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In the movie "The Matrix", Morpheus gives Neo two options:
"Swallow the blue pill – the story ends and you wake up from your bed believing everything you want to believe. Swallow the red pill - you stay in this paradise, I'll tell you how deep the rabbit hole is. Remember: all I offer is the truth. ”
《黑客帝国》（The Matrix）剧照
On Reddit, the fifth-largest website in the United States, the name of the most influential men's forum is "The Red Pill." Its founding marks a whole new phase of online misogyny – one that not only mocks and devalues women, but also believes that men – especially heterosexual white men – are being oppressed by women in a society in which men – especially heterosexual white men are being oppressed by women. They use classical imagery and classical writings to promote the propaganda of white racism, and consider themselves defenders of intellectual authority and inheritors of Western culture and civilization.
Social media has brought unprecedented democratization of information, but it has also created opportunities for men who hold anti-feminist views. Social media has elevated misogyny to new heights of violence and malice.
Donna Zuckerberg, a doctor of classics at Princeton — and the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — used "The Red Pill," the most influential men's forum on Reddit, the fifth-largest website in the United States, as an example to participatory observe numerous "alt-right" communities and tell how the men in "Red Pill" used ancient Greco-Roman documents and history to advance their patriarchal and white supremacy ideas, culminating in a book, "Red Pill and Misogyny."
《红药丸与厌女症》，原书名：NOT ALL DEAD WHITE MEN
Excerpt from "The Red Pill and Misogyny" "Introduction"
In late 2016, posters of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa began appearing on college campuses in the United States. The posters feature black-and-white photographs of sculptures, most of which are either ancient, such as Apollo Belvedere, or in a distinctly classicized style, such as Nicolas Coustou's 1696 statue of Caesar. The images are filled with prosaic, seemingly innocuous slogans such as "Protect our heritage" and "Our future belongs to us." The posters sparked a wave of outrage and were quickly taken down, although they were still sold on the Identity Evropa website for almost a year under the heading "Epic Posters."
Identity Evropa的海报，写着LET'S BECOME GREAT AGAIN
This propaganda of white nationalism using classical imagery is by no means an isolated case. In fact, Identity Evropa's posters are unusual not because of the things they depict, but because they exist in physical form. In an even more untouchable online world, far-right groups that share Identity Evropa's ideals are increasingly using artifacts, texts, and historical figures reminiscent of ancient Greece and Rome to add cultural support to their ultra-conservative ideas about the perfect white masculinity.
These online groups have many names — the Alt-Right, the manosphere, Men Going Their Own Way, pickup artist — and exist under a giant umbrella called the red pill. This group of men is united by the same resentment toward women, immigrants, people of color, and liberal elites.
The name "Red Pill" is taken from the movie "The Matrix" and encompasses the idea that society is unfair to men, especially heterosexual white men, and that it is designed to favor women. "Red Pill" originally made its home in the sub-version of "Red Pill" (r/theredpill), a forum dedicated to discussing the concept of red pills on the social media platform Reddit. And its influence and reach far beyond this base camp.
Men in the "red pill" community — on Reddit and elsewhere — share articles, memes and news events to provoke each other, and then that anger is then vented in what is known as cyberbullying: a series of electronic abuses of the less fortunate to draw attention.
社交媒体Reddit的LOGO
The Red Pill community has a strange and awkward association with social media: its members generally display a general disdain for all major social platforms, but at the same time they use these platforms as their primary mode of communication, and strongly protest when members are banned from social networking sites. James · James "Roissy" Weidmann, the author of the famous blog Chateau Heartiste, refers to Twitter as "Twatter", and the famous blog "Return of Kings" in the men's space community frequently posts articles claiming that Twitter is a bad friend of Milo Yanopoulos Yiannopoulos) and other conservatives, which will lead to its eventual bankruptcy. Many of this group exist on both Twitter and Gab, the latter being a loosely restrictive copy of Twitter, while parts of the group have moved from Reddit, a barely regulated news aggregator, to its less restrictive rival, Voat. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook (and my eldest brother), is often derided by titles like "Mark Zuckerberg" or "Zack the Green Hat," a term derived from the term cuckold and especially commonly used in "red pills."
