Narrator, audiobook producer, podcaster, writer, editor/producer for the JimFear138 YouTube Account, editor/co-producer for Laughably Dapper, and Project lead for Dramatically Dapper, co-founder of Dimension Bucket Magazine, and host of the Dimension Bucket Magazine Podcast. This site is meant to be a collection of my work so everything is nice and accessible.
Disclaimer: Opinions here do not represent the opinions of Laughably Dapper or Dimension Bucket Magazine. They are purely my own.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast! This time I talk about how weird it feels to be shilling for stuff I didn't make, go over an article about a couple Trump supporters who got what they deserved, and discuss Bill Nye The Anti-Science Guy's new Netflix show! Hope y'all enjoy!
So this post is probably gonna piss some people off but so be it. I should get out of the way at the beginning that I have a lot of respect for Dr. Peterson. I enjoy his lectures, I enjoy his appearances on various podcasts, his interviews, and one day I hope to read his books when I'm not slammed wall to wall with work. He's a fascinating figure and an intelligent man, and I feel tremendous sympathy for what he went through with regards to the Canadian legal system and their flawed understanding of basic human rights. That said, I'm not going to agree with everything someone that I like says. Even my friends and I have frequent disagreements. My respect for Dr. Peterson remains, but he is wrong in his characterization of MGTOW. Fair warning folks, this is gonna be long and involved, so pull up a chair, get a drink and a smoke if you're into that kinda thing, and settle in for a long haul.
Apparently this happened early in April, and I have no idea how I missed it since I'm subscribed to several MGTOW YouTubers, and several of them made responses to this statement of Dr. Peterson's. I guess I wasn't on YouTube much the past month, but in the past couple days I've taken up my 40K model painting hobby again and I was going through my YT subscriptions and found out about this via one of the videos I watched, and I watched several responses, including those from Karen Straughan (a prominent MRA), JohntheOther, DrRandomercam, MessengerRising, TurdFlingingMonkey, and Stardusk/Thinking Ape, and I figured that I would throw my own two cents in on this. Those videos from the listed people are a good summation of my feelings on the matter, but I wanted to write this because...well, honestly I just kinda felt like responding to this.
I should probably just go ahead and say something that I've never really hidden, yes, I am a man going his own way. The individualistic philosophy appeals to my nature as a hermit as well as informing me of several things about human psychology and biology that I was not previously aware of, and gave me several tools with which to arm myself against the predations of a gynocentric legal system that is set up to bilk me of any monies and productivity I might try to use to better my own situation. It's a philosophy of self-affirmation, and let me know that my worth as a person should not be tied to anyone else's opinion, least of all the opposite sex, and that I shouldn't judge the success of my life based on the standards set on me by other people which I did not agree to and up until a couple years ago didn't realize were 100% voluntary. They let me know the dangers inherent in those standards, and made me aware of the fact that I could just walk away if I wanted to (which nobody had informed me of before), and that is exactly what I did.
This is probably going to weave in and out of my actual response to what I'll charitably call Dr. Peterson's arguments against MGTOW and my own personal experience with the philosophy, and maybe get into a few life stories to give you guys an idea of where I'm coming from. Ordinarily I'd keep to what he said, but what he said is vague. It's the old bullshit fire hose attempt that we see so often from SJW's, otherwise known as a gish-gallop, and you can spray a lot of bullshit in two minutes. It takes significantly longer to clean up.
Watching this clip of Dr. Peterson, it's clear that he's done minimal research into MGTOW as a concept, philosophy, or movement, for which he is to be commended after a fashion. Most people just get the basic idea and label us all as virgin neckbeard losers whining online about how much we hate women. He's done a bit more research than your average space cowboy, but not enough to really know what he's talking about. So I'll go through his peace verbatim, point by point, and we'll see where this leads us. No promises about a straight track, though.
"Well here's the decomposition of the fundamental archetype. The dragon of chaos differentiates on the one hand into the feminine, that's the unknown, and the feminine differentiates further into the negative feminine and the positive feminine. The negative feminine is the reason for witch hunts, it's the reason for, uh, you know..."
Now I cut that there for a reason, don't think I'm trying to play out Dr. Peterson's statements in a way that's beneficial to my arguments, even though in this format I do have that ability. I broke this off from the rest of the talk because this really has nothing to do with MGTOW, and he dives straight off from that, "...you know..." into talking about MGTOW itself, so I'm just cutting out some dross here before we get to the meat and potatoes. Dr. Peterson is heavy into mythology. That's cool, it's one of my hobbies as well. Now I haven't watched the full lecture, mostly because his comments about MGTOW don't require me to, so this is out of context and will be discarded as irrelevant to the current discussion. I will say, however, that basing an evaluation of a highly individualistic philosophy focused on helping men survive in the current year with their health, wealth, and happiness largely intact on some interpretation of a binary nature of femininity as (apparently from the slide in the video) represented by ancient goddesses seems not only anachronistic but reductionary, as well as kind of missing the damn point. Whether that's intentional or not, I don't know, but I'd rather not attribute to malice what may be attributed to ignorance or overzealous interpretations of one's primary interest. I do the same thing, and it's no great sin. I just see this whole bit here as ideological claptrap that has no bearing on men trying to survive in the current year. So on with Dr. Peterson's assessment.
"There's a whole group online, called "men going their own way," M-G-T-O-W. That's a very interesting group to go study. There's lots of them, I don't know how many of them there are. Most of them are older, many of them are men who've been through a particularly horrifying divorce for one reason or another. And they're...they've had enough of women."
