There’s an old saying that Red Pillers have made their own: “Men age like fine wine; woman age like milk.” Red Pill lore states that women are at their peak attractiveness in their teens and early twenties, after which they “hit the wall” at age 30 or so and rapidly lose their looks, ultimately becoming attractive only to the most desperate of men.
So what happens when Red Pill men accidentally find themselves attracted to a woman over 30? Let’s take a look at one interesting case study, courtesy of the relationship_advice* subreddit.
“My (28F) BF (30M) is having some kind of meltdown after finding out my friend’s (36F) age,” writes an anonymous woman.
I’ve been dating my boyfriend Mike (fake name) for about four months and everything has been great up until now. This post is gonna make Mike sound kind of crazy but up til now he’s been the nicest, most laidback guy I’ve ever dated.
Smooth sailing so far but the iceberg is about to hit.
About a week ago I was on a Zoom call with two of my friends, who we will call Annie and Sarah. Sarah is 27, Annie is 36. I was talking to Annie and Sarah and Mike leaned over my shoulder to say hello. Because of the pandemic he hasn’t met either of them in person yet and it was his first time actually meeting Annie at all. I wanted him to get to know my friends a bit so I invited him to sit next to me and stick around.
It did not go well.
Sarah was talking about her dating woes and how the pandemic has made it harder to date than ever. Mike made this weird joke about how Sarah needs to find a guy quick because at 30 she’s gonna hit the wall and no man will want her anymore.
He said it in this joking voice, but both Annie and Sarah looked weirded out. I was too to be honest, Mike’s never said anything like that before.
Yeah, but he’s thought it. And OP here is only two years ahead of her (alleged) expiration date.
I guess Mike picked up on the awkwardness because he started trying to explain himself and started saying all this stuff about how women age like milk and it’s not the same for guys and men tend to date younger because after 30 they hold all the cards and can pick and choose.
It may be easier, relatively, for men to date when they’re a older, but it’s not like 30-year-old women are dying on the vine on Tinder.
Annie said “I haven’t had any trouble meeting men” and Mike said “Just wait until you hit 30 and lose your looks, it’s all downhill from there.”
Mike has clearly played his trump card. But it’s not so trumpy after all:
Annie just kind of laughed and I had to tell Mike that she’s 36. And obviously hasn’t lost her looks if he’s mistaking her for a twenty something.
Red Pill dogma, meet reality.
I said it kind of jokingly but Mike just went silent and then walked off into my bedroom and slammed the door.
I guess Mike doesn’t like being seen for the idiot he is.
That night and ever since then he’s been very moody and short with me, and keeps making passive-aggressive comments about how I’m “always” against him and never have his back. We’ve never even had an argument before this so I don’t know where that’s coming from.
How mature of him.
I’ve tried to bring up the Annie thing several times and he either clams up and refuses to talk about it or turns it back into me, Annie and Sarah ganging up on him and bullying him, which I don’t think any of us did. The rest of the time he’s just very short with me and keeps picking fights over tiny stupid things like my tone of voice being wrong.
Sounds like someone who needs to be dumped.
What do I do here?
Dump him.
I really want to talk about what happened and about his views on women and men and ageing because that’s kinda concerning.
Dump him.
I don’t understand why my sweet, cool boyfriend has suddenly transformed into this weirdo because he got politely corrected once. How should I solve this?
Dump him.
“Dump him” was the consensus of the Reddit commenters as well. And you’ll be glad to know that she took this advice. In a followup thread, she explained what happened after her first Reddit post.
First of all I want to say thank you. I didn’t expect my post to get such a big reaction, but seeing everyone basically unanimously tell me Mike was bad news was the wake-up call I needed. …
I also called my dad after the Reddit post and something he said basically cemented my decision to end it with Mike. He and my mom are the same age and have been happily married for 30 years. He said “If you stay with this man then on your 30th birthday you’re going to be worrying he’ll never find you beautiful again instead of celebrating the milestone. Don’t waste your time with someone like that. Every time your mom has her birthday I feel happy that she’s choosing to spend another year growing older with me.” And basically, that’s what I want. And obviously I wasn’t going to have that with Mike.
Nope. You would have a man who got more and more bitter every birthday, whether yours or his, because it’s likely that — despite the whole “men age like wine” thing — .he’s worried about his own aging.
Anyway, long story short I did break up with Mike. I texted him asking to meet up and talk and when he asked what about I told him we needed to discuss the Zoom call and how he’d been acting this week. I got more of the same stuff about how I’m a bully and ganging up on him and HE wants an apology from ME and even though I had wanted to do the break-up in person I realized he was going to keep trying to turn it around into being my fault, so I just told him over text that I didn’t want to see him anymore. He sent back “Whatever. Grow up.” and hasn’t contacted me since.
