8 ms·

Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny

27 points by nkurz 11y ago

seibelj 11y ago
My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people goes like this: -Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc. -Sense of entitlement, where this person "deserves" to have women desire them, specifically attractive women. -Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities. -Techniques fail to help them get women. -Warped sense of reality develops, where it isn't their own fault that they can't get women to love them, it's society's / women's / feminists / someone else's fault. -Intense hatred and fear of the opposite sex, supported by a reactionary ideology that permits their beliefs and behavior.
- deleted 11y ago
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- morbidhawk 11y ago
  > personal theory Yeah that's just your theory. I don't fit into any of those bullet points. My path to red pill started after being married to someone with severe depression and she could never be happy about anything. Since discovering red pill my wife is doing a lot more than just sleeping all day. Not ALL women act entitled, but geez the ones that do can seriously screw up your life if you don't take action. Just passively trying to meet her endless irrational needs never worked.
  - J5892 11y ago
    Are you saying that your wife's severe depression came from a sense of entitlement? If that's the case, you absolutely fit into the second-to-last bullet point.
    - morbidhawk 11y ago
      No, the severe depression came from childhood trauma and abuse. Acting like a child all the time, however, when you're a grown adult and never doing anything responsible is entitlement.
      - kafkaesq 11y ago
        Your language is weird, though. And keeps coming back to associating you wife's "never being happy about anything" and "sleeping all day" to being childish and/or acting from a sense of entitlement.
        morbidhawk 11y ago
        Being a victim is different than playing the victim card. It's hard for a victim to get out of bed and do things but isn't impossible. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether she has legitimate reasons or not and other times its clear as day she's taking advantage. One thing I like about the red pill and also happens to coincide with stoic philosophy is that you call things what they are rather than what society tells you they are
        mercer 11y ago
        (Please don't think I'm extrapolating all this from your comment, or applying it to you specifically. Your comment was mostly just a writing prompt of sorts.) I think your comment nicely expresses the core problem I see in the red pill 'movement', and in a whole bunch of other movements (and moreso on the internet). These 'types' of groups oversimplify or warp an aspect of reality primarily because of negative personal issues or experiences. And while that in itself is not necessarily a problem, in these particular cases it often causes real damage to real, complex people who are usually not responsible for these personal or past issues. It also 'traps' the individuals in a way of thinking that, collective, is probably much more powerful and extreme than the individual themself. The thing is, I can actually agree with 'red pillers' to a degree. I've had some really, really bad experiences with 'damaged' girls who took advantage of me, and something like the red pill could've probably helped me before and after these experiences. My life has improved when I became more assertive. But at the same I try to avoid codifying this experience or lesson into a (personal) philosophy or into a movement I interact with regularly. I try to keep the experiences and the resulting lessons small, because I've found that generalizing from negative experiences and basing world views on them can have terrible consequences. In fact, I believe it's the root of a large number of our problems. Unfortunately, the worse the experience, the more likely we are to draw lessons that are too out of proportion to these experiences. It's understandable, but dangerous. Doing this is particularly difficult for me because I'm the type of person who likes to generalize and systemize things. I have to actively and constantly remind myself that life and people are messy, chaotic things and not a pattern to be recognized and generalized (too much, or too early, anyways). Even if I'm good at it. I'm a big fan of stoicism and have become huge fan of all things zen. I see the same dangers there. There's a sharp divide between those who fled into the 'mindfulness' world because of trauma and/or burnout, and those who took it up for other reasons. The former group is often quite unpleasant and deeply unsettling to me, and has in fact played a big role in keeping me from 'discovering' meditation and whatnot. I've noticed the same with certain groups of Christians, cleaned-up drug addicts, atheists, and so on. The main difference is that in most of these movements there's a healthy mix of different people who came to be part of it for different reason. On the internet, it's not only easier to form and become part of such groups, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also attracts a disproportionate number of 'systemizing' people like myself ('spectrummy', for one).
