Many women my age have this experience. You are having a conversation with a guy. Maybe you even had a great game of poker beforehand, but periods come up and you start to talk about it. Inevitably, you come to the ‘Men need to understand women’s bodies more’ part of the conversation, after passing through ‘Why do they freak out about blood anyway?’ And the guy turns to you and asks, ‘Are you a feminist?’ And right then you know the conversation is about to go south, not just because yes, you are a feminist and have been around long enough to predict the sudden downward turn of his lips. He is not as friendly anymore.
But you know he will almost immediately begin his lamentations on ‘the plight of men’ to inform you that actually (as if you did not know), men go through stuff too: society has failed men. Do you know why men are committing all these suicides? Why? Because ‘everyone is rallying around women, but no one is paying attention to men. Why don’t women also try to understand how men function?’ You ask what men’s suicides have to do with women, how suicides even entered a conversation about periods, what equivalent to periods men have that women need to understand. And of course, there isn’t anything. Men do not know what it is like to constantly be in between transitions of growth and shedding, hormones rising and crashing, pain and discomfort, UTIs from nowhere and yeast infections because you are allergic to his semen. You bear the burden of pregnancy while the most he has to do, as Michelle Obama said on her ‘Diary of a CEO’ interview, is ‘cum in a cup’. And that is when the traditional route has failed.
He looks at you, measuring you, wondering how far you are willing to go with this. But you are virtual strangers (despite the poker game) and he doesn’t know that the discussion will last three hours. In the end, he pivots to ‘men’s mental disposition is different from women’s’ and you agree, ‘but what does that have to do with periods?’ And then he starts his tirade on ‘modern feminism’, how it has ruined women and ruined the world for men, how women are taking all the big jobs and men are being left in the dust. This is where he intended to go in the first place.
And you know he listens to the Andrew Tates and Ben Shapiros of the internet, complaining about how modern feminism is ruining society, how ‘modern feminism is making women unhappy’ (because they care so much about women’s happiness), how homes are empty and desolate because women are too busy being CEOs. And when you try to get a word in, he shuts you down; ‘No, listen, I’m the one telling you.’ For once in your life, you have a comeback at the ready ‘I don’t need to be told anything. That is just your opinion,’ thanking Kenyan MP Millie Adhiambo for the inspiration. (You, like him, are a typical chronically online Gen-Z.) The conversation boils down to that he is unhappy with the plight of men, and he thinks women’s success has something to do with it. How? ‘You know the way society has supported women and men have been left in the dust.’ But does he know why women needed support in the first place? You argue about what equality means, but he is still in the business of ‘telling you’, and you are very close to hitting him over the head with the salt shaker in front of you, so you refrain from interrupting for a while, let him ramble on about a topic he clearly knows little about.
Misogynists always think they know more about feminism than the women they deride, and they want to educate you about the difference between equality and equity. They want to tell you, and you find yourself, finally, interrupting the conversation with ‘don’t tell me what I already know’, and you know he thinks you are too emotional. Such a woman, he must think. You almost say ‘how dare you’, but that would be horribly cliché.
*
Social media has done a lot to even out the playing field for many, created channels of income in which individuals, families and even communities have been able to rely, connected people who would never otherwise meet. But it has also democratised the spread of stupidity. In scrolling through social media, you will likely encounter some men calling themselves ‘red pillers’, or simply, ‘the red pill’. These men (they even have women in their ranks now) have taken the firm, empowered position of blaming women for all personal and social ills, all their pitfalls and shortcomings. From why society is failing to why ‘modern women’ are sluts and why men are ‘unfairly’ accused of sexual assaults.
They range in degrees of stupidity, from the classic misogynists who think women should remain in the kitchen (their god-ordained place) to those who believe women do not (cannot) have orgasms, the Claviculars who think men beat women even on the beauty front because men are ‘natural’, and the Fresh and Fit of it all, to whom women do not deserve anything at all; money, respect, fidelity. They have found the truth, they know the truth, and they rely on the hordes of men who are young and inexperienced or gullible to make their bread on the internet. They say the most provocative things for attention, and your friend the red piller swallows it up and regurgitates it in your face. Stupidity, spread around like a world-spanning fart.
An insidious form of radicalisation has been rising lately. Friends tell of boyfriends who suddenly want them to cook every meal, men changing from the kind people their wives married to demanding submission (what women are made for). Social media’s ability to create communities of common interest has now widened the definition of ‘community’, enabling all sorts of creeps to find like-minded, similarly miserable creeps who gain popularity in their racist and misogynistic groups. You need not only fear that your boyfriend is cheating anymore. He could also be part of a secret (or not so secret) Telegram group where pictures of you circulate across borders and continents, pictures which may or may not be taken with your knowledge or consent. The recent case of Gisele Pelicot comes to mind.
*
Zadie Smith succinctly traced radicalisation in White Teeth. Published in 2000, this book is older than me, but it so clearly captures the mind of a young man undergoing this very phenomenon. Millat, a teenage boy, is inducted into a radical group; the ‘Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation’ (KEVIN for short). What begins as a search for enlightenment, to be a good Muslim, progresses into a hatred that he does not understand but clings to. He learns to hate women, distrust science, and engage in violence against those he disagrees with, and it starts with leaflets:
Earlier in the week he had set aside some time, read both leaflets and felt peculiar ever since. In three short days Karina Cain, a darling of a girl, a real good sort who never irritated him (on the contrary, who made him feel happy! Chuffed!) had irritated him more than she had managed in the whole year they’d been shagging. And no ordinary irritation. A deep unsettleable unsolveable irritation, like an itch on a phantom limb. And it was not clear to him why.
The KEVIN crew do not like his girlfriend. They hate that she does not embody the womanhood they approve of, and at every turn, they try to warn Millat away from her.
