Both men and women are socialized to desire a romantic partner as a reward. Prince Charming wins the love of a beautiful woman. The “Disney princess” is still a staple of the brand. For men, good examples are those 90’s sex comedies that basically depict sex crimes as laughable, but ultimately have the adorkable loser winning the hot girl.

There’s been a ton of critique about these media portrayals. The male gaze has entered cultural consciousness and any sexualization of female characters at all is bound to be criticized as misogynistic. Modern Disney princesses are empowered and largely aromantic and not codependent. Pop songs are more about women’s intolerance for male fuck ups (the power puff girls of pop, Charli XCX, Chappelle Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter’s biggest hits are all about disposing of men, pursuing sexual alternatives to men, and exerting sexual influence over men). Horror movies are about women regaining autonomy through violent retribution.

Something that gets less talked about is men decentering women. MGTOW/MRAs are viewed as fringe weirdos. We take it as a given that men do not decenter women because so much of manosphere rhetoric is about obtaining women and winning their sexual attention. And because the dating market is so skewed towards men pursuing women. Red pill also has the built in premise that female sexual attention is the marker for masculine success, and that view goes basically unchallenged.

But red pillers DO decenter women. When they say that “it’s about self improvement” they’re talking about the starting point of red pill, which encourages men to decouple their self worth from women and focus on being successful enough to magnetically draw women to them. Red pill advocates “outcome independence” (not caring if a woman rejects you or not) as the basis of a healthy numbers game. It encourages men to treat women as interchangeable sexual investors.

There isn’t anything outwardly problematic about decoupling your self esteem from sexual or romantic approval. But that is never really the point. The point is to get back at them by proving how much you don’t need them, by proving how dispensable they are to you.

And this is where the echo chambers come in. Essentializing grievances, treating shared negative experiences as inborn problems about the other gender, leads to sexist indoctrination. Observed trends become evidence men and women’s inferior nature. Rather than challenging the validity and scope of gender roles, sexist stereotypes get reinforced, while challenging sexist stereotypes gets hand waived away as naive misgivings about the “nature” of men and women. It becomes a kind of arms race to have the most insulting, inherently dismissive and obnoxiously self victimizing take.

Outside of sexist echo chambers, these views would are rightly seen as delusional. Men and women who don’t hate each other have a vested interested in not reinforcing their own biases. They care to make the other person happy and try to understand their perspectives, which requires understanding men and women as people rather than stereotypes.

Which is not to say that sexism doesn’t already tacitly permeate all or most layers of society. It’s just that decentering is a sexist cop out. It’s easier to write off the other gender and go down a sexist rabbit hole where you are always right because the other gender’s experiences doesn’t count.

People who make the effort to try to be appealing to them and try to understand them, will always be better adjusted, enjoy better mental health outcomes, and experience more sexual and romantic success. Caring about sex and romance is not inherently weak or bad, and it is not the flaw that radicals on either side make it out to be.