There’s a curious movement I’ve heard about. It’s not new, it’s been around for a while, in many ways it has been around since the dawn of time. But now they have an acronym! MGTOW, or men going their own way. Predictably, they’ve been labeled as mysogynist, seperatist, male-supremacist, alt-right, anti-feminist incels. If you decide to look them up, the main things you’ll read about them are the judgements others have made about them, telling you what you should think about them. Especially what women think about them.

And I certainly don’t think the movement is a good thing. Generally speaking, their attitude is not a great sign. But I’m also disturbed by the lack of understanding and sympathy they get, compared to other groups, as if the complaints or concerns of men simply have no value and aren’t worth even giving a thought to. That, to me, seems a bit hypocritical, when we’re so willing to listen and to make excuses for so many other groups, even subgroups of men, such as drug addicted and criminal men. Are there some groups we’re happy to see fail and suffer? Groups we’re happy to see be alienated and turned into resentful and depressed and isolated misanthropes? Because we think they deserve it?

I’m not sure we’ve really thought that position through. And I’m not sure we’ve thought through what the consequences of having large numbers of isolated and depressed and resentful men in our society are likely to be. The cost tends to be pretty high, including in areas like drug addiction, alcohol dependency, criminality, and suicide. And those social ills tend to spills over into all parts of society, besides the lost value those young men could be contributing. Do we really think they deserve such fates? Or that we really don’t need what they could be contributing?

Whatever the specific arguments or beliefs of any members of the manosphere happen to be, one can be assured that they will be greeted with derision and criticism, and any complaints they have will be taken as proof of their “toxic” nature. And as I understand it, that actually is one of their complaints. That women get a free pass to say anything they want about men and will get praised as heroes for standing up to those male bastards, whereas anything men have to say is treated as childish whining and disgusting sexism.

Historically, men haven’t been encouraged to complain, but to simply grin and bear things. And that seems to be an innate instinct in men. Be strong, keep a stiff upper lip, don’t expose any weakness or it will get taken advantage of. As a result of taking this approach, men aren’t great at expressing themselves. In fact it’s a serious problem when it comes to their physical and mental health. They just aren’t likely to talk about it if something is wrong. And if something is wrong, they’re more likely to express it through aggression or apathy than any other means, and that doesn’t generate sympathy. We feel sympathetic for crying children, not screaming ones, although both are equally upset.

Fortunately, men’s lower level of average neuroticism means that they’re also less bothered by a lot of things. But when they are, which happens a whole lot more than you think, they don’t have the tools to express or deal with it. In fact some of the men I know who are the least emotionally expressive are, in fact, men with fairly deep feelings, but they are unable or unwilling to express them because they’re so far out of their depth in their ability to manage or express them. So they just ignore them and carry on. Or they get angry and aggressive, even destructive or self-destructive. That tension has to go somewhere. And just because they don’t know how to physically or verbally express their emotions doesn’t mean they don’t have them. They might just cope by having a drink or a smoke or starting a fight instead.

I’ve often observed that we don’t recognize similar behavior when it greets us in unfamiliar clothes. Like most men, I have the capacity to hurt my wife’s feelings. And she has the capacity to be emotionally distraught. But she is almost completely unaware of her own capacity to hurt my feelings, and has virtually no capacity to tell when I am emotionally distraught. I think a lot of men and women are fairly good at understanding their own sex and what they’re feeling, but are actually quite bad at assessing the other sex. I suppose that’s why, when I was young, there were so many magazine articles focused on figuring out what the other sex was thinking.

I would certainly be the first to admit that there’s plenty to be unhappy about regarding men. I myself have been in the receiving end of a lot of negative experiences with them. And around the world and throughout history they’ve done some pretty terrible things. If I was looking for a reason to reject or criticize men or want to free myself from them, I wouldn’t have any shortage of good arguments. It’s only my own proximity to the gender that prevents me from doing so. I don’t really believe I, or the human race in general, can get away from or do without masculinity.

