the internet is our bedroom

I was exposed to red pill content for a year. this is what I learned.

i. our bedroom

I have this idea that the Internet is our bedroom.

I didn’t want to put this in writing because I felt like it was somewhat obvious. Because when you turn on the Internet, you’ll find bedrooms everywhere. Girls’ bedrooms, I mean. They are in the background of makeup tutorials and viral dance videos and story times — everything. All the major genres of content that sustain the social Internet.

Kaitlyn Tiffany points this out in her book about girls online and fan culture,¹ writing that “The whole web is created in a girl’s image now.” Or, perhaps more accurately, the whole Internet can feel like a girls’ bedroom because that is the space that we most frequently encounter when we go online.

ii. the Internet

A man I dated began watching Red Pill content. He did not become Red Pilled himself, but he did consume hours of men talking about women in a way that dressed up degradation and violence in civil discourse. He fell asleep with the YouTube app open, the murmur of men telling women to wait their turn to speak or asking for their body count became part of the hum in our bedroom that I needed to fall asleep.

Sometimes, we laughed at these men, who are so obviously being used by the women they invite on their shows. These women — dressed in Shein or else, inexplicably, cosplay — appear on Red Pill podcasts knowing that their viewership is mostly young and male and that those young men will likely subscribe to their OnlyFans accounts if only they sit for a few hours and say anything about trans-women or the gender pay gap or whether or not men should pay for dinner on the first date. Other times, the content felt mind-numbing, a constant stream of men spinning virality for themselves out of arguments that went around and around, ideas and terms that they gave shape to by chanting them over and over (high value male; modern woman; sigma, alpha, beta, chad; Red Pill, Black Pill, MIGTOW), each word a tupla.

It might surprise you (or maybe it won’t) to know that it isn’t just white men who make this kind of content. Indeed, the entire medicine cabinet of psychopharmacological metaphors that supply the system by which white men express their hatred for women of all races online is elastic. It can adapt to marginalized groups as well. There are men of all races who make this kind of content, perhaps not seeing that at the bottom of the rabbit hole is the hard, dirty ground of eugenics and white supremacy. There are also women who make Red Pill content.

I feel the need to acknowledge this because so few people who write about Red Pill content consider how it is perpetuated by those of us who have the most to lose in the system of white supremacy. Or maybe they do know and it is just expected that we should hurt ourselves over and over in this way. It is expected that we become inured to a system — a “dating market” — where each body has a certain market value, and the value of all bodies, except those who are white and male, steadily depreciate over time. This is the way it has always been.

“What would your grandmother have done?” the men admonish the women as they all sit hunched over cheap microphones. And I think to myself, my grandmother would never click on a video with the title “Sigma Male Rejects 304.” She would not have any idea what any of those words mean.

iii. the algorithm

I joked to my friend, “I have an idea for a novel but the research for it would fuck up my algorithm.” I would have to use a separate algorithm to research it, I told them. Do I really want to go there? I asked them.

This is a friend who I have told a lot of ideas to because they are very honest when they know my ideas for stories are bad. When I told them this idea, this one that would mess up my algorithm, they stayed very quiet. Maybe they were afraid for me, knowing how quickly our algorithms can spin us alternate versions of reality that look so very appealing.

Here is the idea: a woman who hosts a Red Pill-adjacent podcast suspects she is being stalked by one of her subscribers. This other woman — her stalker — is taking on the podcaster’s mannerisms, adopting her talking points, starting to show up places IRL that the podcast host does not want her to be. The podcast host begins to suspect that this other woman, this fan, her stalker, wants to kill her. But no one believes her. Because why would they? If the podcaster is no longer of use to men on the Internet — which is to say, if she is human with human problems — than what reason would they have to listen to her?

I wanted to write this story because I saw women who, much like my main character, went online to recapitulate what Red Pilled men say as a way of attracting followers and money and clout and obtaining that enviable job of just talking into a microphone on the Internet. I wanted these women to know that I saw them and that I saw how they are being used and I wanted to reflect that back to them.

But I was also interested in how doing the research to write this story might turn my algorithm into a knife — a very sharp knife. One that I could use to gut my Internet, which is quite often innocuous and designed to sell me things, evinced by the title of a video recommended for me by my YouTube homepage: “cozy vlog 🧸🍂 | fall thrift haul, august TBR, new hearth & hand fall collection, fall decor haul.” I wanted to see how far I could push my algorithm to find me another world, one populated by women who have views that I myself do not hold.

In Elle Reeve’s recent book Black Pill, which draws upon her near-decade as a journalist embedded in American far right extremist movements, she writes about how there is a dangerous misconception when it comes to people who hold beliefs that we disagree with. We are predisposed to think that these people are stupid. “Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true!” she writes. “The sick, sad truth is that the world is not being ruined by dumb monsters but by smart people just like us.”

