A number of years ago, I ran into a conflict that I never encountered before but ever since then have never forgotten. You see, I was an editor for the opinion section of a small newspaper some years back, and I had printed the article of a young man who criticized a group of people who were local moped riders that happened to be part of a moped community. The immediate response from that community was not dialogue explaining why he was wrong, but instead an extremely hostile approach that included attempts to attack the very nature of the newspaper itself, including physical threats and intentions of causing actual physical harm. This type of behavior went on for several days over the next week, and it was an immediate education in how irrational and quick to arms certain members of the population can be, especially when the moped community we were talking about was generally a very pleasant and friendly sort whenever dealing with pretty much any other issue beforehand. Basically, what it taught me is that people can be easily led to very dark places in very short times, and people are generally on the verge of being very irrational and unfeeling towards any other person to whom they are not personally accountable.
Fast-forward a couple of decades to today, and I’d like to share with you an experience I encountered only a short time ago. Over the pandemic, I started to view a lot more Youtube programming than I had in the past, and at one point, I was trying to find videos on how to get better sleep, and I came across the ASMR community. Interesting community. But they’re not actually the ones I want to talk about. But what I discovered is that when you watch a certain type of content on Youtube, you start to receive all sorts of recommendations for other content that is somewhat similar, and through one strange connection to the next, the algorithms ended up recommending to me content that mostly caters to what I’ll refer to as the “man-o-sphere”, a place where videos seem to incorporate a lot of male commentators who seem to have a lot to say about the state of dating in America. And what I discovered was that it was content that was filled with some very angry voices.
The thing about this content is that Youtube has a really weird algorithm-recommendation process that seems to suggest more and more outrageous content, thinking that’s the natural progression of what you wish to pursue. So, what started off as videos to help me sleep, narrated by very kind, friendly women with soft voices, turned into angry, violent “my way is the only way” right-wing women haters. The sad thing is that the transition in recommended content did not really take that long to occur.
Anyway, I could talk about this content for hours, but that’s not really what I came to talk about either. What I wanted to talk about was something I discovered called MGTOW, which happens to stand for “men going their own way”, which is basically an approach that men make who have given up on ever pursuing traditional relations with women because of a belief of something called “market forces” in dating circles that seem to value this elusive end goal of high value men avoiding any involvement with women who can never seem to measure up to a system of goalposts that become harder and harder for anyone to ever achieve. And a lot of the evidence cited will generally be some very specific types of data that point out that over the years feminism has changed both men and women in ways that make the man and woman dynamic from history more adversarial than it’s ever been and now more of a man vs. woman dynamic that constantly feeds into a zero sum dichotomy where men always lose out unless they happen to be part of this mysterious one percent of the highest value men.
Now, a lot of this rhetoric can be pretty persuasive, even if a lot of it is often cloaked in the retelling of a lot of wives’ tales involving statistics that are quite often repeated over and over to sound authentic, but when I started investigating a lot of the studies myself, I realized how flawed so many of them were, meaning that even some of the commonly held understandings in the community itself were based on misinformation. And let’s just say that as an outsider to this community, I kind of came in with a doe-eyed approach and thought one day that I’d share my observations with the rest of the world, because while some of it was flawed, some of it was interesting enough that I thought my public contacts might be interested in some of this information as well, and then, well, just decide for themselves.
So, I created a Youtube report of my own that was a little over an hour long, and I posted it, expecting my usual cobweb-like response. Instead, I got that response I remember from the moped community some years back.
When I did my report, I was reacting to the MGTOW community that I had observed, and I wanted to put it out there for others to know this community was out there. I wasn’t really all that critical of the community, but just presented what I saw. But then made a couple of blatant errors. The first was not realizing that some of the sources I was referencing in the story weren’t really considered a part of the MGTOW community, but kind of a secondary community that I had not even known was a thing. You see, there were levels of what I will now call the man-o-sphere, which is broken up amongst different philosophies, one of which is the dating strategy community, another being the pick-up community, one being a strictly anti-feminist community, and then kind of in their own corner of this hemisphere, the MGTOW people. Well, because I had titled this story something like “Finding out about MGTOW” and then going into my observations and analysis, an immediate campaign of dislikes started from people who were adamant supporters of a very specific MGTOW philosophy AND community. In my years of doing Youtube, I don’t think I’ve ever received a dislike for a video, mainly because most of my videos are designed to inform or help people. And within minutes of posting it, I had a few dozen dislikes from people and some really heated responses in the comments that were basically just very angry that something they watched didn’t seem to treat MGTOW like it was the greatest thing since sliced butter. And strangely enough, there was basically nothing negative that was even shared about MGTOW and its philosophy. It was like some weird signal switch had been hit and now everything that followed would forever bathe the room in darkness.
After the continued negative attention, and a tiny sliver of positives and likes indicating people found the report fascinating, I just took the video down and decided to never do a video on that population ever again. I quickly came to the conclusion that they weren’t interested in discussion, or even educating anyone about anything. For a population that doesn’t appreciate when women call them out for toxic masculinity, the response was pretty damn toxic and completely out of the blue. If I learned anything, it was that some people don’t play well with others and have no desire to come to any common ground to raise a common conversation. It also sort of illustrated exactly what seems to be wrong with our country right now and why it’s not going to get any better. As long as people remain in silos away from each other, our country is forever going to continue to spread apart at the seams.
I know this sounds a bit depressing, especially as I haven’t written anything in some time on this blog, but I really wanted to share this, and I’d greatly appreciate any insight you might have to share in response.