When I visit the subreddit r/TheRedPill—one of the manosphere’s more infamous ports of origin—I find that Reddit has quarantined it. “Are you sure you want to view this community?” the page asks me, telling me that the community is “dedicated to shocking or highly offensive content.” I click through. I’m here to read a popular post from 2016 entitled “HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD: 37 Rules of Approaching Model-Tier Girls.” The post bills itself as a “complete guide to picking up 9s and 10s,” though it hastens to add that it doesn’t cover body language or “handling logistics.” (I adjust my expectations.) Its author, who appears to be a man named Mike Haines, describes his past life as a sickly, shrimpy kid, frequently bullied by other, bigger boys. For most of his life, Mike has been involuntarily celibate, but after taking the red pill, he began regularly fucking 7s and 8s, and his current girlfriend is a 9 who’s done some modeling work.
Mike’s philosophical system is simple: Women are attracted to men, period. The only problem is that, for evolutionary reasons, they’re also picky. Red-pillers describe this phenomenon as hypergamy: the tendency of women to seek increasingly attractive partners until their standards are impossibly high. Because they naturally prefer men with stronger frames—frame is a term of art in the pickup artist community, meaning something like “social comportment” or, if you like, “gender”—women unconsciously subject each potential suitor to a series of tests designed to put his frame under pressure: “Women want to submit to you. They want to submit to a strong man. But she can’t submit to you if your frame is weaker than hers.” Paradoxically, this means that male seduction is, in Mike’s own words, a “passive process,” not an active one. Mike clearly has little patience for cheap tricks or shortcuts: pickup lines, manipulation techniques, good looks or deep pockets. The name of the game is, simply, endurance. “Women have said things to me that are totally brutal—called me ugly, too short, a loser, etc.,” Mike confides. “It doesn’t penetrate.”
And so transpires an unexpected reversal of roles: in order for a woman to be sure a man’s worth submitting to, she must first dominate him. The man, conversely, must learn to look forward to his submission: “Women are wired in such a way that they can’t become wet for a man unless he’s overcome some kind of resistance to get her,” Mike explains. “Hence, tests actually help you to seduce her. You want her to test you. The more tests you endure, the faster she’ll sleep with you.” The biggest loser—the one most open to abuse, suffering, humiliation—thus turns out to be the biggest winner. Desperate to prove he isn’t a woman, he temporarily becomes one. A man will gladly “swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him,” the SCUM Manifesto dryly observes.
You may think I’m being too generous to Mike and his fellow Red Pillers. Aren’t these men entitled chauvinist pigs, wannabe rapists, domestic terrorists? Don’t they value strength, force, assertiveness, independence? Sure. But if there is one thing the SCUM Manifesto teaches, it’s that you must never assume that men actually want the things they say they want. “The male has one glaring area of superiority over the female,” the manifesto asserts: “public relations.” For Valerie, the single greatest hoax in the history of human civilization was the simple idea that men are men. The patriarchal system of sexual oppression therefore existed not to express man’s maleness, but to conceal his femaleness. “He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is,” writes Valerie. She had already dramatized this phenomenon in Up Your Ass, where Bongi goads Russell, a Red Piller avant la lettre, into fucking her behind a bush, just to show she can. Russell is initially repulsed, but he can’t help himself. “I could never make love to you, but I am louse enough to screw you,” he snarls, lunging at her. But Bongi stops him. “First get on your knees and say: ‘Please can I do it to you?’” she commands. He obeys. “You’re a good doggie,” she smirks.
Indeed, this is the surprising core of the whole Red Pill theory of seduction: never stop begging for it. Mike concedes that being forced to undergo a battery of tests just to get some ass “might seem ‘unfair’ to you.” But he doesn’t care. “If you can’t handle the abuse from some blonde chick in a bar,” writes Haines, “how the fuck are you going to handle beating a 7ft tall man to death with your bare hands when he and his tribe invade your village and try to gang-rape your girl?” The star of this primitivist metaphor is, interestingly, the very warlord whose ability to get laid the post promises to impart to readers. Only here, he isn’t them—he’s their invisible competition, whose animalistic powers of abuse have been entrusted to the woman they see before them. “Women will test you brutally when they want to sleep with you,” Mike cautions. This reminds him of the film Fight Club, because of course it does:
Getting a hot woman into bed is like the hazing scene in Fight Club where the new recruits are lined up outside the door. Tyler berates the recruits with personal insults. “Too old, go away.” “Too fat, go away.” He forces them to stand outside for days. He tells them there’s no possibility they’re getting in. Most give up. But the few who stay are ultimately invited inside. Seducing the hottest women is the same. It’s a WAR OF ATTRITION.
Like The Matrix, Fight Club is a popular point of reference in the manosphere. The film is easily described in alt-right terms: a milquetoast beta meets a rebellious alpha named Tyler Durden, and together the two found a men’s fighting ring; when the club starts committing acts of terrorism, the beta discovers that Tyler is an alter ego he has unconsciously created for himself in order to escape his meaningless middle-class life. It is therefore all the stranger that in Mike’s analogy, the role of Tyler Durden is given to the hot girl. The girl is the hazer, screaming at recruits like a drill sergeant, beating them with a broom, while her seducer assumes the position of the schlubby would-be initiate whom Tyler dismisses with disgust: “You’re too old, fat man. Your tits are too big. Get the fuck off my porch.” Men are not men. Men are never men.
In 2018, when the Guardian asked Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk what he thought of the film’s popularity on the far right, he replied that the phenomenon reflected “how few options men have in terms of metaphors” for their experience of gender. Asked what he thought would come of the alt-right, he answered that he thought it was too fringe to last. “It might be comparable to Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men,” he told the interviewer. “The extreme always goes away.”