Frosty

Some MRAs are libertarian and support the NAP such as myself. One of the big issues facing men is that they have the state telling them that they cannot be near their children, that they're a danger to their children and have to pay for everything but have minimal to no contact. Men cannot possibly spread the word of peaceful parenting and hope to raise their children well if they first cannot even get access to their own children. There's many good things that people can fight for and people ought to fight for everything they think is right, but just like Stefan doesn't deal with anything that's not really philosophy related, the MRM don't really deal with anything outside of men's rights, i think it's fair to be focused like that, many people such as myself support both positions and follow Paul and Stefan equally, there is some cross over and I think it's great to get both communities involved with each other, and where I can I do recommend members of the groups to each other.

Sorry a delay posting this I've had to think some of these things through a bit more. I listened to an interesting debate between a feminist and Janet Bloomfield the woman responsible for the #WomenAgainstFeminism hashtag who runs the JudgyBitch blog, they debated on the AmazingAtheists youtube channel and Janet brought up the concept of Trans people not representing a new kind of gender but we should just consider it more of illness like we would any other abnormal bodily function. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, when I look past the shock value that initially has I think it makes sense. The more I think about it the more the new age "gender" which is moving away from the "binary" gender of male or female is kinda unhelpful. It's also horribly confusing because gender is supposed to represent social norms in this context for example if you wear a dress or trousers, or makeup or not, however other parts of feminism are trying to destroy gender norms which if you think about it really just leaves you with sex as the only distinguishing trait. Outside of exceedingly rare mixed gender cases (certainly much rarer than trans genders which itself is rare) we basically do have a gender binary. I'm all for moving away from a society which has gender norms as i think that's just peer pressure to conform to expectations which itself is bad and so I can't really in good conscience support that, but at the same time the idea of non binary gender stops making any sense. So I'm starting to sway towards not really considering things like trans as essentially a new gender, I think you're the biological gender you measurably are and that likely the brain is suffering from an abnormal state, probably due to imbalance of hormones during fetal development or something similar. Still I have no preference with how people deal with these issues be that changing their body, or altering their mind, but I think that should be kept separate from socially inherited behaviour in society for males and females to act certain ways. It's possible I'm just reading too much into it and that, as you say, it's just a convenient way of describing the feeling to others to which the feeling is foreign and cannot be experienced directly. It's really more that this framing is also used in conjuction with common correcting the issue by changing the body, again that could just be coincidence, as has already been discussed, transitioning is shown to be the best route to happiness, maybe the only one for a lot of trans people, and at the very least that's just a matter of practicality. I think you're right about the issue of how trans people are seen in society, in some places there's still strong stigma around it which is a shame, hopefully society becoming more enlightened is just a matter of time as the older generation with very ignorant views slowly die off and the younger generation grow up more open minded and enlightened. However I think that withholding this from a serious romantic partner is a big deal especially if you do it for a long time, to cover up something not only extremely important to yourself, but something potentially extremely important to your partner is not virtuous at all. I'm grateful for your insight and the detail you put into your post, I'm open minded but ultimately fairly ignorant when it comes to this topic so learning some real world perspective is very helpful. I suppose the question of love is somewhat of a tricky one, It's tough not to get caught up defining yourself into a corner with words, for example if you fall in love with someones identity is it fair to say if that identity changes you're no longer in love with them? Is that more or less important when the persons identity changes due to physical or mental attributes? I guess in a free society with freedom of association you have your own standards. An interesting debate I got in to was with someone over the UK reform of the gay marriage laws, part of keeping marriages the same sex was not allowing people who are married to legally have their sex changed (not the operation, but the legal acknowledgement of their sex). When the new laws were suggested they also suggested changes to the marriage laws allowing future sex changes to occur in marriages but existing marriages the person wanting to change sex had to have written consent from the other partner. The SJWs spoke out about this about how it allowed people to control the sex of their partner, when in fact it was just protecting the rights of the married couple since part of the marraige contract inferred that your partner stays the same sex. I guess in an ideal society you'd specifically choose what kind of marriage contract you want, and what sort of rights you give up and then you could pick if you agreed to stay the same sex or not, that would have to be entirely voluntary of course.

