One of the things that makes the Red Pill or MGTOW[1] community attractive to a lot of younger men today is that the purveyors of the movement like to share hard truths; the kind of truths that many others avoid. You will hear them say stuff like, “We drop truth bombs,” or “We will tell you the cold, hard truth,” and other things like that.
And I will grant it to the men, and sometimes women, in this movement they are willing to deal with uncomfortable and awkward topics that much of the mainstream discourse just does not want a bar of. It is no wonder, then, that the Red Pill community gains traction with many young men.
There is very good evidence that we live in a gynocentric[2] society and that the deck is stacked against the man. This is even true when it comes to domestic violence, in how it is understood and how it is punished. Martin van Creveld, who is a historian,[3] notes in his remarkable book, The Privileged Sex, about domestic violence:
“What is true of the military is equally true for society at large. In 1975, and again in 1985, the National Institute of Mental Health studied a national sample of 2,143 married and cohabiting couples. In both years, the number of attacks which spouses of either sex directed at the other was practically equal. Another study discovered that each year, American wives were one-fifth more likely to “severely attack” their husbands than vice versa.
In Canada, according to yet another study, the discrepancy is greater still. Of the women interviewed, 6.2 per cent admitted to having beaten up their partners during the preceding year, as compared to 2.5 per cent of men. In the same study, more women than men admitted to having used “severe” violence, and more women than men admitted to having used a knife or a gun. And the more severe the violence, the more likely it is to be directed by women against men. One study of police records found that women were three times more likely to threaten or use weapons, such as knives and guns, against their spouses than men.
So-called reverse spouse abuse — note the terminology, which makes clear that the real thing refers to men abusing women — is the most under-reported form of all domestic violence. Some of the reasons for this may be methodological. It stands to reason that at least some men are being hit or pushed, have things thrown at them or are kicked or whipped, just as some women are. But this does not prevent most investigators from ignoring that possibility.
They assume that men’s “accounts of the violence cannot be taken at face value,” while registering what women say as if it were gospel truth. For example, 30 per cent of women questioned in one emergency room between 1976 and 1979 blamed their injuries on domestic abuse. Since men were not questioned on the matter, they could not have reported it even if it had taken place.
Conversely, when one study compared the percentage of people of both sexes admitted to hospital emergency rooms as a result of injuries allegedly caused by domestic violence, it turned out that there was little difference between men and women.
Another reason why female-on-male domestic violence is under-reported is the lenient way such cases are treated. In the movies, women who commit violence against men are often applauded by the audience. The reverse happens rarely, if ever. In real life, men who dare to complain are likely to be despised, derided, or both. One does not have to be a criminologist or sociologist to know that, as long as it is perpetrated by a woman against a man, domestic violence “tends to be… victim precipitated.”
Stripped of jargon, this means that a woman is much more likely to be regarded as having acted in self-defence. This applies even when, as happens in no fewer than 70 per cent of all known cases, the violence is applied at a time when the man is helpless. Lorena Bobbitt was not the only woman whose male partner was asleep at the time of the attack. Other men were drunk or bound.
As former New York governor Mario Cuomo, the father of current New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, said when he decided to pardon a woman who shot her estranged husband after driving several hundred miles when it comes to women who kill “there are no rules.”
In a single act of clemency in 1990, the governor of Ohio, Richard Celeste, pardoned no fewer than 27 women convicted of murdering their husbands. The leniency exercised toward women who have killed their relatives may explain why 15.9 per cent of imprisoned female killers, but only 9.6 per cent of male ones, are where they are for that offence. It may also explain why adult women are 24 per cent more likely to kill their children than are men, and why under-age women are 32 per cent more likely to kill relatives, small children included, than under-age men.
So strong is the presumption that “mothers don’t kill” that it has even formed the basis for a legal defence strategy. One offender who resorted to such a defence, a Virginia female convicted in 2000 of cooking her baby in a microwave oven, got off with a mere five years in jail. With good behaviour, she could have gotten off in three. Later she was joined by several more microwave-mothers, all of whom cited various psychological symptoms in the hope of receiving similarly lenient treatment.
Thus, when a woman accuses a man to whom she is not married of using violence against her, or of sexual harassment, or sexual assault, or rape, then the man in question is disproportionally likely to suffer punishment.”[4]
Martin van Creveld shows beyond a shadow of doubt how favoured women are by the legal system over men. In other parts of the book he shows how often men and women convicted of the exact same crime, meaning they were both involved at every point, still get off lighter than the men they were committing it with.[5] Both women and lawyers know this is the case and take advantage of the fact.[6]
All this goes to show that the claims of the Red Pill men that society favours women in many contexts are absolutely true. They are not lying when they say that a man will almost always be at a disadvantage before the courts and in many other aspects of life. They are basing this often on their own personal experience, and also on well-studied research like that provided by van Creveld in The Privileged Sex.
