a more through explanation:
Without further ado, the four levels of MGTOW:
Level 0: Situational awareness
This level includes men who are aware of the realities that face them in society, and yet deem the risks acceptable to have a go at playing the game. I will only touch briefly on this group, as there are not many of these around, and for good reason - the odds stacked against men having the white picket fence deal are still too bloody high. For the first time in a long while, men are having to filter women based on their ability to shrug off constant bombardment by society to give in to their hypergamous natures (and the same bombardment repeatedly chastises and criminalises mens' polygamous natures) and adjustment still has to take place, which may not happen before society at large collapses (yes, I'm that pessimistic).
Yet there are still some who seem to be content, if not happy. Men in this group may take precautions to keep what they have, such as learning game or through other methods (for example, Keoni Galt has made it clear in no uncertain terms that if his wife does try to pull him through the divorce meat grinder, he will pull out all stops and enact mutually assured destruction just short of actual violence) to minimise the risks as far as possible while still having a hand in play.
Which is why I do not consider this a level per se. Even though men in this group are aware of what they face, they do not reject any aspects of society because of their knowledge, which is necessary; pick-up artists, reactionaries and men's rights activists are also possessed of this knowledge, but their reactions to it are different. This is miles better than being a bumbling blue-pill average frustrated chump wallowing in propoganda and programming, of course, but does not truly fit the MGTOW label as has been put forth.
Level 1: Rejection of long-term relationships
Short brief: the MGTOW rejects all form of long-term personal relationships with women, including but not limited to marriage, cohabitation of any sort which might be classified as common-law marriage, picking up for a single mother's children, or any action which might be used in court to turn him into her legal indentured servant.
Common reasons for this:
a) Massive risk incurred by men in pursuing this course of action in the form of chilamony and frivorce theft, draconian domestic violence laws that follow the Duluth Model, being robbed of their children and having them alienated, all for no perceptible reason other than societal pressure and conditioning.
Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Intimacy and commitment that women desire, temporary or otherwise.
b) State-supported wealth transfers from men to women via the divorce, child support and domestic violence industries.
You may have heard of the marriage strike, in which large numbers of men are boycotting this rotten institution - either consciously or unconsciously, it does not matter. They're still out. A simple look through the manosphere wll turn up huge numbers of stories about men and children thrown through the family court meat grinder.
The effects of the marriage strike are interesting, and not just in the "where have all the good men gone?" "you're a sexist bastard if you don't have the hots for used-up sluts" and "man up and marry those single mothers like a good Christian man" articles. Men in general are leaving the plantation in droves - Dalrock has some interesting stats on remarriage and never-marrieds, and the stats do appear to be in line with many men adopting the stance.
As GirlWritesWhat points out in one of her videos: "We have soured the deal for men."
And she's right. As things stand today, there is no reason for men to get married whatsoever. Women have no legal or social obligations to men, and yet men are expected to carry all the traditional obligations while labouring at the same time under progressive ones.
So, they ask themselves. Why bother?
Why?
There is no reason for a man to get married today, ever. Why have children when they can be ripped from you at a moment's notice, and you'll never see them again? Besides, with surrogacy a man need not even get married to have one on his own terms - one example would be the Rotunda Clinic in India, which will for the price of US$20,000 do all the dirty work of hiring a surrogate for a man and give him a child with his own genes. Love, intimacy and companionship? One doesn't need to get married for that, even if one actually finds a suitable partner. Sex? Rollo Tomassi estimates that while game won't get an omega a hb7 or 8, he might be able to pull in a 4 to 6, which is just as well thanks to today's culture.
The only reason blue-pill men continue buying into the claptrap and feeding themselves to the meat grinder is that that's how it's always been done, that they're still feeding into the white picket fence dream.
The dream which doesn't exist any more.
When young men look up and see their predecessors hanging from the rafters, bullet holes in their skulls and as piles of ashes in before the steps of family courts, is there any wonder they are walking away?
Level 2: Rejection of short-term relationships
Short brief: the MGTOW rejects all form of personal relationships with women, including dating, one-night stands, friendships, etc. Any contact with unfamiliar women is kept strictly professional and at a minimum.
Common reasons for this:
a) Inane laws that govern the treatment of sexually-charged crimes such as rape or sexual assault compared with, say, murder or theft. Rights stemming from due process such as the right to face one's accuser (rape shield laws), the right to be considered innocent before found guilty (dear colleague letter, hanging in the court of the public, repeated calls for less evidence to be required for guilt, activist groups pushing for guilty verdicts irrespective of actual evidence).
b) The broadening of the definitions of these crimes to encompass a widening set of behaviour, to the point that post-coital buyer's regret can be considered rape.
c) The heaping of culpability upon men and the concurrent removal of culpability from women for their actions (such as sex when both parties are drunk).
Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Beta orbiter benefits to women. (Chivalry, etc.)
b) Greater loss of intimacy and romantic prospects for women.
c) A general growing indifference by MGTOWs to women (and an observable trend from men in general, too). Hate is not the antithesis of love, because it still implies the one doing the hating still cares to some extent about the hated. The indifferent merely ignores all of this.
