The Manosphere’s Poison Pill

Everyone seems to agree that young men are in crisis. The egalitarian left, the conservative right, the nationalist right, and political dilettantes all say the same thing: there’s something wrong with men today.¹

And they’re right. Men are far more likely than women to die by “deaths of despair” (suicide and substance abuse). Young men are much more likely than their female peers to be single and lonely. During 2000–2002 and 2016–2018, the number of young men who report having gone sexless for at least a year increased from ~19% to ~31%, while remaining effectively unchanged for young women.² Young men need help, especially with their love lives.

There’s plenty of concern that young men are in trouble; there’s little concern with actually helping them. This is why young men searching for help will find only one place which seems to take their problems seriously and offer advice. It’s become known as the “Manosphere” and its leading figures have hundreds of thousands of X followers and millions of YouTube subscribers.³ The source of most of the Manosphere’s advice comes from its largest faction, the “Red Pill.” Unfortunately for the young men desperate for help, this pill is filled with poison.

What’s in the Red Pill

What guidance do Red Pillers give men? Here’s a sample of advice highlighted by r/TheRedPill, a Reddit discussion forum with several hundred thousand members. To better your relationships with women:

• “Speak to women as though they are children — because emotionally, they are”;⁴
• Since “women get their behavioral cues from men,” boss them around;⁵
• “Give your woman 2/3 of everything she gives you” because “giving her slightly less than she gives you is critical to maintaining your superiority in her mind”;⁶
• “Puppies randomly punished/loved develop stronger affections” (advice titled “Sexual Strategy Is Amoral”).⁷

Who would take such obviously bad advice seriously? The audience for this is not men who’ve had fulfilling relationships with women; it’s for men who have not.

The Red Pill takes its name from a scene in the movie The Matrix in which the protagonist chooses to accept a disturbing truth by ingesting a literal red pill. The allegedly disturbing truth Red Pillers say men must accept is that women’s social liberation from men and unilateral control over reproduction have revealed and unleashed their true sexual nature. Only by accepting the reality of women’s essential nature will men have success in the modern dating market.

Red Pillers assert that by her nature, a woman’s ideal mating arrangement is to have a stable, provider male (a “beta”), whom she sleeps with transactionally but is highly prone to cheat on with a genetically high-value “alpha” male (whom she unconsciously wants to father her offspring). Additionally, women are disloyal to their partners in that they’re always ready to trade up, either for a more “alpha” fling or a better-providing cuckold (a trait Red Pillers call “hypergamy”).

In the Red Pill worldview, “hypergamy” is a natural female trait. Those desires are not caused by any set of ideas: the difference between today’s women and their great-grandmothers is just that great-granddaughter can get away with acting on the same, natural innate desires great-grandmother had to suppress. This “theory” of women’s sexual psychology is the basis of the advice sampled, above. For example, the reason “it’s critical to maintain your superiority in her mind” is to set off her natural desire to sleep with an “alpha” male.

But what’s the basis of any of this? There’s none. It’s a toxic fantasy. To give this fantasy the allure of science, Red Pillers claim that their views are backed by evolutionary psychology.⁸ Their pseudo-theory is a caricature of evolutionary psychology’s “dual mating hypothesis,” which posits that during the fertile period of their ovulatory cycles, women prefer short-term relationships with men who have more pronounced masculine features than they’d ordinarily choose.

Even by the standards of its originators, the evidential basis of the dual mating hypothesis has long been questionable.⁹ Recently, evolutionary psychologists have written on the misappropriation of their research by Red Pill influencers.¹⁰ Red Pillers don’t care.¹¹ The Red Pill’s claim to be based on psychology is an outrageous pretense. It’s a way to hide from themselves the fact that their theories are nothing more than a way to rationalize their own failures with women.

The appeal of bad ideas about love and sex

The Red Pill isn’t the only set of stories people tell themselves to avoid taking responsibility for their romantic failures. Swap the sexes, and the Red Pill sounds awfully familiar. According to radical feminism, men are naturally aggressive, dangerous, and prone to use deception and violence to control women. Of course, this is as nonsensical as Red Pill claims about women. Men aren’t deterministic robots without control over their behavior. The decision to deceive is a decision, i.e., a choice, as anyone who has resisted a temptation to lie can know. We make choices based on the character we have, but, as anyone who’s worked to form or break a habit knows, the choices we make shape our character. Men aren’t a natural menace to women, and the men who are choose to be that way. Feminism’s view of men, and the Red Pill view of women, contradicts the fact that humans have agency over their lives.

And Red Pillers will rush to point out that feminist tropes are ready rationalizations for any woman who wants to avoid taking responsibility for her problems with men. The Red Pill, like radical feminism, endorses the contradictory view that one sex can control their values, desires, and behaviors while the opposite sex cannot. How convenient. The inconsistent determinism of each is further evidence that their stories are rationalizations.

This is how the Red Pill maintains its audience: it provides convenient rationalizations for men’s failures, mistakes, and ignorance, just as radical feminism does for certain women. If your girlfriend leaves you for another man, it’s not that you drove her away, or that you mistook her for a loyal partner, or that you two just weren’t compatible. It’s that women are just like that: they’re always ready to trade up and leave you for a more “alpha” guy or a better “provider.” Such outcomes are inevitable; there’s little you can do to prevent them and you’re certainly never to blame. When men internalize this fatalistic way of thinking, it’s unsurprising that many of them cynically swear off women (“Men Going Their Own Way” [MGTOW] is another Manosphere faction).

