This is the most selfish thing I’ve written so far.

A few weeks ago, I was driving my car and I realized that the driver seat seemed a little low compared to the rest of the car. Was my seat crooked? No, the seat was fine. Suddenly, I felt a pit in my stomach. I got out of the car and hoped that it wasn’t what I thought that it was.

It was. The tire went flat. Welp.

To make things worse, it was below freezing outside and I had not put on nearly enough layers to keep myself warm. Double welp.

With no other options, I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. However, it turned out that the lug nuts were frozen in place and could not be easily removed. That’s how I found myself stuck on the side of the road with a flat in subzero temperatures. Triple welp.

My reaction?

I’m a calm and gentle person by nature and it takes a lot to get me angry. So, when something does get me ticked off then you better believe it’s a big thing.

This ticks me off. Buckle up because it’s about to get real.

Recently I came across a post on Reddit where the poster asked “How much of the Red Pill is true?” and “Do women really respond to this quite well? Which type of women? All of them? I’m actually now scared to continue dating this girl now because I feel like eventually I’ll be the boring guy she is dating and she’ll cheat on me eventually with the Red Pill guy. The rock hard built guy who has lots of friends and social dominance.”

Ugh! It ticks me off that The Red Pill exists!!

What is The Red Pill?

If you don’t know what The Red Pill is then consider yourself lucky. I hope you hang on to your innocence for as long as you can.

Okay, okay. I get sarcastic and I start swearing when I’m angry but I’ll try to put that aside for the sake of writing a coherent article. No promises, though!

The Red Pill is a subreddit on the Reddit internet forums that purports to be about “Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men”. In reality, it’s ridden with misogyny and sleazy tactics that are utterly disrespectful to women.

I mean, look at that post at the bottom of the screen “7 Tips on keeping a Plate”. They don’t even recognize women as human beings. They refer to women as “plates”. FUCKING PLATES! And it’s got OVER 100 UPVOTES!!

Here’s a few examples of what they preach:

They teach “dread game” or making your girlfriend fear that you’re about to break up with her in order to make her do what you want her to do

Women are hypergamous and that they instinctually seek out the best Alpha male available, even if that means leaving the man that they are currently dating (or are married to)

Alphas make up 20% of the male population and have sex with 80% of women

If a woman is hesitant about having sex then you need to push past her “last minute resistance”

They believe that “All Women Are Like That” and that she’ll constantly throw “shit tests” at you to determine how much of an Alpha you really are

About that last bullet. According to The Red Pill, if she says: “I’m mad at you!” then it’s a shit test. The incorrect or Beta response (apparently) is to ask her what’s wrong or how you can make it better. Supposedly, the correct or Alpha response is to say something like “Good”, “I like you better mad”, or “That’s too bad. Frowning causes wrinkles.”

Does that sound like a bunch of nonsense to you? If so, that’s a good thing because it means you’re a decent human being. Common sense tells us that a lot of their ideas are wrong, that dread game is a scummy tactic, that women can’t be blanket generalized as hypergamous, and that shit tests are idiotic.

The truth about “Alpha” and “Beta”

According to The Red Pill, the “Alphas” form 20% of the men and they get to have sex with 80% of the women. This is commonly referred to as “Alpha Fucks/Beta Bucks” by random weirdos on the internet who have no formal education in human behavior and yet who claim to understand women better than women understand themselves. If you pass her “shit tests” then you can prove yourself an alpha but if you fail then you’re a beta.

The Red Pill claims that this is how wolves behave in nature. The Alpha wolf is the leader of his pack and has the first choice of female wolves to choose from, while the Betas get his leftovers. They use this to justify acting like a jerk in real life because that’s supposedly how Alphas behave.

That’s also wrong.

Alpha and Beta don’t even exist in nature. The terms alpha and beta were first popularized in part by Dr. David L. Mech in 1970 based on his observations of wolves—in captivity. However, in 1999 he realized that wolves don’t naturally behave that way without human intervention and has since renounced the concept of alpha and beta. That’s right, The Red Pill is based on concepts that have been disproven for almost 20 years!

Why do this, then? Why use the terms alpha and beta when they’ve been demonstrated to be false? What’s really going on is that alpha and beta are used as a recruitment strategy. It forms a sort of club, and anyone who is a part of their in-crowd is labeled an “Alpha” and anyone who isn’t is labeled a “Beta”. The people who have swallowed The Red Pill and accepted the alternative facts as objective facts become their own clique, like the way that the jocks or cheerleaders or nerds form their own groups in high school.

After all, you don’t want to be a beta do you? You don’t want to lose your woman to one of the alphas who are having sex with 80% of the women right??