This is partially correct. As I said, Dr. Peterson has done a bit of research, just not enough. There are lots of us. It's impossible to get an accurate headcount for various reasons, but I'd put the number roughly around 40-60,000 conscious MGTOW. Conscious MGTOW refers to the men like myself who are aware of the philosophy and have consciously decided to adopt it. There are thousands; perhaps tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who really can say; unconscious MGTOW. These are the men who look around themselves and see the world as it is and notice that something just isn't right. They see their uncle, or their father, or their friend go through a "particularly horrifying divorce" as Dr. Peterson puts it, and realize that maybe they shouldn't put themselves in the position for that to happen to them. They know nothing of MGTOW as a philosophy or an online movement, never heard of it before, would give you a confused as hell look if you asked them about it. But because of what they've seen, either in media or their own personal lives (be it something that happened to someone close to them, or a personal experience), they've decided to avoid marriage entirely for the sake of self-preservation. Karen Straughan, in her video linked here, describes this phenomenon adequately via anec-data, telling the story of the man she's currently involved with and what he was going through and about to do before she met him, and the convincing she had to do to get him to believe that she wasn't going to do the same thing to him that his ex did.
But Dr. Peterson is right, in my estimation. At least partially. Most MGTOW men that I know of are older. Some have been through the meat grinder, others just did it because it made sense. After all, you see a man walk unknowingly into a minefield and get blown to pieces, you're probably not gonna walk into that minefield. Messenger Rising, for example, has been through that meat grinder, and with no disrespect I say that he is severely damaged because of it. He's seen this process first hand, and serves as a signpost for younger men like myself (or at least I was younger when I found his videos) brightly and vehemently laying out the dangers that face men who walk into that mine field. He's had his fucking legs blown off, and he's bitter. Frankly he deserves to be, given what I know of what he's been through. It's not my business to disclose, go watch his channel if you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, but suffice to say that meat grinder barely describes the horror that man has experienced, and my heart goes out to him. Here's his response to Dr. Peterson.
However a growing contingent of MGTOW are men like myself. I've been through some shitty relationships, who hasn't? But only after discovering the MRM and MGTOW did I realize exactly how large of a bullet I dodged, and I only wish I'd discovered them sooner. Here's where we get into personal shit. My last serious relationship, which lasted about two years give or take, was rocky but not necessarily unhappy until near the end. I also had assurances about things that many MGTOW warn about, because she was on the pill and I knew for a fact that she was on the pill because she took it in front of me every day. As such when we got down I didn't wear a condom. Yes, I fully understand how stupid that was, and I am forever grateful that nothing ever came of it. As I said, I dodged an immense bullet. I'm lucky that we were both young and definitely didn't want kids at the time.
After that relationship ended I fell into a depression for about a year, started interacting online more, finally decided to pick myself up by my bootstraps and get back on the horse, and gradually through one channel or another found the MRM and MGTOW. I spent a good deal of time kicking myself for how fucking retarded I'd been. Trust me, self-flagellation for my stupidity has been achieved long ago, you don't need to inform me of how idiotic I was. As I started listening to the content of people like Barbarossaa, Stardusk, Messenger, and many others, I realized that not only had I dodged a bullet, I had walked straight into a minefield and come out the other side without losing a damn thing except some pride and that year or so spent in a depressive fit. I got extremely lucky. And I knew for a fact that I could not expect that luck to repeat itself in my next relationship. So I stopped. I refused to walk back into the minefield. I counted myself lucky, and walked back into ground that I knew didn't contain any mines. I'd rather keep my legs, and indeed my life, thank you very much.
There are many men like me. We see what happened to guys like Messenger and we think to ourselves, "My god, that poor man. He may not be able to go back in time and correct his mistake, but I can learn from his experience and ensure that the same thing never happens to me." And lots of us are angry about this. I was, for a very long time. I wanted the traditional lifestyle. Wife, job, kids, all that. But after hearing about these horror stories (and developing my understanding of myself as a person) I knew that if I ever did have kids with a woman, and she took them away from me and I was unable to see them, I would kill myself. I would not be able to live with that. And given the statistics (marriages fail almost 50% of the time in America, and women are awarded child custody in upward of 90% of cases), I knew that this path was not one I wanted to chance walking down. Again, there are clear signposts indicating the minefield, I was just lucky enough to see them before I ruined my life and possibly eventually took it. And for the longest time I felt like something had been stolen from me. Not that I thought I was entitled to sex, or a relationship, or children, but the opportunity for all that had been taken away. It was very troubling, and it took me a while to get over. Something that I had been told I could get, moreover that was the ideal situation for any man, had been ripped away from me by cold, hard reality, and I knew it was never going to come back. I think it's perfectly understandable that I was angry about that. I had been fed that bullshit literally my entire life, by the media, my parents, my family, my teachers, my pastor, my friends at church, everybody had fed me the exact same lie. I bear them no ill will, because they didn't know it was a lie. They were ignorant, as I was, and I factored that into my calculus during my adjustment to my new mindset and lifestyle.
