Fifteen years ago, I got taken in by the male grievance cult and swallowed its nonsense whole: pickup artists, Chads, dual mating strategies… all that garbage, though we had different names for the stuff. It was the same ugly culture, thought it seems to have gotten worse. I was what would today be called an “incel”: unsuccessful with women, and seething with rage. I’m ashamed of my participation in that world, and in the then-fledgling art of internet trolling, seeing what all the nonsense has led to.
Today, for a contrast, I’m happily married to a feminist woman, and I’m writing Farisa’s Crossing, a novel with a female protagonist. What changed? Well, the time in between has been quite interesting, and I think there’s something one could learn from my own zero’s journey into (and, later, out of) the “red pill” world of male grievance culture. Yet, every time I sit down to write “that” essay… I just fucking can’t. I don’t like reliving it. Today’s incel phenomenon hits too close to home. I read delusional, angry screeds on the “braincels” subreddit or various other incel forums, and I remember a time when I could have believed (or even said) such things. It gives me a headache.
Forgive me if this is raw. I’m not a saint. I don’t judge the male grievance community– increasingly like a cult in its commitment to a set of incorrect, self-defeating, and misogynistic beliefs with no bearing in reality– from a place of superiority. I was there once. I got taken in, and I got out. I know how it operates, and I know why it appeals to some young men.
What is it that drives young men, while they endure that oppressively quotidian and not especially harmful problem of early-adulthood sexual infrequency, into such rage and despair? Well, I think everyone should watch this video about charismatic anger. Rage spreads. Fear sells a story. Angry memes stick in the mind, regardless of truth. Add to this some confirmation bias, apex fallacies, and ready-made excuses for one’s own sexual infrequency– “it’s not me; it’s all women”– and you get a self-defeating complex that takes years to evict from one’s head. As with a cult’s illogic, smart and otherwise rational people don’t seem to be immune to this.
Most of the guys who get taken in male grievance culture are like me around age 20: decent men in a vulnerable, difficult time where the rules are unclear, it’s hard to know what’s going on, and everyone else seems to be doing better. That said, the luminaries of this culture seem to be an assortment of loathsome creatures, such as: white nationalists (who argue that multiculturalism and miscegenation have caused the incel’s problems), domestic abusers, pedophiles (who wish to normalize their perversion by demonizing adult female sexuality), and the sex addicts who call themselves “pickup artists”.
The male grievance cult, in other words, draws its strength from the worst of the male gender.
Blue, Red, Black and Green Pills
Mainstream American culture doesn’t indulge in the overt misogyny of incels or pickup artists, but one of politically correct hypocrisy. We claim to be liberal and vote conservative. We support a might-makes-right economic system, corporate capitalism, in which economically successful men (until 2017) were able to maltreat women with impunity; it was one of the perks of being an executive. This corporatized, paper-thin, dishonest culture I call chauvalry: a combination of chivalry and chauvinism. It’s what the male grievance culture calls the blue pill.
The blue pill’s not feminist. It’s the worldview of the Hollywood movie where being “a nice guy” and working for hard for his boss is enough that a man “ought to” get sex any time he wants it. In romantic comedies, it shows us male behaviors that would actually put someone in jail: ticketless airport runs, stalker-level displays of singular attention at the Act-2/Act-3 transition, punching guys in the face who look at one’s girlfriend the wrong way. It tells men that if they do the right thing, two hours of cat saving ought to be enough to attract women– even if a man is still in high school. That’s not how it works. An exercise montage stands in for the hundreds of hours it takes to fix or improve an ill-cared-for body. Adults know this, but adolescents might not fully get it.
The blue pill, “nice guy” worldview is casually misogynistic. It indulges in just world fallacies that suit our corporate masters. Do what you’re told for fifty weeks, it says, and your beautiful wife will give you hot sex on your two-week vacation. Be the hard-working “all-American” guy, and you’ll get laid, no problem. It presents sex as the ultimate validation of male virtue, and women as a sort of “insert compliments and free dinners, receive blowjobs and nookie” vending machine. You don’t have to go to the gym and become an attractive person, or read books and become an interesting person; just show up at your job, and a pretty girl will come by and touch your dick, we promise.
Of course, sex is not (nor should it be) the measure of male virtue. Men are not owed sex for being productive members of society; they are not owed sex at all from anyone who does not want to have sex with them.
Usually by the first or second year of college, men realize that the blue-pill story is fraudulent. They see useless men getting ample sexual activity in high school and they’re told that it’s different in college. Whether they go to a state school or to Harvard, it isn’t. Actually, I don’t think that useless men are getting more sex on average than anyone else; they’re just the ones who make a trophy out of it. The decent people are having sex, too; they’re just not talking about it.
