Edward Leedskalnin, Early MGHOW

Last summer, my partner and I spent a couple of weeks in Florida.  We loved St. Augustine, loathed Miami, and I spent a lot of time either soaking in the pool or making friends with the hotel bartender while my partner and her son enjoyed the Orlando theme parks. One morning my partner, who is a very spontaneous travel companion, woke me up at what I call "zero dark thirty" (it was probably around seven, the crack of dawn in vacation time) to excitedly announce we were going to make a pilgrimage to something called "The Coral Castle," which my partner recalled from the old "Ripley's Believe It or Not" column that used to be featured in the "funny pages" of local newspapers.

Several hours later, we arrived at the gates of this marvelous monstrosity:

Prepare to be amazed.

Edward Leedskalnin was a Latvian immigrant at the turn of the last century who, like many MGTOW, was disappointed in love. When the gal he'd set his cap for permanently and irrevocably "friend-zoned" him, he made his way to Southern Florida, where he devoted the rest of his life to building a "coral rock" Taj Mahal in order to win her affections. He worked tirelessly, mostly at night and behind a tall wall, so the townsfolk of Homestead couldn't see exactly what, or how, he was doing it, but he managed to heave great blocks of coral into place all by himself. He included within this compound all the amenities his lady love would require, too, including a bath tub, his'n'her thrones, and even a creepy little chamber in which he planned to "discipline" their future offspring. Not a detail was overlooked, and not a surface could one sit on without risking serious abrasions.  

Sadly, but not surprisingly, Ed died a bachelor, but his monument endures and and draws thousands of visitors to the pleasant, sleepy hamlet of Homestead, Florida: a testament to the awesome feats a single, ordinary man can achieve when He Goes His Own Way.

ROQ Makes Me Laugh (On Purpose)

A lot of stuff on Return of Queens makes me laugh, but in a way that probably does not reflect well upon my own character.  The writers on ROQ make a fetish of their femininity and constantly admonish their readers to be "lady-like", but their blatant bigotry makes a mockery of their class airs.

You see a true "lady" (or anyone born of the professional or upper middle class in the past fifty years) may be as racist as they come, but she would rather die than admit to it. So that's what I laugh about: the ladies at ROQ are hicks, and -- sorry to say it -- white trash to the core.  Their attempts to pretend otherwise are what make me laugh.

What's different about this ROQ post, "a cutting edge documentary of the MGTOW movement," is that is is supposed to be funny. Kudos to Meredith Knight, the contributor who posted it.

In fact, all of Meredith Knight's posts so far are decent, and show a degree of wit and humor noticeably lacking in most of the anti-feminist female bloggers. Not surprising, perhaps, if she is a Registered Nurse (they're usually pretty smart people).  I wish I could persuade her to switch teams.

I'd leave a comment on the site about how tickled I was, but I am sadly not welcome there, since according to their policy, "No hybrids of either are welcome, especially feminists.  Included in the list of excluded are trans-gender [pre AND post op], gender fluid [whatever the hell that means], gay men, lesbians, male feminists [yes they do exist], and any combination of those previously listed."

I just hope Knight, with all the biology classes she's surely taken, does not seriously believe that "human hybrids" exist.

MGTOW Mark "Minty" Minter Slides Off His Barstool

Poor Mark Minter!  He bumped up on Manbooz last night, where he was roundly razzed, and then apparently had a few more shots before churning out this strange missive to his guru, Roosh.  Is it too much cheap tequila?  Or has he truly lost his mind?  The comments that follow are equally bizarre... Yet there is a strange poetic beauty in all this incoherence.  Kinda like reading The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, y'know?  Although hardly a ringing endorsement of the expat MGTOW lifestyle... 

(Note:  Go to manboobz to read David Futrelle's analysis and some really funny commentary.)

