Our beloved and dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) has had some rather interesting things to say about the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) crowd over the past few days, and boy has he been copping some stick for those remarks:

It is very interesting indeed to hear His Voxness talking about the MGTOW crowd. Contrary to what you might believe, he is not trying to excoriate MGTOWs for choosing not to have families and children. What he is criticising, with extreme vehemence, is the way in which MGTOWs spread despair and misery to others.

Now this is where we have a bit of a problem.

There are quite a few MGTOW types who read this blog. I am honoured and privileged indeed to have Terrence Popp as one of my (very occasional) readers. First Sergeant Popp served his country with honour and distinction, and picked up at least two Purple Hearts in the process, while turning unspanked young cubs into actual soldiers – and doing a damned good job of it.

I read his book, The Warrior’s Way and the Soldier’s Soul, and reviewed it back in 2017. I often watch Popp’s videos over at the Redonkulas YouTube channel and I have found them to be hysterically funny in many cases, even as they deliver a major dose of nasty red-pill truths right between the eyes.

Terrence Popp is an example of a warrior who fought for his country, did so to the very best of his ability, and then came home to find his life destroyed.

This has happened so many times, to so many men, that it is fast becoming something of a cliche. And that is deeply unfortunate. It is immoral and insane that those who fight hardest for their country are then torn down and destroyed by the very legal system that they fought to protect.

And yet it is a depressingly common story. It usually goes something like this:

A soldier goes off for an overseas deployment. He comes back to find that his wife has shacked up with another man and taken his children away from him. She takes him to court and divorce-rapes him. Her lawyer takes every possible opportunity to call him a murderer, a violent psychopath, a baby-killer and child-molester, and a mindless Myrmidon in front of the judge. His years of honourable and decent service are used against him. His post-traumatic stress disorder, which comes from watching his battle-brothers chewed to pieces by IEDs and gunfire and the savage barbarity of those he fights, is used to make him look insane and unfit for human company, let alone for being around small children.

He ends up losing 90% of his wealth and assets, having his already meagre wages garnished, and rarely, if ever, seeing his children. And that is if he is lucky, for certain definitions of the word – if he is not, he could easily end up homeless, on the streets, strung out on drugs. Or he could end up “suck-starting a 12-gauge shotgun”, as Popp himself calls it.

This is the story of many, many MGTOW advocates. They risked everything, and they lost. They were ripped off, lied to, and betrayed by the very system that they fought to protect.

This is outrageous, disgusting, and utterly immoral.

Given their experiences, it is entirely understandable that many of those warriors, who have been utterly betrayed by the very system that they fought to protect, would tell everyone else not to get married, not to have children, and not to get destroyed and turned into yet more hamburger by the meat-grinder that is the Western legal system.

I cannot find it within myself to criticise those men for advocating such things. And for men like Terrence Popp, I have nothing but great respect, and will always listen respectfully to their stories and even their negative advice about women.

I won’t necessarily agree with it, and I don’t have to. But I will at least give it a fair listen – and then make up my own mind.

Those men took the risks. They lost. We can and should feel great sympathy and empathy for them, because they did what they were told all their lives is the right thing to do.

We run into big problems, however, when men who did not take those same risks, then turn around and preach what basically amounts to surrender. And there are LOADS of those zombies wandering around.

There are far too many MGTOW advocates these days who never took the risks of dating, never mind marriage, and run around telling all of us that women are the problem, and that marriage is an incredibly stupid idea that fails far more often than it succeeds, and that any man who signs up for marriage and children is basically signing away his freedom for a live of slavery.

This is a message of nihilism, despair, and hopelessness. It is a message delivered straight from the arsehole of Satan.

It is a message that we as Christians are commanded to fight against.

There are several huge flaws in the average MGTOW’s line of argument.

The first is in the use of dishonest aggregate statistics. And here, His Voxness is absolutely correct to condemn MGTOWs for being utterly dishonest liars.

Yes, it is true that roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. However, anyone who knows anything about statistics knows that confusing aggregates with individuals is a very stupid rookie mistake. Divorce rates vary wildly by state and even by county in the United States of America.

