The Red Pill is Not Feminism
Feels Before Reals isn’t just for liberal-progressive Wokezi snowflakes.
According to contemporary TradCons’ misunderstanding of both the “Red Pill” and Feminism, both somehow share a lot in common. The list below is usually what follows when self-righteous OrthoBros need some comparison to conflate the Red Pill praxeology with Feminist ideology:
Condemn the opposite sex's promiscuity
“Remedy" by advancing promiscuity by your own sex
Mock chastity
Spurn marriage/fam
Pro-contraception
Mock Christianity
Talmudic view of sexuality
Egalitarian: women should be in the workforce (out of the home)
I’ll address each misconception individually to clarify them. However, there’s one overarching misconception that they all miss—the Red Pill is not an ideology. Feminism is. In its purest form, the Red Pill is a praxeology. This is a $10 word that most TradCons seem unwilling to look up on Google, so I’ll throw them a bone here:
Praxeology is the theory of human action based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, contrary to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior.
For the sake of brevity, we’ll use this stripped-down definition here, but if you want a more in-depth definition of Praxeology, read my essay, The Praxeology of the Red Pill. If you pull up the Webster’s Dictionary definition, you’ll get even more simplistic:
Praxeology: the study of human action and conduct
That’s it. The Red Pill is unconcerned with what anyone does with the information that the study of human action and conduct makes a person aware of. Because in its most ideal sense, the Red Pill is the praxeology of human intersexual dynamics. It is unconcerned with the best or worst practices that anyone infers from the interpretation of the data gathered and related by the praxeology of the Red Pill.
Separating the Red Pill from an ideology or a belief set is made all the more difficult when people need it to be a set of best practices to attack it from an ideological basis. People think the Red Pill is a popular narrative created by Andrew Tate and Pearl Davis over the last two years. Moralists need the Red Pill to be advice or a set of best practices in order to force it into their preexisting belief sets. People cannot simply have data presented to them without being told how to feel about the data. This is the tragic result of making emotionalism the preeminent social narrative since the Sexual Revolution.
Feels Before Reals isn’t just for liberal-progressive Wokezi snowflakes. Social conservatives default to the same emotionalism – they just do it with a Bible in hand. When the Red Pill is necessarily defined as an ideology, advice, or a movement, it removes the Praxeology that moralists struggle with and makes it a doctrine of beliefs that they can compare to their own. This is why they fixate on illegitimate Red Pill figures like Tate or Pearl. It puts a face to the “advice” they need to believe the Red Pill is about.
Analysis vs. Solutions
The Red Pill praxeology is rooted in factual absolutism. If there is a mission statement for the Red Pill, it is this: We have an obligation to objective truth. That obligation is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, that obligation complements our preexisting biases, values, and beliefs, but often, it doesn’t. It steps on a lot of ideological toes along the way. Emotions, which cannot be excluded from the factual equation, hinder objective understanding. When Dr. Gad Saad famously said, “Fuck your feelings” on The Joe Rogan Podcast, he wasn’t saying it for effect. It was an objective assessment.
Moralists lose the narrative in the solutions they feel should follow the Red Pill analysis. This is always the part of the assessment where they say something like, “The Red Pill gets some things right…” quickly followed by, “But they have no solutions…” That’s because the Red Pill isn’t concerned with advice, solutions, or best practices. Moralism and emotionalism don’t like the uncomfortable questions that a factual Red Pill praxeology forces them to consider.
The Red Pill is first concerned with gathering accurate data. Interpreting that data comes next, but implementing that data (making it useful) is where the Red Pill stops and the experimentation begins. Problems arise when the presumptions of implementation come before anyone understands what the data is and if it’s being accurately interpreted. And because self-help advice books sell way more copies than data-based textbooks, we get “red pill” personality-brand influencers putting the implementation cart before the Red Pill horse.
This is where moralists often start. They’ll claim all this Red Pill data is already in the Bible, so we already know what God wants us to do with it (best practices). If you were one of God’s chosen people (believers), you’d already know this. This basically steals back the valor of the Red Pill being, a praxeology that’s proved accurate in defining human nature. It moves the factual argument to a solutions argument for which they already believe they have the answers. If you pay prostitutes to fuck you, who needs Game? If you have the Bible, Quran, Torah, Bhagavad Gita, etc., who needs the Red Pill?
Over my 22+ years in the Manosphere, the most consistent frustration I’ve gotten from Moralists is that it took pickup artists of the early 2000s to point out the reasons why men have been leaving their churches in droves. The natural response to this indignation is always some appeal to how their particular religion has always been the real Red Pill. They refuse to accept that the source of their frustration is human nature, not a ‘fallen’ social order.
Feminism is the rationale du jour of this election cycle. It’s this convenient dismissal of anything that conflicts with what is and what ought to be regarding intersexual dynamics. If men are being “pussified” – Feminism! OnlyFans explodes from $5.8M to $2.5B in five years? Feminism! And if you believe “those red pill guys” are advocating for vasectomies and wanton sex with ratchet hoes, it must be because they’re all covert feminists.
But the comparison list of what moralists’ straw man as the attributes of Red Pill ideology doesn’t even hold up.
Condemn the opposite sex's promiscuity: This is the most out-of-touch article on the list. I can’t think of a recent episode of The Rational Male Podclass or Access Vegas or even Fresh & Fit where we haven’t been (often falsely) criticized for holding or not holding women accountable for their promiscuity. If anything, we get criticized for “excusing whores of their bad behavior” by platforming them at all.
