
Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny - nkurz
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/14/the-red-pill-reddit-modern-misogyny-manosphere-men
======
danielvf
"Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images
without consent."

This makes me scared for the facts in the rest of the article.

[Correction, as nkurtz points out, the above quote is not actually the authors
opinion.]

~~~
nkurz
That's a quote from the article, but it's not intended as a fact. In the
context of the full quote, he's offering a caricatured viewpoint that he does
not agree with, and then going on to show that the world is not so simple:

 _Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how
shitty are men really?”_

 _The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum
of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately
controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of
course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn
images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed,
inevitably._

 _The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is
“really pretty shitty”._

 _But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis:
how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men’s behaviour online
translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute
conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we
not?_

~~~
danielvf
I stand corrected.

------
seibelj
My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people
goes like this:

-Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc.

-Sense of entitlement, where this person "deserves" to have women desire them, specifically attractive women.

-Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities.

-Techniques fail to help them get women.

-Warped sense of reality develops, where it isn't their own fault that they can't get women to love them, it's society's / women's / feminists / someone else's fault.

-Intense hatred and fear of the opposite sex, supported by a reactionary ideology that permits their beliefs and behavior.

~~~
morbidhawk
> personal theory

Yeah that's just your theory. I don't fit into any of those bullet points. My
path to red pill started after being married to someone with severe depression
and she could never be happy about anything. Since discovering red pill my
wife is doing a lot more than just sleeping all day. Not ALL women act
entitled, but geez the ones that do can seriously screw up your life if you
don't take action. Just passively trying to meet her endless irrational needs
never worked.

~~~
J5892
Are you saying that your wife's _severe depression_ came from a sense of
entitlement?

If that's the case, you absolutely fit into the second-to-last bullet point.

~~~
morbidhawk
No, the severe depression came from childhood trauma and abuse. Acting like a
child all the time, however, when you're a grown adult and never doing
anything responsible is entitlement.

~~~
kafkaesq
Your language is weird, though. And keeps coming back to associating you
wife's "never being happy about anything" and "sleeping all day" to being
childish and/or acting from a sense of entitlement.

~~~
morbidhawk
Being a victim is different than playing the victim card. It's hard for a
victim to get out of bed and do things but isn't impossible. Sometimes it's
hard to tell whether she has legitimate reasons or not and other times its
clear as day she's taking advantage. One thing I like about the red pill and
also happens to coincide with stoic philosophy is that you call things what
they are rather than what society tells you they are

~~~
mercer
(Please don't think I'm extrapolating all this from your comment, or applying
it to you specifically. Your comment was mostly just a writing prompt of
sorts.)

I think your comment nicely expresses the core problem I see in the red pill
'movement', and in a whole bunch of other movements (and moreso on the
internet).

These 'types' of groups oversimplify or warp an aspect of reality primarily
because of negative personal issues or experiences. And while that in itself
is not necessarily a problem, in these particular cases it often causes real
damage to real, complex people who are usually not responsible for these
personal or past issues. It also 'traps' the individuals in a way of thinking
that, collective, is probably much more powerful and extreme than the
individual themself.

The thing is, I can actually agree with 'red pillers' to a degree. I've had
some really, really bad experiences with 'damaged' girls who took advantage of
me, and something like the red pill could've probably helped me before and
after these experiences. My life _has_ improved when I became more assertive.

But at the same I try to avoid codifying this experience or lesson into a
(personal) philosophy or into a movement I interact with regularly. I try to
keep the experiences and the resulting lessons small, because I've found that
generalizing from negative experiences and basing world views on them can have
terrible consequences. In fact, I believe it's the root of a large number of
our problems.

Unfortunately, the worse the experience, the more likely we are to draw
lessons that are too out of proportion to these experiences. It's
understandable, but dangerous.

Doing this is particularly difficult for me because I'm the type of person who
likes to generalize and systemize things. I have to actively and constantly
remind myself that life and people are messy, chaotic things and not a pattern
to be recognized and generalized (too much, or too early, anyways). Even if
I'm good at it.

