Culture

RFH On The Manosphere, Semi-Ironic Radical Feminism, and Being Love-Pilled

Her presence marks the end of a simplistic anti-feminist era and the beginning of a more complex, fractured one.

By Jaimee Marshall23 min read
Radfem Hitler

Some of our readers less plugged into online discourse may be perplexed why someone named Radfem Hitler would be of interest to an audience like the one Evie has cultivated. Our audience largely consists of traditional conservative women who reject feminism and want to reclaim their femininity. However, I hope that in engaging with this conversation, you’ll understand why her influence and voice as a former right-wing trad wife turned disillusioned “radfem” is of significant interest.

RFH resonates with right-wing women who have become more conscious of their place in a space increasingly dominated by resentful, misogynistic actors—figures who, ironically, undermine the very foundation of conservative thought, which once held that men and women are different but uniquely valuable.

Jaimee Marshall: You’re a very influential poster on X. I consider your tweets a mixed bag of incisive criticisms of toxicity in the manosphere and red pill communities, as well as tongue-in-cheek satirical tweets that hold up a mirror to those communities and expose their absurdity. They’re always really funny, biting observations of the cultural zeitgeist. Before we get into anything, just so I don’t get in trouble here because I’m already on thin ice for interviewing a self-identified radical feminist and X’s public enemy number one, can you give our readers a little background on why you go by the name RFH, which stands for Radfem Hitler?

RadFemHitler: I’ve been around the internet for a minute, politically. I don’t know if you guys were super familiar with the kind of anti-SJW days and, I guess, what developed into the online right-wing. It used to be a really popular thing back then to call feminists “feminazis,” kind of like how people call someone a “grammar Nazi,” It’s just adding “Nazi” onto something when someone’s militant about something. It comes from that. I just thought it was funny. 

Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it goes over their heads a bit, and they think it’s very literal, but it’s just meant to make fun of that term. I’m just kind of calling myself militant.

She doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the kernels of truth at the heart of her most provocative posts are never more obvious than in the outrage they provoke.

JM: Some people think that you’re a feminist libtard. Others think you’re a right-wing fascist. You’re kind of hard to pin down ideologically. Can you explain the evolution of your arc socially and politically?

RFH: I guess why it’s a bit hard to pin down is because I started as a libertarian, and they’re their own tribe. I don’t know if you’ve read Slate Star Codex, but he talks about these tribes—red tribe, blue tribe, and a kind of gray tribe—these weird, in-the-middle, nebulous sort of people, like a lot of TPOT (This Part of Twitter) tech people, libertarians, or former libertarians. So, I started out in that camp of people, which already puts you in a strange spot where a lot of ordinary people don’t really know what that is. 

Then I became a Trumper, I guess, in 2016. Well, 2015. I was a very early Trump supporter, pretty much right after he announced. Since then, I’ve adopted more positions that liberals agree with, but I’m also not a liberal. A lot of liberals call me a white nationalist, racist, right-wing chud, but then right-wingers call me a total libtard. 

So, in some ways, I’ve moved toward the middle, “centrism,” but not in the sense that all my positions are just sandwiched right in the middle of the right-wing and left-wing positions. It’s that my beliefs are just kind of a mix. Some things I agree with the right on, and some things I am more left-leaning on. In that way, there is this sort of spiritual libertarianism about it. But I’m also not a libertarian anymore. I don’t really identify with a political group. It’s hard to explain succinctly, but at the end of the day, I’m just doing my own thing.

JM: A radical centrist (I say, jokingly).

RFH: (Laughing) Yeah, radical centrist, I guess.

JM: I’ve listened to some of your other interviews and heard you talk about your evolution from growing up in a conservative family to getting into libertarianism and the MAGA Trumpian space. At some point, it’s clear you became disillusioned with the status of women in the right-wing sphere. Was there a specific incident that made you reevaluate your views on the social aspects of right-wing politics?

RFH: A lot of people want there to be a single inciting incident, but it really was this slow slide into it because I had this idealized ‘trad’ view of things. I did grow up quite Christian, very Midwest—there was a sort of naïveté to it. It was kind of idealized. But as the right became more associated with the manosphere and Red Pill stuff and really leaned into that, I started getting more and more irritated every passing month. I was getting more disillusioned, more irritated.

I remember one time I got into this argument with these guys. One of them had knocked up a woman in Charlottesville [presumably at the Unite the Right rally], and everyone was calling her a whore, but no one seemed to have a problem with his behavior in the situation. He was married with a bunch of kids, but somehow, it was all on her. I kept saying, “It takes two people to create a baby; she didn’t just get pregnant on her own. It’s not some Virgin Mary situation.” But people wanted to act like it was, like somehow he’s not responsible for ejaculating in this woman while having this whole family at home. 

That still sticks with me. I would say that was when things really started to turn in my mind. That really bothered me because there was so much talk about how women don’t have agency and women don’t take accountability. And I’m like, "What do you think you’re doing right now? You think men don’t have agency over their own sexual desires and impulses, and you don’t think that men are accountable for what they do with their dick." It was just so mind-boggling to me. 