  - seibelj 11y ago
    Anyone can have an attitude of entitlement. I have observed it in both genders and in various life circumstances. Focusing on women shows your bias.
    - morbidhawk 11y ago
      I put into practice what I've learned from red pill because of my own relationship dynamic. I never said I worshipped it like it was my religion. It's not biased when it is what it is
  - tdkl 11y ago
    So instead of realizing you married an incompatible person, you changed your behaviour to an extreme ? To paraphrase the "pick-up" jargon - that sounds beta.
    - morbidhawk 11y ago
      > So instead of realizing you married an incompatible person, you changed your behaviour to an extreme I found red pill 8 years into my married. I married and had 2 kids really young while going through school and being the sole-provider. I've been conditioned to do such due to my Mormon upbringing. It's recent that I've started to take control of my life instead of just doing what others tell me to do. I'm a far way off of being the Alpha that gets respect
      - tdkl 11y ago
        Those facts actually explain some of the things. If you had more experience with choosing the partner, this perhaps wouldn't happen (which would also mean you'd be more in control of your life as you said it).
      - Mz 11y ago
        As a former full time wife and mom, let me respectfully suggest that if your wife gave birth to two kids while you were going to school and the sole provider, she probably was doing more than just sleeping all day. A lot more. I am sorry for your personal problems and your marital problems. But I am not convinced that your remarks about your wife are an accurate assessment. My husband used to say similar things about me. When we were married, he had the career of his dreams and was going to college with plans to get his PhD and become a college professor. We got divorced. He seems to have given up on getting a PhD etc. It has been a lot of years. His life seems to be okay. It isn't terrible. But his ability to pursue his dreams seems like it died when his "do nothing" wife with an abusive childhood left the picture. He now cooks for his cute new wife, something he never did for me, and she is in school, but his big dreams seem to have been abandoned. I am not trying to be mean here. I sincerely hope you get your problems resolved. But I think you are underestimating the work involved in raising kids, running a household and supporting a man's career. I often slept during the day because, unlike him, the kids were waking me up at night. Best.
  - Mz 11y ago
    Passively trying to meet anyone's endless irrational demands never works. It is not a gendered issue. Crazy is as crazy does.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- reversecs 11y ago
  "Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities" The red pill distinguishes itself from "pick up artist communities". A quick look over it sees that they advocate more for strengthening one's self-esteem to be independent from what women think of them. They also tend to generalize about women in ways that are not very popular, but generalizing what is perceived as negative behavior makes it much easier to deal with, understand, and move on from that behavior. In the end is just a community that supports men, and sometimes at the expense of their idea of women. I'm not really sure if its a good or bad thing. But does anybody have a duty to think about people a certain way? Surely we need to treat everybody fairly, but once that is achieved what duty does an individual have to think about a people in a certain light at all times? If that person can develop a system that works for them and makes them happy and does not infringe on the rights of others then do we encourage people to do find what works for them? Or do we train them to think about others in a way that agrees with the majority of people.
  - erikpukinskis 11y ago
    > do we train them to think about others in a way that agrees with the majority of people. You can't decide without looking at the specifics of the training. Is the training useful to people and relatively harmeless? Then yes, train as many people as you want. Is it destructive? Then maybe limit the training to just the folks with that specific brand of sadism/masochism and try to limit their area of dominion to a place with good warning signs so you don't have innocent people wandering into that without having a chance to consent.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I have acquaintances who are somewhat invested in the "red pill" worldview, and I've had this conversation with them, and I think this comment oversimplifies. Yes, "red pill" thinking concentrates on confidence. But it's directed confidence: red-pillers tend to believe that confidence strategies are effective ways of generating interest from women. And while there is probably some truth to that, the red pill ideology pretty quickly drives that truth into something dark and broken, by making determinations about women being susceptible to undeserving men who prosper through deceptive confidence and status schemes.
