A time has come for men to say no to women’s chaos. It is a time to take charge and refuse to be bullied into destructive surrender and unchecked capitulation to the failed feminist experiment […]. It is time for men to rediscover the operant masculine frame needed to steer the society towards order […]. Before it is too late.
Amerix
Mark Odhiambo, a 27-year-old migrant from Siaya County, single ja-pap, and unemployed university graduate, had lived in Pipeline since 2016. After graduating in physics, he struggled to find permanent employment and stayed afloat by writing essays for Chinese students. Being unsatisfied with his economic status and romantic life, he described Kenyan women as materialistic and unfaithful: ‘Women are women. They are always materialistic. […] When she needs something and there is somebody giving her a better option, she will go for it.’ When asked about Amerix, who had been one of Kenya’s most successful social media masculinity consultants during the time of my fieldwork, Mark got excited and claimed that the advice of Amerix had been ‘educative’ for him since he had first read his Twitter posts:
Amerix is talking about why shouldn’t we be us? Why do you have to be dictated by a woman? Let the woman decide whatever you have to do. Be away from friends, she does not want that. Do whatever she wants? You see that? So, we were like, give us this shit. […] From the first day, we were all into this Amerix thing. […] there are some people who argue that Amerix is misleading the men, but then if you understand what Amerix is talking about, it is the real thing, the real situation on the ground.
Amerix, a healthcare professional hailing from western Kenya, had
been
giving Kenyan men controversial advice on their health, finances, and sexuality on Twitter for the last couple of years. Having branded hashtags that were widely shared by migrant men on their social media channels, such as #MasculinitySaturday or #StayTaliban, ‘the man teaching men about masculinity’ (Kinyanjui 2020) had become one of Kenya’s most infamous social media personalities. Men not only passively absorbed his advice by following his Twitter account, but also actively engaged with his ideas in a Telegram channel that had almost 100,000 members in 2022. To understand what attracted Mark and other male migrants in Pipeline to his advice, it is helpful to give a short introduction to the red pill movement, which highly influenced Amerix’s anti-feminist doctrine.
1 Proponents of the red pill ideology avoid the term ‘movement’ due to the alleged scientific grounding of their advice. In his Telegram channel, Amerix, for instance, called the red pill movement an ‘intersexual power dynamic instrument that reminds men to remain masculine. It is a compass that redirects you back to your manly path in case you veer off the track.’Members of the red pill movement assume that feminism has infiltrated all areas of life, from education to the economy, over the course of the last 50 years, resulting in the replacement of the biological supremacy of men over women with a cultural supremacy of women over men. According to Jacob Aliet, author of Unplugged: Things Our Fathers Did Not Tell Us, joining the red pill movement ‘awakens men to the reality that society is dominated by feminist values and often misandrist attitudes’ (2022a: 36). The main social and political intention of the movement is to ‘unplug’ men from the ‘matrix’ of a ‘femicentric’ world order so that men can begin to see the reality and improve their ‘game’, that is the practices and tactics they rely on to become sexually, romantically, and economically successful (ibid.: passim). ‘Less committed to changing the rules of the game and more concerned with discovering those rules and discussing them for the purposes of men’s personal sexual advantage’ (Van Valkenburg 2021: 89–90), the red pill ideology relies on evolutionary biology to argue that the behaviour of women is predetermined and therefore predictable. This predictability can be used to men’s advantage if they agree to apply strategies backed up by insights from behavioural psychology. Such an integration of scientific findings makes the red pill movement’s antifeminism appear ‘as not radical but common, relatable, and, crucially, rational’ (Jones et al. 2020: 1914). The red pill and associated movements, such as MGTOW (‘men going their own way’), thereby accomplish ‘lowering the barrier to entry and broadening the opportunities for recruitment’ (ibid.), particularly of intelligent and educated migrants such as Mark who struggled with what they perceived as the unrealistic economic and romantic expectations of women.
Followers of the red pill ideology share some basic assumptions about female nature. They believe, for instance, that women act according to their hypergamous nature when choosing their boyfriends and husbands. In contrast to the culturally produced ideology of female romanticism, women, in other words, allegedly flock to the richest men for financial support and to those men with the best genes for reproductive purposes. This ‘dual mating strategy’ supposedly leads women to have sex with so-called ‘alpha’ males while depending financially and emotionally on ‘beta’ males. Furthermore, the red pill ideology assumes that women are ‘solipsistic’, which, in this context, refers to women’s inability to consider worldviews other than their own as valid or valuable. Due to feminism’s successful and total indoctrination, men allegedly no longer dare to criticize women but must constantly conform to female values, making it impossible for women to become self-critical. Lastly, proponents of the red pill movement agree that women follow Briffault’s law, a hypothesis of evolutionary biology that assumes that female animals only spend time with males if they derive a benefit from it. In short, women are viewed as ‘hypergamous, calculating, and uncaring’ (Preston et al. 2021: 836).
