The thing about red pill/female dating strategy types is that they are correct enough about one thing (sexual attraction being amoral) that many other people don't want to talk about that they can superficially come across as bold, courageous truth-tellers to frustrated, insecure, and immature young people. This mentality has two gigantic problems.
The first is that these movements teach you to despise the opposite sex. If you're going to internalize the red pill movement's misogyny, you will not be capable of having a long-term happy relationship with a woman. Why would you be? If women are the scheming, exploitative hypocrites the movement tells you they are, how could you possibly love and trust one? If you're going to internalize female dating strategy's "relationships are nothing but a transaction" mentality, you are always going to be looking out for yourself and only yourself and keeping constant score. You shouldn't be surprised to discover that's a shitty foundation for a relationship.
Related to the first thing, the second thing is that red pill/FDS have zero insight into making relationships last. The initial spark of attraction, particularly sexual attraction may be amoral, but the ingredients of long-term happiness are decidedly NOT amoral. Since most people say they want long-term, happy and loving relationships, this lacuna matters a great deal. The things that spark initial attraction and the things that make a relationship last are not the same thing, and our culture really struggles to digest this fact. The two big five personality traits that predict long-term relationship success are conscientiousness combined with agreeableness. That shouldn't be surprising. People who care about your feelings and follow through on their end of the relationship are probably going to make you happier five years from now. People who date looking for a partner wisely aren't ignoring sexual attraction; they're ALSO taking five years later into account. It's hard to do this when you're young and horny and you're so attracted to someone that you convince yourself you will make it work no matter what, but sexual attraction, on its own, just cannot do all, or even most of the work the longer the relationship lasts.
Also, this "ask the fisherman, not the fish" advice is kind of midwit. So many of the supposed "fishermen" offering this advice haven't caught any fish (or have to keep throwing them back because they're bad fish). And yes, a lot of the time the opposite sex isn't going to give you useful advice on how to attract them, but it's not because they're scheming and dishonest. It's because if they're not attracted to you, they probably don't know how that could be changed and default instead to giving the advice they'd give to someone they already find attractive. Better advice - find the people in your life who are in the types of relationships you want to have and are happy with them. Instead of asking them for advice, ask them how they met and what they like about the other person. Framed this way, you'll get more honest information than you will if you ask for advice.
Last piece of my little rant. Anyone who says they want to avoid marriage because it's "just a piece of paper" is telling you something interesting about themselves. If marriage is that meaningless, then they wouldn't be trying so hard to avoid it. Who's scared of a piece of paper? Marriage clearly DOES mean something to them, and they are afraid of that something and either do not understand themselves well enough to know what it is, or they're afraid to face it. If you don't want to get married, that's fine, but it's probably better if you can articulate why.
"The first is that these movements teach you to despise the opposite sex. If you're going to internalize the red pill movement's misogyny, you will not be capable of having a long-term happy relationship with a woman. Why would you be? If women are the scheming, exploitative hypocrites the movement tells you they are, how could you possibly love and trust one?"
This right here, this has all but destroyed my dad's life. My parents were coworkers hooking up on the rebound in-between life transitions when they got pregnant, they had no foundation to build a relationship off of other than having a kid together. They were totally incompatible and my mom was so miserable she carried out an affair. My dad thought he had done everything "right" - he had taken responsibility and married my mom, he had tried to be a provider for the family, he had made the kinds of sacrifices men were supposed to make, but he didn't actually respect my mom or even really seem to like her that much- so the infidelity and the divorce made him bitter. Then later on, he found the Red Pill and it fed his bitterness so much that it became all-consuming, anything careless or thoughtless that any individual woman did became an example for how "all women are like that", just full-blown misogyny. Now, he is "content" to live out the last decades of his life alone because he believes a relationship would just be setting himself up to have his life ruined by some bitch.
That situation with your dad is so sad. :-( And I think it illustrates TRP problem. There are other, very different frameworks he could have applied to his situation that would have applied really well, but would have sent him in very different directions.
But our ideology is also our filter - our brains pattern match for the schema we expect to see, so to your dad, perahps the world _is_ (as he sees it) more like a TRP dystopian hell-scape than it is for you and me.
Nothing worse for a man than his own company. I see guys like your dad at work all the time, when the health conditions they’ve been ignoring become impossible to ignore. They’re the ones who walk in with a black foot, or deep jaundice, or a tumour fungating out of their chest wall, who can barely talk to you they’re so unused to speaking to another person. It’s honestly tragic.
1. “default instead to giving the advice they'd give to someone they already find attractive” - YES! Very much this!
2. I’d push back a little on sexual preferences being amoral. I think tastes/preferences are not nearly as cast in stone as people make them out to be. Maybe you can’t/shouldn’t guilt yourself about not being into short dudes or whatever, but there are lots of social factors that come into play. If people can discover at age 60 that they’re gay, they’re certainly able to find it in themselves to be attracted to someone who’s not “toned” or whatever.
About your point 2 - i think it's more about not being able to *choose* who to be attracted to. There's a lot of discourse about "unpacking" why you're attracted to X or Y and how attraction comes from subconscious social conditioning but no real advice on how to change one's attraction.
That is to say that I think attraction absolutely can change but I don't think one can really decide to make that happen.
True! You can’t say “I will do [ABC] and my preference will become [XYZ]”. All you can do is ask yourself why you’re into x and what is so bad about z.
*Do* people discover at age 60 that they’re gay? I feel like every time I’ve seen something resembling that, it’s one of two different scenarios. The first is that they’ve always been attracted to the same sex, but they’ve finally stopped fighting it or hiding it. The second is that they find themselves attracted to someone of the same sex for the first time, but it’s not like they lost all attraction to the opposite sex, so it’s more that they’ve discovered they’re bisexual.
The 2nd scenario is what I have in mind. In the case of women, it does sometime seem to be accompanied by a loss of interest in the opposite sex, but for all I know maybe they were kidding themselves the whole time about being into men.
One sort of redpiller I can't get over are the guys who get themselves in a real rage over the idea that women (and only women) are 'lying' to men by saying "looks don't matter" or "it's what's on the inside that counts." It's such a childish oversimplification. I just think of someone stomping their feet when I see those memes about how hot guys get away with lines that ugly guys don't.
The other thing that really made me lose any respect for the concept of these guys giving 'hard truths' is how they will argue to the death against any woman who claims to not care about (for example) height. It's about the same intellectual level as somebody who says "well the studies that say chocolate is the most popular flavour are WRONG and FLAWED because *I* hate chocolate".
And I get some of it's a backlash to people saying looks/height etc never matter at all but surely it's hardly a leap to imagine that even if there's a general preference for tall men, not every single woman would have it... or that height, like everything else, is just one of many ingredients in the bizarre alchemy of attraction soup.
Its the volume of the lying that starts to add up. Something about the topic of human attraction makes a lot of people completely lose all their integrity.
When there is one lie it can be addressed and discussed. When its literally beginning to end lies (with no truth), the experience is significantly more frustrating.
Loved this comment. Thank you for writing it. I was really feeling miserable and wondering if truly these manosphere spaces is all we can offer as a society to apparently both boys and girls so they learn the “truth” about each other. We are truly doomed as a society if this evil is all we have to give young children.
Hopefully, I just don't think that's in the cards. I should probably write my "debut" article about this, lol.
The reason Redpill is winning (and going to win) isn't that it's ideas are good, its that is absolutely destroys its direct competitors.
1. Social Progressives
2. Religious 'retvrn' people.
1. Social progressives usually don't really understand the questions being asked, but when they do have answers they are horrible. "Just be a good person" is bad advice, but it also directly insults anyone looking for advice. Also if you take them at their word you end up with a ton of flat earther tier beliefs; such as; "looks don't matter," "girls just want someone who's nice," "dating is equally difficult for everyone."
2. Religious people are stuck in a loop where they basically just wish people were different than how they actually are. The advice, while earnest, of "go to church" is absolutely useless for non-Christians or secular people. And yes this is a different group than redpillers; if you can't tell the difference between "I want to fuck 10 girls in 9 days" and "I want to baptize my 5 children in the name of Christ" just aren't the same types of goals.
The classical liberal who doesn’t sugarcoat things but still hold a non-nihilist view on life - ppl like CHH are the alternative. You don’t need to agree. Wish you the best on your article.
You make a good point about agreeableness and conscientiousness being predictors of long term relationships success. I think this gets interesting (and frustrating, and tragic) when we start looking at cultural shifts that have taken place in recent times.
Under the best of circumstances, men who are too agreeable and too conscientious will have difficulty landing a girlfriend - you have to cut against the grain of everyday, ordinary, non-seductive reality to get things started and to build a little frisson and sexual tension - but in recent years metoo style feminism has made it so men have to be even less agreeable and conscientious to make things happen.