In The Matrix, the protagonist is offered a choice: take the blue pill and persist in self-deception, or take the red one and engage reality, starting on a hero’s journey. The male grievance community co-opted this metaphor, and starting using the term “red pill” to describe their alternative, less corporate but more vicious, misogyny. Of course, what they call “red pill” isn’t any more reflective of reality than the blue pill worldview they reject (and that all thinking adults know to be a facade). But, they took that term first, and we’re stuck with it that way.
The red pill view of women and relationships is much more dismal. It views all of us (male and female) as selfish, hypersexual, narcissistic and obsessed with physical appearances. Coming from a mix of failed providers who fared poorly in divorces– most divorces aren’t “won” by the woman, but impair both parties’ finances– and sex-addicted pickup artists, the red-pill view that dominates male grievance culture is intensely negative. For example, the typical red-pill view of women is that they all secretly long for domineering men (“Chad”, in incel lore) who will degrade them.
In the early 2000s, the process was called “speed seduction” or “Game”; now it’s known as pickup artistry. The truth about pickup artists is that they’re often insecure, disease-ridden, broken men. Their lives aren’t enviable. Their high-frequency promiscuity is mostly made possible by lowering of standards. A bona fide sex addict doesn’t care if she’s a “9/10” marriage-worthy chemical engineer or a “3/10” disease-ridden drunk party girl, and relationally-impaired men often can’t sustain the effort necessary to attract the former. However, their unhealthy lifestyles have given them hypertrophic social ability. They know what a certain subclass of women, selected for rapid sexual availability, want.
What makes pickup artistry so dangerous an art for a young man to learn is that (as with cults) the first courses and modules will focus on what 97% of people (i.e., the ones who know it) would call common sense: basic social skills and grooming: don’t talk about sex on the first date, wear dark colors to seem more masculine, do between 25 and 40 percent of the talking. All of this advice actually works, contradicting that two-word blue pill myth, Be Yourself. It’s the later material in the pickup world that’s more disturbing. Ultimately, pickup artists’ views of women are not based on the best sample, but on the small percentage of women on whom cheap tricks work. Since pickup artists are rarely able to achieve long-term, mutually enriching relationships, they deny their possibility. Run Game forever, they say. Never let your guard down, they say. Don’t be vulnerable, they say. All girls are basically the same, they say. It’s best not to listen to that shit. None of it’s true.
Pickup artistry doesn’t work, not as advertised. The high-pressure sales tactics that lead to quick lays will undermine genuine relationships. “Dread game” is abuse. Finally, having sex with a lot of different women never cures insecurity. Sex is amazing when it exists on its own, in the context of a loving relationship, but sex rarely solves problems. It does have a fascinating history of creating them, though.
Though the blue-pill lie ignores corruption, the red-pill lie exaggerates it, and advises one to manipulate it for personal benefit. This doesn’t work as most people hope, because few people get away with aggressive non-virtue for very long. Con artistry is a great way to get a one-night stand, and a shitty way to find relationships. In the long run, most people don’t find it fulfilling, men who indulge in pornified casual sex lose interest in “7/10” women, in the same way that porn addicts tire of vanilla scenes and gravitate toward the extreme, and obsess over the “9/10” they can never have.
It shouldn’t be surprising that men selling the secrets of how to con women into reluctant sex will also swindle men buying their services. They overpromise. Bed Models In 21 Days, only $26.99. Those who dip into these corrupt games find that they’re not winning enough, but the losers become enraged and disgusted. Despair sets in, and that’s what incels call the black pill.
Blue pillers view the world as just and indulge in hypocrisy. Red pillers view the world as corrupt and seek personal benefit, making the world a little worse with each move. Black pillers see the world as hopeless; it must be destroyed. That’s what produces the Elliot Rodgers and Alex Minassians.
When I was a redpilled guy trying to up my dating game, I learned about “negging”– an exaggerated refutation of the blue-pill notion that disingenuous compliments lead anywhere– and how to deal with those pesky interlopers called “AMOGs”. One learned how to play hot-and-cold games. I don’t like that I indulged in this, but the blackpill incel discussions of today’s world are worse: one finds martyr worship for murderers like Elliot Rodger, fantasies involving Westworld-esque sexbots, and female sexual slavery from the “pro” side of a debate that should not exist. These blackpilled men are, of course, deranged and need psychological help. I doubt many of them, in a country without universal healthcare, will get it.