Amerix’s popularity with Kenyan men sprung from his ability to make use of the red pill movement’s ‘ideological elasticity’ (Ging 2019: 644). Concepts such as female hypergamy and solipsism, for instance, resonated with migrant men’s belief in women’s materialistic nature and their experience of pressure caused by allegedly insatiable female desires. Moreover, Amerix transferred the technical terminology of the red pill movement to the Kenyan context. The following excerpt from his Telegram channel, for example, illustrates how he contextualized the language of the red pill movement by comparing Kenyan ethnic groups with categories of men abhorred by proponents of the red pill ideology such as ‘simps’, ‘white knights’, ‘orbiters’, ‘incels’, ‘average frustrated chumps’, and ‘cucks’.
2 These terms are widely used by followers of the red pill movement. In brief, ‘Orbiter’ denotes men who spend resources on women hoping that they will have sex with them in the future; ‘simp’ is short for ‘sucka idolizing mediocre pussy’ and refers to men who have embraced feminism to increase their sexual access to women; ‘cuck’ describes a man who accepts his spouse’s hypergamous infidelity; an ‘incel’ or ‘involuntary celibate’ has lost his masculinity and can therefore no longer find sexual partners; a ‘white knight’ is a man who protects women despite the alleged fact that women are ruling in a femicentric world; and an ‘average frustrated chump’ is another term for a ‘beta’ male who cannot find sexual partners. This allows him to lament about the downfall of the powerful and strong ‘African man’ who is masculine, non-democratic, anti-western, emotionally stoic, and physically fit:
Radical feminism has led to the mutation of our beliefs hence giving rise to WHITE KNIGHTS (Luhyas), ORBITERS (Kambas), SIMPS (Luos), INCELS (Kalenjin), CUCKS (Kisiis), Average Frustrated Chumps (Kikuyu). […] What should men do? They should stick to their traditional beliefs in the dating market. Don’t allow feminists to warp and promote the mutation of our different beliefs.
3 The characterization of jo-Luo as ‘simps’, for instance, refers to Luo men’s alleged romanticism, and the description of Kalenjin as ‘incels’ alludes to Kalenjins’ allegedly violent nature.For Amerix, feminism had, in other words, done more than create a femicentric world where masculine men were oppressed by women and their so-called ‘effeminate’ male allies. It supposedly also had, with the help of Christianity and the NGO sector, destroyed traditional African gender relations based on strict heterosexuality and marriages between strong patriarchal polygamists who dictate and submissive wives who obey. According to Amerix, this deterioration of gender roles further deprived aspiring Kenyan politicians of masculine role models. Instead of strong leaders who reject western values, such as Rwanda’s Paul Kagame or Russia’s Vladimir Putin, both celebrated by Amerix as true men, Kenya had embraced feminine democracy and leaders who had become mere appendages of ‘effeminate’ western politicians.
Although Amerix’s excitement about military and totalitarian dictatorships appealed to many young Kenyan men, the popularity of his Telegram channel largely stemmed from the easily implementable advice he offered. The practices Amerix advocated mostly touched on economic, sexual, health-related, and relationship issues. Akin to a military drill instructor, Amerix greeted his channel members every morning by reminding them to bathe using cold water and engage in physical exercise, after which he shared advice on nutritional, sexual, and economic topics. He advised men, among other things, to walk barefoot, to defecate while squatting, to use condoms, to identify single mothers and women who had abortions by looking for stretch marks on specific body parts, to perform compound weightlifting exercises, to reduce their blood pressure, to sunbathe their testicles, to practice ‘autophagy’ by fasting for 24 to 72 hours, to avoid ejaculation to increase testosterone levels, and to ban industrially processed foods from their diet.
4 Amerix’s focus on practices that control the flow of substances in and out of the body alludes to theories about the permeability of human bodies common across Eastern Africa (see, for instance, Geissler and Prince 2010: passim, Taylor 1992). His fixation on modern sexual practices, his praise of dictatorships, and the strict distinction he made between his followers and everyone else furthermore strongly reminded me of the ‘authoritarian personality’ structure analyzed by Theodor W. Adorno and others (Adorno et al. 1950). All these different practices were part of Amerix’s ‘4P’ and ‘5M’ doctrines that aimed at helping men to be able to ‘provide’, ‘produce’, ‘precede’, and ‘protect’. In order to accomplish that, men needed ‘money’, which they could easily acquire by focusing on their ‘mind, muscles, men, and material’, that is by working out, socializing with other men, building a home, and ‘unplugging’ themselves from the ‘femicentric’ worldview that compelled male migrants to try to live up to the expectations of their wives and girlfriends instead of focusing on their own well-being. Men were left with the choice to either, in the words of Amerix, ‘change’ by embracing his anti-feminist ideology and masculinizing practices, or ‘perish’ if they refused to stop focusing on what women demanded of them.
