At the Independent UK: Inside the world of men who’ve sworn never to sleep with women again:

The first rule of Fight Club – the 1999 film about an underground boxing club for men grappling with masculinity and dead-end jobs – was to never talk about fight club.

Almost two decades after its release, tens of thousands of men have formed a real-life online community called MGTOW, or Men Going Their Own Way.

Their first rule? Abandoning all romantic relationships with women.

On Reddit alone, some 15,000 readers are subscribed to the MGTOW page which declares it is for “men going our own way by forging our own identities and paths to self-defined success; cutting through collective ideas of what a man is.”

Other websites including MGTOW.com are also dedicated to what they see as each man’s fight for sovereignty of himself….

The origins of MGTOW are unclear. The MGTOW website loftily suggests their ideals hark back to “Schopenhauer, Tesla, Beethoven, Galileo, or even Jesus Christ”, and equates it to “fire”.

“MGTOW is not as old as fire, but it’s as old as a man’s first discovery of it. If MTGOW is fire, then perhaps feminism is gasoline,” reads the MGTOW.com history page. A more concrete theory is that MGTOW was created by online aliases Solaris and Ragnar in the 2000s, when they penned a manifesto calling for men and women to adhere to traditional gender roles and to fight for pared back govermment.

And while their communities may be virtual, their determination seems very real indeed.