“Grow up” … but not past the age of thirty, says the guy who seems stuck at an emotional age of ten.
H/T — thanks to @redditships and @yetanotherlefty for bringing this post to my attention
*The fact that this post is from the relationship_advice subreddit means there’s a non-zero chance that it’s made up. But this one seems pretty authentic to me.
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Props to the good counsel of the dad who certainly got his priority and his heart at the right place. The behavior of the guy seems believable enough. I’ve met a few fellow who had similar reactions learning that a pretty woman was passed thirty, black or jewish (the last was especially odd to me since it’s not like there is not a lot of stereotypes about a jewish women being ugly out there).
Considering I’m 22 now and I still look like the fetus 16 year old I once was (so much so that my husband gets in disgusted looks and comments when we are out on date cause he looks far older then I do), I don’t think I’m going to look and different at 29 to 30.
Famous last words.
I’m not sure Sarah’s the one who’s going to have a hard time finding dates now.
First rule of holes: when you’re in one, stop digging.
This is also a red flag. Being extremely conflict-averse then exploding suddenly is a very bad sign.
I have the following advice (to her and to anyone else in a similar situation):
Leave. I can guarantee this man believes what he said unironically, and he’s using the pretense of a joke for plausible deniability. He also probably believes far worse. You will not be able to dissuade him from his views, as he will not listen to a woman. It would be dangerous to stay.
A classic DARVO makes me think he’s an experienced abuser. This probably isn’t his first time doing this.
Be eternally youthful but also be my mommy and soothe my owies
I like this very much.
This reminds me of the times someone misgenders you, you correct them and in a mealy-mouthed way they give you their incorrect perception of you as gospel truth to justify why they made a mistake. I had a friend group that consisted of people like this. They are not pleasant and they are troubling. OP did a huge good for herself by leaving. Also, her dad is cool as hell from what I can tell.
@epronovost
“ I’ve met a few fellow who had similar reactions learning that a pretty woman was passed thirty, black or jewish (the last was especially odd to me since it’s not like there is not a lot of stereotypes about a jewish women being ugly out there).”
Eh? I get the rest but how can they be surprised to learn a pretty woman is black? Surely they know she’s black as soon as they see her?! Or do you mean the kind of guys who say “you’re pretty for a black girl” and are genuinely shocked that that is NOT a compliment?
On a separate note while Reddit is full of trolls I can easily believe this is true. As a 40 year old woman (who is perma single) it has taken an incredible mental effort on my part to not let this kind of thing get to me. It was helped by the fact that in my 30s, especially early 30s, people constantly placed me 10 years younger. So much for this “hitting the wall” if they are mistaking women 30+ for much younger.
@ Steph
To a ‘just one drop’ type, a Swedish albino with just one tracable bloodline ancestor who was black would be considered a black person.
@Kevin
But then there should be no surprise there as the people who typically insist black women are unattractive generally don’t mean black women who can pass for white.
In fact they would argue the only reason she is attractive is because she does not look unambiguously black.
@Naglfar
All too true. I learned this from being in relationships with abusive men. They’re biding their time, making nice, waiting until you have invested too much time and effort and love into the relationship to ever leave (they hope). After I was out of those relationships, I had a client, a very well educated and very successful man, who actually did the same thing. He had few opinions to offer at first, and I had the strong impression that he was holding back. It wasn’t until I was halfway done with the project that he started complaining and demanding the impossible. So happy to be done with that man and his project and his abuse!
Just a moment ago, I saw this tweet on my timeline, which seems appropriate to mention. I didn’t know Fran Drescher was 36 when The Nanny started! The idiot in today’s Mammoth post would probably explode 🙂
https://twitter.com/douzmanian/status/1358903128867930113?s=20
I actually internalised some of the aging stuff when I first started reading this blog back in my early twenties, and I had generally very low confidence (looking back now I can see all that worrying was a waste of time). Now I’m 31 I don’t care – I still feel young but have made more peace with the fact that getting older is unavoidable. Trying to cling to youth is not a recipe for happiness.
Mike’s meltdown response is really indicative I think of the fragility of the whole red pill philosophy. The women aging badly trope is absolutely essential to their worldview because it provides a comfort blanket to their ego. They might feel like women are winning now, but can think “just you wait, in the end I will win, because after 30 no man will want you while girls will beg at my door”. And Roosh is a pretty clear example of what happens when they find out that isn’t true.
Four months during a pandemic isn’t a very long time to hide the fact that he’s thin-skinned, thinks he doesn’t have to be polite to women he doesn’t want to bang, and can’t handle conflict in a mature way. They likely haven’t been socializing very much.
As with any abuser, at some point there’s going to be a “relationship reveal”. Only instead of cake and colored confetti and cannons, it will be an encounter with friends or some slight disagreement that blows up seemingly out of nowhere and comes as a complete surprise. Congratulations, it’s a jerk!
