One of the most interesting aspects of The Red Pill, at least for me, is how weirdly successful this internet phenomenon has been. I know it doesn’t feel like The Red Pill, a hobby started by losers, for losers, about losers, is or can ever be “successful”, but hear me out.
A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, some time around the year 2010 give or take a few years in either direction, some guys in their 20s and 30s found themselves at the end of a marriage or long relationship, courtesy of their wives and girlfriends behaving in ways they never saw coming - honestly, things they didn’t imagine their women were even capable of. These men realized that either women had changed (along with society) over the years, or that they didn’t and had never known what women are actually like and are actually capable of. Maybe both.
Hitting the dating scene again after a long period of being locked down, these men also realized that everything that reliably got them a girlfriend in 1997 was coming up completely empty. The game had changed and they needed to learn how things were working in the modern day - what actually attracted modern women and how the dating, sex, and relationship scene functioned.
This small group of men started talking on the internet, trading stories, notes, ideas. They didn’t recruit or advertise. Maybe a little bit of word of mouth if the topic came up, but no concerted efforts to include other men. They just posted content for each other. But the group grew to over 100 men. Then thousands. A few years later, they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Still a small group when you think about the size of the global population, but a numerically impressive amount of men considering these are internet nerds who like to talk about relationships and theorize about women on social media - a presumably small subset of dudes.
And all of these men had independently discovered The Red Pill with no recruitment, advertising, or marketing efforts. None of the content was written to attract, just to explain, but enough men were typing the right questions into their internet browsers or hearing someone mention The Red Pill off-hand (often in a negative way) and would investigate. Many of us found this dark corner of the internet not because a Red Pill man recruited us, but because of something a woman did to us. And many more of us found this place not from recruitment and marketing efforts, but because some annoying internet personality was saying terrible things about The Red Pill and we got curious what this thing even was.
That’s arguably quite a successful little metric there. With no or very little recruitment, advertisement, or marketing, over a hundred thousand men independently discovered The Red Pill.
The Red Pill grew large enough to acquire detractors. Some were dedicated groups of detractors focused primarily on denigrating The Red Pill, while others were just general correct-thinking groups who’d occasionally dump on The Red Pill because its way of thinking didn’t align with their socially-accepted correct way of thinking. The second kind of detractors were actually more telling than the first. When a stand-alone fringe group wants to gripe about another stand-alone fringe group, that’s just two groups of nerds on the internet arguing. But when The Red Pill started to be lumped in with various other unpopular extremist groups, this normalized The Red Pill. The Red Pill was just one of the guys you’d mention when listing off the bad guys. And frankly, because The Red Pill wasn’t recruiting, advertising, or marketing, those detractors functioned as the marketing wing and drew in even more curious men.
That’s quite the metric as well. With no or very little recruitment, advertisement, or marketing, The Red Pill achieved infamy.
Several ideas that were regarded as Red Pill extremism in 201X have quietly (and I mean very quietly) made their way into the mainstream. The usual path for an extremist idea to become accepted goes like this:
“You’re just a bitter misogynist who hates women. Women aren’t like that at all, and everything that you’re claiming works for dating and sex is false.”
“Not all women are like that, just a few, and you’re projecting that to everyone. And the stuff that you say works only works on a tiny minority of dumb women.”
“Sure, some women are like that, but definitely not all, and what you’re saying works will work some of the time, but why are you so bitter and negative about it and using it as an excuse to hate on women?”
“This stuff The Red Pill is saying is so obvious to anybody with a brain. We’ve been saying this forever, and now these woman-haters are acting like they’ve discovered it. What losers!”
If you’ve been around us losers for awhile now, you can probably think of a few Red Pill talking points that have made that journey.
But that’s another impressive metric, when something a group of hated men was shouted down for saying ten years ago is now something everybody is saying. It’s an even larger feather in The Red Pill’s cap when people bend over backward to make sure we all know that The Red Pill was not the origin of the idea and did not exhibit any intelligence in figuring out this very, very obvious fact, and that the language The Red Pill uses to expresses it is wrong and hateful.
The crown jewel of success in the modern age, however, is money. Follow the money and you’ll see what people really think, even if their mouths say something different.
Some Red Pill dudes have turned this internet hobby into a business. (Many tried and failed, but a select few actually pay some bills screwing around on the internet.) We like to stick our tongues out at them and call them grifters, but it’s not like they’re robbing or conning people - the peasants pay money for things they want or find valuable, quite knowingly and consensually. So grift or not, someone somewhere is willing to part with some money over all of this internet nerding out about sex and masculinity.
But the money doesn’t stop with the known Red Pill dudes. Renowned social media pundits who have followings, clout, even online careers for some of them, have jumped on the Red Pill train.
I’m not talking about the crop of dumb kids who have saturated the market, every one of them thinking he’ll sell himself as the new masculinity and replace the Red Pill old men. I’m talking about people with fairly established online brands who incorporated Red Pill or anti-Red Pill as part of their brand going forward.
A few fun examples:
There’s a decently-known (at least in this space) old guy from the Men’s Rights movement who, if you’d asked him about The Red Pill 10 years ago, would have told you he hates those PUA simps and has nothing to do with them. Today, he claims to be the founder of The Red Pill, with everyone who came after him grifting off of his movement. There’s a well-known bald criminal muscle man who entered the scene nearly a decade after The Red Pill began and has become the public face of an ideology that doesn’t actually have a hierarchy or a face because young boys think his bigotry is cool. There have been blue-haired sexual deviants and countless women with internet gigs adding Red Pill ideas, or attempted refutation of Red Pill ideas, to their content.
In short, people with internet careers who know how to make money on the internet saw The Red Pill and what it had become, from its humble origins of nerdy men discussing sex and women, and thought “Wow! I can run with this and make some cash!”
As much as we like to complain about grifters, the fact that there’s anything to grift at all is quite a metric for success.
But at the end of the day, The Red Pill being an internet phenomenon doesn’t really matter. That was never the point.
If just one man, reading something some Red Pill dude pissed out of his keyboard, went to the gym instead of the gun store, The Red Pill has saved lives. If just one guy, God forbid, started talking to girls, even if he didn’t end up a super-Chad with a harem of models, and just went from an untouchable to having a chunky girlfriend, The Red Pill has at least slightly improved his life.
And there are countless stories like that. Guys who say, “Thank you, Archwinger. Thanks to you, I finally talked to the girl I like and she turned me down flat - I knew she would. But if I didn’t talk to her, I wouldn’t talk to the next girl or the one after that, and I’m through being the guy who doesn’t talk to the girl.”
Good job, internet men. Keep it up.
