The term red pill became popularised from the 1999 film The Matrix, where the main character is offered a choice between a red pill, representing an uncomfortable truth, and a blue pill, representing blissful ignorance.
The red pill movement on the other hand is a men’s activist movement, that is a sub section of the manosphere (a diverse collection of websites, blogs, and online forums that promote certain ideas about masculinity), that took this idea to showcase the uncomfortable truth that males are the “oppressed ones”, rather than females, in somewhat retaliation to women’s rights and feminist groups.
This genuinely started off on the right foot, discussing and debunking a lot of myths about gender inequality (pay gaps, domestic abuse, lack of representation in leadership, “the patriarchy”, etc) and opening the conversations about the struggles that males face more than females, (mental health, domestic violence and harassment, suicide rates, custody issues, homelessness, longer prison sentences, divorce settlements) that is well presented in the documentary “The Red Pill” that premiered on October 7, 2016.
This opened the online space for multiple personalities to ride the wave. Re-emphasising the key topics and ideas discussed in the documentary and then providing some guidance to males specifically on what they should focus on to become a "high value man" to attract woman and not be lonely. This was done through typical self-development preachings, like learning new skills, going to the gym, eating cleaner, making more money, and hanging out with motivated people.
They also would provide basic not always accurate insights into masculine and feminine relationship dynamics, what should and shouldn’t be “tolerated”, showcasing that when this traditional dynamic is flipped, there is a higher likelihood of them being cheated on or divorced. (we will create a detailed post on masculinity and femininity to clear this up)
However, certain influencers became a little out of control trying to impress their communities. This usually happens when the individuals who create these online communities don’t necessarily have an appropriate understanding of the complexity and scope of the whole issue and only see it from their narrow lens and ironically start to become like the feminist and women’s activist groups that they originally criticised to get popular, showcasing their inability to take the red pill to its true extent.
Some of them started to promote that young males should just focus on making money and improving their physical appearance, with the more successful and sexually active guys to look at getting a vasectomy in as early as there 20’s, and sleep with at least 50 females before they decide to settle down, to be less likely to get “finessed” when they are in a relationship. A lot of this was said as a counter measure to modern female who don’t tend to value family as much as previous generations… and is just completely stupid.
Though they are not wrong in what they tell their audience that will get them to attract more girls, it’s the girls that they are criticising that are the type to be attracted to those qualities. They don’t seem to understand that the “good traditional women” with low-no body counts that they want to attract, value different things.
The intention to tell males to improve themselves doesn’t change but it’s the function of these qualities that these women find attractive not just the aesthetics of a lavish life and an attractive physique. It has everything to do with the qualities of being a good father and if majority of females keep going towards the shiny objects, that doesn’t mean that we should lower our standards and only work towards things that will attract or gain attention from these females.
This also doesn’t mean just because you may have all those qualities to be a “good father” that you get to have an open relationship on your end. Most of the guys running these communities try to justify that if you are in the top percentile then your partner should accept it as part of the package. This is just childish, and no good women will put up with this, which questions the females these guys are with. Most of them aren’t even in a long stable relationship nor seem to have the structure of one.
Anything under 20-30, years is not really long when you think about it, and we don’t really get to see all the negative effects of their ideologies until their kids grow up, which at that point the damage has already been done.
We present what the "red-pill" movement should focus on in our blog post, "What it means to be a man"