I was this kind of naive, Midwestern autist [I don’t think she means this in its most literal sense, fyi] in many ways, and I just thought, “How could you think that if you think men have agency and women don’t? How can you actually see it that way?” That doesn’t make sense. From there, the cogs started to turn a bit. It was little chips in the armor with the beliefs that I had, and then there were other incidents along the way. Then, I eventually did get married, and I had this very traditional, like ‘trad’ marriage. 

I didn’t work, and I was going to stay at home. He was going to make the money and all this stuff. It devolved into just him and his family absolutely terrorizing me, unfortunately. I always say this, so people always want to pin it on my marriage being bad, but that’s the thing: I could accept that I just had a bad situation with this one bad actor, right? That happens. Sometimes you just encounter a really bad actor, but I realized in the process of the marriage ending and trying to get help from the situation that the whole system was actually set up to help him do this and help him be terrible.

No one wanted to hold him accountable for any of his behavior. No one really saw a problem with it. In fact, I was blamed just for “choosing” him, for “picking” him repeatedly. It’s like, well, you know, we met when I was about 19, and I did all the things you said I was supposed to do, so why are you blaming me for the fact that he ended up being crazy? So, it wasn’t just that I had a bad marriage. Pretty much everyone around him, around me, it was all set up to help him or just not hold him accountable. That’s when I realized that a lot of the things that feminists were talking about actually did make a lot of sense. There was a systemic issue and a fundamental problem with people’s beliefs around men and women and marriage.

JM: So it exposed this cognitive dissonance with this movement you were a part of and what you were seeing in your day-to-day life.

RFH: Yeah, and I wasn’t the only one experiencing this. I was in these groups with other “trad” women—women who were like-minded and right-wing. Slowly, over the course of being in this group for a couple of years, it just seemed that everyone had the exact same story whenever they got married; it just devolved into abuse—emotional abuse, often physical abuse, and financial abuse. It was the same story over and over and over again. It was so hard to ignore after that point. 

JM: I want to ask you about the evolution of the anti-feminist space that I think has changed a lot since the 2016-era Trumpian culture wars, which I was very much a part of as well. Back then, the discourse was more focused on debunking feminist myths. You had Milo Yiannopoulos’ “feminism is cancer” shtick, Lauren Southern crashing Slut Walks, and endless videos about the wage gap or rape culture statistics and things that seemed pretty easily disprovable or trivial things that feminists made mountains out of molehills out of (like manspreading or mansplaining). 

But today, the manosphere has completely shifted the conversation and seems to have poisoned gender discourse with resentment-driven, delusional pseudo-masculinity, so how do you think we got to a point where so many of the original anti-feminist figures who helped shape that movement have now distanced themselves from these actors completely, and in an ironic twist, aligned themselves with more of these radical feminist people?

RFH: Yeah, well, I think most of the people who have done that are pretty much all women, and I think the answer is quite simple. I think it’s just that they spent too much time around these guys or ended up dating one or a couple of these guys, and the same thing kept f***ing happening. Every relationship was just a total disaster, or they kept getting bullied right out of the movement. No matter how much they contributed, how loyal they were, or how much they simped for men, it just didn’t seem to matter. No amount of adulating yourself would please them; they would come after you and just harass you, like the way Lauren Southern had so many people constantly harassing her. 

I think she was one of the most public symbols of this happening just because she had one of the biggest followings at the time as a girl in this space, probably the biggest. They really, really liked her at first, and then slowly, they just kept turning on her. No matter how much she supported their beliefs. It’s so funny because there was a lot of resentment talk that they complain that liberals do in regards to white people. It sounds so similar, and I never get how they don’t hear it. I don’t understand how they don’t hear themselves when they’re saying, “Oh, Lauren doesn’t deserve to have the following she has because she only gets this following because she’s a woman, and there are men who say the same thing, but better, and they don’t have the same following.” That sounds very lib-tarded of you, actually.

JM: Absolutely. I’ve noticed a lot of women who have long rejected the feminist label and have attacked feminist ideology have had that feminist moniker thrown back at them, often by right-wing men as a way to shut down any of their points, and it’s a way of saying, "You've been found out. You're just like the liberal feminists you profess to condemn.” It is almost like when liberals throw around Uncle Tom accusations at black conservatives to shut down any valid criticisms by attacking their character (or de-legitimizing white creators by accusing them of white privilege), and I was wondering if it’s creating this cognitive dissonance in these women and actually pushing them towards feminism, ironically.

RFH: Yeah, it is, because when you can’t win with these guys at all, and the views become so warped, so extreme, at some point, it’s just so irrational for you as a woman to keep tolerating it because at some point they will turn on you. I think a lot of women get turned on by these guys at some point, and they have this come-to-Jesus moment where it’s like, “Oh, I guess we weren’t all just brothers and sisters together, fighting the liberals, but ultimately loyal to each other. You’re not involved in the brotherhood, girl. You’ll never be a part of it."

