My Problem with the Red Pill

By now, I’m sure most of you have heard of the phrase “red pill” or “red pilled”. It’s a term that comes from the 1999 film The Matrix and refers to the choice that Neo is given: take the blue pill to forget everything and go back to his normal life or take the red pill to learn the truth about the Matrix. As time progressed into the new millennium, its meaning evolved into learning an uncomfortable truth about our world or understanding that reality is not what it appears to be.

Well, that’s the simple way of putting it.

Nowadays, the term “red pill” is tightly intertwined with men’s rights activism and the Manosphere, a collective of men who promote masculinity and oppose feminism. How did this happen? It’s a bit of a long story but the simple answer is that a lot of men like The Matrix and found the red pill analogy fitting for how they felt about modern-day gender dynamics. From their perspective, being red pilled means that you open your eyes to the reality that men are constantly getting the short end of the stick because of entitled women and feminism.

Some people may look at my blog and automatically assume that I support the red pill ideology because I’m…