The manosphere fundamentally became a surrogate father for the life lessons I never got. Good and nice aren’t attractive any more. What I saw in movies – where having a good heart and being yourself is all you need – that’s not what happens now. It’s not the way courting worked when my parents met. I found myself putting in all this effort for nothing, it was very defeating. And either she’d no-show, or cancel right before. You’d meet a girl, hit it off, get her number and agree to a date. Morpheus Manfred: Over the past 10 years, the flakiness of women has gotten worse. It was stacked against guys, and it was a very unpleasant experience. Morpheus Manfred: Having spent my 20s looking for female companionship, I noticed that the dating game wasn’t what I was taught – what my parents prepared me for, and what I learned from movies. I ask him what event led him to The Red Pill (his answers have been edited for length). He moderates the community’s 141,966 (and counting) members, and like most of them, describes himself as white, early 30s, male and conservative (he would have preferred Rand Paul to Donald Trump, but he likes Trump’s “watch-it-burn” style). Anonymity is sacred facelessness is the sacrifice it demands. The head moderator of The Red Pill goes by the handle Morpheus Manfred, and when he agreed to give me an interview it was only by online chat. The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is “really pretty shitty”.īut 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? Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. 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. Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how shitty are men really?” The discussion threads are a mixed bag of rage and curiosity: screeds against feminists, advice on how to masturbate less, theories on why women fantasize about rape, descriptions of arguments with girlfriends, guides to going up to strangers on the street, and, most of all, workout schedules and diet regimes. In the hours upon hours I spent wandering this online neighbourhood, I saw mostly feral boys wandering the digital ruins of exploded masculinity, howling their misery, concocting vast nonsense about women, and craving the tiniest crumb of self-confidence and fellow-feeling. But the bulk of the comments are much more muted and, frankly, pathetic. There is plenty of vileness, to be sure – elaborate conspiracy theories formed out of pure misogyny and outright hatred of female independence. But judging The Red Pill by the most extreme statements of its members is, if not unfair, then at least inaccurate.
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