(please excuse the long and rambling post, it's very much me exploring these ideas out loud and I'm still forming my opinion, despite how it might appear I don't lean one way or another on this issue yet, I'm simply interested why people tend to lean one way or the other in specific circumstances, I'm simply being skeptical about our approach to thinking about this in order to try and get an understanding that's deeper than just "i feel it should be this way", part of exploring that is by playing devils advocate) Well I wouldn't choose for someone else, that would be immoral, people choose how to deal with decisions related to their own body. if it was me who had the choice to change it would depend on a lot of factors for example how unhappy I felt vs what the repercussions of your change were. You're doing several things to weight your argument here, first of all you're creating a false dichotomy of changing one thing vs the other, where as personally I would be much more inclined to simply accept that I was born abnormal and that's just part of who I am, I can't say for sure how I'd behave because I've never been in that situation. Second of all you're creating a condition that you'd become a completely different person, obviously to what degree it changes who you are is not trivial here, it could be that changing the brain translates to relatively minor changes in personality and beliefs/memories but eliviates negative feelings of mismatch between gender and sex. Who knows...but I'm hesitant to address your question, you're leading an answer, so my response is it depends to what degree change occurs. I also suspect that the general population would overwhelmingly vote for the same brain, I'm acknowledging this appears to be the case based on the framing we see from trans people, I'm simply interested as to why it's framed this way and if that kind of framing is done for fundamentally good/right reasons or not. I don't think that you've demonstrated why it's essential that if we're to continue to exist that we choose the same brain, I don't really know what this means or how you arrived at that. People get injured or go through trauma where they're psychologically altered in some way, we can lose memories, we can have personalities split or merge, humans can experience a lot of very fundamental changes to our brain and our capacity to reason or think, you seem to be suggesting that any kind of fundamental change to someones mentality would or should upset the relationship between people. What if your partner of 20 years suffers something like that, are you then justified in leaving the relationship simply because part of them has changed? I think it's a nice sentiment that people ignore the purely physical and focus on the menal but I don't think it has anything to do with reality because we're fundamentally attracted to the physical form and have different reactions to it. Maybe the best example is if your partner of 20 years changed sex completely, if you're heterosexual and your partner is of the opposite sex but changed to have a body of the same sex. What do you think the general populations reaction to that would be? Physical appearance isn't completely unimportant to most people, despite what we'd like to aspire to. I take a few issues with the rest of your post. First of you talk about dehumanizing people by looking at things from purely a biological perspective, but isn't to say modify your biology like your sexual organs doing the same thing? It's it dehumanizing to say that part of you is wrong so you'll just cut it off, treating parts of your body as simply accessories that don't belong. Don't get me wrong I have no moral issues with people doing whatever they want to their own bodies, I just don't think that completely aligns with what you're saying here. I disagree that the physical part of someone isn't part of their identity, your brain acts through your body, how you control yourself, how you perceive the world, and how you live your life, having a different body alters who you are and your mentality, your identity might be stored in your brain but it's constructed in tandem with your body. If you were born blind instead of sighted do you think your personality would be constructed differently? I think you've downplayed the physicality of people somewhat. It might be the case that for you personally that it literally doesn't matter at all and that's fine but I don't think that represents everyone nor does it appear to represent any kind of ideal moral position. I mean its a nice idea that we love someone for their "soul" (ugh - a friend used this term recently) and by which I mean their personality, thoughts, ideas, experiences etc...but that stuff can change in somoene just as much as their body can. That raises the interesting question of should you stay with somoene if their body/mentality does change in ways that are off putting. I know one thing for sure I wouldn't bail on a relationship of 20 years with someone I loved just because their body had changed in some way, nor would I bail if their mentality changed in some way, there's limits to which both can change that are acceptable, those limits differ from person to person. So i guess to answer your first question, "no", if they mentally changed completely I'd like end that relationship, if they changed a bit but were mostly the same I'd stay with that person. Thinking about that from another perspective it's sort of like looking at the range of people you find acceptable for long term relationships to begin with, that's a range of acceptable mental and physical characteristics, most people not raised indoctrinated on Disney movies know there's not some 1 magical person out there perfect for you, real life is all about tolerances within ranges you'll accept. Anyway it's an interesting topic, I've not yet made up my mind on this, it'll require more thinking but it's interesting to me. Just to add one last thing, it's interesting to hear Tundra's opinion as a trans person (thank you Tundra) and I'm sort of surprised to hear the opinion that is indeed a brain problem but again as we've discussed already that changing the body is an issue of practicality. I'd like to politely ask Tundra if you had the option to alter your brain chemistry to relieve the feeling of brain/body mismatch would you do that, and to what degree would side effects of change in personality affect your decision? Please don't feel any pressure to answer, that's a personal question and I completely respect any decision to decline. Also another thought occurred to me, people taking hormones to alter the growth of the body to aid in transitioning do actually see changes in their personality? I mean aside from the fact that you deliberately decide to change your gender (gender being separate from sex) by altering your behaviour, don't the hormones also change things like how emotional you can be and various other subtle mental changes? Liberalismus how do you feel about the body/brain divide when it comes to hormones used to help transition, if they have effect on both, does that affect the "identity" of people in your opinion? Would you draw the line at a partner of 20 years using hormones if that subtly altered their personality as part of a transition? Thanks everyone, enjoying the discussion and learning a lot!

