Is The “Red Pill” A Psyop To Make Men Gay?

Have you ever read some random “hot take” on social media and wondered why people are so insistent on oversharing and, as a result, posting their Ls? Nine times out of ten I read a “red pill” post, my eyebrows raise in (well warranted) judgment. I mean, I thought this community was meant to productively unpack and push back against regressive feminist beliefs. 

Whether known by the “manosphere” or the “red pill movement,” this cohort of chronically online individuals is conditioning men (and women!) to act no different from radical, reactionary feminists. Whereas radical feminists can inadvertently produce bitter, lesbian women, lately, it seems like “alpha” red pillers have similarly regressed into pushing behaviors that divide the sexes and, frankly, seem somewhat gay. 

Is this rejection of the opposite sex a psyop to control the population? Or is it just an unintended consequence of narrow-minded romantic advice? Let’s discuss.

The Manosphere’s Descent into Spiritual Homosexuality

On March 19, “female Andrew Tate” Hannah Pearl Davis, known by her screen name Pearl, retweeted a series of photos of “actual trans women” who the original poster said “look better than the average ovary owner.” Pearl agreed with this sentiment and, in her retweet, said, “I hate to say this but trans but [sic] more effort into their appearance than most American women.”

Her reasoning? She made the broad, sweeping statement that males identifying as transgender women aren’t fat, wear dresses, have long hair, and have no visible tattoos while – I guess – she’s comfortable alleging that actual females don’t do this. She added, “Men do everything better I swear.”

Anyone familiar with her tired schtick understands that she probably doesn’t believe that males make better “women” than females do, but Pearl is a dyed-in-the-wool provocateur who drives up her engagement rate on social media by regularly posting inflammatory content. She baits people with rage. And nothing great is accomplished.

Co-founder and editor-in-chief of Reduxx, Anna Slatz, responded to Pearl’s misogynist take by saying she was “dropping another quarter in the ‘redpill is a psyop trying to make men homosexual’ jar.” 

This same sentiment has been shared by many online commentators skeptical of the new manosphere movement, like Alexander of DatePsych, who said “the red pill is 95% daytime television tier gossip,” or Allie Beth Stuckey, who said “the line between the ‘red pill’ movement and homosexuality is so thin these days. … Like just admit you’re simply not attracted to women and are grossed out by them! No need to shroud your woman-hating in faux masculinity.”

In the past, Slatz has said that the end game of this new manosphere is homosexuality because only other men could love and understand their fellow man, even going so far as to call it “spiritual homosexuality.” Why? It would appear that many red pill teachings tell men to go against their biological nature to seek companionship from a woman. 

At the same time that the manosphere instructs men to isolate themselves from women, our modern beauty industry standardizes womanhood into a cut-and-paste, unnatural aesthetic. Think the Karjenner clan and other look-alikes, whose slick, plastic-y appearance can only be achieved through the use of expensive facelifts, cosmetic fillers, Botox, and makeup. I mean, does Dylan Mulvaney, a biological male identifying as a transgender woman, look all that different from biological females like Megan Fox?

Anyway, red pillers often tout aphorisms about how women act – how our natural behavior is antithetical to them being the most alpha version of themselves. Couple that with the image of femininity they’re sold by Karjenner-looking women, which is this cookie-cutter, shallow representation of real beauty, and it’s no wonder why they’ve become so divorced from reality.

Red pillers aren’t the same as incels (involuntary celibates), however, and many are proud of their high body counts. They think they’ve transcended normal relationships but still feel the desire to get casually intimate with women. This argument is as follows: Maybe if they grow so comfortable with male companionship, femininity becomes shallow and standardized, and rates of transgenderism are on the rise, then these men will prefer to satisfy their biological urges with womanfaced men.  

Will that actually happen? Perhaps not. If you close your laptop and lock your phone, you won’t find much “manosphere” influence in the real world. I’d wager that most people you pass in your daily commute or on trips to the grocery store have no idea what “the red pill” even is. 

But this train of thought is still quite pervasive. Andrew Tate reached mainstream audiences with messages just as toxic as feminism, but quickly became censored and, in many cases, fully deplatformed. Attempting to find original clips of his alpha platitudes proves quite difficult since so much of his content has been purged from regular search engines and social media search features.

His X/Twitter account, however, is still alive and kicking. Some of the sentiments he shares really seem sus when put into this conspiracy theory of sorts that this is all just some psyop to make men gay or just outright miserable.

“As a man, you were not destined to be happy. You were destined to build the world. TO CREATE. TO DO. You were designed to make your women and children happy, not BE happy,” Tate tweeted on January 30, 2024. 

What good does it do to tell men they shouldn’t ever be happy? Should men work themselves to burnout, knowing that male suicide rates are dangerously high? Why stunt the human experience just to uphold some pseudo-religious lifestyle?

“Men want to work. Women want ‘fun’. Analyse ‘fun’ in this world. What is fun? It’s evil. It’s haram. Real men want to build. Women only want to feel good at the expense of the world. Adam gave Eve EVERYTHING. What did she do?” Tate tweeted on January 25, 2024.

Since when do we operate off blanket statements like men only want to work and women only want to feel good? These types of platitudes come from an unrelenting obsession with evolutionary psychology. The manosphere has taken a truly eye-opening scientific discipline and stretched it thin, making a total joke out of a theoretical approach to seek ancestral reasoning for human psychological adaptations.

