Kelsey, age 28, had a long-standing crush on Peter* when they were at high school together, but she’d never thought he’d be interested in her romantically. “He seemed too cool,” she says. So, when he started DMing her over Instagram a few years after they graduated, eventually asking her out, it all felt like a “dream”.
She liked that Peter seemed to share a lot of her values. “He was very liberal, pretty hippy, and vegan — into rave culture and that kind of stuff,” she says. “He made me want to be a better person.” But about a year into dating, towards the end of the COVID pandemic, Peter started to change. It began with his diet: he became a carnivore, citing Paul Saladino — an influencer who promotes a carnivore diet — as his inspiration. When Kelsey looked up Saladino, she saw that he is an anti-vaxxer. And, soon enough, Peter started to parrot Saladino’s views on vaccinations.
While Peter’s change in views disturbed Kelsey, she still saw the qualities she’d fallen for in him. “We still had our good moments, and still laughed a lot together,” she says. “I was hoping he would change.”
However, as time went on, Peter’s views only got more extreme, and his behavior towards Kelsey grew more controlling. “He started trying to dictate what I should eat, saying I shouldn’t eat vegetables anymore,” she says. He also started telling her to dress more modestly, and to dye her hair, which was pink at the time, a “normal” colour.
In the last few months of their relationship, Peter began to make comments that were transphobic and sexist. He started to quote Jordan Peterson in conversation regularly, and would read books about traditional marriage and roles for women versus men. On one occasion, he tried to read a passage from The Case for Patriarchy to Kelsey, which resulted in an explosive argument. They broke up shortly after. “Our relationship just started to feel very one-sided by then — like I had to please him,” she says. “It didn’t matter how I was feeling anymore.”
Kesley isn’t the only person whose relationship has fallen apart after her partner started to show interest in the ‘red-pill’ — a growing subculture that challenges feminist narratives and emphasizes traditional gender roles as the natural way of life. Taken from the movie The Matrix, it’s the concept of waking up to the realities of the world, while the likes of you and me are “blue pilled” or “normies” (incels are “black pilled”). In a viral TikTok captioned “RED PILL CONTENT RUINED MY RELATIONSHIP” Mila explains how she broke up with her boyfriend after he started listening to Fresh and Fit (a podcast widely criticized for misogyny) and consuming Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) content. The video has been met with over a dozen comments from people who claim to have lost partners to the ‘red-pill’.
With recent research showing that TikTok and YouTube shorts are rapidly amplifying misogynistic and male supremacist content, it’s perhaps no surprise that more people are seeing their partners, family members and friends exhibit this kind of thinking. It’s this kind of thinking that documentarian Louis Theroux explores in his new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere. This patriarchal network rooted in misogyny also gives way to more extremist views which we watch play out on camera with racist, homophobic and antisemitic slurs being hurled.
A YouTube spokesperson said: “Hate speech, harassment and cyberbullying have no place on YouTube. We have strict content policies in these areas which we rigorously enforce using a combination of human reviewers and machine learning technology.”
According to TikTok, “community guidelines specifically identify misogyny as a hateful ideology and we remove it from the platform with a variety of methods. Between October and December 2024 , 91.6% of videos removed under our hateful behaviour Community Guidelines were removed proactively.”
Last month’s release of Netflix’s Adolescence ignited conversations nationally around the spread of ‘red-pill’ content among young boys, which even reached British Parliament. However, it isn’t just young boys who are vulnerable to ‘red-pill’ content. “There’s definitely a wide age range in the manosphere,” says Jessica Aiston, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Queen Mary University of London who authored a paper on the representation of feminism within the manosphere. “The focus on vulnerable young boys does overlook the fact there’s a lot of older men, including people in their 30 and 40s, some retired, in these spaces”
In Adolescence, Jamie’s parents struggle to spot the warning signs of trouble — they thought Jamie was ‘safe’ upstairs in his bedroom (not getting into trouble out on the street). This resonates with Kelsey, who says she couldn’t have foreseen her partner falling down the rabbit hole. “It felt like a healthy relationship; we were equal,” she says.
Adolescence blames the manosphere for the rise in men signing up to right-wing, conservative ideologies. But as critics of the show have pointed out, the manosphere does not exist in a vacuum. Rather it’s the latest continuation of a long history of violent misogyny.
As Aiston points out, it is usually the case that people drawn to the manosphere already have some pre-existing view that the community is tapping into. “There are definitely some people who might be more vulnerable, such as people who already hold some sexist or anti-feminist beliefs — which, of course, is not uncommon, given that we do live in a patriarchal society. Or, they might hold a soft view of them, and this is taken to an extreme in the manosphere,” Aiston says.
For Anna*, age 26 from the UK, there were early signs that her ex, Josh*, might be susceptible to ‘red-pill’ beliefs. Because they were friends for four years before becoming romantically involved, she was familiar with his dating history. “He didn’t have much luck with women throughout most of his 20s,” she says. “I think years and years of frustration with not getting what he wanted from women eventually led him to form a negative opinion of women.”
