The Real Reason That Blackpilled Men Hate Women

Can’t Blame the Hierarchy But Need to Blame Someone

Here’s the gist of it, for those who don’t want to wade through how I came to this conclusion or who just want to know the conclusion up front: The not-hegemonically masculine guy has failed to climb the rungs of the patriarchally established dominance hierarchy. The men who have achieved in it are worthy of derision but not hate because they have clearly won their spoils of desirable women using hierarchical standards, if not quite fairly and squarely, at least in an expected and tacitly agreed-upon way. To blame them or the hierarchy itself is to shamefully admit that you haven’t measured up. So all that anger and frustration gets turned on the women — the ones you should have been awarded as objects which indicated your prowess and success.

This is what I believe and these are the reasons why:

According to internationally known systems scientist, Riane Eisler (and anybody else who is paying attention at all), patriarchy is a system based on domination hierarchies. This is obvious to most people, but for the sake of thoroughness, let’s explore her model a little bit more before we go on.

Societies adhering closely to the Domination system have the following core configuration:

• top-down authoritarian control in both the family and state or tribe
• the subordination of the female half of humanity to the male half
• the devaluation of caring, nonviolence, and other stereotypically “soft” values
• hierarchies of domination based on “power over”
• a high degree of institutionalized or built-in fear, coercion, and violence

The other end of the spectrum is a partnership model, and although no human societies fit completely on either end of this spectrum, here in the United States, we are decidedly along the dominance end, despite some significant inroads in the past 50 years. We are also still very much a patriarchy in many ways.

*For more from me about Eisler’s work and how it fits into our society, read this:

The idea of “power over” is still the way a lot of social institutions work today, ergo, we live in a hierarchy of domination.

Men, in particular, are expected and encouraged to vie for the highest pecking order they can attain within this hierarchy. It’s part and parcel of what it means to be a traditionally masculine man in America, although more and more men are recognizing the damaging and limiting effects of hierarchies of power when they have nothing substantively to do with achievement. And of course, none of us are automatons blindly following all of the proscriptions of culture, but neither are we totally able to avoid them either, without significant effort. It’s not easy to get away from the past 10 thousand years.

So what if you are a guy who is born poor, homely, or socially awkward? What if you are scrawny and shy or have bad acne or a limp? What if you don’t like sports or cars or whatever else the males in your area rally their masculinity around? What if you don’t naturally align with the qualities that those who are at the top of the hierarchy have, what then?

I’ve been reading a lot lately about incels and toxic masculinity, from scholarly articles and research to pure opinion pieces. Combine that with what I know about Eisler’s dominance model and a recent conversation I had with someone who had all the markers of an angry “blackpilled” man, and I’ve got a working theory of why guys like this hate women so much.

Men who consider themselves to be “blackpilled” stand in opposition to those who identify with either of the more commonly known “blue pill” or “red pill” ideologies.

According to those who “have taken” the black pill, their ideology holds that “the game is rigged from the start, that being attractive is far more important than personality or techniques. It can be extended to the idea that there is little to no benefit in playing at all if you were dealt a bad hand in terms of appearence [sic].”

The blackpill is not a Chad and will never be one. “According to the introductory thread on Incels.me, “Chad is what incels are not: Charismatic, tall, good-looking, confident, muscular. [They] can be perceived as good or bad. It’s a meme mostly.”

If our society, including the dating world, is a dominance hierarchy, and you do not happen to have been born a “Chad,” then from the blackpill point of view you are shit-out-of-luck and stand no real chance of ever getting a date, because all of the women, even the ones “in your league” will still be vying for higher status men and ignore you. Never mind that plenty of people work to improve themselves, including their looks, on a daily basis. Never mind that all you have to do is look out the window to see all kinds of people paired up.

You, the blackpilled male, may resent the Chad for being at the top of the hierarchy, and even though you claim that this game is rigged, and so not worth even attempting to play, my theory is that telling yourself you believe anything else means admitting failure on your part. It means admitting to yourself and others that you have not performed well enough to rise up in the hierarchy to access the spoils available to those who are at the top. Ostensibly, the blackpill rejects trying to even vie for position at all, but since hierarchies based on dominance have been the prevailing forms of both government and society for the past 5 thousand years, they are extremely difficult to escape.