Mark Minter • a day ago

Ah, but when you are there, this American life is a million miles away, and far, far from your thoughts. When you are there and on the streets, those unfamiliar streets in that strange world and culture, you live more in 5 minutes than you do here in one day. It starts at the jetway when you arrive, it builds when you see the foreign immigrations officers and it smacks you in the face when you step outside the front door or the airport. All airports are the same, little pieces of America, no matter where you are in the world. But that ends at the front door.And when you go alone, when you have very little to anchor you, when you get into that taxi and ride through the city, when you end up in some strange room, and you drop your luggage, and then in the following days as you find your way, find yourself, then all you were, and all that was, is so so far away. And it can ruin you forever. I have been back 3 years and I do not seek to engage America in any way. I stay home, on the internet. I shop in the middle of the night for food. When I must be out in the day, I move quickly, efficiently. I interact little with this society that I am no longer a part of. Some of that is age but a lot of is that I have killed my American self and I feel no affection for it, no loyalty to it, and I shall discard it forever, soon. The only connection is feel to it is you, you band of renegade rebels to whom I feel a kindred spirit.Listen closely to expats. Perhaps it is a self limiting situation. I would assume no lover of America, no person that celebrates it as a place, is an expat. So on one hand, they are a group disposed to dissent. They may have issues over the laws, the bureaucracy of the new place they now live, but rarely do they ever ever long for America.

• Despite the claims of feminists, America is the Matriarchy, the land owned and dominated by women and their mangina menservants, their guards, their infrastructure that so caters to them, their laws.You see it when upon landing in America. In other places, immigration is almost a "lip service", a gang of sorts to get money from you when you arrive and when you leave. The security you must pass, when entering. is almost a joke compared to what you encounter when you arrive in America. And it is far greater when you leave, those airlines and airport security forces have a procedure that is not so much that the idea of the country you are leaving, but rather the dictates of America, and its women.And here you are not a man, but a functionary, a manservant, a slave to women. You see it when you arrive, you feel it, you know it, that stripping of your masculine dignity that begins the moment you leave the plane and enter an American terminal, that herding, that loss of the you that is you. And you see it as you come out on these clean, lit streets, this great giant boring shopping mall, all designed for women, all policed for women, all at the behest of women and those manginas that have bought in, that know no different, that do not understand what they are, what they do, and what they have done.  So, yes, you leave because you have the idea that something here is wrong, some other place must be better, NAPALT, Not All Places Are Like This. Perhaps, if you are only gone for a short while, you won't quite be a able to put your finger on what the difference is, just that it is different. But when you spend a good deal of time away, you know there is a difference, and if you must come back, then you yearn not to be here.
  It is not the adventure of the place or the exotic.  What you miss is the experience of being a man in a way that this society will never allow. It is too late for here. It is more than merely cultural, more than social, it is even biological. This matriarchy has dominated even nature here, controlled every last aspect, even the dirt, even the germs, all of the animals, and certainly, all of the men. If you stay, you will remain in angst, a slave to women. When I close my eyes the image I see is elsewhere. And when I die, the fact I got to live elsewhere for a time, will dwarf what I feel about here. It is the basis of my rants about marriage and this American life as a married man being insipid, stupid, and a waste of the life of man. Because it ties you to here, it chains you, it removes your option, your hope, that you might leave, and seals your fate as a slave.

  
  

MGTOW, or My Uncle, the Misogynist

I don't usually think of putting a trigger warning on one of my posts, but I will alert anyone who is reading that this post involves incest and sexual abuse (not of a child).

This year my mother's younger brother died.  Aside from my sisters, he was the last remaining member of my immediate family. 

Although my sisters and I were not indifferent to his passing, no one shed a tear.

He died alone, in his late seventies, in a nursing home.  He had been failing for several months.  A social worker handled his final arrangements.  There was no funeral; no one would have attended, anyway.

How did this happen?

Once I adored my only uncle.  Every other Christmas, he swept into our lives from exotic locales: Korea, Iran, Thailand, Turkey.  He worked as a technician for military contractors like Litton.  He seemed to me to be larger than life (and at 6'4" 300#, was an indisputably powerful presence).  When I was a child, he was the only male who showed me physical affection.  "Don't pick her up Ken!" my mother would cry.  "She's heavier than she looks!"  But clinging to my uncle's thick neck, fragrant with aftershave, I was as light as a baby monkey.  He bought me Lincoln Logs; he laughed at my antics.  My sisters and I vied for his attention, but I was always secretly convinced that he loved me the best of all.  I had every reason to believe that my uncle would always be the #1 Guy in My Life.

Time passed.  My sisters and I entered adolescence.  Suddenly our uncle didn't love us so much.  He had a way of scrutinizing my developing body with a hypercritical eye.  He warned me darkly of the dangers of becoming so fat that no man would ever want me.  He no longer had any interest in what I was studying or reading or doing.  When we did engage in conversation, he steered it toward sexuality: his own and mine.  He regaled me with stories of his adventures in third world brothels, of the sexual peccadilloes of his many girlfriends, his own sexual preferences, and all the perils and pleasures of being a randy globe-trotting bachelor. 