I suppose one question worth asking is, is contemporary feminism a rejection of or criticism of masculinity as such? That seems to be what the MGTOW believe. Well, frankly, after taking a good, hard look at the general feeling among feminists, as well as the scholarship that is current and popular in the ideology, and having consulted with some more moderate feminists, I think the answer is yes, absolutely. But they’ve got very good reasons for doing it. So good that it doesn’t really count as sexism, because it’s just true. And therefore the response is merited. A lot of the work of modern feminist theory reads quite a bit like a list of official accusations against an enemy of the state. And I, as a man, am willing to sign the confession.

So, fine, I’m willing to admit that when it comes to having a good reason to want to criticize men, judge them as a group, emancipate yourself from them, even resent them and punish them, there is no shortage of good reasons. And women are doing a bang up job of listing them. One of the growing frustrations of women, however, is their dissatisfaction with the effect this enunciation seems to be having. It just seems to be bouncing off men’s thick heads and leathery hearts. All of this reputation destruction has had some effect on men, but clearly not enough. Men still persist in being men. And every time it seems their day has come or they’ve cleaned up their act, it turns out nothing has changed.

There are several possible explanations. One is that men simply suck, and complaining about it isn’t going to make a tiger change his stripes. Maybe they’re just too inveterate and obstinate and insensitive to care. Or, if men’s flaws are innate and endemic, then it’s possible that women’s objections are just coming off as too general and insurmountable for men to take in properly. I’m reminded of Stoic the Vast gesturing at his son and saying, “You just need to change this.” And his son replying, “But you just pointed to all of me.”

Or maybe men, more traditional and typical men, are feeling jealous of the understanding being granted to certain subgroups, such as homosexual men, criticism of whose typical social and sexual expressions would be considered prejudice and abuse, bringing many women to their defense. And they wonder why their own natural and innate social and sexual proclivities are so inexcusable. Or maybe they’ve seen the way that people respond to criticisms of some racial minorities, arguing that it’s wrong to judge a whole group by the actions of a few, and that making generalizations and drawing negative conclusions about a whole group is rank prejudice. And maybe they wonder why such arguments don’t apply to them, why they’re so much worse, so unworthy of a similar defense and understanding.

It might also be the case that many men just aren’t that interested in listening to blanket criticism from someone who doesn’t even know them and isn’t in any serious relationship with them. Men might care what their mothers think of them, or their girlfriends, but if you’re not part of their intimate social circle, they might wonder why the hell they should listen to you or care what you say, much less be moved or hurt by it.

It’s also possible that men are listening, and this is just the best they can do. One question that might be worth investigating, is whether women are actually capable of recognizing or understanding the effect they’re having on men. If, just for the sake of argument, women had a certain kind of unique power and privilege, and if they actually had the means to affect, control, or even hurt men by means of it, would they be capable to recognizing it?

The question of whether women are capable of recognizing their own capacity to harm others is worth focusing on. I’m sure women are fully aware that they’re capable of hurting one another. But do they believe that they’re capable of hurting men? Is that a fundamental premise in their mind when they’re dealing with men, the idea that they could hurt or harm them or affect them?

I think you could forgive women if the answer is no. It’s not immediately obvious that men can be hurt. In part this is due to a major difference in physical qualities. Men have thicker and more elastic skin that won’t tear or cut as easily. They bruise far less easily. Their larger muscle mass, thicker bones, and larger internal core volume make them more resistant to damage and environmental hazards. And testosterone not only increases aggression, making it easier to ignore threats, it also suppresses anxiety. It’s just much harder to hurt a man, given the same conditions. And that carries forward into their mental attitude and self-understanding. Not only are men less actually vulnerable (in the short run) to harm, they often perceive themselves and are perceived as others as invulnerable to harm.