So far as "having enough of women" goes, that's also untrue. There are many MGTOW men that maintain romantic relationships with women. The only difference between them and the average guy is the relationship is on their terms and they let the women know it. Each MGTOW handles this differently. Barbarossaa, for example, has stated several times that he dates but makes it explicitly clear that he's never getting married and doesn't want children. Stardusk, on the other hand, lives his life with as little contact with women as possible. I, as another example, fill out just about every single box that Dr. Peterson ticks off in his little rant. I don't want to date, I don't care about sex, I definitely don't want to get married, I refuse to cohabit with women due to common law marriage, and I very much intend on keeping my time and resources to myself. However, unlike Stardusk, I don't avoid women. I'm friends with many women, and we get along just fine. Some of them are even, shock horror, feminists, and we're very friendly and enjoy hanging out with one another. I would never date them simply due to the realities of biology and the legal system, but I do enjoy their company and I don't go out of my way to avoid women unless they prove themselves individually to be particularly unsavory characters. There are levels to this MGTOW thing, and despite different people attempting to quantify them, it's not as cut-and-dry as people would like. Yes, some MGTOW have "had enough of women," and those that do generally have a damn good reason for it if you actually listen to what they have to say. Others, like myself, bear women in general no ill will and have no problem associating with women so long as we all understand where I'm at with regards to dating, one night stands, marriage, and the like. As I said, Dr. Peterson clearly needs to do more research, but I don't blame him, as my particular research into this philosophy took well over two years, and I can only speak from what I know of the MGTOW that I've interacted with in one fashion or another over the past three or four years.
"So they tell the young men that they're teaching, never have a permanent relationship, never share your territory with a woman, never share your possessions, make sure you never live together, and don't stay with one long enough to enter a common law relationship because you will be stripped of everything that you have. Well that's a hell of a thing to be telling people..."
Once again, Dr. Peterson has done some research, but it's lacking. This is a broad-stroke summary of some of the more extreme MGTOW positions, some of which I myself hold, as I said. We'll tackle them one by one.
"Never have a permanent relationship"
This can be interpreted several ways, and I've heard it interpreted several ways by many MGTOW, some very respected voices in the...I guess community, but that isn't really the right word. Anyway. I think Dr. Peterson really means "marriage" when he says this, and this is the one thing that all MGTOW agree on. I was around when we had this little spat, and the general consensus from nearly all corners of the mgtowsphere was that married men cannot be MGTOW. They've entered into a binding contract with the state that gives the woman full power over them, whether they knew what they were getting into or not, and as such cannot be considered to be "going their own way." They're going her way, and if she decides that she doesn't like that way, she can unilaterally change the terms of the contract without his consent and he will be forced to abide by them at the point of a gun, which is the state. So if Dr. Peterson really did mean to say "marriage" when he said "never have a permanent relationship," then he is 100% right in his assessment.
However, there are many MGTOW who tell other men (including the more "radical" guys like Barbarossaa) that men can do whatever they want. If they want to get into a long term relationship with a woman, go to and good luck, just be aware of A through Z, because all those letters and the data points they represent should be factored into your calculus when entering a long term relationship with a woman. Some guys need that. I personally don't, so I don't bother. But some men do, and the least we can do as MGTOW is make available information that men who are going to do that sort of thing need to be aware of so they can avoid the pitfalls that so many men have fallen into before them. So you can have a permanent relationship with a woman, just be aware of her nature, your nature, and the state's nature, and never ever sign on the dotted line of a marriage contract. Also be aware of common law in your state. You could be living with a woman you're not even dating or having sex with for a period of time, and suddenly the state has decided that you're married and she can come after you for alimony. That's one of many things that men entering into long term relationships with women (that exclude eventual consensual marriage) need to be aware of before they go traipsing into a mine field.
"never share your possessions"
Now I'm not entirely sure where Dr. Peterson got this from. There are a few MGTOW forums out there on the internet, but I don't use forums in any capacity, so he very well could've read something from mgtow.com or wherever else and picked this up. Once again, MGTOW is a very individualistic philosophy, so you could probably ask 10 MGTOW about this and get about 15 different answers. My personal take on it is that I don't see the issue with sharing your possessions. One of my female friends (whom I also work with on a podcast that we're producing) needed a better microphone because she was working with a headset, and she's voicing one of the main characters in that podcast. I had just gotten a new mic to replace my Blue Snowball, so I gave her the Snowball because I didn't need it anymore and she needed a decent microphone. I'm also not interested in engaging romantically with her, not just for the reasons outlined above, but because she's currently engaged to another of my friends, and honestly I have no romantic interest in her. Besides, they're an adorable couple, and it would be a crime against nature for me to attempt to get between them in any fashion, other than joking that I'm going to steal her man one day. This point really does seem like nonsense to me, and like I said I have no idea where he got it from. Even interpreting it liberally I can't think of anything that I remember any of the MGTOW thinkers that I subscribe to mentioning anything like this. Although it's a large well of knowledge to draw on, so it could just be a situation where he read or heard something that I didn't.
"make sure you never live together"
Once again this can be interpreted several ways, depending on where you live. Some states don't have common law marriage. In those cases it's probably okay to live with a woman, so long as you lay out firm boundaries with regards to who's paying bills, who primarily owns or rents the living space, and so on and so forth. That's up to the individual MGTOW, to be honest, and someone like me wouldn't live with a woman because on the whole I find living with others to be tiresome and cumbersome, and had I the choice I would live alone. Unfortunately I'm not quite so lucky as to be able to decide that yet, and so I deal. But once again, what Dr. Peterson is doing here is taking one of the most extreme positions (one I admittedly hold) from a wide range of opinions and using that to characterize the philosophy as a whole. It's a bit dishonest, but again I'll chalk that up to ignorance or visceral emotional reaction on his part rather than any intentional malice to mischaracterize MGTOW.
"and don't stay with one long enough to enter a common law relationship because you will be stripped of everything that you have."