Forming their own clique allows them to rationalize away any logical argument against their ideology. If someone tells them that alpha and beta don’t actually exist in nature, they can just say “Oh, don’t listen to what he’s saying. He’s just a beta.”

It provides a way for blame someone else for your problems

As Dale Carnegie writes in How to Win Friends and Influence People, the infamous gangster Al Capone never thought himself guilty but instead saw himself as an unfairly persecuted man who only wanted to help others. When we fail at something, one of the hardest things we can possibly do is to take an honest look at ourselves and try to identify what we did wrong. It’s much, much easier to find someone or something else to blame for our shortcomings.

That guy who was my classmate in school and is now getting paid more than I am? He’s just a brown-nosing suck-up. I’m having trouble getting a date? It’s because I’m short and/or Asian. My friends keep beating me in Mario Party? They’re just lucky. As the Joker said in The Lego Batman Movie, “I’m not your worst enemy. Your worst enemy is you.”

This kind of sleazy advice is prevalent because it offers men who are struggling with women an alternative explanation to why they aren’t having success with women. Some men struggle with women because they’re socially awkward, or they’re not presenting themselves well, or they have a negative attitude that women find unattractive. That’s a tough pill to swallow.

An easier pill to swallow is to simply blame other people for your failures. It’s much easier for them to blame feminism, or to claim that women don’t like nice guys, or to say that women are all irrational creatures and that’s why they can’t get a girlfriend. It doesn’t matter to them whether or not that’s actually true. The Red Pill offers them the dark promise of being able to get success with women without having to take that hard look at yourself and admit that you may be doing something wrong. The cost of admission is that you become a terrible person in the process. You sell your soul to the devil.

The price you pay for following The Red Pill

Okay, let’s get right to the Million Dollar Question. Does The Red Pill work?

It “works” in that you might be able to get a woman to stay with you in the short term. But after that you’ll begin to wonder why all of your relationships feel so unfulfilling.

The Red Pill is flat out emotional abuse. If you’re seeing a woman and you start to use dread game, she might wonder why you’ve suddenly started to act all cold and distant. She’ll wonder, “Is something the matter? What’s bothering you?”

The Red Pill will tell you that this is a shit test. Don’t fall for it. Hold your frame. Keep doing what you’re doing so that she’ll recognize you as an alpha and not a beta.

Maybe she’ll try harder to make you happy. Not because she’s trying to trick you but because she’s genuinely trying to make you feel better. “What’s gotten into you?” she thinks. To you, it looks like The Red Pill is working. But every dread game you play cuts her emotionally. She can’t feel the warmth or the secure, trusting bond that comes with a healthy relationship because you’re too busy waging psychological warfare with her. She may stick around for a period of time, hoping that you see the light and stop playing games with her.

But you don’t, because The Red Pill tells you not to look like a beta. And eventually she’ll get fed up and leave. Maybe not today. Maybe in a matter of weeks, or months, or even years. But she cannot be happy in such a relationship and every game you play just pushes her that much farther out the door.

You turn to The Red Pill forum. You post about your experience. Are the other guys there going to think for a while and say to themselves “Maybe this Red Pill isn’t working after all?” Nope. Instead, they’ll encourage you to double down on your beliefs!

“All Women Are Like That. AWALT,” they’ll tell you. “She fell in love with Chad.” You weren’t alpha enough, so she left you for someone who was. And you buy even deeper into The Red Pill philosophy in order to make yourself more alpha, unwilling to face the fact that it was The Red Pill that messed you up in the first place.

“The Red Pill is just incomplete! You can just take the good and leave the bad!”

*sigh* Here’s where I really get ticked off…

This is something I’ve heard from people defending The Red Pill. The Red Pill is not bad, they say. It’s just incomplete. You can just take whatever good advice you find there and ignore the misogynist parts.

Here’s the thing, though…NO OTHER SELF-HELP LITERATURE REQUIRES YOU TO DO THIS!! If you’re reading Models by Mark Manson or Mate by Tucker Max or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by the late Stephen Covey, you don’t have to filter out the misogynist parts to only try and find the good parts. All of it is good advice! None of it is misogyny!!

Also, how are you supposed to filter out the bad stuff in the first place if you’re inexperienced and you don’t know anything about dating? You need to already be knowledgeable about dating in order cherry-pick the good gems of advice out of the bad stuff. But that’s why you were looking for advice in the first place…because you weren’t knowledgeable about dating yet and you wanted to be! How are you supposed to pick out the good advice from the bad if you don’t already know what the good advice is!?!

