[Minor49er]

MGTOW's major proponents will go out of their way to demonize women whenever they can. It's common for these people to turn towards things like RealDolls (the supposedly lifelike sex dolls) and anime starring under-aged girls. Raging Golden Eagle on YouTube is the poster boy of this kind of MGTOW advocate.

Self-improvement isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex.

[XorNot]

I've noticed most of those types of groups essentially use self-improvement as the vector to ship the hate message. Which is pretty classic cult behaviour in the end: build a support network, isolate people from other networks (by making them evangelists for you) and then threaten to cut them off if they don't go long with the rest of the message.

[heretogetout]

This is also how non-hate groups rope people in -- Scientology, for example, literally starts with the premise that they can help you improve yourself from t=0.

[rowanG077]

Self-improvement definitely isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex. But from what I gathered MGTOW is(was?) simply a movement that wanted to improve their lives by being comfortable without being in a relationship for various reasons.

I never got a misogynistic vibe from them. But it's literally years ago I had read about them. They could very well have gone the Incel route over time. Which was a non-toxic movement in the beginning as well.

[eropple]

That's never what the MGTOW people asserted in any serious way. From the jump it was "the world is 'sexually prejudiced' against us men [or capital-M Men when they were being extra weird] and so we should separate from it entirely." It immediately leapt right into what would today be called "cope" how even if you do get married she'll just divorce you for a studly chad and take all your stuff, the fear of feminists (hiss! never mind that mainstream feminist study is pretty in on the assertion "this is bad for dudes too"! hiss!), all that. As a side effect of this insularity, for some people trapped in it there were definitely some self-improvement vibes. But that was never the goal of the people developing its, for lack of a better term, theory.

I used to study online right-wing and fascist movements as they evolved. The incel and MGTOW crowds absolutely went towards a fearful, hard-right-wing view of the world as fast as they could be led towards it. It is difficult to gin up another reading of the core stuff that doesn't depend on being super, super credulous.

ETA: 'XorNot, in a sibling reply to yours, raises a really good and thoughtful point about the self-improvement gimmick being a good way to rope suckers into your movement, and it's worth thinking about.

[rowanG077]

It's not "my" movement. I was triggered by someone saying it is a hate movement when this was not my impression. I just went back using the wayback machine to a random page from 2015: http://web.archive.org/web/20150813192410/https://www.reddit...

There doesn't seem to be any weird stuff there but I'm not a social scientist so I will have to take your word for it. I'm not so invested to start a heated discussion about this anyway.

[heretogetout]

If you go forward a few days or months you will start to see rabid hatred of women pop up from time to time. Frequently enough for the sub to earn its reputation.

[rowanG077]

From time to time is very different from being a hate movement. In any large group of people weird stuff pops up from time to time. I think you can only classify something as a hate movement if the hate is inherent to the large majority that make up the group, which didn't used to be the case for MGTOW.

[heretogetout]

Given you say you didn't see the misogynistic content I'm not sure you spent much time looking in to what was going on in the subreddit -- you may have missed how hateful its members were, especially in the latter years.

[Minor49er]

I always got the feeling that MGTOW was nonpartisan, or rather, apolitical at their core

[eropple]

Most right-wing movements of which I am aware would definitely like to be seen as apolitical (and thus reduce the critical eye aimed at them). But the line you can draw from there (and similarly from "apolitical" rage-movements like GamerGate) to the current state of things is a straight one.

[rowanG077]

Conversely it's very easy for people to label any group they don't like as a hate group to try and sway public opinion to discount them.

[Minor49er]

This seems at odds with Stephen Colbert's famous quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias". Regardless, there isn't anything in MGTOW that indicates either left or right wing views as far as I can tell

[heretogetout]

There was a lot of anti-Clinton hate in the MGTOW sub.