This kind of contradicts his last point in the list, but I'll say that this is more due to him working from the top of his head because he wasn't speaking with notes in front of him. I don't think he meant to contradict himself in this mischaracterization of MGTOW, but he did, and it needs to be brought up. We all make mistakes, after all. But yes, this is a very, very real concern. I've heard of guys who were living with a woman in a state with common law marriage, split up, and then were come after for alimony. God forbid they were living with a single mother, in which case they were come after for alimony and child support for a child that was not theirs and for whom they were not the primary caregiver. These men didn't even have to be in a sexual relationship with these women. And yet the state decides that he must take care of her and whatever progeny she has, whether or not those kids are actually his. These are some of the horror stories that have driven men like myself to the assessment that living with a woman is too great of a risk and should be avoided entirely if at all possible. This doesn't even have to be done out of greed or malice on the part of the woman. She can apply for government benefits, they see that she lived with this guy for enough time to qualify as common law married, and decide that instead of shelling out taxpayer dollars they'll just foot the bill to this poor sod, who's now on the hook for god only knows how many years. She can even specifically request that they not do it and the state can still put the guy on the hook. Men have no rights in this situation. The only logical recourse is to not put yourself in the position to be taken advantage of like that. This is very good advice that Dr. Peterson is maligning through some misplaced sense of duty, or traditionalism, or romance, or whatever his motivations might be. But the fact remains that this does happen to men, and it is not something to be offhandedly dismissed.
"Well that's a hell of a thing to be telling people..."
Yes. It is. Especially since it's all true, to one degree or another depending on your interpretation. Except that bit about sharing possessions, at least to my knowledge.
"...but what's happened is that the female has been manifested in their life as only the negative archetype and they've got that confused with ALL WOMEN."
You're embarrassing yourself now, Doctor. This is how I know you haven't done adequate research into MGTOW. Some men, yes, have had the female manifest in their life as only the negative archetype. Messenger Rising might be a good example, although I don't know if his ex-wife is the only negative female archetype he's experienced, or if all the women in his life were just evil. Then you have men like me. Most of my experience with women has been good, apart from some failed romantic endeavors. I love my female friends, and I assume they love me as well. My mother, while she could fly off the handle at times, loved me very much, and I her before cancer took her from us. I've had plenty of female teachers that were a joy to be taught by. And my last girlfriend I enjoyed a very loving relationship with up until the last few months. It's not about confusing bad women with all women.
It's about recognizing that all women have the potential to be bad women, and what's more will not be punished but rewarded at your expense for this bad behavior, should they choose to act on those darker impulses. You're confusing the phrase "AWALT" (All Women Are Like That) with forcing a negative stereotype onto women based on the worst examples of the sex. AWALT describes a certain set of biological factors that have been bred into women via evolution over thousands of years that all women have to one degree or another, and will choose to act or not act on depending on their position or situation. Hypergamy, the tendency for women to look for the best opportunity to have someone take care of her and her children, is a fact in all women. Whether or not those women indulge it, or even know it's there, is largely up to them. The fact that "all women are like that" (ie hypergamous) is no moral referendum on women, it's just how they are. Just like men are generally bigger and stronger. The moral referendum comes in when women choose to act on their hypergamy to the detriment of a man she has chosen to victimize to serve that hypergamy. Those women can be classed as "evil" because they are specifically engaged in behaviors in service to their base nature that has the effect of putting another human being into a position of enslavement, imprisonment, or suicide. Sometimes all three. Does that mean all women will do such a thing? No, of course not. Once again, Karen Straughan is a perfect example. But all women have the capacity to do that, and what's more they're encouraged to by their environment if they live in a moderately mechanized society with a sufficient level of social advancement that affords them the opportunity to get a better deal and just collect a check every month instead of dealing with the man attached to the money.
Once again, all women have the capacity, and enough of them act on it to make men suspicious, and justifiably so, of entering into contracts with them. Or putting themselves into the position to be forcibly entered into a contract against their will by the state. This is shown in the men who take women from traditional societies (rural China, for instance), bring them over to America, marry them, and as soon as she's got citizenship she divorces the man and takes half his shit. Guaranteed if they'd stayed living in rural China she would've been a devoted wife, because her survival would've depended on him providing for her. but in America the laws are so enabling that she doesn't have to abide by anything that the man might've thought he was getting into. This happens very frequently, but isn't the only measurement. Just look at, once again, China's formerly rural areas that are becoming more modernized. Soon as they do, and women have other options than marriage, divorces skyrocket and we see numbers comparable to what we currently have in the West, with something like a 35-50% divorce rate, and women initiating divorces 65-75% of the time. The reason for this has to be something other than human opportunism, otherwise the rates would even out. There's something deeper, and MGTOW call it hypergamy. These numbers are seen in a rough approximation wherever something like no-fault divorce and alimony are instituted. We see comparable numbers in America, Canada, the UK, China, Indonesia, Australia, India, all over the world. There is simply something about women that makes them more prone to divorce when they aren't dependent on a man directly for their survival, and that's something that men need to be aware of.
Yes, all women are like that. No, not all women act on it.
But how many meat grinders are you willing to go through before you find the diamond in the rough?
For many men like myself, the answer is precisely zero. The juice isn't worth the squeeze, to quote Barbarossaa.
