While we're distracted by young boys being 'red pilled', we're missing who else it's happening to.

For years now, the "Red Pill" phenomenon has been making the rounds in men's rights forums and incel communities.

Now, thanks to Netflix's hit series Adolescence and a looming federal election, its existence has been thrust out of the shadowy corners of the internet and into more mainstream public discussion.

But how is the "Red Pill" phenomenon really changing our society, and is it possible that we've forgotten a different cohort of young people who can fall victim to such an ideology?

Watch: Adolescence trailer on Netflix. Post continues after video.

What is the "Red Pill" phenomenon?

The "Red Pill" phenomenon rejects feminism and pushes traditional gender roles, blaming women for men's struggles.

The "Red Pill" concept was co-opted from the 1999 film The Matrix, which showcased a choice between living life in blissful ignorance (the blue pill), or taking another path, confronting the harsh, unsettling truths of the world (the red pill).

The alt-right men that form part of the 'manosphere' use the term to describe an 'awakening' from what they perceive as a world biased against men.

In this way, to follow "Red Pill" ideology is to adopt a misogynistic and anti-feminist worldview, where men are seen as victims of feminism and political correctness.

The hit TV series Adolescence cast a much-needed spotlight on the young boys falling down the alt-right pipeline, showcasing a 13-year-old boy who is so convinced that he is unworthy, that he commits a heinous crime.

But, it's easy to forget that young girls are being pulled into similar extremist ideologies. Though, through entirely different pathways.

"We need to be very careful, cognisant and critical of trends that can lead to the alt-right pipeline," said journalist Jess Britvich on TikTok.

"Because while these things aren't inherently conservative or, dare I say, even fascist, sometimes they can be the starting point for a very slippery slope."

For young girls, online gateways to extremism often masquerade as self-improvement, wellness, and divine femininity. Here's how.

Wellness and fitness.

Wellness. It's certainly become a buzzword in recent years. It seems that every week, there is a new way for women to embrace "clean beauty" and "clean eating".

In itself, opting for more organic food or natural skincare ingredients is not insidious. But there is a threat of falling too deep into the wellness algorithm.

"You can quickly slide down the slope to the alt-right by engaging in content around distrust in regulatory bodies, Anti-Vax rhetoric, conspiracies around Big Pharma," said Britvich.

This crossover between wellness culture and conspiracy thinking isn't new, but it's certainly ramped up thanks to social media platforms like TikTok.

14 years ago, Charlotte Ward and David Voas coined the term "conspirituality" in a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion.

Ward defined it as "a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fuelled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews".

In other words, when people start to lose trust in mainstream institutions, they turn to alternative beliefs that mix wellness, mysticism, and political paranoia.

As explained in The Guardian, "[Conspirituality] describes the sticky intersection of two worlds: the world of yoga and juice cleanses with that of New Age thinking and online theories about secret groups".

Apart from conspiracies, fitness content aimed at women can quickly move from empowering messages about strength and health, to moral judgements about body types.

"Skinny talk and diet culture start as fitness routines and feeling your best," said Britvich. "It's a slippery slope to assigning moral superiority to thinness, which then can slide pretty quickly into eugenics."

In some cases, fitness culture equates thinness with discipline and worth, and frames any deviation as weakness or failure. At its extreme, this thinking veers into eugenics, the discredited ideology that certain physical traits make people inherently superior to others.

For young girls, who are particularly impressionable, falling too deep into the wellness and fitness algorithm can blur the line between self-care and scepticism toward science, while also pushing extreme ideas about hyper-individualism and physical "perfection".

Trad-Wife culture.

Since Ballerina Farm, the "Trad-Wife" movement — short for 'traditional wife' — has exploded online. Trad-Wives believe in traditional gender roles in marriage, with women monopolising the homemaking role.

While there's nothing wrong with choosing a domestic life, what starts as aspirational cottage-core content can gradually introduce more extreme ideas.

"[It] can quickly slide into a conversation about promoting very rigid gender norms, anti-feminism and ideologies that contribute to Christian Nationalism and White Supremacy," said Britvitch.

While Trad-Wives can fall on both ends of the political spectrum, according to UK-based extremism researcher Julia Ebner, as many as 30,000 Trad-Wives aligned with far-right ideologies were part of a Reddit group called Red Pill Women, claiming to be "awakened" to "male subjugation by feminism".

Ebner suggests that "the search for love is what radicalises most Trad-Wives", meaning they adopt the beliefs of men's rights activists who want "a return to traditional power roles and exaggerated notions of masculinity and femininity".

The Trad-Wife aesthetic (think prairie dresses, home-schooling, and reverence for "traditional" family life) romanticises a past where Christian values were supposedly at the centre of society, ignoring much of the systemic oppression that came with it.

Many influencers in this space quote scripture to justify why women should remain homemakers as part of a divine, "God-given" order, where men lead and women submit.

Extreme Trad-Wife content can reinforce Christian Nationalist goals, like opposition to reproductive rights and the LGBTQ+ community. It also suggests that modern society is corrupt, filled with excessive consumerism and casual sex.

At its most innocent, Trad-Wife content offers an escape from the pressures of modern hustle culture, a sense of stability, or even just nostalgia for a slower, simpler life. But beneath the soft-focus Instagram posts and vintage dresses, there is a risk that young girls can fall into an extremist rabbit-hole.

Homesteading and Homeschooling.

There's something undeniably appealing about the self-sufficiency movement, growing your own food, teaching your kids at home, disconnecting from the chaos of modern life.

But when the homesteading aesthetic collides with messaging about "taking back control" from corrupt institutions, the idea of "self-sufficiency" stops being about fresh eggs and homegrown tomatoes, and starts being about rejecting anything remotely mainstream.

"While gardening, being closer to our food sources and taking a hands-on role in your child's education is great, it can quickly lead to mistrust in institutions overall, a mistrust and public schooling, said Britvich.

"[This] can lead to classism, racism. I feel this is extra important because of the attacks on the Department of Education right now, this problem is just gonna get worse."

And that brings us to… Trump's executive order.

On March 20, 2025, the President of the United States signed an executive order aimed at closing the Department of Education.

The order instructs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to, "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities."

If this actually happens, America is looking at losing $100 billion in federal school funding, potentially eliminating 180,000 teaching positions (affecting 2.8 million students in low-income communities), weakening civil rights protections for students, and disrupting federal student loan programs.

While this would require congressional approval and faces legal challenges, the mere attempt empowers those pushing anti-institutional messages.

For people already questioning the system, moves like this fuel the fire, making it even easier to buy into the idea that institutions like schools can't be trusted.

Recognising the pipeline.

On the surface, wellness content, Trad-Wives, and homesteading content are all a bit of fun. But, as we know, the algorithm is sneaky, and for young girls who might not have the media literacy to spot the shift, it's way too easy to slide from casual scrolling into something radical.

"Once the algorithm kind of attaches on to you, it's slowly going to feed you more and more intense and more and more extremist rhetoric and ideology. It is imperative we educate young women around this," said Britvich.

While Netflix's Adolescence has us all watching out for the warning signs of young men becoming radicalised, we need to recognise the unique ways young women are being targeted.

The aesthetic is prettier, the messaging more subtle, but the result can be just as extreme.

Feature Image: TikTok/@jessbritvich