At some point, it’s the most rational choice, but some women will hold out, and that’s why a lot of the female-hating women have become even nastier, it seems, because you have to be on a whole other level. Before, you could say things like, “The wage gap is fake, you guys,” and it is kind of, but I think it’s a little more complicated than just saying it’s not the same hours worked for pay or whatever, but you could say basic facts that are true without really condemning women. Now, like this tweet that went around yesterday, you have to tweet things like, “Women are 1000 times more evil, sinister, and calculated than men are,” so you have to say things that are the complete opposite of the truth.

JM: Alex Kaschuta had this tweet a few months ago that said, “The tradfem horseshoe is based on the acceptance of one fact that liberal feminism cannot face: men are different and dangerous. The difference between trad and radfem is simply strategy. One appeases, one defects.” Do you think that’s essentially the crux of this?

RFH: Oh, yeah. And I’ve tweeted some very similar thoughts on this. There absolutely is a horseshoe. It’s really easy to jump from trad fem to rad fem, more so than it is like lib fem. If you were someone who always rejected liberal feminism, and I basically always did, because the sex-positive “go be a slut” stuff always really bothered me, I never really identified with that. I rejected it pretty quickly, but I rejected it in part because I very much had a view that men and women were different and that a lot of male sexuality is quite evil. So, I never wanted to participate and sleep around with a bunch of guys or tell women to do that because male sexuality is quite gross in many ways when it’s not accompanied by love. It’s quite destructive, so you shouldn’t be doing that to yourself. 

It’s really easy, then, to have a traditional view with that opinion, but it’s also really easy to have a radical feminist view with that opinion of male sexuality. Really, the only difference is that the trad wife tries to appease the man to get him to love her and avoid being put in the position of “whore,” while the radical feminist is the black pill version that’s like, “you’re never going to get him to see you as 'not a whore.'” You should opt out of doing that, and I’m not fully a radfem in that way. I have a boyfriend. I think you can find an exception, and I am an idealist. I really do believe in romantic love; I just think it’s quite rare to really find it. So, I’m kind of in the middle even of being trad fem or rad fem, but yeah, the horseshoe there, it’s very, very real.

JM: So you are love-pilled, then. 

RFH: Oh, I’m very love-pilled, and I don’t know why people don’t get that. You know why? It’s because whenever I tweet something nice, it never gets nearly the same amount of attention, so people can say they hate how my tweets are mean and all that shit. It’s like, guys, you like the mean stuff.

JM: That’s so true. I was going to ask what you have to say to people who think that you are the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with this divisive gender war content. Do you think you play a role or are just having fun?

RFH: I think I’m “having fun.” That’s what I’m on X to do. I think ever since I was a child, I loved arguing with people. It really is fun to me, and some people get a bunch of cortisol and adrenaline, and they get scared, or it’s really uncomfortable, and they don’t like it. For me, it’s almost soothing. I love arguing. I really, really do. So, I think people think I’m mentally ill in a totally different way than I am. It’s not that I’m angry and miserable all the time. I actually really like my life. I’ve liked it for several years now, since I’ve gotten divorced.

JM: You’re just comfortably contrarian.

RFH: Yes, but I’m just mentally ill in a way that I like to argue with people, and it's soothing. I do think I’m “just having fun,” and I also don’t think I invented the division between men and women. I think that’s already been there and I’m just pointing out what they’re already saying.

JM: Would you say you have a standout inflammatory tweet, whether intentional or not, that you think definitively sent people into a collective meltdown in your mentions?

RFH: Oh god, there’s actually so many of those, but, honestly, the one that’s pinned on my profile is pinned there for a reason. That really pissed people off. It’s about men not being ensouled. That’s a really good one. To me, it’s one of my faves, but I’ve had a lot on there that have produced a lot of hatred. Often, it comes down to stuff about dating, in particular. If you touch on the subject of dating, that really gets people the most upset, and I think it’s because so many people are not having the experiences they want to have out in the dating market.

JM: What do you think are the most regressive or self-sabotaging talking points that are being parroted right now in the red pill and trad spaces that are actively harming women, in your opinion?

RFH: I would say the whole narrative around divorce and family court is so completely backward and completely wrong and just not factual whatsoever, and it is really hurting women because when these trad women get married, and then they end up divorced because the husband’s like literally beating them, they think that they’re going to have such an easy time getting custody of the kids because that’s what they’ve been told. It’s just not like that at all. If he wants to fight you on it, it’s going to be very, very difficult, even if he’s an abuser. 