I'm a big fan of stoicism and have become huge fan of all things zen. I see
the same dangers there. There's a sharp divide between those who _fled_ into
the 'mindfulness' world because of trauma and/or burnout, and those who took
it up for other reasons. The former group is often quite unpleasant and deeply
unsettling to me, and has in fact played a big role in keeping me from
'discovering' meditation and whatnot. I've noticed the same with certain
groups of Christians, cleaned-up drug addicts, atheists, and so on. The main
difference is that in most of these movements there's a healthy mix of
different people who came to be part of it for different reason.

On the internet, it's not only easier to form and become part of such groups,
but I wouldn't be surprised if it also attracts a disproportionate number of
'systemizing' people like myself ('spectrummy', for one).

~~~
morbidhawk
I agree with what you're saying. Generalized advice doesn't work with everyone
and with every situation since people are different. You've got to take what
does apply and leave the rest. I'm going to therapy now too and my therapist
does help me to not to take the assertiveness too far but at the same time she
admits that she's shocked to see me go through such vast improvements in such
a short amount of time. I'm surprised too, once I stopped caring so much about
the relationship and I actually tried to end it after my wife got physically
abusive again, my wife is now getting her act more together and realizes that
domestic violence is an immediate relationship-ender for me now.

------
rendall
Can we have a moratorium on generalizing about groups of people, please? Women
do X. Black people do Y. Jews do Z. Men do AA. It's offensive.

"The online community hosted on Reddit is where men go to air their toxic
views about women."

Ah yes. Men go there. That's what men do. Go to Reddit and hate on women.
Didn't you know?

~~~
rendall
Good god what a stupid article. A stupid article about stupid people. It's a
singularity of stupidity.

------
jcslzr
All I know is that it works. I do not agree with everything, but the opposite
idea that every women is an angel is also not true (except for Mothers).

------
tdkl
Mark Manson put out a great explanation why people go to such extremes, he
called them a "fake-alpha". [1] It happens when going from a "nice guy" with
repressed anger and unmet needs to a so called "alpha-male" popularized by the
modern pick-up communities. While the short-term it might be working, it
doesn't actually make you a better person to live with. This can changed be
with opening up more. [2]

[1] [http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-
page-1](http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1)

[2] [http://markmanson.net/power-in-
vulnerability](http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability)

~~~
reversecs
The concept of power in vulnerability fails to distinguish two important
things about being vulnerable. If a person is mentally weak they _are_
vulnerable. If a person is strong enough to make him/herself vulnerable they
are strong.

These are two different people and its all about where the person is coming
from. If a person is putting themselves into a position to fail they are
considered strong because they can afford to fail, the thought being that they
obviously have a lot of confidence and competence in some other parts of their
life.

If a person is weak or obviously trying to appear tougher than they really
are, we say they are vulnerable because we know they are compensating for
something.

All of this is to say that boldly putting yourself out in the world for
criticism is a powerful thing to do because you are obviously secure enough to
accept some criticism. The solution proposed from Manson appears to suggest
that if you are vulnerable that you are powerful right now, but that isn't
true.

This basically means that you need to be powerful to let yourself be
vulnerable, otherwise you aren't letting yourself be vulnerable, you are being
forced to be vulnerable. So the issue for weak people remains in TRP as well
as in Manson's case, how do weak people become powerful?

~~~
tdkl
As with everything in life - with practice. There are no shortcuts without
actually meeting people. He only advises a lot of simple strong points to
actually think about which ones we want to attract and how to prepare
ourselves to lessen the possibilities for rejection (not stopping it, since
it's completely normal to be rejected, since you can't be compatible with
everyone). It's all well laid out in the Models book.

Now I don't mean to spin all this around about the book, so I'd suggest
reading through his blog posts, perhaps starting with the "best articles" to
get an impression of what he's about. I'm positive that someone open minded
enough will get something compelling out of it.

~~~
reversecs
You're right, I should probably read into his theories a little more.

One other interesting point is the possibility that making oneself vulnerable
is a proxy for risk taking which is a more masculine tendency.

[https://www.cogneurosociety.org/testosterone_risktaking/](https://www.cogneurosociety.org/testosterone_risktaking/)

------
wahsd
Wait. Red pill is misogyny? Is this just intentional conflation and
misinformation?

Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality or truth in lieu
of the short term and blind comfort of illusion and self-delusion.

~~~
Raphmedia
What you may remember as red pill and what the red pill community was at the
beginning wasn't misogyny.

Sadly, you only need to take a look at their subreddit to see that everything
went downhill from there.