Red-pill pickup artistry, at least, had better exit options than black-pill incel rage. In the mid-2000s, I used cheap tricks to get dates and make-out sessions, and to improve my confidence. It may have improved my life, though I doubt it. Eventually, with enough dating and relationship experience, I learned (spoiler alert) that women are people. Even when women I dated rejected me, they didn’t seem like terrible people; they were only quicker to perceive that it wouldn’t work out. Successes kept me going: the odds are always low, but the payoff is high.
With black-pill misery, though, there seems to be no exit. If I believed I lived in the world that these guys think is the real world, I’d be just as enraged. See, they believe that all women secretly want to sleep with their high school bullies, mythologized as “Chad”. In their view, romantic relationships are impossible, because they’ve used stunted male sexuality for their model of the adult female. Women who show genuine sexual interest in non-Chads, they believe, are settling for a “betabux” provider and, like a cat in heat, will do anything to get alpha sperm when she’s ready to have children. The red pill turned men into pickup artists; the black pill is turning them into suicides or, worse yet, murderers.
Most cults have an eschatological narrative, because cultish behavior is unsustainable and therefore the world’s imminent end must be, at least, wished-for. The recent turns in male grievance culture show us belief in a post-apocalyptic landscape. It says that women like their mothers and grandmothers no longer exist. It says that today, every “Stacy” has been fucked by 100 Chads before age 15. Ask a blackpiller about adult sexuality, and you get a picture of junkyard animals fighting over scraps of meat, ten weeks after the end of the world.
Fuck the blue pill. Fuck the red pill. Especially fuck the black pill.
There is corruption in the world; it has always been there. But, it is rarely so hopeless as to merit nihilism and destruction (black pill) and one need not get involved and add to the corruption (red pill). Are there women so damaged that they’ll sleep with men who deploy cheap tricks? Of course there are. That doesn’t mean that one has to take part.
I advocate what I’d call, in response, the green pill: to acknowledge reality as it is, with no self-deception, but then to do the right thing, rather than the easy thing that everyone else seems to be doing, anyway. If the world’s dirty, be clean. Plant a fucking tree. This is the approach of the ancient cynic or stoic, whose wisdom has not decayed with age. Don’t support women’s rights because you think it’ll get you laid (it might, or it might not); support women’s rights because it’s the moral thing to do.
In our might-makes-right, corporatized society, the green pill isn’t fashionable. We see bad guys winning, all over the place. Our president bragged about (and, almost certainly, has actually committed) sexual assault, and still got elected. Am I really going to make a case for virtue– as an end in itself, with no expectation of reward– when corporate capitalism reigns and so many bad people seem to be winning? Yes.
No one tells young men this, but being male sucks from ages 18 to 23 for most people. Men have a higher sex drive than women their age, but also the women in that cohort are attractive to the full age range of men, whereas men in that group can barely attract their own counterparts. Women have all the options; men have lots of competition. It gets better for men as the years pass, but the male initiation period has never been a positive experience. I went through it as well. Most men do.
Here’s what I’ve learned. The sex I didn’t have at 17, 18, 19, 20, 21… never mattered. In the long run, whether one loses virginity at 16 versus 26 is unimportant. That said, what I do remember, and not in a good way, is how often I acted like an asshole. I’d be lying if I said I was fully over that.
The results of actions fade in importance over time; the actions themselves stick around in one’s mind, and a person has to live with them forever.
Perhaps that’s the strongest case I can make for virtue on its own. I don’t know that I need a stronger one.
The blue pill is the chauvalry of disingenuous “nice guys” in a patriarchal corporate system where sex is a reward for good male behavior, rather than an immensely pleasurable expression of deep love. Blue pillers are just-worlders who go to work and believe their companies are “meritocracies”. Red pillers are men who’ve internalized how capitalism’s alpha males actually behave– they’ll lie, cheat, and steal to glamorize themselves– and apply it to sexuality. The black pill prescribes aggressive nihilism– humanity is hopeless; best to kill everyone. None of these are virtuous attitudes, and they’re all expressions of our right-wing corporate society. I advocate something else entirely: let’s be honest with ourselves about the world’s corruption– and fix it.
