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Popping the red pill: How toxic masculinity is reshaping young men's identity online

Popping the red pill: How toxic masculinity is reshaping young men's identity online
Kavisha Pillay
By Kavisha Pillay
1 Apr 2025
Facebook
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This isn’t some niche internet subculture, it’s disturbingly mainstream, alarmingly widespread, and quietly reshaping how millions perceive masculinity.

Over the past few days, fresh from watching Netflix’s Adolescence, I plunged into murky social media rabbit holes that the algorithm had, mercifully, kept hidden from me until now. 

I’d previously heard terms like manosphere, naively imagining them as obscure digital hideouts where disaffected men gathered to swap grievances and conspiracy theories. 

But after hours of scrolling through what’s known as “red pill” content, it quickly became clear that this isn’t some niche internet subculture, it’s disturbingly mainstream, alarmingly widespread, and quietly reshaping how millions perceive masculinity.

The red pill movement, for the uninitiated, draws its name from the 1999 blockbuster film The Matrix, where swallowing the red pill reveals harsh, hidden truths about reality. In this case, the “truth” peddled is a worldview that casts men as victims, stripped of their natural dominance by feminism, political correctness, and a supposed conspiracy of cultural decay. 

What starts as a kernel of legitimate grievance (say, the lack of attention to men’s mental health or the pressures of traditional breadwinning) quickly metastasizes into a fever dream of misogyny, entitlement, and retrogressive ideals. It’s a narrative that’s less about empowerment and more about resentment, cloaked in the language of self-improvement.

Take Andrew Tate, who is the poster child of this ideology. 

A former kickboxer turned self-styled guru, Tate’s rise to prominence is a masterclass in algorithmic seduction. His videos, which are short, punchy, and dripping with machismo, showcase him bare-chested, working out, displaying his luxury cars, cigars, and a rotating cast of scantily clad women, all props in his performance of “alpha” masculinity. 

His message to young men is simple: reject empathy, build wealth, and dominate others, because that’s what “real men’” do. 

Never mind that his own life, a tangle of legal troubles, including allegations of human trafficking and sexual assault, suggests less a triumph of manhood and more a cautionary tale of hubris. To his millions of social media followers, mostly disaffected young men, Tate isn’t a flawed human but a middle finger to a world they feel has left them behind.

Manipulative


Tate’s content isn’t dangerous simply because it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous because it’s manipulative. 

Between flashy displays of wealth and overtly toxic rhetoric, Tate communicates about fitness, faith, responsibility, and the value of overcoming hardship. He champions the idea that “real men’” are forged through struggle and adversity, which builds character and strength. 

To a young man who has faced genuine hardship such as loss, poverty, bullying, or loneliness, this message can be compelling, validating, and even empowering. But this is the bait, a psychological operation of sorts, pulling vulnerable boys and men deeper into a distorted worldview. By mixing genuine encouragement with subtle poison, influencers like Tate weaponise the struggles of youth and men, transforming hardship into radicalisation.

Then there’s Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose intellectual style gives the red pill community a sense of credibility. 

Peterson often speaks with the seriousness of a concerned father, warning that society is losing its way because traditional gender roles are disappearing. He mixes complicated topics, like psychology and religious stories, to create a simple message: men should be strong, disciplined, and in control. Peterson’s popularity gives the red pill movement a polished, academic image that makes it harder to dismiss.

Meanwhile, men’s rights activists push these ideas to disturbing extremes. On their websites and YouTube channels, they obsessively discuss topics like divorce laws, custody issues, and domestic violence, claiming men are the real victims of society. For men’s rights activists, masculinity isn’t about dignity or strength; it’s about keeping a bitter scorecard of complaints against women.

The allure, though, is undeniable. Social media amplifies these voices through outrage and virality, turning bad takes into gospel. Tate’s bombast racks up views, Peterson’s displayed earnestness sparks endless debates, and the men’s rights activists’ fringe ideas find fertile ground in echo chambers. 

