Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and emotional abuse.

Chapter 3 explores the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW, pronounced “mig-tau”) community. In sharp contrast to both incels and PUAs, who focus on sex, MGTOW adherents believe in abstaining from all relationships or interactions with women. They view women as toxic and society as feminized and gynocentric. This community is also explicitly anti-feminist. 

There are four main “levels” of MGTOW, varying from simply avoiding long-term relationships with women to complete isolation from “blue-pill” society altogether. MGTOW believe there are inherent risks to interacting with women, and they are most frequently concerned with the threat of false accusations of rape or abuse—they claim these allow women to ruin men socially, financially, or legally. 

Bates draws several parallels between MGTOW and Men’s Rights Activists (which will be explored in the next chapter), as both groups have the most similarities and overlap. They are concerned with false accusations of rape, as well as with marriage and divorce, both of which are viewed as advantageous to women and detrimental to men. Women are “portrayed as parasites, simply riding on the coattails of men” (100). MGTOW communities also laud men’s achievements in science and discovery, claiming that men can pursue higher achievements by abstaining from relationships with women.