When a man is wronged by his partner, the advice he needs is that he should remind himself that a person, not a sex, wronged him. A romantic relationship can be an enormous value to him, even if this one wasn’t. He should reflect on whether there were signs that his partner would betray him so he can recognize them in the future. He should also reflect on whether his own behavior was a factor. And he should consider whether the values which attracted him to this woman in the first place were healthy. Does his behavior attract women inclined to this behavior? All the values and decisions which led him to her were under his control. But he can only succeed in the future if he reflects on and takes responsibility for them. What the Red Pill offers is a convenient way to evade that responsibility.

The real pill young men need

Of course, not every man who consumes Red Pill content is looking for handy rationalizations. Men find the Manosphere because they’re looking for advice. So, it’s important to recognize that the Red Pill comes packaged with good advice. That’s its initial appeal to men who aren’t yet resentful of women. In the same places these men find the Red Pill advice described above, they also find advice on becoming more social and improving their appearance. Men who first hear this advice from the Red Pill don’t realize that none of it follows from Red Pill pseudo-science. Whoever first teaches a young man how to improve his appearance, develop his confidence, and improve his social skills in ways that help him attract women will seem like a sage. Unfortunately, the Manosphere is one of the few places he’ll hear even basic, commonsense advice. (Is it any surprise, then, that young men are in trouble?)

Most tragic, though, are the men who have little or no experience with women and take the Red Pill. Young men who’ve only known rejection or never tried to find a partner arrive at the Manosphere looking for help. But what they get from the Red Pill is a reason to give up and a way to rationalize their failure to pursue values as a virtue. The “involuntary celibate” (“incel”) faction of the Manosphere is characterized by its hopelessness and victim playing. You might be a nice guy, they say, and therefore “deserve” a partner but women only reward “alphas” with sex, so why bother?

Young men convinced that they’re naturally unappealing to women will do nothing to improve their romantic prospects. Maybe they’ll join an online incel group to complain about women, instead. Eventually, they’ll come to resent women so much that they’d rather see women humiliated than work to improve themselves. Maybe they’ll spend their time watching podcasts designed to embarrass the women they fantasize about.¹² Or worse.¹³

A young man struggling to find a woman needs a philosophy that rejects determinism and fundamentally embraces agency — his own and his partner’s. Such a philosophy would encourage him to think about what values he wants in a romantic relationship and what kind of woman would provide them. It would encourage him to think about what kind of man would be a value to her and to work to develop those character traits.

The commonsense advice a young man first encounters in the Manosphere is effective not because it teaches him “alpha” traits, but because in small ways it encourages him to think about what values he has to offer to a woman and to put his thought into action. Women have standards, too, and that’s good for him. He must think about what sort of man he wants to become and then to seek out the sort of woman who would find that man attractive. Doing so can be difficult and deeply painful, but worth it. This is the hard-to-swallow yet life-saving pill young men need.

1. Jill Lepore, “What’s the Matter with Men?,” New Yorker, January 30, 2023; David Brooks, “The Crisis of Men and Boys,” New York Times, September 29, 2022; Josh Hawley, “Senator Hawley Delivers National Conservatism Keynote on the Left’s Attack on Men in America.” Speech, keynote address to National Conservatism Conference 2021, accessed May 25, 2024. Elon Musk (@elonmusk), “Tweet,” Twitter, September 21, 2023.
2. “Suicide Mortality and Coronavirus Disease 2019—A Perfect Storm?” JAMA Network Open, June 1, 2020.
3. Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale), Twitter, accessed May 25, 2024. Whatever, YouTube, accessed May 25, 2024.
4. HumanSockPuppet, “HumanSockPuppet’s Guide to Teasing Bitches,”  Reddit, accessed June 2, 2024.
5. HumanSockPuppet, “Guide to Managing Your Bitches,” Reddit, accessed May 25, 2024.
6. Ibid.
7. Reddit user, “Puppies Randomly Punished/Loved Develop Stronger Character,” Reddit, accessed June 2, 2024.
8. “pk_atheist,” “Almost a Hundred Subscribers—Welcome Newcomers,” Reddit, archived June 10, 2015.
9. Steven W. Gangestad and Tran Dihn, “Women’s Estrus and Extended Sexuality: Reflections on Empirical Patterns and Fundamental Theoretical Issues,” Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022).
10. L. Bachaud and S. E. Johns, “The Use and Misuse of Evolutionary Psychology in Online Manosphere Communities: The Case of Female Mating Strategies,” Evolutionary Human Sciences 5 (2023): e28. Published August 30, 2023, accessed June 2, 2024; Daniel Conroy-Beam, “How the incels warped my research,” Boston Globe, May 16, 2024, accessed June 2, 2024.
11. Rollo Tomassi, the influencer arguably most responsible for Red Pill “theory,” blames the failures of the dual mating hypothesis on the presence of women in psychology and researchers’ fear of being placed on a terrorist watch list.
12. Becca van Sambeck, “Inside the Controversial World of the Whatever Dating Podcast,” Vice, April 13, 2023.
13. “2014 Isla Vista Killings: Manifesto,” Wikipedia, last modified May 25, 2024.