This article undertakes the first known qualitative study focusing on The Red Pill, an online forum wherein heterosexual men attempt to improve their seduction skills by discussing evolutionary psychology and economic theories. My content analysis of twenty-six documents (130,000 words) designated by the community as central to its purpose and ideology shows that The Red Pill is not just an expression of hegemonic masculinity but also explicitly integrates neoliberal and scientific discourses into its seduction strategies. I theorize that the resulting philosophy superficially resolves a contradiction between hegemonic masculinity’s prescriptive emotional walls and an inherent desire for connection by constructing women as exchangeable commodities.

The “manosphere” is a constellation of masculinist social media communities loosely unified by an anti-feminist worldview. Although extant journalism and social media scholarship successfully delineate the manosphere as a significant social problem by associating it with misogynist cybercrime and cyberhate, the resulting narrative simplistically pathologizes manosphere discourse while leaving its misogyny undertheorized. In this article, I complicate this emerging narrative by demonstrating how a certain central manosphere discourse qualitatively overlaps with a broader neoliberal ideology. I do so by further developing a critical discourse analysis of quasi-representative manosphere documents drawn from “The Red Pill,” a sub-forum of Reddit.com. Although this forum is explicitly devoted to discussing heterosexual seduction strategies, I find that it also produces a discursive means for fiscally conservative men to reconcile their pro-capitalist economic beliefs with apparent evidence of capitalism’s destructive tendencies and contradictions. This forum’s anti-feminist discourse implicitly parallels Marxian theory while explicitly supporting free market capitalism and denigrating women, thereby providing men with a linguistic and conceptual framework to scapegoat women for economic problems while leaving neoliberal ideas and assumptions unchallenged.

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