Men on Strike, Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters by Dr. Helen Smith, PhD
This was a pivotal book for me, and I’m actually having some difficulty now, still, in sorting out my reactions and explaining why.
I first ran across references to the book on Youtube in videos of TV interviews with Dr. Smith the author, and the interviews hit home. She was, in effect, validating things I had thought and felt for many years, decisions and choices I had made myself based on my perceptions that I had pretty much come to accept were “just me”. She was saying that there was an increasing percentage of men who perceived the position into which we are being put in the same way, and that simply not cooperating with the forces putting us there was, in fact, a rational reaction to the situation- perhaps the only rational reaction to the situation. I had never heard of MGTOW, and I don’t recall the acronym ever appearing in the book, but the fundamental core of MGTOW is there… minus the silly woman-bashing and emotional reactions that cloud the real issues.
The fundamental message of the book is that a dispassionate exploration of the current situation of men in the First World leads to the conclusion that the fictional computer WOPPER reached in the 1980s film War Games: “A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY”. The book shows that many millions of men are similarly, mostly independently and largely quietly, deciding “not to play” in various ways, and that it will in the end prove futile to attack this non-participation simply because it has really become the only “winning” move left to men. Men are now making that move in droves, simply refusing to participate in institutions that seem determined to punish them for being men.
Dr. Smith does an admirable job of detailing how society has slowly restricted men’s options over the years, how institution after institution has become more (usually openly and blatantly) biased against men because they are men, how they are being openly discriminated against (and drugged into passivity) in elementary schools, have become a shrinking minority of college students, are being eased out of business and government and victimized by the courts, and how men have been reacting- are reacting- in huge numbers by simply turning their backs on the those who seek to mock, vilify, demean and oppress them. Not saying that women have not been and are not oppressed as well, much of history AND the current situation has been a “raw deal” for BOTH genders, but women have gained a voice in society to object and be heard that men seem lack entirely.
Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point as men where simply refusing to participate, refusing to just go along with ridiculing and mocking ourselves, in publicly demonizing and vilifying ourselves to thunderous applause, is interpreted as an attack on women. Simple Ghandi-esque passive non-cooperation, the most pacifist reaction imaginable, is now interpreted as aggression. The reaction to men trying to speak out on these subjects has exactly paralleled the reaction to women speaking out in the 1920’s and before- men are expected to shut up and do as they’re told, to fill societal roles defined for them by women and not object in any way.
The book made sense of, and in a sense validated for the first time things that I had sensed and decisions I had made literally since childhood, bucking society in the process, and in that sense was both a revelation and a liberation for me.
Sadly, the book came out in 2013, and it has had seemingly little impact. For a little while it seemed that Dr. Smith had gained an audience, as she herself points out simply because she was a woman saying these things and not a man, but in the longer term she seems to have been just brushed off. In my own experience, none of the women I’ve recommended the book to ever read it, and even one or two that I bought the book for have completely ignored it… so I think we’ll be on this path for a while to come, with men increasingly “going Galt” and abandoning entire segments of society to the detriment of both genders.
If you have a more open mind, whatever your gender, please read this book. It will explain a lot of things that seem to elude the media entirely.
– Robert the Wombat
