Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by
Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020
‘What you are really asking for is RMV = Relationship Market Value,’ Kim explains to a woman who calls herself Liz and seems obsessed with optimising her SMV in an effort to regain the love of a guy who ditched her after several weeks of dating. It’s painful to watch in real time how Kim skilfully takes all her fears and insecurities, inserts them into the Red Pill formula and gets a Trad Wife out of it. I am not in the most mentally stable state myself. Having just come out of a painful break-up, I begin to question myself, my approach to relationships, my role as a woman. Just focus on the research, I keep telling myself. But as I start spending hours, days and weeks in the forum, I can sense that this is becoming more than an undercover experiment.
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Confusion about changing notions of masculinity and femininity, and about the delicate balance between submission and dominance, has pushed men and women into fundamental identity crises. ‘Everything you had been taught and told was based on a lie. The lie that you can have everything, self-fulfillment and a happy family life. It just doesn’t work that way,’ one Trad Wife tells me. Blame it on the hook-up culture, as Brittany Pettibone would say, the product of modernity, social progress, feminism. Millennials are increasingly fed up with the fast-speed dating culture of the techno-sexual age, where apps like Tinder and Bumble mess with its users’ brains. The instant gratification, the dopamine that gamified dating sends through our bodies to manipulate our desires and twist our perception of reality.