To begin with, let's start from a comment found on Sunshine Mary's blog:
"Our entire social structure is designed to support women’s living any way they want.
Employers are required to follow a host of laws addressed to women in the workplace: anti discrimination in hiring, work assignments, work practices, workplace accommodations, and facilities. Anti sex harassment laws with insanely punitive consequences for men and insane definitions of “sexual harassment” (being defined as sexual conduct by unattractive men and any conduct by anyone that any woman doesn’t like). FMLA for childbirth and maternity leave.
Women are allowed to do and say anything they want anywhere. Men are restricted in their speech and conduct. VAWA, which has a “must arrest” policy in a domestic violence call. Women can assault and beat men in public with impunity and the tacit support of feminists.
There are new social customs to constrain most men. A man is forbidden to notice an attractive woman at work. He is not to comment on it, talk about it or even look a second or two too long. Nuclear rejections, public shaming are the norm if a man she deems unattractive deigns to talk to her in public. Men are never, ever to even notice good looking women. Older men are shamed from dating or having sex with younger women, and are shamed into dating women “more their age” for the specific purpose of providing men for lonely middle aged unattractive battle axe divorcees. Men are never, ever to comment on or appreciate a woman’s physical appearance, or compare an attractive woman to an unattractive woman.
Attractive men are exempt from all of these legal and social conventions."
Attractive men, of course, meaning alphas. For betas and omegas, the reality of life is stark. Interaction with women is potentially toxic and dangerous to men, thanks to the way laws regarding relations between men and women have been set up that almost unilaterally follow the Duluth Model, which assumes male perpetration and female victimhood.
When women are allowed to get away with light sentences for genitally mutiliating their husbands, when they lie about rape just to win $10,000 in a radio talk show, to avoid trouble for coming home late, so on and so forth, when up to 41% of rape accusations may be false - why bother? When a man can get in trouble and have his life ruined and forever tainted on a single woman's word and society will howl for his blood, it's not hard to see why some men might very well decide the risk isn't worth the reward and disconnect from women altogether unless absolutely necessary.
Indeed, it would appear that many young men (and sometimes women) are getting sick and fed up with the way things are, and the men are absconding altogether. AVFM radio has had boys of 13 and girls of 14 calling into the show to share their lives and observations on misandry. When people are waking up from the matrix programming from a younger and younger age and saying "fuck you" to it, what can the only end result be?
Level 3: Economic disengagement
Short brief: the MGTOW refuses to produce more than is strictly necessary for his individual survival. He will do as much work off the books as possible to avoid taxation, and will endeavour to remain in the lowest tax bracket possible without jeopardising his way of life and acceptable standard of living.
Common reasons for this:
a) Lack of desire to produce due to being denied a meaningful and socially accepted path to respect within the grasp of the everyday beta man.
b) Refusal to pay into confiscatory wealth transfers from productive beta men to other groups via the state. The amount paid into taxation vs the amount of benefits received from the state is one example of this.
Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Economic production falls drastically as beta men refuse to be more than self-sufficient.
b) Taxation revenue falls drastically as beta men stop producing, resulting in greater debt and borrowing required to maintain government spending.
In Esther Vilar's work The Manipulated Man, she posits the following theory as to why traditionalism, interestingly, does not solely restrict the sexual natures of women as feminists claim, but also the sexual natures of men. Her theory, from what I remember from reading the book, goes like this:
*Men have three states: they are capable of great destruction, great creation, or great hedonism.
*For obvious reasons, we do not want destruction, but men will snap under pressure or participate in it for a cause.
*Most men, however, will default to hedonism, since it requires the least effort. This results in what detractors call "Peter Pan syndrome".
*In order to get men to produce, there are three methods that have been tried throughout history: forced production (I.E. slavery), restricting access to resources, and giving them a family.
*Slavery requires enforcement by other men, which in turn shifts the problem: how do the elite alphas convince the enforcers to comply? One way of doing this was to entice the enforcers with women who were attractive but not so enough for the alphas, but that does not solve the problem of slavery meaning that men will take every opportunity to underperform.
*Restriction of access to resources does not work very well because most men do not require large amounts of resources to be content. Food, shelter, and a source of entertainment is usually enough to satiate most men, leading to the stereotypical bachelor pad. Consumption in the modern world today is driven overwhelmingly by women (80-91%, depending on which economist you ask), so men producing enough to support themselves is insufficient to meet the needs of civilisation.
*Hence, there is a need to give a man a family to incentivise him to create. Enter traditional monogamous marriage, in which a man must give up his instinctive polygamous desires to settle for more reliably-provided sex with his wife.
*However, men do not have the certainty of paternity that women do of maternity. In lean times (most of human history), both men and women will tend to look after their own first, but as stated, men do not have that certainty.
*Hence, womens' hypergamous natures must be curtailed in order to allow men the assurance of paternity of their children. The sexual natures of women are curtailed only as a secondary measure to the primary motive of curtailing male sexual nature.
