Disclaimer: I’m talking about heterosexual men.

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Manosphere is a broader culture of male-oriented content on the Internet that deals with men’s dating habits encompassing pick-up artists and mens rights activists. Redpill is the broad ideology of this group which claims there’s hard truths the public doesn’t want men to know, which is that women are conniving simpletons and men must be aggressively masculine and ruthlessly materialistic to attract women.

The redpill videos are boring and repetitive so I can only bear to watch a few at a time. What I know about them is through leftist and liberal political streamers that have started to react to redpill content at higher frequencies. They are cringe inducing, depressed men who genuinely hate women and make unironic Matrix references that were outdated by 2003. The redpill message is incoherent and contradictory. It bluntly casts women as simple-minded, man-hating, sex-having, attention seekers that men should ignore while simultaneously directing men to put all their self-worth into what women think of them.

This genre of online content succeeds in luring young men and teenage boys largely because they lack useful advice on dating and mental health in general. While society has stripped away many traditional ideas about gender, in dating the primary practice of men approaching and courting women is still preferred by the majority of participants. Moreover, now that women are in the workforce and have the highest degree of economic stability ever seen, men can no longer solely depend on their superior earnings to be considered a suitable partner.

Women have an entire ecosystem of dating and relationship advice, for all ages and races, in the form of publications, radio, TV and live programs, social media accounts, websites and books. All of which guide women on how to date, seduce, attract, protect against, vet and manage relationships with men.

Men don’t create similar ecosystems and instead perpetuate the idea that all males are inherently supposed to know how to flirt and build relationships. Asking for advice is emasculating, and for many boys, sexual education begins and ends with some condoms, pornography and a pickup artistry book.

The “manosphere” claims to address this deficit, but it doesn’t. The sole goal of redpill content creators is to enrich themselves by feeding men a feedback loop of bad messaging and tactics that fail in practice, followed by content blaming women for not being receptive. Lately they’ve been asserting that “women in the Western world” have too liberal social standards and need to be controlled by men.

The manosphere is quite multiracial; it’s not solely neurotic white boys, and a plethora of the redpill content seems to be produced by Black men as well as White men. The recent Meg The Stallion vs. Tony Lanez case illustrated how many Black men and boys aren’t defending abhorrent but talented artists like they were with R. Kelly, but now are motivated simply by hating Black women.

Left-wing social media and pop culture has started to pick up on the issue of males falling for this content. However, I’ve seen some people assert that the manosphere appeal to men because they offer guidance while pop culture and the left don’t. Something that needs to be made clear here is this:

Andrew Tate, the Fresh and Fit podcast, Roosh V, Dan Bilzerian, the late Kevin Samuels and a whole host of “manosphere” schemers who thirst for the money of frustrated, young men and boys aren’t aiming to improve men’s lives or give them useful advice on courting women and becoming successful, because they’d no longer pay for services or spend hours watching YouTube videos. Their job is sell vitriol and 2-d ideas about women as a kind of drug, assisted by TikTok recommendations and YouTube autoplays.

— Origins of Radicalization —

In the early days of YouTube, the first generation of popular, political YouTubers created Atheist and anti-Republican content. The audiences were large and diverse, but the content creators were overwhelmingly white men known as the skeptic community.

By the early 2010s, this community overlapped broad swaths of online subcultures and YouTube political content. A small number of female members began proposing that the skeptic community should be actively anti-racist and anti-misogynistic. The backlash was severe, and its many prominent white male content creators made popular videos against it.

Over time a narrative spread that a radical insurgency of feminists were trying to commandeer these prominent online communities for their identity politics. The women who proposed these ideas, and the media support they had, gradually became the primary enemy for Internet forums and subcultures, which led to Gamergate. Many new political commentators gradually dropped their center-left facades for hard right-wing, anti-immigrant, racist and, primarily, sexist content.

By 2015, the majority of YouTube political content was anti-feminist and anti-social justice compilation videos, which gradually deteriorated into anti-women videos. However, the tides changed in 2016 when male, left-wing content creators entered YouTube and effectively diminished the skeptic community both in argument and content.

But that movement succeeded at creating a mainstay of victimhood culture among young men by portraying pop culture’s aesthetic embrace of feminism as attacking men and boys for being male and masculine. All that’s changed now is that they’ve expanded to TikTok, a platform rife with Gen Z young men, that makes short attention span content with minimal pushback inherent in TikTok’s structure.

— The Scammers —

Andrew Tate is a man who says violent and offensive things about women and brags about being rich, which spread up on social media and then mainstream media, and he was subsequently mass-banned. Usually deplatforming of this kind works, but the excessive and lazy media coverage gave Andrew Tate untold numbers of new followers. He went from another name in the pack of largely unknown losers to the leader of boys’ self-improvement content on social media. His clips are re-posted at high frequencies across social media platforms he’s banned on.

Tate initially made his money through pimping women out to online sex and porno services in low income countries. Now he cons men into subscribing to his multi-level marketing scam. He gives out low quality seminars “teaching” males how to become rich by investing in cryptocurrency which will make his students rich enough to have sex with lots of women. Tate makes money by getting boys to subscribe to his scam university — not posting on social media — which supposedly now earns him millions a month. Saying outrageous things about women on social media was merely advertisement.

