How the Red Pill Brainwashes Men Into Misery
Man, this red pill got a lot of you dudes quite literally brainwashed.
I know this because of some responses I got to my last essay on this topic. I got a lotta love for that essay from a lot of dudes who went down a similar path, but there were a lot of cats who had issues. And they were a lot of the same issues.
That’s what got me thinking:
Maybe the problem isn’t just the critics. Maybe the problem is how this whole Red Pill mindset is setting dudes up for failure without them even realizing it.
In that essay, I talked about the problems that I—a dude who was a vocal mouth piece for the red pill and spent varying degrees of time around many of the names in the space—noticed and how those problems do more harm than good for the (mostly) young men who embrace those ideas.
But a lot of dudes—and some girls—took issue with the essay, and a lot of the same types of comments came up. So here, I’m going to address them.
I ain’t trying to change the mind of any dudes my age or older. You cats are set in your ways.
It’s the dudes younger than me I hope I get to.I can see from the responses to my last essay about the Red Pill that a lot of the dudes reading are young. Y’all the ones who need to understand what you’re messing with before you adopt a worldview that will lead to a series of problems that will put you in a position of bitterness, regret, and loneliness.
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The No True Scotsman Fallacy and Confirmation Bias Of The Red Pill
Before we jump in, I gotta address pedants and nit-pickers in the room. I’m not talking about the idea of being “red-pilled” about politics, or health, or any other thing NOT related to men and women.
I get that use, but that ain’t the use I’m talking about and you know it. So before pipe your fingers to argue that the red pill isn’t just about dating, and I’m only talking about PUA side of things, miss me with that.
I made it clear in the other essay that I thought the focus on self-improvement was a huge plus of the Red Pill.
Like Avon Barksdale said in The Wire, “This ain’t about ya motherfucking business class either. It ain’t that part of it. It’s that other thing.”
In fact, this is one of the biggest problems with what the Red Pill has become.
It’s caught in a bad case of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Whenever someone points out something labeled as Red Pill that exposes flaws or contradictions, defenders just say, “Oh, well that’s not real Red Pill. This is what the Red Pill truly is.” So no matter how many problems you point out, they just redefine what counts as Red Pill to dodge criticism.
I got a lot of dudes telling me that the red pill is just understanding the truth about male and female sexual dynamics and moving accordingly to protect yourself. See, even most of the people responding got what part I was talking about and at least framed their criticisms accordingly. Here’s the beef I have with this line of thinking.
Confirmation bias is a real son of a bitch here. You only start looking for the information that confirms your feelings and emotions about women.
That’s a problem when you’re coming into the Red Pill space because nobody finds this place when they’re in a happy place.
So you end up picking up only the things that fit your angry perspective and ignoring anything that doesn’t. But your perspective is based only on your experiences—largely negative —which is why you’re there in the first place.
While there are some universal truths, subjective experiences also shape what we believe to be true. Look at it like this:
Bishop Don “Magic” Juan will disagree, but a pimp and a preacher are not gonna have the same perspectives and advice on women because they have different experiences with women.
And if you ain’t trying to be a pimp and have the type of relationships a pimp has, you probably don’t want to listen to his advice on women. Likewise, if you don’t want the type of woman that a preacher has, you don’t wanna listen to anything he says.
This has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of the women around either. This is about the experiences they’ve had that have shaped their worldview.
I’m the first to admit that if your goal is to catch a bunch of bodies, following the Red Pill will lead you directly to that end, and do it extremely well—and that’s because it was constructed by dudes who were looking to solve THAT problem.
You rarely meet a guy, red pill or otherwise, who says something like “They keep giving it up to me, but I can’t get em to commit.”
Yeah, there’s men’s relationship advice out there, but that stuff is not only FAR less popular, but I hesitate to even put it under the red pill category because—if you follow any piece of red pill concept of dealing with women to its natural conclusion in the 21st century—whether it be spin plates, MGTOW, or sleep with a bunch of women before you know which one is worth it—you end up in a situation that is optimizing for a low commitment, low effort nut. Not a relationship.
