If you want to run an ideological movement, and you plan to stock it with humans, you had better prepare to deal with splinter sects (at least if the unbroken entirety of human history is any guide). Splinter sects are groups that share your basic worldview, agree with just about everything you say, but find that one key point of divergence that ticks them off enough to leave and build their own clubhouse.
The MGTOW have a group like this who go by the handle TFL: True Forced Loneliness (yes, these guys love acronyms). The two sects are in complete agreement that feminism is leading the West to a catastrophic civilizational decline.
But the TFL ding the MGTOW for what they see as a bit of fundamental dishonesty in the way they handle the inevitable “Eh, you’re just bitter because YOU can’t get a woman” retort to everything they say.
The preferred reply from the happy bachelors at MGTOW would be: “can’t! Haha, nothing could be further from the truth! Women are banging down my door! I WON’T date a modern woman!”
The True Forced Loneliness crowd want to own up to the “can’t.” Embrace that “can’t.” Publicize the “can’t” – even using their real names and faces in videos. They want to make the uncomfortably personal the political, in order to make the point that a society consigning increasing numbers of men to a life of involuntary loneliness is not a society on the right track.
So what happened to the TFL?
The TFL movement seems to have crested about 2007-2010. It took me a fair deal of surfing around and research to sort of reverse-engineer what the TFL were. Their flurry of activity apparently included:
- writing a manifesto
- building a website
- multiple Youtube channels and online forums
- someone even made up ballcaps with “TFL” emblazoned
Today? Can’t find the Manifesto. Some channels are shuttered. My anti-virus won’t let me go to trueforcedloneliness.com because it’s trying to download phishing software to my PC (or have the feminists gotten to you too, anti-virus makers????). Their old forum at americanwomensuck.com redirects to another forum where the main concerns are saying unkind things about Zionists and nice things about Ron Paul.
What happened to the TFL? I’ll air four theories:
1) Successful movements are generally built by charismatic leaders with great communications skills. How do you imagine “guys who couldn’t get laid if their lives depended on it” rate on those?
2) It’s a movement whose membership is premised on a changeable condition. I saw a video in which TFL-leader Bill actually complains that too many guys over the years have gone “turncoat” on the movement the minute they got a girlfriend. NO, REALLY??
3) The last thing Networks of Doom will ever do is try to cast a cheap pop-psychology judgment on the mental health of a movement’s adherents, so let me just raise this hypothetical: if Martin Luther spent each day making 40-minute Youtube videos that consisted of a tightly-wound man posting screenshots of Youtube comment pages and seething, in a barely-concealed fume, “why are you saying this, ROBERT?…You are a FUCKING TRAITOR, Robert…I think you have ANGER MANAGEMENT issues, ROBERT – I know, I used to struggle with it as a younger man…” – wouldn’t we still all be saying the Latin Mass?
4) And finally, there’s the “The MGTOW crushed them” conspiracy theory. The MGTOW have no love for the TFL, as evidenced by this post on the mgtowforums that rated other men’s-movement sites:
Some of the manosphere sites are good, some are just incessant whining. Anything True Forced Loneliness is just repellent.
While on another forum, a TFLer posited:
the main attributes of the MGTOW crowd are treachery and faking friendships to divide forums and terminate friendships. That is what they did to the TFL movement very quickly.
(Bonus Q: Are there also extremely long-winded theories that the MGTOW are motivated by Zionism to crush TFL? CLICK THAT LINK FOR THE SURPRISING ANSWER.)
TFL Today
But the movement is not gone. The world of 2012 is not so different from 2008. Women continue to sleep with bad-boy cads instead of TFLers. So men who identify as TFL continue to go on Youtube – as in this video from two weeks ago – to share their personal pain with a world that doesn’t want to hear it.
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