By David Futrelle
A lot of what’s called “Red Pill Dating Strategy” is little more than abuse — mimicking the behavior of real-life skeezebags who employ assorted psychological tricks designed to keep their partners feeling desperate and insecure. It’s as if the Red Pillers read a rundown of toxic behavior in relationships and decided to use it as a to-do list.
But for this strategy to work properly, the subject of this sort of manipulation has to remain unaware of the tactics their abuser is using. So what happens if a woman learns about these tricks and realizes they’re being used on her?
Well, for one thing, it freaks out this dude who never thought he’d get caught. And so he turned to the Ask The Red Pill subreddit for help.
Oopsie daisy!
Naturally, one of the Red Pill regulars suggested that he respond to the accusations of manipulative abuse by … gaslighting her.
“I would honestly look at her crazy … and act stupid, ‘redpill? I don’t understand what you mean by that?’ Or some bullshit,” wrote rprookie.
Another suggested that he try to convince her that the abuse was a good thing.
Be blunt, yes it is selfish and narcissistic in some ways. Here’s the catch there’s nothing wrong with that. Surprise!! Most of therapy or psychology is helping people prioritize themselves in a healing process to develop healthy and more effective habits/behaviors. The red pill provides a way for men to better themselves and simply be honest about what they want and encouraging them to pursue it. For example, how many men want a threesome, but never try to get it?
The red pill has literal posts about how to get it and that’s the point self improve men/ actualization has an element of selfishness because you are the subject of change.
I’m sure his “abuse is good at least when I’m doing it because then I might get a threesome” argument will go over swimmingly.
Another commenter blames the therapist, and psychiatry in general.
So your midwit girlfriend learned some big girl words from her therapist, thus causing the very untheraputic outcome of more conflict on her life.
Your basically experiencing the same thing ever American Dad experiences when their daughter gets back from libtard university.
Google the antipsychiatry movement and if your not a midwit you should be able to hard counter with serious anti therapy critique.
Still another commenter thought that the OP had nothing to worry about.
All of the girls who called me a manipulative, abusive narcissist went on to fuck me even better. Those are just cute nicknames they use for us with their friends and orbiters.
Meanwhile, another commenter suggested that the girl was being the manipulative one:
If a women calls you manipulative/abusive whatever, basically anything remember that it’s for her personal gain. It’s just a tactic to manipulate you into turning into a little beta pussy for her. You should be worried tho if someone you trust and respect calls you this.
I’m pretty sure he neither trusts nor respects her; that’s why he’s treating her like shit.
There were also numerous commenters telling the OP to break up and move on and though their reasoning was often suspect I have to agree with them on this. OP, end this abusive relationship — and move on from the Red Pill altogether. Use this as a wake-up all. Get some therapy yourself. And don’t get into another relationship until you’ve expunged all traces of the “Red Pill philosophy” from your system.
H/T — The Blue Pill subreddit
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Back to the Old West for a moment: Anyone know why Hollywood went for the ‘Sunday best’ Stetson as their common image of a ‘cowboy hat’ rather than the more practical and widely used derby/bowler hat?
@Kevin
Branding and drama.
For the branding part, the stetson makes the cowboys on screen stand out from the guys in the audience – many of whom were wearing derbys. Normal guys used to wear hats all the time, you’d feel undressed going out without one on.
The drama is both direct and indirect – directly, an easily visible coloured signifier of good and evil manages the audiences expectations. Indirectly, the broad brim of the stetson gives more interesting light/shadow options for the director to play with – and when cowboy flicks came in, movies were a mature enough art form to start thinking about things like that, even for B feature fillers.
@Dalillama
“Personality disorder” is not synonymous with “asshole”. It looks that way because way too fucking many people on the internet still feel justified in assuming, based on no evidence, that people who wronged or mistreated them must have personality disorders. For instance, if I were to apply the same sloppy pseudo-diagnostic criteria, I could look at your callous indifference to the well-being of a group of people with stigmatized mental health issues, and slap the label of “sociopath” on you, at which point you could be written of as hopelessly evil. However that would be inaccurate and unfair to people who have actual personality disorders, because it doesn’t take a clinical disorder to devalue and dehumanize a group of people who already face tremendous social stigma. It just takes being a basic boring bigot, like you.
