Men Need to Start Paying Less Attention to Women

Men should be focused on building their own lives

One of the negative traits of the online men’s influencer world is that it encourages men to de facto structure their lives around women in some respects.

The pickup artist community is the most straightforward example. The pursuit of women, and thinking about the pursuit of women, is central to their lives.

Many others are shaped by anti-woman ideologies. The Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, pronounced MIG-tao) movement encourages men not to get married, and often to avoid dating or any entanglements with women on the premise that men can only lose from this arrangement. They’ll have to slave away to earn money to give their wives and children, could be “divorce raped,” and other such bad outcomes.

MGTOW even has their own logo.

But how few of these men seem to be actually going on about their lives. The whole point is not to go your own way, but endlessly talk about what a racket marriage is. Far from putting women behind them, they talk about nothing but women.

The incel community (involuntarily celibate) defines their entire sense of worth around women not wanting to have sex with them or even date them. Their rejection by women inculcates a sense of hate and even violent rage.

Undoubtedly our relational success with the opposite sex, for both men and women, is primal. It’s not just a matter of indifference. But the incels elevate it all our of proportion. Women become the measure of their sense of their own identity and worth.

Many of these folks are also explicitly anti-feminist. They define themselves and their philosophy in opposition to feminism. The manosphere of a decade ago, whatever its problems, had an air of fun about it. But today’s there’s a harder edged anti-woman sentiment.

While ostensibly about men, these folks are actually obsessed with women.

My impression is that historically in America, men didn’t think nearly as much about women as they do today. Much of their lives was spent, as pagan men’s influencer Jack Donovan put it, being “a man among men, in a world of men.”

Newsletter #79: The Teachings of Neo-Pagan Masculinity

Men and women did much together, of course. But there were also a lot of de facto single sex milieux in which they spent much of their time. The military was a man’s world. So was the factory or the office for the most part (though of course the white collar man might have an affair with his secretary). Many of the clubs and social organizations men belonged to were male only affairs.

Men spent much more time in male spaces than they do today, in the company of other men. They were perhaps more worried what other men thought of them than what women did. They had their own projects and plans.

With second wave feminism came the desire to integrate, and then delegitimize all male environments. They net result is that men today spend virtually their entire lives inside co-ed spaces, which naturally turns their attention more to women. They are deprived of male community.

A lot of men today need to think a lot less about women than they do. Not less of women but less about women.

While, they probably shouldn’t be “going their own way,” young men today should be actively building their own lives, in which women play a proper role but aren’t at the center or obsessed over.

This probably means men need to create more all male groups and activities that aren’t organized around women in some way.

The need to spend less time worrying about what women are doing is particularly important for those who think of themselves as “anti-feminist.” As Benjamin Mabry pointed out in his guest essay, we have to define ourselves in terms of what we are for, not what we are against.

Against the Antis

Even being for “patriarchy” can be a de facto form of anti-feminism. The word patriarchy was barely used prior to the mid-1960s. The very word itself is language derived from second wave feminism.

I have been clear that this is not an anti-feminist publication, and you rarely hear me talk about it. I have my own agenda. To the extent that there’s a group of people I am critical of, it is conservative male pastors who in my view have been very off base on their teachings to men about gender.

Also, way too many men online make a critical error when they criticize feminists or other women with whom they disagree.

One of the first rules you learn on the playground as a boy is to never hit a girl. Too many man today seem to have forgotten that.

If you criticize a woman online, you are going to look like the bad guy. It doesn’t matter if she tears into you first.

Is that fair? Maybe not, but it is reality, and you have to deal with the world as it is.

It is extremely unprofitable for men to get into fights with women online.

What’s more, by attacking them, you are giving them the thing they want more than anything: attention. They can even profit from your critiques. More than one crowdfunding campaign has been turbocharged by a woman saying she’s received online abuse - which is what there’s a good chance she’ll say your criticism was. They might get an op-ed placement in the major media from it or even get to testify to the United Nations, which happened in one particular case.

If a woman is saying something online you strongly disagree with, the best policy is usually to ignore it and move on. Nothing says you have to follow them on X.

Sometimes you can’t not respond if you are personally attacked. But even here, you can often simply chose to not get offended when people try to provoke you. This works with criticism from both men and women.

All this is not to say that you should adopt a policy of never paying attention to or talking about women. I’ve positively highlighted the work of female scholars like Mary Douglas, and positively reviewed multiple books written by women. I’ve even written about feminism on occasion. The point is to keep things in their proper place and not become obsessed.

Too many men online are way too concerned about what women are saying and doing.