Why (Some) Women Get Obsessed With The Red Pill

TRP was never intended for a female audience, but it's surprisingly addictive for some of us.

Photo by Joseph Frank on Unsplash

It’s been Red Pill Week on Substack, and personally, I couldn’t be happier because this has been one of my Internet obsessions for a while. For those of you not in the loop, The Red Pill (or TPR) can best be described as a loose, unofficial ethos about the “true nature of women” (ie: dual mating strategy, amoral sexual preferences for masculine alpha males, etc.) written for a male audience. It’s brash, it’s crude, and at times it’s downright offensive, but it prides itself on stoically accepting inconvenient truths as opposed to wishing the world worked the way we want. It’s a favorite of former “nice guys” and men whose wives won’t fuck them, among others.

I read way too much red pill shit in the 2010s, as I’ve written about before, so while some red pill writers might think I’m oversimplifying it, I’m only doing that because I don’t feel like being a fucking geek and posting a full Reddit FAQ. But anyway, I would say if you’re looking to map TRP on the Internet subcultures framework, it’s somewhere in between pickup artistry and MRAs. (Personally, I enjoy red pill content that veers more toward pickup artistry if only because it’s more interesting, but as

Archwinger

pointed out in his article last week, if a woman likes a red pill writer that means you shouldn’t listen to him. So I don’t know.)

By the way, this article will be free (usually my 5+ articles per week are paid, consider it a Thanksgiving gift.) But anyway, if you like what you read here, you should consider opting for my 30% off Thanksgiving sale for annual subscriptions!

But anyway, the latest TRP drama made me feel young again because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen these talking points debated online. It started when

Helen Roy

published a question in her advice column where a woman laments her older boyfriend stringing her along while making her jump through hoops for a proposal which will obviously never come. It would be easy to simply dismiss him as a jerk who doesn’t really like her, but the reason he inspired the title Your Red Pill Boyfriend Will Ruin Your Life is that he was socially inept enough to actually tell her that “women hit the wall at thirty,” among other copy-paste red pill sayings. He wasn’t just a jerk: he was a red pill jerk with no filter.

Then we had the defenses of the red pill and more contras: Red pill writer

Archwinger

jumped in with There Are Girls In Our Playground, clarifying that women shouldn’t even be reading red pill content, and should absolutely never be posting in red pill spaces with the woman equivalent of mansplaining.

Jaimee Marshall

wrote about TRP’s bad faith problem and referred to TRP as grooming a generation of “pick me girls.” Then

Rian Stone

responded with his article about how TRP doesn’t have a bad faith problem, but an uncaring solution—sexual strategy is amoral, and nobody has to care about the plight of women (or men, for that matter) who mean nothing to them. Rian argued that TRP wasn’t responsible for that woman’s plight anymore than feminism was responsible for a man browbeaten into a sexless marriage by his frigid wife: his advice to both people would be to take agency, own their shit, and leave.

As one of those pick-me girls who got hoovered into TRP a while ago, all of this kind of makes sense to me in different ways. On the one hand, Helen’s article stuck with me because I wrote about how it is evil to deliberately waste a woman’s fertile years by promising a proposal and never doing it (although in hindsight, I probably underplayed the woman’s responsibility in cutting these relationships off before they get to that point, but admittedly it’s hard because you have to start all over again, older). However, I am not entirely stoic about bad things happening in other people’s relationships, even strangers, and I think that once we start dating someone, who do kind of owe it to them not to be a terrible person.

But I also understand the allure of TRP, even for the people for whom it explicitly wasn’t designed: women.