- deleted 11y ago
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- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people goes like this: -Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc. Funny, because my personal theory about how some men become feminists starts much the same way; they actually consider it an "in" to get women.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Your personal theory is also a very convenient tactic used by some online forum denizens to dismiss concerns about gender parity.
    - forgetsusername 11y ago
      >Your personal theory is also a very convenient tactic used by some online I'm sure it is. Are you implying that's me? That's rich. Meanwhile, guys like the feminist gamer podcast dweeb are using it as a platform to creep women. Isolated incident, I'm sure. I find it hard to reconcile that the tech world has such a problem with gender parity and harassment-- my industry certianly doesn't-- and at the same time appears overwhelmed with male feminists that are oh-so-concerned about the issue? How do you explain that? Judging by the comment sections on places like HN, the tech industry should be the absolute best place on earth for women to feel safe; but it isn't. The "M'lady" and "Nice guy" memes exist for a reason. There are predatory creeps out there. You might even know a few, but apparently are looking at the wrong people.
      - nkurz 11y ago
        my industry certainly doesn't What's your industry and what do you think is different about it?
        forgetsusername 11y ago
        >What's your industry Pharmacy. >what do you think is different about it? Do you want my non-PC-sure-to-offend-the-hive-mind-version? "Nerds". The tech industry is filled with them (obviously). And let it be known I consider myself one. Look at any thread about autism here; it will be filled to the brim with people with people who have self-diagnosed themselves with some level of autism. I suppose it's because everyone likens themselves to some sort of Rain Man. But they hardly ever consider the common negative affects of said disorders: social awkwardness. Being as how many men are awkward around women at the best of times, it's much worse when you have gawky nerds trying to achieve the same outcomes[0]. I don't really know. It's just a theory. Maybe you should ask hivemind#10232123 above me here; you know, the guy who works in an industry that, apparently, women don't want to go near for fear of harassment (despite the fact that every second guy is a feminist), lecturing a guy who works in an industry where men and women are in actual parity without the need to distribute a concrete list of "things not to say to women". [0] See 40 years of pop culture.
wahsd 11y ago
Wait. Red pill is misogyny? Is this just intentional conflation and misinformation? Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality or truth in lieu of the short term and blind comfort of illusion and self-delusion.
- Raphmedia 11y ago
  What you may remember as red pill and what the red pill community was at the beginning wasn't misogyny. Sadly, you only need to take a look at their subreddit to see that everything went downhill from there.
- Steko 11y ago
  > Red pill is misogyny? ... Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality Shockingly it can be both.
jcslzr 11y ago
All I know is that it works. I do not agree with everything, but the opposite idea that every women is an angel is also not true (except for Mothers).
tdkl 11y ago
Mark Manson put out a great explanation why people go to such extremes, he called them a "fake-alpha". [1] It happens when going from a "nice guy" with repressed anger and unmet needs to a so called "alpha-male" popularized by the modern pick-up communities. While the short-term it might be working, it doesn't actually make you a better person to live with. This can changed be with opening up more. [2] [1] http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1 http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1 [2] http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability
- reversecs 11y ago