It’s easy to see how Josh’s “negative opinion of women” resulting from romantic rejection could be taken to an extreme in certain online spaces. In the manosphere, pseudoscientific theories are often used to blame women for mens’ feelings of sexual or romantic rejection. For example, the “80/20 rule” refers to the pseudoscientific theory that 80% of women are only attracted to the top 20% of men. In Adolescence, it is rejection that ultimately leads Jamie to kill.
Josh and Anna started dating just before Anna was due to move to a different city for a work placement. They exchanged ‘I love you’s’, and planned to be together on her return. After moving, Anna recalls having a conversation with Josh about Andrew Tate over text, where she was deriding Tate’s “idiotic” views. Josh told Anna that while he didn’t agree with what most of Tate says, he had some “good points”. This alarmed Anna: “I suspected that he was taking [Andrew Tate] more seriously than he was letting on.”
A few weeks later, almost out of nowhere, Josh started ignoring Anna’s calls. Eventually, he suggested that they stop speaking until she moved back. “I was completely heartbroken,” she says. He started up contact again within the month, and things went back to normal for a while, with them exchanging messages every day. But this only lasted a short while, before Josh cut contact again.
The second time this happened, Anna decided to call him out on it. Josh responded by admitting he was deploying a ‘dread game’ — a dating strategy often used by red-pilled men involving uncertainty as a way to increase their perceived value in the eyes of a romantic partner.
“When I told him that ‘dread game’ doesn’t work, he responded that it ‘worked on his ex’. I was absolutely beyond disgusted,” says Anna. “I told him that his ‘tricks’ had completely ruined things with me and I was no longer interested.” Anna says she was reminded of a clip she’d seen where Andrew Tate suggests being cold and distant as a tactic to make women chase you.
These kinds of dating games and strategies are common in the manosphere, and reflect a view within the community that women are a homogenous group, according to Aiston. “We see this in acronyms like AWALT which stands for All Women Are Like That,” she says. “If you’re in a relationship and you’re reading all these stories about how women act, about how women are toxic, then you might start seeing things like that in your own partner, in your own relationship, even if that’s not the case.”
For Izzy, age 21 from the U.S., her boyfriend Brian’s* descent into the manosphere felt more subtle. At first, it even seemed innocuous, as he grew increasingly preoccupied with ‘self-improvement’. “He had mentioned wanting to work on himself, so he was reading a lot of self-improvement books, and going to the gym” she says. It wasn’t until Brian started mentioning the content creators he was watching — such as the YouTuber Hamza Ahmad — that Izzy realized there was something more sinister about Brian’s newfound obsession with self-improvement.
“Maybe a few of Hamza’s videos were about working out and bettering yourself — but mostly they are riddled with misogynistic and ‘red-pill’ beliefs,” says Izzy. “I was immediately so scared.”
Aiston says that self-improvement or self-help messages are often used found in red-pill communities. “Sometimes, [red-pill content] can use this self-improvement angle to make it seem more legitimate,” says Aiston. As Izzy experienced, this can make it harder to recognize when the content is harmful. “Going to the gym can, of course, be a good thing — the problem is when it’s framed by these communities in terms of you needing to be strong, because women are making you weak,” says Aiston.
Like Kelsey, Izzy hoped she could change Brian. “It felt like my responsibility to fix him, but I also knew this was a huge rabbit hole that was hard to get out of,” she says. She started by creating a Google doc of “manosphere deprogramming videos” from creators who challenge toxic masculinity. Izzy and Brian watched a few of them together. “He was definitely taking mental notes, but I had to send him the Google doc so he could do this on his own. I did not want to parent him about this,” she says.
Ultimately, though, Brian’s views had changed how Izzy saw him. “The more he delved into the red-pill rhetoric, the more I just couldn’t look at him the same,” she says. “I saw him for the lonely and insecure guy that he really was.” They broke up a few months after Izzy found out about Hamza and the other creators he was watching. Izzy says she was “heartbroken” to have lost the person she thought she knew.
Laura, in her early 40s, describes a similar heartbreak when her boyfriend of a year started consuming red-pill content during the pandemic, which eventually caused them to break up. “It was so devastating,” she says. “In all honesty, it would have been so much easier if he just died. He’s still around — but the person that I love is gone.” Laura tried to intervene, but says that it was near impossible trying to get through to her partner at the time. “There’s no way to combat it. Giving facts makes it worse: he only dug his heels in even further,” she says.
As Aiston points out, intervening can be extremely hard, because of how these spaces prime men to think. “There’s a lot of distrust of anything outside of the community,” she says. “They can just say that, ‘Oh, that’s because you’re blue pilled’, or ‘you’re brainwashed by feminism’.”
Even though Izzy recognizes it would have been easier to leave Brian sooner, she is glad she tried to ‘de-program’ him. “During our breakup, he thanked me for pestering him enough to get him to snap out of it,” she says. “He said he was going through a stupid phase, and was starting to notice that it impacted his younger brothers too, which was kind of unnerving to him.
“It’s really important to notice the signs and recognize when your boyfriend is acting off,” continues Izzy. “If you can, talk to your partner about whatever you’re feeling — and hopefully they listen to you.”
*Names have been changed and surnames withheld to protect identities.
This article was originally published in May 2025 and has since been updated.
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