And I know this is just my opinion, but I think most dudes actually want a relationship. Not just sex. Because sex is as easy Cashapp.
I see chicks literally advertising sex for sale, and you ain’t gotta be a baller to afford some of these prices.
But a lot of dudes have too much pride to pay for it because they know that even if they’re paying for it either way, the product is way cheaper when ANYONE can get it—even if she regularly gives it up to low-quality dudes.
The Red Pill Is Just A Praxeology. So what?
Another criticism I got on that essay was that the Red Pill was just a praxeology.
For those who don’t know, because that’s not a term you hear every day, a praxeology is just a fancy, GRE-level word from philosophy used to describe a system or framework for understanding human action—basically, a way of breaking down why people do what they do, usually in some logical or structured way.
It’s not supposed to tell people how to behave. It just explains why they do what they do.
This part isn’t wrong, but it’s an incomplete cop out —and any of you guys I still have who have found yourselves parroting this, listen up:
No one just observes human action without trying to optimize it for their own purposes.
Economics, Game theory, and psychology are all praxeologies, and the study of those disciplines motivates our actions to reach the goals we want.
Whether that’s to make money, win a game, or decrease crime. Yes, the disciplines themselves are amoral, neither good nor bad, but their morality isn’t my argument.
My problem with just saying it’s a collection of data on human nature is that it doesn’t account for the humans you’re dealing with.
In my street smarts essay, I talked about how the worst of human nature can manifest itself in any environment, but some environments have more bad stuff than good. If you spent your whole life in jail, all of your observations about human nature are going to be based on dealing with convicts.
This doesn’t mean that people who haven’t been to jail are fundamentally different than people who haven’t. It’s just their environment made them role by a different of rules to get what they want and to survive, and if you want to get what you want and survive, you get with the program or you get got.
And since Red Pill theory is based on dudes experiences dealing with women who messed them over and then, they decided to make every ineraction about getting sex quickly or swearing off women entirely, the ideas are true in some environments, but try acting like convict on the outside or a square in the joint, and you’re gonna have a lot of problems.
More specifically, let me spell this out.
Because sex is arguably the most powerful urge that a man tries to fulfill, he isn’t just going to study the theory of intersexual dynamics without it influencing his behavior. So, if he studies the red pill, and all of its accompany theories, most (if not all) are geared to optimize for sex above anything else, then there will very much come a point where all he knows how to do is get laid—even when he wants something else or more.
The Red Pill Trains You To Be Alone
The Red Pill gives you tools to get laid — no doubt. But it trains you so hard on that one goal that when you finally want something deeper, you might not even know how to get it anymore.
Now let’s tie this back to what that means for you.
Because when you take theory and try to apply it to real life without thinking it through, that’s where the trouble starts. Let me give you an example.
You can’t throw the baby out without the bathwater. I liken it to eugenics.
In theory, everyone is practicing some form of eugenics when they choose a beautiful or intelligent partner to have kids with. It’s technically what we all do in mate selection, consciously or unconsciously.
But in reality, when people try to deliberately and systematically apply eugenics as a social policy, it becomes ugly and destructive — even though the goal is the same: trying to create better genetic outcomes for future babies..
The same thing happens when guys take Red Pill theory and start rigidly applying it to all women and relationships. What could have been useful insights turn into bitterness, harm, and dysfunction.
And I’m not saying that a guy shouldn’t learn how to get laid. I’m just saying that if that’s all you know how to do, you’re gonna struggle if or when you decide that you want to do more than that.
Drawing back to the prison analogy, if you get locked up for shooting someone and you never learned how to fight, you’re gonna be at a real disadvantage when something pops off in jail because you ain’t got a gun and you never learned how to throw hands.
What Modern Feminism And The Red Pill Have In Common
The last interesting piece of criticism I got came from a woman who actually agreed with most of what I said — but took issue with me comparing feminism to the Red Pill. She argued that they’ve got nothing to do with one another.