If you're agreeable and conscientious and you see women all around you (or even just on the internet) talking about how much they hate male attention, how they don't want strange men to talk to them, how men are basically this terrible, dangerous, creepy, rapey, privileged, disgusting imposition in their lives most or all of the time; if you're conscientiously agreeable towards all the talk of affirmative consent, and the various ways in which a certain type of feminist spent a straight decade insisting that men be more deferent in relation to women and advising them to be "decent human beings" by acting in a way that's directly contradictory to what women tend to respond positively to at the beginning of relationships, sexual/romantic relationships never get off the ground in the first place.
For that matter, a deferent approach as a man has the tendency to attract women with cluster b personality disorder traits - they can smell the potential for the for codependent relationships they're seeking in that - so men who are too agreeable and conscientious can also end up with less positive impressions of women as a result of their direct experiences with these types.
Inevitably, some men recognize the general problem (if only obliquely or emotionally) and then swing hard in the other direction, turn to an extreme embrace of the red pill stuff, and become embittered towards their own previous aspirations for a happy relationship, which end up feeling like the naive dreams of a child.
To cut a long story short, to me it seems like 2010s feminism was basically one big dysfunctional and antisocial recipe for ensuring that fewer healthy, successful, long term relationships would form.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but on the other hand, a lot of angry online feminists do seem to be partnered up! I suspect that 20-30something women who are without a partner for long stretches are far more likely to be struggling single moms than educated feminists who are alone by choice because no man is good enough.
This is actually the kind of thinking that keeps you stupid and not learning. You gotta find people who are willing to teach you things you want to learn and be coachable.
Most people get ahead in life thanks to having a godfather or a mentor or a great boss who showed them the ropes. Or a parent who guided them. Is that bad now and should oprah return all her success because she was mentored by maya angelou?
this is so relatable.. I was pushed into it out of a combination of morbid curiosity, inexperience and loneliness: no one around me would have indulged these questions then. I was pretty sheltered and wanted to know what men were *really* thinking, and what my value *really* was, but ended up absorbing all these horrible ideas about my age, value, personality and beauty that unfortunately aligned with a lot of the narratives I was surrounded by in church.
I’ve had trouble shaking some of these ideas to this day.
One way you can tell that the red pill isn't what men are *really* thinking - look at the people in your life who are in the happiest relationships. Do they act "red pill"? I'd be willing to bet they're not like that at all.
I guarantee you my wife has never heard of the red pill, she has certainly never heard of me talking of the red pill and yet, without the red pill circa 2012 version, I'd never have met her and got married.
Everybody ages. The fact that people read the most cringe single “red pillers” on reddit without actually reading any of the source material and come up with this shit. Have you read rollo? Heartiste?
From your comments, it sounds like something you learned from TRP was formative and important to you. I read a dozen Rollo blog posts and it basically re-enforced my negative priors.
What did you get that was important, valuable and meaningful?
A lot of men go unhinged when they find out women are just people. The fantasy is ruined. That doesnt make it not true. The red pill guys who use it to have sex with as many women as they can either end up finding jesus or going insane
The people I know irl who spout redpill stuff are usually bitter middle-aged men who hate their wives, divorced men, and socially awkward young men with zero rizz, EXACTLY who you would imagine. And all of them are varying levels of conventional attractiveness! Also fit and masculine. lol.
Meanwhile, the other men, the ones who treat women like people, are friendly, funny, and very noticeably surrounded by other men and women.
The redpill guys are generally better looking in terms of what men like most (muscles, beards, zero facial movement lol), but no one likes them!
I'd you're telling people in your life about the redpill that's because you're seeking their validation about it, or attempting to manipulate them into it.
So if you're doing it right no one would ever know
There’s an unfortunate overlap between red pill content and the way traditional gender roles are sometimes discussed in church circles, religious media, etc. I feel like some female religious writers have caught on to this and written about it, but men not so much. It can be quite challenging to unpack it all. And then there’s a whole grift problem of female red pillers who have big followings because there's an insatiable thirst for this content.
They are completely different though. Winning conditions being "fuck 10 girls in 9 days" and "baptize 6 children in the name of Christ" just aren't the same kinds of goals.
I experienced the same as a teen. I was an insecure and lonely high schooler who never got attention from boys, so I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. I stopped right around when I had a glow up/grew out of my awkward phase, which coincided with starting college and meeting a lot more like minded people including guys who were into me.
1. the right wing sicko “kidnap a woman and keep her in the woodshed” red pill submission guys who are along that spectrum but not as far (sometimes just as slightly as simply treating their wife as childish, with disdain or silent contempt- STEM guys are like this a lot) ranging to the homestead homemaker slave to the more empowered homemaker influencer consumerist secularist
and
2. the upper middle class lib CHH types and their Christian Grey hot Ezra Newsom husbands (sorry!! You’re my favorite)
come from a similar underlying value ethos, the libs just kinda believe they are winners and the right wing guys believe they need to try harder to be winners and this whole world view is transposed into relationships like
did anyone else watch that movie Materialists, these are both MATERIALIST worldviews where people become a value judgement
when romance and human communication and relationship and experience together is individuated and personal in a way you can’t put into a spreadsheet or reproduce in a VR headset or in a laboratory. It happens once just once between you in time and place in all of human history and just you know your half of it
maybe that’s why my disenchantment with marriage is so strong because so many marriages don’t have the enchantment, it’s just a political institution- how many wives have i known
how many marriages have i known less enchanted than even a celibate friendship I’ve had- some of these people truly hate each other for the sake of some kind of capital allocation scheme KMS
CHH once wrote a piece on how when you’re a straight woman who wants a relationship with a man, it helps to, you know, actually like men.
But it’s also true that if you’re a straight man, it helps to like women!
That’s the fatal flaw of the Red Pillers: they don’t like women. They see women only as a piece of ass. If a woman says “a man’s only worth is the money he earns,” you would say that woman doesn’t like men and isn’t on track to a happy relationship with one, right?
Yes. Liking women is kind of important to have enjoyable interactions with them! I suppose if you're attractive enough, women might still be into you, but if you hate them, you won't have a very good time long term.
It's a bit of a digression, but TRP culture reflects a more general problem: If the mainstream insists that certain topics are verboten, only assholes and anons will be able to honestly discuss them. This might seem worth it in the short term, but especially with the internet existing it imo always ends up blowing up into everyone's face sooner or later.
On the article itself, very interesting perspective! I've always been more on the periphery of TRP spaces because while I think that they sometimes just are simply correct about some things that you're not supposed to openly blurt out in polite company (a trait you seem to share with them), they've always been a bit whiny and their proposed course of actions was at odds with my own goals (just a bog-standard long-term monogamous relationship for the purpose of creating a family eventually! Disgusting, I know). Your article makes me wonder whether I was just insufficiently creative in wringing out useful advice. But, happily enough, it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
"only assholes and anons will be able to honestly discuss them."
This! My fear (as a father) is that my sons will find something on TRP that is true and not commonly said elsewhere and then assume the rest of what TRP says is in the same epistemological category.
You should tell them that. That they might find some useful advice from weirdos, but it doesn't mean they should trust everything they say. I sure wish I got that advice earlier
I was always skeptical of TRP because they asserted so many things that were obviously, on their face, wrong. For example, that most 20-something women are routinely going out to clubs and banging guys in the bathrooms.
Also, non-toxic dating advice and discourse seems much better than it was in the early-to-mid 2010s? We’ve moved beyond “just be yourself”. If anything now I think mainstream discourse has overcorrected to the “it’s your fault, use your agency” side of things for dating (at least on men’s side of things).
Here's a big thing that should make young men skeptical of the red pill - look at the men in your life who are in happy, long-term relationships. How many of them achieved this with red pill behavior?
The vibe I got from the red pill guys is that they were mostly angry, lonely nerds who couldn’t find healthier outlets for their emotions. And a lot of them seem like the types who manage to have casual sex once or twice a year and then think they’re gods and have women Figured Out.
Isn’t the core red pill belief that you should hit the gym and make money and act confident? That’s very good advice. Hating the people you are pursuing isn’t.
I strongly believe that's a Motte and Bailey opener. Redpill gets very crazy surprisingly quickly. And not like dating stuff, like Fresh and Fit are full Holocaust deniers.
You don't even want to know how many people I've run into 15 years later who I ran into in 2010-2013 in the heartiste comment section "Hey are you that scott?" "Yes"
"What are you doing now?"
"I'm married with 4 children"
"Me too man"
It's like the liberal who doesn't know any conservative. We are smart enough to not talk about it with you.
Yeah. In retrospect this may have been an early example of algorithms showing me my dumbest opposition, because guys who are not brain damaged (and even ones with good perspectives!) seem to have taken a lot from PUA adjacent communities in their past. but r/TRP always read like a lot of dudes who had never seen, let alone touched, a woman.
