Why are Millennial Men Becoming MGTOW?

By: H.T., H.T.’s Blog

I will not lie and say that it’s hard to be a straight male in the modern cultural climate. I will say that when you break down the reality of something that often is weaponized or deemed caustic, you kind of see why so many straight men feel so lost. The concept of human lust is an easy thing to understand regardless of sexuality, gender, race, economic or political identity. It’s just that the issue of straight men’s libidos is seen as a bit of a third rail in society, yet on some level society plays to it in some way to sell things to us or motivate us towards something. When people wonder why subcultures like incels, MGTOW and PUA exist, I think the mistake made is that this is ONLY a reactionary movement towards feminism. But when you actually listen to a lot of these group members’ experiences about being a man that, in the pursuit of attention and sex from women, that often it does feel more laborious than its worth. Not only that, we SEE men who not only have it easier but also get the kind of attention we only dream about. Within reason one can understand why some men fair better in the modern dating pool than others, but when you listen to the lower ranked men you get an insight into what the core of the worry is for many men.

But then you get to groups like MGTOW and PUA, you start to truly see where such cynicism begins to fester. Yes, men are not owed sex by women, but if we are working under the paradigm that affection needs to be EARNED, this is where men start to get frustrated as it feels often like the threshold for what is tolerated as far as flaws and shortcomings from a man is contingent on if he fits a certain level of what is lusted by physically by women. And fact is, it’s understandable, but to not expect an underclass of rejected men who sit amongst themselves, compare notes and realize they are low ranked in the modern dating scene and that it feels like, not that there’s no hope, but that what “improvement” by women’s standards gets them isn’t worth the climb.

Men do get frustrated because often at a point we do notice that the longer we go jumping through the proverbial hoops to get women’s affections, we collectively notice that not only are there men who have to do less, but a growing number of these men do LESS than us and get more attention from women than we could ever dream. So in the end, it’s not even that we feel we’re owed, it’s that we feel like we just aren’t cut out for the modern narrative for dating in that one can’t help but feel cynical when most of the time we see men who do less but get more women. Even from the stance of having game, today it often feels like just knowing how to talk to women doesn’t even guarantee men a better chance at finding a mate. Speaking from a very common yet anecdotal perspective of a lot of men, many of us notice that no amount of charm or character seems to help in a dating pool run by women that seem to make excuses for men that are general dolts or even actively toxic to them but are their physical ideal.

So what is the solution? Honestly, if all the men that can’t find love even after trying to the best of their ability collectively decided to, yes, go their own way and live a womanless, childless life, I think these men would be happy. But I also think that entities like capitalism would collectively have a shit show as they would find out that eventually it wouldn’t be able to maintain the veneer of a shiny happy utopia when there’s clearly entire communes of men living lives that from a marketing standpoint are a nightmare to sell to by the social standards of neoliberal society. Why? Because the ugly truth is that the modern life of a single, childless woman is far easier to watch than that of a single childless man. For the latter, most of us aren’t huge players that get women throwing themselves at us. We might make a lot and can often pay our bills on time, but often we find ourselves spending money almost entirely on us. There’s no coworkers with a crush on us, and the scene of guys discussing issues like women and sex are much less quippy and witty, and much more blunt and by all accounts much more politically incorrect. In short, there’s a reason the closest things men get to any semblance of what life as a modern man is a CBS show that is about to end and really stopped being relevant to modern men when 3 out of 4 of the male characters got married and one became a father. Meanwhile, we still get shows like Girls and Insecure, derivatives of the grandmother of these kinds of shows in the modern frame, Sex and the City, and it shows no signs of stopping. There’s nothing wrong with showing single women enjoying their lives, hell I still watch episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore because from a writing standpoint, the show’s still pretty impressive. And no, there’s nothing wrong with showing single women fucking who they want, when they want, but there is a thing society has to consider on the whole about the other gender they show.