  The concept of power in vulnerability fails to distinguish two important things about being vulnerable. If a person is mentally weak they are vulnerable. If a person is strong enough to make him/herself vulnerable they are strong. These are two different people and its all about where the person is coming from. If a person is putting themselves into a position to fail they are considered strong because they can afford to fail, the thought being that they obviously have a lot of confidence and competence in some other parts of their life. If a person is weak or obviously trying to appear tougher than they really are, we say they are vulnerable because we know they are compensating for something. All of this is to say that boldly putting yourself out in the world for criticism is a powerful thing to do because you are obviously secure enough to accept some criticism. The solution proposed from Manson appears to suggest that if you are vulnerable that you are powerful right now, but that isn't true. This basically means that you need to be powerful to let yourself be vulnerable, otherwise you aren't letting yourself be vulnerable, you are being forced to be vulnerable. So the issue for weak people remains in TRP as well as in Manson's case, how do weak people become powerful?
  - tdkl 11y ago
    As with everything in life - with practice. There are no shortcuts without actually meeting people. He only advises a lot of simple strong points to actually think about which ones we want to attract and how to prepare ourselves to lessen the possibilities for rejection (not stopping it, since it's completely normal to be rejected, since you can't be compatible with everyone). It's all well laid out in the Models book. Now I don't mean to spin all this around about the book, so I'd suggest reading through his blog posts, perhaps starting with the "best articles" to get an impression of what he's about. I'm positive that someone open minded enough will get something compelling out of it.
danielvf 11y ago
"Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent." This makes me scared for the facts in the rest of the article. [Correction, as nkurtz points out, the above quote is not actually the authors opinion.]
- wingless 11y ago
  Who needs facts when you can just write liberal propaganda? It's $CURRENT_YEAR after all.
  - nkurz 11y ago
    What about the article strikes you as liberal? Your tone makes it sound like you are dismissing it because of this, but I doubt you'd find many self-described liberals who would be as gentle on Redpillers (or friendly toward Jian Ghomeshi) as the author. And why is the $CURRENT_YEAR meme popping up everywhere recently?
    - rjeli 11y ago
      Re: "current year" - right wing netizens are frustrated with the recently popular John Oliver and his repeated insistence that it's 2016 and his opponent's views are therefore ridiculous.
- nkurz 11y ago
  That's a quote from the article, but it's not intended as a fact. In the context of the full quote, he's offering a caricatured viewpoint that he does not agree with, and then going on to show that the world is not so simple: Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how shitty are men really?” The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably. The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is “really pretty shitty”. But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis: how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men’s behaviour online translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?
rendall 11y ago
Can we have a moratorium on generalizing about groups of people, please? Women do X. Black people do Y. Jews do Z. Men do AA. It's offensive. "The online community hosted on Reddit is where men go to air their toxic views about women." Ah yes. Men go there. That's what men do. Go to Reddit and hate on women. Didn't you know?
- rendall 11y ago
  Good god what a stupid article. A stupid article about stupid people. It's a singularity of stupidity.
forgetsusername 11y ago
>You can't just stick the words Pretty sure I can stick what I want, where I want, without running it by you. I didn't mean offense, and said so. Who put you in charge of the intent of my language use? >intrinsically offensive statement Call the PC Police! We've got an emergency! Someone has chosen to be "offended"! It's merely a statement that I wouldn't expect someone utilizing the strategy to come onto a web forum amidst a conversation about said strategy and say, "Hey, I do that!" >end up being civil. Not sure a known forum bully should be lecturing anyone on being civil.
- dang 11y ago
  Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN. I've told you before that we ban people who do it. If you do it again, we will ban you. It's odd to hear you depict tptacek as a bully. I've been a close reader of his comments since we both joined HN a long time ago, and there is no one who has done more to eliminate that quality from his comments here. It makes me want to ask him to release his death beams of snark and sarcasm just once into this thread, that we all might behold their terrifying power. But a smoking black crater is not what we need more of. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514330 and marked it off-topic.