I think the idea that 20-something women were routinely having casual sex with hot men in various places came from a lot of RP stories in very specific places.
If you focused on specific neighborhoods in LA, Miami, Vegas, and NYC where RP was doing a lot of its groundwork - that shit was actually true. It’s still true today. Is it all women? No, not even close. But I know a lot of women who have been or are those women. It’s a specific crowd like Burning Man is a specific crowd. The problem that I think some may have extracted (or said) was that this was a generalized thing happening *everywhere*. It definitely wasn’t.
That said, I feel the CHH audience is a bit more on the sexless spectrum and might’ve never been around these things and therefore have the position, “well if I wasn’t having sex in club bathrooms or fucking someone I just met at a bar that night then certainly no one else was”.
The problem with all the red pill stuff is it was derived from pick up culture which was primarily created from the LA club scene. surprisepikachuface that hot LA club girls are super narcissistic and negging works on them.
Sir I can assure you that no person in their 20s in Vegas is going out. It’s all fun 30 year olds hitting Fremont east while the anxious zoomers bedrot and play video games.
> [be me, non-target audience, sifting for dating advice nuggets in inflammatory TRP]
lmao, same, except I did this as a gay guy looking for a high-value dominant man 😂😂
Ended up making a PowerPoint called The Virtuous Twink (pillars: youthfulness, industry, chastity*) and scandalizing my urban-monoculture leftist friends
The PowerPoint of it all gives this that little something extra. I also love the idea that urban-monoculture leftists watch PowerPoints their friends made! *chef’s kiss*
A few things, as someone who went from pretty inconsistent self-esteem to more self-confident in my own skin:
* It IS pointless to be discussing why some women are hotter, that some men prefer certain types of women, and, I suppose, figuring out how you can be that type of woman. It could make sense to be having that type of discussion with a couple of close friends who know you and your life well. But on a large forum, it really is pointless because the variation and the deviation from idealized scenarios is too much. Most people are not fit, and most people who think of themselves as fit aren't fit either - going by rising obesity rates. Most men aren't great providers - the average income isn't that high, and - you need two incomes anyway. And they still manage to have partners, judging by marriage rates. If you establish you aren't that idealized person -- then what? Consign yourself to a nunnery?
* Besides, these discussions ARE full of insecure women anyway, and most well-adjusted women and forum moderators don't want insecure women driving each other crazy with some major insecurity cross-pollination, not on their forum anyway. It IS the right thing to tell them to get more self-confidence rather than ruminating over these things. Otherwise, it would be the single woman equivalent of mom forums where everyone's trying to out-safety each other and tearing each other down for not having a rearfacing carseat at age 8. When I think about it that way, wouldn't you rather mods of some of the crazier mom forums tell people their dear child is probably fine and they should get their OCD looked at, than give them a forum where they larp as normal while making normal moms feel insecure?
* Most healthy people want to be with other healthy people with good boundaries. Reading a situation well enough to take initiative is not dominance - it's just taking initiative. Not having opinions about things isn't submission, it's just not having opinions and not caring to. Wanting someone else to tell you what to do isn't submission, it's being unable to take charge of your own circumstances and essentially expecting some kind of mothering(?) where your partner is responsible for your happiness. Most people are fine with their partner being that way in certain domains, but no one enjoys having to provide that constantly, across the board, unless they themselves have significant issues with control.
* I was pretty insecure until my husband proposed to me as well (though I was almost 30 then), and I gotta say, it's just that kind of circumstance where no one can assure you of an outcome. Going on forums to find ways to make your partner propose to you is similar to buying essential oils from a mormon MLM mom to win the lottery - the outcome is not actually under your control, but you want some soothing that you think is working while you wait for things to take their natural course. You're betting on a man, and there's going to be some level of uncertainty on how things will pan out, and the only way to figure things out is through honest conversation -- and I guess the forums are right that if you're not able to have a honest conversation about these things, it's probably not a great relationship.
Maybe Red Pill chat is the single male equivalent of Carseat Mom forum? Both seem to abhor the normal uncertainties of life and seek to control them. If anything bad happens to you (redpill) or your kid (carseatmom), it's all your fault, but here are things you can do to improve your odds of nothing bad happening, like negging women, or keeping your 3-year-old in a rearfacing carseat.
Red Pill chat is like body building/weightlifting chat. 90% of the people never get to the gym and get strong and whine about which supplements to take online instead of hitting the weights. And with both cases, don't take advice from the 90% who never get better and pretend it doesn't work because people didn't follow the program.
Hmm, I always appreciate CHH's tours through the world of Red Pill, so this is enlightening. But I do think that this article, like a few others, runs the risk of over-generalizing. I think the comment below about not conflating dominance with intention/initiative is pretty spot on. I think people of all genders are attracted to intention/initiative/direction, but we're in a culture which makes it really easy to be passive (again for both/all genders).
I also always have to push back a little bit about CHH's claims that body positivity is a benevolent scam and that certain norms of fitness/grooming are universally of a higher tier or higher value than others. I really think that some of these articles, which are so interesting and rigorous in some ways, would benefit from some critical reading of structuralist/feminist theory about the degree to which these categories are culturally constructed. Not saying that adhering to social norms is unimportant if you're looking for a mate, but I think (anecdotally, woman in my 30s, having dated a lot, currently in a new, but happy and serious relationship) that 1. As one of the comments below says, attraction ≠ chemistry, and 2. chemistry is much more mysterious and less normative than what TRP would have you believe (thank God!). Having dated plenty, and, more importantly, having had lots of close male friends over the years who have confided in me about their love/sex lives, I am constantly surprised by the things men sometimes notice and are drawn to or turned off by (I feel like this is kind of a given for women, but the same holds true there)--and the way that preferences (for style, body type, demeanor, sexual attitude) varies so widely in different cultural environments/micro-context. And I think that's actually one of the most gorgeous things about being human!
Yes, I really agree with this take. Attraction is so interesting, and what people find attractive can vary pretty widely from niche to niche. Chemistry is hard to pin down. And ultimately you need to click really well with just one person.
This is true! There is a very nebulous (and yet important) component of chemistry that cannot be predicted by "hot person with interesting things to talk about." However, as you mentioned, being conventionally attractive and interesting obviously *help.* Congrats on the relationship!
Thanks! Anecdotally, and maybe superficially, I was thinking of specific micro-environments like my rural/crunchy liberal arts college (so, maybe a slightly unconventional, but hardly a truly counter-cultural space),where there were certain women/men who were total hot commodities/extremely sexually/romantically sought after in that specific environment, which you might not assume just based on, say, a picture of them in neutral clothing. They just embodied the "vibe" of what everyone was trying to look like/be/be perceived as in that bubble!
Obviously you probably don't get served as much of this content as I do (thanks instagram algorithm!) but I'd be curious sometime to hear your take on instagram/tiktok dating advice aimed at women (esp. women in their 30s). Some of it I find helpful, but some (as I commented further down) I find very depressing, especially as it seems to encourage women to treat dating like a math problem, and to distrust or devalue chemistry (in a way that I don't think anyone would dare do for men!)
It really bothers me — deeply — that any woman would be bound up with a man who requires his wife maintain a certain look to remain acceptable.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to have the love of a man who accepts me as I am, who values me for my personality more than my appearance.
I’m about to turn 60 and I don’t care about makeup and fashion. I know how to clean up when I want to, but most days it’s braided hair, a bare face and a random dress I bought at Old Navy.
I will continue to age. So will he — although, annoyingly, he continues to rock a barely graying ponytail and looks much younger than 61.
Something often forgotten: the original incel communities were started by guys who were angry the red pill DIDN’T WORK for them. One of the original incel forums was called “PUA Hate.” “Blackpill” as a term is of course a scornful spin on “Redpill.” They had tried all the tips and tricks, got nothing out of it, and decided all the RP gurus were hucksters selling false hope when the truth was they were just genetically unlovable because of their negative canthal tilts and recessed maxilla.
Thats why I'm a little confused with all the red pill talk since so much of the current day discourse is more blackpill doomerism. Is red pill even relevant today?
One of my hotter takes (that I feel is incredibly apparent) is that incels "exist." Like there is indeed no level of social skills, gym, or career that can fix their dating woes.
One very important thing that CHH and several commenters here mention is how unwelcoming a lot of woman-friendly online spaces were to men who felt alone and unwanted - a lot of rhetoric about Nice Guys and the friend-zone and such really defaulted to assuming the absolute worst motives on men’s part, so lonely young guys went where they would find empathy. One reason I’ve become such a fan of CHH (besides her being funny as shit), is her willingness to show grace and empathy to guys who are struggling with dating - I’m a divorced 50something guy, but I’m still very protective of my lonely and confused teens-and-early-20s self.
