I saw a lot of plays that semester, sometimes with classmates, sometimes alone. I remember seeing Mies Julie at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, an adaptation that transported Strindberg’s forbidden love plot from fin-de-siècle Sweden to postapartheid South Africa. Julie, now the daughter of a wealthy white Afrikaner, and John, a black servant on her father’s estate, circle each other with vicious, electric eroticism. In the play’s explosive climax, John grabs Julie and fucks her right there on the table. I remember the actor pulling down his pants, his naked ass to the audience, in the universal theatrical language of sex. It wasn’t exactly a rape, but it wasn’t not a rape, either. Afterwards, I marched down the street with some girls in my class, fuming. The staging had been gratuitous, I told them: lurid, exploitative, misogynistic. They let me rant. They had come to expect this kind of behavior from me. Feminism, they thought.
But sex was everywhere. I remember seeing Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Philip Glass’s five-hour minimalist opera about Albert Einstein, in an extremely abstract sense of the word about. I went with the girl with whom I’d cheated on my ex. In the fourth act, there was a blackout, and after a moment, a long illuminated white bar appeared horizontal on the stage floor. Over an organ solo, the left side of the bar began to lift, like the hand of a clock, until the bar was perfectly vertical. When I watch videos of this scene on YouTube today, it takes about ten minutes; as I sat there in the dark, watching this great white erection, it felt like eternity. Valerie would have hated it.
When I got home that night, I probably watched porn. I did that most nights, guiltily hiding out in the shared bathroom, as if my roommates wouldn’t notice: a sad, pretentious boy, furious about rape, hopelessly addicted to pornography. The two things fueled each other: the more righteous I felt in public, the more I could wallow, privately, in my shame. My anger made me angrier; what got me hot got hotter.
It would still be years before it would occur to me that I might be a woman. If the thought had presented itself then, I would have batted it away like an insect. I hated being a man, but I thought that was just how feminism felt. Being a man was my punishment for being a man. Anything else was greed.
BONGI. Why’re girls called chicks?
After all, men have the peckers.
“Screwing is, for a man, a defense against his desire to be female,” proclaims the SCUM Manifesto. The paradox of the male libido is that it isn’t actually male. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the manosphere, that awfully named borough of the Internet where pickup artists, men’s rights activists, incels, Men Going Their Own Way, and other alt-right communities go to commiserate, swap tips, and air their woman-hating and racism without fear of reprisal. At the heart of the manosphere lies the conviction that men—paradigmatically, though not always, white men—have lost status in the past fifty years, ultimately thanks to the rise of feminism. To awaken to this fact is to take the red pill—a phrase borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, whose hacker protagonist Neo is given the choice between a red pill and a blue. The latter will return Neo to his simulated everyday life with no memory of the choice; the former, which he picks, transports him out of the Matrix and into the real world where humanity has been enslaved by sentient machines. In recent years, the alt-right has co-opted the scene as a parable for seeing past feminist brainwashing to the truth: feminism is a disease, all women wish to be dominated, and nice guys finish last.
Of course, another interpretation of the red pill is possible. Trans women have claimed The Matrix as an allegory for gender transition since at least 2012, when director Lana Wachowski publicly came out as a trans woman while doing press for the film Cloud Atlas. (Her sister and codirector Lilly followed suit in 2016.) The symbolism is easy to find in the plot: Thomas Anderson’s double life (he’s a hacker by night), his chosen name (Neo), his vague but maddening sense that something is off about the world (“a splinter in your mind,” resistance leader Morpheus calls it). Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. You get it.
And then there’s the red pill itself, less a metaphor for hormone therapy than a literal hormone. Many have pointed out online that back in the nineties, prescription estrogen was, in fact, red: the 0.625 mg Premarin tablet, derived in Matrix-like fashion from the urine of pregnant mares, came in smooth, chocolatey maroon. Trans allies on Twitter now gleefully brandish this fact as a well, actually–style rejoinder to the alt-right’s recent co-optation of the red pill scene as a parable for “awakening” from feminist brainwashing.