In fact, statistically, if you even bring up the fact that he is an abuser, you’re more likely to lose custody of your children. Family court doesn’t work like a normal court like criminal law, and it really just comes down to the discretion of this judge. Many of them are old men, and when they see a woman who’s reporting abuse, their thought is, “Oh, you’re mentally ill because of the abuse”, if they even believe that the abuse is real. They either think that you’re making it up or if they believe you, they think, "well, you’re mentally ill due to the abuse,” or the man, although an abuser to you, has never hurt the kids. So, they almost think he’s better fit to raise the children than the battered woman who’s traumatized. 

So, the divorce and custody stuff is really insidious. I try so hard to debunk this stuff, and it’s crazy that no matter how many times you show them the facts, like actual studies, show actual statistics, they will just ignore it. They will literally stick their fingers in their ears and go, “la, la, la, la.” They don’t care. They need to hold on to this idea that dads are oppressed by the family court system so, so, so badly because they need to hold onto this idea that men are oppressed by women when they aren’t. Of course, most women have custody. I don’t understand how people who are traditional feel that the traditional role of the woman is to take care of the child, then act shocked that, more often than not, the mom has the primary custody. Well, of course, because dads don’t really take care of the kids as much as moms do. So, most of the time, dad’s like, “Yeah, you should continue taking care of the kids. I don’t really want to do that.”

JM: Yeah, and that comes back to those sex differences that they love to talk about, but not when it’s inconvenient for their narrative. Red pillers constantly emphasize sex differences when it benefits men, like justifying male cheating or high body counts as biologically natural. But when sex differences provide context for certain things they’re opposing as a supposed male disadvantage, suddenly, the differences themselves are the issue. Why is it that sex differences are only acknowledged when they excuse male behavior but dismissed when they explain male struggles? Do you think it’s just willful blindness?

RFH: I think it’s just basic cognitive dissonance and some of them are smart enough to realize what they’re doing, but they’re also not going to be honest about it. They have an agenda, and the agenda is that they want the maximum benefit for men and for women to have the least amount. The facts don’t really matter in that case, and some of them are just genuinely stupid, so it just depends on who you’re dealing with, but a lot of the bigger accounts with bigger followings in this space, I think they know that they’re lying. 

I always get so stuck on this topic in particular, but whenever they bring up, for example, boys struggling in school, it just really sets my teeth on edge because, again, they all of the sudden sound like the biggest libtards in the world and they’re saying, “well, there’s like this systemic bias against boys in school and the teachers are oppressing the little boys, and that’s why boys can’t compete with the girls.” Suddenly, gender differences aren’t real; it’s just bias that’s stopping boys from succeeding, when, in actuality, it’s just that, in the past, if you were on that left side of the bell curve for IQ, and there are more men on that far left side, you weren’t going to be in school, because you’re really not cut out for it and probably shouldn’t be there. Now, they’re in school and not doing well, so that’s what happens.

JM: A lot of women in dissident rights circles are drawn to the trad wife ideal without realizing that the conditions that made traditional marriages functional in the past no longer really exist. Without those cultural guardrails like family vetting, religious duty, and a real sense of masculine responsibility, this dynamic seems to disproportionately attract Machiavellian, controlling, abusive, and outright dangerous men to these (online) spaces. Do you think women in these spaces understand the risks they’re taking, or are they walking into a trap without realizing it? Because these spaces attract certain personalities that women should be on guard and looking out for.

RFH: No, I don’t think they know at all. I think there really is a total naïveté and kind of ignorance of, like you said, all the structures that were set up in there in the past to help these things work. They completely don’t exist anymore, especially if you are a middle-class, white American growing up without any religious attachments, any sense of community, or extended family. White, middle-class Americans are very isolated people, and to have a very traditional DOM-Submissive kind of vibe to your marriage when you’re really going to be entirely alone in your home with no family around, and they probably live in a whole other state, that’s just a recipe for very dark triad men to come in and pull you away from your whole family and your friends and then just f*** up your life. They don’t realize that when they sign up for this, and you can tell. A lot of very inexperienced young women are tweeting and making these posts.

JM: I definitely get that naïveté vibe and sense that it is exploited, unfortunately. In a similar vein, we had a number of years where we had the MeToo movement. There was a widespread push to “believe all women,” which I found to be a toxic set of beliefs where we just kind of valorized women as being inherently honest with no incentive to lie or manipulate in any circumstance ever. However, now that the “manosphere” is gaining more cultural influence, I’m seeing the pendulum swing to the opposite extreme. I’m seeing so many men in the right-wing sphere assuming that men are always the victims and women are always deceitful, even when there is substantial evidence to the contrary, like, say, a video that paints a picture of a potentially abusive dynamic. Why do you think these spaces struggle to recognize nuance and default to such black-and-white thinking?

RFH: I think they have a personality disorder, to be honest. Honestly, and I’ve tweeted about this before, I think we live in an epidemic of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury). People think that TBI or CTE comes as a result of being rocked really hard or concussed multiple times, but—and this comes from me getting into “Peaty” stuff, like Ray Peat—a lot of personality disorders essentially induce a sort of brain injury. Really black-and-white thinking like that is a brain injury. It’s essentially like your brain metabolism, and your brain’s access to energy is malfunctioning from some sort of trauma from growing up in a certain way where that’s been completely excised from you. Sometimes, it’s just a result of literally being on the internet too much on really extreme corners, and that’s like all you’re seeing; you’re just in an echo chamber for too long. 

