Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.]
And why is the $CURRENT_YEAR meme popping up everywhere recently?
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?
-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.
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.
If that's the case, you absolutely fit into the second-to-last bullet point.
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).
I found red pill 8 years into my married. I married and had 2 kids really young while going through school and being the sole-provider. I've been conditioned to do such due to my Mormon upbringing. It's recent that I've started to take control of my life instead of just doing what others tell me to do. I'm a far way off of being the Alpha that gets respect
I am sorry for your personal problems and your marital problems. But I am not convinced that your remarks about your wife are an accurate assessment. My husband used to say similar things about me. When we were married, he had the career of his dreams and was going to college with plans to get his PhD and become a college professor. We got divorced. He seems to have given up on getting a PhD etc. It has been a lot of years. His life seems to be okay. It isn't terrible. But his ability to pursue his dreams seems like it died when his "do nothing" wife with an abusive childhood left the picture. He now cooks for his cute new wife, something he never did for me, and she is in school, but his big dreams seem to have been abandoned.
I am not trying to be mean here. I sincerely hope you get your problems resolved. But I think you are underestimating the work involved in raising kids, running a household and supporting a man's career. I often slept during the day because, unlike him, the kids were waking me up at night.
Best.
I am genuinely not trying to be dismissive of your side of it. Often, things get better simply because the babies get older. Infants and toddlers are incredibly demanding.
Anyway, best of luck. Sincerely.
That said, I think this may show one reason men are enticed to "take the red pill." Morbidhawk claimed that his marriage was in shambles until he changed the way he acted toward his wife, and that she was irrational and entitled. Without knowing his situation, most repliers accused him of not being sympathetic enough for his wife, and then that his wife was actually working much harder than he gave her credit for.
It's difficult for me to avoid bias, but I'm trying, and the point I want to make is that TRP preaches looking at the situation and social dynamics objectively, without contemporary cultural filters, and this is attractive to those who may have had experiences contrary to what that contemporary culture preaches.
This is my personal blog: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/
Purely coincidentally, since it gets updated erratically, the most recent post is titled A Few Good Men.
FWIW, I suspect the fact that I am not some kind of man-hating bitch likely factors into my prominence on HN in spite of my gender.
The red pill distinguishes itself from "pick up artist communities". A quick look over it sees that they advocate more for strengthening one's self-esteem to be independent from what women think of them.
They also tend to generalize about women in ways that are not very popular, but generalizing what is perceived as negative behavior makes it much easier to deal with, understand, and move on from that behavior. In the end is just a community that supports men, and sometimes at the expense of their idea of women.
I'm not really sure if its a good or bad thing. But does anybody have a duty to think about people a certain way? Surely we need to treat everybody fairly, but once that is achieved what duty does an individual have to think about a people in a certain light at all times? If that person can develop a system that works for them and makes them happy and does not infringe on the rights of others then do we encourage people to do find what works for them? Or do we train them to think about others in a way that agrees with the majority of people.
You can't decide without looking at the specifics of the training. Is the training useful to people and relatively harmeless? Then yes, train as many people as you want. Is it destructive? Then maybe limit the training to just the folks with that specific brand of sadism/masochism and try to limit their area of dominion to a place with good warning signs so you don't have innocent people wandering into that without having a chance to consent.
Yes, "red pill" thinking concentrates on confidence.
But it's directed confidence: red-pillers tend to believe that confidence strategies are effective ways of generating interest from women.
And while there is probably some truth to that, the red pill ideology pretty quickly drives that truth into something dark and broken, by making determinations about women being susceptible to undeserving men who prosper through deceptive confidence and status schemes.
Do they? Going by the article (which goes by /r/theredpill), there would seem to be a lot of overlap, jargon-wise:
Alpha – Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women.
SMV – Sexual Market Value. A shorthand statement for “what you bring to the table”, whether for a one-night stand or for a longer relationship.
HB – Hot Babe (often followed by a ranking on a 1-10 scale).
Funny, because my personal theory about how some men become feminists starts much the same way; they actually consider it an "in" to get women.
I'm sure it is. Are you implying that's me? That's rich.
Meanwhile, guys like the feminist gamer podcast dweeb are using it as a platform to creep women. Isolated incident, I'm sure.
I find it hard to reconcile that the tech world has such a problem with gender parity and harassment-- my industry certianly doesn't-- and at the same time appears overwhelmed with male feminists that are oh-so-concerned about the issue? How do you explain that? Judging by the comment sections on places like HN, the tech industry should be the absolute best place on earth for women to feel safe; but it isn't.
The "M'lady" and "Nice guy" memes exist for a reason. There are predatory creeps out there. You might even know a few, but apparently are looking at the wrong people.
What's your industry and what do you think is different about it?
The question is, are those dudes representative of males who believe in feminism as a whole? That, I doubt very much. It's an extraordinary claim --- that thousands of men who say they believe in parity between men and women are saying that solely as a pickup device, and not because of the sharp and obvious lack of parity in the tech workforce --- and it demands extraordinary evidence.
Do you have any such evidence?
As a single data point, I am a male who is strongly feminist and I am not trying to impress any women. I know it wouldn't have worked anyway. None of my attempts to improve my attractiveness (in the literal meaning) ever worked anyway. It has always seemed to me that you have the best chance of meeting and attracting women when you aren't trying. I assume this is also true for women looking for men.
I have no idea, and never made that claim.
>not because of the sharp and obvious lack of parity in the tech workforce
That's what I find hard to reconcile: such concern about the issue, still bad.
>Do you have any such evidence?
Do you have any evidence of anything you've claimed, before you start asking me for evidence for things I haven't? I used the word "some", and cited a high profile case. My job is done as far as providing evidence.
Have you ever considered that you've been in tech for so long that you're blinded to what people outside of the HN hive-mind see? From my long time around this site, you're probably too arrogant for that.
"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?
[1] http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1
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?
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.
One other interesting point is the possibility that making oneself vulnerable is a proxy for risk taking which is a more masculine tendency.
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.
Sadly, you only need to take a look at their subreddit to see that everything went downhill from there.
Shockingly it can be both.