It is disturbing that when you start to look for other people with really good values, people who have derived them from first principles and not just been indoctrinated some how, that's pretty rare in my experience. I'm now 30 and it's taken me a long time to gather enough knowledge about the world to really start building a solid world view that I feel is accurate and coherent, and I'm very inquisitive and like to learn a lot, so maybe it's unreasonable to expect a lot of people to have done the same? i don't think it's a problem unique to dating sites that's for sure, I mean if we had a much more enlightened population then we'd probably not have the state we have today, so that's a big hint! It does make more sense to seek virtue in places like the FDR forums, philosophy forums, atheist and skeptic conferences and hangouts, etc...but it's undoubtedly male orientated that's for sure...it is starting to feel like a 1 in a million shot that I'll find someone like minded. I'm not so quick to judge people with dating profiles, I have them myself, the way I see it is that it's a long shot either way...hopefully one day a woman with her head screwed on will search for libertarian in the interests section and find me - Yeah, dream on!

Speaks to the general irrationality of a large portion of the population, which is worrying and kinda sad. As someone who has recently changed his priorities towards finding someone virtuous above all else this makes the prospects of online dating almost a waste of time, in fact dating of any kind. Interestingly if you search free sites like OKCupid and POF for terms like libertarian, libertarianism you literally will not find any women (even if I set distance to 5000+ miles), hits for searches on skeptic, atheist net a few more hits but not many, philosophy almost none. Switch that search to men and you'll find loads...it literally would be easier to be gay, not kidding.

In my limited experience it appears that women actually enjoy the courting period, they get to asses the suitability of their partner, generally speaking enjoy being romanced and treated to things such as meals, trips, gifts and lots of attention. Obviously to the male that's not as enjoyable, they usually end up paying and having to put in the effort, make the moves and be proactive about the whole situation, it's high stress that you get it right and often costly in terms of time and money. Again it strains credulity that women in the main do not recognize that this is an asymmetric relationship, that the woman is using a position of power in order to obtain resources from the man. While I detest modern feminism I actually disagree that it's them who are maintaining traditional gender roles of the man pays, I think it's done the opposite and started to turn the tide, I've been on dates with women who have insisted to pay half (not many mind you) I think those traditional gender roles of the man approaches and courts the woman, and the woman picks from her suitors is much older than feminism and rooted in biology and feminism wants to abolish that, I think it's probably more likely that a non feminist woman would want to maintain the status quo of the asymmetric relationship, chivalry, etc. But certainly something is changing in society, easy access to porn, the lack of gratification for men in the dating game, the lack of face to face communication in general, increase in social issues among children especially, pressures from feminism which make men scared of the issues of consent, like you cannot initiate any kind of flirtatious touching/hugging or affectionate physical behaviour because some women are complete headcases when it comes to consent and take the issue too far. People will never again invite women for coffee in an elevator thanks to the insane ramblings of Rebecca Watson, it just makes the stakes too high for men. We now do not have clear social rules for what's acceptable and the risk of punishment for simply learning boundaries through trial and error is too high. The PUA community is the logical outcome you'd expect when one gender controls the conditions that are conducive towards getting laid, you'd expect the people who lack the power in the asymmetric relationship to attempt to understand what gives them an advantage and to game the system for their own benefit. The PUA community is actually just a reflection of what a lot of modern women want from men, I think women find the idea offensive, not just because they're being manipulated but also because it's a reflection on their behaviour and expectations which aren't all that virtuous, after all if that kind of behaviour genuinely didn't work on a woman she'd have no reason to be upset at it.

Some people simply cannot face the reality that they're responsible for the harm of others, especially those they care for, I've met a few people like this before (incidentally all women), they're simply not used to being held responsible for their actions and so it's a shock to their system when they are, that tends to result in emotional outbursts and irrational behaviour to misdirect the issue and put blame on others. What will help this issue is people (mostly men) holding women responsible for all their actions and decisions so they start getting used to the idea, they learn the skills to cope with these issues logically and rationally rather than deflecting.