Of course, a part of me was fascinated and flattered that an adult would make me such a confidante, but part of me was increasingly uncomfortable with him.  As a 14 year old in the 1970s, I knew nothing about "appropriate boundaries."  That concept had not yet been coined.  I dealt with my internal conflict by mostly avoiding him.  From a safe distance, I could still "love" and admire him

While I was teaching in Tehran, my uncle popped in unexpectedly from Amman.  While using the toilet, he glimpsed my diaphragm drying on the edge of sink, and let me know in no uncertain terms how "disgusting" he had found the sight.  Deeply shamed, I explained that, had I known he was visiting, I certainly would have hidden it from view.  My apology hardly mollified him.  Apparently, it wasn't the sight of a diaphragm per se that upset him, but the fact that it was my diaphragm.  I was perplexed by this.   

Clearly, my uncle enjoyed sharing the details of his own sexual adventures with me.  Why was he distressed by evidence that I was sexually active myself?  Did I not at least get credit for being sexually responsible?

While I was doing a Fulbright in Italy in my twenties, my uncle visited me from Germany.  He offered to take me to the Riviera for three days.  As we checked into the hotel our first night, I found he had reserved a "matrimoniale".  He was visibly annoyed when I balked at this arrangement.  When he complained that I was taking advantage of his generosity by insisting on separate beds, I paid for a separate room.

Later, I met my uncle at the pool, where he coolly appraised my swimsuit-clad body.  "You're one of those fat women who actually looks better without her clothes on,"  he opined.  I dived into the water to escape my embarrassment.  Later, he came over to the pool where I was idly dangling my legs.  He sat down beside me, laid a ham-sized hand on my knee, and invited me to give him a massage before dinner.  As he insinuated his hand between my thighs, it was clear that "massage" was code for something more intimate.

I stammered something along the lines that what he was proposing sounded a lot like "incest."  The very word stuck in my mouth like a clod of filth, but my uncle was unfazed.

Indeed, he proceeded to instruct me that incest was nothing new, nor anything necessarily immoral.  After all, the Pope had routinely given 17th century Spanish kings dispensation to marry their nieces.  (I didn't think at the time of pointing out that our family had been neither ruling class nor Catholic for at least 300 years. All I could think of was Sex with Uncle Kenny = eeewwww.)

The weekend went down hill from there.  Needless to say, I couldn't wait to get home.  Bidding my uncle arrivederci at the train station, I urged him to get psychological help to deal with his issues.  I mean, that's actually how I put it, and I said it with great kindness because I mostly wasn't angry; I mostly felt sorry for him; I mostly thought he was just a very, very lonely man with "issues" (possibly stemming from abuse my his mother / my grandmother).  I suppose I thought that my familial duty was to steer him into therapy so that he could learn to have intimate relationships with women who weren't prostitutes (or nieces).

My uncle looked me in the eye rather tenderly for a moment while i was earnestly imploring him.  "You know, you remind me so much of your mother..."  The implication was that it was not me he lusted for, but instead his sister / my mother. 

"Anyway," he suddenly turned away dismissively, his face hardening, "You're too old for me now."  (I was 25.)

I never shared these experiences with my mother.  I didn't trust she would believe me, and I didn't want to poison his relationship with the only person he really loved.

Fast forward ten years later: I accidentally saw my uncle while visiting my mother.  We got into a heated dinner table conversation about domestic violence.  When I declared, "There's no excuse for a man to hit a woman," my uncle flew into a rage.  He reared up, chair clattering across the floor, and raised his huge, clenched fists.  Towering over me, eyes bulging with fury, he bellowed, "Some women NEED beating!  Because SOME women just don't know when --  to -- SHUT UP!"  And then -- and this is the worst part -- he opened his mouth and began flapping his tongue in a grotesque caricature of a nagging woman.

My jaw tingled in apprehension of the shattering blow it was about to receive.  

I fled, barricading myself into my mother's bedroom, and refused to emerge until my uncle had left. Weeks later, I sent him a note, telling him our relationship was "over" until he had gotten "help" for his "anger management."

