Is the Roissysphere the next evolution of MGTOW?

Here’s an interesting exchange between zed and Novaseeker on the Anakin Niceguy post I linked yesterday.

First, zed responds to my comment:

Ferdinand Bardamu: I don’t regard the Roissysphere and MGTOW as being mutually exclusive – in fact, the two groups are natural allies.

zed: I’m a member of the group that came up with the term MGTOW and articulated some basic principles – probably the most radical member. I agree completely with the above statement.

There is and has been a lot of doom and gloom among the MRA-type conversations. For a lot of men, loss of the old traditional roles and values has left them without a roadmap for how to live their lives. There is a lot of tendency to project morose fantasies about the future based on the twin assumptions that

1) things will indefinitely continue as they have been going, and

2) men will not come up with anything new and will simply dig in their heels and hope for an eventual return to the “goodle days and good old ways.”

I have always maintained that men would innovate and adapt to the changing social environment. I see what is going on in the Roissysphere as being exactly that sort of adaptation. In many respects, it is simply the next evolutionary phase of men’s response to the vast social changes currently underway.

I see that there have been 3 distinct types of reactions to feminism, historically, but only one type of SoCon resistance. The phases in order were -

1) men going along with feminism. In the idealized period of the 1950s-1960s, with civil rights and the Vietnam war as backdrops, the idea of “change” was very attractive to young people. The old traditional male roles were no piece of cake for men, so lots of young men were fooled by feminism’s promise to “liberate” everyone – for a while.

2) the marriage strike. However, it became pretty obvious pretty quickly that feminism’s true agenda was not the liberation of men, but their further enslavement. Feminists and SoCons were quite able to agree that women were perfect and men were awful and that all the blame for all the problems of the world belonged exclusively to men. Women were totally freed of any social pressure to conform to their traditional gender roles, while the social pressure on men to conform to theirs was replaced by a rapidly expanding police state and government intrusion into private relationships – “the personal is political and the political is personal.” With marriage, fatherhood, and even in many cases finding a woman attractive being progressively criminalized, many men chose not to do those crimes because they did not want to do the time.

3) Marry foreign / expat. Some of the men who did still want a more traditional type of relationship saw their salvation in having relationships with women from cultures not yet poisoned by feminism. Some of these men also chose to abandon their country of birth and move somewhere the culture was more traditional.

4) Game. In sharp contrast to phase 3, I view “game” as being the first true innovation on the part of men. The other 3 phases all have in common some degree or desire to be “social architects” and shape the culture in the direction dictated by the person’s individual beliefs. Game, on the other hand, is purely pragmatic. Young men without the idealism of the boomer generation and the desire to “change the world, rearrange the world” fully accept the fact that the world is not the way they wish it was, probably never will be, and that wasting one’s life trying to make it so is probably pointless. So, their approach is to take the conditions given to them and make the best life that they can within that context.

I think it is the first approach I’ve seen in which men are taking back their own power, and it is obviously a world view that appeals to younger men. I see it as simply taking the groundwork that some men have been laying for the past 40 years, that eventually came to manifest itself under the term MGTOW, and taking it to the next level.

Novaseeker joins in:

I think that’s pretty insightful, zed.

I think that, in general, many of us believe that the genie is *not* going back in the bottle, in terms of things going backwards. Time’s arrow points in one direction. The real options for men, I think, are determining what *kind* of personal adaptation they want to undertake in their own lives to the changes that have taken place and still are underway.

I see MGTOW as one way of adaptation, really. It means, to me, deciding for yourself what to do, regardless of what society and women want of you. That is a kind of adaptation to the current situation. Roissyism is another, different, one, for people who have a different focus. There *are* MGTOWs who are in relationships and marriages, but I think they are outnumbered, substantially, by the ones who are purposely not. This is fine, it is just a tenor of the group as a whole. And I think that there are some MGTOWs who use “Game” or parts of it, and so on.

I guess I don’t see the MRA movement as ever realistically gaining much significant political traction. Men are too divided, women are too united, and ultimately men will, mostly, throw other men under the bus when a woman is involved. So I’m not sanguine on men’s rights, as a movement.

