At the beginning of October, about a month after Pierre Poilievre became the Conservative Party of Canada and Official Opposition leader, he came under fire when it was found that some of the YouTube videos uploaded to his YouTube channel included a tag associated with a misogynist men’s rights movement, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW).
“If it were not for Global News, we would not have learned that the Conservative leader has been purposefully using his videos to appeal to far-right, misogynistic online movements” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, and called on Poilievre to apologize in the House of Commons.
Poilievre, 43, who has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 2004, was discovered to have tagged a total of fifty videos on his YouTube channel with “MGTOW”.
Although Poilievre did not apologize, he did address the issue and said that he “condemns” the organization and corrected the problem as soon as it became known to him.
Men Going Their Own Way’s Place Within the ‘Manosphere’
According to MGTOW manifestoes circulating on the Internet, MGTOW choose ownership over sovereignty. MGTOW is the right to say “no”. It’s rejecting the preconceived notions and silly cultural habits that define a man today. They do not try to fit into social norms and refuse to kneel down and be enslaved like a common object. They live first for their own interests in a world where this is not appropriate.
Although it might not be very apparent from these declarations, the ideology underlying the movement is extremely misogynist. Taking a closer look at it, we can find multiple similarities between MGTOW and other components of the manosphere, such as the Involuntary Celibates or “Incels”:
External locus of control
The “locus of control” is a psychological notion introduced by Julian B. Rotter in 1954 and has since become a crucial concept in personality studies. It indicates the degree to which individuals believe they have control over the events in their lives — or vice versa, that they are at the mercy of external factors that determine their successes and failures. A person’s locus is conceptualised as internal if the belief that they control the direction of their life dominates, whereas the locus is external if the belief that life is controlled by outside factors that one cannot influence prevails.[1]
Even though someone’s locus of control is always located on a spectrum, it is also true that those who self-identify as incels display a markedly external locus of control that doubtlessly overshadows the internal one.
When talking about inceldom, one is dealing with a sort of institutionalised external locus of control. Accordingly, members are designated as involuntary celibates, by their own perceptions, because of women’s unrealistic demands and promiscuity, and because the incels are genetically unlucky, while at the same time their social life is non-existent or very limited because the world is an unfair place.
If the control over your life is completely out of your hands, you feel powerless and this, in turn, further undermines the notion of personal responsibility, which might otherwise provide a brake on the slide towards antisocial behaviour and radicalisation.[2]
Although the extremely external locus is typical of incels, it if a feature that they share with virtually every other component of the manosphere, including MGTOW, who decide to withdraw from the standard social interaction between genders because they feel the entire system is unfair towards men and needs to be changed.
MGTOW do not really conceive any form of self-criticism.
Degrading view of women
The manosphere is crowded with disparaging views of women and, at best, women are portrayed as intrinsically interested in sex and shallow. They will seek the most powerful partner. In our modern societies, this translates into the richest man.
On this view, women’s nature is pathologically hedonist, unable to think in the long term, materialistic, and sexually aggressive.
History favored women
According to the most widespread worldview in the manosphere and among MGTOW, feminism is taking over: technological changes and political actions have favored women and exposed men to unprecedented struggles. MGTOW blame such developments as birth control methods, the spread of divorce, and battles for child custody systematically won by the mothers.
Contrary to what feminists say, according to MGTOW it is men who are disadvantaged in society.
Entering the Red Pill galaxy
In order to understand these problems, according to manosphere ideology, men need to swallow the Red Pill.
“Pills” started as a prominent feature in online chat rooms and forums of the alt-right. The term “red pilling” is derived from a popular scene of the movie The Matrix (1999) in which the protagonist, Neo, is offered one of two pills: the blue pill would allow him to continue to live in happy ignorance of reality, while the red pill would show him the world as it really is.
By choosing the blue pill, individuals opt for reassuring blindness, whereas by choosing the red pill they are willing to know unpleasant truths. “Red pilling”, accepting the truth, as bad as it is, represents a core philosophy for incels.