Personality disorders don’t necessarily mean mistreating others. Symptoms can include harmful behavior towards others, yes. They can also include self-destructive behavior, other behavior that’s unhealthy for the person with the PD, and behavior that’s just considered strange. And not everyone who has a PD is going to mistreat others.
People with personality disorders aren’t deliberately choosing them because they like the results. They are engaging in deeply-entrenched patterns of maladaptive coping skills, often learned in chronically traumatic environments. Relearning it is a complex task that takes extensive effort and support in learning healthier coping skills.
Personality disorders are not as untreatable as you make them sound! Getting the correctly targeted therapy, sometimes with added medication, has resulted in significant improvement for many people with personality disorders! For example, many people with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder respond well to CBT! But right, this is the Stereotype People With Mental Illness Game, so we’re ignoring two entire clusters of personality disorder and pretending that “personality disorder” means “Cluster B”, and “Cluster B” means “asshole”. Can we acknowledge the impressive success rate of DBT in helping people with borderline personality disorder? Or does that fuck up the narrative too much, by acknowledging that these are human beings in a lot of pain who need help coping with how much their disorder makes them suffer? Or is that giving too much humanity to chronically traumatized people when it’s easier to write them all off as bad?
And before anyone tries to mischaracterize what I’m saying, it’s not okay or excusable for people with personality disorders to abuse people. It’s not okay for anyone to abuse people. If someone who has a personality disorder abused you, then you’re absolutely justified in being pissed off at that specific person, and keeping them out of your life. And if someone hurt you and you don’t know why, you can be angry at them without furthering stigma against groups of chronically traumatized people in extreme psychological pain. I know you’re choosing to be a bigoted asshole about this, because you like it. But you hurting people like this is volitional behavior on your part, and you can choose to stop inflicting this kind of pain on people. I don’t expect you will stop inflicting harm on vulnerable people, and instead I expect a mob response of defensive rage and anecdata about people who, according to the expertise of someone on the internet with no clinical qualifications, totally must have had a PD to hurt someone like that! But you can change.
@ Threp
Thank you for the heads-up. I never would have twigged the shadow thing independently, surviving former early film studios round here look like greenhouses just so that enough light would reach the film to ensure it would develop.
Oh, come on. Some of the milder PDs aren’t actively malicious. Some are even politically progressive, and have all the right “ideas”.
But because they refuse to take any responsibility for their feelings, actions or inappropriate outbursts, they fall into a toxic habit of denial, projection and gaslighting. When boundaries are set or they’re called out, they abandon real friends who tried to help them, and drift into progressively more chaotic and disfunctional relationships that have the one benefit of enabling them to think they’re never at fault and perpetually “misunderstood”. They never apologize (that is volunteer an apology as opposed to needing to be hunted down like a child), and they’re more than ok with allowing their new friends to spread lies about the people who actually cared about them.
This should sound familiar. As should this:
“I would honestly look at her crazy … and act stupid, ‘redpill? I don’t understand what you mean by that?’ Or some bullshit,” wrote rprookie.
Not that it ever actually worked. It’s just baffling to hear an otherwise smart person spew obvious bullshit and in the end only isolating themselves and becoming more miserable.
You’re right about medication not working, but you’re wrong about therapy. For the PDs who are tired of being miserable and can finally admit they are the cause of 99% of their perpetual chaos, cognitive therapy can work. But they have to DO IT. And not whine about how they can’t afford therapy. That is a real challenge, but if they can consume genre fiction and history books (proving their memory is perfectly fine and able if they’re motivated), then even a half-assed effort in trying to understand their explosive outbursts would be better than, “this is so hard, my real friends will put up with shit indefinitely”.
I have to generally agree with “Sick of your Ablism”, though not with every point.
The PD itself is not causing the “asshole lifestyle”. It’s the denial and refusal to get help or do anything but the most surface cosmetic changes: “don’t yell at people for no reason because you feel bad, yet refuse to talk about it”.
Eventually you have to let the people who refuse to change their behavior go. You might miss they person you thought they were, but you never miss the drama or gaslighting. Good fucking riddance.
As an aside, it is interesting the PDs most resistant to change are those raised white and male. Consciously or not, they benefit from the desire of many people wanting to believe their ongoing tales of “my unreasonable mom/teacher/boss/ex”. Seen that in the comments now and then.