At some point, I became addicted to reading and lurking TRP content, although thankfully not posting or attempting to change minds. This entry to TRP as a young woman in my early twenties came from a few things: I have an obsessive personality, I always found sexual dynamics fascinating, and I was deeply insecure about my own sexual appeal. I was an awkward preteen (weren’t we all?) and when I blossomed out of my awkward phase, I couldn’t quite figure out where I lived on the spectrum of attractiveness. Had I actually become hot, or were college-aged guys just horny losers who would hit on anything? Could both be true? Was I a 7 or an 8, or…a 5 adjusted for age? If my age was so important, how could I best take advantage of my youth to land a high-quality husband who also wouldn’t lose interest as soon as I got older? I couldn’t stop thinking about this stuff. And mainstream sources, especially those targeted to women, didn’t address obvious things, like the fact that some women were more attractive than others, and that men predictably liked certain traits in women on average, like fit bodies, curves, natural-looking makeup and long hair (the fact that not ALL men liked these things was presented as proof that these generalizations meant nothing.) If I tried to address these topics in women-centric spaces, I’d be called shallow, insecure (well, duh, so what?) and vapid—sometimes an internalized misogynist, just for neutrally stating what was obvious about men’s desires. It was verboten to admit you wanted to appeal to men at all, let alone admit to looksmaxxing.

Mainstream attitudes about women also assumed we were all hot by default, because only beautiful women count. In hindsight, I was a pretty attractive young woman, but like many young women, I wasn’t sure of it and needed constant reassurance and confirmation. It didn’t help that in the 2010s, it was assumed that every young woman was inundated with male attention from literally every man, and all of it was unwanted and predatory (don’t get me wrong—I’ve experienced plenty of unwanted male attention, but I’ve never entered a room and felt that every man was lasciviously undressing me with their eyes).

This obsession with my attractiveness, or SMV (sexual market value) and the fact that nobody on my “team” was willing to indulge it, coincided with the fact that I had just landed a pretty high-quality boyfriend, who was just as blunt and filterless about these things as I was, and who openly told me that my looks were important. Not the most important thing, mind you. He was also very keen on ambitious women with impressive careers and women with whom he could have stimulating conversations. He was left-wing, and regularly joked he was more of a feminist than I was. But he didn’t pretend to love me even if I was a worm. He made it clear that things like fitness, attire and grooming were important to him (with obvious exceptions for medical issues and postpartum) and he valued those things in himself too. If I shared this information in normie conversation, I would be warned to “get out” because my boyfriend having a preference for fit, well-dressed women (and voicing it) was a sign of emotional abuse. But I knew he had a preference that the majority of high-value men shared, and his only sin was being honest about it, which really wasn’t a sin of all, since I asked him.

Anyway, all of these things pushed me out of the mainstream and into less socially acceptable places because I needed advice—not just how to look my best, but how to keep my boyfriend interested and ultimately get him to marry me. I refused to believe that this was entirely up to chance, or that the world was split between “good men,” who would commit and love you even if you looked and behaved like Miss Trunchbull, and “bad men” who had standards and preferences. I knew that humans were multifaceted and on some level, I already knew a basic tenet of TRP—that sexuality was amoral. People can control their sexual behavior, but their sexual preferences aren’t beholden to morality. You cannot make yourself attracted to the neckbeard who is polite to you but devoid of sex appeal. Men also cannot control what they like, only lie about it. Your best bet is not complaining about people not finding you attractive, but becoming attractive. (In all fairness TRP applies this to sexual behavior which is why they don’t condemn infidelity or really moralize about anything, but alas I’m not a red piller.)

I also really wanted my boyfriend to propose soon, because by then it had been four years—and it was blatantly obvious that mainstream sources of advice about this topic sucked. Just as an example, this was the type of advice I got from friends, family and mainstream Internet spaces, when I lamented feeling insecure in my relationship and wanting him to propose sooner rather than later:

• Why do you even want to get married? It’s just a piece of paper. (Often said by people who were married themselves, acting like marriage happened to them by mistake).

• Four years isn’t that long. You’re so young!

• Women have so many better options than marriage, why don’t you travel the world instead?

• At 23, you don’t even know yourself.

• If you want to get married this badly, you don’t really love your boyfriend, you just love weddings.

• You should never talk to him about your marriage timeline because he will think you’re crazy and clingy.

• You shouldn’t care when (nay, if) he proposes at all.

• If you’re insecure about your relationship that means you need to go to therapy to cure all your negative emotions once and for all.