It really can induce this sort of weird brain injury where you genuinely can’t see contradictions, and your thinking becomes so black and white. You don’t generally have the metabolism or energy to think about things in a nuanced manner because that really does take more energy. It takes more intentional thought to think that way, and you kind of have to pause, and you can’t come from a place of purely going off of your first reaction.

You do have to sit and think and put yourself into multiple different shoes and situations. All these things take brain energy and time. If you’re not healthy enough, you literally won’t be able to do that. This is also why you see this type of thinking commonly in people with dementia as well. It does look really similar, so I think a lot of people are effectively inducing a kind of soft dementia into themselves via their environment. I know that’s probably a very physical explanation as to why that’s occurring, but I think that’s a big part of it, and that’s why “Peating” is really important.

JM: I think we’re definitely giving ourselves brain worms, but I’m not so familiar with “peating” or Ray Peat. Can you explain what that is?

RFH: It’s like a different idea surrounding energy, bioenergetics, and metabolism. It’s sort of a broad philosophy about how the body is able to produce and access energy and how the metabolism works. The idea is that if you eat the right types of foods, you can actually create a better metabolism by supporting your thyroid health, and when your metabolism is working correctly, everything else works better. 

You become a more patient person, and you also have more energy to do things. Because you have more energy, you’re more patient; you’re kinder; you’re less reactive. Americans, in particular, have really bad metabolisms and thyroid health because our food is quite poisonous, so it’s really bad. For Americans, our food system and social media—are just a powder keg for a lot of very extremist black-and-white views. 

JM: I attribute your tweets to making even me rethink some of the brain worms I had stewing in my brain for years because I remember circa 2016, during peak anti-feminist ideology, there were these popular talking points that I adopted, some of them seemingly uncritically, now that I look back. I remember there being some super unobjectionable things, like this popular video that circulated of this girl dressed totally normal, like a T-shirt and jeans, walking down the streets of New York. Because I was so overcome by my desire to own the libs and the feminists at the time, I thought the video was extremely stupid, invalid, and whining about nothing. 

It was about this woman demonstrating that she was not doing anything to provoke anyone; she was dressed completely normal and was trying to go on about her day. Yet, she’s being relentlessly catcalled by a bunch of men as she walks down the street. That’s objectively uncomfortable and an unfortunate reality that all women face, this objectification that can border on scary and intimidating. And it’s almost mind-boggling to me that I actually said that a number of years ago, and I don’t know what was going on in my mind. I think I just thought every single feminist talking point was super trivial. 

So, that got me thinking about your crossover appeal into various online communities, even ones that, on paper, should hate you. A lot of people who interact with you come from different online communities with diverging political theories and esoteric philosophies. I come across a lot of male right-wing accounts that are very much a part of these communities and are opposed to everything you stand for and talk about, but somehow, your tweets seem to cut through that mental barrier that would usually stop people from reading further. Why do you think that is? Are you just a really incisive tweeter, and you’re harping on things people haven’t thought about before?

RFH: I think it’s maybe that there’s an understanding that they haven’t verbalized yet, but it’s something that they’ve been feeling in the pit of their stomach for a minute, and I had felt the need to put a lot of those feelings to words. When I first started tweeting, COVID was still going on. I was separated at the time, and I was trying to process a lot of my own feelings that I had been feeling for a minute and really verbalize them because I guess that’s how I’ve always processed things in the past. I really need to write because it’s how I process. 

So, I think I’m just speaking to something that they’re already kind of feeling, but they just haven’t really put the words to it just yet, and I’m just “doing that for them” in a sense, or I’m just doing it first before they’re doing it themselves, just because I have a compulsive need to do that. I think a lot of people like to harp on how much I tweet, but honestly, it is kind of a compulsion. I have thoughts and feelings that row around in my brain a lot, and they’re going 1000 miles per minute, and I feel like I need to get it out physically. The way that I do that is I write it down, and for some reason, it feels better when you tweet it into the ether. 

JM: What are your thoughts on pick-mes? What is a pick-me? Do pick-mes know they’re pick-mes, and is that accusation sometimes weaponized unfairly?

RFH: A pick-me is someone who shamelessly self-promotes, essentially. It’s basically like a whoring of sorts–a spiritual whoring. It’s just shameless self-promoting, like a type of grifting. It’s when you put other people down publicly to build yourself up a bit so that you can increase your “market value.” That’s how I would define a pick-me.

JM: Do pick-mes know they’re pick-mes? Typically, it’s characterized as vying for male attention, right?