@NOBODY
You are missing several things about how PDs work, I say as someone who is friends with and follows a number of people with NPD and BPD. You’re talking like the problems with PDs are largely to do with choices of how to behave, and that’s just not how PDs work.
First, PD =/= asshole. You can be an asshole without having a personality disorder, and you can have a personality disorder without being an asshole.
Secondly, I’d bet a thousand that you don’t have any disorder that causes emotional dysregulation. I’m bipolar. Realizing that I am manic or depressed does jack and shit to stop it, only to help me manage it and help it pass sooner. Knowing you have a problem with how your brain works… does not solve that problem. Often, it can’t be solved. So we learn to manage it, which entails a complex set of skills unique to the person that are often best learnt from other people with our disorders, which is harder for people with PDs because of the pervasive idea that they’re conspiring against people without PDs if they work together. But our disorders never go away, even if that’s what it looks like to an outsider. You have no idea how much of an emotional load that is.
Lastly, quite frankly fuck your classism for saying “whine about how they can’t afford therapy.” You realize how hard it is for people with mismanaged PDs to hold down jobs? How much energy it takes to work through issues like that on your own? I had to figure out 80% of this shit by myself because doctors refused to talk to me as a human instead of a problem to be solved, and it’s taken me five years to get to a semistable place. You blatantly do not understand how much work it takes to work around your own brain and how it’s wired.
TL;DR: Fuck off with this demonizing, dismissive, ignorant shit about people with PDs, and stop equating them to shitheads.
@Sick of your ableism
You rock. Keep sticking up for my demonized cousins, they need it.
Thirding “not everyone with a personality disorder is an asshole” here, and the anti-ableism and anti-classism bits.
@NOBODY:
Hypothesis: people who never apologize, by and large, are precisely the people who were “hunted down” and made to do so repeatedly as children, and the reason is that for them an apology is not an act of contrition but an act of submission and a demand for one is thus an attempt to assert dominance, and from anyone other than a parent figure, their boss at work, or another authority figure, an illegitimate attempt to boot. (Psychopaths, meanwhile, will readily apologize … albeit insincerely. So the worst of the ones with a propensity to be actively dangerous to other people will slip right under your radar if “never apologizes” is your method for identifying problem people…)
This goes double if they were routinely, as children, coerced to apologize for things that they actually didn’t do, or that were involuntary on their part at least. That would complete the disconnect: apologies not when they actually had something to be contrite about, but purely as part of a dominance display by a parent figure.
An interesting question is then, from whom do the same people demand apologies be given to them? Those who genuinely fucked up and hurt them in some way, or those they perceive as subordinate? Do other people often demand apologies at all, or expect that they be freely given instead?
As far as I’m aware, no regular on this board is a clinical psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, or other mental health professional. Nobody here is qualified to make sweeping, generalizing statements about all people with mental health challenges.
Especially statements that whole categories of people are beyond any possible help.
Narcissistic personality disorder is very resistant to treatment, but to say it can’t possibly be treated is dehumanizing and ableist in the extreme.
Borderline personality disorder is absolutely treatable! It is frequently comorbid with bipolar disorder and it responds to a lot of the same types of therapeutic interventions. So saying it is untreatable because folks with BPD choose to have personality disorder is not only ableist, it’s demonstrably (easily demonstrably) perfectly false.
I’m not really sure what to make of this discussion. I think I’m not going to comment on Dalilama’s post, as there has been no response to the criticisms so far and I can only guess from the post structure that they didn’t mean to spread harmful stereotypes about mad-identified people. I’m just a bit concerned about the nature of the criticisms, as it seems to make things out to be as if Dalilama is a repeat offender when it comes to ableism or even bigotry in general.
Some of us already feel disposable and ultimately unwelcome and just less and less inclined to share any views on any forum on the internet.
@An Impish Pepper
There are times when something someone says is egregious enough that one time is enough for censure. Saying that a whole class of mentally ill people are that way in order to victimize others and that they choose to be that way because they want to hurt people how they are is deeply ableist and incredibly inappropriate.
All those of us pushing back are upset about is that this is spreading ideas that are actively harmful to a marginalized group of people. Not doing that isn’t a high bar bar to clear.
Insofar as refusing to take responsibility AFTER they admit they have a problem BUT THEN get inappropriately upset when they are no longer allowed to make chaos, it really is. I too have known people either diagnosed or with similar symptoms.
