I admit I haven't studied the phenomena of herbivore man fully but essentially guys in Japan have decided not to get married, get a job or basically do what he saw his father do for years.

I ran into such a guy when I was travelling one time and he said he did NOT want to work in a factory like his parents did and that was the option available to him. This was back in the 90s.

I could relate. I didn't want to live the life my mother lived. Back when I was a teenager, the mothers of the kids I went to school with were all stay at home housewives who were bored out of their brains. They had few friends so they were lonely and didn't want jobs because they thought working was kinda beneath them. So these mothers occupied their time meddling with their kids lives. These women who have been brow beaten into being stay at home housewives because it is supposedly better for the kids - OMG - no its not, not unless the mother has interesting and stimulating things to do with her life other than living vicariously through her children's lives.

I couldn't think of anything more boring.

I think the herbivore men movement is born straight out of a desire just not to run the rat-race they see their fathers doing. Chasing jobs, chasing money, even just writing about it puts stress knots in my stomach. I worked, I know how dog-eat-dog the work environment can be, I know how vicious people can be in offices, I know about the ulcers that come from stressful working conditions - work isn't great either.

A friend I know thinks the problem for young people in Japan is the lack of opportunities to start small businesses, and then will tell me that he is afraid he'll kill Japanese people because they see him jay walking because Japanese don't see cars, they instead watch people. This is not a society of entrepreneurs, it is a society of follow the leader and let the old people go first and perhaps it is a dying society, I don't know.

Running a small business is no magic bullet either. Small business is risky, very hard work and there is no guarantee it will be successful, especially when there are no safety nets. It is swapping one rat-race for another and still leaves people chasing $$ and leaves you with ulcers to buy stuff you don't really need or want.

In some ways herbivore man is the ultimate revolution, it is the statement that this life style of chasing money is unsatisfying, utterly meaningless and unsustainable.

Nevertheless in the west, the herbivore man is glorified yet feminism seems to be totally vilified. The MGTOW movement hate women, unlike the herbivore movement. This isn't about men verses women, its about the stereotypes set up for us and the system. This is most painfully illustrated in the US were you get an education and you are deep in debt then you have to chase a job to get out of debt. You then buy a house and you're still in debt, just deeper. So you get a credit card, more debt. You work, continually encouraged to buy stuff, consume food, gadgets, gadgets that need replacing, clothes, fashions, DVDs, remodel your house, upgrade, buy buy buy, all the while, you are continually producing more landfill, consume medications to make you feel better, hide the pain, cure your depression, go to hospital... lose a job, get a new job, stress, pay the bills and then die.

I think herbivore men are particularly saying they do not want to participate anymore. This is having consequences with the Japanese economy, the old won't be able to live off the backs of the young. This is perhaps the ultimate revolution.

I think that is what women have been saying with feminism. Yes we still want partners and friends, we still love men, we just don't want to only be mothers living in traditional roles.

But no movement comes with self-awareness, it starts as an intuition. We want off this treadmill. The species does NOT need us all to breed to survive. There are more than enough people already. 

It recently occurred to me to shame some assholes by implying they have little dicks.

You see women have their bodies scrutinized all the time. Are women ugly, too fat/thin, uteruses/vaginas, breasts, legs, asses and their sizes are constantly in the news and up for discussion and whats good for the goose is good for the gander right? If my body is up for discussion, why can't we discuss men's bodies and how well they are endowed.

This was so utterly distressing to these men that I got threats. Sure I am not worried, we have guns, my lawyer has been informed and he's contacted the authorities and we're in the NRA.

Even my male friends said of this picture things like: "hey that's really a girl you know" and "oh that's a girl who's taken steroids". How did they get so experienced with women? I assume its from years of examining porn? But why were they so keen to make it about women?

You know the reality is, I never even thought the picture was real. I thought it was photoshopped. Perhaps I am too inexperienced with men or I need to up my porn quotient?

Okay so why is it okay in our society to make statements about the size of women's butts, breasts, talk about vaginas and uteruses in the news constantly yet a guy's penis size is beyond questioning? If you don't like it, how do you think we feel? Stop it.

But then women do it too. Sometimes women say and do awful things to each other because they think that men will like them? Either this is straight from the Milgram experiment, where women defer to men who they see as the authority or its Stockholm syndrome. Many women seem to be displaying symptoms where they give men a pass and blame the victims, such as in the Steubenville rape where these girls threatened the victim on twitter. Either way it appears they are cowering to men and the patriarchy.

