This project analyzes discourse from the online forum forums.red, a hub for red pill ideology, to understand how masculine identity is shaped through financial advice, self-improvement narratives, and sexual strategy.Using a mixed-methods approach, we examined how users frame gender relations through the logic of competition, value, and market exchange.
Our findings show that the forum functions primarily as a space for masculinity guidance, encouraging men to optimize themselves in response to perceived social and sexual hierarchies. Across threads, users draw on economic metaphors like “sexual market value” and “beta provider,” blending self-help rhetoric with evolutionary psychology and neoliberal ideals such as individualism, discipline, and performance. Overall, the red pill discourse promotes a vision of masculinity rooted in market rationality, where identity, intimacy, and worth are treated as assets to be improved, ranked, and defended. This project highlights how economic reasoning shapes contemporary expressions of masculinity in online communities.
Scraping
01_1_scraping-forum-postslinks.ipynb Scrapes forum thread URLs and post links from forums.red
01_2_scraping-forum-posts-comments.ipynb Collects post content and user comments from scraped threads\
Analysis
03_bertopic_analysis.ipynb Topic modeling of forum discourse using BERTopic
04_1_classification_quant_analysis.ipynb Keyword-based classification and quantitative analysis
04_2_classifier_validation.ipynb Validation and evaluation of classification results
Results
manosphere-final-presentation.pdf Presentation summarizing methods and findings
- Netography
- Discourse Analysis
- Topic Modeling
- Keyword Classification