SELF-HELP’S AUTHORITARIAN EDGE

We are surrounded by self-help gurus on social media, selling quick fixes to our most intimate problems. Advice about restoring “feminine energy” or “masculine power” has become especially popular, promising success in love, sex, money, and life itself. This isn’t just a casual trend. It speaks directly to the insecurities produced by the neoliberal era, where individuals are left to manage systemic problems on their own. Increasingly, this culture is taking a darker turn, echoing authoritarian ideas about power and control.

“Care deficit,” a term coined by feminist scholars, refers to a systemic shortfall of resources, time, and social bonds to sustain our well-being. It shows up as exhaustion, emotional distress, and dependence on marketised and individualised remedies. The pervasiveness of self-help is a by-product of the neoliberal context, which posits well-being as an individual responsibility and self-improvement as a moral imperative.

At the same time, self-help ideology carries authoritarian tendencies that have received little attention in both scholarly and public debate. It elevates the authority of self-help “experts” who often resemble charismatic populist leaders, with their influence amplified by the emotional proximity fostered by social media platforms. Yet the connection doesn’t end there.

Self-Help From Reconciliation To Survival

Self-help industry is intertwined with neoliberalism in two ways. First, it offers a provisional fix to the care deficit by generating a new economy that capitalises on our vulnerabilities. Second, it brings neoliberal ideas into our personal lives with the notion that selfhood and relationships should be managed like a business. As public and community-based care infrastructures continue to erode, online self-help resources have become essential coping mechanisms, particularly as formal therapy remains financially out of reach for many people, especially in Global South contexts.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, self-help culture emphasised communication, emotional reflexivity, and reconciliation as pathways to personal and professional success. This orientation aligned with a phase of neoliberalism that absorbed and commodified progressive values. In that spirit, popular therapeutic discourses encouraged both men and women to combine traditionally “masculine” traits such as assertiveness and autonomy with conventionally “feminine” capacities for empathy and care.

Contemporary self-help, however, displays a significant shift, promoting more essentialist and authoritarian understandings of the self. Femininity and masculinity are no longer framed as traits to be reconciled but as authentic selves that should be restored in their sex-specific bodies. This restorative logic rests on the diagnosis that personal and relationship problems stem from men’s and women’s alienation from their supposedly natural states under the corrupting forces of modern life.

This diagnosis further aligns with alarmist narratives about a broader crisis of gender order and social cohesion that characterise contemporary authoritarian politics. Calls to restore feminine and masculine energies are presented not only as remedies for personal and relationship problems. They also support wider moral agendas linked to neoconservative politics, including anti-gender movements and growing hostility toward LGBTQ communities.

Another key issue is the surge of extreme individualism and survivalism in self-help discourses. Daniel Nehring (2024) draws attention to this dynamic taking shape under the crisis of global neoliberalism marked by economic insecurity, social fragmentation, and declining trust in institutions. Accordingly, a survivalist approach to personal development has gained prominence, one that prioritises self-preservation and gratification within a dystopian world fraught with conflict and danger. Therein, personal development “is not about thriving in a rational world” but rather “about getting what you really want in a world out of kilter” (ibid, 326). 

Turkey is an important context for observing these dynamics, where gendered anxieties intersect with the government’s masculinist restoration politics centered on strengthening the patriarchal family and criminalising non-normative sexualities. Turkish society is riddled with frustration caused by the destabilisation of traditional gender relations and neoliberal precarisation.

What accompanies this is a desire for a strong patriarchal figure imagined as the head of both the state and the family.

In this light, I examine Turkish self-help influencers and their relationship advice. A neoconservative version of postfeminism and red pill ideology emerge as two corresponding gendered frameworks in this context. Both call for a return to traditional gender roles while reinforcing neoliberal ideas of personal responsibility and self-improvement. Moreover, they promote survivalism and strategic performance grounded in a pragmatic yet partial recognition of inequality and precarity.