27 points by nkurz 11y ago

My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people goes like this: -Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc. -Sense of entitlement, where this person "deserves" to have women desire them, specifically attractive women. -Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities. -Techniques fail to help them get women. -Warped sense of reality develops, where it isn't their own fault that they can't get women to love them, it's society's / women's / feminists / someone else's fault. -Intense hatred and fear of the opposite sex, supported by a reactionary ideology that permits their beliefs and behavior.

deleted 11y ago
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morbidhawk 11y ago
> personal theory Yeah that's just your theory. I don't fit into any of those bullet points. My path to red pill started after being married to someone with severe depression and she could never be happy about anything. Since discovering red pill my wife is doing a lot more than just sleeping all day. Not ALL women act entitled, but geez the ones that do can seriously screw up your life if you don't take action. Just passively trying to meet her endless irrational needs never worked.
- J5892 11y ago
  Are you saying that your wife's severe depression came from a sense of entitlement? If that's the case, you absolutely fit into the second-to-last bullet point.
  - morbidhawk 11y ago
    No, the severe depression came from childhood trauma and abuse. Acting like a child all the time, however, when you're a grown adult and never doing anything responsible is entitlement.
    - kafkaesq 11y ago
      Your language is weird, though. And keeps coming back to associating you wife's "never being happy about anything" and "sleeping all day" to being childish and/or acting from a sense of entitlement.
      - morbidhawk 11y ago
        Being a victim is different than playing the victim card. It's hard for a victim to get out of bed and do things but isn't impossible. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether she has legitimate reasons or not and other times its clear as day she's taking advantage. One thing I like about the red pill and also happens to coincide with stoic philosophy is that you call things what they are rather than what society tells you they are
        mercer 11y ago
        (Please don't think I'm extrapolating all this from your comment, or applying it to you specifically. Your comment was mostly just a writing prompt of sorts.) I think your comment nicely expresses the core problem I see in the red pill 'movement', and in a whole bunch of other movements (and moreso on the internet). These 'types' of groups oversimplify or warp an aspect of reality primarily because of negative personal issues or experiences. And while that in itself is not necessarily a problem, in these particular cases it often causes real damage to real, complex people who are usually not responsible for these personal or past issues. It also 'traps' the individuals in a way of thinking that, collective, is probably much more powerful and extreme than the individual themself. The thing is, I can actually agree with 'red pillers' to a degree. I've had some really, really bad experiences with 'damaged' girls who took advantage of me, and something like the red pill could've probably helped me before and after these experiences. My life has improved when I became more assertive. But at the same I try to avoid codifying this experience or lesson into a (personal) philosophy or into a movement I interact with regularly. I try to keep the experiences and the resulting lessons small, because I've found that generalizing from negative experiences and basing world views on them can have terrible consequences. In fact, I believe it's the root of a large number of our problems. Unfortunately, the worse the experience, the more likely we are to draw lessons that are too out of proportion to these experiences. It's understandable, but dangerous. Doing this is particularly difficult for me because I'm the type of person who likes to generalize and systemize things. I have to actively and constantly remind myself that life and people are messy, chaotic things and not a pattern to be recognized and generalized (too much, or too early, anyways). Even if I'm good at it. I'm a big fan of stoicism and have become huge fan of all things zen. I see the same dangers there. There's a sharp divide between those who fled into the 'mindfulness' world because of trauma and/or burnout, and those who took it up for other reasons. The former group is often quite unpleasant and deeply unsettling to me, and has in fact played a big role in keeping me from 'discovering' meditation and whatnot. I've noticed the same with certain groups of Christians, cleaned-up drug addicts, atheists, and so on. The main difference is that in most of these movements there's a healthy mix of different people who came to be part of it for different reason. On the internet, it's not only easier to form and become part of such groups, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also attracts a disproportionate number of 'systemizing' people like myself ('spectrummy', for one).
- seibelj 11y ago
  Anyone can have an attitude of entitlement. I have observed it in both genders and in various life circumstances. Focusing on women shows your bias.
  - morbidhawk 11y ago
    I put into practice what I've learned from red pill because of my own relationship dynamic. I never said I worshipped it like it was my religion. It's not biased when it is what it is
- tdkl 11y ago
  So instead of realizing you married an incompatible person, you changed your behaviour to an extreme ? To paraphrase the "pick-up" jargon - that sounds beta.
  - morbidhawk 11y ago
    > So instead of realizing you married an incompatible person, you changed your behaviour to an extreme I found red pill 8 years into my married. I married and had 2 kids really young while going through school and being the sole-provider. I've been conditioned to do such due to my Mormon upbringing. It's recent that I've started to take control of my life instead of just doing what others tell me to do. I'm a far way off of being the Alpha that gets respect
    - tdkl 11y ago
      Those facts actually explain some of the things. If you had more experience with choosing the partner, this perhaps wouldn't happen (which would also mean you'd be more in control of your life as you said it).
    - Mz 11y ago