Furthermore, condemning the promiscuity of either sex has always been the purview of moralists for millennia, so I’m unsure as to whether this is unique to feminist ideology.
“Remedy" by advancing promiscuity by your own sex: I presume this is meant to be a comparison of sex-positive feminism to some notion that the ‘red pill’ is advocating for men using notch count as a metric for their self-esteem. Again, the Red Pill doesn’t ‘advance’ anything. It merely defines and diagnoses. But in that defining, moralists and emotionalists think that the act of doing so is itself an advocation for a behavior. It is not. Even sex-positive feminism was never about a “remedy” to counter the opposite sex’s promiscuity. It was a hedonistic green light for post-Sexual Revolution women to enjoy casual sex in the wake of hormonal birth control and on-demand abortion. That’s a much easier sell than, “Hey, gals, let’s get even with the boys by being more promiscuous.” It’s a fundamental ignorance of evolved female sexuality.
Mock Chastity: I can’t speak to feminist ideology, but I would challenge anyone to find a single instance of chastity being “mocked” on any mainstream Red Pill podcast. If anything, we’re attacked for some mistaken notion of wanting the Madonna/Whore double standard. A virgin bride who fucks like a porn star. What’s misconstrued as “mocking” is usually pointing out that most men and women like to have sex, and it’s a primary motivator for us. We mock the 40-year-old virgin if he’s male, but we cry with Lolo Jones when she’s freezing her eggs at 40 on TikTok because she’s still a virgin waiting on God to deliver her perfect husband. No one is mocking chastity, but again, presenting facts without telling people how to feel about them invites people to interpret them through their implicit biases.
Spurn marriage and family: Spurning marriage and family is a recent doctrine of militant feminism. Before hormonal birth control (HBC) and the Sexual Revolution, marriage and family were a non-issue for even the worst Suffragettes. Only after The Pill was there a landslide of divorces commensurate with the rise in the use of HBC for women. The logical outcome of this was a continual decline in marriage stemming from women delaying marriage until later in life. In 2024, the average age of first marriage is 30 for women in the US. In 1965, it was 22. Self-identifying feminists or not, women don’t spurn marriage or family as much as they delay it to the point of becoming unmarriageable. Even a good Christian like Lolo Jones knows this.
Tongue-in-cheek viral Tweets about vasectomies aside, most Red Pill-aware men are far more apt to apply that knowledge toward getting a monogamous girlfriend and family formation. Only a fraction of men are cut out for the Player Lifestyle that ‘red pill’ critics think is a rampant meme in the Manopshere. Most men are happy to apply the Red Pill to get a date – at all – with a woman because it’s a vast improvement over the grinding celibacy they’re enduring now.
Pro-Contraception: This is a classic, self-loathing Catholic / OrthoBro position in the 21st century. I’ve seen these guys unironically Tweet things like, “Any sex that’s not for procreation is a drug addiction.” It’s thematically similar to a lot of the rationalization cope I read from Incels justifying their “choice” to be eunuchs. Everyone is pro-contraception. Feminists, Red Pill, Incels, MGTOWS, and if abstinence is defined as a form of contraception (it is), even Orthodox Christians are “pro-contraception.” What they’re really against is fornication. Fornication facilitated by contraception.
Mock Christianity: While I’m sure many militant feminists have mocked Christianity since the late 60s, it’s not something that plays well in the Manosphere. The term “mock” is a container word. It can mean whatever anyone wants to put into it. It’s why moralists are so ready to use it. I don’t see any direct “mocking” of any particular religion in Red Pill spaces. However, I do see quite a bit of mocking of Judaism in moralist spaces of late. If anything, the Manosphere has united Christians and Muslims in a shared defense of patriarchal masculinity.
At the risk of glossing my ego here, I spent three years of my life researching and interviewing men of all faiths to publish my fourth book, The Rational Male, Religion, in an effort not to ‘mock’ any religion or atheism. At the same time, I focused on the confluence of intersexual dynamics and religion. I specifically called this out in the introduction of the book.
Talmudic view of Sexuality: I’ll admit I had to look this up.
The Talmud says that a man cannot force his wife into having sex. The Talmud also claims that rebellious children will come from people who conceive a child in certain ways, including if a woman has sex out of fear of her husband, if either one is drunk, and if a woman is raped, along with other examples.
If wanting sex with a willing participant out of genuine desire is a strike against the Red Pill: guilty as charged. If this is the definition I’m supposed to defend as being a Red Pill best practice, then I guess not forcing my wife to fuck me is Red Pill. You’ll have to ask self-identifying feminists if they’re down with non-consensual sex as an article of their ideology, but I think I know what they’ll say.
Egalitarian, Women should be in the workforce (out of the home): This is a fundamental (deliberate) ignorance of the Red Pill praxeology. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Red Pill content will know that egalitarianism and communitarianism are well-defined parts of women’s evolved mental firmware. Even ‘Red Pill’ frauds don’t advocate for egalitarianism. I’ve outlined egalitarian-equalism for more than twenty years now. The fact that this would even make the list is an indictment of the confident ignorance of moralists who know nothing about the Red Pill.
Rollo Tomassi is the author of the Best Selling book series, The Rational Male.
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