If you insist on living in Sodom metropolitan Southern California, or Gomorrah New York City, let’s say, then your odds of finding a good woman to marry and have babies with are pretty damn low. It is possible, don’t get me wrong; I know plenty of guys at my old martial arts school that have been happily married for 10, 20, and even 30 years. But it becomes exponentially more difficult because the culture, the laws, and the very nature of your environment work against you.

By contrast, if you live in a small traditional town in a conservative Christian part of the country, your odds of divorce are considerably lower. The odds of divorce for traditionalist Christians are less than 1 in 5 – and the smaller and more tightly knit the community that you get married into, the lower those odds become.

There are many factors that determine the likelihood of divorce. Education, number of prior sexual partners (on the woman’s part, mostly), past family history, income and wealth, age differences, race, language, religion, and cohabitation before marriage all factor into the odds of a successful marriage.

Free Northerner put together a brilliant analysis of the statistics years ago which summarises it all very nicely. Take a look at these numbers:

Age of first sexual experience:
> 18: ~32-38%
17-18: 47%
15-16: 59%
13-14: 72%
< 12: 82%

Number of prior sexual partners:
0: 20%
1: 46%
2-4: 56-60%
5-15: ~70%
16+: ~80%

Age of First Marriage:
< 18: 48%
18-19: 40%
20-24: 29%
25+: 24%

Time of first birth:
Before marriage: 67%
0-7 months after: 59%
8 months after: 32%

Education (correlated tightly with IQ):
Bachelor’s: 22%
Some College: 51%
High School: 59%
< High School: 61%

Race/Ethnicity:
Asian: 31%
White: 46%
Hispanic: 47%
Black: 63%

Parents:
Two parents: 42%
Non-intact family: 62%

Religion Raised:
Catholic: 47%
Protestant: 50%
Other: 35%
None: 57%

Religion:
All Christians:41%
Active Evangelicals: 34%
Non-active Evangelicals: 54%
Active Mainline Protestants: 32%
Non-active Mainline Protestants:42%
Active Catholics: 23%
Non-active Catholics: 41%
All non-Christians:48%
No religious beliefs: 51%
All non-Christian religions:42%
Non-active other religions: 48%
Active other religions: 38%
Jewish: 39%

Cohabitation:
Did not cohabitate: 43%
Cohabitated with husband before marriage: ~55%

Effects of Wife’s share of total income on divorce risk:
0-20%: 1x
20-40%: 1.39x
40-60%: 1.62x
60-80%: 2.12x
80-100%: 2.19x

Income Quartile:
Lowest: 1x
2nd: 0.87x
3rd: 0.86x
Highest: 0.92x

The results of this analysis are very straightforward.

If you are a Christian, especially an active one, and you marry your wife when she is relatively young – preferably in her 20s – and you earn most if not all of the money, and you are in a relatively high income bracket, and you wait until after marriage before having your first child, and your wife has very little sexual experience, and you are either Asian or white…

Then your likelihood of divorce is very low. I wager that, once you account for correlations, the joint probability distribution will render your true odds of divorce to under 10%.

The second great problem with the MGTOW philosophy is, of course, that it is indeed a philosophy of abject surrender.

Look, I get it. Fighting and struggling is horrible and unpleasant and painful. I speak as a powerlifter of 8 years who walks around with injuries to every single major load-bearing joint on the left side. (Except for my left ankle, which by some miracle isn’t damaged – but I injured my right ankle a year ago, and trust me, that more than makes up for it.) I speak as a student of martial arts who has done, and reveled in, full-contact sparring for 4 years and smashes his shins into a heavy bag on a regular basis.

I can’t blame any man for not wanting conflict and pain. But the hardest lesson that I have ever had to learn is that nothing good ever comes from running away from hard times.

Surrender is not a strategy. I’ve been shouting this from the rooftops for years now, to anybody – which amounts to like five people. Which suits me just fine.

And here’s the funny thing: I once advocated for many of the same things that the MGTOW guys did.

If you look at a post of mine from way back in 2013, you will see that I once wrote that marriage probably is not for me. Now, this was just 4 months or so after I started my blog. I was attending the wedding of one of my closest family friends in London, and that is what I wrote after the experience.

