MGTOW ideology emerged in the early 2000s, although it is not clear where it originated.[9] A blog calledNo Ma'am was one of the first sites dedicated to the ideology, publishing a "MGTOW Manifesto" in 2001.[10] Early members of MGTOW were largely politicallylibertarian and focused onindividual self-reliance in accordance with traditional notions of masculinity. Over time, the movement's focus shifted towardmale separatism.[11]
Far-right commentator andpolemicistMilo Yiannopoulos is credited with helping to popularize MGTOW with a 2014Breitbart article titled "The Sexodus", in which he described men who were eschewing women, love, sex, and marriage because of feminism.[12] MGTOW discussion forums include the subredditr/MGTOW, created in 2011, smaller auxiliary subreddits, andMGTOW Forum, an independent website that emerged in 2014. FollowingReddit's 2017 ban of a largeincel subreddit, r/MGTOW was briefly the largest and most active manosphere forum on the site.[13]
Researchers have implicated MGTOW communities inonline harassment of women. r/MGTOW andMGTOW Forum are among the communities which "have been growing in size and in their involvement in online harassment and real-world violence", according to computer scientist Manoel Horta Ribeiro and colleagues.[14] Communications researcher Scott Wright and colleagues state that "MGTOW propagate extensive and wide-ranging passive or undirected harassment and misogyny onTwitter."[15] Shortly after publication of a 2020preprint of a paper examining manosphere groups online, Reddit quarantined r/MGTOW, a restriction the platform applies to subreddits determined to be "extremely offensive or upsetting to the average redditor" which prevents them from earning advertising revenue and requires visitors to agree to seeing potentially offensive content before entering.[16] r/MGTOW was banned in August 2021 for breaking the site's policies against promotion of violence and hate.[17]
Membership
Members of MGTOW communities are primarilyheterosexual,white,middle-class men from North America and Europe. Unlike themen's rights movement, MGTOW do not permit women to join.[18] MGTOW often disavow hierarchies and claim to beleaderless; some deny that MGTOW is a group or movement at all, instead emphasizing each member's individuality and independence within a collective.[19]
Researcher Callum Jones and colleagues write inNew Media & Society that "while the precise number of MGTOW followers is unclear, it appears to be a popular and growing group within the Manosphere".[20] As of 2018[update], MGTOW was smaller than both the men's rights movement and the pickup artist communities online, withMGTOW Forum having over 25,000 subscribers and the subreddit r/MGTOW having over 35,000.[21] The subreddit had grown to 104,000 members by 2019,[note 1] with another MGTOW forum listing over 32,000 members.[20]
Ideology
MGTOW advocate for men to withdraw from what they see as agynocentric society that has been corrupted byfeminism.[22] MGTOW believe that men are better off avoiding any relationships with women, including marriage. Instead, the group believes that men should eitherabstain from sex with women entirely, or alternatively only havecasual sex while avoiding romantic or financial commitments.[3] Online MGTOW rhetoric is characterized byanti-feminism,masculism,[23] andmisogyny.[24] MGTOW believe that feminism has made women dangerous to men, and that male self-preservation requires dissociating completely from women.[25]
A 2020 study byWright et al. found that despite MGTOW claiming to reject women entirely, some 59% of MGTOW forum posts mentioned women, with the majority (61%) of those mentions being misogynistic in some way.[3] Jones et al. suggest that this reflects a need for MGTOW toperform their rejection of women in order to belong.[26]
The MGTOW community usesjargon shared by the broader manosphere, including thered pill and blue pill metaphor borrowed from the filmThe Matrix. Those in the manosphere who have been awakened from feminist "delusion" to the supposed reality that society is fundamentallymisandrist and dominated by feminist values are said to be "redpilled" or have "taken the red pill"; those who do not accept that ideology are referred to as "bluepilled".[27] Other jargon includespejorative terms for other men such as "beta", "cuck", "soy boy", and "white knight".[28]
Like other manosphere groups, MGTOW subscribe to the "red pill" belief that there is systemic bias against men in society,[29] includingdouble standards ingender roles[30] and bias against men infamily courts.[12] MGTOW endorse the belief shared by other manosphere groups that women follow a similar pattern in dating and marriage: young and attractive women arepromiscuous and engage in "hypergamy", having sex with numerous men and abandoning a man if a "higher-value" man shows interest. They believe women gravitate towards "alpha men" who are attractive but mistreat them, reinforcing the ideology of feminism.[31] According to MGTOW, as women begin to age, they settle down with "beta males"[32] who provide for them financially, but to whom they deny sex, sometimes engaging inextramarital sex with more attractive men; these relationships ultimately lead to divorce, in which the women will be favored by the courts due to what MGTOW call female privilege.[33]
MGTOW men gauge their participation in the movement on a series of four levels.[34] At the first level, men believe they are used and manipulated by women (called "situational awareness" or the "red pill"[35]) but still believe in the value of marriage; they are sometimes described as "purple pilled".[36] At the second level, men reject long-term relationships,cohabitation, and marriage, but will still participate in shorter term relationships and sexual encounters.[37] At the third level, men reject short-term relationships and limit their interactions with women.[38] At the fourth level, men minimize their engagement with the state and society, including employment; this is called "going ghost".[34][note 2]