As I have said often we see so many images on TV of women, men and how they interact. They are turning us into stereotypes so they can sell us stuff. TV tells us women's only job is to be a house wife and mother. Its kind of like saying all men should be toll booth operators. TV doesn't tell us women joined convents more often 75 years ago or about Boston marriages. TV told us women living together was bad. TV tells us women need men. Such as this story about a town in Brazil which was made up with only women were after men. It was quickly reported that this was not so and no such town exists. In modern culture it seems that men are absolutely sure women cannot exist without men - hmmm. TV tells us all kinds of rubbish.

The other thing is men generalize about women. She's upset because its her period or she's crazy or some shit. Men never think a woman could be upset with them because the man's behaviour is bad.

However women are not allowed the privilege of generalizing about men.  If you look around at who causes all of societies problems, it is men. Men are the presidents, men are the CEOs, men run the banks, men are the diplomats, men start the wars, men foreclose on homes, men do all the violence and when men complain that men are the victims of violence, it is usually at the hands of other men, men do the raping, men do most of the crime...

There are so very few women in positions of power that women's influence on the world stage that our direct impact could only be considered marginal, women are still getting used to power. There are so few women committing crime that our jails are 93% full of men.

If men want privacy, then I think women should be entitled to privacy too. Men must stop interfering in anonymous women's decisions. If a man doesn't know her, he has no say in the matter.

One of the most destructive things the 1% has done with MSM is turning the genders into stereotypes so they can sell us even more stuff. And one of the most pernicious results of this is the so-called "war of the sexes" between male and female stereotypes, and more importantly, the resulting alienation that TV causes.

MSM tells women they have to be beautiful so we have to buy makeup, fashionable clothes, shoes, get expensive hair cuts, shampoos, lotions, drink sickly sweet liquor and live in diet world... Men have to be manly, wear guy clothes, play computer games, own guns, drink beer/expensive liquor, drive a big SUV, watch sports on a big expensive TV, never feel fear, never need help, never show emotions....

You get the idea.

Recently I came across the #MGTOW group -- or rather they introduced themselves to me -- and reading their Twitter stream revealed what seems to be an agenda of perpetuating conservative roles for women and a burning hatred for "feminism".


There, I found this clip and two things quickly struck me: first, the argument that men should get custody more often in divorce court, and second, the cited example of a man who set himself on fire because he didn't get custody of the kids. OMG. In such a case the court ruled very wisely. Should custody, the responsibility for a growing child, go to a parent who would immolate himself in a fit of pique over not getting his own way?  Because the citation of "man setting himself ablaze" was not specific, I searched for myself and quickly found at least two related stories -- the latter of which seems to glorify the suicidal man as a tragic victim of a vast anti-male conspiracy. In fact, in the second story, the man slapped his daughter til she bled yet was found 'not guilty' of domestic violence (!) Because the specifics of the story aren't directly cited, it could even be a story different altogether from these.

The custody issue is strong with these women hating groups.

This article says a number of things but specifically addresses the divorce courts and how women are allegedly granted unfair preferential custody of kids. I thought this should be about the kids and not a game between the spouses or, more generally, genders. My understanding is the court attempts to minimize the disruption to the children's lives. I am sure men love their kids too and most fathers who love their kids would want what's best for them rather than wanting to get back at the mother, or because they somehow think its unfair that they perceive women getting any preferential treatment over them, a man. Frankly, the motivations of men who rail against the custody issue worry me: are such men really putting the welfare of children first, or their own wounded egos?  While I am sure that there are times the father is the best adult to raise the kids it would seem to me that the more common concern is kids going for unsupervised visits with their violent fathers. Additionally, while most men wouldn't, men who do go to extremes such as setting themselves and their children on fire make the case for keeping kids away from such men. Sure, women can be awful parents too. The point is, the job of divorce courts should be to evaluate custody on a case by case basis on what is best for the CHILDREN, not to hand out advantage based purely upon the parent's gender.

Then men complain about paying child support. Well the man chose to have sex and chose to do so without a condom. Sex has consequences. (And not just for women.)

Furthermore, "men's rights" groups can and do indulge in denial of domestic violence, e.g. in this article. But the statistics pretty much speak for themselves and are not in mens' favor. The reality is, about 7% of prisoners in the US are female, and of those, only 40% are in prison for violent crimes, whereas 60% of the male prisoners are in there for violent crimes (in California). Women don't commit as much crime as men and are much less violent than men. So while I don't doubt that some women do physically abuse their partners, more men abuse their spouses and even kill them. This video gives a beautiful account of the depth of the problems our society is facing and Patrick Stewart also gives a tragic account of watching his mother being beaten by her husband, a returned soldier. I say the issue is far more complex than some guy comes home and simply decides to beat up on his wife and kids.  There is no doubt domestic violence exists and while some of it is done by women, men do beat women and often to death.