‘You could be a great leader of men, Millat,’ said Brother Tyrone (why did everybody keep telling him that?), looking first at him, then at Karina Cain, the curve of her breasts peeping over the car door, beeping her car horn in the street. ‘But at the moment you are half the man. We need the whole man.’
And Millat’s mind starts changing:
He usually showed Karina everything. Now, just her asking grated him somehow. And what was she wearing? Same belly top she always wore. Except wasn’t it shorter? Weren’t the nipples clearer, more deliberate?
When he notices the problem in her clothing where there was none before, jealousy hits. He:
‘… started noticing what she wore and the way other men looked at her. And when he mentioned it she said ‘Oh, I hate that. All those leery old men.’ But it seemed to Millat that she was encouraging it; that she positively wanted men to look at her, that she was – as The Right to Bare suggested – ‘prostituting herself to the male gaze’.
With the policing of her body comes the policing of sex;
‘When they made love, he said. ‘Don’t do that… don’t offer it to me like a whore. Haven’t you heard of unnatural acts?’
And inevitably, the threat of violence:
‘Besides, I’ll take it if I want it – and why can’t you be a lady, don’t make all that noise!’
And there went the relationship, like a lot of women have experienced. The rise of the red pill, of ideas founded in concrete as thick as marshmallows, has changed and ended many relationships. Some women wake up to completely different people, people demanding submission, obedience, threatening violence. And this happens among friends, too. A friend came to me, confused about a friend of hers that she has known for years now but who had suddenly turned homophobic. The whole thing unravelled in a group chat they had formed since their campus days. They hung out, drank together, talked about life, and lamented the education system.
After a birthday party, pictures are sent to their group chat by the celebrant, who is also part of the friend group and who is gay. As usual, he is dressed flamboyantly in a fabulous pink suit with a large pink flower brooch. But what would have been a regular conversation before in the chat turns into something ugly. Changed friend (a man) overreacts, calling the photo an ‘abomination’. This is a first. They have always known he was gay and nothing of this sort had ever been said before. At first, he is given the benefit of the doubt, since we have gotten used to ‘rage bait’ in the rage-money economy of social media.
The others try to smooth over the comment with humour, but the overreaction explodes into a tirade of homophobic slurs, talk of showing his gay friend ‘reality’ and ‘the truth’. Homophobe swings from ‘keep your sexuality to yourself’, disgusted, to talk of ‘free speech’ when everyone else tells him he is being rude, mean, cruel. As a chronically online Gen-Z, you know exactly the kind of people he follows, the cesspit of content he draws from. And in the end, a friend of five years is booted from a WhatsApp group to spread his bigotry elsewhere. Now in Kenya, homophobia is the rule of the day, so finding safe spaces with your chosen family is invaluable. But this guy ‘changed out of nowhere. I don’t even know what happened to him.’ And of course, AI made an appearance; when the other members of the chat sent him an essay to argue against his position (again, benefit of the doubt) only for the homophobe to send a screenshot of an AI-generated summary, a reductive five sentences for a five-page article. And he was gone.
But in this age where things seem to be fraught, where censorship and bigotry go hand-in-hand, it is encouraging to discover that bad ideas can be solved by good ideas, and simply that sense exists. Instagram creator @caingraves posed a question for his audience: ‘For the guys who’ve escaped the manosphere/red pill mindset, what was it that made you realise it was all bullshit?’ The answers he got reveal the danger of such an ideology, as well as the capacity for change. I sampled a few of them, and they are very revealing as to the insidious nature and the danger of this sort of ideology. As @be.orla comments: ‘A German author said “Women are also humans” in a TV show and the people discussing couldn’t even agree on that…’
It is also revealing that a lot of these men’s radicalisation was tied to right-wing ideology, which employs most of the same tactics to gain influence: fearmongering, misinformation, exploiting insecurity. @teramorfis ‘… realised that the Trump administration doesn’t just [sic] have my interests in mind (as a blue collar labourer) and other marginalised people.’ According to @marcus_chavez_c137 it took ‘realising that no one was actually trying to turn me gay or trans’. But the consequences can be devastating. @jakobkuenstler realised this ‘when my quote “friends” in that space were trying to convince me to beat up my mom simply for grounding me…That’s when I knew I had to leave.’
The most extreme forms of red pill content propagate an insecure idea of masculinity as @lucasf_3942 attests: ‘One of my friends at the time got genuinely angry when a girl tried to hold the door for him. Took him a whole week to calm down from it.’ It creates a masculinity that demonises women, so that they are not people but mythical demons. For commenter @ijaat_kyrayc, all it took to leave was ‘actually talking to women…’ These men spend hours at a time on social media because they lack community in real life. No wonder, as @pas_monnom comments: ‘I made friends and realised what was said on the internet was wildly different from real life’. Insecurity was a recurring reason. According to @ga1actlc: ‘Realising I didn’t hate women. I hated myself.’
You find that a lot of these men consumed red pill content to find camaraderie in their everyday challenges, but @butte_rman left ‘when it turned from simple and realistic problems to just downright hating women’. And radicalisation knows no borders. The most common antidote to this ideology I found in the comments was community and good ideas. Even just reading books. As commenter @metalevex said, ‘…Books and reading real, peer-reviewed studies as opposed to watching Nick Fuentes…I abandoned a part of myself to conform to alt-right ideology and got nothing out of it.’
All is not lost. All is not lost quite yet.
Aimee Chelangat is a Kenyan writer intimately interested in understanding the workings of human relationships and their dynamics on all societal fronts. Her essays and short stories are published or forthcoming in the Daily Nation, Qwani and Whispers of the Resistance Magazine. She was longlisted for the 2025 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
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