If you read van Creveld’s book he shows beyond a shadow of a doubt this this has always been the case for humanity and will always be the case. I would summarise his argument as such, “Yes, women are privileged, if they weren’t the human race would really struggle.” In other words, women are privileged, because to some degree they need to be. What is even more interesting is that even the Bible leans into this position as well.
We read in 1 Peter 3:7 this, “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honour to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” This passage is often misunderstood because it states plainly that women are “the weaker vessel.”
For one feminists either get offended at or seek to redefine its meaning, because they do not like their physical vulnerability spelled out so bluntly. I saw one such feminist (the worst kind; a male feminist) once actually argue that weaker meant stronger. That made me laugh. But it is also misunderstood by conservatives who seek to say that women are equal to men, but also different. Putting aside the fact that ‘equal’ and ‘same’ are synonyms, so this conservative response makes no sense, Peter did not say they are equal, he said weaker. Why is this? Because God created men and women to bear very different loads and roles in this world.
What Peter is saying is very important: he is saying, “Don’t regard your wife as your equal, capable of doing everything you can do. Treasure her as the more fragile honoured vessel she is, otherwise, God will be against you.” Our society thinks that it is horrible if husbands and wives don’t consider each other equal. Peter is saying the opposite, it is horrible if we do. It is built into creation that men should have more regard for women, than for men. Especially their own wife. Because the women has more need for it.
So complaining about how men and women are not treated equal, but should be, is both a fool’s errand and way off base. It is actually incredibly harmful. For one, a pretty, or even reasonably pretty young woman in a courtroom, or interview room in a police station, is always going to evoke more sympathy than a man in the same position, especially with men. This is like an immutable law of nature, it is foolish to try to suppress this. Because this has been built into how we should view women. Secondly, society would not work if it was not this way, because women are the weaker vessels they need more consideration and care in almost every context. And this is a good thing to provide.
Van Creveld hits on this in the Conclusion of his book:
“We men well realize that nature, having made us, as Nietzsche put it, the “unfruitful animal” and forced us to compete for women, has turned us into the superfluous sex. Giving us larger and more robust bodies, it has also destined us to act as beasts of burden. Our need of, and love for, women being as strong as it is, most of the time we do not really mind the fact that they are privileged in so many ways. Nor, in our heart of hearts, would we like the situation to change. After all, it was women who gave us life. In a way, all we are doing is returning a debt. This is true even if the burden is occasionally heavy, and even if while carrying it we sometimes have to lay down our lives. Ceasing to support women, we would lose not just our existence but our self-respect. Perhaps the real reason why women have never fought in war is because, as Hector told his wife, we men would rather die than watch them dying. To quote an Indian proverb, where women are worshipped, there the gods dwell. It would be nice, though, if from time to time, amid the torrents of invective feminists spew at us, we occasionally heard a pleasant female voice saying “thank you, Mate.”[7]
As a Christian obviously I cannot endorse worshipping women, of course this is not right. Also I don not agree nature made us this way, rather it is God’s design. But the sentiment of van Creveld’s conclusion is spot on: men are created to provide for women and make sure that they are lifted up to some degree and women are created to come along side men and take advantage of this provision and protection.
In other words, there might be some good policies which the Red Pill community could achieve. But the underlying philosophy of advocating for equality between men and women is foolish. It won’t happen, can’t happen, and would be devastating if we attempted it, “Ceasing to support women, we would lose not just our existence but our self-respect.” The inbuilt patriarchal nature of our world that views and treats women with privileges and favours it does not also hand to men is part of God’s design for our world. Yes, because of human sin it is corrupted and taken in unhealthy directions, but it is not wrong in and of itself for these intrinsic differences to exist and be cultivated. In fact, it is vital that they are to some degree.
This is why the Red Pill philosophy is ultimately bankrupt. It might have some good points, as did the feminism of the 19th Century. But the solution the feminists put forward, more equality between the sexes, ended up causing a whole host of new issues. The Red Ppill community is falling into this same trap. The solution is not the Red Pill, it is Peter, and Paul, and Moses, and Jesus; the very Jesus who told his friend John to look after his mother. In the Scriptures we find the solutions we should be applying, outside of basing our position on their foundations, we risk falling into an even worse situation.
[1] Men Going Their Own Way
[2] Female favouring, or female dominated culture. Bing defines it as, “centred on or concerned exclusively with women; taking a female (or specifically a feminist) point of view.”
[3] I have no idea what he thinks of MGTOW or the Red Pill.
[4] van Creveld, Martin 2013, The Privileged Sex (pp. 167-169). DLVC Enterprises. Kindle Edition.
[5] Ibid, pp. 155-160.
[6] Ibid, p. 160.
[7] Ibid, p. 287.
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