As you may have heard in the news, he was recently arrested in Romania with charges of human trafficking. Allegedly — and very credibly by his own admission, and the police’s — he would trick women into falling in love with him, and then pressure them into a pornography racket with threats of violence to not leave. He openly stated he moved to a right-wing country like Romania because women lack legal power to accuse him of sexual misconduct, unlike women in the western world. Apparently it didn’t pan out. He is admired, unfortunately, by many boys even as young as 9 years old, who are served videos of him saying women are beneath him with flashy cars, private jets, and girls smiling around him on TikTok.

This is a whole universe of Internet content delivered to young boys and men. And something these suckers don’t understand, particularly the ones attracted to redpill videos with girls hanging off of men in the videos, is that all the conventionally attractive women are just models and sex workers being paid or advertising themselves, as was revealed in a Vice News documentary. They serve to trick horny guys into thinking they too can attract women by being aggressively misogynistic and rich.

— Bad Statistics —

Redpill content will frequently misuse statistics from old studies to assure gullible men that women have unreasonable standards. But it’s always warped with phony empiricism and mathematic illiteracy. They usually cite old studies with questionable methodology or Reddit “studies” and frequently reference dating apps while broadly generalizing half the planet. They claim 80% of women go after 20% of men based on irrelevant studies, which mathematically doesn’t make sense. 80% of women do not have physical access to 20% of men. They extrapolate from dating app studies showing women infrequently swipe like 5% of the time without understanding it’s not the same 5% of all men.

Dating apps are one of the greatest things that ever happened to men because now you don’t need to develop many social skills to approach women. Simply take decent pictures of yourself and you’ll have your foot in the door. Don’t fall victim to their algorithm and use the app both sparingly and selectively. That’s good advice for men, but redpill instead curses dating apps for allowing women to have sex more safely and discerningly.

A 2018 Washington Post story reporting a high share of young men under 30 had not had sex for a whole year is perpetually shared by media outlets regularly to this day. This isn’t a redpill exclusive, but this too is flawed. Firstly, it was barely reported but the organization that conducted the survey released 2021 numbers showing that more women under 35 than men, including nearly half of women ages 18 - 25 had no sex the whole year. Secondly, the whole survey system is a sample size of about 100 people — it’s not reliable. (Read this great write up on this survey debunking redpill talking points).

Mens Rights Activists (MRA) love to deploy male harm statistics, which they amplify with the goal of debunking the idea women can be marginalized. One common example is the fact that men are overwhelmingly homeless compared to women. That’s truly shocking, but it’s because housing unstable women are often economically dependent on a man providing their shelter. This means women are frequently stuck in abusive and untenable relationships, which is the leading cause of homelessness for women.

Ironically, it’s the manosphere telling men they don’t need help, reinforcing that idea throughout society and contributing to male homelessness. Of course they don’t actually try to resolve any of these issues, such as why homelessness is a thing. The manosphere just preaches that men just need to become millionaires to avoid being homeless and poor. Genius advice.

— Women’s Issues —

What the manosphere idolizes is a man who sleeps with every woman — while filled with contempt for women who don’t sleep with them — and then will only consider a relationship with a woman who has no sexual history. In other words an ideal woman is one who wouldn’t be attracted to the tactics of PUAs and redpillers, which never seems to dawn on its participants. In addition to living an unhappy life where you judge yourself by how many women can sleep with you; the manosphere essentially targets and creates the kind of women they despise and rail against endlessly -- women who have sex.

And with this messaging being pumped out into male self-improvement content online, suddenly the similarly awfully toxic women and girls content makes a lot of sense. Look at the content girls as young as 10 are watching on TikTok nowadays. Imagine your self-esteem as a teenage girl or young woman being fed content by an algorithm on how to avoid making expressions, to avoid wrinkles, to starve yourself, all in the service of attracting men. Contradictory messages telling you to embrace your sexuality, while also saying to lie about your sexual activity in order to get a man.

Deeper into the algorithm and female content on TikTok gets really dark. This sad obsession about attracting “high value men”; attracting men past a certain age; endorsing toxic and manipulative means to date men. We don’t talk about it because women harm themselves and not others as men do but it makes everyone’s experience in dating and relationships worse.

Redpill people respond by claiming that it’s men who have it rough and must be in the top percentage of attractiveness to get a woman, but it’s completely delusional. 92% of all plastic surgeries in the United States are done by women. Frequent studies show body dysmorphic disorder disproportionately affects women compared to men. It’s pretty obvious men don’t have a corner on body imagery issues here.

If these men and boys actually had female friends or even a sister they’d know the idea that women have disproportionate access to sex is not a product of dating apps. Women have always had access to many men for sex because women have been hit on by swarms of random men their whole lives since they were 10 years old.

Sex is the assumed ulterior motive of a male stranger ever talking to women. Women often have to wonder if every man that befriends them, helps them, or even talks to them is genuinely interested in them as a person, rather than an attempt to simply have sex with them.

So many inexperienced young men will pretend to only be platonically interested in a woman, up until realizing sex isn’t possible and then disappear from her life. That makes women angry, bitter and distrustful towards men. Many men doing this just don’t know when it’s too soon to make a move or too late. That’s where men giving good advice is actually needed, but the manosphere isn’t doing that.

I will offer solutions in Part 2, tomorrow.

The Discourse Lounge

Debunking The Redpill: Part 1