Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how shitty are men really?” The discussion threads are a mixed bag of rage and curiosity: screeds against feminists, advice on how to masturbate less, theories on why women fantasize about rape, descriptions of arguments with girlfriends, guides to going up to strangers on the street, and, most of all, workout schedules and diet regimes. In the hours upon hours I spent wandering this online neighbourhood, I saw mostly feral boys wandering the digital ruins of exploded masculinity, howling their misery, concocting vast nonsense about women, and craving the tiniest crumb of self-confidence and fellow-feeling. But the bulk of the comments are much more muted and, frankly, pathetic. There is plenty of vileness, to be sure – elaborate conspiracy theories formed out of pure misogyny and outright hatred of female independence. But judging The Red Pill by the most extreme statements of its members is, if not unfair, then at least inaccurate.

Tribes 2 reddit and 4chan