You Hate Women

Citations below

Intro

TRP, also known as “The Red Pill,” defines itself on Reddit as: “Sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” The Red Pill takes its name from the movie The Matrix. If you have “taken the red pill,” you see the world and, TRP’s focus, women truly as they are. TRP exists mainly on a popular subreddit (with more than 150,000 subscribers) of the same name. As a result, there are no “leading TRP voices,” unless you count Endorsed Contributors, like GayLubeOil.

TRP believes that women do not - and cannot - make rational decisions and are driven wholly by self-interest.

Versus MRAs

Officially, MRAs define themselves in relation to women based on legal rights and standing. TRP focuses itself in relation to women mostly on the basis of sex and relationships. In practice, they share a lot of the same beliefs.

TRP Jargon

The easiest way to understand the TRP worldview is directly through their jargon. They have a large glossary of terms, that basically set out what they believe the world to be. Much of these rely on pop evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology (which is controversial) is based on the idea that "we have stone aged brains in our modern heads."

Popular terms include:

SMV: Sexual Market Value. This is the perceived value of a sexual partner. TRP believes that, due to the rule of “hypergamy,” a woman will pursue men with higher and higher SMV, until she eventually becomes an Alpha Widow.

Hypergamy: The idea that women will seek out men based on a sliding scale of “alpha-ness” and “dominance.” For example, if a woman is dating a barista, she’s going to be on the lookout for the manager of a Starbucks. In brief, it is the idea that women will always date up.

Alpha Widow: A woman who has dated so far up that she cannot get over it. This woman, according to TRP, has usually hit The Wall.

The Wall: The perceived expiration date of a woman’s sexual viability and, therefore, the expiration date on her. (According to TRP, this date is 28. Sometimes 29, with good behavior.)

Cock Carousel (sometimes abbreviated as CC): The time in a woman’s life where she fucks everyone and everything. According to TRP, this mystical time exists for all women. It ends once a woman reaches The Wall and looks for a Beta Buck or Blue Pill man to support her

Beta Buck/Blue Pill: A man who has not taken the Red Pill and accepts society’s view of the world/women. He will be fooled into supporting a woman financially and emotionally because he doesn’t have/refuses to accept the secrets of TRP.

Plate: A woman you have sex with, but do not engage in a relationship with. The act of balancing many of these sexual relationships is called “spinning plates.”

Shit Test: A way a woman determines if the man she is with is an Alpha. Examples cited in TRP have included asking how many women the man you are seeing has slept with, asking a man when he is going to settle down, and a woman asking a man to get her something. (Ed note: I would explain this one further but I honestly don’t really understand it, and, as with lots of TRP stuff, the definition of this is as shifting as the sands of time beneath our feet. It seems to just be whatever a woman does that annoys the man she’s sleeping with.)

Holding frame: Maintaining your bearing as an alpha in spite of shit tests. Basically, from my TRP reading, this seems to boil down to refusing to answer questions you don’t feel comfortable answering and emotionally backing out of situations whenever a woman does something you don’t like.

PUA Crossover

Citations below.

Intro: 

MRAs aka Men’s Rights Activists, generally a mix of Canadian and US men and women, are the most “palatable” of the online misogynists. By labeling themselves as “activists,” they adopt a thin veneer of respectability, although their “activism” on behalf of men has proven to be basically non-existent or, in some cases, an outright scam. MRAs (who consider themselves at the forefront of the Men’s Right’s Movement, or MRM and in some cases MHRM - Men’s Human Rights Movement) espouse a platform that includes such issues as protections for the rights of fathers, protection against what they view as widespread fake rape allegations, and increasing male enrollment in higher education. In actuality, little to no work is actually done on these fronts and the majority of the “activism” boils down yelling at women online and publicly accessible memes.

Heavy Hitters:

Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice for Men (AVfM), was once the star, and in many ways, the face of the MRA movement. He has a history of violent rhetoric that he made attempts to tone down in light of increased media attention. In recent years his star has fallen, after negative press in the wake of the MRA conference in Detroit in 2014 and MRA in-fighting. (Particularly damning was a thoroughly researched 2015 Buzzfeed article, entitled “How Men’s Rights Leader Paul Elam Turned Being a Deadbeat Dad into a Moneymaking Movement.”)  And in recent months, Paul Elam has moved his efforts away from AVfM  (the leading MRA site for most of the 2000s) entirely. He has since switched his focus to An Ear for Men, purported to be a men’s counseling service by Elam.