TheSouthern Poverty Law Center categorizes MGTOW as a part of themale supremacist ideology,[8] a category they began tracking on their hate group tracking project,Hate Map, in 2018.[39] Fellows at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism publishing with theInternational Centre for Counter-Terrorism have said that members of MGTOW "openly disdain women, and normalize it through online harassment."[40] MGTOW and other manosphere communities overlap with the reactionary, white nationalistalt-right[5] and otherwhite supremacist,authoritarian, andpopulist movements worldwide.[41] Both MGTOW and the alt-right believe that feminism has destroyed Western society.[12]
Although some[who?] consider MGTOW to be a part of the men's rights movement,[44] others[who?] have cited MGTOW's separatist ideology as distinguishing them from the MRM, which engages in political activism to try to drive societal change.[45][35] MGTOW members describe men's rights activists and incels as "losers" and "betas".[3] Early MGTOW groups were primarily libertarian and opposed to "big government"; this led to a rift with men's rights activists who wished to lobby for governmental change, particularly with regards tocustody anddivorce law.[46] Wright et al. state that the founders of MGTOW were originally men's rights activists who became disillusioned with political activism, believing the "gynocentric world order" could not be changed.[47]
MGTOW is also at odds with the pick-up artist (PUA) community. Both PUA and MGTOW rhetoric is frequently misogynistic and objectifying towards women; however, whereas PUAs seek to manipulate women into providing sex, MGTOW claim to reject heterosexual relationships entirely.[3] The two groups share a reciprocal disdain for one another; PUAs have mocked MGTOW as "Virgins Going Their Own Way",[21] and MGTOW deride PUAs as being dependent on women's approval, contributing to what they see as overvaluing of women in society.[48]
^abZuckerberg (2018), pp. 19–20: "In spite of the conflict between pickup artists and Men Going Their Own Way over their differing approaches to women, both groups have begun to merge with the so-called Alternative Right or Alt-Right, a neoreactionary white nationalist group that began gaining prominence in 2015 and has been growing since."
^Zuckerberg (2018), p. 19: "Men Going Their Own Way aim to live their lives free of female influence and define manhood completely on their own terms. Over time, this aim has evolved significantly: while it initially started as a movement for self-reliant masculinity in harmony with traditional gender roles, it now advocates for living entirely separate from women and engaging in 'marriage strikes.'"
^Wright, Trott & Jones (2020), p. 909: "MGTOWs also contribute to the propagation of online harassment. Their contribution to a 'digital culture of misogyny' [...] combined with their rapid growth as other Manosphere groups face sanctions, positions them as an influential group within the Manosphere".
Lin (2017), pp. 77–78: "MGTOW, an exclusively male, antifeminist group [...] Like many other antifeminist groups, MGTOW comprises [sic] of mostly straight, white, middle-class men from North America and Europe. "
O'Donnell (2022), p. 25: "Unlike most men's rights activists, MGTOW do not allow women to join under any circumstances, owing to the nature of the movement."
Wright, Trott & Jones (2020), p. 911: "Structurally, MGTOW disavows the very idea that they are a group at all; they emphasise each individual man's voice and independence. MGTOW also often claim to be leaderless."
Lin (2017), pp. 91–92. "Most of my informants onReddit adamantly deny MGTOW as a movement, and fashion it more as a like-minded internet collective."
Wright, Trott & Jones (2020), p. 910: "All groups in the Manosphere share a belief in a 'gynocentric order' and Red Pill ideology. [...] MGTOWs encourage a separatist approach in which men live a self-empowered life away from women."
Jones, Trott & Wright (2020), p. 1904: "MGTOW are a group of men who vow to stop pursuing romantic relationships with women to focus on self-development and preservation; they are separatists who want to abandon the gynocentric order (Lin, 2017) and focus on more individualistic, self- empowering actions."
Lin (2017), p. 78: "Unlike other antifeminist groups, MGTOW espouse the abandonment of women and a Western society that has been corrupted by feminism. [...] Convinced that feminism will ultimately bring about societal demise, MGTOW vow to expunge themselves of gynocentric influences, and to nurse their besieged masculinities with the support of other men online."
Johanssen (2023): "both communities [Incels and Men Going Their Own Way] are highly misogynistic and clear representations of toxic masculinity"
Lin (2017), p. 86: "Across platforms, MGTOWs consistently display pent up emotion, cynicism and resentment towards women. They deliberate over just how a man should go his own way, and whether men and women are meant to work together or not."
Hodapp (2017), pp. xvii–xviii: "Men Going Their Own Way [...] claim to be acting in the name of self-preservation, which can only be achieved by cutting women out completely. In general, MGTOW argues that feminism has made women so toxic and dangerous for men that it is no longer safe for women to engage with them."
Lin (2017), p. 89: "When women do decide to settle for a man, he will be a passive 'beta-type,' whom she will boss around and target for his 'utility value'—financial assets and stability."
Zuckerberg (2018), p. 19: "Men Going Their Own Way bemoan the tendency of women to spend their most attractive years with unreliable alpha males—often embodied by the generic characters Chad Thundercock and his black counterpart Tyrone—before they 'hit the wall' in their late twenties and their attractiveness begins a steady decline, at which point they become more willing to settle for a beta male. These men believe it is better to opt out of this rigged system."
^Zuckerberg (2018), p. 19: "Men Going Their Own Way were in the past almost uniformly libertarian, and their distaste for 'big government' led to a schism with the men's human rights movement, many members of which are theoretically interested in activism in the form of lobbying for changes in custody and divorce law."
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The dictionary definition ofMGTOW at Wiktionary