"And that's partly...you know you gotta ask yourself, if you know the mythological stories, maybe if you made the right sacrifices you wouldn't have so much trouble with women. It's a good question to ask yourself first, and I would also say...you know if you're a woman who has trouble with men, or you're a man who has trouble with women, it's not the women, and it's not the men. It's you. Because the women are telling you what's wrong with you, and the men are telling you what's wrong with you, and if you don't listen, it's either you or all men. Well that's easy it's all men. That's certainly how it's played out in the world right now. No. It's not all men. By definition. By definition. And it's not all women, that's for sure. "I don't wanna have anything to do with women." You're a pathetic weasel. That's the same statement."
More of the "MGTOW is just feminism for men!" garbage. That's not explicitly what he said, but it's what he meant, let's not be intellectually dishonest here. This argument has been debunked so many times, by Barbarossaa, by Stardusk, by RagingGoldenEagle, by TurdFlingingMonkey, and dozens of other MGTOW that I shouldn't have to waste my time on it. But, because Dr. Peterson has done so little research into the phenomenon he seems to despise on such a visceral level, I will.
Sacrifices? Like the men who've blown their brains out because their kids were taken away from them even though they did nothing wrong? Did they make the appropriate sacrifices? Or the guys I mentioned that get common law married to a single mother who they weren't even romantically involved with and were forced to pay alimony and child support? Did they make the appropriate sacrifices? Was that their penance for not doing so? What about the kid who was raped by his female teacher, she got pregnant, waited till he was 18, then came after him for child support? What sacrifices should he have made to not have so much "trouble with women," Dr. Peterson? What wrong could that child have possibly committed to warrant such a steep penalty? I realize these are emotional examples and the last is quite extreme, but I'm doing this to demonstrate that Dr. Peterson has a fundamental misunderstanding of what he's dealing with.
He's coming from a position of a happy marriage where he earns enough to keep his wife satisfied, gets to see his kids every day that he's not traveling on business, and has relatively little to worry about because even if he had lost his job due to that joke of a Canadian court he was dragged through he has enough supporters on the internet (thanks in part to people like MRA's and MGTOW's, I might add) that he could probably make a successful living writing books and doing speaking engagements and making YouTube videos (patroeon is a thing, after all); and he has the audacity to tell these men who have had their lives ripped away by callous, unfeeling, evil women that they would've been okay if they'd made the appropriate sacrifices? What sacrifices should Messenger have made to not get dragged through the kangaroo courts in his country and had his entire life go to shit thanks to his vindictive ex-wife? You're going to look these good men who were taken advantage of in the metaphorical eye and tell them that it's their fault that the legal system was already stacked against them and the women they'd attached themselves to decided to take advantage of it? On behalf of those men, and with all due respect, fuck you. You are the equivalent of the person who won the Power Ball Lottery telling everybody you know to buy scratch-off tickets because you won the big prize. You have no understanding of the pain the men you so casually deride as romantically unsuccessful have gone through, and I pray to god that you never do.
This isn't about romantic problems. As I laid out above, many MGTOW have successful romantic lives. This is about human nature, male and female, and the legal system that we all exist in that encourages and rewards women for indulging in the darker parts of their nature at the expense of the men who loved them. This is about men seeing a system that is so stacked against them that they'd have to be ten different kinds of idiot to try to run that obstacle course. This is about a minefield that you're sitting there from your pretty, secure position on the sidelines, yelling at men to run into because it's "the right thing to do," and those men saying, "Hell no," and walk away with all their limbs intact. And then you come out with that old, tired line that basically boils down to, "Well you probably can't get laid."
Because that's what you're talking about here. These men have been taken apart by the legal system and greedy, spiteful, evil, vindictive women, and according to you it's their fault that they've been taken advantage of. We've turned our backs on romantic relationships because we've either experienced the consequences or can see them full well, and it's our fault that we have "trouble with women." If only they'd been more discerning, right? If only they'd made better choices in romantic partners, right? If only they'd properly vetted their partners, right?
Well a lot of men, myself included, have decided to hell with that. We don't need it. We're better off without it. We're happier, we have more money to spend on the things we want to spend it on, we have more time for our hobbies, we have more time to hang out with friends, we have more time to devote to our careers. We don't need romantic partners, or children, or any of that traditionalist horseshit. We're out here redefining masculinity on our own terms in a world that despises masculinity, and for that we ought to be commended. We're the one label in this massive war of identity politics that is an apparent threat to literally everybody, including MRA's. As the meme above states, "I am not on anybody's side, because nobody is on my side."
Nobody is on men's side. Nobody with any power, anyway. MRA's try, but they're still hung up on changing a gynocentric legal system in which women are 54% of voters. Nothing will come of it. Even the PUA's like Roosh are starting to go MGTOW-lite, because despite their thick fucking skulls and addiction to pussy some shit is starting to seep in. MGTOW is the only philosophy that actually offers men the tools with which they can protect themselves from this society and legal system that seeks to take advantage of them even unto their death. We're hated by traditionalists, PUA's, "rational skeptics", white nationalists, black nationalists, the alt-right, the far left, Republicans, Democrats, even MRA's to an extent, although we used to be allies. Because we help men. We save men's lives. We not only arm men with the tools to protect themselves but give them a place to unashamedly air their grievances without fear of reproach, and for that we're called misogynists. Even by someone who has been so manhandled by feminism as Dr. Jordan Peterson.
