Introduction
Sexual freedom is proclaimed and elevated to dogma. The exhibition of bodies is permitted, often encouraged, and on OnlyFans it is even a source of income. Sobriety and etiquette are toxic legacies of patriarchy, hallmarks of that “good guy” who is the quintessential culprit of femicide.
On Instagram and Tinder, potential one-night stands are available in a sort of digital showcase, just a click away. Monogamy is so out of fashion that it is considered “vanilla,” i.e., banal, insipid, and inferior.
These are some images that can be traced back to “transgressive conformism”: an ideological atmosphere that has its roots in the revolution of customs, in a series of intellectual choreographies initially hatched in universities and then exhibited in everyday life: the flattening of men and women, the “deconstruction” of gender stereotypes, the sanctification of individual enjoyment. This is the new world forged by feminism and political correctness, locked in a fatal embrace.
In reaction to this ideological cage, redpill was born on the web: a sociological theory that attempts to provide survival tools to an exposed and defenseless subject, a part of Western male youth. What is the potential of this emerging ideological weapon and its subject?
Theoretical ABC
Redpill owes its name to the film The Matrix and refers to an uncomfortable truth, as opposed to bluepill, a reassuring lie digested by the mainstream media. And the uncomfortable truth concerns precisely the power imbalance that transgressive conformism has established, benefiting women and a male minority, the real beneficiaries of the revolution in customs, and penalizing the majority of men.
The red pill insists on the biological element: males and females are different, having “polygamous” and “hypergamous” instincts, respectively. The first expression refers to the tendency to mate countless times: after all, for men, sperm production is almost infinite. On the contrary, women are instinctively hypergamous because they tend to select the best ‘partner’, as they can only sustain a limited number of pregnancies during their lifetime. Thus, for men, the aesthetic element (‘Look’) of their ‘partner’ will be predominantly relevant, while women, in a more selective manner, will also be interested in socio-economic conditions (‘Status’ and ‘Money’).
Look, Status, and Money are the terms of the “LMS” theory, the pillar of redpill, and represent measurable values that are subject to increase or decrease. All this, from biology to society, from theory to practice, shapes a market that relegates men to the demand side and women to the supply side.
According to the red pill, until 1968 there were social pressures—the “patriarchy”—that ensured a certain balance. Thus, moralism tempered instincts, marriage was the most common final destination, and the 1:1 ratio between supply and demand, in the pairing of a male and a female, was pretty much guaranteed, apart from sporadic escapades, which, not surprisingly, were always condemned and relegated to the margins of society.
The sexual revolution, however, has altered this balance by legitimizing promiscuity. Thus, the majority of women, the strong side of the market supply, always select the same minority of men with the highest LMS values, leaving the male majority in a state of loneliness. This trend is most evident on dating apps such as Tinder. Here, according to the specialized website Swipestats.io, women have an average 30.7% chance of making a “match,” or a date, compared to 2.63% for men. It is no coincidence that male sexual abstinence has risen in the last twenty years from 3% to 11.6% among men up to the age of 40 in Italy, according to a report by Censis and Bayer, and from 19% to 31% among young Americans up to the age of 24, according to another study. The only male data bucking the trend concerns the sexually more active minority which, according to another study, saw its number of partners increase from 12 to 15 and from 38 to 50: an increase concentrated respectively in the “top” 20% and “top” 5% of men in the United States between 2002 and 2011-2013.
These trends are also confirmed, perhaps with greater emphasis, in Scandinavian countries, where feminism has taken deep root. According to one study, for example, in Finland, young men who have had at least two sexual partners in the last year have fallen from almost 50% in 1999 to less than 20% in 2015; women, on the other hand, maintain more stable levels. Over a longer period of time, the trend worsens: women have seen a progressive increase in their number of partners (from 2 in 1971 to 5 in 2015), while men have seen the opposite trend (from 5 to 3 in the same years).
In Italy, the most comprehensive and coherent systematization of the red pill theory is provided on the website Il Redpillatore.
Who adheres to redpill?
Like all ideologies, redpill can provide a horizon of meaning, an impulse for action, but it can also lead to resignation and violence. Similarly, Marxism and the Enlightenment gave rise not only to the greatest achievements of modernity but also to the Red Brigades and Jacobin terror.
However, this common-sense assumption seems to escape the media circus, first and foremost its flagship: the investigative podcast winner of the ‘Premio Morrione 2024’ award, available on RaiPlay. The ploy is always more or less the same: to confuse the ‘red pill’, which is a theory that people actively adhere to, with ‘incels’, i.e. those men forced into loneliness (the term derives from the English ‘involuntary celibate’) because of their unattractive physical appearance or mental disorders.
Incel animate forums where they pour out their frustration, often with hatred and violent language, and sometimes even legitimizing their resignation by distorting redpill theories. Over the years, some incel have also made headlines by committing murders and other violent acts, accompanied by bombastic headlines. Thus, the mainstream has easily managed to dismiss incels, redpill, and other anti-feminist expressions on the web in a single pot, sometimes inventing or exaggerating nuances of misogyny, fascism, and white supremacy. In this regard, a recent report by the European Union stands out.