I recently read "Are you mad at me" by Meg Josephson. It's a good, well-written book on people pleasing, and it's also clearly centered around women's people-pleasing experience. Which is fine!
But to me it really illustrates a contrast. I think the matched book for men is "No More Mr Nice Guy" by Robert Glover, which I got specifically to read as a contrast but haven't dug into yet.
Like, there just isn't a normie space for men who have the male version of a people-pleasing schema...perhaps because sexual desire is too distracting.
I struggle with this. I’m the same age as you and I saw all this content, too. And I treated it like you would expect an Obama voting liberal feminist to treat it.
In hindsight, though, I should’ve been more understanding. There was one particularly embarrassing event where I was drunk at an anime convention, and I got into a playful argument with some fedora guys talking about MGTOW. I was basically making fun of them and calling their ideas dumb.
What I didn’t realize was that despite being a nerd (at an anime convention, hello) I actually did well with women and I generalized my own experience to everyone else.
That was bad and I shouldn’t have done that. But these guys also don’t make it easy. Most of them are just shitheads. And it doesn’t help when some of the more famous ones turn out to literally be slobs living in mom’s basement.
I think one the "blue pill" failings is while a lot of extreme redpill stuff is dumb, in disagreeing led to some other dumb stuff. There was a meme handwaving away all gender differences as social rather than biological. At the time it kinda made sense during the prewoke era but now that enough time has past, gender dynamics remain mostly the same. One could argue a lot of zoomer issues were trying to outsmart traditional gender truthisms
I spent many minutes considering all of this, which is odd because I’ve been married for 38 years. Not my problem! So why did I propose to my wife, and not string her along like a shitlord, or replace her with a younger model as she aged? For one thing, I was aging too! But also because I had life goals—kids, family life—that I cherished, outside of my work. And our goals aligned in a committed relationship. Less worry about “does this relationship look good on me?” And more “are we supporting each other the right way to make children, family, and fidelity work?” I was my own bundle of anxieties about self-worth as a young man, and I saw that being in that particular relationship could help me cope with them, at the same time I could be a helper to my wife, with her specific needs. And there was the sex. Yum. One was in fact the loneliest number for me. I wanted to be part of a two, and was willing to work at it. I didn’t suddenly wake up married, I rushed into the embrace when it felt right.
As an older married man who came of age before TRP I had a similar "not my problem" view, except my sons are 11 and 14, so it sort of is my problem. :-(
Everything you write about points to (one of) the big problems with TRP: it's just insanely reductive about male behavior. If you were to read that crud, you'd think that the only thing I could value or care about (cuz I'm male) is having sex with hot young women, preferably many of them. It's the most restrictive man-box ever.
It’s a niche community but I’ve always wondered how much of femcel ideology is influenced by the redpill. I have a sister who fell down a femcel pipeline and it’s mainly due to the fact that she consumed a lot of redpill content and as a woman, she ended up internalising it.
May as well respond to the meat of the article, too.
As always, red pill is about misogyny. Not everything about it is misogynistic, but misogyny is its reason for being.
CHH has again engaged in my pet peeve of conflating initiative-taking for dominance. They are rather different, if related. But, for instance, it would be dominant for a woman to require her boyfriend to plan their dates and make sure they cater to her desires.
I have never experienced the notion that people would pretend they don’t care about looks. Literally not ever. And I’m well on the left flank of the CHH commentariat. Mainstream reddit advice, which I think CHH has written about, is ALWAYS that your partner is abusing/betraying you and you should break up and whatever they’re doing might even be a crime but IANAL. So maybe there would be people in that pit of crazy who claim that not wanting to date someone due to lack of physical attraction is immoral, but I can assure everyone here that it was never a thing to pretend that it was unacceptable to care about looks.
Yes, the truth is somewhere between everything is your fault and nothing is. For me, the journey was initially thinking that everything was my fault, I must’ve done something wrong to realizing that a lot of the time, what’s going on with people is their own shit and has nothing to do with you. That’s one of the tougher lines to walk in dating and life, generally: when should I reassess what I did because I fucked up vs. when should I just decide that it was a them-thing and just move on.
Lastly, I’m not sure I agree with the notion that people of both genders are bad at saying what they’re attracted to. Maybe I’m just a particularly spectrum-y guy who is in touch with what he likes? Also, it’s absolutely true that women like guys who are basically nice (not to be confused with the 2010s villain capital N-Nice capital G-Guy), and I can confirm this is true because I’m less nice than average, and it certainly has cost me in dating!
I think for people of both genders, there is 1. What you’re attracted to, 2. What *you say* you’re attracted to and 3. Who you end up with, and there are typically vast gaps between all 3 of those things.
You know, I can't really bring myself to agree. I suspect it's true that people might say they are attracted to things that they are attracted to in a literal sense but that are shallow and unimportant in the final analysis (that 6'5" blue eyes song; guys saying they prefer to date a woman who is blonde or has big tits).
But, like, I would say that I'm attracted to women who are smart and interesting to talk to, who likes at least some of the same things I do, who has interests of her own, who has a fairly similar worldview, who I'm physically attracted to, and who is responsible and can problem-solve with common sense. I could imagine ending up with someone who isn't checking every box just because, for whatever reason, the world just lights up when we're together...but I don't really think the world is going to light up if she's not most of those things? I'm not going to fall for some MAGA chick because I'm mesmerized by her perfect body or something like that?
I don’t think it’s always dishonesty or poor self-knowledge. It’s more that chemistry plays such a huge role in partner choice, and it’s so rare to have that connection with someone, that folks will understandably say “am I going to turn down this person just because they don’t check boxes x, y and z?”
Well, it depends what those boxes are. If they're shallow stuff like height or eye color, they really shouldn't be on the list in the first place. But as I said, I can't really imagine some absurd level of chemistry with someone who likes Donald Trump or who has nothing going on or whatever else.
I have an even hotter take around the value of really passionate chemistry. Basically, I think that it kind of blinds you to real issues with compatibility that might rear their heads down the line.
Yeah, short-term chemistry can be hugely misleading. It’s part of how so many women end up with raging assholes. Eye color is very easy to overlook and being MAGA is very much not, but even though I don’t much care for smokers and would prefer someone who listens to, say, something else besides adult contemporary, those are both things I’d be happy to overlook if the person is awesome.
I don't think it's that people are bad at saying what they're attracted to. It's more that people struggle with how to tell someone they're not already attracted to how to change that, and kind of default to talking about how they'd like a person they're already attracted to to act.
Also I agree that “here are all the ways in which I expect you to dominate me, and failure to comply will result in… well, you don’t wanna know” does not really have a submissive ring to it.
It's pretty apparent that CHH uses the word "dominant" to mean, basically, that her husband would plan dates and basically tell her where to be and when, and it was a breath of fresh air vs. college and high school guys who would just go "I dunno, what do you want to do?"
Maybe if she was late she'd get spanked or something; it could very well be that she is also sexually submissive, but I really don't have the sense that CHH's husband is dominant in the sense that he controls what happens essentially whether CHH likes it or not, that he expects her to subsume her desires to his, etc. It really does seem like she's using dominant to mean, basically, making plans.
The thing about red pill/female dating strategy types is that they are correct enough about one thing (sexual attraction being amoral) that many other people don't want to talk about that they can superficially come across as bold, courageous truth-tellers to frustrated, insecure, and immature young people. This mentality has two gigantic problems.
The first is that these movements teach you to despise the opposite sex. If you're going to internalize the red pill movement's misogyny, you will not be capable of having a long-term happy relationship with a woman. Why would you be? If women are the scheming, exploitative hypocrites the movement tells you they are, how could you possibly love and trust one? If you're going to internalize female dating strategy's "relationships are nothing but a transaction" mentality, you are always going to be looking out for yourself and only yourself and keeping constant score. You shouldn't be surprised to discover that's a shitty foundation for a relationship.
Related to the first thing, the second thing is that red pill/FDS have zero insight into making relationships last. The initial spark of attraction, particularly sexual attraction may be amoral, but the ingredients of long-term happiness are decidedly NOT amoral. Since most people say they want long-term, happy and loving relationships, this lacuna matters a great deal. The things that spark initial attraction and the things that make a relationship last are not the same thing, and our culture really struggles to digest this fact. The two big five personality traits that predict long-term relationship success are conscientiousness combined with agreeableness. That shouldn't be surprising. People who care about your feelings and follow through on their end of the relationship are probably going to make you happier five years from now. People who date looking for a partner wisely aren't ignoring sexual attraction; they're ALSO taking five years later into account. It's hard to do this when you're young and horny and you're so attracted to someone that you convince yourself you will make it work no matter what, but sexual attraction, on its own, just cannot do all, or even most of the work the longer the relationship lasts.