She’s lucky Mike showed who he was before she had invested a lot in the relationship.
@WWTH
This^^^, a million times. He throws a tantrum because a woman had too many birthdays, but somehow she’s the one who needs to grow up.
Putting excess emphasis on a woman’s looks is toxic in itself. It doesn’t matter that some women remain conventionally attractive after 30; the paradigm itself that women need to be conventionally attractive is toxic. The dad in this story gets it. He’s not hung up on his wife’s looks. Mike is hung up on looks. So while it’s funny that he got his comeuppance with a woman who was over 30 but didn’t look it, and stories about how women can remain attractive after 30 are true, the point of the story is that the basis of Mike’s paradigm is that women are defined by their looks, which is entirely toxic regardless of whether a woman can defeat it by being hot after 30. Women who aren’t hot after 30 are valuable, too.
@Policy of Madness
Yeah completely agree. By reducing a woman’s worth to her looks you ensure she is a throwaway being, whose value both has an inherent time limit and is subject to the whims of her beholder. Red pillers both inflate the importance of looks (seeing very young, very attractive women as some of the most powerful people in modern society) while denigrating anyone with good looks as being inherently shallow, deceptive and ultimately doomed. Women they don’t consider attractive simply don’t exist at all, except as a punchline.
@LollyPop
Hey, it’s me.
I’m one of those conventually unattractive AFAB people that are either ignored or mocked.
I’m almost 30 myself and still every cis man I’ve met has focused on looks too much.
I guess my personality isn’t good enough.
@ Elaine
I’m 27 (28 in July) and I still get mistaken for a college student.
I’d love to know exactly what she should have done to please Mike in this situation. Go out of her way to insulate him from the fact that he was so loudly and proudly wrong regardless of the facts and her relationship with her friends? Apologize for being correct?
There’s no way she could have saved his embarrassment that wouldn’t have come at her own embarrassment. How do you get to be a 30-ass year old adult and still angry when people around you don’t throw themselves down to cushion your feelings? Grow up, Mike.
@mouse sparrow
This is one of the reasons why I’ve always found it vaguely amusing when one of the beautiful people (usually celebs of some description or other, basking in endless adoration and wealth) complains that no one takes them seriously because of their good looks. I get that people fetishise looks and that women of all levels of attrativeness face sexism etc, but honestly I think that any gorgeous woman who imagines that being less conventionally attractive would make cishet men take them more seriously would be sorely disappointed by the reality.
Women get wiser as they age. They just get better at spotting toxic guys. I was an easy prey for toxic people when I was younger but the person I’ve grown into won’t put up with assholes like him. Ageing is great.
I can relate to saying something you thought was funny and then realising you are an idiot for saying it, but I don’t see how Mike thought this would play out. What was the desired outcome, had he been correct about Annie’s age? That everyone demurely acknowledge his wisdom? That OP takes this wisdom to heart and trades him out for an older guy before she runs out of time?
@NautaliaC
See also people who assume that their view on your presentation is shared by everyone. People are sometimes visibly confused when I tell them I don’t know which (gendered) bathroom or such I should use and tell me it’s obvious to everyone that I am a guy, because somehow they know for a fact I’ve never been asked to leave the men’s room and no one’s ever shouted “lesbian” at me to get my attention across the street.
@Masse_mysteria
I’m guessing he expected them to agree or be quiet, yes. He might have believed all the apocryphal tales from the red pill subs about how to “redpill” women.
Most of the time I fail to see a man who’s just as attractive or even more attractive than a woman when both are above their thirties. It can be me feeling some disgust at seeing a man as attractive, because I generally don’t find most of how men aspire to and are allowed to look like very attractive and because most of the time I generally don’t find men attractive in that way anyway, but also because of internalized homophobia (IDK if I can call it that if I can’t consider myself a totally cisgender man) or something.
@Naglfar:
This is a guy who reads those “and then everyone clapped” stories, and believes them.
@ Masse_Mysteria I don’t think he considered being wrong a possible outcome. One of my cousins had a PUA phase and this whole thing reminds me of how strangely adamant he was about being right during that. He had always been a little prance-y. But in that phase it was almost as if he had some kind of dissonance, to the point of ignoring obviously logical arguments. It was disconcerting.
What I think caused all of this and thankfully made him break the “nice guy” act was, that he set himself up. They caught him in his own logical fallacy, since he obviously had thought a 36yo woman was younger than 30. He himself had proven that his dogma was just not that and thus embarrassed himself (especially in his own mind). And since these guys are inable to deal with negative emotions or consequences in any healthy way, he did what people with this kind of degenerate frame of reference always do: He projected. He tried to repair his broken frame by another narrative that fits into it, namely that women are always at fault and all of em mean bitches.