In reality, the redpill is one of several expressions of the anti-establishment concerns of a large part of Western youth. According to a recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom, more than half of those interviewed expressed aversion to feminism and traditional media, discontent with democracy and wokeism, and fascination with charismatic leadership and even dictatorships. Another recent survey found support for traditional values and aversion to minorities and feminism, especially among men aged 16 to 39 in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Spain. Across the Atlantic, however, an investigation attributes a decisive role to this social force in Donald Trump’s recent rise to the White House: “They are not marginalized, nor do they belong to the working class, nor are they anti-elite, nor are they many of the other adjectives used to describe Trump supporters since 2016,” as reported. “Rather, they are young, highly interconnected, urban, and very online. They are rebels who would once again storm Capitol Hill, albeit without the pathetic fear of the January 6 rioters. They are cryptocurrency nerds and influencers. Many are attractive enough to appear in the upcoming remake of American Psycho.“
The content shared on social networks is also ”attractive.” On TikTok, in particular, numerous videos have gone viral, exalting muscular masculinity, accompanied by psychedelic music and motivational messages, more or less directly inspired by the red pill. This is the case, for example, with the trend “reject modernity, embrace masculinity,” or even the speeches of Jordan Peterson and Rollo Tomassi—all encouragements aimed at Western men to wake up from their daily slumber, from the woke and feminist media bombardment. Other platforms, such as Reddit or hidden Facebook groups, also offer advice on how to improve one’s LMS parameters and praise values such as discipline, strength, clarity, and ambition.
Thus, unlike the incel, this youth harbors its concerns more generally in a climate of intolerance towards groupthink, but also in the name of self-improvement, in an attempt to understand and master the distortions of contemporary life. While a large part of this social group is not yet fully aware of systemic dynamics, a minority is active on social networks, conveying messages and even forging an aesthetic. In this sense, memes and TikTok are effective propaganda tools with untapped potential—not dangerous means capable only of dumbing down their users, unaccustomed to the longer and more complex logical processes typical of a book. More generally, we must not forget that the development and purpose of a social network can manifest itself late and even in unpredictable and contradictory ways. Thus, Facebook initially appeared in harmless forms, as a tool for reconnecting with old classmates, then became involved in progressive causes (remember the Arab Spring and Barack Obama’s praise) and finally became the springboard for the triumph of European populism.
In a word, young men, with their ideological atmosphere, can reawaken, extend their influence, reach a wide audience of supporters, and join the broader battle against woke culture. In this scenario, its influence can encourage a new rebellious, strong, and uncompromising stance—a stance far removed from the usual complaints about the “dictatorship of political correctness,” which are all too often accompanied by justifications and excuses on the broad anti-woke front.
Ideological enclosure
Biology and evolutionism, statistics and market dynamics, self-improvement strategies and digital aesthetics, resentment and cynicism thus forge the redpill, an ideology of reaction to transgressive conformism. In fact, the nature of both antagonists is exquisitely contemporary, with activism, aesthetics, and disenchantment in direct opposition. By definition, action and reaction belong to the same world and share the same matrix. In this sense, we can cite as an emblem that uncomfortable historical interpretation which, primarily with Ernst Nolte, sees the success of fascist revolutions in their ability to fight their primary enemy, communism, on the same level, assimilating its methods and characteristics.
Thus, in the fury of the fight against transgressive conformism, in the red pill there is no room to mourn either the past or the death of God. Activism and individualism supplant all sorts of chivalry and community solidarity; resentment and statistics freeze the momentum of romanticism and sacrifice; the aspiration to dominate the sexual market dethrones the defense of the sacred, traditional authority, and the archetype of the father. In a word, the redpill stands outside the fence of conservatism.
Among the fences of the red pill, the aforementioned perspectives of Jordan Peterson and Rollo Tomassi, two interpreters of the crisis of the contemporary male, certainly sprout, but so do evolutionism, primarily the theories of parental investment and the selfish gene developed by Robert Trivers and Richard Dawkins, respectively.
One can also discern, in the immediate vicinity, echoes of the perspectives of heretical socialists such as Christopher Lasch, Michel Clouscard, and Michel Houellebecq, authors critical of inequality, the narcissism of contemporary society, and the integration of the revolution in customs into capitalism. More precisely, Lasch’s idea of a structurally narcissistic society, in which the individual is formally emancipated but in reality exposed to constant competition for recognition of their social status, is absorbed. From Clouscard, the redpill takes up the idea that transgression does not represent a break with the bourgeois order but the foundation of the status quo of post-1968 capitalism. Even before redpill spread across the web, Houellebecq was already highlighting the cynicism, deformities, and injustices of eros in contemporary society in his novels.
In all three cases, it is not a matter of doctrinal adherence, but of thematic contiguity: redpill intercepts the same civilizational malaise, translating it into digital lexicon and individualized practices of adaptation and rebellion. These are themes, sensibilities, and impulses that are difficult to pigeonhole into traditional ideological camps—right and left, conservatism and progressivism. Only a small minority of adherents and curious onlookers can certainly transit in these surroundings. In fact, the red pill represents a niche phenomenon, a small world hungry for revenge, marginalized, misunderstood but also strongly pathologized and stigmatized by the corridors of power. But wasn’t homosexuality in a similar position in the last century, with its ideological corollaries, language, and activism? In fact, it is often from niches that heresy capable of subverting conformism germinates. And, in this sense, the red pill can be considered the disjointed cry of a fatherless generation, raised in abundance and ending up in a void.