Also, this "ask the fisherman, not the fish" advice is kind of midwit. So many of the supposed "fishermen" offering this advice haven't caught any fish (or have to keep throwing them back because they're bad fish). And yes, a lot of the time the opposite sex isn't going to give you useful advice on how to attract them, but it's not because they're scheming and dishonest. It's because if they're not attracted to you, they probably don't know how that could be changed and default instead to giving the advice they'd give to someone they already find attractive. Better advice - find the people in your life who are in the types of relationships you want to have and are happy with them. Instead of asking them for advice, ask them how they met and what they like about the other person. Framed this way, you'll get more honest information than you will if you ask for advice.
Last piece of my little rant. Anyone who says they want to avoid marriage because it's "just a piece of paper" is telling you something interesting about themselves. If marriage is that meaningless, then they wouldn't be trying so hard to avoid it. Who's scared of a piece of paper? Marriage clearly DOES mean something to them, and they are afraid of that something and either do not understand themselves well enough to know what it is, or they're afraid to face it. If you don't want to get married, that's fine, but it's probably better if you can articulate why.
"The first is that these movements teach you to despise the opposite sex. If you're going to internalize the red pill movement's misogyny, you will not be capable of having a long-term happy relationship with a woman. Why would you be? If women are the scheming, exploitative hypocrites the movement tells you they are, how could you possibly love and trust one?"
This right here, this has all but destroyed my dad's life. My parents were coworkers hooking up on the rebound in-between life transitions when they got pregnant, they had no foundation to build a relationship off of other than having a kid together. They were totally incompatible and my mom was so miserable she carried out an affair. My dad thought he had done everything "right" - he had taken responsibility and married my mom, he had tried to be a provider for the family, he had made the kinds of sacrifices men were supposed to make, but he didn't actually respect my mom or even really seem to like her that much- so the infidelity and the divorce made him bitter. Then later on, he found the Red Pill and it fed his bitterness so much that it became all-consuming, anything careless or thoughtless that any individual woman did became an example for how "all women are like that", just full-blown misogyny. Now, he is "content" to live out the last decades of his life alone because he believes a relationship would just be setting himself up to have his life ruined by some bitch.
That situation with your dad is so sad. :-( And I think it illustrates TRP problem. There are other, very different frameworks he could have applied to his situation that would have applied really well, but would have sent him in very different directions.
But our ideology is also our filter - our brains pattern match for the schema we expect to see, so to your dad, perahps the world _is_ (as he sees it) more like a TRP dystopian hell-scape than it is for you and me.
Nothing worse for a man than his own company. I see guys like your dad at work all the time, when the health conditions they’ve been ignoring become impossible to ignore. They’re the ones who walk in with a black foot, or deep jaundice, or a tumour fungating out of their chest wall, who can barely talk to you they’re so unused to speaking to another person. It’s honestly tragic.
1. “default instead to giving the advice they'd give to someone they already find attractive” - YES! Very much this!
2. I’d push back a little on sexual preferences being amoral. I think tastes/preferences are not nearly as cast in stone as people make them out to be. Maybe you can’t/shouldn’t guilt yourself about not being into short dudes or whatever, but there are lots of social factors that come into play. If people can discover at age 60 that they’re gay, they’re certainly able to find it in themselves to be attracted to someone who’s not “toned” or whatever.
About your point 2 - i think it's more about not being able to *choose* who to be attracted to. There's a lot of discourse about "unpacking" why you're attracted to X or Y and how attraction comes from subconscious social conditioning but no real advice on how to change one's attraction.
That is to say that I think attraction absolutely can change but I don't think one can really decide to make that happen.
True! You can’t say “I will do [ABC] and my preference will become [XYZ]”. All you can do is ask yourself why you’re into x and what is so bad about z.
*Do* people discover at age 60 that they’re gay? I feel like every time I’ve seen something resembling that, it’s one of two different scenarios. The first is that they’ve always been attracted to the same sex, but they’ve finally stopped fighting it or hiding it. The second is that they find themselves attracted to someone of the same sex for the first time, but it’s not like they lost all attraction to the opposite sex, so it’s more that they’ve discovered they’re bisexual.
The 2nd scenario is what I have in mind. In the case of women, it does sometime seem to be accompanied by a loss of interest in the opposite sex, but for all I know maybe they were kidding themselves the whole time about being into men.
One sort of redpiller I can't get over are the guys who get themselves in a real rage over the idea that women (and only women) are 'lying' to men by saying "looks don't matter" or "it's what's on the inside that counts." It's such a childish oversimplification. I just think of someone stomping their feet when I see those memes about how hot guys get away with lines that ugly guys don't.
The other thing that really made me lose any respect for the concept of these guys giving 'hard truths' is how they will argue to the death against any woman who claims to not care about (for example) height. It's about the same intellectual level as somebody who says "well the studies that say chocolate is the most popular flavour are WRONG and FLAWED because *I* hate chocolate".
And I get some of it's a backlash to people saying looks/height etc never matter at all but surely it's hardly a leap to imagine that even if there's a general preference for tall men, not every single woman would have it... or that height, like everything else, is just one of many ingredients in the bizarre alchemy of attraction soup.
Its the volume of the lying that starts to add up. Something about the topic of human attraction makes a lot of people completely lose all their integrity.
What do you mean by the volume of the lying?
When there is one lie it can be addressed and discussed. When its literally beginning to end lies (with no truth), the experience is significantly more frustrating.
Loved this comment. Thank you for writing it. I was really feeling miserable and wondering if truly these manosphere spaces is all we can offer as a society to apparently both boys and girls so they learn the “truth” about each other. We are truly doomed as a society if this evil is all we have to give young children.
I mean... the manosphere type of cultural group will almost certainly 'win' but I'm not really sure what a win condition looks like.
I don’t agree. There’s better things coming for social media and substack is just the start.
Hopefully, I just don't think that's in the cards. I should probably write my "debut" article about this, lol.
The reason Redpill is winning (and going to win) isn't that it's ideas are good, its that is absolutely destroys its direct competitors.
1. Social Progressives
2. Religious 'retvrn' people.
1. Social progressives usually don't really understand the questions being asked, but when they do have answers they are horrible. "Just be a good person" is bad advice, but it also directly insults anyone looking for advice. Also if you take them at their word you end up with a ton of flat earther tier beliefs; such as; "looks don't matter," "girls just want someone who's nice," "dating is equally difficult for everyone."
2. Religious people are stuck in a loop where they basically just wish people were different than how they actually are. The advice, while earnest, of "go to church" is absolutely useless for non-Christians or secular people. And yes this is a different group than redpillers; if you can't tell the difference between "I want to fuck 10 girls in 9 days" and "I want to baptize my 5 children in the name of Christ" just aren't the same types of goals.
The classical liberal who doesn’t sugarcoat things but still hold a non-nihilist view on life - ppl like CHH are the alternative. You don’t need to agree. Wish you the best on your article.
CHH is the alternative /srs
But she won't be a household name for at least another 6 months.
You make a good point about agreeableness and conscientiousness being predictors of long term relationships success. I think this gets interesting (and frustrating, and tragic) when we start looking at cultural shifts that have taken place in recent times.
Under the best of circumstances, men who are too agreeable and too conscientious will have difficulty landing a girlfriend - you have to cut against the grain of everyday, ordinary, non-seductive reality to get things started and to build a little frisson and sexual tension - but in recent years metoo style feminism has made it so men have to be even less agreeable and conscientious to make things happen.
If you're agreeable and conscientious and you see women all around you (or even just on the internet) talking about how much they hate male attention, how they don't want strange men to talk to them, how men are basically this terrible, dangerous, creepy, rapey, privileged, disgusting imposition in their lives most or all of the time; if you're conscientiously agreeable towards all the talk of affirmative consent, and the various ways in which a certain type of feminist spent a straight decade insisting that men be more deferent in relation to women and advising them to be "decent human beings" by acting in a way that's directly contradictory to what women tend to respond positively to at the beginning of relationships, sexual/romantic relationships never get off the ground in the first place.
For that matter, a deferent approach as a man has the tendency to attract women with cluster b personality disorder traits - they can smell the potential for the for codependent relationships they're seeking in that - so men who are too agreeable and conscientious can also end up with less positive impressions of women as a result of their direct experiences with these types.
Inevitably, some men recognize the general problem (if only obliquely or emotionally) and then swing hard in the other direction, turn to an extreme embrace of the red pill stuff, and become embittered towards their own previous aspirations for a happy relationship, which end up feeling like the naive dreams of a child.
To cut a long story short, to me it seems like 2010s feminism was basically one big dysfunctional and antisocial recipe for ensuring that fewer healthy, successful, long term relationships would form.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but on the other hand, a lot of angry online feminists do seem to be partnered up! I suspect that 20-30something women who are without a partner for long stretches are far more likely to be struggling single moms than educated feminists who are alone by choice because no man is good enough.