I think, rather, that men need to realize that the times have changed fundamentally, and we are not going back. In light of that, I think the best way forward is for, as Welmer said so well on his blog a while ago, men to realize that the new system gives us the ability to refuse our own gender role, too, and to make our own way, however we wish to do so. This does not imply a unified political movement, but rather the actions of individual men, each taken in the fullness of the realization of their freedom, embracing that freedom, reveling in it, and living their own lives — with or without women, with or without Game, with or without fatherhood and marriage and all of that stuff which serves today to hem in men as much as it does anything else. We can each be our own personal revolution, if we embrace that freedom and live it in our lives.

zed responds again:

Novaseeker: We can each be our own personal revolution, if we embrace that freedom and live it in our lives.

zed: I would have loved to copy your entire post, novaseeker, because I thought the whole thing was spot on. It seems that philosophically you and I agree just about completely. (I’m tgc, BTW.) You are an exceptional writer, and the whole so-called “MRM” is going through a transition which men like you (and Anakin, and Welmer, and a lot of other bright new stars in the men’s blogosphere) can facilitate with your writing.

There is no “going back.” As you say – time’s arrow only points forward. History is nothing but one continuous process of change, and we happen to have been born in a time when there was a lot of change going on. The future belongs to those who rise to meet it.

While I share with Anakin some personal-values-based resistance to “Game”, at it’s simplest level it is nothing more than Dale Carnegie updated for today’s social conditions. “Winning Friends and Influencing People” took different strategies in the past than it does today, and those who remain stuck in the strategies of the past will get left behind.

I’m one of the original marriage strikers – closing on my 60th birthday without ever having married. I have a perspective that straddles a lot of viewpoints, but isn’t really part of any of them. The remarkable thing to me is how similar “Game” of today is to conventional notions of masculinity 50 years ago. “Everything old is new again” as the saying goes.

The old roles were what they were because they generally worked for both sexes and that was what both sexes generally wanted. After a few-decades-long massive experiment in social re-engineering attempting to change the natures of human beings, those natures are forcibly re-asserting themselves. Men under the age of 30 or so have never seen any of the old social values and roles, so they are looking at things from a fresh context without the blindness induced by pre-conceived notions which afflicts a lot of us older guys.

Those of us raised pre-feminism but living most of our lives under the Feminist Reich have, for the most part, gotten stuck in the mode of defending the sort of manhood and masculinity we were raised to live. Men a few years younger pretty much were indoctrinated into the “new” order of things, and tried to work out new roles having little to go on except the building blocks left over from the old ones – protector, provider, etc, along with “sharing the housework and childcare.” I think you fall into this category, novaseeker.

Now, we have a third group of men who were born and have lived their entire lives under the Feminist Reich, and who are quite rightfully telling older men that we don’t know squat about the world they live in and the lives they lead and thus have nothing of any use to tell them about it. They are neither entirely right nor entirely wrong, but like every generation of men will have to learn for themselves.

Like many posters I have seen recently, I have a lot of animosity toward the SoCons who have done absolutely nothing toward reining in or balancing female excess and sociopathology and have reacted only by attempting to hold men to their old roles with a massive police state while allowing women to run wild. They have lost all credibility and moral authority by living in denial of the real world that young men must live in, and therefore hae lost most of their ability to influence young men. A culture which turns on, attacks, and alienates a large percentage of its future citizens makes a grave error.

Novaseeker: I think the best way forward is for, as Welmer said so well on his blog a while ago, men to realize that the new system gives us the ability to refuse our own gender role, too, and to make our own way, however we wish to do so.

zed: That, in a nutshell, is MGTOW.

Novaseeker again:

zed: Men a few years younger pretty much were indoctrinated into the “new” order of things, and tried to work out new roles having little to go on except the building blocks left over from the old ones – protector, provider, etc, along with “sharing the housework and childcare.” I think you fall into this category, novaseeker.

Novaseeker: Pretty much, yes. My parents were married in 1958, so very pre-feminist, and they still think women want nice men who are stable and good providers — hehe. That particular intergenerational change is too much for them to really see, I think. So I was raised with a lot of things that did not apply at all in the current setting. Led to disaster, really, but that’s life.

zed: They have lost all credibility and moral authority by living in denial of the real world that young men must live in, and therefore hae lost most of their ability to influence young men

Novaseeker: This is very true. I think that many on the left smack their lips over this and think all these guys are becoming Obama leftists, but I don’t see it. What I see is a generation of men who are saying “screw this”, and slacking, playing X-Box, learning Game and so on. They hate the liberals because their message is so inherently anti-male to anyone but the most privileged alpha male (or brainwashed “beta”) it is viscerally perceived as rubbish. But the right is besotted with women, and how wonderful they are, and is so eager to throw men under the bus that it results in an odd feedback loop of men being pushed by both camps back to the X-Box. The right then condemns them, not realizing that their own stupidity was part of what led them back to the X-Box. As a result, I think we have a younger generation here who will find its own way, more or less.