Finally, the people you surround yourself with influence your perception of reality. Even when you don’t think it does. In a 2005 experiment conducted by Gregory Berns of Emory University, volunteers played a game where they were shown two different objects on a computer screen and asked to decide whether the first object could be rotated to match the second. When played alone, the volunteers were incorrect only 13.8 percent of the time. But, when played with a group of other people—who were actually actors instructed to unanimously give the wrong answers—the volunteers were incorrect 41 percent of the time.

Here’s the kicker. Were the volunteers consciously giving the wrong answer to fit in with the group? Or, did the group’s opinion actually change the way they saw the shapes? We know the answer, because the volunteers had MRI scans as they were doing the activity. The volunteers weren’t consciously trying to fit in with the group.

The volunteers gave the wrong answers because the group’s opinion changed their perception of reality!

The people you surround yourself with influence the way you see the world. Many of us think we’re immune to marketing, even as we are unconsciously influenced by it. If you swallow The Red Pill thinking you’re smart enough to just ignore the misogyny, guess again. That’s when it really gets you.

“But I used The Red Pill and it helped me!”

That might be true. If you have used The Red Pill and accomplished some sort of self-improvement, congratulations. I mean that. There’s no need for me to belittle your accomplishment in any way.

I will admit The Red Pill does have some good gems of advice. Abundance mentality. Not putting women on a pedestal. Working out and being healthy. All good pieces of advice to follow.

Here’s the thing about taking advice from The Red Pill, though. All of those good gems of advice are buried under mountains and mountains of misogyny. And if you’ve successfully applied advice from The Red Pill to better your dating life, then you could have gone to any other place that offers dating advice and gotten those same gems, but without all of the woman-hating.

Seriously, go read something like Models by Mark Manson or How to Win Friends and Influence People by the late Dale Carnegie.

“There will always be people being extreme or callous but why the charge against the actual philosophy? It’s like hating the whole of Islam because of the actions of a small sub-group.”

Finally, I’m sure some people will think I’m being too harsh with The Red Pill as a whole. That it’s not worth dismissing the entire philosophy just because some of its follows have decided to be all misogynistic and women-hating.

And to that I have to say…

*sigh*

Alright, alright. Calm down Steve.

Is it too optimistic for me to believe that the 2,400 words I’ve written above are going to convince anyone to spit out The Red Pill? Probably. Red Pillers have an amazing capacity to ignore logic, even though they claim that women are the illogical ones.

No, I don’t honest believe that any of this is going to convert any Red Pill followers away from the cult.

When I was little, I used to be afraid of many things that my adult self would think was silly today. I used to be afraid of the dark. Of monsters hiding in my closet. Of that freaking piano guarding the red coin in Big Boo’s Haunt and that giant eel in Jolly Roger Bay.

Today, the things that scare me are different. What scares me is the idea that a well-meaning gentleman might stumble upon The Red Pill. Perhaps he doesn’t have a lot of dating experience. Or maybe he’s been burned a few times in the past by women who didn’t respect him. So he goes looking for dating advice. And he comes across The Red Pill.

It makes him feel uncomfortable at first. “Is this really true?” he wonders. He doesn’t feel too good about the advice, but he doesn’t have that frame of reference to dispute the things he’s reading. He doesn’t have enough experience to argue against what they’re saying. So he tries to implement what he comes across. And it seems to work, at first. He gets more dates. More women going out with him. He feels a little better about himself. But his relationships are rocky and filled with drama. Has he started to become a jerk? An asshole? Should he start to reconsider his beliefs?

“All Women Are Like That. AWALT,” The Red Pill tells him. They reassure him that it’s not his fault. That the reason for all his dating hardships is because women are little emotional creatures who are unable to use logic. They’re not even human beings. They’re “plates”. And at that crucial moment when he begins to reconsider the way he interacts with women, The Red Pill persuades him otherwise and instead encourages him to double down on his beliefs. To “alpha” even harder and stop being such a “beta”. Then she’ll get the tingles for him and do anything that he wants. And all of his problems will be solved. So he sinks even further into the cult and loses any shred of self-awareness, blaming women for his problems while simultaneously being the cause of them.

To me, The Red Pill is complete and utter nonsense. And I hope that it’s nonsense to you as well. I didn’t write this article to convince any Red Pillers to leave their cult. I’m not that optimistic. Like I said before, I’ve written this post for selfish reasons.

I wrote this on the off-chance that the well-meaning gentleman sees this post first. I want him to know that there’s an alternative to all that sleazy advice out there. Before he accidentally stumbles upon The Red Pill. Because that idea scares me. It keeps me up at night and makes it hard to fall asleep, knowing that this sort of misogynistic darkness exists. So maybe…just maybe…he’ll see this post first before he wanders off into The Red Pill.

If you’re reading this, I want you to know that you NEVER take advice from The Red Pill. Ever.

Maybe now I can fall asleep tonight.

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