The Big Q: Committed Relationships With Women?

Questions, questions, questions. How to find a good combination of happiness and integrity as a man these days? Good answers seem to be in short supply. We're going to talk today about two groups of men who are asking hard questions and doing their best to give their lives integrity, even when the answer isn't easy. Don't go away. Hi, I'm Coach Kammer. The first thing I need to say in this video is that big life issues facing men can raise a lot of strong emotions and can truly and literally be matters of life and death. If you're a man questioning how to make your life happy, please understand that I'm not a counselor or a therapist. I'm an advocate with a particular point of view about men. So take everything I say with a grain of salt and check it out with someone who can work with you personally and help you think it through. Maybe your parents, maybe a friend with good judgment, maybe another trusted adult, maybe a therapist or maybe a counselor at school. So who are these two groups of questioning men that I'm talking about? The first one has questioning in their name: LGBTQ. Men who are questioning whether they are straight or gay or bi or transsexual. I've had two gay roommates in my life, and I am quite certain that one of them was was gay in the womb and was able to answer the question, "Am I gay?" relatively easily. The other was still questioning but had made the rational decision that life as a gay man offered him his best chance for happiness. The other group doesn't have a Q in its name, but when you read what they have to say, you sometimes get the feeling that they have had to make a decision that really wasn't their first choice. They are called MGTOW, M-G-T-O-W, men going their own way. They are heterosexual men who have essentially given up on women. Many, if not most, if not almost all of them, would like very much to have a fair balanced, equal, respectful, committed relationship with a woman, but their experiences and observations have convinced them that it's just not in the cards for them. So they are going their own way, single and unencumbered, and I think not completely happy about having to do that to maintain any sense of personal integrity. If you've heard of MGTOW, you might have heard that they are misogynistic, that they have a deep and abiding hatred of women. But let's take a closer look at that word misogyny and its counterpart misandry, the hatred of men. In 1985, two women published this book, A Feminist Dictionary. Listen to how they define hatred of men. 1. A refusal to suppress the evidence of one's experience with men. 2. A woman's defense against fear and pain. 3. An affirmation of the cathartic effects of justifiable anger. Now, is it not possible, since women, like men, are human, and imperfect and sometimes do bad things, to define misogyny not as something absolutely and categorically awful, but rather as a regrettable phenomenon in human existence. MGTOW would say that they are refusing to suppress the evidence of their experience with women. They are defending themselves against fear and pain, and they are affirming the cathartic effects of justifiable anger. MGTOW are not particularly happy to feel distrustful of women, and maybe some of them have very poor estimations of how women should treat them, but they can and often do make very powerful statements about women's expectations of how men should treat them. If we want to improve male-female relationships and fairness between the sexes, The answer is not to demonize or try to cancel MGTOW. Now, let me tell you a little bit of my personal understanding of both LGBTQ and what we might call MGTOWQ. Shortly after I started In a Man's Shoes, the radio show I did from 1983 to 1989, I started wondering about myself. Why do I have such a strong interest in men? Why am I always saying good things about men? Why am I trying to improve men's lives and open up new options for men, including myself? Am I not a quote-unquote "real man"? People ask me all the time whether I'm gay. Could I in fact be gay? Well, my period of questioning didn't last long, but it does suggest that for some people at least, deciding that gay life might be where they fit in best can involve cognition and judgment, not just genetics. Now, what is my experience with MGTOW? I can probably summarize it best by saying I did not meet my wife until I was 60. And we did not get married until I was 62. I lived my life determined not to have a lousy marriage, and I lived through a lot of lonely times. But I was also determined somehow, someway, to have a good marriage. I did, and I do. I didn't give up, but I also recognized I was very very lucky. And I think that's the essential cue, the big question for some MGTOW: Is it really absolutely hopeless that I will find a woman who will treat me as her equal? Why do I care about LGBTQ and MGTOWQ men? Because I fancy myself a coach on a team trying to stage a comeback for male integrity and happiness. And I am always looking to recruit great players. And there is a lot of integrity and hope for happiness in LGBTQ men and MGTOW men. I'm not looking for supposed superstars. I'm not looking for stereotypical alpha males. Alpha males can be great in certain circumstances, but in my experience, when alpha males enter the realm of sex, and relationships, they reduce themselves to alpha males with a lowercase a, becoming almost comic in their desire to be heroic and gain the approval of women and win themselves an alpha female. God help them. No, the our comeback team doesn't need alpha males, especially not lowercase alpha males. We need alphabet males with a full range of hopes and dreams and desires and the ability to express what they want and work with others on a team that goes out and gets it. So what do LGBTQ men and MGTOWQ men have in common that makes me think they are natural teammates? Because they have so, so much in common. I've already mentioned that they have integrity and they need to be true to themselves. But also, at the most fundamental level, what they have in common is their feeling that they don't want to go straight. And by that I mean they both want to turn their futures as males from a forced march along a narrow path to a wider range of experiences and opportunities for happiness. Take a look at the two signs that the two groups are seeing along their current routes. The one on the left is my interpretation, but the one on the right is actually based on the official MGTOW logo. The first question I propose to both groups is this: If society in general and women in particular, could be persuaded to change their requirements, expectations, demands, and suppositions of men involved in committed relationships with women, might that lead you to think in any way differently about the possibility of having a committed relationship with a woman? And here's a question they might want to ask me: Why do you care if men are in committed relationships? The answer is because I know the importance of a balanced diet, and our society is suffering a very bad case of vitamin M deficiency. And I don't mean Motrin, and I don't mean folic acid. The more happy relationships men can explore and discover, whether with men or with women, the more vitamin M gets into the life of the nation. I have much more to say about how LGBTQ and MGTOWQ men can be great teammates in opening up the relationship game for men. But let's see what you think of this so far. So let me leave you with a road sign that comes up just after the first two we saw a few minutes ago. And here's another one that comes up a little after that. Please subscribe, please comment, let me know if I should continue along this line. Thanks for watching.