No one teaches you anything. Take some agency over your life.
This is actually the kind of thinking that keeps you stupid and not learning. You gotta find people who are willing to teach you things you want to learn and be coachable.
if ones an adult looking for a savior the issue isn't the quality of savior
Most people get ahead in life thanks to having a godfather or a mentor or a great boss who showed them the ropes. Or a parent who guided them. Is that bad now and should oprah return all her success because she was mentored by maya angelou?
Once you become an adult
You're talking about childhood
was maya angelou mentoring a baby oprah?
The word "mentor" is almost exclusively used with adults.
lmfao ok big boy
Kind of an odd response to what I said. What makes you think I don't have agency over my life?
A+++
this is so relatable.. I was pushed into it out of a combination of morbid curiosity, inexperience and loneliness: no one around me would have indulged these questions then. I was pretty sheltered and wanted to know what men were *really* thinking, and what my value *really* was, but ended up absorbing all these horrible ideas about my age, value, personality and beauty that unfortunately aligned with a lot of the narratives I was surrounded by in church.
I’ve had trouble shaking some of these ideas to this day.
I am so sorry that was your experience. I have a feeling it was for many women!
One way you can tell that the red pill isn't what men are *really* thinking - look at the people in your life who are in the happiest relationships. Do they act "red pill"? I'd be willing to bet they're not like that at all.
I guarantee you my wife has never heard of the red pill, she has certainly never heard of me talking of the red pill and yet, without the red pill circa 2012 version, I'd never have met her and got married.
Wonder how she would feel about being past her sell-by date after age 30.
Everybody ages. The fact that people read the most cringe single “red pillers” on reddit without actually reading any of the source material and come up with this shit. Have you read rollo? Heartiste?
This is a little too “how can you dismiss Dave Matthews Band when you haven’t even heard every single note they’ve ever recorded” for me.
One book. Probably the biggest one. the rational male is a couple hundred pages and is known as "the godfather of the redpill"
This is more like "How can you dismiss Dave matthews bad if you've never even heard a single song played by dave matthews"
"Oh, i read reddit criticizing him"
Hmm. If I had taken the red pill, my wife would never have married me. Different folks, different strokes, I guess!
You are reading the most deranged takes from the most deranged proponents on the internet.
Speaking of which, that's an interesting Substack you have there, pal!
Depends. Since its broad umbrella, there is a lot of normie stuff.
From your comments, it sounds like something you learned from TRP was formative and important to you. I read a dozen Rollo blog posts and it basically re-enforced my negative priors.
What did you get that was important, valuable and meaningful?
A lot of men go unhinged when they find out women are just people. The fantasy is ruined. That doesnt make it not true. The red pill guys who use it to have sex with as many women as they can either end up finding jesus or going insane
The people I know irl who spout redpill stuff are usually bitter middle-aged men who hate their wives, divorced men, and socially awkward young men with zero rizz, EXACTLY who you would imagine. And all of them are varying levels of conventional attractiveness! Also fit and masculine. lol.
Meanwhile, the other men, the ones who treat women like people, are friendly, funny, and very noticeably surrounded by other men and women.
The redpill guys are generally better looking in terms of what men like most (muscles, beards, zero facial movement lol), but no one likes them!
I'd you're telling people in your life about the redpill that's because you're seeking their validation about it, or attempting to manipulate them into it.
So if you're doing it right no one would ever know
Doing what right?
Take a guess
Nah. Doesn't seem worth it.
There’s an unfortunate overlap between red pill content and the way traditional gender roles are sometimes discussed in church circles, religious media, etc. I feel like some female religious writers have caught on to this and written about it, but men not so much. It can be quite challenging to unpack it all. And then there’s a whole grift problem of female red pillers who have big followings because there's an insatiable thirst for this content.
They are completely different though. Winning conditions being "fuck 10 girls in 9 days" and "baptize 6 children in the name of Christ" just aren't the same kinds of goals.
I experienced the same as a teen. I was an insecure and lonely high schooler who never got attention from boys, so I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. I stopped right around when I had a glow up/grew out of my awkward phase, which coincided with starting college and meeting a lot more like minded people including guys who were into me.
This is also relatable to me coming from the other side of things.
A lot of my worldview conflict with both:
1. the right wing sicko “kidnap a woman and keep her in the woodshed” red pill submission guys who are along that spectrum but not as far (sometimes just as slightly as simply treating their wife as childish, with disdain or silent contempt- STEM guys are like this a lot) ranging to the homestead homemaker slave to the more empowered homemaker influencer consumerist secularist
and
2. the upper middle class lib CHH types and their Christian Grey hot Ezra Newsom husbands (sorry!! You’re my favorite)
come from a similar underlying value ethos, the libs just kinda believe they are winners and the right wing guys believe they need to try harder to be winners and this whole world view is transposed into relationships like
did anyone else watch that movie Materialists, these are both MATERIALIST worldviews where people become a value judgement
when romance and human communication and relationship and experience together is individuated and personal in a way you can’t put into a spreadsheet or reproduce in a VR headset or in a laboratory. It happens once just once between you in time and place in all of human history and just you know your half of it
maybe that’s why my disenchantment with marriage is so strong because so many marriages don’t have the enchantment, it’s just a political institution- how many wives have i known
how many marriages have i known less enchanted than even a celibate friendship I’ve had- some of these people truly hate each other for the sake of some kind of capital allocation scheme KMS
This is why its a good thing for normal people to be able to talk about these kinds of things.
CHH once wrote a piece on how when you’re a straight woman who wants a relationship with a man, it helps to, you know, actually like men.
But it’s also true that if you’re a straight man, it helps to like women!
That’s the fatal flaw of the Red Pillers: they don’t like women. They see women only as a piece of ass. If a woman says “a man’s only worth is the money he earns,” you would say that woman doesn’t like men and isn’t on track to a happy relationship with one, right?
Yes. Liking women is kind of important to have enjoyable interactions with them! I suppose if you're attractive enough, women might still be into you, but if you hate them, you won't have a very good time long term.
red pillers are super gay
It's a bit of a digression, but TRP culture reflects a more general problem: If the mainstream insists that certain topics are verboten, only assholes and anons will be able to honestly discuss them. This might seem worth it in the short term, but especially with the internet existing it imo always ends up blowing up into everyone's face sooner or later.
On the article itself, very interesting perspective! I've always been more on the periphery of TRP spaces because while I think that they sometimes just are simply correct about some things that you're not supposed to openly blurt out in polite company (a trait you seem to share with them), they've always been a bit whiny and their proposed course of actions was at odds with my own goals (just a bog-standard long-term monogamous relationship for the purpose of creating a family eventually! Disgusting, I know). Your article makes me wonder whether I was just insufficiently creative in wringing out useful advice. But, happily enough, it doesn't matter anymore anyway.
"only assholes and anons will be able to honestly discuss them."
This! My fear (as a father) is that my sons will find something on TRP that is true and not commonly said elsewhere and then assume the rest of what TRP says is in the same epistemological category.
You should tell them that. That they might find some useful advice from weirdos, but it doesn't mean they should trust everything they say. I sure wish I got that advice earlier
Yup. And combining this with all the flat earther tier takes by more mainstream people a lot of people will whiplash into more redpill stuff.
Stupid takes such as: "looks don't matter," "girls just want someone who's nice," and "everyone has an equally difficult time dating."
That’s what drew me to TRP in my late teens. It seemed to me that they were the only ones halfway honest about hoe sexual attraction actually works.
I was always skeptical of TRP because they asserted so many things that were obviously, on their face, wrong. For example, that most 20-something women are routinely going out to clubs and banging guys in the bathrooms.
Also, non-toxic dating advice and discourse seems much better than it was in the early-to-mid 2010s? We’ve moved beyond “just be yourself”. If anything now I think mainstream discourse has overcorrected to the “it’s your fault, use your agency” side of things for dating (at least on men’s side of things).
Here's a big thing that should make young men skeptical of the red pill - look at the men in your life who are in happy, long-term relationships. How many of them achieved this with red pill behavior?
The vibe I got from the red pill guys is that they were mostly angry, lonely nerds who couldn’t find healthier outlets for their emotions. And a lot of them seem like the types who manage to have casual sex once or twice a year and then think they’re gods and have women Figured Out.
Isn’t the core red pill belief that you should hit the gym and make money and act confident? That’s very good advice. Hating the people you are pursuing isn’t.
No. Most people use "red pilling" to describe being converted to right wing beliefs, particularly about gender.
Kinda.
I strongly believe that's a Motte and Bailey opener. Redpill gets very crazy surprisingly quickly. And not like dating stuff, like Fresh and Fit are full Holocaust deniers.
You don't even want to know how many people I've run into 15 years later who I ran into in 2010-2013 in the heartiste comment section "Hey are you that scott?" "Yes"
"What are you doing now?"
