The exponential growth of online dating podcasts shows that a large audience exists, searching for answers. Modernity has estranged us from our ancestral instincts. Disempowered men may seek wisdom in blunt-but-encouraging sermons by Andrew Tate, or find cathartic release in the moralising roundtables of superficial women and “sex workers” on FreshandFit and the Whatever Podcast. The problem with the manosphere is that it operates within and perpetuates the paradigm of the industrial and sexual revolutions, that which made men and women so maladaptive and unattracted to each other in the first place.

Catholic academic Ivan Illich’s book Gender explains this adversarial paradigm that confines us modern men and women. In feudal and agrarian economies, the family was the primary entity of social and civic engagement, its home the primary producer and recipient of goods and services. The world was gendered: tools and tasks slowly evolved to be sex-specific, and they became unquestioned customs of daily life. The sexes worked cooperatively, complementarily, for mutual subsistence.

The industrial revolution transformed this subsistence home economy into a mechanised global market by promising abundance. Goods went from the means by which our families survived, to ends unto themselves to create and accumulate. With the prospect of abundance came consciousness of scarcity, however: one’s privation relative to others.

From gendered collaborators, we became individuals competing for the same opportunities

Just as eating forbidden fruit made Adam and Eve aware, afraid and eager to blame one another, scarcity recontextualised the relationship between men and women. From gendered collaborators, we became individuals competing for the same opportunities and commodities. When work left the home, men and women were stratified into breadwinners and housewives. Market forces corroded this boundary, encouraging women to enrol themselves en masse in the workforce. This “unisexing” pressure found its enabling agent in the contraceptive pill, which allowed women to augment their biology and indeterminately defer motherhood to compete on parity with men. Female autonomy became defined by financial independence — conditional on abstinence from pregnancy. Hence why Reactionary Feminists argue that autonomy-at-all-costs feminists, with their push for unrestricted abortion and redistributive gender pay equity, are a post-hoc rationalisation, rather than progenitive force, of technological change.

The pill’s unforeseen social and environmental consequences have estranged the sexes as much as changing economic circumstances. Placebo-controlled studies found women self-reported lower libido and lower relationship satisfaction after starting the pill. Up to 90 per cent of women surveyed reported adverse mental health effects from long term contraception use, with a quarter attributing the demise of an intimate relationship to it.

This may be because the pill affects mate selection. Because the combined progesterone pill tricks the body into thinking it is pregnant, the theory goes, a woman’s priority is no longer reproduction, but resource procurement and protection. Selecting a mate whilst on the pill, then discontinuing taking it during the relationship, may mean a woman finds her sexual attraction to her partner waning with time — which could help to explain present unprecedented rates of marital breakdown.

The pill also makes women less attracted to masculine men. One study found women on hormonal birth control preferred “significantly less masculine” facial features when rating potential mates on attractiveness. It may even be a self-fulfilling prophecy: with the urinary run-off from hormonal contraceptives contaminating the water supply, we are engineering men’s endocrine systems to produce less testosterone. Since the pill was brought to market, sperm counts have fallen 62 per cent in the last fifty years.

By admitting Pick-Up Artists and promiscuous MGTOW advocates into the Red Pill coalition, the manosphere remains as reliant on the contraceptive pill for non-committal sex — valorised by anti-marriage self-styled alphas — as autonomy-at-all-costs feminists are. Without abandoning the inhuman logic of the pill, the social and economic order, which Illich identified as emotionally and financially immiserating men and women, will go unchallenged.

The Darwinian pragmatism of the manosphere doesn’t provide an escape route

More fundamentally, the manosphere’s prescribed “How” for overcoming the austere Houellebecqian dynamics of the sexual marketplace is bereft of any “Why” that rejects the materialistic presuppositions that produced feminism. It at once argues it is both a necessary adaptation to misandrist divorce laws and hypergamous female mate-selection methods, and a return to evolutionarily-congruent relationship dynamics. Many don’t realise their advice is predicated on viewing man as the anachronistic homo economicus, however. The manosphere’s metric of success is that of marginal utility — of reaping material rewards, rather than embodying metaphysical ideals. It is the second sore cheek to feminism on the smacked backside of sexual and economic liberalism.

By putting the focus on earning more, becoming a socially-proofed and financially prosperous “high-value man”, we suggest the path to success is to dominate one’s competition and impress a woman into submission. The foundations of your self-esteem are still transactional. Relationships are still as “self-expressive” as those promised by the sexual revolution: to be severed whenever you no longer feel you are contributing to being one another’s “best selves”.

The Darwinian pragmatism of the manosphere doesn’t provide an escape route for our broken culture — only a ruthless adaptation strategy of being a warlord or well-groomed Beautiful One, whilst our densely-populated mouse utopia descends into cultural cannibalism.

Rather than abandoning the present order and rebuilding a wholesome alternative, Manosphere channels exist as pressure-release-valves for men to spend money on text-to-speech superchats to insult attractive women, who have been equally mis-sold a promise of material and sexual self-determination. Red Pill is a muscle relaxant for male revolution. It reifies the adversarial dynamic of the industrial and sexual revolutions, rather than rejecting it.

These men’s resentment may well be warranted. Many have fallen afoul of punitive divorce laws, can’t own a home with the opportunity ceiling of a high-tax affirmative-action-enacting economy, or had relationships ended by women tempted by FOMO-inducing promises of fleeting online attention and exotic travel. Nonetheless, although some amongst the manosphere may not want to hear it, both sexes have been equally duped by modernity. We will only fix things by abandoning it together.

Whilst AI-generated pornography will create an addicted underclass, it may have the beneficial social effect of bankrupting the porn industry. How can voyeuristically watching two (or more) damaged strangers bash bits compete with inserting yourself into a fantasy with anyone, anytime? Until that dystopia comes to fruition, a Lysistrata-style strike — or even legislative action — against the pill may make the industry non-viable. This will end the perverse incentive for young women to prostitute themselves on OnlyFans — often for little profit — which many Manosphere devotees rightly resent.

The industrial and sexual revolutions have been a disaster for the complementarity of men and women. Success is not defined by Bugattis or body-counts. We must recalibrate our cultural heuristic for what comprises a good life — from material concerns, toward embodying metaphysical ideals by fulfilling relational obligations. Otherwise, everyone will lose this battle of the sexes.