Debunking the Blackpill

The ‘blackpill ideology’ is an expansive neo-traditionalist-conservative (“tradcon”) ideology with a primary purpose to demotivate men in dating, their most common mantra being the phrase “It’s Over” (as in “your life is over”). I’ve done quite a bit of research on the blackpill as I found it to motivate significantly anti-social behavior toward myself (and others) and felt that its various premises had empirical flaws. This includes attempting to contact those who originally came up with the theory on obscure evopsych blog comment sections, and also interacting significantly with those who currently lead blackpill spaces.

There have been a few attempts to debunk the blackpill in the past. I feel they miss the mark as they usually ignore the foundational definition and prefer to just make up their own strawmen. I hope my experience arguing for years with those who created the most visible self-described blackpill literature will also lend weight to this rebuttal.

Each section of this essay introduces a fact that challenges a core pillar of blackpill theory. The first section of this essay attacks the blackpill at its definitional source.

Involuntary singlehood was prominent long before the sexual revolution

The core definition of the blackpill was that the sexual revolution created involuntary singles. It’s basically a combination of the original definition as articulated by blog commentator ‘Paragon’ in 2011, implicitly blaming “[current] deferred ecological pressures”, for “increas[ing] the mating latitude of females”¹ with a book by Roger Devlin. The Devlin book is called Sexual Utopia In Power. While likely knowing nothing of Paragon, Roger Devlin simply made Paragon’s argument more easy to understand to self-described blackpillers, who widely circulated his book. Devlin blames current contraception from the sexual revolution as a whole for “female hypergamy” (ie mating latitude upwards in perceived value).² Here is the gist of the original blackpill definition as the Paragon/Devlin synthesis:

“Monogamous marriage is sexual socialism, everyone gets a wife, this is how it was before 1960. After the sexual revolution, women chose to get into harems with high-status men and thus frustrated singles were born. We can best return to near 0% sexual frustration by reinstituting traditional patriarchy and traditional gender roles.”

This is the underlying philosophy to the blackpill, including in 2026. There is a small element of truth to this philosophy, in that women were given a choice to have sex with involuntary singles, and they have largely not been doing that. It does not logically follow that this started during or because of the sexual revolution.

19th century USA

How about we examine the 19th century then, as it has possibly the most recent stats on monogamy enforcement? It turns out that in 1850, for example, when only about 3 per 1000 couples were divorced, 77% of men below age 25 were unmarried in the United States, and about 68% in 1870.³ So given male testosterone peaks between ages 18-25⁴ and about three quarters of these young men were absent from the only non-stigmatized form of sex at the time, there were a lot of pent-up men back when monogamy was “enforced”. “Enforced monogamy” (i.e. reducing divorces, mate guarding, slut-shaming, etc.) therefore does not “encourage” marriage and thus socially sanctioned sex to any satisfactory extent during the years men are harmed by exclusion from socially sanctioned sexual activity.

The Baby Boom is not an argument for “sex rev caused celibacy”

Blackpillers consider the 1950s a great time for involuntary singles before the sexual revolution. That period was the baby boom, not an expression of patriarchy. Of course involuntary singles briefly benefited from women wanting to catch up on childbirth from having limited opportunity during WWII. It was not, however, anything inherent to patriarchy, and the 1940s and 1950s hardly even qualify as a patriarchy, as marriages weren’t arranged, divorces were legal and increasingly common, and it was just one 20 year blip in time.

Now I’m not claiming that divorces lessen the rate of involuntary singles. To make that claim, I’d have to see if more divorces increase or decrease the rate at which people have sex within marriage, so that is not my claim, as I do not have the statistics on that. I have only proven that the traditional societies tradcons revere, and the tactics they used, did not solve involuntary singledom, as they had tons of involuntary singles. They did not prevent involuntary singledom. And the sexual revolution did not cause a mass involuntary single problem, as there already was a mass involuntary single problem in the West. This is clear.

The sexual revolution actually led to women marrying more within their class

Not only did the sexual revolution not cause ‘dating up’, it instead caused women to marry more within their class. For example, according to a study by the Bonn Institute for the Study of Labor, since the 1960s, people have generally married more, not less, within their class, as measured by education level.⁵

The Houellebecq argument

The French author Michel Houellebecq famously made the following argument in his book entitled Whatever, which is widely circulated among blackpillers as gospel:

“Sexual liberalism creates a phenomenon of acute pauperization, just like wild liberalism does.” - Michel Houellebecq in Whatever

or, more simply

“Sexual liberalism creates involuntary singles just as wild economic liberalism creates poverty.”

This at first glance appears similar argument to the original Paragon/Devlin synthesis, but Houellebecq was not widely shared until later.