It’s a feedback loop that’s reshaping how millions perceive manhood, not through quiet reflection but through a megaphone of extremism.

How young men are being radicalised 


Young men aren’t simply stumbling upon red pill content, they’re being methodically guided toward it. 

A recent experiment by researchers at Dublin Central University highlights this troubling reality. By creating artificial social media accounts mimicking teenage boys, they uncovered how quickly and aggressively the algorithms funnel young users into toxic echo chambers. Within mere minutes, sometimes just two, platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts served up relentless streams of manosphere content, dominated by influencers promoting extreme, often hateful ideas of masculinity. After only a few hours of passive engagement, these accounts were bombarded with content rooted in anti-feminist rhetoric and toxic alpha-male myths. 

The study also identified three core narrative frameworks consistently deployed within manosphere content, each designed to appeal to vulnerable young men. 

First, crisis narratives perpetuate fear and victimhood, claiming men and traditional masculinity are under existential threat, blaming feminism, alleged liberal “brainwashing”, and “women-centric” legal systems.

These narratives dangerously exaggerate false accusations of rape, despite overwhelming evidence that sexual violence remains vastly underreported and under-prosecuted. They portray the traditional, heteropatriarchal nuclear family as collapsing under supposed threats from female promiscuity, divorce, LGBTQ rights, and what they ominously term the “trans cult”. 

Second, motivational scripts position masculinity as inherently tied to economic and emotional self-control, promoting myths that hard work inevitably yields success, a message that ignores systemic economic instability caused by neoliberal capitalism. 

Stoicism and emotional suppression are praised, while influencers frame emotional struggles such as depression and anxiety as weakness, laziness, or evidence that men are being feminised.

Finally, the manosphere relies heavily on debunked gender “science”, using outdated and discredited evolutionary psychology to argue men are biologically driven to fight, protect, and provide, while women’s roles are limited to reproduction, nurturing, and domesticity. 

Any empowerment of women, these influencers argue, inevitably emasculates men and disrupts a supposed “natural order”. 

These pseudoscientific ideas reinforce harmful stereotypes — such as the contradictory claims that men seek marriage only with virgins while pursuing promiscuity themselves, that all women are inherently hypergamous and transactional in relationships, and that heterosexual interactions fundamentally revolve around dominance and submission.

A local context 


Unlike the disinformation of a supposed “white genocide” in South Africa, femicide is an undeniable reality. 

Our society is already plagued by devastatingly high rates of gender-based violence, and the spread of manosphere ideologies only worsens this crisis. 

Recent horrific examples include a man who shared a video of himself on Facebook after murdering his partner, attempting to justify his actions by claiming she had mistreated him, and a Forex trader who killed two young women simply because they refused to spend the night with him after he had bought them dinner. 

Adding insult to injury, thousands flocked to a Chris Brown concert held during the 16 Days of Activism for No Violence Against Women and Children campaign. Advocacy groups like Women For Change faced vitriolic attacks simply for highlighting the obscenity of giving a platform to a known repeat abuser. 

The spread of manosphere content is particularly dangerous in South Africa and other countries that grapple with high levels of gender-based violence. These toxic online narratives reinforce existing harmful beliefs that women are objects to control and dominate. 

By tapping into men's frustrations and vulnerabilities, the manosphere promotes aggressive and violent attitudes toward women. This isn't just an online issue, it fuels real-world violence. 

So where does this leave us? 


Dismissing it as a clown show risks underestimating its pull. Engaging it head-on often feeds the beast because every critique becomes “proof” of persecution. 

The real challenge is offering something better: a vision of masculinity that’s affirming yet adaptable, confident yet compassionate. It’s not about ceding ground to nostalgia or pandering to entitlement, but about addressing the root anxieties such as the economic, social, and emotional issues that fuel this fire. 

This isn’t just about a few loudmouths, it’s about a generation of men at a crossroads, and the ideas vying to define them. The red pill’s twisted masculinity may be irresistible to millions, but it’s a dead end. The question is whether society can build something worth choosing instead, before the algorithm decides for us. DM

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