I've been hanging around the RPW subreddit, and the comparison between that version of the Red Pill and TheRedPill subreddit is quite striking.

When I was first introduced to The Red Pill, it bore much more in common with the source material. Basically it just asserted that what we were being told about men and women in the main culture wasn't true, and that perhaps maybe MRA's had as much of a point as Feminists. Also there was the novel idea of maybe perhaps questioning the tactics used by Feminists to accomplish whatever their ends happened to be.

I didn't see much about "game" or Pick-up Artistry within the Red Pill. Early MGTOW had more to do with guys telling women "no" and maybe going monk mode than being synonymous with pump and dump. So more like the "out with the boys" meme. The early Red Pill had nothing to do with PUA's, other than to use their effectiveness to prove that women shouldn't be put on some kind of pedestal.

Origins aside, I'd like to focus on that pedestal. PUA's still put women on a pedestal, in much the same way that Blue-Pilled feminism does. Sex is important, so the PUA gets sex by turning women on through various cheap tricks (that will make him loathe them in the long term), and he have a few hours of anticipation, a few minutes of ecstasy, and long-term bragging rights. All of this is dependent on women having that pedestal and "offering" sex.

But the Red Pill was about removing that pedestal, not reinforcing it. A PUA can talk all they want about how they only see women as objects and therefore they are demeaning them, but their focus on casual meaningless sex for that object gives it a high demand that far outstrips the increased supply that their methods supposedly induce. So sure the PUA has taken away the ephemeral, mysterious "value as a person" away from women, but they replace it with high-value objectification. This only fuels the problem that brought men to the Red Pill in the first place, which is that men are marginalized in the (object side of the) sex market.

The Blue Pill was all about pitting men against women (from the Red Pill perspective). With feminism it was about claiming past and present oppression. With PUAs it's all about the inherent evolutionary strategy putting men and women at odds (and you can't question the dumb stories we tell if they sound like science!). Red Pill was recognizing that things aren't as bad for women (over men) as mainstream culture would have us believe, and that the real dividing lines of culture are elsewhere, not in gender. This is where perhaps RPW, with its focus on traditional femininity and masculinity, has a much stabler and more coherent view of the Red Pill. The focus is to remove the programming that fueled the animosity and Blue Pill, not fight animosity with more animosity.

I'm curious of the viewpoints as to whether we should really consider PUA's as part of the Red Pill.