I understand what it's like to have a conflicting relationship with social media. I moved to Silicon Valley in 2012 when my husband had just accepted a job at a social media marketing company that would later acquire Google. All three of my siblings have worked on social media, as have most of my network. Because I know a lot of people who work in tech companies, I've heard a lot of talk about how the power of technology can change the world and build community.
However, as people with common interests are connected to each other, the strengthened community inevitably includes groups that share resentment and prejudice.
The community studied in this book is a perfect example of this. Social media has democratized information like never before, but it has also created opportunities for men with anti-feminist ideas to spread their views to a wider audience — while also spreading conspiracy theories, lies, and fake news. Social media has elevated misogyny to new heights of violence and malice.
Social media
Today, anyone who doesn't want to be a digital hermit is bound to come across this kind of male online. The inevitable encounter is not particularly painful and shocking for those who have been prepared and able to recognize the tactics they use to attack their targets, including how to use the Greco-Roman canon to enhance their credibility.
The "red pill" community's fascination with ancient Greece and Rome is by no means unique. Political and social movements have long invoked the history, literature, and mythology of the ancient world for their own benefit. Borrowing the symbols of these cultures, one can powerfully claim to be the inheritor of Western culture and civilization, as the Nazis did in the 40s of the 20th century. The men in the "red pill" have ported this strategy to the digital age. They transform the ancient world into a set of memes: images of ancient sculptures or monuments become shortcuts that can be copied and fabricated at will, projecting their ideology and promoting it to the world.
"Red Pill and Misogyny", photo by designer Yamakawa
Classics is not the only field of inquiry that these men use to rationalize their views. They also had a special interest in the history of England, Germany, and Russia, especially in the Middle Ages, and wrote and cited articles on evolutionary psychology, philosophy, biology, and economics. In any case, the Greco-Roman classics had a special cultural importance for them. They often refer to writers like Marcus Aurelius and Ovid in an attempt to reinforce the notion that white men are defenders of intellectual authority, especially when they believe that this authority is being challenged by women and people of color.
They claim that the ancient world, and by extension, the study of the ancient world, is suffering from an onslaught from "political correctness" and "social justice warriors" in American classrooms. As colleges and universities begin to remove some of the "dead white men" from literary orthodoxy and replace them with non-white, non-male writers who have not yet died, the living white men in "The Red Pill" have established themselves as guardians and protectors of the Chinese heritage of Western civilization.
"Red Pill's" dabbling in classics is worth paying attention to, even if it's as simple as a few keyboard warriors writing for hundreds of thousands of online readers. These men, no matter how many they are, are disproportionately loud in online discussions about sex and gender, and it is important to explore how they use the classics to construct their authority. Unfortunately, however, the abuse of classics by the far right goes far beyond the confines of a handful of online publications and forum editions.
Glossary in the appendix to Red Pill and Misogyny
This book is about how the men in the "red pill" use ancient Greek and Roman documents and history to advance their ideas of patriarchy and white supremacy. My goal is to expose the mechanism of this use: to show how the classical worldview constitutes the "red pill" and how these people armed themselves with Greco-Roman propaganda. No one interested in classics or social justice should ignore this trend. It has the potential to reshape the meaning of ancient Greece and Rome in the 21st century, while also fueling dangerous, discriminatory ideas about gender and race.
As Angela Nagle points out in her 2017 book Killing All Ordinary People, the far-right online subculture is driven by a deviant political opinion. It is perhaps particularly ironic that the ancient Greco-Roman classics, with their considerable and recognized cultural capital, were so strongly embraced by a fundamentally countercultural movement.
The men in "Red Pill" use their vision of the ideal of Western civilization and its past to critique our own society and encourage change, often rhetorically taking this strategy as a natural way to understand what the classical world means today. However, by analyzing and deconstructing the passion for ancient Greece and Rome of the Red Pill, I hope to shed light on a different perspective on the feminist radical space that the classical world can occupy in today's political discourse.
Red pills and misogyny
Written by Dona Zuckerberg, translated by Meng Xiyuan
Undercover to expose the misogynistic trend on social media in the United States
Kuang Zheng was misused by Shun Zhibai Nan's classical literature