Why the Black Pill’s So Relevant
Red- and black-pill thinking, two branches of the male grievance culture, have always existed, but the red pill was always much more prevalent. People would rather believe they can manipulate their way to a better life than convince themselves that they’re terminally fucked (or the lack thereof). When I was taken in by the male grievance cult, wannabe pickup artists were common and no one identified as a permanent incel, or discussed murdering innocent people (as Rodger, Cruz, and Minassian have) to prove one’s point. So what changed? I’m going to borrow a dumb 1990s catchphrase: “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
Back in my day, when we walked uphill (both ways) nine miles through the snow (now get off my lawn) we had something that doesn’t exist anymore: a functioning labor market. As I said, it has always been difficult to be an 18- to 23-year-old man– the supply/demand imbalances leave a lot of young men single. But, there were other things to do than stew about not getting laid. Let me explain how the whole “work” think used to work.
In the 1970s, a college degree and a car was all it took to talk your way on to a job– if you were 27 or older, a management job; if you were 32 or older, an executive job– anywhere in the country. So, what did you do, if you were a decent 22-year-old who couldn’t get laid? You worked, because these things called “careers” existed back then, and because if you actually showed up on time at your job and were still working at 1:30 in the afternoon, you’d be flying business-class by age 35 and running a company by your mid-40s. If you were what is now called an incel– back then, we just called it “not getting laid”– you could invest time and energy at work and distract yourself from the sex you weren’t having. That economic world doesn’t exist anymore; the 1% took it away from us. Thanks to offshoring and automation, the only thing left to do in the corporate world, except for those born into elite connections, is subordinate make-work with no career value, creative fulfillment, or redeeming social value.
It shouldn’t be surprising that our society would be throat-deep in a dangerous masculine crisis. Work sucks for women as much as it does for men– actually, it sucks even more for them– but men have been told for hundreds of years to identify themselves with their paid work, and that success in business is the ultimate expression of masculinity. With corporate consolidation and an imploded job market– one that hasn’t recovered from any of recessions we’ve had since 1973, although the stock market has and property prices are sky-high– this setup has produced an untenable situation where men are told that masculinity is to be found by… subordinating to other men. Of course the system would collapse. Ex falso quodlibet.
When I was an unsuccessful 22-year-old man, in 2005, I said a lot of shit that I now regret, but I held out hope (and was right) that my lack of social and sexual success was transient. The difference, in the post-2008 world, where housing is unaffordable in places where there are jobs, and where third-world corruption has become the norm in the “lean” private sector company, is that “incel” now stands as a permanent identity. Not knowing it, young people have conflated their permanent (unless we overthrow corporate capitalism) economic misery with their transient socio-sexual difficulties and become hopeless black-pillers. I don’t blame this on the women who are exercising their right to turn down men; I blame this on the 1% for stealing everything– for wrecking our economy and culture, and for perpetuating the simmering (blue pill, mostly) misogyny that makes these rages possible. The Elliot Rodgers of the world are like Japan’s hikikomori, but with the misogyny of an emerging fascist movement, and (scariest most) the guns of America.
So what are we going to do about it? We must overthrow corporate capitalism– a might-makes-right system of cancerous masculinity– before its corruption spreads further and the masculine crisis becomes an all-out war. We need to overthrow the red-pill corporate executives– the ones who perpetuate corruption for personal benefit– and the blue-pill establishment enablers, before this black-pill psychosis can fester and its shit really hits the fan.
In the Meantime
Angry young men such as today’s incels do not tend to believe facts put in front of them. If they listen to reason, they’ll still find their way to extreme interpretations. It’s very hard to change a mind in the moment. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t blast bad ideas. People will eventually come around. It’s good to plant the good ones, even knowing they’ll be rejected at the time.
I’ve argued for feminism with incels. What these men don’t realize yet (and won’t be convinced any time soon, but there’s hope) is that feminism is actually good for the decent man, the “beta male” who’d rather play with his own kids than do 3 extra hours of work for a company that poisons someone else’s kids in Brazil. When I explain why feminism’s good for average beta males like me, the reaction tends to be either “well, obviously” (from the leftist progressives) or shock (from the zero-sum-thinking incels). Either way, here me out.
The incels have mythologized their high-school bullies, with a bit of male porn actor thrown in, as “Chad Thundercock”, the priapic Norse god of white male douchebaggery. The rest of us just call this loathsome creature “frat boy” or “bro”. The thing is, Chad is the guy who wins out under misogynistic structures like corporate capitalism. In societies where women’s fathers and economic forces parcel women out as a sexual commodity, Chads rule. Meanwhile, the more feminist a society is, the better results will come to the patient, caring, and less-macho men that women are more likely to choose– because they’re better fathers and far superior lovers than the Chads.
Incels tend to come, I’d guess, from the earnest lower-middle-class– the ones who once believed in all-American mythologies about corporate meritocracy, and who bought into the blue pill worldview– so they have a sense that the men women choose when directed by economic forces (or, better yet, economic necessity) are somehow superior to the brutish or monstrous men– there may be racial attitudes here– that women will choose if left to their own devices. There’s no evidence that bears that out, though.