      As a former full time wife and mom, let me respectfully suggest that if your wife gave birth to two kids while you were going to school and the sole provider, she probably was doing more than just sleeping all day. A lot more. I am sorry for your personal problems and your marital problems. But I am not convinced that your remarks about your wife are an accurate assessment. My husband used to say similar things about me. When we were married, he had the career of his dreams and was going to college with plans to get his PhD and become a college professor. We got divorced. He seems to have given up on getting a PhD etc. It has been a lot of years. His life seems to be okay. It isn't terrible. But his ability to pursue his dreams seems like it died when his "do nothing" wife with an abusive childhood left the picture. He now cooks for his cute new wife, something he never did for me, and she is in school, but his big dreams seem to have been abandoned. I am not trying to be mean here. I sincerely hope you get your problems resolved. But I think you are underestimating the work involved in raising kids, running a household and supporting a man's career. I often slept during the day because, unlike him, the kids were waking me up at night. Best.
- Mz 11y ago
  Passively trying to meet anyone's endless irrational demands never works. It is not a gendered issue. Crazy is as crazy does.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
reversecs 11y ago
"Discovers some sort of methodology that is supposed to help them get women, such as pick up artist communities" The red pill distinguishes itself from "pick up artist communities". A quick look over it sees that they advocate more for strengthening one's self-esteem to be independent from what women think of them. They also tend to generalize about women in ways that are not very popular, but generalizing what is perceived as negative behavior makes it much easier to deal with, understand, and move on from that behavior. In the end is just a community that supports men, and sometimes at the expense of their idea of women. I'm not really sure if its a good or bad thing. But does anybody have a duty to think about people a certain way? Surely we need to treat everybody fairly, but once that is achieved what duty does an individual have to think about a people in a certain light at all times? If that person can develop a system that works for them and makes them happy and does not infringe on the rights of others then do we encourage people to do find what works for them? Or do we train them to think about others in a way that agrees with the majority of people.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  > do we train them to think about others in a way that agrees with the majority of people. You can't decide without looking at the specifics of the training. Is the training useful to people and relatively harmeless? Then yes, train as many people as you want. Is it destructive? Then maybe limit the training to just the folks with that specific brand of sadism/masochism and try to limit their area of dominion to a place with good warning signs so you don't have innocent people wandering into that without having a chance to consent.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I have acquaintances who are somewhat invested in the "red pill" worldview, and I've had this conversation with them, and I think this comment oversimplifies. Yes, "red pill" thinking concentrates on confidence. But it's directed confidence: red-pillers tend to believe that confidence strategies are effective ways of generating interest from women. And while there is probably some truth to that, the red pill ideology pretty quickly drives that truth into something dark and broken, by making determinations about women being susceptible to undeserving men who prosper through deceptive confidence and status schemes.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
forgetsusername 11y ago
>My personal theory that the path to becoming one of these 'red pill' people goes like this: -Naturally unsuccessful with women, because of personality / looks / etc. Funny, because my personal theory about how some men become feminists starts much the same way; they actually consider it an "in" to get women.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Your personal theory is also a very convenient tactic used by some online forum denizens to dismiss concerns about gender parity.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >Your personal theory is also a very convenient tactic used by some online I'm sure it is. Are you implying that's me? That's rich. Meanwhile, guys like the feminist gamer podcast dweeb are using it as a platform to creep women. Isolated incident, I'm sure. I find it hard to reconcile that the tech world has such a problem with gender parity and harassment-- my industry certianly doesn't-- and at the same time appears overwhelmed with male feminists that are oh-so-concerned about the issue? How do you explain that? Judging by the comment sections on places like HN, the tech industry should be the absolute best place on earth for women to feel safe; but it isn't. The "M'lady" and "Nice guy" memes exist for a reason. There are predatory creeps out there. You might even know a few, but apparently are looking at the wrong people.
    - nkurz 11y ago
      my industry certainly doesn't What's your industry and what do you think is different about it?
      - forgetsusername 11y ago
        >What's your industry Pharmacy. >what do you think is different about it? Do you want my non-PC-sure-to-offend-the-hive-mind-version? "Nerds". The tech industry is filled with them (obviously). And let it be known I consider myself one. Look at any thread about autism here; it will be filled to the brim with people with people who have self-diagnosed themselves with some level of autism. I suppose it's because everyone likens themselves to some sort of Rain Man. But they hardly ever consider the common negative affects of said disorders: social awkwardness. Being as how many men are awkward around women at the best of times, it's much worse when you have gawky nerds trying to achieve the same outcomes[0]. I don't really know. It's just a theory. Maybe you should ask hivemind#10232123 above me here; you know, the guy who works in an industry that, apparently, women don't want to go near for fear of harassment (despite the fact that every second guy is a feminist), lecturing a guy who works in an industry where men and women are in actual parity without the need to distribute a concrete list of "things not to say to women". [0] See 40 years of pop culture.

