Men Going Their Own Way different from incel
Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW ) is an anti-feminist, misogynistic, mostly-online community advocating for men to separate themselves from women and from a society which they believe has been corrupted by feminism. The community is a part of the manosphere, a collection of anti-feminist websites and online communities that also includes the men's rights movement, incels, and pickup artists.Like other manosphere communities, MGTOW overlaps with the neoreactionary alt-right movement and has been implicated in online harassment of women. The Southern Poverty Law Center categorizes MGTOW as a part of the male supremacist ideology.History
While it is not clear where the MGTOW ideology originated, it is believed to have emerged in the early 2000s. A blog called No Ma'am was one of the first sites dedicated to the ideology, publishing a "MGTOW Manifesto" in 2001. Earlier members of MGTOW were largely libertarian. There is a divide between early and contemporary members of MGTOW, with some earlier members expressing derision for the present-day MGTOW community. Online MGTOW forums have included the subreddit r/MGTOW, created in 2011, smaller auxiliary subreddits, and the MGTOW Forum, an independent website that emerged in 2014. Following Reddit's 2017 ban of a large incel subreddit, r/MGTOW was briefly the largest and most active manosphere forum on the site.According to author Soraya Chemaly, MGTOW and other manosphere communities overlap with various white supremacist, authoritarian, and populist movements worldwide, such as the alt-right which came to prominence around 2015. MGTOW and the alt-right overlap both in membership and in ideology; both believe that feminism has destroyed Western society. Far-right commentator and polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos is credited with helping to popularize MGTOW with a 2014 Breitbart article titled "The Sexodus", in which he described men who were eschewing women, love, sex, and marriage because of feminism.Researchers have implicated MGTOW communities in online harassment of women. In January 2020, a group of computer scientists published a preprint of a paper titled "The Evolution of the Manosphere Across the Web"; r/MGTOW and the MGTOW Forum were among the online communities which the authors said "have been growing in size and in their involvement in online harassment and real-world violence." The paper was described in MIT Technology Review as "the most complete picture yet of the misogynistic groups that fuel the incel movement online" and in Der Spiegel as "the most comprehensive attempt yet to analyze the manosphere online". Shortly after publication, Reddit quarantined r/MGTOW, a restriction the platform applies to subreddits determined to be "extremely offensive or upsetting to the average redditor" which prevents them from earning advertising revenue and requires visitors to agree to seeing potentially offensive content before entering. r/MGTOW was banned in August 2021 for breaking the site's policies against promotion of violence and hate.On October 6 2022, Global News reported that there were hidden tags labeled "#mgtow" in videos uploaded by the team-managed YouTube channel of Canadian Opposition leader, Pierre Poilievre, since March 2018. Poilievre said he immediately had his team remove the tags as soon as he was made aware of them, when questioned about MGTOW Poilievre stated "I condemn this organization" and "we on this side reject all misogyny and all acts of extremism, and that is how we will always conduct ourselves over here".Membership
Members of MGTOW communities are primarily heterosexual, white, middle-class men from North America and Europe. Unlike some other manosphere groups, MGTOW is exclusively male. MGTOW often disavow hierarchies and claim to be leaderless; some deny that MGTOW is a group or movement at all, instead emphasizing each member's individuality and independence within a collective. Researcher Callum Jones and colleagues write in New Media & Society that "while the precise number of MGTOW followers is unclear, it appears to be a popular and growing group within the Manosphere: the subreddit r/MGTOW has grown from 54,000 members in early 2018 to 104,000 members in early 2019 and there are 32,859 members listed on one MGTOW forum." Author Donna Zuckerberg described MGTOW in her 2018 book Not All Dead White Men as smaller than the men's human rights movement and the seduction (pickup artistry) communities, with the MGTOW Forum having over 25,000 subscribers and r/MGTOW having over 35,000.