Men Going Their Own Way and Incels: Differences and Radicalization Risks
In spite of the multiple overlaps between the two online communities, there are differences between incels and MGTOW. For example, incels not only take the “red pill”; they often go a further step and take the “black pill”: that is, they believe there is nothing that can be done to change the awful reality once you have seen it. MGTOW, by contrast, think that once the “red pill” has been taken it allows them to see the existing vicious gender interaction — and to opt out of it.
Another difference is that incels display a higher level of verbal and often tangible violence. They predominantly believe that monogamy should be forced and that women should be forced to marry men and have relationships, while Men Going Their Own Way want — as the name suggests — to be separate to protect their own notion and perception of masculinity.
Beside the differences, however, experts and governments are becoming increasingly aware of the threat posed by the discourses in the manosphere which, albeit not necessarily violent, can still act as a powerful breeding ground for radicalization and should be considered a radical milieu. By “radical milieu”, we mean an environment that, while not physically violent itself, shares core elements of perspectives and experiences of violent attacks’ perpetrators. In this way, radical milieus provide the breeding and recruiting ground, as well as direct and indirect support to those individuals who might continue their process of radicalization to the point of committing actual attacks. It is a virtual space where members can find a support system, a unique sense of belonging and, most importantly, implicit or explicit legitimisation for their grievances.
These are a few thoughts retrieved from a MGTOW blog:
When it comes down to men and women, now it is clearly a one-sided deal. A very bad deal. But men are continuing to act stupidly, and continuing to be desperate for any female attention and approval. And of course there’s a lot of white-knighting going on constantly, both in real life and online.
I thought at a young age that I wanted to turn the tables on the whole equation when it comes to dating. I started refusing to pursue women in any way whatsoever. The only way they would get any interest from me is if they pursued me, or if they actually treated me as an equal. And it’s pretty rare to get that unless you have money and resources. So I spent a lot of time alone.
Is Ignorance An Excuse?
According to YouTube records, the MGTOW tag on videos by Canadian Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was added in early 2018 and it has remained there since that time.
Over the years, Mr. Poilievre has had many members of his staff upload videos — all of them knowing the necessary passwords — thus his office claimed to be unable to determine who exactly had added the tag.
All things considered, this might be completely true, and so might the claimed complete ignorance of the politician about the ideology underlying MGTOW and its overlaps with violent discourses and actions.
When it comes to radicalization, however, ignorance can hardly be considered an excuse, especially in a country like Canada, where misogynist violence has already cost lives.
On 23 April 2018 in Toronto, a van drove into pedestrians, killing ten people and injuring sixteen others, in the deadliest attack of its kind in Canadian history. The attacker, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel, was then arrested after trying to goad police into shooting him.
In his statement, Minassian quotes incel terrorist Elliot Rodger who, on 23 May 2014, killed six people and injured fourteen in Isla Vista, near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), before committing suicide.
Canadian security and intelligence officials have warned that violent misogyny is considered a national security threat and a form of “ideologically motivated violent extremism.”
Men Going Their Own Way do not seem to be tangibly violent — yet. However, blaming society for being an intrinsically unfair and biased system, wishing to dismantle feminism completely, and accusing women of being shallow, materialistic, and immoral leads them to the choice of disengaging from any form of relations with the opposite sex. This, in turn, fosters the creation of as worldview in which communication and interaction with the out-group, i.e. women, is completely non-existent. And this is where radicalization stems from: the absolute rupture between the in-group and the out-group, with the first continuously reinforcing narratives of hate about the latter and discourses of victimhood about itself.
European Eye on Radicalization aims to publish a diversity of perspectives and as such does not endorse the opinions expressed by contributors. The views expressed in this article represent the author alone.
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ENDNOTES
[1] Rotter, Julian, ‘Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement,’ Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, Vol. 80 (1966), 1–28.
[2] Brzuszkiewicz, Sara, ‘Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control,’ The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) Evolutions in Counter-Terrorism, Vol. 2 (November 2020), 1-20.
