The MGTOW acronym for Men Going Their Own Way has received a great deal of attention in recent years, with various claimants and critics purporting to define the community, marginalize it by denigrating its adherents or accusing it of misogynistic bias in opposition to feminism in general. There are also attempts to expropriate the community in the service of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), but I believe all of these to be an erroneous assessment of an emerging Zeitgeist growing daily in strength and influence—a rational migration by some men to opt out of bizarre mating rituals funneling the foolish into binding legal contracts inimical to their interests. Some in the community liken it to taking the red pill instead of the blue pill, a reference to the first Matrix film, in which the red pill reveals the truth and the blue pill returns one to the familiar world of illusion.

My own inflection point, or red pill moment if you will, came in January of 1990, when I realized that my marriage to my third wife was doomed to failure—that it was simply a question of time until the inevitable implosion. I would have pulled the ejection lever immediately, but we had a child together, a beautiful boy of seven months. It would not have been a propitious time, so I waited. That time came three years later in February of 1993. I’ve always known that I don’t do well in captivity, but as a certified alpha male, I have always been willing to pay any price to escape the bonds of matrimony. It was hard on our son, but to my ex-wife’s credit, she encouraged my equal access to participate in his upbringing.

There are degrees of MGTOW. Some eschew all interaction with women not strictly work- or friendship-related, including marriage (universally), relationships (mostly), and even dating. I still date, but much has changed since my transmogrification. I want to stay in full possession of my faculties, in order to critically observe virtually every woman’s propensity to manipulate. I no longer tell my story, mostly because it opens a window to my emotions as well as my sexual fantasies, which women typically seek to exploit with admirably honed skills innate to the gender. There is no danger of being dragged into a relationship followed by cohabitation, which can be as draining emotionally and financially as marriage. I have arguably evolved the lowest nag tolerance in this quadrant of the galaxy, so these dating escapades inevitably teeter towards self-destruction.

I live ascetically on a fraction of my income, pursuing interests that promote self-improvement and creative fulfillment. It’s also liberating to abandon the trappings of wealth and status. It would be natural to assume that I’m merely ranting in my dotage, but I beg to differ. It’s precisely because I’ve endured three marriages and have been in many intimate relationships that I can lend gravitas to the discussion. One of the ways feminists like to disembowel the MGTOW community is by characterizing us as Millennial slackers playing video games in our parents’ basements. This does not apply here. MGTOW is a far wider-ranging phenomenon than can be dismissed as a generational idiosyncracy. Our power lies in the fact that we’re not even looking for acknowledgement, much less approval. We just don’t care what anyone thinks about the community, be they feminists, the white knights among men that support their crusade, or the corporatized media that seek to marginalize us in five-minute sound bites.