The statements that he's attempting to compare by simplifying one down to the level of the other are not even close to the same thing, either in meaning or in action. I've already explained AWALT, and won't do so again. But action is a different story. Feminists state that all men are rapists, evil, depraved, manspreading, male gaze, etc etc ad nauseum. MGTOW state that there are aspects of female and male nature that men need to be aware of, and then lay out different paths for dealing with them. The big difference here is that we're harming nobody. We do not seek government power, we do not seek to change laws, we do not seek to inflict our vision of the world on anybody else. Not only is feminism wrong in its assertion of men's nature, it seeks to impose this vision of men on the entire world by the barrel of a gun. MGTOW does no such thing. We have theories, hypotheses, conjecture backed up by evidence both statistical and anecdotal, and we deliver these to any who would listen on demand, for free, asking nothing in return. Not legal changes, not that anybody conform to our ideas, not that we be put in charge of a god damned thing, and not even your respect or kind treatment to those of us who've been damaged.
Because we know you won't give it.
So we sack up and deal with the slings and arrows of the ignorant, like Dr. Peterson in this instance. We soldier on, and every once in a while a guy picks up what we're laying down and saves himself some absolute hell. And that's worth it. That's what we're trying to do. We're trying to save men's lives right now, not in some mythical utopia years down the road that won't ever materialize.
If that makes us "pathetic weasels" then I for one am willing to live with that appellation. At least we aren't commanding men to run into a minefield and then blaming them for getting their legs blown off.
Okay, I know what you're thinking. Or at least I can probably roughly approximate what you're thinking.
It probably runs something like this: "Jim, you're a total degenerate, & you never shut up about how much you like monster girls. This is obviously some degenerate ecchi shit. Why should I waste my time with this bullshit when I know it's just gonna be some borderline porn like Monster Musume?"
Yes, I am a degenerate, and yes, I do love monster girls. Unconditionally. And for less-than-Christian reasons. Here's another part where I get to say "however."
However. (I really do love that part, like you guys don't even know)
This is not an ecchi (softcore porn) show. And really, that makes me love it even more.
Shocking, I know.
Actually, back when Monster Musume was airing, a friend and I would talk about how we both thought that the show would be much better served by being a straight-up romance between Kurusu and Miia, with the rest of the girls being friends that they had adventures and hijinks with. I don't even think Miia is best girl and I think that the show would've been better as a romance with her as main squeeze. It would have much more potential to be a more serious affair, and we very likely would've gotten a lot more character development and more interesting subplots out of the show than what we currently get through the manga and anime. Although I will say that I still like it. It's fun, and that's the most important thing to me. Also the gratuitous tiddie, but anyone who watches or reads Monmusu knows what we're all there for, so that can be set aside to talk about it's other merits and detriments.
Kukuruyo (who has a wonderful non-ecchi monster girl comic currently running on his site, Monster Girls on Tour) actually brought this up on Twitter in a conversation I and a few other people had recently. The monster girl genre has kind of been tainted by Monmusu blowing up like it did. I mean I'm not gonna lie, to my understanding it was pretty much always this weird fetish for lonely nerds on the internet (coughcough). But thanks to the popularity and visibility of Monmusu, everybody who hears someone like my stupid ass talking about monster girls immediately starts to drift into lewd thoughts. And they're more than justified in that. That really is kind of the long and short of it, barring a couple of shows and manga that happen to feature monster girls, but don't make the sexual aspect the key thing. Kukuruyo recommended Hyper Police, which I've yet to check out (I've been watching Konosuba shaddap), but from the wikipedia article it sounds very interesting and, according to Kukuruyo, it's not some ecchi softcore porn shit. So the genre would be greatly served by some people coming out and using monster girls as a feature in the world, but not making it all about da tiddie.
ANYWHO, back to the point of this post. Jesus, I need to work on my bloviating...
Interviews with Monster Girls is not an ecchi show. Actually, surprisingly enough, they go to great lengths to NOT put ecchi shit in it. They kinda fail in this in the last episode, but one character is a succubus and they go to the pool, so what are ya gonna do? But the vast majority of this show does not use the monster girls for lewd purposes, for which I commend them. Like I mentioned earlier, we in the monster girl [fandom? community? movement? philosophy? I'm too drunk for this?] need some content creators to come out and use monster girls as a feature in their created universe, but not devolve into complete ecchi degeneracy.
This show, I believe, does so admirably.
Now you might get conflicting opinions. Not everybody is into slice of life anime. Kukuruyo mentioned that he thought that the show was boring as fuck every time the vampire girl left the scene. I disagree, but Kukuruyo is entitled to his opinion, and taking that point of view into account I can even see where he's coming from. But, once again, I disagree.
I think that this is an excellent drama show that builds its characters admirably, and focuses squarely on the point of the show without wavering one little bit. That point is: What if demi-humans just suddenly sprang up, were rare, and had to deal with living in a largely human world? The show actually attacks this concept with a rare ferocity, and they don't get bogged down in side plots and, likesay, ecchi fanservice shit.
It would probably help if I actually described the general plot of the show at this point, so you can get an idea of where I'm going with that defocused drunken rambling above.
So okay. In this world demi-humans (effectively monster girls) have begun springing up all over the place. Oddly enough, it's a genetic mutation this time, they're not off in some mythical land of monster tiddie like in Monster Musume. So two humans can have a child that winds up being a vampire, with no supernatural interference whatsoever. They're also incredibly rare. Rare like the dullahan girl (look it up, it's actually a mythological creature) who features as one of the main characters of the show is one of only three dullahans that exist on the planet. Other variants of monster girl are more common, but not to the extent that they are in other media featuring the concept.
