficult for MGTOW to find ample evidence of the unfair treatment of men. Unlike the men’s rights movement, however, they do not posit solutions and therefore do not even attempt to work for change. To do so is pointless MGTOW argue because the social arrangement is so wildly unbalanced in favour of women that any change is scotch-taping a gaping crack or rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. Since the cards are rigged to yield aces for women, reforming the card table is pointless.

Instead, the MGTOW solution is to disengage from work, social obligation, children, and politics, and above all, to disengage from women. For most MGTOWs this involves embracing a bachelor existence and making no effort to look for a long-term relationship. This does not necessarily mean all MGTOW forswear sexual relations; some MGTOWS will engage in sexual activity with prostitutes or have a string of short term relationships with women. Such sexual relationships are considered acceptable within the sub-culture providing the relationship is entirely about the man’s gratification and serves his desires, goals and interests. He comes first.

This means that MGTOW typically relate to women with a conscious and premeditated lack of attachment, even with those they are having sex with. More advanced MGTOWs actually embrace their virginity or celibacy and commit themselves to keeping it – something known as “the full monk”.

Given this attitude toward sex and relationships one might be forgiven for thinking that MGTOW must be a relatively niche phenomenon, perhaps isolated to a smattering of disgruntled men, cracked misogynists and borderline misfits. It is hard to imagine too many men forgoing sexual relations for the sake of a lifestyle philosophy.

(One of the reasons God planted sexual desire into the human creation was to propel the two genders together and cause them to both need and desire union. To surmount this God-given impulse requires a great deal of rebellious effort. Martin Luther once observed that sexual desire arose from the original command God gave to his creation to “be fruitful and multiply”, and consequently, the yearning for sexual congress “was the last thing to die in man”.)

But far from being limited to a bag of human odds and ends, the MGTOW movement and various localised versions of it – such as the Japanese “herbivore men”; the soushoku danshi (“grass eating boys”) – now boast a significant and growing number of practitioners of this lifestyle. In Japan, 60% of men in their twenties, and 70% of men in their thirties are now classified as “herbivore men” with no interest in romantic or sexual relationships at all.

The rise of this phenomenon has caused something of a moral panic in Japan. A lack of romantic enthusiasm among their young men combined with rapidly declining population does not give demographic cheer. It is worthwhile seriously weighing up the long-term societal damage. It gives us some inkling into the population cost that a movement of this sort could one day have.

Although there are some regional distinctions between soushoku danshi and MGTOWs – MGTOW are a lot more aggressive in promoting their ideas unlike their Japanese counterparts – yet the worldview of both shares the common disengagement with traditional male roles:

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. “We don’t care at all what people think about how we live,” he says. Many of Hosho’s friends spend so much time playing computer games that they prefer the company of cyber women to the real thing. And the Internet, he says, has helped make alternative lifestyles more acceptable. Hosho believes that the lines between men and women in his generation have blurred. He points to the popularity of “boys love,” a genre of manga and novels written for women about romantic relationships between men that has spawned its own line of videos, computer games, magazines, and cafes where women dress as men. Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West’s “commercialization” of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman’s affection.

Neither does the MGTOW movement only encompass burnt out adults (young or old) whose dating or marriage experiences have turned them cynical and jaded. The media has reported on a growing number of teenage boys who are entering the movement as early as the age of 15. These represent a distinct and significant sub-set of the the movement – the TGTOWs: Teenagers Going Their Own Way. For these teenagers, relationships are fraught with the potential for abuse, dysfunction, pain, and breakdown. and many of them are deeply mistrustful of women. They have seen girlfriends make accusations against male relatives or friends, or they have had horrendous familial experiences. They thus choose to disengage early and seek for a life lived in secure solitude inside a small controllable circle.

It is a view of the self and of broader society that is close to a kind of moral solipsism: “the self is all I can trust“. Other TGTOWs maintain nearly exclusively male friendships, play a staggering amount of video games, work a minimal job, make no progress toward the usual accoutrements of adulthood like home ownership, and satisfy their sexual impulses with pornography.

A distinct flavour of revenge permeates the MGTOW movement. It is impossible to encounter any tendril of the movement without being exposed to its acidic hostility toward women, non-MGTOW men, and the social structures that hold a nation together. This thirst for vengeance is reflected in a recent MEL magazine expose of the MGTOW sub-culture. The quotes from its adherents shine a very strong light on the deep sense of alienation and anger these men seemingly experience:

MGTOW (pronounced “MIG-tau,” at least per everyone I spoke with) is a worldwide social phenomenon and online community of heterosexual men who have chosen a lifestyle that avoids legal and romantic entanglements with women at all costs. A Man Going His Own Way values self-ownership above all else, believing that he — and only he — has the right to decide what his goals in life should be. He refuses to surrender his will to the social expectations of women and society since he believes both have become hostile toward him. Some MGTOW make a pledge of celibacy. (“Cut off the **** supply and raise awareness against the millions of chicks that use men and disrespect our natural role.”) Some engage in sex with prostitutes exclusively. (“The only honest women.”) Others sleep with tons of women; they’ll just never marry them. (“Even if a man has only three lovers in his entire life, he is getting more than his own grandfather — who had to marry her first.”)

