I consider myself a MGTOW, but I’m still hoping to get married and have a family someday. I believe there are still women out there who have a firm enough grasp on reality to build a good relationship… They’re just rare, and becoming rarer.
I think the tone of conversation between MRAs and feminists is not very helpful, and I wonder if NVC would make a difference. There are a few parts of the book that deal the way the author himself was conditioned as a boy to ignore his own feelings, and the way women are conditioned to ignore their own needs.
Taken from “Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall B. Rosenberg PHD
An interaction I had with a teacher when I was about nine years old demonstrates how alienation from our own feelings can begin. I once hid in a classroom after school because some boys were waiting outside to beat me up. A teacher spotted me and asked me to leave the school. When I explained I was afraid to go, she declared, “Big boys don’t get frightened.” A few years later I received further reinforcement through my participation in athletics. It was typical for coaches to value athletes willing to “give their all” and continue playing no matter how much physical pain they were in. I learned the lesson so well I once continued playing baseball for a month with an untreated broken wrist.
Women, in particular, are susceptible to criticism. For centuries the image of the loving woman has been associated with sacrifice and the denial of one’s own needs to take care of others. Because women are socialized to view care taking of others as their highest duty, they often learn to ignore their own needs. At one workshop, we discussed what happens to women who internalize such beliefs. These women, if they ask for what they want, will often do so in a way that both reflects and reinforces the beliefs that they have no genuine right to their needs and that their needs are unimportant. For example, because she is fearful of asking for what she needs, a woman may fail to simply say that she’s had a busy day, is feeling tired, and wants some time in the evening to herself; instead her words come out sounding like a legal case: “You know I haven’t had a moment to myself all day. I ironed all the shirts, did the whole weeks laundry, took the dog to the vet, made dinner, packed the lunches, and called the neighbors about the block meeting, so [imploringly] …so how about if you…?”
“No!” comes the swift response. Her plaintive request elicits resistance rather than compassion from her listeners. They have difficulty hearing and valuing the needs behind her pleas, and furthermore react negatively to her weak attempt to argue from a position of what she “should” get or “deserves” to get from them. In the end the speaker is again persuaded that her needs don’t matter, not realizing that they were expressed in a way unlikely to draw a positive response.
I think the woman’s problem in the example above is that she doesn’t know how to speak more honestly and directly with men. I think a lot of men fail in their communications with women because they do not know how to speak more patiently and compassionately.