Many men wouldn’t even admit to themselves that they are vulnerable and could be harmed. Partly because they are unusually resilient, but also because they know somewhere, deep down, that they can’t afford to vulnerable. Life is out to get them, they’re going to facing some scary stuff that would like to eat them up, including other men. And if they show any vulnerability those predators and competitors will sieze on that weakness and devour them. And women won’t respect them or see use in them. They can’t afford to be vulnerable.

One of the strange side effects of both the physical and psychological optimization of men for resistance to danger and harm is that they’re actually far more at risk from it. Men are, statistically, far more at risk of serious harm and far more more short-lived than women. Not just human men, but all male mammals. When you see and hear the colorful displays of the males of many bird species, you might think, “How lovely!” But a more reasonable assessment of risk would reflect, “How much more likely you are to be caught and die dressed and singing and acting like that!”

It’s surely a strange fact that those most likely to suffer harm are those least concerned about it, and those least likely to suffer it are those most concerned. Conscientious people are always worrying and obsessing about whether they did things right, when of course they’re the least likely people in the world to have made a mistake. But in fact that’s why they’re the least likely people, because they spend so much time worrying. Unconscientious people are far more likely to make mistakes, yet are far less concerned about doing so, and in fact make more mistakes for precisely that reason. Men, as a group, are the least safe of the sexes, but feel it the least, and because they feel it less they are the least safe. Women are much more preoccupied with safety, and so they feel their relative insecurity far more. The upside of this preoccupation is that they manage their safety (and the safety of others around them) with much greater care.

The question is, how much do men (and women) buy the hype? How much do men really believe that they can’t be harmed? I would say the answer is “Much less than you think.” Their bravado is necessary. It’s how they deal with and manage their actual vulnerability to the situations they’re going to be put (and put themselves) in. They know they need to fight and “man up”, because if they don’t they will be overcome or left behind or ignored. Other men will crush them and women will forget them. So they have to maintain a strong offense.

It’s harder for me to judge how much women believe the image men project or what impressions they take from their own experience. I know that my wife is almost comically easy to hurt and bruise, and she knows it, and that she also knows that it’s very hard to hurt me in any significant way. And I’m not a particularly robust male, frankly. I’m not even taller than her, and that’s very atypical. Still, she knows she can tell the kids to go ahead and jump on me because I won’t get hurt, while she has to carefully protect herself or suffer immediate and painful bruises. And that understanding structures her whole approach to herself and to me.

I would guess that, for all that women in some ways don’t want to acknowledge the myth of male invulnerability (for many and obvious reasons), they actually deeply assume it far more than they would like to admit. I think deep down they don’t believe, or don’t want want to believe, that they are really capable of harming men. And so they don’t feel any concern in attacking them or inviting others to attack them, because men can’t be hurt.

Maybe this attitude springs from the tendency to generalize from embodied experience to psychology. Maybe the mere daily experience of men as these big, hulking, rhino-like things throughout your life just sells the story to some deep part of your psyche. Maybe the stoic, aggressive, inarticulate, insensitive, or confrontational habits of many men reinforce that impression at a behavioral level.

I think that deep down many women aren’t aware (nor many men for that matter) that they possess the real capability of hurting men. I don’t mean hurt them physically, which obviously they can do if they really try. No, I mean they can hurt them emotionally and psychologically. They are a threat, they can do harm, they are scary, they have power. But because men don’t react or express themselves the way that women do, women can’t recognize it. They can’t see it for what it is. And many men frankly can’t help them much; their own habits are so conditioned around keeping themselves unaware of their own vulnerability.

Women, on the other hand, are optimized for awareness of and communication about their own vulnerability. But as a result it’s hard for them to understand anyone who isn’t. And men aren’t. I once had to have an hour-long argument with my dad during which he got very angry and offended at my prodding, just to get him to admit that he was feeling anxious and worried about something. I once went for weeks in extreme depression, even sinking as low as repeated self-harm, before I realized that no one was ever going to notice it unless I just straight up told them.