That was the last time I ever spoke to my uncle in person.  We occasionally exchanged words when I picked up the phone at my mother's house. I was cold but civil, while he nattered on, seemingly oblivious to the chill.

When I heard Uncle Kenny was undergoing a triple bypass, I wondered if I shouldn't patch things up between us; let bygones be bygones.  I didn't want to be left holding the grudge if he died.

However, while I was mulling thusly, my mother mentioned casually-in-passing that my uncle had long been disparaging my character to anyone who listened, i.e., had accused me of being "a slut" who had actually come on to him, and, apparently, had slept with half the Iranian Air Force as well.  Aside from the obvious disturbing question of What kind of mother allows her daughter to be so slandered?, I was mortified to realize that extended family members, many of whom hadn't seen me since I was a child, had been hearing this vile stuff about me for years.  

In the end, I did call my uncle a few weeks before he died.  I wanted to remind him that he had been loved once, if only by a little girl that no longer existed.  He wasn't moved by this gesture.  "I'm not leaving you a dime," he croaked faintly in a voice I could hardly recognize.  "I know, I know," I assured him. "It doesn't matter."  

His will left his entire estate (or at least what could be traced and pieced together) to a Korean bar girl who'd had the misfortune of suffering a debilitating aneurysm in his apartment twenty years before. The social worker did the legwork of locating the girl's family in Seoul; I'm sure they were happy for the windfall.  I was just grateful it hadn't gone to the NRA.

My partner might admonish me for speaking ill of the dead here, but my rejoinder is this:  My uncle cannot read these words, and even if he could, he wouldn't suffer because he would not feel a jot of remorse.  

Anyway, he had an entire lifetime to try to understand and be understood, to love and be loved.  It was his choice to live, and to hate, and to die alone, the same choice being made right now by all those MGTOW.

Observe But Don't Engage!

That's the opinion of my partner regarding commenting on manosphere blogs.

She's worried about my safety of course. She also thinks that by engaging with them, I am egging them on.  She thinks I'm on a Joan of Arc trip.  "Don't make yourself bait for a nut case," she pleads.  There is merit to this argument.

She assures me, as does my young male colleague, that the "manosphere" is a tiny group of delusional and paranoid misfits who are mostly all bluff, anyway.   "But there seem to be thousands of them," I protest.  "Maybe, but I doubt it," says my male colleague.  "I'm a guy, and I'm all over the internet, and I've never heard of any of this crap.  Anyway, there are millions of other people."

I know thousands is a lot less than millions, but it still seems like rather a lot.  Of course, if most of these guys were dragged out from behind their computers and exposed to the full light of day, it's likely I'd find them more pitiful than threatening.  Although they fantasize a lot about running away to various poor countries where the living is easy and the girls are cheap, I suspect most of them never go farther than the local convenience store for more beer.

For example, they idealize angry old gasbags like Mark Minter, an MGTOW who brags about living off the local economy in Colombia, and you know what?  I too tried escaping from the U.S. (in my twenties, a lifetime ago), but it got pretty damn old, pretty damn fast.  In the hothouse environment of most expatriate communities, it takes about two weeks to recreate whatever social straight jacket you thought you'd escaped, only now it's even worse because there's no reliable electricity, hot water, or public libraries.  You learn after a while that wherever you go, there you are.  

If it seems like you're an outcast in your own land, and everything and everyone is rubbing you the wrong way all the time, and you are casting about for someone or something to blame, take it from me:  Look in the mirror.

Don't take these buffoons seriously, I think.  And then I remember, wait, Isn't that what a lot of Germans were telling each other in Berlin in 1930?

I've promised my partner to step away from this for the sake of my sanity, but I'm of two minds.  Does one just ignore bullies, hoping they'll get discouraged and go away?   On the other hand, do they "win" if they chill or silence feminists' public voices?  I'm thinking of course of the redheaded protester doxed and harassed by "A Voice for Men" readers this week.   

How can these guys scoff at the existence of "rape culture" when their widespread response to rude or uppity women is to advocate gang-raping, torturing, and murdering them?

The answer is, of course:  They don't care.  They're not looking for truth, or compassion, or mutual understanding.  They are angry white guys who have lost (or never developed) the capacity to engage in rational debate or self-analysis.  That leaves them to spinning fantasies of escape and revenge rather than doing the hard work of engaging in any effective way with the rest of society or taking any positive actions.