I can have sympathy from a distance. But no way is anyone who behaves that way going to suck anymore of my limited time. I did my time, was patient and supportive for almost a decade with one “friend”. My reward? To be gaslit and lied about, and their pathologically jealous partner(who has their own tragic story and I ALSO tried to be a friend to), try to destroy my business reputation.
So good luck to them. Really. We need more mental health services. And funding and all that. But pretending everyone must have an inexhaustible supply of personal understanding is not workable or realistic.
Gosh I have never considered that.
/Sarc
This is why, in at least one case, I was ridiculously patient, because I had similar unsupportive adults in my youth. My patience lasted for EIGHT FUCKING YEARS.
At some point, no matter how unhelpful your upbringing is, you must find a way to acquire adulting skills if you want your life to go forward. It’s not fair to do it on your own but it must be done. I speak from experience.
What you absolutely can NOT do is attack the people helping you. I speak from experience there too. In my case it was a factory manager who was really kind…who I snapped at for no reason.
She really kindly asked why I did that. I didn’t know, but by non God, I was going to find out, because I did not want to hurt people who were being kind to me.
People showing PD disfuctions simply do not respond to that kind of informal engagement. They must have professional therapy.
Edit: perhaps it’s not clear but I have unlimited patience for someone struggling with issues because I understand that journey, provided one thing: THEY ARE DOING THE WORK.
But the second I have evidence they were never doing the work and just making noises, I’m done. I don’t do codependency.
That sounds a lot like the way conservatives always talk. Sink or swim, like it or lump it, that’s just the way the world is, it doesn’t matter if you had disadvantages and other people were born on third base you can still be successful as proved by $(INSPIRING_EXAMPLE) and therefore if you’re not it’s your own damn fault and quit whining about structural disadvantages and rocking the boat and yadda yadda yadda …
And of course the bloody site ate it.
Fuck this shit I’m going to bed. Maybe things will be working correctly again tomorrow. :/
There’s a big difference between saying “people with personality disorders are salvageable” and “people with personality disorders must be tolerated endlessly.” I haven’t seen anyone equate the two; maybe I missed it. The mentally well often experience splash damage from the mentally ill, and that’s unfortunate; your first responsibility is to yourself and your own mental health. If you can’t be mentally healthy around someone with (just to pull it out of the air) borderline, then you’re not required to put up with them! I discriminate heavily against mental illness in my own personal life, simply because my own bullshit is enough of a challenge without taking on the challenge of someone else’s bullshit additionally. I’m entitled to do that. The mentally healthy are also entitled to do that. It sucks to be the mad person being pushed away, but I recognize that nobody is required to put up with me any more than I am required to put up with someone else.
But, again, there’s a difference between pushing someone with mental illness away, and declaring unilaterally that they are unable to be helped, objectively, by anyone. The first is self-care; the second is ableism. I’m sorry for what happened to you with your (ex?) friends, but that’s not what’s being criticized.
*sigh* Here I go wasting more hours that I could have spent on something that wasn’t going to repeatedly hack away at my self-worth while doing it.
Censure is one thing. Dragging a person as a bigot, based on one post that may have been a miscommunication, is something more. It says something about the person’s relationship with the community — what it is, and what it should be.
The fact that being an asshole is not a mental illness is an extremely common theme, not just in the comment sections here but also in some of the articles. Many people have nonetheless tried to internet diagnose in the past, and many have been called out on it. Dalilama has been a regular in these comment sections for longer than I started reading them, and is generally among the people who do the calling out. I’m not saying that being “woke” makes you impervious to criticism, even harsh criticism. But at some point you’re just disregarding an entire context to read a post in the worst way possible. There’s a difference between demanding better of someone, and talking to them like they’re a troll that David forgot to ban.
Anyway, I’ve seen enough similar altercations on here that I’m not exactly inclined to say too much more for fear of people jumping down my throat again with the worst sorts of nonsense about my beliefs and values.
@an impish pepper
What was the context? Honest question.
I think I can understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been there, on other forums. It is frustrating, especially when you don’t know what will set other people off.
Sorry if you feel disposable. You’re not.
Yeah sorry Dalillama is wrong about personality disorders. BPD at least can absolutely be treated and managed.
(It’s also hard to the distinguish from CPTSD, and preferentially thrown at AFAB and female-presenting people as a diagnosis; so you have a lots of people getting stigmatized with it and abused for it when what they need is some fucking trauma-competent therapy. I was lucky, I would have easily fallen into that category if I’d been AFAB.)
