I have been watching Keys to the VIP (it's a great show by the way, you should watch it), and I have observed something interesting. On IMDB the show has almost only either 1 ratings or 10 ratings, and the show has many, many reviews full of pure, unadulterated hate towards the show.

I have never seen something like this, there appears to be a fairly large group of people who react extremely negatively to the show. In almost all of such reviews there are no rational arguments against the show, it's just pure hate.

So I wondered why certain people react so strongly to the show. It's not even something that can be explained by the culture war - many of these reviews are from years just after the show has been released, in fact the vast majority of these negative reviews are from around 2006-2012, and it's more more recent reviews that are more appreciative of the show and have more nuanced takes.

I have some ideas as to what could explain such a negative reaction.

I.

First, I think game in general is a taboo topic, it concerns things that are not supposed to be said and are not supposed to be noticed. Women don't like "nice guys", women like assholes (but only the right ones), psychopaths are successful with women, lying can help you in your game, women themselves lie a lot, and there is a high chance a woman will leave you for a more "exciting" guy if she gets "bored" with you.

It's like if you started openly talking about sex in a fundamentalist Christian community. Of course sex is something that happens and it's important, but you are not supposed to openly talk about it, and if you do you will be vehemently attacked. It's not the only such modern taboo, there are examples of other things you are not supposed to notice or talk about nowadays.

II.

Second, the game also completely destroys the benevolent sexist myth that women are angelic beings who can do no wrong (basically "all women are queens"). While I doubt many people literally believe in this most extreme version of this idea, I would wager many people believe in a milder version like "women are morally better". If around 2009 such beliefs were more widespread, then that may partially explain why many people reacted much more strongly to the show back then than they do now.

I would say this is particularly important in the context of the USA, there are reasons to think Americans are particularly resistant to changing their views on "optimistic myths" they believe in:

"My own sense of the thing is that underneath the happy talk, underneath the dogged adherence to failed ideas and dead theories, underneath the shrieking and anathematizing at people like me, there is a deep and cold despair.

[...]

Yet for a moralistic, optimistic people like Americans, this despair is unbearable. It's pushed away somewhere we don't have to think about it. When someone forces us to think about it, we react with fury. That little boy in the Andersen story about the Emperor's new clothes? The ending would be more true to life if he had been lynched by a howling mob of outraged citizens."

• John Derbyshire

III.

Third, I would suspect many of the people who wrote these negative reviews are betas who feel threatened by the positive attitude towards alpha male sexuality on the show.

3 of the 4 judges are experienced PUAs, they fall into a loose, common definition of an alpha male, and while some of the contestants have no game and fail miserably, others are highly success PUAs.

My idea is this: Betas who got some success with women are afraid that one of these experienced PUAs could at any moment, effortlessly, take their girlfriend away. Or maybe even some greater beta will learn more about the game and he will take their girlfriend away. And hence they react so negatively to the show. Meanwhile alphas don't care because they are alphas and they don't feel threatened. Gammas and below don't care because they don't get pussy anyway.

Here I'm specifically using Heartiste's classification of alpha males, beta males, gamma males and below based on "how hot are the women he can attract, how strong is that attraction for him, and how many of those women find him attractive".

This is also interesting because I would say the fundamental mission of the Red Pill community is to spread the knowledge of the game around. Nowadays compared to when the show was released people are more lonely, more introverted, they marry less, have a harder time entering into relationships (even though many men say they would want to marry and have a family). So now game is needed more than it was needed back then. Without game, in the current sexual environemnt the natural alphas will get even more women, and even less will be left for betas and all the types below. Such an environment is untenable and bad for civilization. Even if one doesn't accept Red Pill ideas, he must still see this goal as laudable and worth pursuing. We can see that betas also stand to gain from learning the game, they shouldn't just reject the game when they see it in action.