User:Men's Rights EXTREMIST/Critique of Inside Red Pill, The Weird New Cult For Men Who Don't Understand Women

Inside Red Pill, The Weird New Cult For Men Who Don't Understand Women


 * Welcome to The Red Pill, an Internet community on Reddit founded on the general belief that women have it better than men.

It's a little more nuanced than that; Red Pillers believe that alpha men have it better than women, while beta men and omega men have it worse than women. There are comparatively few alpha men being chased by comparatively many women, while beta men are chasing women who mostly are uninterested in them except as settling material.
 * Red Pill is not a dating advice bulletin, but rather a forum for people — men, mostly — exploring an ideology that revolves almost exclusively around gender.

It's a little of both. Red Pill offers dating advice based on an ideology that revolves almost exclusively around gender.
 * Red Pill pays a lot of attention to that last part about sex – conversations on the forum are often about one's strategies for attracting mates, but there's a present (if slightly lesser) focus on self-improvement as well.

Sort of. They try to help men get their thinking straight about women, so that they aren't so distracted from the self-improvement that will make them happier and ultimately help them attract women. This can involve a healthy amount of depedestalizing, which unfortunately is going to come across as woman-bashing because the goal is to take men from a position of unrealistic idealization to a more balanced perspective. This is what women usually want, though — for guys to stop having a creepy combination of being (1) obsessed with them and (2) unattractive to them. Viewing women (and especially any one particular woman) as fellow human beings, rather than flawless angels, can be a step in the direction of reducing neediness that makes women uncomfortable.
 * The prime candidates for this community generally seem to be men who, for whatever reason, have had bad luck with women or have been otherwise wronged by a female.

The word "otherwise" should be omitted, since it implies that Red Pillers think having bad luck with women means that you've been wronged by women. A lot of Red Pillers, when they find they've needlessly been missing opportunities due to their beta ways, are angry at themselves and with society for raising them to be betas or omegas. They may direct their anger at feminists because they view feminist policies, norms, and values as having caused so many men to come from broken homes where they didn't have a father figure who could teach them alpha ways. But this anger at feminists is not directly solely at women, since there are also male feminists, and male allies of the feminist movement, out there.
 * A prominent feminist blogger who we'll call Alicia described Red Pill to us as follows: "Where feminists are saying, 'Okay men, you have enough rights. Let women catch up,' Red Pill says, 'Hey women, you have too many rights and we need to take some away.'"

That is not an accurate description of the difference between feminists and Red Pillers. Feminists will often view the situation as a zero-sum game and advocate giving women more power at the expense of men. They talk very little about how their agenda will ultimately benefit men. Red Pillers, on the other hand, believe that their agenda will ultimately benefit most women as well, by giving them a greater choice of attractive partners, reducing the number of desperately frustrated betas who give them unwelcome advances, increasing attractive women's prospects of actually getting an alpha or greater beta to commit to them (as opposed to just having sex with them), etc.
 * Alicia told us that she's "tried to empathize with some of these guys for a long time, because it's clear that many of them are suffering so acutely. They want female attention and for one reason or another, they're not getting it."

She probably failed to empathize with them. People generally don't care all that much about the unrequited yearnings of losers, whether they be male or female. They just want to get rid of them and not be bothered by them anymore. This is why friendships often die when one of the friends reveals his attraction for the other, and gets rebuffed; the awkwardness of the situation exceeds the desire to remain friends.
 * As they grow online, the real danger is in exposing this stuff to younger boys

What is the alternative? Without an avenue for self-improvement, heterosexual men who get rebuffed or mistreated by women generally have two choices: to consider themselves hopeless losers, or to blame women. In many cases, there is no other movement that is offering these guys any help, or even a plausible explanation, for this situation. Boys are going to be bewildered and disillusioned when they come of age, try to be a good beta they've been conditioned to be, and find that women and society often punish them for it. Red Pillers see this coming and try to head it off by instructing these boys before it happens.
 * From an outside perspective, it seems like they're a bit too vocal about categorizing themselves as alphas and others as betas

More often than not, they're labeling behavior rather than people as betas, because they recognize betas can become more alpha, and that we all have some beta in us. It's like when Christians talk about "sinners" while recognize that they sin too. The difference is that the repentant sinner will get into heaven (much as the reformed beta will have better prospects of attracting women).
 * It seems like The Red Pill is generally taking the idea of alpha from the pickup artist perspective and running in an extreme direction with it.

This isn't surprising, because the PUA community was Manosphere 1.0. The Red Pill movement expanded the PUA doctrine into a more comprehensive philosophy that continues to grow and evolve, often discarding beliefs and tools such as the neg whose usefulness seems to have been overstated.
 * The goal of an alpha should be to serve the world and improve other people – not to tear men down and hate women.

Red Pillers generally despise the "white knights" and "manginas" who they believe serve as enablers of women's self-destructive behavior and mistreatment of men. They also have adopted an attitude that American women have degraded themselves to a point of being mostly just useful (outside the workplace) for sex, and they figure that if women have opened themselves up to being used by men for sex (as opposed to being willing to have a stable, long-term relationship involving mutual trust, respect, nurturance, and protection), they might as well be the ones to use them.