The Manosphere Celebrates Self-Destruction

This post is making the rounds as a man explains his decision to have a vasectomy, despite not being married or having children.

A few observations:

1. The author, Mentu, admits to sleeping with a woman, who apparently is a Christian, but lets her (apparently fatherless) children listen to Lady Gaga and Britney Spears.  I am perfectly aware, of course, that many Christians have fallen to the temptation of fornication (a non-capital offense under the Law), and refraining from it is not strictly a condition of salvation.  However, being publicly callous about it, i.e. lacking all shame, is a further step away from any real external evidence that one’s faith has any meaning in terms of one’s behavior.  As it appears from reviewing other posts of his, Mentu is definitely not Christian, but rather is somewhat associated with Christian Men’s Rights types, while still finding their emphasis on marriage and family off-putting.

2. These two passages, I believe, are particularly telling:

The only reason I even speak to her is because she looks good on my arm at work parties, and she’s one of the few women I’ve met who can hold an intelligent conversation with my boss while still being sexy and feminine. I’ve met tons of women who could do one or the other, but not both. . . .

I realized that I can (and have) found women who would probably make a decent wife, but I have yet to come across a woman who I would want to be the mother of my children.

I think what he’s getting at here is that he is of two minds when it comes to traditionalism.  On the one hand, he wants to be an urban sophisticate and attract status at trendy parties at his workplace.  On the other hand, he wants a traditional mother for his children.  The women who would make good mothers are presumably not sexy/feminine/intelligent enough to impress his boss.

3. Has he really exhausted his opportunities?  Before destroying one’s entire genetic line, it would make sense to search the ends of the earth for a suitable wife and mother of his children.  Or does he attend a typical seeker-friendly suburban church (or any church at all) and then assume that his sample of women there are representative of all Christian women?¹  Has he attended any churches where homeschoolers are predominant, for example?  The opportunities for fornication would certainly be reduced (and the fathers of these homeschooled girls would be rightly concerned with his sexual history).  I’m an action-oriented kind of person, and if single I would personally visit every candidate church in my area before simply giving up.  That’s a lot of work, though, and uncomfortable, when an unmarried mother with a nice “rack” is already willing to sleep with you.

4. The MRM, despite its essential correctness in pointing out the need for divorce law reform, has degenerated into somewhat of a self-referential, fully unfalsifiable ideology.  Anyone trying to make a point to a Marxist or feminist has experienced this: any “argument” you use is just the “language of oppression.”  Similarly, Men’s Rights Advocates consider any criticism of any individual man’s choices to be “shaming” language, a feminist plot to oppress men.  There are simply no irresponsible, foolish men.  All are victims of feminism because of the wicked structure of our society.  I predict I will be accused of telling men in his situation to “man up and marry those sluts,” to use the preferred slogan of the MRM.  No, I’m saying that he should stay away from sluts, stop being a slut himself, and find the pockets of people out there who still believe in traditional values.  We are still out there, but we largely, out of disgust, do not move in fashionable circles.  Your children are worth the risk of a divorce, which can be minimized statistically with proper mate selection.

5. The most straightforward explanation of MRA’s who choose this sort of behavior is that they are not really traditionalists.  They use the ideas of traditionalism to point out problems in our society, which are then used to nurse a sense of despair that there is no use in trying.  Like picking at a wound or eating hot food, there is a sort of pleasure in wallowing in despair, as the brain produces opiates to dull the effect of unpleasantness.  Once this despair is believed – that relationships between men and women are hopelessly defective – there is perfect justification, not for silent, noble suffering or castration (much too pre-modern), but rather for postmodern indulgence, whether through the path of fornication and pick-up artists or with pornography.

This post, more than any other, shows the dead-end of the Men’s Rights Movement and much of the manosphere.  They point out legitimate injustices that overwhelmingly favor women, such as our no-fault divorce laws, and use this to indulge a sense of despair that justifies self-defeating behavior, in this case literal self-mutilation and destruction.  Young men, entertain this dead-end worldview at your peril.

Tweet