Instead of internalizing how you have failed to achieve in the hierarchy, which would be unacceptable, you turn your anger outwards towards the “spoils” that would have been rightfully yours if you had gotten up to higher rungs.

In other words, you turn your anger on the women whom you perceive to be rejecting you, or worse yet, not even aware that you exist. Because if you direct all of that blame and hatred toward the hierarchy itself, that is admitting that you have failed within the hierarchy and that is not acceptable to admit. Sure, Chads may be worthy of your disdain and the game is rigged, but the real rage is for the women (aka the spoils you should have gotten)!

All of this bears out in the recent conversation I had with just such a guy last week. Everything was the fault of women. They ignored him and made him feel invisible when he was in school because he was socially awkward and not conventionally handsome. I listened to him, but also tried to tell him about my band geek husband who had read GQ all through high school so that he could learn how to dress better and have confidence and manners (and boy does he ever now!). No dice for Mr. Black Pill! He wouldn’t even acknowledge that I had said any of that.

I told him about my first boyfriend, Roger, who had coke bottle glasses and was a bit on the scrawny side, but who was a really kind, intelligent, and generous person. Roger, despite his nerdy appearance (and being named Roger), had some inner confidence that had nothing to do with being in any way like a Chad. Nope, no dice!

I told him that since I am tall and blonde, I was often asked in high school if I were a model, but that I nonetheless did not have any dates until the summer after I graduated from high school, and those were with Roger, not with a Chad. It was not as he imagined, that I had my pick of guys and simply had to choose one. And it was not necessarily true that even the fat or homely girls also had choices available to them as he asserted (at least not any more or less than the less Chad-like guys did.) I reminded him that all kinds of people of all shapes and sizes do pair up, and that being conventionally attractive in a Becky type of way (the female equivalent of a Chad) was also no guarantee of company. He wasn’t having it though — the wound was too deep.

I told him how girls are expected to wait to be pursued and that the ones who initiate are considered aggressive and unfeminine and so we all mostly just had to “wait by the phone” hoping that it would ring. That one got a response! He told me that I was delusional or at a minimum had lived a very sheltered life. When I linked him to several articles written by and for men on the subject of why even now, 30 years later and amongst grown-up people, this still is expected to some extent. I got no reply.

There was nothing this blackpilled guy could or should have done — he was simply a victim of these women and all women. “I had no options,” he told me. I got the impression that he was perhaps once married, but wasn’t any longer, and so now he spends his time railing against feminism and telling off women any chance he gets. There is no empathy available because that would require vulnerability and he is too wounded to go in that direction.

I sympathized with his very clear pain and even suggested that he pursue some therapy or shamanic work so as not to be in so much agony all the time, but I don’t think that at this point he would even know who he was without this rage and pain. He would not address or acknowledge these suggestions or even the fact that he was hurting. Again, to admit to it meant more shame and failure, I think. It was just all the fault of the women — it had to be! It had become like both a toxic friend and a holy cause to him and so he’d just assume stick with it, marinating continuously in his own poisonous spew.

This guy professed understanding and sympathy for incels, although I don’t think he was far gone enough towards feeling that he had the right to kill women to make them pay. He was just going to make them pay with words every chance that he got. He’d failed at the patriarchally established dominance hierarchy, but the men who had achieved in it were never mentioned once. They had not stolen or appropriated anything that he deserved (because they had clearly won theirs by hierarchical standards, if not quite fairly and squarely, at least in an expected and tacitly agreed-upon way).

So this is what my theory distills down to: Some males who are not born Chads may experience rejection or insecurity (as we all inevitably did growing up, even the Chads), but they muddle through somehow, no doubt using a variety of strategies. Perhaps these are men who have internalized the inherent dominance hierarchy less fully. Perhaps they just had more family support at home which helped them hold on until they could find their proper milieu. But for whatever reason, these men did survive their formative years without becoming full of despair and hate, and the vast majority of them probably found mates.

And for whatever other unknown reasons; perhaps depression or Asperger’s tendencies, or the lack of what the men who survived had as resources, some men do not muddle through. They get stuck in the outrage and hopelessness of their failure to cut it in the way that has been dictated for males by the patriarchal structure. And since the admission of failure to cut it is even further shaming, they simply turn their pain outwards on the women they should have had access to if they had been more successful. These are the blackpills and the incels. At least that’s what I think.

For more from Riane Eisler, read Sacred Pleasure, Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body- New Paths to Power and Love.