By Rugmini Kalithodi
The red pill has been the hardest to swallow. A loose, sprawling network of internet forums, Reddit threads, YouTube personalities and Discord servers, the “manosphere” claims to advocate for men’s rights. But more often than not, it peddles harmful, regressive ideologies steeped in misogyny.
It’s tempting to laugh it off – to call it delusional, sad, silly. Perhaps it’s my positionality, my academic training, my feminist politics or my distance from these online spaces that made me dismiss the manosphere at first glance. But that is the first mistake.
To regard these communities as fringe or irrelevant is to overlook a crucial truth: they are populated by real people, mostly young men grappling with real pain. And in that pain lies both vulnerability and danger.
This is the paradox of the manosphere. It is a space where men, particularly those of my generation Gen Z, go in search of community. We are the first generation raised with unfettered access to the internet. We were exposed to adult content before we understood consent, and socialised into viewing women’s bodies through the lens of commodification long before we had the emotional tools to form relationships. Into this digital confusion, the manosphere arrives offering language, structure and – most importantly – validation.
Take the incel community, for instance – perhaps the most visible and controversial subgroup within the manosphere in developed nations. Short for “involuntary celibate”, incels blame their romantic and sexual failures on a system they believe is rigged against them. At the heart of this belief system is a conspiracy theory of gender relations: they believe they live under a “gynocracy”, a matriarchal order propped up by feminism, in which women use their sexual autonomy to oppress men.
For these men, feminism is not a liberation movement, but a cruel trick, one that allows women to chase after hyper-attractive “Chads” while average or “low-value” men are left behind.
This belief is often explained through the so-called 80:20 rule: that 80 percent of women are only interested in the top 20 percent of men. Based on a misreading of dating app data, the rule becomes a cornerstone of the incel worldview, fuelling an arms race of self-optimisation, competition and despair.
What follows is not just resentment toward women, but also among men. Incel forums are often filled with users dissecting their physical features, comparing bone structure and jaw angles, recommending dangerous procedures like limb-lengthening surgery, and tracking “looksmaxxing” routines like some sort of tragic self-help cult.
These men are not just fighting for female attention; they are also fighting to be seen by one another. It is a brutal marketplace of aesthetics where insecurity is monetised and empathy is punished.
But beauty in these spaces is not a neutral category. The standard is overwhelmingly Eurocentric. The archetypal “Chad” is often white, tall, light-skinned and blue-eyed. The closer one is to this ideal, the higher one ranks in the incel hierarchy. What emerges, then, is a deeply racialised logic of desirability. And it isn’t subtle.
While researching the manosphere, I stumbled upon a bizarre lexicon – words I initially thought were satire. Terms like currycel, ricecel and Tyrone. These are racialised slang terms used within incel forums to describe Indian, East Asian and Black men and women.
Currycel, for instance, is used to describe South Asian men, typically with derogatory undertones implying that their ethnicity alone makes them unattractive and sexually undesirable. Tyrone is the Black male equivalent of Chad, often used in fetishised or violent contexts.
It is a racist caste system masquerading as a dating advice forum. And in the Indian context, it blends easily with casteism – perhaps the oldest, most enduring hierarchy of them all.
Caste shapes marriage, dating and desire in India, and the incel ideology maps neatly onto it. Dalit men are excluded from narratives of desirability, while dominant-caste men express anxiety over “losing” upper-caste women to more socially mobile partners.
Feminism, in this context, is once again framed as a threat, not just to men’s romantic prospects but to caste purity and masculine pride. This collision of racism, casteism and misogyny makes the incel community uniquely dangerous – not only because of the ideologies it spreads, but because of the deep emotional need it fulfils.
What becomes clear, when you spend enough time reading through these threads, is that most of these men are simply looking for someone to talk to. Someone to affirm that their feelings of rejection, loneliness, and confusion are valid. The tragedy is that they often find that affirmation in the most toxic places imaginable.
They are not born angry; they are made to feel unworthy. And in a society that teaches men to suppress vulnerability, to fear intimacy, and to equate masculinity with dominance, many of them find themselves completely unequipped to process that unworthiness.
The manosphere steps in with its promise: take the red pill, and you will finally understand the world. Take the red pill, and you will stop being invisible.
But what the red pill actually offers is an illusion of clarity, one that trades real community for ideological radicalisation. It offers answers that feel good in the short term but are corrosive in the long term. It confirms every worst suspicion about women, about feminism, about self-worth. And it leaves no room for healing.
We are witnessing a generational crisis in masculinity. Not just in the men who commit online harassment or violent acts, but also in the boys who silently internalise these ideas. Who learn, too early, that their value lies in how they are perceived rather than how they feel. Who fear softness. Who crave connection but are told that asking for it is weakness.
Feminism is not the enemy here. In fact, it may be the only ideology that has consistently tried to create space for men to be whole, emotional, complex humans. But feminism has also failed to reach many of these young men. And when those men go looking for answers, they often find Andrew Tate before they find Audre Lorde.
To counter this, we need a radically inclusive conversation about gender, one that holds space for male vulnerability and redefines masculinity without indulging in misogyny. One that sees incels not as caricatures, but as casualties of a patriarchal system that harms everyone, albeit in different ways.
We also need to teach young men that community does not have to be built on dominance. That validation is not the same as victory. That beauty is not only what is seen but what is felt. That they are allowed to hurt, and allowed to heal.
The red pill is poison dressed as salvation. What we need is a chill pill of love, inclusivity, compassion and humanity instead.
Rugmini Kalithodi is currently an undergraduate student at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, Pune. She likes to spend her time deep diving into anything and everything cultural studies.
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