I got into red pill read about 4 years ago, and found the subreddit about 3 years ago.

Many of the red pill women who posted here don't seem affiliated with the actual internet phenomenon, but more were involved in specific abusive relationships or with fundamentalist partners. However, it is my opinion that many RPW women are like me, and that their relationships as depicted online are a bit of a act. I was never a conservative or a sexist. What appealed to me was it gave me a clear guideline to reclaim a sense of worth when I had so little.

I graduated with a public relations degree in 2011 and worked as a waitress during college. I had no real connections or serious internships while in school. I followed my boyfriend to another city which was close enough to see family and friends, but not keep my old job. I wound up getting fired from a restaurant job in a relatively well connected small city, and was unable to find shifts at any of the better places. I took a temp job that paid almost nothing at a small company where my boss treated me a like a personal assistant and never taught me any usable skills. I eventually got so depressed it made me sick and I stopped going to work. Overall, this was negligible. My boyfriend was happy to support me, the car payments and extra expenses didn't exactly make my $400 a week a big deal for us.

I graduated from a top school with good grades, but fell behind on my student debt and had no real desire or reason to go to grad school. I was told my whole life how smart I was and how I would certainly become successful. Reality was humiliating for me. Unemployed, I began to spend more and more time online, reading obscure and absurd. Often to occupy my mind, often to make myself feel smart or significant again. That's the period of time I found the red pill.

All I need to do to be a high quality woman in the eyes of this community was to be thin, cook, and be nice to my boyfriend. I was told that all those friends who were single but had things I envied were the real failures, while I was great success as long as the scale stayed down and my boyfriend was happy. I patted myself on the back when considering the women in my life who dressed sloppily, couldn't cook, were disagreeable, had lots of student debt, took pride in their basic jobs, etc. Some of this was grounded in normal human flaws I observed around me, some of this was based on some straw man modern woman I had created in my mind to prop myself up. With regards to my friends who were also in loving relationships, I would find instances of disrespect and other dysfunctional behavior, and would comfort myself with the thought that their relationship was inferior to mine. In five years, my boyfriend and I would still be together, because I never snapped at him or told him not to play 8 hours of video games.

Keep in mind, during none of this time did my boyfriend give a shit about my submission or my housekeeping. He saw me busying myself around the apartment, picking up new projects, and paying more attention to my fitness and grooming. He cheered me on because it looked like I was coming out of my depression. And the reality is, yes, making him the center of my focus did increase my feelings of affections for him. Our relationship felt oftentimes like the crushes I had in high school. I would make decisions based on how he would see me, like wearing that nightgown slip with the itchy lace trim in the dead of winter instead of flannel pajamas and soaking in every look he gave me, while priding myself on the amount of cold I was suffering for that extra taste of affection. Other girls wouldn't do that sort of thing, after all, I must be a hot commodity.

What was interesting to me when I first found the community was how so many of the young women were exactly like me, especially when speaking privately. Young women whose lives had not turned out the way they had imagined: not necessarily "failures" but competitive women with active minds who had few outlets. Some were highly educated and married to high income men on the coasts, but did not have the types of careers that women in their social groups had to justify working, especially with kids in the mix. A number of women had live-in boyfriends and were not working. They were a break-up away from living with their parents, at best, some even had kids. This community did get very competitive, often regarding every conceivable status-marker apart from type of employment.

I never had an epiphany where I discovered feminism or anything like that, since I was never isolated and this belief system was entirely in my head. What happened was gradual. I got a life. I took a volunteer job at a local charter school, which turned into a paid full time position. I tutored after school and helped run a creative writing club for students. I got out of the small world I had created for myself and realized I neither had have a big fancy job nor be anybody's dream girl to feel self worth. I also found that many of the complaints which I had prided myself on not having, like those involving partner that doesn't do equal house work, were grounded in reality. I saw the "bitchy" "fat" girls get married to good men who were crazy about them. I saw the career driven bullish women quit to take care of their growing families. I stopped having that subtle compulsion to compare myself to other people, especially other women.

As this change occurred in me, I found more and more of the behavior and writing in the red pill women community petty and grating. I saw myself in these women, and tried to give them advice that wasn't necessarily feminist, but would give them a sense of self-containment and pride. This was received poorly.

tl;dr I got into Red Pill Women because I was insecure and it made me feel good about myself and my relationship. When I found other ways to feel good about myself, I didn't need it anymore.