"I'm married with 4 children"
"Me too man"
It's like the liberal who doesn't know any conservative. We are smart enough to not talk about it with you.
So guys grew up and got married. I think there's a little too much correlation-causation fallacy happening here.
The point of the redpill was the late bloomers getting some advice. The hopeless will always be hopeless
Because a lot of Redpill stuff is a huge Motte and Bailey, they would say 99% or higher.
The openers are always "get in shape, and get your life together and your dating life will improve" which covers pretty much all relationships.
Yeah. In retrospect this may have been an early example of algorithms showing me my dumbest opposition, because guys who are not brain damaged (and even ones with good perspectives!) seem to have taken a lot from PUA adjacent communities in their past. but r/TRP always read like a lot of dudes who had never seen, let alone touched, a woman.
I think the idea that 20-something women were routinely having casual sex with hot men in various places came from a lot of RP stories in very specific places.
If you focused on specific neighborhoods in LA, Miami, Vegas, and NYC where RP was doing a lot of its groundwork - that shit was actually true. It’s still true today. Is it all women? No, not even close. But I know a lot of women who have been or are those women. It’s a specific crowd like Burning Man is a specific crowd. The problem that I think some may have extracted (or said) was that this was a generalized thing happening *everywhere*. It definitely wasn’t.
That said, I feel the CHH audience is a bit more on the sexless spectrum and might’ve never been around these things and therefore have the position, “well if I wasn’t having sex in club bathrooms or fucking someone I just met at a bar that night then certainly no one else was”.
The problem with all the red pill stuff is it was derived from pick up culture which was primarily created from the LA club scene. surprisepikachuface that hot LA club girls are super narcissistic and negging works on them.
>Vegas
Sir I can assure you that no person in their 20s in Vegas is going out. It’s all fun 30 year olds hitting Fremont east while the anxious zoomers bedrot and play video games.
No one is having sex anymore.
> [be me, non-target audience, sifting for dating advice nuggets in inflammatory TRP]
lmao, same, except I did this as a gay guy looking for a high-value dominant man 😂😂
Ended up making a PowerPoint called The Virtuous Twink (pillars: youthfulness, industry, chastity*) and scandalizing my urban-monoculture leftist friends
Hahahha love it
The PowerPoint of it all gives this that little something extra. I also love the idea that urban-monoculture leftists watch PowerPoints their friends made! *chef’s kiss*
.... I am thinking in stereotypes but I kinda feel like that's a more useful perspective for it lol
A few things, as someone who went from pretty inconsistent self-esteem to more self-confident in my own skin:
* It IS pointless to be discussing why some women are hotter, that some men prefer certain types of women, and, I suppose, figuring out how you can be that type of woman. It could make sense to be having that type of discussion with a couple of close friends who know you and your life well. But on a large forum, it really is pointless because the variation and the deviation from idealized scenarios is too much. Most people are not fit, and most people who think of themselves as fit aren't fit either - going by rising obesity rates. Most men aren't great providers - the average income isn't that high, and - you need two incomes anyway. And they still manage to have partners, judging by marriage rates. If you establish you aren't that idealized person -- then what? Consign yourself to a nunnery?
* Besides, these discussions ARE full of insecure women anyway, and most well-adjusted women and forum moderators don't want insecure women driving each other crazy with some major insecurity cross-pollination, not on their forum anyway. It IS the right thing to tell them to get more self-confidence rather than ruminating over these things. Otherwise, it would be the single woman equivalent of mom forums where everyone's trying to out-safety each other and tearing each other down for not having a rearfacing carseat at age 8. When I think about it that way, wouldn't you rather mods of some of the crazier mom forums tell people their dear child is probably fine and they should get their OCD looked at, than give them a forum where they larp as normal while making normal moms feel insecure?
* Most healthy people want to be with other healthy people with good boundaries. Reading a situation well enough to take initiative is not dominance - it's just taking initiative. Not having opinions about things isn't submission, it's just not having opinions and not caring to. Wanting someone else to tell you what to do isn't submission, it's being unable to take charge of your own circumstances and essentially expecting some kind of mothering(?) where your partner is responsible for your happiness. Most people are fine with their partner being that way in certain domains, but no one enjoys having to provide that constantly, across the board, unless they themselves have significant issues with control.
* I was pretty insecure until my husband proposed to me as well (though I was almost 30 then), and I gotta say, it's just that kind of circumstance where no one can assure you of an outcome. Going on forums to find ways to make your partner propose to you is similar to buying essential oils from a mormon MLM mom to win the lottery - the outcome is not actually under your control, but you want some soothing that you think is working while you wait for things to take their natural course. You're betting on a man, and there's going to be some level of uncertainty on how things will pan out, and the only way to figure things out is through honest conversation -- and I guess the forums are right that if you're not able to have a honest conversation about these things, it's probably not a great relationship.
Maybe Red Pill chat is the single male equivalent of Carseat Mom forum? Both seem to abhor the normal uncertainties of life and seek to control them. If anything bad happens to you (redpill) or your kid (carseatmom), it's all your fault, but here are things you can do to improve your odds of nothing bad happening, like negging women, or keeping your 3-year-old in a rearfacing carseat.
The Car Seat mom forum analogy omg hahaha
“Driving each other crazy with major insecurity cross-pollination” cracked my shit up!
Red Pill chat is like body building/weightlifting chat. 90% of the people never get to the gym and get strong and whine about which supplements to take online instead of hitting the weights. And with both cases, don't take advice from the 90% who never get better and pretend it doesn't work because people didn't follow the program.
Hmm, I always appreciate CHH's tours through the world of Red Pill, so this is enlightening. But I do think that this article, like a few others, runs the risk of over-generalizing. I think the comment below about not conflating dominance with intention/initiative is pretty spot on. I think people of all genders are attracted to intention/initiative/direction, but we're in a culture which makes it really easy to be passive (again for both/all genders).
I also always have to push back a little bit about CHH's claims that body positivity is a benevolent scam and that certain norms of fitness/grooming are universally of a higher tier or higher value than others. I really think that some of these articles, which are so interesting and rigorous in some ways, would benefit from some critical reading of structuralist/feminist theory about the degree to which these categories are culturally constructed. Not saying that adhering to social norms is unimportant if you're looking for a mate, but I think (anecdotally, woman in my 30s, having dated a lot, currently in a new, but happy and serious relationship) that 1. As one of the comments below says, attraction ≠ chemistry, and 2. chemistry is much more mysterious and less normative than what TRP would have you believe (thank God!). Having dated plenty, and, more importantly, having had lots of close male friends over the years who have confided in me about their love/sex lives, I am constantly surprised by the things men sometimes notice and are drawn to or turned off by (I feel like this is kind of a given for women, but the same holds true there)--and the way that preferences (for style, body type, demeanor, sexual attitude) varies so widely in different cultural environments/micro-context. And I think that's actually one of the most gorgeous things about being human!
Yes, I really agree with this take. Attraction is so interesting, and what people find attractive can vary pretty widely from niche to niche. Chemistry is hard to pin down. And ultimately you need to click really well with just one person.
This is true! There is a very nebulous (and yet important) component of chemistry that cannot be predicted by "hot person with interesting things to talk about." However, as you mentioned, being conventionally attractive and interesting obviously *help.* Congrats on the relationship!
Thanks! Anecdotally, and maybe superficially, I was thinking of specific micro-environments like my rural/crunchy liberal arts college (so, maybe a slightly unconventional, but hardly a truly counter-cultural space),where there were certain women/men who were total hot commodities/extremely sexually/romantically sought after in that specific environment, which you might not assume just based on, say, a picture of them in neutral clothing. They just embodied the "vibe" of what everyone was trying to look like/be/be perceived as in that bubble!
Obviously you probably don't get served as much of this content as I do (thanks instagram algorithm!) but I'd be curious sometime to hear your take on instagram/tiktok dating advice aimed at women (esp. women in their 30s). Some of it I find helpful, but some (as I commented further down) I find very depressing, especially as it seems to encourage women to treat dating like a math problem, and to distrust or devalue chemistry (in a way that I don't think anyone would dare do for men!)
It really bothers me — deeply — that any woman would be bound up with a man who requires his wife maintain a certain look to remain acceptable.
I cannot tell you how good it feels to have the love of a man who accepts me as I am, who values me for my personality more than my appearance.
I’m about to turn 60 and I don’t care about makeup and fashion. I know how to clean up when I want to, but most days it’s braided hair, a bare face and a random dress I bought at Old Navy.
I will continue to age. So will he — although, annoyingly, he continues to rock a barely graying ponytail and looks much younger than 61.
