Monique forwarded me the Sunday Times article on MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way; pronounced ‘mig-tau’), Meet the men giving up on women, in which Martin Daubney interviews members of the online community, and describes how the movement’s male members, feeling that both western norms of dating and the legal paradigms surrounding relationships, marriage, and parenthood are stacked against them, have decided to forego marriage, parenthood, and in some cases intimate contact with women altogether (known as ‘ghosting’).
‘So sad that both sexes have come to the same gloomy conclusion,’ Monique said. She’d also forwarded the article to her son in the hope he wasn’t of the same opinion. She feared her personal experience of divorce had made her son wary of marriage.
I found the article skewed, interviewing the least militant male members plus two female sympathisers of the movement who negatively generalised women, completely misunderstood the definition of feminism and assumed those resistant to the movement don’t believe men’s needs matter. ‘MGTOWs are resisted and hated because they represent a completely new paradigm where men’s needs, interests and desires matter — because they do,’ Canadian blogger Karen Straughan said.
‘How did James respond?’ I asked Monique a few days later.
‘He hasn’t.’
‘I expect he was offended you considered he was of the same opinion,’ I laughed.
Daubney concludes that ‘these men feel abandoned, unwanted and even despised’ and therefore deserve our ‘understanding and sympathy’.
There’s no doubt that he and Monique have a point. The movement’s rise comes at a time when more women than men are graduating from universities across western countries yet former hedge-fund manager Kim Elsesser has released Sex and the Office, which argues that our inability to be comfortable around colleagues of the opposite sex is stopping women from gaining the contacts and creating the networks they need to get promoted.