The Honey Badger Brigade, headed by Karen Straughen, is a group of female MRAs. They, too, were at the 2014 conference, and were deeply entrenched in the MRA movement and AVfM. Straughen was considered one of the leading voices for men’s rights issues via her YouTube channel. But they recently have switched their focus (as evidenced by stylistic changes on their website and Twitter), pursuing newly converted anti-feminists in the wake of Gamergate (to be covered later). The Honey Badger Brigade has been covered by the press.

JudgyBitch aka Janet Bloomfield is another female MRA who was prominent in the movement at its height and attended the ill-fated 2014 Detroit conference. She runs her own blog, JudgyBitch.com, which carries the following lede: “The radical notion that women are adults.” She also serves as the “Director of Social Media” for AVfM, and has been banned from Twitter multiple times for harassment and abuse. (She has a bizarre history of creating fake tweets and attacking prominent feminists, most notably Jessica Valenti, on the basis of these fictional tweets. This is a practice that other misogynist corners of the internet have been forced to call her out on.) Janet Bloomfield has also received mainstream attention (including an out-of-place appearance on The Doctors, accessible via Bloomfield’s YouTube page).

Disturbing Pieces of History:

The École Polytechnique Massacre occurred in 1989, when Marc Lepine entered a classroom in Montreal and shot 28 people, including 14 women, saying that he was “fighting feminism.” At the end of the deadly massacre, he shot himself. As a result of the massacre, stricter gun control laws were enacted in Canada. This event still serves as a talking point for MRAs.

Thomas James Ball serves as a well-known touchpoint for the MRA movement as it exists today, even in mainstream publications. In 2011, he self-immolated on the steps of a courthouse in Keene, NH to protest a custody agreement with his ex-wife and, later, back payment on child support. He detailed his grievances with the court in a 40-page memoir and 15-page letter sent to his local paper, The Keene Sentinel. At his death, Thomas Ball was a member of Fathers & Families (now The National Parents Organization).

This Blog:

Misogyny in the US is as prevalent today as it was yesterday. Without the entire societal structure holding it up (thanks to legal protections and women who fought hard to change our culture), anti-feminist misogyny in the US (defined for the purposes of this blog as “anti-women sentiment that seeks to reverse gains for women or portray women as less-than”) has fractured into small movements, scattered about the internet and in real life. For the purposes of this blog, I will be writing both about religious and non-religious misogyny and defining them as such.

This blog seeks to write about anti-feminist misogyny as it exists online and in life, shedding light on the fringe that is moving more and more quickly towards the center of the national discussion on women.

Me: 

In 2000, my home got the internet. I was 12. By 2002, reading anti-feminist websites (specifically religious anti-feminist websites) was one of my favorite things to do. Raised religiously myself (but also a person who - at 5 - declared that her husband would take her last name because I liked my last name!), the religious framework of this type of misogyny fascinated me. I was fascinated by a group of people who felt that they were bound by an extreme set of rules and that these rules would help them to structure their lives in a way that not only made sense to them but was pleasing to God. 

The first site I became obsessed with was called Ladies Against Feminism (which still exists today). It existed, in 2002, as a independent blog where women (writing under the naming structure: “Mrs. FirstName LastName”) would share tips on gardening, dressing modestly, and their opinions about their specific, Christian-tilted concerns around courtship, Biblical womanhood, and living in a male-headed household at the turn of the millennium. Their 2004 article “Should Women Vote?” remains one of my favorites.

LAF underwent a site redesign in 2011, producing less original content and linking to other Christian blogs more often than they produced their own work. As a result, I lost interest in the site, for the most part. By this time, I was hot on the trail of reading about secular anti-feminist misogyny: Pick Up Artist (PUAs), Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), groups of men online who felt that the world had made them celibate against their will (”incel”/”involuntarily celibate”), men who eschewed the company of women entirely (”Men Going Their Own Way”/”MGTOW”), and men who felt that they saw the world - and more specifically women - as they are (”The Red Pill”/”TRP”).

I’ve been reading and tracking anti-feminist websites online since 2002, when LAF was founded. It occurred to me that this equates to about 14 years of collected anti-feminist knowledge.

There are already great sites, like We Hunted the Mammoth, that track online misogyny in real time, but the jargon that they use can be hard for an outsider to parse. I hope, in a small way, to open people’s eyes to the “philosophies” of these various groups.