These are not stupid people, not stupid men who make these podcasts. And neither is the algorithm that will push their content across all the corners of your Internet if you choose to interact with it. As much as we don’t want to admit it, the algorithm is not a blunt object or a dumb tool any more than my Red Pilled woman podcaster is. And that is the problem.

iv. the valley

Before it was a movie, Valley of the Dolls was a book by Jacqueline Susann, an actress who became a writer and was once accused by Truman Capote of looking like a “truck driver in drag.”

Susann had spent her teens and twenties in showbiz, acting for the stage and then for television before she began working in advertising, which led her back to writing. She wrote a sci-fi romance about a woman who falls in love with the alien who abducted her and then she wrote a book of letters to her poodle, Josephine, who accompanied her on her book tour, dressed in matching outfits. But what she really wanted to write about was the drugs she encountered working in the entertainment industry in the 1940s and 50s. She called the project The Pink Dolls. Dolls were Susann’s euphemism for pills — the uppers and the downers coursing beneath American pop culture, keeping it alive.

Valley of the Dolls was published in 1966, on the cusp of the Women’s Liberation Movement — what we call the Second Wave of feminism. It follows a trio of young women, who instead of marrying and starting families, are instead drawn out of the home and into show business. And even though all three reach the heights of fame and fortune, all three find themselves in the valley: lonely, unfulfilled, addicted to their own private cocktails of amphetamines and barbiturates (the dolls) to sleep at night or sparkle in the morning. Although it was panned by critics and Susann’s contemporaries, figures that would define the Women’s Lib Movement like Gloria Steinem, Valley of the Dolls became one of the bestselling American novels of all time, peeling back the curtain on modern celebrity and calling into question the means by which women could “make it” in this new world.

The Matrix is often pointed to as the urtext, the genesis of “being X pilled” online. That scene where Morpheus stretches out his hands and offers Neo a choice: the blue pill, the chance to forget, to go no further, to end the story; or the red pill, the chance to know, to discover, to see the world differently. Thunder crashes, and Neo takes the red pill.

For many men who are Red Pilled or Black Pilled or whatever color corresponds to the worldview they subscribe to, this scene provides a story that explains how they got to where they are, how they became disillusioned by one world that was offered to them and, so, chose another. For these men, taking the Red Pill is a choice. They chose to know more.

But when I watch Red Pill content, I see how it proliferates across my algorithm. Strangely, even though I am signed in to my alternate account — the one I was going to use to research my novel about the woman Red Pill podcaster who is being stalked by a subscriber — I begin to see this content spread to my other social media platforms, my For You Page on TikTok, my explore page on Instagram. I cannot cordon off my algorithm, keeping the Red Pill content contained to one profile while the rest feed me book recommendations and craft projects and recipes.

What I am trying to say is that, while these men tell themselves a story, (I took the red pill that was offered me), there is actually a different version of the story that they do not acknowledge. When the women in Valley of the Dolls start to take dolls, it also begins as a choice. But soon, they find that they need the pills. That they can’t function without the pills. That the pills are slowly but surely undoing them, but they can’t sleep without them or they can’t perform without them or they just feel too alone without them.

Addiction is like this. You choose to take the red pill one morning and then, some mornings later, you find that you can’t live without it. To me, the men creating and consuming Red Pill content have less in common with Neo and his choice than they do the girls in Valley of the Dolls. They don’t see past a fake world and into another realer, more authentic world. Instead, they have become addicted to something that provides them a little relief from the misery of performing, of waking, of living another day. And in their addiction, they are losing control.

v. the rabbit hole

The book I’m writing right now is a history of girls’ bedroom culture. It’s based on the dissertation I wrote to get my doctorate, but instead of being for academics, it’s for you. Every morning, though, when I go to work on my book, I feel less and less like I want to actually finish it. It feels too optimistic, and I don’t know anymore if it’s a good thing that the Internet is our bedroom.

Because if the Internet is our bedroom, then we have invited everyone in: the Red Pills and the Pepe memes and the racists and the algorithm. They are all in here with us, and they are all addicted to versions of reality that are strikingly disparate from one another and slowly seeping into and corroding our own. They are in our bedroom, whispering to us as we fall asleep.

I swallowed a pill and now the world looks different.

I swallowed a pill and now I see all the ugliness.

I swallowed a pill and I don’t know if it was my choice or not.

Thank you all for reading! I felt like I was rotten to the core and so I wrote this essay to try to help myself feel better. If you are new here, hi! Welcome to Internet Bedroom. I typically write silly little frivolous posts about nostalgia and girl culture but now I kind of want to start writing serious stuff too I guess. Hopefully that’s ok with you all! Thank you for being here and thank you for reading <3

1. Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It