So now we come to the main character. Tetsuo Takahashi is a biology teacher for a high school. Yes, the plot of this show DOESN'T center around a young virgin who's constantly caught between a bunch of demi-humans that want to tickle his pickle! You may need to sit down for this. I know that's a shocking revelation. But Dude (he will heretofore be referred to as "Dude" because I'm drunk and fuck trying to spell out his name every time, and he also bears a striking resemblance to The Dude from The Big Lebowski, in attitude if not appearance) is a high school teacher, in his early to mid 30's, and is fascinated by the concept of demi-humans.
IN AN ACADEMIC SENSE, YOU FUCKING PERVS.
He actually majored in biology because he wanted to study them and expand understanding around these creatures. Unfortunately, he couldn't find enough demi-humans to interview while in college, so now he finds himself teaching high school biology. Fortunately for him, his high school has recently admitted several students who are demi-humans (or "demi's" as they call them colloquially), and he finally has the chance to learn more about these fascinating beings straight from the horse's mouth. He can record their "lived experiences" I guess you could say.
He meets a vampire, a dullahan, a Yuki-onna (snow woman), and a succubus, and proceeds to ask them all kinds of embarrasing questions about their various natures, and even performs (consensual and non-lewd) experiments on them to gain a deeper understanding of their natures. So the main focus of the show is this guy trying to understand them, as well as them dealing with living in the human world.
So on to the characters, which are the real point in any slice of life show worth its salt! I've already described Dude, so I'll forego that character and tell you about the monster girls he interacts with.
Hikari Takanashi is the vampire. They do a bit of subversion on the classic vampire tropes, and Hikari's not exactly your typical vampire due to that. She loves stinky foods like garlic, isn't afraid of crosses, can walk into sunlight without bursting into flame, although she's pretty sure a stake through the heart would kill her. Mostly her vampirism just makes her thirst for blood, hate the heat, and avoid direct sunlight whenever she's able. She also has this adorable tic where her teeth itch, and she needs to chew on somebody to get rid of it. Ordinarily she gnaws on her sister's arm, but she also takes a liking to the snow woman because her constantly cold skin agrees with Hikari's vampire nature. She's very energetic, a total loudmouth, and also a little bit of a prankster. It's easy to see why Kukuruyo thinks she's the most interesting character in the show. She's high energy, and I could very well imagine some image edits of her wearing a MAGA hat floating around, though I've yet to find any myself. Although maybe that's because I haven't looked, but anyway.
Kyouko Machi is the dullahan. Unlike Lala in Monmusu, Machi can't attach and de-attach her head from her body at will. Her head is permanently de-attached from her body, and she has to carry it around in her hands, put it in a sling when she's in the bath, and attach it to her chest with a harness whenever she eats. She's very self-conscious, but that doesn't stop her from making friends and interacting in as normal a fashion as possible with the other students in the school. She also enjoys having her head cradled securely by others, which leads her to develop a crush on Dude, which thankfully doesn't go anywhere. Because not only is Machi not best girl, she's also a high school student, and Dude is like 15 years older than her, and that would be creepy. Like, really creepy. And Dude takes measures to ensure that she gets the net with that. But Machi is a total sweetheart, and she is very self-conscious about her status as a dullahan, which makes her incredibly adorable.
Yuki Kusakabe is the snow woman. Yuki is very timid and shy. She's read a bit about snow woman mythology, and what's more she's had experiences with her powers that lead her to believe that she might be dangerous to other people. So she's kind of a shut-in, or at least anti-social, until she runs into the rest of the demi's and starts developing friendships with them. Most of the stories about Yuki-onna are very sad, and Dude uses these to understand how her powers manifest so that he can help her overcome her social anxiety. She actually runs into a bit of trouble with a pair of gossips at her school when she turns a boy down because she's afraid she might accidentally freeze him to death, and the resolution to that is greatly satisfying. IN JAPANESE. They fucked the dub up on that point, but I'll get to that.
Sakie Satou is the succubus. Being a teacher, she's set apart from the rest of the demi's in the show, and that immediately puts her ahead of the pack in the running for best girl, but her attitude is what really sets her apart and speaks to the level this anime went to avoid devolving into ecchi fanservice bullshit. Obviously if you have a succubus character, you're going to want to show off how alluring and sexy she is. Well, they specifically avoid that. In this world, succubi have a pheromone effect that drives men crazy. This is transmitted to these men by sight & how much skin they show. How that translates to an olfactory sense that would be necessitated by pheromones, I don't know. Don't ask me, I just write up the "reviews". Maybe it's released constantly by their skin, and the more skin they show, the more pheromones they let off, but that's just rampant speculation as it isn't adequately explained in the show. Maybe they go in deeper in the manga, but I kinda doubt it.
Taking at least two paragraphs because this really is the most interesting character in the show, Sakie understands that she exerts an effect on men that she literally cannot help. That's precisely how she was born, and she can't exactly change her biology. So, in an effort to curb this, she takes measures to decrease the effectiveness of her pheromone effect. This is why I've taken to calling her "Conservative Succubus Lady". She places a heavy emphasis on personal responsibility. I should mention that in this world, succubi are called "dream demons", and they have the ability to basically give guys wet dreams if they fall asleep near them. So in an effort to curb this, she lives miles outside of town in what is effectively a cabin in the woods, because if she lived in an apartment complex the dream shit would get way out of hand far too quickly. She also reduces the amount of skin she shows by wearing a tracksuit everywhere, making herself less alluring and showing off as little skin as possible. This, of course, doesn't stop horny high schoolers from ogling her, but she does what she can to reduce the effects of a condition that she can't really help.