I Thought We All Agreed – Don’t Blindly Trust the “Science”

Tate didn’t create this model, but he sure popularized it for the modern viewer. Back in 2013, when the manosphere was in its adolescence and was better known as the “pick up artist” (PUA) community, many within its grasp overused scientific research and findings from evolutionary psychologists and behavioral ecologists to turn the dating market into an easily digestible game they swore they could win.

Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist, penned an op-ed in Wired during this time about his astonishment that PUAs were taking his book The Mating Mind and using it to validate their sexual stereotypes. PUA antics online even got so popular they managed to earn their own critical entry in the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Glossary of Extremism and Hate.

The PUA handbook sounds pretty familiar, if you’ve ever heard or read anything from Tate, Pearl, Sneako, or others. 

“The seduction community hybridized a Darwinian fatalism about motives (men are hard-wired to seek casual sex, women are hard-wired to be choosy) with a self-help optimism about improving one's sexual charisma,” Miller wrote.“Science-minded singles have new levels of self-consciousness – not just as people, but as fitness displayers, mate choosers, gene replicators, and social primates.”

But Miller echoed the warning of author and dating consultant David DeAngelo, who said, “PUAs run the risk of becoming dependent on the techniques and shortcuts that, on average, tend to increase dating success. Many of them are like a person who wants to learn a new language, so they learn 100 words then stop and use only those 100 words forever."

Even evolutionary psychologists or behavioral ecologists will admit, however, that science is fallible. Therefore, we can’t just base all of our decisions on these pseudoscientific competitive strategies. One such expert, Macken Murphy, discussed this on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast. Murphy noted how some people will weaponize studies – like preferences for female BMIs or male facial hair, for example – despite there being many mixed results across cultural contexts. There may be more modest preferences than universal ones, he said. 

This doesn’t mean to throw the baby out with the bath water, but perhaps instead of treating specific studies like they are fully factual doctrines, evolutionary insights should be used as points of discussion and food for thought. 

This is why, in my reporting on scientific studies for Evie, I don’t make Pearl-esque assertions that misconstrue how humans actually operate. Correlations don’t always equal causations, and evolutionary insights can only serve as a fraction of our understanding of attraction and behavior.

But, as cultural commentator and documentarian Lauren Southern so accurately said, red pillers are “attempting to turn understanding women into a science, how they work, how to control them, or just an outlet for bitterness over lost connection or lack thereof.”

This new manosphere wouldn’t exist “without an obsession around women,” Southern stated. 

Anti-Feminist Women Need To Watch Out for This Sexist Trap

Much of the advice pushed on women by red pill circles only further divides the sexes.

“Women are not prepared for work. That’s fine. You need a man and you need to obey him and have his children. There’s no other way out of slavery. Let men struggle and war, we’re built for it. Get a rich man. Then add VALUE to his life so he doesn’t replace you. Do it while young and hot. Hurry,” Tate tweeted on October 21, 2023.

Beyond extrapolating evolutionary psychology or behavioral ecology studies to the extreme, I don’t know where the manosphere gets this idea that women somehow aren’t prepared to work. 

Haven’t women always worked in some capacity? Maybe we weren’t breadwinning CEOs back in the day, but the notion that women shouldn’t work beyond domestic roles is truly a product of modern times. The idyllic vision of husband and wife was curated throughout the early to mid-20th century and romanticized through widely marketed, dreamy depictions of the fulfilled homemaker. 

Women in the upper Paleolithic were documented as having joined the hunt in some circumstances alongside the men. Archaeologists have found that some prehistoric women were so physically strong their upper arm strength was over a quarter stronger than today’s elite rowers who train for peak physical fitness.

"They're ancient working moms," said Brigitte Holt, an anthropologist who discussed these archaeological findings in an interview with NPR, adding that these women were likely "hoeing, planting, harvesting, chopping wood, grinding grain and getting water – and all this while raising small children."

Women in the Middle Ages in Europe were documented as being shopkeepers, midwives, blacksmiths, and even ironmongers. Before Islam, gender roles in ancient Mesopotamia were much more egalitarian to the extent that women in Sumer, for instance, could be a priest or a doctor, own real estate, and even act as a judge.

We shouldn’t underestimate women’s contributions to the labor force simply because more modern societal structures have afforded us the luxury of less stressful work. What good does it do to unnecessarily stunt ourselves when we’ve got just as much brain power to perform specialized tasks as men? 

“No men do not need women outside of reproduction. Not true. Society would function fine. Men build the world. Women are meant to pass on culture. But now in 2023 women have ruined the culture,” Pearl tweeted on June 23, 2023.

Again, all I’m gathering when I read these platitudes or watch their ragebait TikTok clips – like Pearl’s takes on women destroying men’s legacies, emasculating their husbands “every day,” or losing the ability to even find a “high value” man after hitting the so-called wall – is that these people somehow, magically know better than all us normies. 

Closing Thoughts

Why disparage women for aging – as both sexes will? Why disparage men for wanting real love and companionship? This subsection of the manosphere that boils relationships down to a sexual transaction for the continuation of the human race is really bizarre. 

Marriage isn’t a death sentence for men or for women, no matter what Pearl, Tate, or their sycophants spread on social media. So, I can’t blame people for thinking that this messaging is meant to encourage men to go gay or just truly “go their own way.”

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