Here’s what I told her:
Feminism’s original stated purpose was to achieve parity for women — legally, socially, and culturally. And by pretty much every metric, that’s not just been achieved — it’s been surpassed. Today, women outperform men in almost every quality of life metric you can measure. And they don’t just outperform men by a little. The gap now is larger than the one men had over women from the 60s through the 90s.
But here’s the downstream effect of all that: relationships are suffering. Distrust between the sexes is at an all-time high. A lot of women have been taught to never rely on a man — and yet, that’s what a relationship is at its core: relying on each other. At the same time, men have gotten wary of getting into relationships because they feel like it’s a trap. And we’ve got the numbers to back this up.
Fewer young people than ever are dating, in relationships, or even looking for one. And if you don’t believe me, let’s look at the numbers. This ain’t just opinion — this is reality.
👉 A 2020 Pew Research Center report found that 47% of single adults under 30 said they aren’t looking for a relationship or casual dates at all. That means nearly half of young adults are opting out of the dating pool entirely.
👉 Between 2007 and 2017, the percentage of 20-somethings in steady relationships dropped from 66% to 51% — a steep decline in just ten years.
👉 In 1976, about 86% of U.S. high school seniors said they’d gone on a date. By 2017, that number had fallen to just 56% — a massive cultural shift over the decades. And it continues to fall.
👉 The Institute for Family Studies reported in 2022 that 28% of single men under 30 said they hadn’t been on a single date in the past year — double the rate from the early 2000s.
I’ve linked to all of these stats below just so you know I ain’t talking outta my ass.
The message of both the Red Pill and modern feminism is showing up in these numbers. Both encourage people to protect themselves by keeping the opposite sex at arm’s length — but the result is fewer relationships, more distrust, and more loneliness.
We’ve got two worldviews — Red Pill for men, feminism for women — both telling you to protect yourself. And what’s it getting us? Loneliness, distrust, fewer real connections
If you’re under 30 and reading this, look around — this is your generation. This is what we’re dealing with. And it ain’t gonna fix itself
The Red Pill just pushes men further down the same path. It tells guys: “Don’t trust women. They’re all the same. Don’t date women who travel. Don’t date women who post on Instagram.” It’s the same playbook.
That’s why I compared them. Both feminism (the version it’s evolved to) and the Red Pill prey on each sex’s worst fears. And both end up driving men and women further apart — when what most people really want deep down is to find someone they can trust and build with.
I’m not saying that the red pill ain’t gonna help you out with women if your problem is getting laid. Any girls who found this essay and read that ain’t gonna like it, but most of y’all got a friend who keeps messing with fuck bois. Or you were that girl, or still that girl now.
But what I am absolutely telling you is that the way the red pill puts the game now, if you ever have any desire to do something more than wet your whistle for a short term, you’re gonna realize you’re a hammer facing a lugnut.
A lot of young dudes don’t realize this, and there were a lot of guys in the responses to my last essay trying to warn them.
If you’re reading this and feeling called out — good. That means you can still think for yourself, at least. This isn’t about shaming you. It’s about giving you the chance to choose something better
But it’s all good.
You do what you want and at the end of the day, I’m just trying to warn cats that when you move one way for so long, it’s gonna be hard to switch to another way of thinking. Just like squares in jail or dudes who’ve been down too long trying to reintegrate — it’s hard to switch up when you’ve moved one way for so long
So if you’ve been reading this and thinking, ‘Damn, maybe I’ve been caught up in this mindset,’ now’s your chance to see how systems — whether it’s the Red Pill or the law — can work against you when you’re not paying attention
References
- Nearly Half Of Americans Say It’s Gotten Harder To Date: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/
- Sexless American: Young Adults Are Having Less Sex: https://ifstudies.org/blog/sexless-america-young-adults-are-having-less-sex
- High school dating activity on the decline: https://www.datingadvice.com/studies/high-school-dating-statistics