There’s something to this. Taken seriously, it suggests that the manosphere red-piller’s resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. In this reading, he is an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha’s body, consumed with the desire to be female and desperately trying to repress it. His desire to increase his manhood is not primary, but a second-tier defense mechanism. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president; but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes—shoots up a school, builds a wall—in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.
But there’s another level. The Wachowski sisters, even if they knew about Premarin, could never have predicted that the most common form of prescription estrogen today would be blue. Aquamarine, actually—a tiny, coarse 2 mg estradiol pill supplied by Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva that turns to powder in your mouth. At present, I take the blue pill twice a day, once upon waking and once before bed, sending myself back into the simulation. By this logic, the hidden trans woman of The Matrix is not the messianic Neo, but Cypher, the sleazy traitor, who agrees to hand Morpheus over to the machines in exchange for being reinserted into the Matrix. “Ignorance is bliss,” he tells the agents, mouth full of juicy, nonexistent steak. (Recall that cipher is an old word for zero.) “I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand?”
Valerie would have approved of hormone therapy, I think. The SCUM Manifesto alludes, positively, to a futuristic world where men are transformed into women “by means of operations on the brain and nervous system.” This was one of SCUM’s nongenocidal solutions for the few men who might remain after the revolution. Another, hinted at in a footnote, sounds a lot like the Matrix—a vast virtual reality network that men would willingly plug themselves into as “vicarious livers.” “It will be electronically possible for [men] to tune into any specific female [they want] to and follow in detail her every movement,” Valerie explains, declaring it a “marvelously kind and humane way” for women to treat their “unfortunate, handicapped fellow beings.”
Isn’t that the whole point of gender—letting someone else do your living for you?
BONGI. Come and get it.
When I visit the subreddit r/TheRedPill—one of the manosphere’s more infamous ports of origin—I find that Reddit has quarantined it. “Are you sure you want to view this community?” the page asks me, telling me that the community is “dedicated to shocking or highly offensive content.” I click through. I’m here to read a popular post from 2016 entitled “HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD: 37 Rules of Approaching Model-Tier Girls.” The post bills itself as a “complete guide to picking up 9s and 10s,” though it hastens to add that it doesn’t cover body language or “handling logistics.” (I adjust my expectations.) Its author, who appears to be a man named Mike Haines, describes his past life as a sickly, shrimpy kid, frequently bullied by other, bigger boys. For most of his life, Mike has been involuntarily celibate, but after taking the red pill, he began regularly fucking 7s and 8s, and his current girlfriend is a 9 who’s done some modeling work.
Mike’s philosophical system is simple: Women are attracted to men, period. The only problem is that, for evolutionary reasons, they’re also picky. Red-pillers describe this phenomenon as hypergamy: the tendency of women to seek increasingly attractive partners until their standards are im
possibly high. Because they naturally prefer men with stronger frames—frame is a term of art in the pickup artist community, meaning something like “social comportment” or, if you like, “gender”—women unconsciously subject each potential suitor to a series of tests designed to put his frame under pressure: “Women want to submit to you. They want to submit to a strong man. But she can’t submit to you if your frame is weaker than hers.” Paradoxically, this means that male seduction is, in Mike’s own words, a “passive process,” not an active one. Mike clearly has little patience for cheap tricks or shortcuts: pickup lines, manipulation techniques, good looks or deep pockets. The name of the game is, simply, endurance. “Women have said things to me that are totally brutal—called me ugly, too short, a loser, etc.,” Mike confides. “It doesn’t penetrate.”