I repeat: I wrote it. I own it. Nobody held a gun to my head and made me write that. It’s on me.

And I was wrong.

So what changed my mind? Why is it that, six years later, I am not only interested in getting married and having kids myself, but telling other men to do the same thing?

One word: faith.

It took me a long time to become a Christian. But during the process of conversion, I came to understand why it is that Christians see the world as being controlled by an evil, immortal, psychopathic serial killer. The Great Enemy delights in our sin, pain, and misery. He takes perverse joy in seeing us fail. He revels in our fear. And when we refuse to fight back against evil, he knows he has won.

Every time that one of us becomes a Christian, finds a woman, gets married, and settles down to have kids, he loses power. I wager that if you have enough spiritual and mental awareness, you can practically hear him screaming in rage and frustration when that happens – because righteousness, holiness, and simple human joy cause him great pain.

So let’s say that you do find a girl that you really love and want to marry, and let’s say that you look at the statistics pointed out above and conclude that, while she isn’t perfect, she might be a good partner. A MGTOW type might well press you and ask you what on Earth makes you think that you will succeed?

After all, thousands and millions of other men have tried before you. And they failed.

Well, for starters, you and your wife should share common values and faith; you have made a clear commitment to get married; you are willing to defer pleasure now for gratification after marriage; and – make a note of this, it’s pretty bloody important – you are winning the game of hypergamy.

That, after all, is the point of marriage. You are making a binding commitment to someone.

You have to be willing to make it work.

Ultimately, all of the statistics and probabilities and other such cold mathematical calculations do not matter at an individual level.

And yes, any man reading this has every right to ask, “Hey, Didact, who the hell are you to pontificate on such matters?” After all, if you knew my history when it comes to dating women, you would be well within your rights to call me a massive hypocrite.

I’ll own up to my own personal failings, openly and publicly. They are my errors of judgement and mine alone – and believe me when I say that some of those errors are gigantic. It is only by the grace of God that I was spared real tragedy – I kept my guardian angels working seriously overtime with that Ukrainian woman, for instance.

And yet, here I am, stating for the record that I do think that marriage is a good idea and that I do believe in going through with a lifelong commitment of that kind.

The only question you need to answer is: are you prepared to take the risk?

You can take any number of steps to minimise the downside risks.

Have a relatively small wedding – because people who have huge lavish weddings tend to be more about the status and respectability that come with marriage, rather than the actual sacred covenant itself.

Get a prenup, and be really honest about your assets as well as hers when getting it drafted. Make sure that it applies in multiple jurisdictions – and if you end up moving, make sure that it gets re-certified and filed appropriately by a real lawyer.

If you find yourself getting married to a foreign woman – don’t live in her country on her terms. She will have a way out, but you will be screwed, because you are on her turf.

If you get married in the degenerate and dying West, then try to avoid living in big cities. Move to the suburbs, where it is quieter and more spacious and you have room to breathe and raise children. Space is vitally important for couples. The couples who fight the worst are the ones who spend too much time with each other in close proximity, in my experience.

Never lose sight of the laws of hypergamy. If she earns more than you do – or, worse, multiples of what you do – then you are in big trouble. The only upside there is that the burden of alimony falls on her and not you.

Make sure that she wants to have children. A woman who wants to get married but doesn’t want children is, in biological and reproductive terms, a failure.

There are plenty more things that could be written about this subject, but ultimately it all comes down to one question, and only you can answer it:

Are you willing to take a risk?

If not, then be a zombie. Just don’t be surprised when guys like me hold up the Cross in front of you and tell you to begone.

If yes – then don’t be disheartened by those calling on you to surrender. Go forth and live your life. Fight hard for what truly matters – for your wife, for your children, for your genetic legacy.

Ask yourself which archetype you want to be:

A patriarch of a clan whose name will be spoken of in loving reverence and respect by descendants whom you will never meet;

Or a drooling, mindless zombie who seeks only to infect others with negativity and poison.

Don’t back down from the fight. Embrace it. Glory in it. Revel in it. And fight to the best of your ability, knowing full well that you could lose everything – because that is what warriors do.