Some women, of course, choose skid-row rotten men, just as vice versa. To the extent that there is a “Chad pattern” in some women, I think it comes from our puritanical attitudes about sex (paradoxically?) more than anything else. Tell young girls that sex is a disgusting thing, and they’ll do it with disgusting men: the abusive frat boys of the world.
There is one painful but beneficial result of feminism for men: we get rejected more. They have more options life. It may be counterintuitive, but all this rejection is a good thing. In the long term, relationships are symmetric: a marriage that’s good for one person is good for the other. Women are choosier not because they’re mean, but because they’re quicker to perceive mutual non-matches, while men are prone to “we can make it work” quixotry. Female choosiness, in the end, saves us time and emotional energy. A polite, respectful turn-down is a favor.
Why does rejection hurt so much, then? My guess is that it has to do with our evolutionary environment: small tribes of about 100 people. In such a small world, being rejected means being humiliated in front of all of one’s whole social world. Rejection and breakups feel like major, life-ending events because, twenty thousand years ago, they were pretty close to it.
In a world with 4 billion sexually active adults, though, rejection is harmless. You can get rejected 300 times and nothing bad happens. Our society is capable of discovering exceptional matches that would never have been found decades ago– I grew up in Appalachia, my wife grew up in the Philippines, and we met in New York– but the price of this is an ultra-high rejection rate.
Under the old patriarchal systems, women were pushed into marriage because they needed economic security, and as a way for their families to improve their social standing or achieve political goals. Love was optional, and long-term marital love seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. True, middle-class (and above) men were assured wives and the loss of their virginity, but “dead bedrooms” were pretty common after the baby-making stage ended.
Although lasting romantic love was the hoped-for marital ideal, it didn’t happen often in the old world that incels seem to want to return to. Old-style family sitcoms where the goofy dad always wants (and almost never gets) sex once seemed that’s-life funny and now, from a 2018 perspective, seem pathetic. Perhaps this is a cultural change more than one in reality, but when I look at the Everybody Loves Raymond marriage and its lost sexual chemistry, it’s not what I think people want, or will settle for. Feminism is forcing men to up their play if they want to get married, and almost everyone seems to be winning.
In sum on this matter, pairings that can generate long-term romantic love– the kind where a couple still want to jump each other’s bones after 10 years of marriage– are rare, and female choice isn’t 100% accurate in finding them, but it seems to be doing a better job than corporate patriarchy (“take it from your father: this boy’ll be a good provider.”)
It seems counterintuitive that heterosexual female choosiness– a source of extreme frustration in the short term– would lead to benefits for heterosexual men. If we accept though that relational health is, in the long term, mostly symmetric, it shouldn’t surprise us that much.
This would require another essay to explore, but I call it the Control Paradox. Relinquishing control can lead to better results, especially when that control is illusory. What’s magical about mature female sexuality, from a male perspective, is that it can’t be controlled. Nothing’s better than a woman going after what she wants.
Our economic system is brittle– corporate capitalism is breaking down already, and will probably shatter in the next fifty years– in the face of control paradoxes. See, we work in firms built on zero-sum thinking. The Graeberian bullshit jobs exist largely because corporate executives believe their subordinates’ happiness equals their misery. The more (stereotypically, at least) feminine open allocation approach to corporate governance results in more innovation than toxically masculine zero-sum command-and-control regimes… but the working world hasn’t learned that, and won’t until corporate capitalism has been overthrown.
It’s extremely counterintuitive that a system where men get rejected far more than ever before would be, in truth, better than all those other mating regimes we’ve discarded. The teens and early 20s are absolutely brutal. But here are things becoming rarer: divorce, loveless marriages, infidelity, and dead bedrooms. It’s sometimes amazing to me that, after all the rejection and false starts and misbehavior (on male and female sides) that I endured, I ended up getting what I wanted all along: marriage to the best woman, at least for me, I’ve ever met.
In Sum
When the blue-pill, politically correct, lies fall away, it’s a vulnerable moment for any man– much like what we are all going through as corporate capitalism’s total failure reaches a point we can’t ignore. Red-pill contempt and black-pill despair can set in, but I’d like to make the case for something else: to acknowledge the world’s corruption, without self-deception or undue negative emotion (for emotions themselves are useful data, but not recreation). I’d like to argue for the green pill: to do, in the face of corruption, the one thing that’s truly rebellious: to be better than that.