Although TRP had no positive stance on marriage, let alone how to get a man to propose, it offered an alternative perspective, one where the cure to “insecurity” was to become better, not to spend thousands of dollars for a therapist to magically make you less insecure. Granted, TRP’s advice was aimed at men, and was typically pretty anti-marriage, or at least did not view marriage as the goal. There were dedicated spaces for married red pill men, but almost all of them were miserable in their marriages (And of course they were. A happily married man who’s getting laid five times a week has no need for TRP!) But I liked that it was no-nonsense, not afraid to offend (in fact, it was often very offensive) and focused on helping individuals achieve their sexual and romantic goals instead of whining about society being unfair or dispensing pop feminist platitudes.

Although the advice wasn’t for women, I read between the lines to understand what made a woman high-value. Red pill writers would insist a woman’s value existed only in her youth and fertility, but I found a lot of the TRP tenets fairly gender-neutral if I used even the slightest bit of critical thinking. TRP said that women shouldn’t be trusted to give advice to men about how to attract women. I largely agree with that, but it also means the same is true for men (which it is, by the way). So even though TRP wasn’t directing this information toward women, I understood there was bias in how they presented the “ideal” woman. They claimed to want a woman who would make everything extremely easy for them, even though in reality, this type of woman would appear low-value and bore them to tears. But no self-respecting person is ever going to admit to enjoying a challenge, wanting what they can’t have, or being swayed by others’ opinions and the perception of scarcity.

Here’s an example. According to TRP, for men, a great deal of appearing high-value was having other things going on in your life other than mooning over a potential partner and at least the illusion that there are plenty of women who would be interested if your primary target isn’t. TRP would argue this doesn’t matter for women, but it does. If you’re a woman reading TRP, you have to remember what red pillers would say about content written by women about how to attract women—a fish cannot teach a fisherman to fish. Critical thinking is required. Listen to what men do, not what they say. And men have never flocked to the shy, unassuming, modest church girl. I wrote about that too. TRP insisted that men preferred submissive women, but as a woman on the extreme submissive end of the submissive/dominant spectrum, it was a hindrance in almost all of my relationships until I met a man who was sufficiently dominant (my husband). Backing up my anecdata, I conducted a study that showed there is a stronger female preference for dominance than a male preference for submission—and in fact, many men consider submissive women insufficiently challenging and understimulating. Red pillers got mad, but I’m sorry, I don’t take men at face value any more than men should take women at face value when we say we like “nice guys.”

To consume red pill content as a woman (or really, as anyone) you can’t be easily offended. And while some on here have painted me as a perpetually triggered feminist SJW, I’m actually not easily offended, especially by stuff not directed at me personally. Part of the red pill’s amoral ethos is that you can’t yell at people for being offensive, you can only yell at them for saying something incorrect or stupid. I believe some women entered red pill spaces because they saw furious coverage of Roosh V’s Return of Kings blog on Jezebel and decided it would be really productive and fun to go there and scold everyone for being shitlords. This, obviously, would be a huge waste of time. But that wasn’t what drew me to it. It wasn’t what drew a lot of other secretly lurking women to TRP. I think for many of us, it was one half spying behind enemy lines, and one half genuine curiosity.

Red pill men often view women’s entry into these spaces as women being incapable of allowing anything to exist that isn’t “all about them.” These discussions result in a lot of spiderman-memeing, in which women and red pillers are pointing to each other, declaring the other one to be the bigger narcissist, and then insisting that every accusation is a confession. The one who smelt it dealt it, as they say. But I actually don’t believe that an insatiable desire to be the center of attention is what attracts women to TRP. Yes, some women are blatant narcissists who need to draw attention to themselves in every scenario, but if women were so threatened by men congregating together to discuss man-coded things, they’d be demanding entry into every fantasy football league. If a woman wanted bottomless male attention, she could simply just post thirst traps on Instagram. Going to TRP for fawning simps seems like a pretty dumb strategy, to put it mildly.