She also has a bit of a romantic subplot with Dude, because he also goes to extreme lengths to not let her pheromone effect...well, affect him. She thinks he has a low libido, which means that she can try to get romantically involved with him without worrying that he just likes her because she's a succubus and holy shit she's so hot she touched my hand I am incapable of thinking with my big brain because my little brain has COMPLETELY taken over. Meanwhile he is completely 100% susceptible to her pheromone effect, he's just really good at hiding it until he gets around a damn corner and almost has a heart attack because oh my god this is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in my life.
This leads to a couple of funny moments and more than a little sexual tension, but what's more important is how she reacts to all this. She actually begins to fall in love with him. Not only because it seems like he likes her for her rather than her pheromone effect, but because he takes all of these demi students under his wing and basically becomes a kind of father figure to them. It's a bit more complex than I'm representing it as here, and it seems to be on a slow burn. I was expecting them to be dating by the end of the first season, and they weren't, so I'm hoping for something better in the second season. If this is slow burning, then they're burning it super slow. But hopefully we can get some actual romance out of these two next time, and if they handle it properly then the slow burn will be absolutely worth it when these two finally hook up.
But the central point of this show is this guy trying to understand these creatures he's fascinated by (once again in an ACADEMIC SENSE), and him helping them learn how to live in the human world. He really does become a kind of dad or uncle (uncle would probably be more appropriate, seeing as how all these girls already have fathers) figure to these girls, and it's sweet to watch them come to understand themselves better through his good-natured fumbling. This also leads to plenty of comedic moments wherein he's taking a scientific interest in their problems, works the issue out in his head, then says something that sounds completely horrible when taken out of the context that only exists in his head, and gets accused of being a perv by all these high school aged girls.
All in all this is a very enjoyable show, and I hope you all will take the time to go watch it. If you're into a more serious, less degenerate show that has monster girls in it, I think you'll find this one well worth your time. Now...I should probably get back to that fuck up with the dub that I mentioned earlier.
Originally I watched the dub first, then went and watched the sub. I was at work, and it was easier to listen to the dub than have to pause my work to pause my phone, or divert my attention to read subtitles. So I broke my general guideline of watching the sub first. Turns out this wasn't that big of a deal. There is actually only one single discrepancy in the dubbed version. But it's kind of a big one, and I might as well inform you guys of it now before you go find it and think I'm recommending you some ol' bullshit.
As I said previously, the snow woman turns down a boy that wants to date her because she's scared that she might accidentally hurt him through the unfocused use of her powers. A couple of gossips start talking shit, and the vampire girl takes it into her head to call them out on it. She does, very bravely in my opinion, and in the Japanese version everything is fine and the encounter proceeds apace as you would expect.
In the dub, however, she gets accused of being; and I wish I was joking; a "social justice warrior". This kinda fucking broke me when I was watching it. I had a bit of a freakout, because I was damned sure that this was not the translation of that line from Japanese, and what's more this is blatant politicization of something that really doesn't need to be politicized. A girl is being bullied because of how she was born and how she's dealing with it, the bullies get called out on their lack of understanding, and everybody kind of moves on. But to drop that specific phrase into the dialogue of the bullies carries a distinct political message on the part of the localizers which I can't ignore.
This is blatant entryism and an attempt to corrupt something that is good on its own without this American political bullshit thrown into it. They specifically gave this line to the bullies in an attempt to associate anyone who used that phrase in a derogatory fashion (like the bully in the show did) with people who are intolerant of others who are different, when that is simply not the case. Social justice warriors have a distinctive ethos that they cultivate, and the people who oppose them aren't just a bunch of intolerant a-holes who dislike people because they're different. So that is a big, BIG strike in disfavor of the dub.
But the Japanese version contains none of this, and having watched both versions I can say with full confidence that that one line, which takes up maybe a second of screen time and is then forgotten, never to be brought up again, is the single discrepancy between the Japanese and English versions of this show. So if you can get past that and don't like watching subbed anime, you'll be more than happy with this show. If you can't...then you might have a little bit of growing up to do.
Just saying.
But the show is very good, I had an immensely good time watching it in both versions, and if you're the type of person that likes a good slice of life anime that happens to include monster girls in a non-lewd capacity, you very likely will too.
I will take this time to mention that the show isn't out on DVD yet, however RightStufAnime does have the manga available. Which, if the manga is anything like the show (I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list), I feel totally comfortable recommending it to people. So if you're interested in picking that up, I do have a RightStufAnime affiliate account, and there is an ad on the left side of the website. So if you're interested in getting this manga I would appreciate it if you would click the link on the blog, and then go buy whatever you want. I'm gonna look into picking this up once I get a decent income, and given the quality of the show I would encourage you to do the same.
It's good shit, fam, and you won't be wasting your time by watching this show or (presumably) reading the manga. I'll read the manga and let y'all know if it's shit, but given the quality of the show I seriously doubt that it is.
In any event, that's about my peace on this. Thank you all for your time, and I hope you'll come back for the next post.
Here's a link to the first issue of the manga, if anyone's interested:
Hello everybody, and welcome to another ramblecast! This time I go longer, harder, and more rambley! I really didn't have a plan when I recorded this, but I soldiered on and managed to get 2+ hours out of it, and I hope you all enjoy my disjointed ramblings. I touch on my recent quitting of my job, my plans going forward, how busy I've been, political shit, a new twitter friend I made, and a whole bunch of other shit because god forbid that I actually keep track of what I'm talking about for once in my fucking life. This goes everywhere, and there's no overall point, so I hope y'all are still willing to put up with my pointless ramblings!
