Bye-bye, Fear of the Walking Dead. I seem to be easing out of pop culture.

I get the whole grand metaphor going on here- people need a way to think about the unthinkable, a way to mentally prepare to some extent for the worst-possible-scenarios that the future might hold, but they don’t want to have to mentally deal with those scenarios in raw form. They need to mull over the issues but at a certain remove.

MGTOW – Response to “Opinion: MGTOW”

“In many ways you’re right, it is “essentially the same ideology”, but I think your are more right than you realize. It is not just a mirror-image ideology with the genders reversed, in many ways MGTOW and feminism are the same phenomenon…”

“MGTOW is the success of feminism. This is what that success looks like. So long as non-participation is increasingly the most rational reaction to the situation for males the movement will continue to grow, whatever the label, visible or not.”

MGTOW – The Red Pill – Australian TV, not Cassie Jaye, is determined to miss the point.

It’s time we stopped thinking like metaphorical lemmings, following the herd to whatever destination they lead us to without objection or dissent, and start thinking like human beings instead, with some compassion for other humans regardless of gender, even in the face of societal or media disapproval.

MGTOW- More Blither Against It, this time from Down Under

This ends with the statement that the “greater good” doesn’t actually exist, which I happen to agree with. Look at hive insects, which are a huge success as an evolutionary strategy, seemingly satisfying the “common good” concept, but don’t provide a single individual life worth living… but then in the very next sentence we get:

“Start looking into this “manosphere” and it’s like going down a rabbit hole — happiness here is supposedly freedom.”

Um, wait… am I missing something here? Is there evidence I’ve missed that happiness is actually slavery?

MGTOW – “10 Cloverfield Lane”: Some twists, but the same feminist tropes.

There are really only three characters in the movie, and while they have some novel elements and they are introduced in novel fashions, basically there is the noble, brilliant, strong and courageous female protagonist whom we gather is fleeing a relationship that might be abusive. Then there is the well-meaning but very explicitly not-very-bright male, and finally the intelligent but very evil male.

There it is, the complete, if minimal, set of near-mandatory early 21st Century feminist film tropes.

MGTOW – Taylor Swift, women’s “Blank Space”, and why a lot of men might say “No, thanks”.

IMHO, the guys are right about this. Having a role to fill that could just as well be filled by any qualified candidate is not a foundation for a relationship, much less an ostensibly life-long relationship with heavy legal and financial penalties for early termination. My impression is that men don’t usually think of women in those terms, they are looking for someone who they uniquely want to be with, and whatever “qualifications” they may have had in mind all become very flexible indeed for the right person… and whether they can articulate it or not, they want that right person to feel the same way about them. Yes, that does seem to imply that most men are more “romantic” than most women. Believe me, these days that’s not hard.

MGTOW – National Geographic’s series Mars is the usual 21st-Century cliche, women in charge, disposable men.

At the end of the series the two women who were previously rivals for power have reconciled, and a harmonious caste of women have quietly taken over all important tasks. The woman in charge makes an exception to her own rules so that she and the other two core women can heroically don spacesuits, drive across the martian landscape in a rover and personally discover life on Mars, thus saving the colony and the mission, with no involvement of men at all.