Something often forgotten: the original incel communities were started by guys who were angry the red pill DIDN’T WORK for them. One of the original incel forums was called “PUA Hate.” “Blackpill” as a term is of course a scornful spin on “Redpill.” They had tried all the tips and tricks, got nothing out of it, and decided all the RP gurus were hucksters selling false hope when the truth was they were just genetically unlovable because of their negative canthal tilts and recessed maxilla.
Thats why I'm a little confused with all the red pill talk since so much of the current day discourse is more blackpill doomerism. Is red pill even relevant today?
The original original incel community was founded by a bisexual woman named Alana who was having trouble dating. And obviously it got away from her.
One of my hotter takes (that I feel is incredibly apparent) is that incels "exist." Like there is indeed no level of social skills, gym, or career that can fix their dating woes.
One very important thing that CHH and several commenters here mention is how unwelcoming a lot of woman-friendly online spaces were to men who felt alone and unwanted - a lot of rhetoric about Nice Guys and the friend-zone and such really defaulted to assuming the absolute worst motives on men’s part, so lonely young guys went where they would find empathy. One reason I’ve become such a fan of CHH (besides her being funny as shit), is her willingness to show grace and empathy to guys who are struggling with dating - I’m a divorced 50something guy, but I’m still very protective of my lonely and confused teens-and-early-20s self.
I recently read "Are you mad at me" by Meg Josephson. It's a good, well-written book on people pleasing, and it's also clearly centered around women's people-pleasing experience. Which is fine!
But to me it really illustrates a contrast. I think the matched book for men is "No More Mr Nice Guy" by Robert Glover, which I got specifically to read as a contrast but haven't dug into yet.
Like, there just isn't a normie space for men who have the male version of a people-pleasing schema...perhaps because sexual desire is too distracting.
I struggle with this. I’m the same age as you and I saw all this content, too. And I treated it like you would expect an Obama voting liberal feminist to treat it.
In hindsight, though, I should’ve been more understanding. There was one particularly embarrassing event where I was drunk at an anime convention, and I got into a playful argument with some fedora guys talking about MGTOW. I was basically making fun of them and calling their ideas dumb.
What I didn’t realize was that despite being a nerd (at an anime convention, hello) I actually did well with women and I generalized my own experience to everyone else.
That was bad and I shouldn’t have done that. But these guys also don’t make it easy. Most of them are just shitheads. And it doesn’t help when some of the more famous ones turn out to literally be slobs living in mom’s basement.
I think one the "blue pill" failings is while a lot of extreme redpill stuff is dumb, in disagreeing led to some other dumb stuff. There was a meme handwaving away all gender differences as social rather than biological. At the time it kinda made sense during the prewoke era but now that enough time has past, gender dynamics remain mostly the same. One could argue a lot of zoomer issues were trying to outsmart traditional gender truthisms
I spent many minutes considering all of this, which is odd because I’ve been married for 38 years. Not my problem! So why did I propose to my wife, and not string her along like a shitlord, or replace her with a younger model as she aged? For one thing, I was aging too! But also because I had life goals—kids, family life—that I cherished, outside of my work. And our goals aligned in a committed relationship. Less worry about “does this relationship look good on me?” And more “are we supporting each other the right way to make children, family, and fidelity work?” I was my own bundle of anxieties about self-worth as a young man, and I saw that being in that particular relationship could help me cope with them, at the same time I could be a helper to my wife, with her specific needs. And there was the sex. Yum. One was in fact the loneliest number for me. I wanted to be part of a two, and was willing to work at it. I didn’t suddenly wake up married, I rushed into the embrace when it felt right.
As an older married man who came of age before TRP I had a similar "not my problem" view, except my sons are 11 and 14, so it sort of is my problem. :-(
Everything you write about points to (one of) the big problems with TRP: it's just insanely reductive about male behavior. If you were to read that crud, you'd think that the only thing I could value or care about (cuz I'm male) is having sex with hot young women, preferably many of them. It's the most restrictive man-box ever.
I hate being in a man box! Somebody give me a pair of scissors so I can cut a hole and escape.
As a man, I am obligated to tell you that the Right Way® out of the man-box is with an angle grinder with the blade guard removed. :-)
I’ll hop in Amazon now. Thx for the tip.
Parents of an adult son have a role to play in preventing a delay that is unfair to the son's girlfriend.
It’s a niche community but I’ve always wondered how much of femcel ideology is influenced by the redpill. I have a sister who fell down a femcel pipeline and it’s mainly due to the fact that she consumed a lot of redpill content and as a woman, she ended up internalising it.
what's femcel?
May as well respond to the meat of the article, too.
As always, red pill is about misogyny. Not everything about it is misogynistic, but misogyny is its reason for being.
CHH has again engaged in my pet peeve of conflating initiative-taking for dominance. They are rather different, if related. But, for instance, it would be dominant for a woman to require her boyfriend to plan their dates and make sure they cater to her desires.
I have never experienced the notion that people would pretend they don’t care about looks. Literally not ever. And I’m well on the left flank of the CHH commentariat. Mainstream reddit advice, which I think CHH has written about, is ALWAYS that your partner is abusing/betraying you and you should break up and whatever they’re doing might even be a crime but IANAL. So maybe there would be people in that pit of crazy who claim that not wanting to date someone due to lack of physical attraction is immoral, but I can assure everyone here that it was never a thing to pretend that it was unacceptable to care about looks.
Yes, the truth is somewhere between everything is your fault and nothing is. For me, the journey was initially thinking that everything was my fault, I must’ve done something wrong to realizing that a lot of the time, what’s going on with people is their own shit and has nothing to do with you. That’s one of the tougher lines to walk in dating and life, generally: when should I reassess what I did because I fucked up vs. when should I just decide that it was a them-thing and just move on.
Lastly, I’m not sure I agree with the notion that people of both genders are bad at saying what they’re attracted to. Maybe I’m just a particularly spectrum-y guy who is in touch with what he likes? Also, it’s absolutely true that women like guys who are basically nice (not to be confused with the 2010s villain capital N-Nice capital G-Guy), and I can confirm this is true because I’m less nice than average, and it certainly has cost me in dating!
I think for people of both genders, there is 1. What you’re attracted to, 2. What *you say* you’re attracted to and 3. Who you end up with, and there are typically vast gaps between all 3 of those things.
You know, I can't really bring myself to agree. I suspect it's true that people might say they are attracted to things that they are attracted to in a literal sense but that are shallow and unimportant in the final analysis (that 6'5" blue eyes song; guys saying they prefer to date a woman who is blonde or has big tits).
But, like, I would say that I'm attracted to women who are smart and interesting to talk to, who likes at least some of the same things I do, who has interests of her own, who has a fairly similar worldview, who I'm physically attracted to, and who is responsible and can problem-solve with common sense. I could imagine ending up with someone who isn't checking every box just because, for whatever reason, the world just lights up when we're together...but I don't really think the world is going to light up if she's not most of those things? I'm not going to fall for some MAGA chick because I'm mesmerized by her perfect body or something like that?
I don’t think it’s always dishonesty or poor self-knowledge. It’s more that chemistry plays such a huge role in partner choice, and it’s so rare to have that connection with someone, that folks will understandably say “am I going to turn down this person just because they don’t check boxes x, y and z?”
Well, it depends what those boxes are. If they're shallow stuff like height or eye color, they really shouldn't be on the list in the first place. But as I said, I can't really imagine some absurd level of chemistry with someone who likes Donald Trump or who has nothing going on or whatever else.
I have an even hotter take around the value of really passionate chemistry. Basically, I think that it kind of blinds you to real issues with compatibility that might rear their heads down the line.
Yeah, short-term chemistry can be hugely misleading. It’s part of how so many women end up with raging assholes. Eye color is very easy to overlook and being MAGA is very much not, but even though I don’t much care for smokers and would prefer someone who listens to, say, something else besides adult contemporary, those are both things I’d be happy to overlook if the person is awesome.
I think the skipping over of "who I'm physically attracted to" here is an example of what CHH was trying to point out.
I don't think it's that people are bad at saying what they're attracted to. It's more that people struggle with how to tell someone they're not already attracted to how to change that, and kind of default to talking about how they'd like a person they're already attracted to to act.
Also I agree that “here are all the ways in which I expect you to dominate me, and failure to comply will result in… well, you don’t wanna know” does not really have a submissive ring to it.
It's pretty apparent that CHH uses the word "dominant" to mean, basically, that her husband would plan dates and basically tell her where to be and when, and it was a breath of fresh air vs. college and high school guys who would just go "I dunno, what do you want to do?"
Maybe if she was late she'd get spanked or something; it could very well be that she is also sexually submissive, but I really don't have the sense that CHH's husband is dominant in the sense that he controls what happens essentially whether CHH likes it or not, that he expects her to subsume her desires to his, etc. It really does seem like she's using dominant to mean, basically, making plans.
And role-playing sex games. She's said that explicitly. Which is fine! I'm just elaborating on what she calls "dominance."