Avoid Toxic Advice from the Manosphere

I believe it was sometime in the late Spring or early Summer of 2018 when I discovered The Red Pill on reddit, something I stumbled upon while searching for advice on how to meet women in-person after being frustrated with the options available on dating apps.¹

It’s shocking stuff at first, especially given my bourgeois, blue-pill upbringing—but the more I read, the more I realized it was true; as I’ve noted many times, TRP, once seen, cannot be unseen.

And while most people would describe those initial posts I read as misogynistic, that wasn’t the point.² In a nutshell, The Red Pill is simply a medium of describing women’s stated preferences vs. their revealed preferences, i.e. how women actually behave when it comes to dating and mating, not what they say they want publicly or on surveys. This is where Alexander Date Psych, William Costello, and Macken Murphy—though I find their work interesting and sometimes useful—often miss the mark. Social scientists are almost always gathering information on people’s stated preferences at the expense of observing what it is they actually do.

However, between 2018 and 2023 (when I left TRP and Twitter and nuked my blog for my relationship), The Red Pill community and Manosphere drifted from its original intention (helping men do better with women) to a more black-pilled and political bent.

Now that I’ve returned to the community, that drift is all the more stark and obvious: most of what I see on X are guys complaining about Snow White (thank God I wasn’t there when Barbie came out), whining about how women behave, holding up the worst examples of the most online feminists as how all women think, etc. I’m reminded of one of Orion Taraban’s excellent podcasts, Making Men Angry at Women is a Business. He’s spot on. Apparently, rage bait that allows men to shame women, or cast them as immoral, dumb, or irresponsible, is a more productive model of content creation than delivering men good advice on how to do better with women, as so many formerly Red Pill gurus have been captured by their audience. Here’s a good example:

That is NOT what you’ll find here. It was not what our leader, RedQuest, focused on, and now that I’m carrying the torch, it’s not something I’m going to spend time on either. Making men angry at women isn’t effective, and it’s actually counter to the core principle of TRP, which is that men should assume agency and control over their own lives. No amount of shaming or black pilled content is going to make women change their behavior—women are women, and when it comes to the sexual marketplace, they’re going to do whatever they want, which is rooted in their biological imperatives as a product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Sexual strategy isn’t moral or immoral—it’s amoral. People do what they need to do to get what they want to the extent they can get it.

It’s the same for men. Chicks can whine all they want about Leo’s young girlfriends, or groan about the lack of “real men” who will marry older women and give them what they want, but this will never stop us from desiring younger, hotter, more feminine women. At the risk of being a Taraban Stan, I highly recommend reading or listening to his book, The Value of Others—he dissects all this stuff at great length. I’m about an hour away from finishing, and it’s excellent.

The point here is that indulging ourselves on black-pilled manosphere rage bait isn’t a productive use of our time. Focus on what you can control: get in better shape (as I am now), go talk to chicks, learn to become more charming and charismatic, pursue your mission, and work to earn more money and/or develop a fun, attractive lifestyle. Use that mute button on X if you’re on there. On this point, since I’ve been gone for awhile, let me know good accounts, blogs, podcasts, etc I should be tuning into—guys who are producing quality content that speaks to how men can get better with women, like blogs about day game with field reports and stuff like that. At some point here I’ll make an entire post of good resources guys can access to this end.

Also, avoid politics to the extent you can. Whether you like or don’t like Donald Trump has nothing to do with how your desire to become a better man and attract women—and since men, especially guys in the manosphere, tend to like him, understand that most women, particularly young women, don’t. But like, that doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be talking about politics with chicks anyway, and if it comes up, change the subject, or tell them what I say, which is that, “I try to focus on the things I can do to build a better life for myself and those I love rather than getting mad on the internet.”

It’s good to remind ourselves of the popular idea that we’re the sum total of the five people we spend the most time with—but expand it. Whatever you put in your mind, and whoever you associate with, even on social media, is going to have an impact on the man you are. Remove anyone or anything that is toxic or negative, and seek out positive role models, mentors, and content that will help you achieve your goals.

Thanks for reading fellas—the next post should be a field report! I told Mr. Blackwing I’d do ten sets this week, so I gotta get back out there. Enjoy the weekend, and remember, there’s never been a better time to be a player.

1. Several of my friends are using dating apps very effectively, and since that’s something I always had trouble with, it’s one area of improvement I want to explore more now that I’m single again. However, since I’m still well above my fighting weight, that will have to come later.

2. Women perceive anything that undermines their advantage in the sexual marketplace as misogyny, a term like racism and genocide, that is thrown around way too often and typically doesn’t apply when alleged.