*With a family that he knows is undoubtedly his to work for, men produce to their maximum capacity and build civilisation.
Knowing this, remove a man's family from him, and he no longer has any incentive to produce. This is why chilamony is so important to the state - enforced by the long arm of the law, he is required to continue producing even though the joys of his family are no longer open to him. And today, Pimp Daddy Government has replaced the husband as the ultimate alpha that no single man can compete with, confiscating resources from men and using them to buy votes from women - a simple breakdown of which demographic puts in/receives more from welfare programs, taxes and government handouts, other things being equal, will quickly show this. Even the mainstream media has finally begun to pick up on this: "men dropping out of the workforce - going hunting, fishing."
Men will jump through all sorts of hoops to get sex, but even they have their limits as to the crap they will put up with - and for many, the shit is overflowing. Without the hope of getting a family due to the dangerous climate of the sexual marketplace, the fact that being good providers is no longer a viable mating strategy, and that the alphas build soft harems of their own, the majority of beta men return to hedonism and stop production. This is an observable effect in Japan's "grass-eating youths", which 60% of young men between the ages of 20-35 self-identify themselves as. They stop wanting to climb the corporate ladder, they stop working hard, and instead produce just enough to get by and pursue their own hobbies and interests on their spare time.
This is what Paul Elam meant when he said: "Ladies, be afraid when men stop thinking with their dicks."
The Japanese government is terrified of this demographic in their already sinking economy. (See in one of my previous posts: the handsome tax) This step is when MGTOW moves out of the sphere of the personal and begins to catch the eye of the political, with reactions that will be discussed shortly later. Sometimes, the decision to disengage economically will be a conscious decision to do so, other times not so much. In the end, though, it all boils down to the fact that they aren't cranking out the tax dollars like they used to, much to the worry of many governments.
The idea is neatly summed up in Typhonblue's parable of the princess and the plough horse, in which she makes clear the essence of MGTOW, traditionalism, and the shift between the two. A small, yet powerful snippet from the parable:
"‘Stupid horse, I let you wear this bridle, but it was always mine. I just used it to control you! And look what you did! You were supposed to live for my needs, but you saved the best in this world for yourself!’ She pulled the bridle from the horse’s head. It turned back into crackled leather and rusted iron in her hands.
She stared at it, dumbstruck, and so did the horse.
Once the horse saw the bridle for what it was, old, worn—and above all, a bridle—his demeanor changed instantly. He reared up, pawing the air with his great hooves. In her haste to get out of the stall and away from him, the princess dropped the bridle.
The stallion turned his head to the stable door. The door was open. In her greed for the bridle, the princess had forgotten to secure it. The stallion’s nostrils flared, catching the scent of long night runs, open water and wild grasses.
He bolted through the open stable door, trampling the bridle to pieces in his escape.
The horse gone, the princess looked at the cracked leather bridle now laying broken on the ground. Off the horse’s head the magic was gone—there was nothing left in the bridle to want—and she felt a dawning horror as she finally understood her mother’s warning. The bridle’s only real worth was its ability to control the plow horse, and she had lost its magic forever."
Level 4: Societal rejection
Short brief: the MGTOW drops out of society altogether. He minimises contact with the blue-pill world and seeks to further his own ends on his own terms. For all intents and purposes, he does not exist. A urbanite might keep to his own apartment, while someone further out may simply head into the wilderness and go off-grid.
Common reasons for this:
a) Disillusionment and disdain for modern society.
b) An understanding of how modern society works, and a desire to protect oneself.
Resources withdrawn from society:
a) Anything that remains after levels 1, 2, and 3 have been enacted, due to the MGTOW practically vanishing.
Known as "going ghost" within the MGTOW community, the most extreme form of MGTOW is to reject a misandric society and drop out altogether. This level of MGTOW, at least in my observation, is the only one which strictly requires a conscious effort and decision on the part of the MGTOW - many men simply drift into stages 1 and 2, but a complete cloistering of oneself from society at large requires some level of understanding as to how the world really works.
In this level, the MGTOW interacts with society only as much as is required for him to survive. Unfamiliar people - men and women - are avoided, and contact, such as that which is required for him due to employment, is kept clean, public and strictly professional. This does not mean seclusion - MGTOWs in this level may have groups of friends whom they may share interests and activities with, but by and large they do not exist.
The minimalist lifestyle of level 3 is still in effect; the MGTOW may still work off the books for cash or barter, and will do his best to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Less scrupulous MGTOWs may decide to bleed the system and hasten the collapse by sucking the system for all the benefits they can obtain. For all societal intents and purposes, the MGTOW is considered dead or non-existent - hence the term "going ghost".
Alternatively, the MGTOW may opt to leave society altogether and seek greener pastures. This is happening not just in the US of A, but in extremely high numbers in highly misandric countries such as Sweden. Whether it is self-imposed spiritual or physical exile, the end result is the same: one less worker drone paying into the system, one less card in the base of the house.