And so transpires an unexpected reversal of roles: in order for a woman to be sure a man’s worth submitting to, she must first dominate him. The man, conversely, must learn to look forward to his submission: “Women are wired in such a way that they can’t become wet for a man unless he’s overcome some kind of resistance to get her,” Mike explains. “Hence, tests actually help you to seduce her. You want her to test you. The more tests you endure, the faster she’ll sleep with you.” The biggest loser—the one most open to abuse, suffering, humiliation—thus turns out to be the biggest winner. Desperate to prove he isn’t a woman, he temporarily becomes one. A man will gladly “swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him,” the SCUM Manifesto dryly observes.
You may think I’m being too generous to Mike and his fellow Red Pillers. Aren’t these men entitled chauvinist pigs, wannabe rapists, domestic terrorists? Don’t they value strength, force, assertiveness, independence? Sure. But if there is one thing the SCUM Manifesto teaches, it’s that you must never assume that men actually want the things they say they want. “The male has one glaring area of superiority over the female,” the manifesto asserts: “public relations.” For Valerie, the single greatest hoax in the history of human civilization was the simple idea that men are men. The patriarchal system of sexual oppression therefore existed not to express man’s maleness, but to conceal his femaleness. “He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the male as active, then sets out to prove that he is,” writes Valerie. She had already dramatized this phenomenon in Up Your Ass, where Bongi goads Russell, a Red Piller avant la lettre, into fucking her behind a bush, just to show she can. Russell is initially repulsed, but he can’t help himself. “I could never make love to you, but I am louse enough to screw you,” he snarls, lunging at her. But Bongi stops him. “First get on your knees and say: ‘Please can I do it to you?’” she commands. He obeys. “You’re a good doggie,” she smirks.
Indeed, this is the surprising core of the whole Red Pill theory of seduction: never stop begging for it. Mike concedes that being forced to undergo a battery of tests just to get some ass “might seem ‘unfair’ to you.” But he doesn’t care. “If you can’t handle the abuse from some blonde chick in a bar,” writes Haines, “how the fuck are you going to handle beating a 7ft tall man to death with your bare hands when he and his tribe invade your village and try to gang-rape your girl?” The star of this primitivist metaphor is, interestingly, the very warlord whose ability to get laid the post promises to impart to readers. Only here, he isn’t them—he’s their invisible competition, whose animalistic powers of abuse have been entrusted to the woman they see before them. “Women will test you brutally when they want to sleep with you,” Mike cautions. This reminds him of the film Fight Club, because of course it does:
Getting a hot woman into bed is like the hazing scene in Fight Club where the new recruits are lined up outside the door. Tyler berates the recruits with personal insults. “Too old, go away.” “Too fat, go away.” He forces them to stand outside for days. He tells them there’s no possibility they’re getting in. Most give up. But the few who stay are ultimately invited inside. Seducing the hottest women is the same. It’s a WAR OF ATTRITION.
Like The Matrix, Fight Club is a popular point of reference in the manosphere. The film is easily described in alt-right terms: a milquetoast beta meets a rebellious alpha named Tyler Durden, and together the two found a men’s fighting ring; when the club starts committing acts of terrorism, the beta discovers that Tyler is an alter ego he has unconsciously created for himself in order to escape his meaningless middle-class life. It is therefore all the stranger that in Mike’s analogy, the role of Tyler Durden is given to the hot girl. The girl is the hazer, screaming at recruits like a drill sergeant, beating them with a broom, while her seducer assumes the position of the schlubby would-be initiate whom Tyler dismisses with disgust: “You’re too old, fat man. Your tits are too big. Get the fuck off my porch.” Men are not men. Men are never men.
In 2018, when the Guardian asked Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk what he thought of the film’s popularity on the far right, he replied that the phenomenon reflected “how few options men have in terms of metaphors” for their experience of gender. Asked what he thought would come of the alt-right, he answered that he thought it was too fringe to last. “It might be comparable to Valerie Solanas’s Society for Cutting Up Men,” he told the interviewer. “The extreme always goes away.”
BONGI. I star in movies for stag parties.
But I’ve got professional integrity—I
only work for the top directors.