This article says boys are being left behind in school. Boys have always been behind at school -- at least in literacy -- yet they always seem to make up the difference later in life in getting better jobs and better pay. There are always various cries of 'failure' in our schools which vary from genuine concern for our children, to pointing the finger of blame for students' inability to "all be above average," to simple anti-public-school propaganda in favor of a privatized education-industrial complex. However, it is well-known that men systemically enjoy higher pay than women, so we can only assume "boys being left behind" doesn't actually lead to permanent impairment for men. In large part this success in pay may well be because of the dynamic of men seeking mates: men learn that in our society, that being good providers will make them more successful at attracting a partner.

This article decries the "gender gap" of men dying more often on the job than women do.  No remark is made about the type of jobs with such high fatality rates, however; in many cases, such high-hazard, high-paying jobs may be ones (e.g. offshore oil platforms, military / military private contractors) where women are discouraged or actively excluded. For instance, there are many articles addressing how women are not only raped in the military, but very often have difficulty finding justice.  This can be seen as one way some men say "get out of our industry": if men feel powerless and threatened in dangerous situations, they can at least put women in a position of having even less power.

Then there are the men denying rape statistics. If anything, statistics under-report the problem, as many victims do not report being raped.  As with this case and this one and this one many women never report sexual assault because of the humiliation and treatment they receive at the hands of the police and the media when reporting it; this makes it difficult to know how many actual victims there actually are. Also there is the difficulty in actually getting a conviction and if a conviction is successful comes with a substantial penalty.

Additionally, there are women who find themselves under heavy pressure to withdraw their rape claims, which results in men who claim "they were just making the rape up" and thus "rape simply doesn't happen." Yet the military reports there are three rapes per hour. Perhaps that number isn't as high amongst the civilian population -- but once again, the statistic of reported assaults is almost certainly still an under-representation of the actual problem. 

We know rape occurs and saying that it doesn't occur is an egregious, bald-faced lie.  But its not only girls that get raped, what about the boys at the hands of priests or this guy or Jerry Sandusky.  While I am sure there are ways women can find to rape men, e.g. anal penetration without the man's consent, it is still more likely men will rape men with men being the victim of 9% of rapes.

Another troubling aspect of this "neither side is innocent of gender bias" article is the suicide statistics. Once again, the stereotypical gender role of men having difficulty with intimacy and relationships is one effect of the pushing of such stereotypes and general alienation from television/MSM.  If men struggle to form or understand relationships, it can leave them more likely to suicide. Men like to feel needed just as anyone does, which brings me back to this audio clip I listened to above.  The second thing that struck me is that this guy thinks he's entitled to a girlfriend despite all the vitriol he is generating towards women. He complained that men are difficult to get to know as well, well I imagine that is true especially when falling into the alienated "men can't acknowledge feelings" stereotype. But men cannot expect to be a friend or a partner unless they make themselves desirable partners.

We all earn our friends and partners. We all give and take to make ourselves desirable partners to each other, not just an intimate life partner but to our friends.

On the other hand, women are pretty much spoon-fed romantic comedies on television and at the cinema. All the books on Amazon "for women" are pretty much romances (with rich men). Women do want intimate relationships, our friends and partners are about the best thing that happen to us because we know that this is what makes life worth living. Men and women are designed to be partners and form teams, but men have to EARN the affection of a woman, not simply DEMAND it.

The loving connection between a man and a woman is one of the things that makes life worth living and probably one of the best ways to prevent suicide.

The problem is that reading much of this #MGTOW list is that it makes me think, here is a group formed by ordinary guys who, having internalized the stereotypical expectations they've been fed by the MSM, are all expecting to (without ever having to confront actual feelings) land super-models who are insipid and don't challenge their ego. 

According to the usual formula, "male stories" tend to result in the man (deservedly!) getting "his woman" through manly acts, sans actual intimacy, in a world of freedom for men where consideration of what women want, or need, or fear, is unnecessary.  "Female stories" tend to result in an unaccountably sensitive, intimate male who is simultaneously successful (read: rich) beyond wild imaginings and puts both his wealth and his sensitivity at her disposal in order to better understand and enrich her inner life.

Well, no wonder men and women don't understand each other, if these are the narratives we learn from.  No wonder women learn to be disappointed that men can be almost blind to issues of actual intimacy -- and that men find themselves raging against the "injustice" of having to take actual female concerns into account.

Men and women are meant to form teams or partnerships and this is what makes life worth living.