Right, so that's an issue of practicality, which is fine and I take no issues with. However I'm talking about the framing that is used by trans people, I almost always read that they're born with the wrong body and that the mentality, the brain part is the part that's "right" - if that even really means anything, which I'm not convicned it does, how is one thing inherently right and the other thing inherently wrong? It would be more correct to say they feel mismatched. I think that stems from some kind of attachment to your own brain as it contains your mental individuality and sense of self, I'm guessing a lot of other people would also refer to as the soul although no such thing has been demonstrated to exist. But from a purely biological perspective the brain is just another organ, I've never seen a good argument that makes the case for any kind of objective reason to consider the brain as inherently right and the rest of the body wrong, however there is I believe a good reason to suspect the opposite is true, simply because you've got the genetic makeup of a male or female yet what is typical among males/females is a difference in brain development, at least due in part to exposure to testosterone in the brain. And I want to be really careful here and be as clear as possible, I'm NOT saying that trans people are wrong in how they feel, I'm NOT saying they should seek one corrective measure or another, I'm NOT saying that one treatment is better or more "right", I'm simply interested in the reasons why this is framed the way it is. I suspect it's to do with the taboo of altering ones sense of self rather than altering the body which today is common place. I'd honestly be interested to hear from trans people on their opinions that if they were given a choice to perfectly and magically correct the body or the brain which they'd opt for, do any trans people struggle with which identity they feel is the "real" one, are there any trans people who actually disagree with the notion that one identity is inherently right and one is wrong and that instead they're simply mismatched?

Friedman debunked this decades ago and so did Thomas Sowell, it's been thoroughly debunked by so many smart people for so long that the only people who actually use this argument are those who are deliberately trying to manipulate others (like Obama winning over the female vote) or by people incapable of critical thinking who are indoctrinated into movements like feminism who parrot this nonsense over and over.

I expect it has its roots in the evolution of our biology, it's an undeniable fact that men are more promiscuous than women when given the chance, you only need to look to the gay and lesbian community to see that gay men tend to be far more promiscuous than lesbians are. I'm not completely convinced conservatism behaviour still exists in women as merely an inability to break free of their biological programming despite modern technology providing solutions for safe sex without risk of pregnancy. I think there's a lot advantages for women keeping sexual availability as a scarce commodity because it keeps the value artificially high and thus makes the value of wealth they can extract from men greater. I think this is the root of why women shame women for being sluts, in my experience it's rarely men that shame women for being promiscuous, it's predominantly other women. This makes sense because promiscuous women drive up the availability of sex and so drive down the value, not just for themselves but for all women, seeking to protect that value is not entirely unexpected behaviour. A humble hypothesis.

It is a game and one I'm not willing to play which is partly why I'm a MGTOW.

Disagree. It's correct to say that males create more genetic variance in their sperm, it's not correct to say that contributes to the overall gene pool. How much genetic variance is created is not the same as how much is effectively used to create new offspring. Only 1 sperm and 1 egg are used in typical conception, so the genetic variance is 50/50. The argument about that eggs are more rare is that there's a much more limited number created and so there's less chances for conception, they're also kept artificially rarer by the host (the female) because it's in her best interest to limit availability in order to ensure the eggs are spent on the best partners to produce the best offspring. Another reason for females artificially making their eggs rarer is because it's a big risk having a child as the child requires a lot of resources from the mother and creates a large inconvenience. Usually this argument is used to explain the asymmetry in sexual behaviour, men are more promiscuous given the chance, where as women are more careful and selective. This leads to asymmetry in social values and generally puts women in control of sexual partner selection. *edit* Oh I should add that theoretically the amount of genetic variance you can produce without mutation is 23 pairs of chromosomes with each having a potential chance to come from either your father or mother, so you have 2 arrangements of 23 pairs or 2^23 which is 8,388,608 possible genetic variance from the father or mother. With an average number of sperm in a single ejaculation being 40m to 1.2Bn you can see that simple laws of average state that a huge number of these are redundant. But the process by which chromosomes make it into the egg or any one sperm to my knowledge is random, so when it comes to genetic variance the contribution is still 50/50. Fun fact, when you combine 8,388,608 combinations from each parent you get a about 70 trillion unique offspring, so there's a 1 in 70 trillion chance that if you give birth a second time the 2nd child will be genetically identical to the first!

