The Red Pill of Feminism

Welcome to the desert of the real

It is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth: that you are a slave. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

If these words sound familiar, it is because they are lifted, almost verbatim, from The Matrix, now famously repositioned as having been - like so much else, from the Stonewall riots to pretty much anything women ever did - all about trans people. But they now strike me as a descriptor of something else. 

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I was a late starter to feminist analysis, and I will come clean: I didn’t see quite how fundamentally being a woman had affected my existence until I was in my fifties. Two incidents brought it home to me. One I wrote about here: the internal model or “theory of woman” that most people have is based on their mother, whose hormonal changes around birth mean that she will put herself second. This feeds into patriarchy by embedding the idea among both sexes that females are subordinate from our earliest moments. We are human, but not quite as human as men. 

The other incident was tiny: my husband gently ushered me to one side to take something from the back of the car. I could have done the same to him. But had I not consented, he could have moved me anyway, and I couldn’t have stopped him. It was like a light switch came on. I could not have done that to him. 

You may not like this assertion: women’s physical well-being is always contingent on men’s good behaviour. I am heterosexual and have lived with or around men most of my life. Most men are well-behaved, of course, and therefore I have been safe. But still, had any of the men I had been close to, or alone with, not been well-behaved, I would not have been safe. This fact results in hundreds of women dying in the UK every year. 

It is so uncomfortable that many women will not readily accept it is true. If you doubt it too, think of women with men they don’t know in late-night train carriages, lonely streets, refuges, prisons and refugee camps. Then think about the women killed by the men they trusted. Male good behaviour is not universal. When men lapse, women get killed. It is worth thinking about why this asymmetry exists. 

***

Humans are only a mildly sexually dimorphic species. True, most men could beat most women to a pulp with their bare hands and not risk even minor injury. Men are by and large bigger, taller, and heavier, with more muscle per pound than women, and that muscle has more explosive power so that even pound for pound, men hit 160% harder.  Their bodies are better able to withstand a punch, too, with different protection around vital organs. 

However, compared to many primate species, our differences are subtle. Male chimpanzees dwarf female ones, for instance. Step outside primates and look at other mammals, like the elephant seal - by comparison, men and women are very similar. The biggest women, as transactivists love to tell us, are bigger and stronger than the smallest men. Eye roll. 

You wouldn’t think it to look on Twitter, but we are the apex species on the planet; we got there because we are excellent communicators, we are bipedal, and we have very large brains for our size. While not all women have children, all women are evolved for what is an extraordinarily difficult, specialised role. And many men hate us for it. 

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Large-brained bipeds with good language skills present particular problems in reproduction. Our young must be born immature, before they are too large for delivery. Even as it is, their heads are huge. To accommodate that, our ligaments can soften so that our pelvises stretch at birth. And, of course, women’s hips are wider; any wider and we would waddle like ducks, but any narrower and the child could not be born. A woman’s gait is different to a man’s, and because of the geometry of her pelvis, she cannot run as fast. This problem would be easier to overcome if we were not bipedal. We would develop better front legs and have a spine that could adapt. It is a problem unique to humans. 

Women are also fatter than men, with about half as much fat again in a healthy, slim female body compared to a man’s. This primes us to be able to nurture and feed an infant. Of course, because we carry fat, we have less muscle; our relative lack of muscle also means we burn our energy more slowly, preserving it for childbearing and feeding. But it makes us both slower and less strong. 

Once born, our young remain dependent for a long time; it takes around 12 years for a child to reach anything approaching independence and longer to reach sexual and intellectual maturity. This time is crucial in language development. It is impractical for a mother to deal with large numbers of children, so we generally bear only one child at a time and ovulation is suppressed by breastfeeding. Even menopause has an explanation here; our last child is likely to be born at least twenty years before the end of our natural lifespan. Tellingly, other animals do not experience menopause similarly. There is even evidence that longevity beyond this point is helpful for gene survival in offspring. Maybe the presence of lesbians in our sisterhood helps here too. 

It doesn’t take much reflection to realise that women have borne the price of humanity’s rise to become the apex species. But where does that leave us? How does it impact our behaviour? 

***

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Ironically, some men - I’m looking at you, Andrew Tate, and it is an ugly sight - think that they have stumbled on something remarkable because they think the world hates men. They even call this a red pill moment. The only reason this is remarkable is that it is so palpably untrue. The world does not systematically hate men, just some men; and the ones doing the hating are, by and large, other men. As one witty tweet put it, “‘Patriarchy harms men too’. At least it does something good”. Woman-hate is different because it is external to women. Male violence is not women’s fault.

Many of the realisations that flowed, for me, from realising that there was an ever-present, unseen (and generally remote, but serious) threat of male violence were painful. I have talked before about some reasons why women might be conditioned to defer to men, but once you assimilate the idea that we are always dependent on not provoking men, other things fall into place. Why are we more deferential?  Why do we tend to conciliate rather than contend? 

Once you have allowed yourself to comprehend that your existence depends on either separation from men or trust in their good behaviour, you have a new lens through which to analyse your behaviour. 

Does the realisation make me more scared? Not really. The beast isn’t any bigger because you know it is there. You can see it in proportion. You can address its presence. You can find safety and space to grow, once you realise it is there. But it is not something that I can, or wish I could, forget. I could understand better that women are not oppressed because we are lesser, but because we are the half of the species that makes it great. 

That was it: that was the red pill. Like Neo, the world was now less comfortable, but it was an authentic, adult, fully human experience. I was out of the prison. Welcome to radical feminism. This is the desert of the real.