Part of the reason for this may be due to the fact that other people are already busy with their own lives and just assume that if anything was really wrong with you that you would tell them, which is not a safe assumption to make about men. And in my own case part of it may have been due to my ability to project a perfect appearance of calmness, joviality, and emotional invulnerability, even in the actual moment when I was trying to explain to someone that I had been cutting my wrists with a knife.

The reduced social connectivity of men might help to explain how something like this happens, but in my own experience even close friends, my wife, and family members who saw me on a daily basis were unable to tell that anything special was wrong with me. And I’m a very communicative and emotionally intelligent man, comparatively, who has a lot of personal awareness also hasld a preponderance of female friends. So I was probably positioned better than most men to be able to share my feelings.

In a way, I’m not sure that either men or women know what to do with male vulnerability. Men don’t know how to express it and women don’t know how to interpret it. Distress in men is often manifested through aggression rather than anxiety. But we’re not used to interpreting aggression in that way, as an equivalent sign to anxiety. We usually interpret it as you being a freaking jerk. And I’m not here to argue that all the aggression of bullies is really just a cry for love and a reflection of their inner turmoil. Plenty of bullies are simply aggressive, antisocial psychopaths who were never socialized properly and who think they really are better than you and don’t care what happens to you, so long as it pleases them. But some aggressive reactions are the result of genuine distress, trying to find a way to escape or to change things so the pain will go away. When something frustrating and threatening gets in men’s way, the first instinct of most of them is to attack it. Knock it down, make it go away.

How we choose to deal with this kind of reaction will greatly affect the costs it extracts from us, as well as who bears them. Some men turn their aggression on themselves. And men have a great track record at winning this confrontation; their successful suicide rate is the highest in their class. Some men will medicate, to smother their feelings and distract themselves. This tends to draw them further and further down into a cul de sac of self-dissolution and distraction, an alienation from the harsh reality of others and most especially from themselves. They suffer an enormous loss of productivity and become drags on society and the people around them, instead of contributors. The third possibility is that they neither avoid nor absorb their own aggression, but instead take it out on others. These are the cases we see more, because of their extremity, though the other two cases are more common.

I can’t say, of course, what we should do about all this. The first step in helping is trying to raise some kind of understanding and awareness, I suppose. Men like Warren Farrell have been doing just that, and despite being at one point a hero of the women’s movement, a sort of ideal male ally, his efforts have landed him in the doghouse, cast out of proper society, for his attempts to extend the hand of care to men. Men are the enemy that needs to be defeated. The danger in our midst. You can’t side with them without siding against women. But Dr Farrell has argued, persuasively, that you can’t care about women without also caring about men.

As for myself, I do recognize that there are a lot of dangerous men out there, men that might need to be fought and confronted. I think most men feel this way instinctively about other men and are fully prepared to act on it. We will even kill each other, if necessary. That’s how convinced we are. But this universalization, this idea that it is all men that are a problem, or masculinity as such, men don’t know what to do with that. It takes away the avenue for the appropriate use of masculinity that men’s self-value has always depended on. It’s a kind of wholesale condemnation whose application seem to encourage rather than discourage the male diseases of apathy, self-medication, resentment, and self-harm. It closes off the path to the hero, claiming that it was a lie, and leaves only the archetypes of the self-indulgent adolescent, the harmless child, and the predatory monster as potential pathways for masculine development.

For myself, I feel pity for the men going their own way. That’s a tragedy. It’s like a universal divorce, the death of something precious. And if you can’t admit that it’s a tragedy then you’ve got some serious prejudice to deal with. But I also recognize that going their own way means that, for all that they are pitiable, their exodus may transform these men into enemies that I have to actively resist, confine, or even destroy. In the past, women have usually taken the role of raising the call for restraint and pity, for understanding and reconciliation. Maybe that’s one reason why it’s so sad to see them egging on such pitiless, genocidal attitudes, embracing the pillory and defeat of half the human race. It’s not one of the masculine tendencies we needed more of in the world.