Something that argument doesn’t elucide in Whatever is that ’liberalism’ is not freedom of the kind celebrated by the Civil Rights Era, liberalism is instead the artificial imposition of a market onto natural human behavior. Here, Houellebecq is not actually blaming female liberation per se, but markets. There exist high barriers to access in almost any market. Markets are not needs-based; they reward based on effective advertising at best. In his fiction book Platform, Houellebecq clarifies his market focus by proposing first world exchange of money for third world sexual favors as a potential “market solution” to modern sexual pauperization. Don’t the third world men lose out in that case? They do.

US-based blackpillers have made little pushback against markets as a whole. The owner of both the largest blackpill forums is a Ron Paul Republican (Ron Paul being the market-trumps-all politician). Separately, most of the Facebook blackpill groups I checked are long descendants of a US based Facebook group called ‘Ancapistan’ (short for “Anarcho-Capitalism-istan”). When a Canadian blackpiller, Seth Hatfield opened fire near Pornhub’s headquarters railing against ‘female hypergamy’ in favor of an anti-market, the US based blackpillers were disgusted. Not by the violence probably. Public posting show they were eagerly awaiting what his ideology was after news of an ‘incel shooter’ broke, but when they discovered his ideology was communism, they were mostly sorely dissapointed.

Personality

The blackpill promotes the notion that ‘dark traits’ and sociopathy help to mate with women and therefore men should adopt those traits.

Nice guys have better relationships

While dark triad traits may help attract certain types of women, this blackpill argument is heavily centered around short-term relationships and immature people. Nice guys, not ‘dark triad’ men, actually fare better in relationships long-term.

William J. Chopik and Richard E. Lucas studied many dimensions of personality traits within relationships. They found that having a partner who is nice resulted in greater relationship satisfaction. However, having a partner that is not nice or neurotic resulted in lower relationship satisfaction.⁶

Some studies have claimed that undergraduate women preferentially sexually select dark triad men as short-term sexual partners.⁷⁸⁹

These studies are limited by the fact that they only studied undergraduate women in countries where the age of longer-term pairbonding is often in the 30s, and the studies were only geared toward short-term relations.

It is frequently claimed that Dark Triad men are more attractive to women, not out of an overt female preference for “bad boys”, but because they have a higher level of superficial charm and thus a high ability to deceive others regarding their interpersonal characteristics. V. Mehta notes:¹⁰

“Carter and his colleagues offer two possible explanations. First, sexual selection might be at work. This would mean that women are responding to signals of “male quality” when it comes to reproduction. And with respect to short-term mating, women may be drawn to ‘bad boys’, who demonstrate confidence, stubbornness, and risk-taking tendencies. Second, sexual conflict may be at play. The investigators state that “Women may be responding to DT men’s ability to ‘sell themselves’; a useful tactic in a co-evolutionary ‘arms race’ in which men convince women to pursue the former’s preferred sexual strategy.” They note that like a “used-car dealer,” Dark Triad men may be effective charmers and manipulators, furthering their success at short-term mating. The authors are also careful to note that though women rated the DT character as comparatively more attractive, it does not necessarily mean that they would have sex with them.”¹⁰

Altruistic, generous men have more dating partners and casual sex than non-altruists

A large study by Steven Arnocky, Tina Piché, Graham Albert, Danielle Ouellette, and Pat Barclay found multiple studies which showed that altruistic men have more sexual partners and casual sex than more stingy and non-altruistic men.¹¹

“In two studies, we show that altruism is broadly linked with mating success. In Study 1, participants who scored higher on a self-report altruism measure reported they were more desirable to the opposite sex, as well as reported having more sex partners, more casual sex partners, and having sex more often within relationships.” - Arnocky et al¹¹

Optimists have much longer, more satisfying relationships than pessimists

Many in the manosphere adopt a position that being negative makes one see the world more clearly, but in reality they are mostly sabotaging themselves while also often arriving at false conclusions through thinking ’negative = true’. A peer-reviewed study by Sanjay Srivastava PhD, Kelly M. McGonigal, Jane M. Richards, and Emily A. Butler found that pessimists fare very poorly in relationship satisfaction and duration as compared to their optimistic counterparts.¹²

The researchers hypothesized this was true because optimists tend to view conflict in a relationship or hardships in their life as a temporary affair rather than a law of nature, letting them overcome their obstacles more quickly and not make a situation worse for themselves or others.