wahsd 11y ago

Wait. Red pill is misogyny? Is this just intentional conflation and misinformation? Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality or truth in lieu of the short term and blind comfort of illusion and self-delusion.

Raphmedia 11y ago
What you may remember as red pill and what the red pill community was at the beginning wasn't misogyny. Sadly, you only need to take a look at their subreddit to see that everything went downhill from there.
Steko 11y ago
> Red pill is misogyny? ... Red pilling is about embracing the sometimes painful reality Shockingly it can be both.

jcslzr 11y ago

All I know is that it works. I do not agree with everything, but the opposite idea that every women is an angel is also not true (except for Mothers).

tdkl 11y ago

Mark Manson put out a great explanation why people go to such extremes, he called them a "fake-alpha". [1] It happens when going from a "nice guy" with repressed anger and unmet needs to a so called "alpha-male" popularized by the modern pick-up communities. While the short-term it might be working, it doesn't actually make you a better person to live with. This can changed be with opening up more. [2] [1] http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1 http://postmasculine.com/the-fake-alpha-males/comment-page-1 [2] http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability http://markmanson.net/power-in-vulnerability

reversecs 11y ago
The concept of power in vulnerability fails to distinguish two important things about being vulnerable. If a person is mentally weak they are vulnerable. If a person is strong enough to make him/herself vulnerable they are strong. These are two different people and its all about where the person is coming from. If a person is putting themselves into a position to fail they are considered strong because they can afford to fail, the thought being that they obviously have a lot of confidence and competence in some other parts of their life. If a person is weak or obviously trying to appear tougher than they really are, we say they are vulnerable because we know they are compensating for something. All of this is to say that boldly putting yourself out in the world for criticism is a powerful thing to do because you are obviously secure enough to accept some criticism. The solution proposed from Manson appears to suggest that if you are vulnerable that you are powerful right now, but that isn't true. This basically means that you need to be powerful to let yourself be vulnerable, otherwise you aren't letting yourself be vulnerable, you are being forced to be vulnerable. So the issue for weak people remains in TRP as well as in Manson's case, how do weak people become powerful?
- tdkl 11y ago
  As with everything in life - with practice. There are no shortcuts without actually meeting people. He only advises a lot of simple strong points to actually think about which ones we want to attract and how to prepare ourselves to lessen the possibilities for rejection (not stopping it, since it's completely normal to be rejected, since you can't be compatible with everyone). It's all well laid out in the Models book. Now I don't mean to spin all this around about the book, so I'd suggest reading through his blog posts, perhaps starting with the "best articles" to get an impression of what he's about. I'm positive that someone open minded enough will get something compelling out of it.

danielvf 11y ago

"Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent." This makes me scared for the facts in the rest of the article. [Correction, as nkurtz points out, the above quote is not actually the authors opinion.]

wingless 11y ago
Who needs facts when you can just write liberal propaganda? It's $CURRENT_YEAR after all.
- nkurz 11y ago
  What about the article strikes you as liberal? Your tone makes it sound like you are dismissing it because of this, but I doubt you'd find many self-described liberals who would be as gentle on Redpillers (or friendly toward Jian Ghomeshi) as the author. And why is the $CURRENT_YEAR meme popping up everywhere recently?
  - rjeli 11y ago
    Re: "current year" - right wing netizens are frustrated with the recently popular John Oliver and his repeated insistence that it's 2016 and his opponent's views are therefore ridiculous.
nkurz 11y ago
That's a quote from the article, but it's not intended as a fact. In the context of the full quote, he's offering a caricatured viewpoint that he does not agree with, and then going on to show that the world is not so simple: Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how shitty are men really?” The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably. The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is “really pretty shitty”. But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis: how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men’s behaviour online translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?

rendall 11y ago

Can we have a moratorium on generalizing about groups of people, please? Women do X. Black people do Y. Jews do Z. Men do AA. It's offensive. "The online community hosted on Reddit is where men go to air their toxic views about women." Ah yes. Men go there. That's what men do. Go to Reddit and hate on women. Didn't you know?

rendall 11y ago
Good god what a stupid article. A stupid article about stupid people. It's a singularity of stupidity.

forgetsusername 11y ago

>You can't just stick the words Pretty sure I can stick what I want, where I want, without running it by you. I didn't mean offense, and said so. Who put you in charge of the intent of my language use? >intrinsically offensive statement Call the PC Police! We've got an emergency! Someone has chosen to be "offended"! It's merely a statement that I wouldn't expect someone utilizing the strategy to come onto a web forum amidst a conversation about said strategy and say, "Hey, I do that!" >end up being civil. Not sure a known forum bully should be lecturing anyone on being civil.

dang 11y ago
Personal attacks like this are not allowed on HN. I've told you before that we ban people who do it. If you do it again, we will ban you. It's odd to hear you depict tptacek as a bully. I've been a close reader of his comments since we both joined HN a long time ago, and there is no one who has done more to eliminate that quality from his comments here. It makes me want to ask him to release his death beams of snark and sarcasm just once into this thread, that we all might behold their terrifying power. But a smoking black crater is not what we need more of. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11514330 and marked it off-topic.