While most of this practical advice aimed at changing men’s behaviour in the real world, communication inside the Telegram channel was also governed by strict rules. Members were, for instance, only allowed to write in English, had to use perfect grammar, and were strongly discouraged from using emojis or excessive interpunctuation, such as multiple question marks, which were viewed as signs of an effeminate mind-set. Members also engaged in other ‘virtual manhood acts’ (Moloney and Love 2018), such as reacting to pictures showing women wearing revealing clothes by calling them out as ‘sluts’ or ‘prostitutes’. It was also common for Amerix to post private messages that men had sent him requesting his advice. Rather than directly reacting to these messages, Amerix asked the channel members to comment on the man’s problem and offer him advice. In an exemplary case, for instance, Amerix had posted a private message from a young man who was suffering from erectile dysfunction. The channel members were asked to intervene by ‘list[ing] the 5 important things this soyboy should do before I tell him what to do to overcome ED’. The advice given included, among many other things, that the young man should start ‘to write like a man’, ‘avoid unnecessary commas’, ‘retain his semen’, ‘avoid looking at naked women’, ‘read books’, ‘eat meat and eggs’, ‘cleanse his chaotic soul’, and ‘quit his dependence on parents’. Reacting to posts by Amerix in ways that proved they had understood the basics of the red pill ideology gave channel members immediate gratification. The fact that they monitored each other furthermore created an almost cult-like atmosphere of reciprocal control and communal shaming, which helped to bring forth a tight-knit virtual group where men who voiced different opinions or showed sympathy with feminism were banned and their comments deleted by their strong leader.
Highly relevant for migrant men’s experience of pressure, Amerix also advised his followers not to marry or impregnate a woman before they were economically stable and repeatedly warned them not to engage in get-rich-quick schemes. By reassuring them that their economic and romantic prime time – the peak of what proponents of the red pill ideology would call their ‘sexual market value’ – lay in their mid- or late-thirties and that they just had to follow his daily advice and work hard, he was able to reduce young men’s economic and romantic pressure. Comparable to the No Mercy Gym members’ extended temporality of delayed physical success, Amerix advised men to accept that it would take time to transform from a ‘beta’ to an ‘alpha’ male. Instead of pretending to be economically successful in order to have sex with women who would only be disappointed by their lack of spending power later on, young men like the unemployed ja-pap Mark should focus on themselves and build strong and lasting bonds with each other. They should, as Amerix had once condensed his advice, ‘follow goals, not girls’.
As one among many ‘reinvigorated political patriarchs’ (Mellström 2017: 1) active in the global manosphere, Amerix managed to successfully incarnate several archetypical male roles at the same time. Described as someone who ‘speaks with a messianic voice from the background’ by one of my male interlocutors, Amerix presented himself as a knowledgeable healthcare professional, a fitness instructor, a fatherly figure who cared about the well-being of young men, a defender of traditional Kenyan cultures, an anti-democrat, and a staunch patriarch. This unique blend of masculine archetypes helped Amerix attract men looking for a vast variety of different things, which ranged from dietary advice to job offers that he sometimes circulated. Every follower could, in other words and in principle, pick whatever he felt was helpful and ignore the rest. By offering an ideological critique of feminism, however, Amerix paved the way for potential political action as he transformed the experience of pressure caused by the expectations of intimate others into an experience of oppression exerted by feminism as a larger societal force. Therefore, a male migrant who joined Amerix’s channel out of curiosity or because he was looking for dietary advice risked beoming ‘radicalized’ over time due to the channel’s cult-like atmosphere and the immediate gratification it offered to men who were willing to comply with Amerix’s criteria of what it means to be masculine.
His versatility made Amerix by far the most popular Kenyan masculinity consultant who was influenced by narratives and practices from the red pill movement. He was not, however, the only such consultant inspired by the red pill ideology. The next section’s interpretation of a men-only meeting on the slopes of Mount Kenya shows that not all Kenyan men following the red pill ideology had the same goals. Some of those attending the men-only meeting, for instance, used the cover of the red pill ideology to be vulnerable and to withdraw from the expectations of their intimate others in order to reassess their personal relationships with women as well as the general state of gender relations in Kenya. Though the men I met on the slopes of Mount Kenya were financially better off than most of my interlocutors in Pipeline and did not live in the overcrowded estate during the time of my fieldwork, meeting them made me aware that a lot of the frustrations that I witnessed among migrant men in Pipeline were actually shared by male Kenyans from different socio-economic backgrounds. Discussing these men’s meeting should therefore be seen as a minor diversion helping us to better understand to what degree the problems male migrants faced in Pipeline were shared by men nationwide.