“Optimists and their partners both experienced greater overall relationship satisfaction, optimists and their partners saw themselves and each other as engaging more positively in the conflict and as reaching a better resolution. [We also] found that the relationships of male optimists lasted longer than the relationships of male pessimists.” - Srivastava et al¹²

Extraversion matters

Blackpillers frequently dismiss love-shy individuals as ‘coping’ that their lack of extroversion is not actually a big problem. However, extroversion matters a lot. The academic Dr. Whyte gathered data from the online Australian Sex Survey of 2016 to determine who has sex and who doesn’t. Dr. Whyte found that extraversion is positively associated with mating success and reproduction (more likely to have children) in men.¹³

Celebrity matters even more

A couple sexually successful self-proclaimed blackpillers have made public note of dozens to hundreds of sexual encounters. One is simply utilizing his white privlege in third world countries, and another has a history of paying many thousands of dollars a month for artificial-virality. He used paid “clippers” to astroturf social media with tens of thousands of ‘organic feeling’ clips of himself on video, and forced himself into celebrity. Both these approaches have little to do with core blackpill theory, but they do work.

That a high-profile male blackpiller has found celebrity works as a significant aphrodisiac in the USA is a rather late realization for any of them, and that person is a minority among blackpillers to have made that realization. But they could have similar success with celebrity by whatever less expensive, legal means, and without getting nose surgeries.

At the point you are paying tens of thousands per month to “mog” and get enough social currency to be seen as sexually attractive, you are paying more than a husband invests in a marriage (through housing payments etc) or someone seeking legal sex work. Celebrity comes with significant trade-offs as well, most people would prefer to be a typical family provider than endure the humiliation celebrities recieve in the USA, being treated by the public like a disposable commodity and treated by the mainstream media as an abusable commodity.

Looks

Blackpillers claim that looks are the most important part of dating. Being shy is going to hurt a lot more, and blackpillers constantly downplay the role of their shyness in their predicament. They also overestimate the role of manly faces and underestimate the role of simple muscle building.

“For both men and women, extraversion equated to greater sexual frequency.”¹³

There is no scientific consensus on facial masculinity and sexual success

It’s messy.

Blackpillers make it black and wite. They promote extremely masculine faces, including getting expensive, risky surgery to attain such faces.

Researchers Penton-Voak Ph.D. and Perrett Ph.D. conducted a study in which they manipulated computer generated composite faces of men and showed them to women. They adjusted for sexual dimorphism, creating faces with big defined jaws, and ones with more feminine jaws. It turned out the ones that were most attractive to women not ovulating were not the most manly.¹⁴

The researchers found that when women were not ovulating, they preferred feminine male faces. Other times, more manly faces. This study has been replicated with differing results and many other studies on facial masculinity have been performed, to say there is a consensus would be overstating. There are simply many differing results, even within studies.

Working out increases your chances of being sexually successful

Some particularly vocal blackpillers state that only face matters and that those who are celibate despite using the gym are coping. This is false. For example, according to a study by UCLA, men who are muscular are more likely to have more short-term sexual partners and are also more likely to have affairs with mated women. Women were also interviewed in regards to the traits of both their most recent partner and their most recent short-term (‘hook-up’) sexual partner. For women whose most recent partner was also their most recent short-term partner, the second to last partner was used instead. Women’s short-term partners were generally more muscular than their most recent partner, and they also reported lower levels of trust and romance in these relationships.¹⁵

“Muscular men reported more lifetime sex partners, more short-term sex partners, and more affairs with mated women at significant or marginally significant levels.”¹⁵

Men are generally more lookist than women when evaluating potential long-term partners

It is a common trope on involuntary single forums to insinuate that women are much more shallow than men in terms of their preference for physical attractiveness in their romantic partners. This is probably false. For example, a study by Pamela C. Regan and Ellen Berscheid of 70 men and women, rating 23 characteristics in sexual and marital desirability, found that men cared more about the looks of a potential marriage partner. In other words, women cared less about looks than men did as far as long-term relationships go.¹⁶

“As predicted, men more than women preferred a physically attractive marriage partner”¹⁶

Promiscuous women

The vast majority of extremely promiscuous women are happy

It is a common blackpill statement that promiscuous women are mostly miserable. This is false.

The best data on female promiscuity and happiness comes from General Social Survey (GSS) data interpreted by the Institute for Family Studies. In their analysis of GSS data, 84% of the most promiscuous 5% of women polled were happy. Even though there is a 5% greater prevalence of unhappy individuals who are extremely promiscuous than the rest of women, the vast majority of the most extremely promiscuous women are happy.¹⁷

The blackpill promotes rape

The blackpill philosophy fondly looks backward at times of arranged/forced marriages, idolizes the days of legal marital rape, and idolizes dark triad traits, sociopaths, and mass murderers.

According to a 2022 CCDH report, 89% of relevant discussions from the largest blackpill forum at the time were in support of sexual violence against women.¹⁸ That forum was surpassed in popularity by another blackpill forum on the same server. The co-administrator of this new blackpill forum¹⁹ was very recently criminally charged with raping and drugging a 17 year old.²⁰ He self-identifies as having been “blackpilled”.²¹