In at least some cases this is factually false. Which doesn't surprise me with Laci who is a feminist who cannot think for herself. In some cases children are born with an ambiguous physical sex, doctors do tests on the infant to determine what mentality the child has when compared to early male/female infants to help assign sex. There is strong gender identifiers at early childhood which can be used to determine the mentality of the child, female babies stare at faces more frequently and for longer, male babies stare at systems/objects more frequently and for longer, this is before any social programming can take effect. One point that I find interesting (maybe no one else does) is that transgendered people almost always feel like the right brain in the wrong body, that is to say a male feels like he was born female brain with a male body. One thing I've always heavily questioned is why this is framed as a physical issues rather than a mental one? Why is the body seen as the "wrong" part and not the brain? Maybe your physical body is perfectly fine and it's the feeling you're the wrong gender which is the issue?

This seems to be fairly common knowledge among men, I suspect that many men would describe women as having the choice between suitors and that women are perfectly aware of this disparity for the most part, it's hard to imagine many men noticing this disparity and simultaneously believing women have no idea it exists. I don't mean to offend or question your honestly but to me it strains credulity that this isn't common knowledge among most women. for this reason I'd really like more women weigh in on this. As Slavik asked, it would be interesting to hear the history of womens dating and what percentage of times they approached men vs men approaching them, I think Stefan at the mens rights conference said the statistic was around 95% male to female? To men the predominant indicator of this is sexual promiscuity, acquiring sex for the average man is not trivial, which is why men praise each other for sleeping with lots of women, maybe its that scarcity that reminds us on a fairly constant basis that the bottleneck sexual encounters is definitely controlled (limited) by women, look at gay men and promiscuity is significantly higher than both heterosexual and lesbian individuals.

How dare men write and create popular media! What do these men think they have some kind of freedom and basic human rights?! *rolleyes*

I find it amusing that this video has mostly down votes. Fairly dishonest analysis of the facts. She opens by talking about college degrees but what we've seen is a huge increase in women taking college degrees in sociology and media studies among other fairly useless degrees and not coming out of uni with marketable skills or even really looking for a job that has anything to do with what they studied. All the major advancements are in fields which males are still the predominant gender, things like maths, physics, engineering, computer science, robotics, any hard science or type of engineering, they're all male dominated fields. These are the degrees that are high skilled and pay the best, that's why there's a gender pay gap disparity because on average it's men in the higher paying fields. The bell curve for IQ is flatter for men it means that while we have more smart men we also have more dumb men than women, now we're seeing a shrinking requirement for manual labour being replaced with robotics and machines it's harder for low skilled men to get jobs. However we're seeing a boom in things like care work, a huge number of women are being pushed out into some kind of medium to low pay care work looking after the children of women who have gone out to work. Study after study is showing that womens happiness is trending downwards not only over time, but also with age, men are happier now than 10 years ago women are the opposite, men get happier as they get older, women are the opposite. I think part of this is motivation, now that cheap or free entertainment and porn is ubiquitous and the reality for getting married and having kids for men has become nothing but a risk and no strings sex has become relatively easy to acquire, men are living the bachelor lifestyle, and you know what, that doesn't take an awful lot of money, forego the mortgage, no expenses on wife or child, even for a medium wage bachelor life is extremely good. We're seeing this in places like Japan with the grass eaters, this new breed of men with basically little or no desire to get aggressive careers or get pinned down with a relationship, they instead focus on things they enjoy and that's simply not women. I think this is partly why happiness of women is going down, they need the emotional connection more where as men I think are largely kept very content with entertainment, material goods and hobbies/interests. Its why we have a young generation of what people are starting to refer to as child-men, men in so called extended childhood basically enjoying social and economic freedom that comes from abandoning the pursuit of women and spending all your money on them. I'm happy for the all the women who have all this success, best of luck to them, but to suggest it's a problem for men is quite the opposite of reality, we're simply not motivated to over achieve and compete like we once were, that family dynamic is completely fallen apart and isn't desirable at all. But it's women who suffer that problem, not men, on average.