The movement’s prescription is to vent its rage and punish the whole of society by deliberately opting not to fulfil any constructive or meaningful role in it. To varying degrees (since some MGTOW are quite successful men), its adherents choose social parasitism as a lifestyle. In its most extreme manifestation they purposefully build nothing, contribute nothing, serve no one, and do not participate in any form of familial life. Additionally, they actively preach hostility against the institutions that hold society up and promote a corrosive attitude of ambivalence and mockery toward these.

Although it may be tempting to regard this movement as too silly for words, it cannot be denied that their strategy is plausible. Any widespread male withdrawal from social life would lead to adverse long-term effects. For this reason the MGTOW movement should be considered potentially the most destructive of all the misogynistic movements, because while this movement is not an immediate danger to life and limb in the way that the incel sub-culture has become, yet by growing to a critical mass (and it is growing rapidly) its effects would be far more destabilising and hazardous.

MEL’s expose gives a good taste of their attitude toward the world at large:

Most MGTOW will tell you it’s more of a philosophy than a movement, punctuated with a serious helping of ZFG (“zero f***s given”). MGTOW are unapologetically selfish and, unlike men’s rights activists, aren’t looking to change the status quo, but instead trying to opt out of marriage, fatherhood, cohabitation and/or whatever else society expects of them — like a flock of indifferent ostriches. Smitty the Great One, another MGHOW, employed a slightly more combative analogy in his description to me: “MGTOW are the Viet Cong of the gender war. The men’s rights activists don’t like us because, while we agree with them on some things, we won’t be their cannon fodder in a war we know they can’t win. Pickup artists hate us because they can’t make money off us. Feminists hate us because we won’t fight them. And women hate us because we won’t give them what they want.”

The MGTOW sub-culture produces streams of video content on the internet that tends to focus on the worst excesses of feminism (such as the infamous “Trigglypuff” recording), or instances of poor female behaviour. Interviews with women who lament the lack of male attention they receive are quite popular, and are taken by MGTOWs as evidence that the movement is gaining traction. Videos of feminist speakers, protesters, academics, or bullies are almost ubiquitous.

Given this preoccupation with poor female behaviour, it is not surprising that at the hub of MGTOW philosophy lies very negative views of women. Women are almost always presented as unreliable, entitled, spoiled, ruined by feminism, spiteful, arrogant, unfeeling, hurtful, money-hungry, and dangerous. Avoiding romantic entanglements is typically presented as a self-protective behaviour.

Digesting a steady diet of skewed materials of this sort, women are spoken of in terms that would curdle milk. Terms like “slut” or “whore” as a normative term of reference for a woman is quite usual. Women are sometimes referred to by their genitals. The abuse is not coherent. On one hand women are often insulted for being “ugly”, fat, stupid or insufficiently attractive but on the other hand, attractive women are attacked because they are attractive. Their appearance opens them to excoriation for their clothing, makeup, or poise. Their sexual activities are speculated over with malicious satisfaction.

Women who have professional qualifications – such as judges, doctors, lawyers or politicians – are regarded as innately dangerous. The common assumption among MGTOWs is that professional women will always act to the detriment of men. It is a striking historical inversion insofar as it resembles the attitude seen among radical feminists of the 1970’s for whom all men were agents of a mythical patriarchy.

Clearly the men involved in the MGTOW movement are angry and resentful. The community crackles with rage and hostility, and this is not only directed outwards. Sometimes the guns are turned upon their own, as MEL magazine notes:

I found the last three weeks I spent in the MGTOW Manosphere to be, for better or worse, reminiscent of 6th-grade recess — playful, petty and short-tempered. Make no mistake: These guys are bullies. Or as they put it, “Turning betas into men is a group effort, no one is in charge … and a good amount of time is spent shooting flaming arrows at each other for no apparent reason.” Immature? You bet.

A typical example of the profanity-laced commentary can be found on this forum (caution: contains extreme language and seriously degrading content). Below is a typical sample, censored for moral purposes:

You guys out there who aren’t Australian, don’t understand just how ******* **** women in Australia are. The courts, the laws and the police are totally against men, the police are the worst white knights you could ever imagine too. Unless you are Chad Mc**********, Australian women will not be nice to you, even during general interactions in a social environment. They’re totally ****, I mean I wouldn’t even **** an Aussie girl with someone elses **** let alone my own (again).

The above sample of MGTOW discourse hints toward a classic MGTOW narrative, which may be described as “The Lamentation of a Good Man“. These are saccharine mini-autobiographies in which the author will describe himself as good-looking, hard-working, athletic, adorable, funny, clever, and basically an all round excellent egg. Despite these qualities, his relationships either do not last or he cannot enter into a meaningful one. Women treat him poorly. He does not find the relational Shangri-La.

The lamentation usually concludes with the MGTOWs revelation that his experiences have proven that women are shallow and fickle. They cannot recognise a good prospect when it is right in front of them and can never be trusted. Of course, it does not occur to these men that their conclusion and its self-serving premise is so tragically flawed that it actually reveals their problem.

Like most sub-cultures, MGTOW embraces a spectrum of men from those who want no children or long-term relationships but are happy to have temporary relationships, all the way to the ultimate fulfilment of the MGTOW philosophy which is disengagement from the broader economic and social structure of his country, and going “off the grid” altogether. At this extreme, MGTOW allies itself with other conspiratorial groups that also preach against the federal government, although the MGTOW solution – to hide away in a cabin somewhere as a completely self-realised individual – is a passive response that does not fortunately lend itself to violent behaviour.