Toxic redpill masculinity leaves men weaker and more isolated. Counter it by reframing male strength as protecting and serving others.
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Toxic redpill masculinity leaves men weaker and more isolated. Counter it by reframing male strength as protecting and serving others.
This is a guest post by Will Bunnett, who has spent more than 20 years in progressive messaging, including co-founding and running a Democratic advertising agency for nearly a decade. Today he researches vital problems in the progressive ecosystem and mediates arguments between his kids.
In 2025, we hear a lot of debate over the trouble with young men. Even Barack and Michelle Obama talked about it on a recent podcast episode.
The reality is that toxic “redpill” masculinity has hooked many men and boys—in part because so many males want to be and do better, and only the extremist right is tapping into their concerns.
But these extremists give terrible advice. They purport to help men get strong and rich, but actually leave them emotionally, professionally, and romantically stunted. So-called “redpill” masculinity is making men even weaker and more lost.
This is exactly where we can step in. We can help men and boys grow their relationships, their social standing, and their professional profiles. In doing so, we can pull at least some away from the allure of redpill logic.
For anyone unfamiliar, the redpill trope comes from the 1999 movie The Matrix—you take the red pill and see painful truth, or the blue pill and stay blissfully ignorant. Right-wing extremists adopted this to claim they'd awakened to their own “truth”: that women use sex to manipulate men and upset a natural order of male dominance.
From there, this strain of masculinity—steeped in dominance and hostility to femininity—spread to mainstream online spaces where men gather. You may know these as the “manosphere,” and if you're reading FrameLab, you've seen its impact on politics.
It’s an active threat to our way of life, not to mention the health and success of the males it pulls in. And despite efforts like Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, even many males who know that toxic but popular red pill-adjacent influencers like Andrew Tate aren’t the answer still don't have alternative guidance.
As one high school student wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
Am I supposed to lead or step back? Does "manly" mean just one thing, and should I still chase it? It's hard to figure out what it means to be strong without being "toxic," confident but not arrogant, assertive but not overbearing. Are we meant to shrink so others can rise? Is it always zero-sum? It's confusing.
This earnest confusion is what redpill extremists have seized on. The causes of male frustration may be largely systemic—fewer blue-collar jobs, evolving gender roles, cultural expectations to show no emotion besides anger. But people gravitate toward agentic causation: if something bad happened, somebody bad did it.
In that mindset, the temptation to find easy villains (women) and facile solutions (become the dominator) is irresistible.
Redpill paths to dominance are pitched as common sense. Who argues with getting fit and working hard? But differences of degree become differences of kind when fitness becomes grotesque muscle caricature and work goals mean grinding yourself to a nub at three jobs.
When impossible expectations take hold, people become vulnerable to scams. Phony workout supplements and expensive coaching seminars prey on men who think they're doing right by themselves and society.
Meanwhile, this focus on strength and dominance makes them unbearable jerks their colleagues and potential partners can't stand. They end up less successful at everything they care about.
Men who've left the redpill world say it harmed their mental health and worsened their loneliness. Their physical health hasn’t fared much better, with higher rates of risky behaviors like steroid use and exercising while injured. “My life has been way better since I stopped dwelling on all that garbage,” says one former adherent.
This is the classic self-help scam: get people thinking they can individually solve collective problems. The way to turn it around is to stop looking at the singular and start looking at the plural. As Barack Obama told Michelle in the recent podcast, we need new structures and expectations in society.
We should measure the males in our lives by what they do for others. They must still practice the self-mastery that redpill masculinity fetishizes—but instead of applying it to getting physically jacked and buying cars, we should reward them for using it to lift up those around them.
In 2022, I tested ads for a client trying to move male voters on abortion. Our ads told men the Dobbs decision meant they had a duty to stand up for the women in their lives, and those women needed the men in their lives now. We moved those men 5 points toward the Democratic candidate.
This appeal to duty satisfies the craving men feel for meaning, significance, and purpose as well as anything redpill offers. It takes more bravery to stand up for a harassed female colleague than to do another set of bench presses. And the former will make women actually like and respect a man, helping solve the interpersonal disconnection so many men report.
As progressives consider how to recruit more men and pull them away from redpill culture, fulfilling these needs for meaning and connection by helping men function better with others will go much further than tax credits or job training programs.
If you want to encourage the males in your life down this healthier path:
Tell them it's their duty as a man to stand up for all the women in their lives. The women they know need them to do this.
Tell them people will think more highly of them and invest more in connecting with them the more good they do for others.
Tell them being a protector doesn’t have to mean buying a gun and building a bunker. Like Barack Obama says, it can also mean simple things like getting somebody’s chair or giving up a seat on the bus.
This approach won't solve everything overnight. There's much more work ahead in reshaping how our culture defines strength and success. But we can start by recognizing that every man we guide toward empathy and service instead of resentment and dominance makes the next conversation a little easier.
Gil Duran
Gil Duran
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