RFH: They do. It is conscious. Women are quite conscious of their own behavior in a way that men aren’t. Frankly, I do think we’re generally more self-aware. It doesn’t mean that we are always self-aware. That’s definitely not what I’m claiming, but I do think women operate with a generally higher degree of self-awareness than men do because we literally do. Our prefrontal cortex is more active than it is in a man’s. 

We are more inward-turning creatures, so we tend to self-reflect more than men. Men are more outward—doing, and women are more inward—thinking. So, when women are engaging in pick-meism, they’re very explicitly aware of what they’re doing. They know they’re putting down other women. They know that they are propping themselves up, and they know that they are doing both of those things in service of increasing their access to male attention and validation. 

JM: That’s interesting that you think that because I think there is a brand of very shameless pick-meism that, for sure, is like that, but I also think that there is a less brazen version of pick-meism that’s more imbued in their subconscious, in ways that aren’t necessarily coming up on the conscious self-reflection level. I think there are less nefarious forms of pick-meism that people may be doing without even knowing they’re doing it.

RFH: Yeah, and I think that’s fair, too. It is a spectrum. I think because I’m a bit older, at this age, when I see people my age doing that, I understand they know what they’re doing. But when you’re younger, especially when you’re in high school, and you’re in college, or just your early 20s, it often can be subconscious on a level because it is something that is kind of pushed into you via the culture to act that way. I guess this leads to your other question, which is, do I think it’s over-weaponized? 

I absolutely do because I think there’s a variety of pick-meism where a lot of young girls are just trying to say that they are different in this way, and maybe they don’t feel like they’ve lived up to every gender stereotype and feel like they’re failing by that kind of gender stereotype like they’re failing to live up to it. That’s not them really being a pick-me, actually. It’s almost self-deprecating, so not every instance of “I don’t like makeup” or “I don’t do X, Y, Z, girly activity” is signaling that you’re “different and therefore better.” 

Sometimes, it really is just a statement of fact. I remember this funny example. I don’t even remember having this conversation, but I met some people in Miami during Crypto Week or Bitcoin Week or something to do with that, and there were some people from X. I guess we had a conversation, and we were talking about makeup, and I was saying, “Yeah, I normally don’t like to wear it in my day-to-day life because I don’t like the feeling of having a bunch of stuff on my face, as in it’s quite over stimulating but I do like to wear it on the weekends. But I also don’t want to feel pressured to wear it every day. I don’t like that.” Then, I guess this girl immediately took that as me saying, “Oh, you’re inferior because you wear it every day.”

JM: Oh, she thought you were trying to mog her.

RFH: Yeah, she thought I was trying to mog her about it, and I didn’t even realize that’s what she thought. She said this to me months later on the internet. She was saying this in my replies, saying I was like a pick-me when we were talking about makeup, and I was like, “Oh God, no. Absolutely not.” I’m literally just saying that as a statement of fact. There’s no judgment; there’s no inherent superiority to wearing makeup or not wearing makeup. I was literally just expressing my own personal preference about it, and I wasn’t even saying that I don’t wear it at all or that I don’t like it because I do. 

JM: Yeah, it’s a delicate situation to make those comments because people always think you’re trying to humble brag or one-up them.

RFH: Yes, so we’re in this weird political climate now with other women. You have to tread carefully about saying that stuff because someone’s going to think that you’re doing pick-me shit. We’ve become a little bit too sensitive to it.

JM: There has been a lot of debate over whether there is any place for women in the right-wing space. The terminally online dissident right has naturally attracted various anonymous bad actors who have had a lot to say about how women don’t belong in the online right-wing space. Do you think it’s just the online right that is becoming an inhospitable place for women, even if they’re fighting for the same cause, or is there no place in the right-wing for women, in your opinion?

RFH: Well, unfortunately, a lot of what was the online right really is bleeding out into mainstream shit. A lot of their talking points, now you’re getting, like, Zuckerberg using their talking points, so it really has breached containment. But obviously, I would say the broader conservative space isn’t literally being like “no girls allowed,” but that sentiment is growing, and it is getting stronger.

JM: You’ve spoken about your disillusionment with liberal feminism, which seemed to push you towards Trumpian, libertarian right-wing politics. What were your biggest criticisms then, and do you still hold them today?

RFH: Like I said before, really, my biggest problem was the garish sex positivity. The “get on the pole” and “sex work is empowerment” and “you f*** a bunch of dudes and you’re empowered.” Everything’s empowering. Every choice you make, you’re empowered, and meanwhile, the choices they’re promoting just kind of benefit men for the most part, and they’re really not great decisions for most women to make. While there are some women who can enjoy a lot of casual sex like that, I know some, a lot of women don’t, and it seemed that they were trying to convince you that you needed to be doing this, or else somehow you were, like, lame or not a feminist, or oppressing yourself in some way. 

I really feel like it was just not aligned with how a lot of women experience sexuality, and it wasn’t in line with our interests in many ways. It put a horrible taste in my mouth, and I never liked any of the sex work promotion or any of the sex positivity stuff. But I have softened on it in some ways, in that I don’t think that if you want to be a Hoe—like that’s really what you want to do—it should be a problem. Some women really are the Samanthas of the world. They’re a minority, but they exist, and I don’t feel the need to demonize anyone who is just genuinely built like that.