Sorry to hear about your childhood, I hope therapy helps and you can move past it. I didn't bother writing a letter or discussing my childhood to either of my parents, they both moved away from me in early adult hood and it didn't take much to let the relationship dwindle, as I've got older and as I've watched more philosophy shows and thought about this issue, your parents are just other people, nothing special, just someone you have a biologically programmed bias to give preferential treatment to. I know that my mother is fairly uneducated and don't know much about my father, but they're both not very smart people, I don't think either of them really knew anything about parenting, certainly not the kind of information we have today on how to raise children well, and a lot of that isn't even their fault. I'm saying this not to excuse them but to point out that it would require a lot of education to really make them understand the error of their ways and it's just not worth the effort, they're not having anymore children they can't really do anything to undo the damage so what's the point. I've been considering therapy for myself regarding my childhood, I'm trying to think of a motivator to make myself go.

We've seen a lot of benefits come from what were originally meant to be weapons of war, we don't always know what benefits we're going to see from technology advancements and many of the weapon advancements of WW2 and the following cold war accelerated technology all over the world, the space race is one of the best examples. One day it might be re-purposing of weapons or weapon technology that benefit mankind in some way, being able to reach out into space and redirect or destroy objects on collision course with earth. I'm all for getting rid of war and the necessity for weapons however we need to acknowledge that the stresses of war cause positive advancements from time to time and that if we're to do away with war that we should attempt to replace them

Watching now, he does not start strong...answering equations? He switches between confused analogies of his ideas faster than he can use them to actually explain what he means. I know this is a TEDx and not an original TED video but the whole series has been going down hill for a while, we're talking about a group that let Anita Sarkeesian go do a talk. *shudder*

Work on replacing the benefits that came from oppressive regimes and violence, a classic example is the boost in technology that the cold war gave us, in a free and non aggressive society with no pressure of death around every corner I think we'll lose some of the motivation to improve and finding a way to replace motivation is important, the future of the human race may one day depend on us having enough progress to continue our own survival.

You don't decide to be an atheist or not, it's just a label for non belief. Your language is telling, you describe it as a choice and you're struggling with god telling you things, which means deep down you probably still believe. The guilt is a defense mechanism that religion has built in, it's to discourage people leaving the faith, it's social programming you'll have to try and un-do, if you continue to struggle with it then consider therapy.

If people are making this kind of argument there's literally no point in talking to them, the odds of you having a constructive conversation is pretty much zero.

There's a good episode of Friends where Phoebe and Joey clash on the idea of there being no selfless good deeds because if you do something good for someone else then it makes you feel good and that's a motivator for doing it. or at least a benefit. I don't know if that's really true or not, I've not thought deeply enough about this before, but I'm definitely skeptical of the idea that people do things purely out of the goodness of their heart, people respond to incentives and feeling good about things you've done is a big incentive.

People rarely attack feminism if you take the meaning of feminism to simply be equality. What people tend to attack is radical feminism, there's a lot of extreme and divisive feminist behaviour and there's also a lot of quite frankly batshit insane feminist theories and assertions, for example: rape culture. Most of these ideas are not based in reality at all, they're based on manipulated statistics and unscientific social theory to fit to the goals of their ideology to gain more power and control for women. Most of the time feminism is simply dismissed as nonsense but they're starting to become aggressive with their ideology where they'll go disrupt peaceful mens conferences, illegally pull fire alarms to evacuate the venue, they've phoned in death threats and threats of arson and vandalism into venues where mens rights discussions are being held. When this kind of behaviour exists we can no longer just passively dismiss feminism as simply wrong, we actively need to fight it.

From the perspective of the Mens Rights Movement and from that of a MGTOW, something men are starting to demand more and more is that we drop social expectations of what it means to be a "man", there's a great quote from Paul Elam who runs AVoiceForMen.com which is summed up nicely in this graphic. Part of the rapidly growing MGTOW trend online is that men are dismissing social expectations of what it means to be a man and defining that for themselves, when other people place expectations on what it means to be a man and they can shame you for not living up to those expectations then they gain control over you and you're no longer free. The fear of being shamed for not being a real man has controlled men for a very long time and we're starting to see the very early stages of change. The biggest change we've seen so far is in the Japanese Herbivore culture, so called grass eaters. These are a large number of men who have simply ignored the old school expectations of what it menas to be a man in their culture, to be aggressive in both the work place and in chasing a wife/family, these men instead have no real interest in making large sums of money or chasing women, rather doing things that they actually enjoy. It's predicted that Japans population will shrink by 1/3rd by 2060 because of falling marriage rates and falling fertility rates. What it means to be a man, or a woman in modern society is something that's starting to be challenged and many men are starting to set their own standards rather than being held hostage to other peoples. So the real question is what do YOU think it means to be a man?