“Selection bias” is the shortest possible version of this list, but let me give the longer version… there are many good, revelatory ideas in the Red Pill and seduction worlds, and these worlds are better than the default many guys learn in school. Any system or ideology will have its blind spots, and real life is much more complex than any ideology.
1. Most of the guys involved seem to be or have been failures with women; this breeds a lot of resentment and unhappiness, and some of those feelings never seem to abate.
2. Guys who have successful relationships with functional women don’t seem very likely to end up writing for the Red Pill. Guys who get cheated on, dumped, etc. seem much more likely to end up reading the Red Pill, looking for answers, and venting on it. Guys in successful relationships (they do exist) never enter, or glance at it before moving on.
3. Red Pill guys overstate hypergamy, female mate competition, etc. The larger world and culture UNDERstate these topics and forces, however. The reality is somewhere between the poles.
4. Contemporary feminism is bad but it also has less relevance in most people’s every day, day-to-day lives than it does online or among a small coterie of humanities professors.
5. Many of the leading guys have some pretty serious things wrong with them, or wrong in their psychology. They can be right about a lot of things and there can still be significant problems that show up, intentionally or inadvertently, in their writing.
6. The women who react to street pickup are probably not a random sample of women, so drawing conclusions about all women can be dangerous. I’m not arguing you shouldn’t do street pickup (in actuality I believe the opposite), but those who respond to cold opens are likely not representative of the broader population.
7. In many cases (not all), you’re learning things from (relative) failures rather than successes.
8. All dogmas are to be avoided.
9. It’s not possible to separate out the true players from the keyboard jockeys.
10. Almost every player who has written anything is living in a big city like London. Few are living in places like Topeka or Oklahoma City or Boise. I conjecture that different girls live in big anonymous slutty cities than live in smaller towns… yes I know about divorce and cheating in smaller towns, obviously those things exist everywhere, but rates and default cultures are probably different.
The biggest upside of the Red Pill is that it tells guys that we have to improve, we have to up our game, we have to protect ourselves, we have to generate value, and the world is not fair. You will often be fouled and the best solution is often to accept the foul and focus on mission and improvement. You can complain or you can improve.
If you study and practice seduction, you will also learn what’s possible. Many average guys think that only a tiny number of athletes, musicians, etc. get peak sexual experiences with top chicks. Not true. Such experiences are open to a very large swath of guys, if those guys realize what’s possible and work towards it. I admit that I made this error myself. Until relatively late in the game, probably around age 30, I didn’t fully realize what was possible. I did well from my late teens to mid-20s, but I didn’t fully realize what is possible until much later.
I’m also the kind of person who wonders about why things are the way they are, and it was clear to me as a teen that what I was told about sex, sexuality, and women by the larger society was not the whole story. The Red Pill and seduction communities are much closer to the truth than the conventional social narratives about mean, oppressive guys and wilting, innocent women. Women are much more sexually charged than is commonly portrayed and many guys never learn this.