The manosphere is deeply divided over the issue of pornography. For many in the alt-right, pornography—and the addiction to masturbation with which it corresponds—is genuinely dangerous for men. The far-right fraternal group Proud Boys, who made headlines in 2018 for beating up antifa protestors on the Upper East Side, requires that all second-tier members subscribe to what they call NoWanks, giving up masturbation and pornography for thirty days at a time. (At the end of a cycle, Proud Boys are given the option of a single cheat wank.) In a 2015 video for the right-wing website The Rebel, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes explains that, by providing young men with a fleeting but addictive hypermasculine delirium, pornography has made it impossible for them to date, marry or reproduce effectively: “You’ve fooled your brain into thinking you’re inseminating 10s, and then when you’re with a real woman, your brain goes, “What are you doing with one broad? She’s not even a 10, she’s like a 7. Why are you wasting my time with this?’” While he admits that being antiporn sounds like “an Andrea Dworkin thing,” McInnes assures viewers that it’s worth their time. “I’ll be whistling on my bike, I sing in the shower,” he tells the camera through his hipster beard. “I really feel more alive.”
Pornography is what it feels like when you think you have an object, but really the object has you. It is therefore a quintessential expression of femaleness. Of course, anxieties over porn addiction are hardly exclusive to the manosphere, especially now that digital technologies, especially smartphones, seem to have placed an infinitude of free, easily accessible pornographic material beneath the nation’s vulnerable thumbs. Hence what is known as Rule 34 of the Internet: If it exists, there is porn of it. This has left the social field well lubricated for periodic moral panics about the sexual degeneracy presumed to prowl the public playgrounds of the digital. The decades-long cancer of go-go bars and porn theaters in Times Square may have finally been cut out by the family-friendly scalpel of the Walt Disney Company, but Lion King–themed erotic cartoons can now be accessed by any twelve-year-old with Internet access and a clue.
Feminists, meanwhile, have been debating pornography for decades, since it became a centerpiece of the so-called sex wars of the eighties. For activists like Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, pornography, with its graphic depictions of female degradation, was the patriarchal institution par excellence, the key to understanding all sex between men and women. Others, sometimes grouped under the label “pro-sex,” wondered how their feminist commitments might b
e reconciled with genuinely pleasurable experiences of dominance and submission—not to mention, eroticism generally. Tensions between the two camps boiled over at the famous “Pleasure and Danger” conference held at Barnard College in 1982. A week before the conference, antipornography feminists phoned Barnard officials to warn them of the conference’s antifeminist agenda; those administrators responded by confiscating 1,500 copies of the elaborate, sometimes graphic seventy-twopage program organizers had lovingly prepared. The day of the conference, while participants gave and heard papers on the theme of “pleasure and danger” in female sexuality, members of the radical feminist group Women Against Pornography passed out leaflets vilifying the conference and accusing women by name of collaboration with the patriarchy. At stake in all this was the question that Amber Hollibaugh raised at Barnard: “Is there ‘feminist’ sex? Should there be?” Or to put it bluntly: can women have sex without getting fucked?
Valerie’s answer is still the best one: No, but who cares? “Sex is the refuge of the mindless,” she gripes in the SCUM Manifesto, which isn’t against sex so much as deeply unimpressed by it. “Sex is not part of a relationship,” Valerie writes. “On the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time.” She had it, of course—sometimes with men, sometimes with women, sometimes for money—and she certainly had no time for the cheap, quasi-religious moralism that antiporn feminists would cultivate in the years to come. If anything, she was an accelerationist about the whole thing: “SCUM gets around … and around and around … they’ve seen the whole show—every bit of it—the fucking scene, the dyke scene, they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier—the peter pier, the pussy pier … you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex.” Ti-Grace Atkinson reports finding a piece of erotica that Valerie had written for Hustler magazine among the latter’s belongings in 1968. “Typical male pornography, S&M, really written from that place,” she told Fahs. “I assume she was writing it to make some money and you can’t play around too much if you want the money.”
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