How manosphere and red pill ideologies doom men to loneliness and unhappy relationships

Red pillers set men up for miserable, sexless relationships with women who hate them.

Feminists like me talk a lot about how the manosphere encourages men to abuse women. But to the men indoctrinated into this cult, this isn’t a reason to avoid red pillers, Andrew Tate, and their unfuckable ilk. These dudes want access to sex and women, and they definitely don’t want to be with feminists, so they’re unlikely to believe what we tell them.

The truth, though, is that manosphere ideology constrains men’s access to women, to sex, to quality relationships, and to hopeful futures. It’s nihilistic misogyny, not feminism, ruining men’s lives.

The typical manosphere loser believes that relationships exist for women to do all of the emotional and physical labor, and for men to earn the money. They see sex as something men are owed, not something men need to be good at, and certainly not something for women’s enjoyment. Women are primarily physical objects and tools to them, not people, which removes their ability to be supportive partners in challenging times. Their misogyny is immediately apparent to women with self-esteem or experience with men.

This limits these men to a small group of women—those who are young, with low self-esteem (and often the trauma and mental health challenges that accompany it), and with few career ambitions. These characteristics make them more likely to center and be dependent on men, and to have few interests and support outside of the relationship.

Manosphere influencers idealize these relationships. The woman is in her feminine energy. The man is in his masculine energy. It’s laughable bullshit to believe that two people socialized into different ways of being and vastly divergent needs will be able to make a relationship work, but logic never stopped any misogynist from living his best and most foolish life.

So what really happens when people are strongly in their [completely bullshit, totally made up] masculine and feminine energies in a relationship?

Women who are willing to overlook the behavior of red pillers (or who actually like that behavior) are a very small percentage of the total population of women. So the number of women willing to date these dudes is quite small—maybe 10% of women.

Those women will expect their misogynist partners to be physically attractive, stereotypically masculine, and to earn a good living. Men who meet these criteria tend to have higher self-esteem and more success, and are therefore less vulnerable to manosphere ideology. So most men seeking out this vulnerable 10% of women are not going to be able to woo them. They’ll ignore the women who might actually show an interest, and end up single, alone, and resentful.

If they’re lucky, they might be able to attract a young, naive, vulnerable woman who likes misogynist men. But that path is going to lead to a miserable relationship, too, because from the outset, the two parties have incompatible needs.

The woman is going to become more and more dependent on the relationship and the man. She’ll likely quit working, and de-prioritize her friends. He’ll find this annoying, because he’s been socialized to not care about women’s needs and to not know how to meet them. He’ll also find her dull and uninteresting, since she has few outside interests and is likely constantly pursuing him.

She’s going to eventually lose interest in the bad sex he’s giving her. She’ll take away or limit the thing he cares about most. And, because she has little incentive to cater to his attractiveness ideals, she might not do much with her appearance. So he’s probably going to be complaining about the way she looks and begging for sex.

She’ll likely get postpartum depression because of him, causing him to perceive her as too much work (and likely causing her to perceive herself as crazy and undeserving, unless she’s fortunate enough to find feminism).

If she’s lucky, maybe she’ll discover feminism and start demanding more. He won’t give it, because he doesn’t respect her and because he’s never learned the skills necessary to be good at relationships. They’ll both be unhappy.

Or maybe she’ll just keep trying to make him love her. That won’t work either, because he lacks those skills. She’ll pursue him more and more, become more and more needy, and he’ll find her more and more annoying. They’ll both be unhappy.

Because marriage extends many benefits to men, he won’t want to get divorced (even if he constantly whines about how awful and unfair things are in his marriage). He hasn’t learned meaningful relationships skills, though, so instead he will turn where he has always turned: to the manosphere.

These men are completely unable to see heterosexual relationships outside of a lens of dominance and abuse. That’s what they’ll use to try to help him. For example, they love using the concept of “dread” as an antidote to a sexless marriage. They argue that women want to have sex when they dread losing their partner, and instruct men to become more attractive to inspire this dread.

It’s not terrible advice, but the framing completely misses the real humanity of women—and the fact that they might prefer to have sex with attractive men. The dread ideology spirals from there, though, instructing men to demand sex as a “need” (yes because nothing is more attractive than male whining). These men would rather lose their partners and live a life without sex than see women as human beings, or listen to women about the real reasons they don’t want sex.

Maybe at some point, he’ll become physically or financially abusive in an effort to control her.

He’ll be a bad father, because he believes the kids are her job. He may also undermine this job by criticizing her parenting, disrupting the routine, stepping in to scream at the kids, or only ever being the fun dad.

If they get divorced, he’ll suddenly change his tune. Raising kids and tending to the home is no longer women’s work. He can do 50/50 now! The man who based his entire identity around earning a paycheck will now insist that he owes her nothing, and that paying for 10% of his children’s needs is literal oppression. After years of telling her only women can raise children or clean, he will tell her—without any sense of irony—that he can do it just as well, and should therefore get equal access to the kids he has very likely neglected for their entire lives.

She’s the real victim in this relationship. It’s objectively abusive for her. But it’s certainly not good for him.

He’ll miss out on the things that matter most in life—deep and meaningful relationships with his children, a mutually nourishing relationship with his partner, a chance at real intimacy, the opportunity to be more than just a cog in the capitalist machine.

He won’t get what he wanted from his marriage. Because he has a superficial understanding of what women are and what their value is, his assessment of his partner’s value will steadily lose value. And of course, no woman can be a useful, pretty object without needs forever.

He’ll feel that his partner unfairly demands things of him, is needy, is controlling. He’ll feel like he’s only a paycheck, because that’s all he contributes.

Whether he ends up single or becomes a bad father in a miserable marriage, he may never understand the role his own ideology plays in his lot. Indeed, when his wife finally wises up and leaves him, he may become even more misogynist, further constraining his opportunities and eroding the quality of his personality.

The manosphere creates self-fulfilling prophecies. It builds meaningless relationships with women men find annoying and unworthy of respect. And then, it tells men that more misogynist bullshit is the answer.

It is not.

Relationships that are exciting, fulfilling, and that meaningfully improve people’s lives are possible. These relationships demand a high degree of emotional engagement and a willingness to learn. They require partners to respect and care about one another. They lean hard on the very skills the manosphere snuffs out.

Women deserve better, but so do men.

If you’re a man who wants an exciting relationship with a woman who keeps you engaged, who attracts and keeps your interest, it’s time to brush up on your emotional and sexual skills—not spend your time listening to Andrew Tate.

A reminder that I’m conducting a poll of parenting practices. This is your last chance to take the poll, as it closes next week. Please take it, and share it so I can get a broad sample. Here’s the link.