JM: Do you think modern parenting expectations are fundamentally at odds with a traditional lifestyle? I know that you’ve tweeted a lot about how women today spend more time with their kids than ever in recorded history and that you seem to think that they’re being driven crazy by spending too much time with their kids because they’re trying to meet impossibly high standards. As much as trads like to pay lip service to “the village,” a lot of them seem to reject any form of outside help, like daycare or babysitters, as if child rearing only really counts if the mother is actively suffering. Can you expand on your thoughts on that?

RFH: Like you said with the suffering thing because I got clowned on this again today over tweeting this, but I think it’s really obvious that to a lot of conservative men, they feel that being a mom is supposed to be a punishment and if you’re not struggling and suffering and miserable, but also have a smile on your face about it, that they’re f***ing mad. They’re f***ing mad if you’re not being pushed to your breaking point and just dripping in cortisol from having to be a mom. They really do think, “I’m putting a baby in you so that you can suffer,” because there really is this weird womb envy, and there’s this envy of how women can get sexual attention for “no effort,” right? And all the attention we get is “unearned,” “it’s unfair,” and they’re doing their libtard shit, so then they’re really resentful, and then they think, “Well, the way we get back at you is that we make you a mom, and that being a mom sucks,” according to them. 

They think it has to suck. A lot of people took that to mean—I don’t know how they took that to mean that I’m saying that motherhood is inherently a punishment. No, I’m saying that conservative men want to make it a punishment, which is why they get mad at you and act like you’re abusing your kid if you have any outside help, if you have, like, a night nurse or a nanny or anything to make the job easier for you. They have to immediately demonize and literally call it demonic and say that your child’s gonna end up, like, “gay,” “trans,” “autistic,” it’s just insane. I think we should be making more of an effort to make being a mom more easy, more enjoyable, and more chill. Parenting in America has just become like an Olympic event, and I think that’s a big part of why a lot of young people are like, “I don’t want to f***ing do that. That sounds awful,” because it kind of is. It looks terrible from the outside.

JM: It definitely plays a sizable role.

RFH: Yeah, they’re really doing everything they can to make it quite miserable, and I think a lot of parenting in other countries is pretty chill. I think in the past, and I’m not saying we should go all the way back to the past, where it’s basically benign neglect, not what I’m saying, but this level of high-investment parenting just never existed before. It’s really just run off the rails. It’s too much. Motherhood shouldn’t be about this performative, weird suffering. It should mostly be an enjoyable experience.

JM: I’ve noticed another theme in your tweets—this idea that we all need to forgive our mother. It seems to be, correct me if I’m wrong, kind of a Jesse Lee Peterson idea; he says that a lot. Were you influenced by him at all with that? Why do we need to forgive our mother?

RFH: He does say that a lot. I used to watch a lot of Jesse Lee Peterson. I used to watch all these people and look, I obviously don’t agree with him a lot now, but honestly, a lot of his interviews with people were some of the most genius things I’ve ever seen because he really took advantage of the fact that a lot of people, when they’re interacting with this old southern black guy, are going to assume he’s really stupid. He just acts really stupid and then just keeps asking you questions, and the person gets so flustered and tied up that they don’t know what to do with themselves. I always called him black Socrates. He was so f***ing funny.  He would just Socratic method the f*** out of you, but he was just acting stupid. So, he was really funny. 

It is kind of influenced by him in a way because that was always his thing, to forgive your mom. But it also just happens to be true. We all need to forgive our mother, and for the past couple of years, that’s been the biggest thing that I had to do was forgive my own mom. I actually did finally reach that point, and not just cognitively, where I’m like, “Yeah, I forgive my mom,” but then when you’re in her presence, you’re back to feeling like you’re 15 again. I actually don’t feel that way anymore around her. I actually did forgive her and get over everything; it is the best, most liberating feeling in the world. Everyone needs to forgive their mom because your mom probably had to do everything, and it’s her first time on Earth as well, and it was hard for her, and she’s also just an individual—a person just like you. If you don’t want to continue being miserable your whole life and hating life, you need to forgive your mom. It’s one of the most important things that you can do for yourself spiritually.

JM: So, do you think our main problems right now are downstream of a neurosis of mommy issues?

RFH: I do think a lot of it does come from mommy issues and this weird trauma that we all have from having a lot of female authority in our lives from a young age. You go from your mom to school, where they’re all women, and when you’re a kid, everyone who’s telling you to do this, do that, or you can’t have this or that, is a woman. I think it makes people really allergic and angry to female authority because no matter what, if a woman speaks in a tone they don’t like telling them, “Don’t do this,” they’re immediately taken back to this memory of being like five years old and their mom saying you can’t have Gushers for dinner, and they’re just losing their shit. That’s why I think we need more dads taking care of young kids and more men in positions of authority over young children. So, I think the excess of female authority during your most formative years does create this resentment of women.