That being said this stuff is complicated. IIRC being officially diagnosed as a “sociopath” or “psychopath” theoretically requires a history of actually being an abuser, and honestly? I generally don’t fuck with people who have low interpersonal empathy and good theory of mind, because IME most of them have turned out to be abusive. I know one or two who (AFAIK) aren’t, but when you have low empathy and live in a society that *systematically rewards you* for having no code of ethics, it’s very easy to become an abuser.
I get similarly exasperated by a lot of the discourse around bipolar disorder TBH. I don’t have it myself, but what I do have is a close family member who has it – and got spectacularly abusive when they were manic.
The blame for that should fall mostly IMO on bigoted and broken institutions that don’t give people with mental illnesses the care we need, or respect our humanity and quality of life when “treating” us. But I also get really heartily sick of the rhetoric that mental illnesses never harm others. No y’all, it is absolutely possible for someone to become abusive or get more abusive due to mental illness. That in no way abrogates society’s responsibility to treat them like a human being, but like… maybe stop with that denial. It actually hurts people.
@Cyborgette
I’m curious, what’s the “yeah sorry” for? I don’t think that anyone is saying that Dali’s right. Dali is wrong about PDs, and they’re wrong about psychosis as well, since a really large percent of people who suffer from a psychotic episode(s) are in some level of denial about being sick, even when they’re “lucid”.
Also, what’s this boards obsesession with BPD? It’s been mentioned quite a few times, and it’s hardly the token Personality Disorder, and hardly the most treatable either. Although I’ve been through DBT, (obviously developed for BPD), and it is an excellent, skills-based program. It will help anyone that puts the honest work in. Because a lot of the symptomology of Personality Disorders comes down to a lack of skills to handle a different brain structure. They’re not monsters. People used to say the same shit about autistic people too.
Lastly, many honest, competent mental health professionals will tell you that Personality Disorders are WAY overdiagnosed, and are super subject to the professional’s biases or even frustration with the client. This is because Personality Disorders are pathological versions of normal personality traits.
Like for example narcissism, well everyone is a narcissist. Seriously, it’s a part of everyone’s personality, a trait that exists on a spectrum from pathologically low to pathologically high. And where someone is on that spectrum is a matter of professional opinion, and if you are a professional that is frustrated or angry with a client, that professional opinion is going to get influenced by your emotions, try as hard as you might to be totally objective. That’s just the facts of the way humans work.
☝️THIS. Thank you for saying that.
@Moogue
The “yeah sorry” was because part of my own pathology is being far too conflict-averse. 😉
Apologies for adding fuel to the fire, but I’m lucky enough to have a full-time job, and my medical benefits will cover maybe three psychiatric sessions a year, total, *if* neither I nor my spouse need any other stuff that’s classed as para-medical. He’s on disability, so I think his sessions are covered, if we can find a psychiatrist with room in their schedule and who isn’t awful (he’s had some in the bast who I’d consider abusive or incompetent).
Oh, ok got it. Makes sense. ?
Although now that you mentioned it, is it just me, or does anyone else read any sentence starting with the words “yeah sorry” in a sarcastic, confrontational way? Maybe it’s a regional English thing, or maybe it’s just a me thing. I am pretty dumb sometimes. ??
@Moogue
Yeah that’s a real thing, and honestly I’m not sure sometimes if I’m doing it genuinely or as a form of passive aggression. Probably a habit I should work on TBH.
@ moogue
I use the ‘Yeah, sorry’ formula when I’ve put my foot in it.
The ‘yeah’ is to indicate I agree with someone; that old thing of agreement/disagreement being a signal for ‘I like you/I don’t like you’ regardless of the subject matter; and the sorry being the apology.
But I can see how people might see it as condescension; especially in text where there’s no tone or body language to take cues from.
Just going to say one thing, honor demands it.
Known Dali for years – way longer than just here. Yeah, she’s got opinions and ain’t exactly shy or circumspect about expressing them. That can rub people the wrong way. Sometimes she’s wrong – she’s human. It happens.
What she isn’t is someone as punches down.
@Threp
Oh yeah, and I’ve seen that. 🙂 Dalillama is one of the posters I most respect here TBH. Just even the best of us get it wrong sometimes.