Evaluating the Effects of the Red Pill Seduction Community Experienced by Intimate Partners

The Red Pill (TRP) is an online antifeminist seduction community, which encourages its members to employ their beliefs and manipulation strategies in offline relationships. Though previous studies have evaluated online TRP communities and their discourse, this study represents the first investigation of the impacts of TRP practices on intimate partners engaged in physical, offline relationships with TRP men. Six in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with women who had formerly been romantic partners with TRP men. Analysis revealed four primary themes: (1) technology use, (2) maltreatment, (3) social beliefs, and (4) long-term effects, each with multiple subcategories. TRP was used by male partners both as a basis for controlling many elements of participants’ lives, as well as a basis for their own beliefs about gender, sexuality, and politics. Despite differences in ages, lengths of relationships, and geographic locations of participants, commonalities were found in their experiences of various forms of maltreatment. As a result, participants expressed high levels of ongoing mistrust toward dating and other men. Findings suggest that TRP exists as a form of intimate partner violence spreading via the internet while masking as a seduction or self-help system, and that its risks are not limited to online spaces. Results may inform future research in order to generate greater awareness and potential prevention strategies for TRP-affected populations.

The “manosphere” is the term for a collection of websites, message boards, and other online spaces associated with the men’s rights movement and similar online-mediated antifeminist groups (Ging, Citation2019; Schmitz & Kazyak, Citation2016). Manosphere discourse encompasses a range of topic areas including the #Gamergate community, which garnered attention for harassment and threats toward women involved in the video game industry, and the politically-concerned alt-right, implicated in events such as the election of Donald Trump for U.S. President and the Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally (Mamié et al., Citation2021; Massanari, Citation2017). Several manosphere groups are specific in their efforts to teach men how to “pickup” or seduce women, such as the Pickup Artistry community which focuses on confidence-building through scripted attraction routines (Bratich & Banet-Weiser, Citation2019; Ging, Citation2019). Another manosphere group, The Red Pill (TRP), teaches a different form of seduction through espousing a specific type of hypermasculinity, reinforcing stereotypical gender hierarchies, and encouraging men to manipulate women to counteract feminism, which it refers to as women’s “sexual strategy” (Ging, Citation2019; Van Valkenburgh, Citation2021).