JM: How do you think we heal the growing political and social divide between men and women? It feels like we’re losing the ability to connect or understand each other.

RFH: I’m not a person who’s like, “This is what we need to do to fix x.” I have a much more fatalistic and longer form view of the world, the future, its cycles, and all this. I feel that this is just going to have to run the course the way it does, and I don’t think there’s any specific intervention we can take to fix the overall issue. It’s just going to have to play out in the way that it does. It’s just inevitable historically and materially; this is just what’s going to happen. At the end of the day, you can’t control that, but you can control your relationships with people in your own life, and that’s what you should focus on. 

That’s why I think a lot of my advice is surrounding things like how to pick a man who isn’t going to have this gender divide with you. It’s more so about finding the right relationship that’s not going to create these issues and those problems and these bad feelings and arguments all the time because that’s really what you can focus on, your own personal relationships. Overall, there isn’t going to be some great fix that we all figure out. It’s just going to have to run its course. So, you have to focus on your own life and find a good man if what you want is a partner and children.

JM: How important do you think labels are in gender discourse? Is it kind of a distraction, or is it useful in terms of how people self-identify? Whether as feminist, rad fem, anti-feminist red pill, trad, these words all evoke specific ideological connotations, but there’s often overlap, and people don’t necessarily internalize an entire ideology wholesale. So does it really matter if, say, someone agrees with the feminists on most things but rejects the label or if someone aligns with red pill ideas but doesn’t identify with the term? How big of a deal do you think that is? 

RFH: Oh yeah, I’m not a label person at all. My name is mostly a joke, and that’s why I just kind of use the acronym (RFH) now, anyway. I don’t really care what people purport to identify as. I think your internal character and how you actually comport yourself is what matters. People get into labels because they get this high off of identifying with something, and it makes them feel special. They feel like they’re a part of this tribe. I used to do that too, but as I’ve gotten older, I just think that’s stupid and it’s a trap. Identity can be such a trap, so no, there are a lot of people that I’m personally friends with who don’t call themselves feminists, and there are probably people who claim to be feminists, but I find myself thinking, you’re very, very annoying, and I don’t think you actually know what that word means. The labels themselves aren’t the important part.

RFH posting is an artform. She’s a reaction, a mirror, and a reckoning.

JM: A bunch of people who don’t like you on X recently tried to falsely attribute a shooter’s manifesto to you, the Wisconsin shooter, Natalie “Samantha” Rupnow. Would you like to set the record straight on that? I know you deactivated because you were getting a ton of hate on X.

RFH: [I've edited down this answer because RFH had some strong words about the people who allegedly spread the rumor, making claims about their own alleged misconduct and motivations. As these are claims that I can’t independently verify, I’ve chosen to omit them here.]

Yeah. I mean, it’s completely fake; the screenshot’s fake. The full manifesto (credit for uncovering this manifesto goes to independent journalist Anna Slatz) was posted and it doesn’t mention me at all. It mentions a bunch of white nationalist males that shot up some schools in Europe. So, it had literally nothing to do with me. Some guy made it up. 

The only reason I deactivated is because I’ve been online long enough to know that truth doesn’t matter when a rumor that salacious is going like wildfire. It’s not going to matter what the truth is, so I knew nothing I was going to say was going to convince anyone who wanted to be convinced of this fact, so I knew the best course of action was just to immediately deactivate and come back later when I felt comfortable to do so. So that’s what I did.

JM: Do you have any advice to offer to women on how to avoid falling into these weird pits of the internet that can ruin your life or do you have anything to say to people who completely misunderstand your purpose as a figure online?

RFH: I’d tell the right-wing women who follow me and are kind of curious but not sure of me to read “Right Wing Women” by Andrea Dworkin. I’ve talked about this book before, but it really is so on the nose, and it’s crazy because she wrote it in the 70s, and it’s crazy how true it still is today. I remember when I was becoming very disillusioned with the right and how they treated women and asked myself why I was so involved in this, "why would I put up with this kind of treatment for all these years?" That book completely explains our psychology and our reasoning for why this happened and why we have the politics that we have. So, it’s a really great book; it really breaks it down. She will forever be so on the nose and poignant—very, very intelligent woman. I would really recommend that women read that. It’s a great book, and it is still so relevant, probably even more so today.

You can subscribe to RFH’s Substack and follow her on X, where she has carved out a space for herself as one of the most influential voices in the gender discourse space. Love her or hate her, her impact as a poster is undeniable. The ratio of sincerity to tongue-in-cheek satire in her tweets can be difficult to discern, but it’s also a good litmus test for whether you really “get” RFH or her commentary. She doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the kernels of truth at the heart of her most provocative posts are never more obvious than in the outrage they provoke. RFH posting is an artform. She’s a reaction, a mirror, and a reckoning.