Men today are dropping out, not having kids and not getting married, not because of a hate for women, but rather that the incentives for us to find relationships and the like is losing ground in the face of the material reality of things. We’ve grown up seeing how divorces wrecked the men around us, we grew up watching girls joke about being side chicks, and even if you weren’t a total prude about what your woman wears, you still have to live in a society where you could greet your girlfriend with breakfast and flowers after a bad week at work and it still would give her the same feeling of validation as her posting a random good morning selfie on Instagram and seeing how many likes it gets in an hour. In short, how do you sell this generation of men on pursuing women when clearly we see that a great deal of us are often left unnoticed?

Using the black community as an example, we often have so many men tapping out of the dating pool because from what a lot of us see, many of us live in a perpetual glut of black female attention. No, we are not owed it. BUT not being owed something does not mean you can’t assess why you didn’t get it. And for many black men it certainly appears as though there is no place for us within the black community love wise that isn’t a bit tortured. Please understand black women, the average black guy can get past that you’ve fucked a few guys here and there, but that’s never the problem on the whole. The problem is that from a class standpoint, when black women date lower socioeconomic men, we have to compete with men who are shiftless, lazy, and contribute almost nothing to your homes, and in many cases that’s who you have kids by. When we go up the socioeconomic ladder, it’s a bit of an easier pill to swallow as at the bare minimum, the men upper class women pick over us have at least a clear as day advantage as the typical upper class black womens’ #MCM who is a guy who looks like Derrick Jaxn. Which I get, I really do. But heres the thing…

Women have a right to choose who they date, marry, and have kids with. But you can’t also expect everyone to be okay with it, especially when we all know said choices don’t always end well. Again, I don’t get mad when some upper class, blavity black woman gets with some professional swole guy with a beard and a shape up, and frankly I’ve stopped worrying about lower class women that only fuck with guys objectively worse than me as there’s literally nothing I can do. But all this being said, women on the whole say “men are trash” because the few they choose to sexually engage are terrible people and the rest that they clearly don’t want to fuck don’t either sit around and bandage their wounds or talk about how shitty other men are. We KNOW other black men are shitty, we’ve always known. And to seriously expect us all to be your cultural nights watch while we know a few of these men who even black women themselves admit are awful get past us and take refuge in your bed, you can’t then with the role you’ve relegated us to call us “nice” guys when we point out said guys are actually a danger to you. Yes, there are “nice” guys that go too far and do more harm than good, but you can’t actually complain that even we can see when the wolves have been let in the hen house just cause a few hens think he’s cute.

I say that to ask the question: why are you mad men are going away, leaving you alone and giving men a path that never crosses with yours so you can be happy with the men that, again, even YOU recognize is an inherent problem? I won’t put words in women’s mouths, but it LOOKS like the number of men willing to fall on the sword for women’s bad choices is dropping not unlike the birth rate. And you know this because many of you, by your own rightful choice, have decided to stop having kids yourself because I think even YOU know that the men left that you want to fuck is narrowing and the men that are actually emotionally built to be fathers is dropping and not a lot of them are men that get you hot and bothered. Men wouldn’t keep bringing up “the wall being undefeated” if we didn’t ALWAYS watch women who hit about 30 when they know they can’t rely as heavily on looks with men beyond the occasional guy who’s lonely and needs a somewhat pretty woman to talk to him, also start to be much more shrewd with who they pick to sleep with. We all wouldn’t CONTINUE to bring it up if we didn’t see it constantly with celebs and with women we know. And no amount of shaming will change that. This is a pattern we see.

We KNOW we can’t force women to pick men that treat them better, and shouldn’t, but at the same time we can’t be expected to make you all feel better about your choices with men, when even WE know it’s shit. We told you they were shit and now you treat your shit choices like a JOKE and treat every guy that sees why it isn’t funny like WE’RE the problem. I’m going to let women in on a secret about a lot of MGTOWs that they don’t like to consider: just about every MGTOW is the son of the kind of man that women today treat as a joke and give their best years to. No, you don’t owe ANYONE your time, body or affection, but if this is who you are going to pick, even when we are living proof these kinds of men create a vicious cycle, then by all means live your live. C’est la vie.