But of course some women are going to be interested in men discussing their sexual strategy for hoodwinking multiple women into secret harems. We want to read this content if only to sidestep those men’s tricks and avoid accidentally dating men like them, but also because it’s hard not to find that stuff interesting. It’s the female version of the high school boys who dream of spying on girls’ sleepovers. It’s natural for everyone to be curious about what the other gender is saying about sex and attraction, especially when they’re being so blunt about it. Of course, the aforementioned high school boys should know better than to break through the windows of the bedroom and say, “Isn’t anyone going to ask us for our opinions on the cutest boys in school?!” and that’s why, as a woman, it never goes well to actually comment or post in a TRP forum or space. But yeah, of course some women are curious about lurking. Why wouldn’t they be?

You might wonder why men’s sexuality would ever be mysterious or interesting to women. After all, men like hot women, right? That’s it, right? Men are simple apes who enjoy booba booba and various lubricated holes, no? I mean, yes, but men are more complicated than that. All women know a gorgeous girl who can’t get a man to commit—even men who are way below her in every way. All women have heard of someone whose boyfriend cheated on her with a less attractive woman. All women know of a traditional, submissive woman who did everything “right” and still got traded out for a younger model. All women know a girl with a high body count—perhaps many—who nevertheless scored a hot and successful husband and had babies, no “wall hitting” involved. Many of us lurked in TRP spaces to decode what was actually going on in men’s minds, and to give ourselves some semblance of control over our romantic fates.

That’s another thing—control. The, for lack of a better word, Reddit ethos of the time was that anything that happens to you romantically is not your fault and it just happens. If your partner cheats on you, they were an irredeemable sociopath and that’s it—it doesn’t matter if you refused to have sex with them for months, stopped taking care of your appearance, or never spent any time with them. The fate of your relationship never had anything to do with you. TRP offered a different perspective, which was that every bad thing that happened to you was your fault, but that also meant you could prevent those bad things by being sufficiently high-value and “holding frame.” The truth probably lies somewhere in between, but you can see why the TRP perspective would be more appealing to lots of people, including women.

Plus, if you’re a woman comparing yourself to the “average woman” as described by TRP, it’s ironically a bit of an ego boost. I was insecure about the fact that my boyfriend wasn’t my first sexual partner, but TRP insisted most women were getting “banged out by ten Chads in the nightclub bathroom.” Suddenly the existence of my high school exes seemed pretty inconsequential.

As I wrote about before, I eventually became disillusioned with TRP because I felt like it was devolving into constant unproductive complaints about women (more MGTOW/MRA than self-improvement and pickup artistry) which are allowed, sure, but aren’t interesting. Plus, I got what I wanted: my boyfriend proposed. We’ve now been married for eleven years and have two kids. His decision to propose probably had nothing to do with all the TRP content I mainlined because while I was getting antsy and scrolling red pill blogs, he was actually already in the process of designing a ring. Ah, well, nevertheless. I’m still glad I read this stuff, if only because it was interesting.

I also dropped off TRP because I felt that there were some major cultural gaps in TRP assumptions about the world. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but a great deal of this content assumes a lower middle class background, and will make sweeping generalizations that are patently untrue when applied to the upper middle class. There is a great deal of talk about “single moms with three baby daddies” which is not a demographic that upper middle class men frequently encounter at all, let alone date. Another example: the oft-repeated claim that educated and high-earning women won’t find husbands because they refuse to date down and men at their education/income level will only date hot 18-year-olds who work at the mall. Except…these women are actually more likely to marry than their less educated counterparts. In addition, men making over $200K almost exclusively date and marry college-educated women, often within five years of their age, not hot au pairs. TRP warns against “anecdata” but repeatedly uses people like Leonardo DiCaprio to make a point about your average man living in Austin. At a certain point I realized this worldview just might be too far removed from my own cultural milieu to make any sense. But nevertheless, it was interesting. I’m glad I read it—not because it directly made my life better, but because at the very least, it provided cool subject matter for my writing, and I can watch a Substack feud go down and know exactly what they’re yelling about.