Pop The Red Pill, Save the Nation

The term red pill originates from the cult movie “The Matrix,” where choosing the red pill symbolises waking up to the truth that the world as we know is an illusion. Red pill ideology has grown within online spaces dedicated to men’s rights activism, male self-optimization, and misogynistic worldviews, popularly called the manosphere. These spaces promote the belief that women are inherently manipulative and that feminism is responsible for social and moral decline.

Red pill ideology is traced back to the early 2010s, coinciding with the onset of global neoliberalism’s crisis. It frames the current conjuncture as a “crisis of masculinity” provoked by feminism, woke culture, and the legal and social norms that supposedly privilege women. Today, red pill ideology circulates globally, attracting men who see it as a way to make sense of their romantic disappointments, economic anxieties, and broader grievances about the world.

Importantly, red pill functions as a form of self-help for men. It offers a practical script: build muscle, boost testosterone, pursue financial independence, suppress emotional vulnerability, and avoid deep attachment to women. In this framework, self-improvement becomes a strategy of defense and dominance in a world portrayed as hostile and rigged against men.

We cannot simply dismiss red pill as extreme misogyny. Its appeal lies in its ability to provide structure and meaning to “male complaint,” as Simon Copland (2025) observes. The manosphere offers an interpretive framework that turns personal setbacks into collective injustice and organises male grievances into a shared identity and mission. Survival becomes the central goal: escape humiliation, regain control, and prepare for a future in which masculine authority can be restored.

Manosphere narratives register the injustice and misery of the present moment, yet locate their root cause in the supposed feminisation of society. In turn, they foreground survivalist and militarised forms of masculinity. Therein, red pill binds gender essentialism and misogyny to racism, xenophobia, and far-right politics. Apocalyptic narratives and crisis imaginaries further reinforce this masculinist ethos by legitimising domination, hierarchy, and preparedness for conflict as necessary responses to a broken world.

In the Turkish context, the leading figure of the manosphere is Tahsin Oğuz Acartürk, who goes by the moniker Dr. RedPill on YouTube, which is his primary arena of influence. His version of red pill is particularly interesting as he articulates individual survival with national survival around the idea of moral restoration.

Acartürk’s nationalism is largely symbolic and depoliticised. He avoids commenting on state-level politics so that he can retain a broad audience that might otherwise fracture along rampant political polarisation. He frequently refers to military service and hazardous labour such as mining as key masculinity benchmarks. Yet this rhetoric erases the classed and political dimensions of such labor. He repeatedly ignores that it is working-class men not upper-middle class men like Acartürk who perform compulsory military service in Turkey and toil in poorly regulated mines at the risk of death.

However, his red pill guidance assumes a middle-class subject with sufficient time, income, and stability to devote himself to continuous self-optimization. This ideal overlooks the realities of overwork, economic precarity, and depression that shape the lives of many men in Turkey. The result is a form of cruel optimism: the promise of empowerment is doomed to fail for young working class men who lack the structural resources to achieve red pill ideals. 

Acartürk often highlights the vitality of men’s social role as soldiers to defend and fight for the nation, which justifies male superiority. Fearmongering about threats of war, natural disasters, and chaos surrounding Turkey accompanies this narrative. By foregrounding military service, an all-time favorite trope of Turkish nationalism, and mobilizing the language of national security, he advances the claim that women fundamentally depend on men for protection. 

But then, women should be deserving of protection. From here, his injunction follows that women should submit to male authority and conduct themselves within the moral parameters of national identity to be worthy of men’s military sacrifice.

Acartürk’s perspective on women draws on long-standing moral anxieties within Turkish modernisation whereby women’s conduct symbolise the nation’s moral integrity. In this vein, he admonishes “emancipated” women who allegedly equate modernity with nightlife, alcohol consumption, or socialising with men. However, his main target is feminists, who, in his view, are not only responsible for the alleged moral breakdown of Turkish society but also provoke violence against women by “emasculating” men.

Neoconservative Postfeminism: Pretend and Prosper

Postfeminism can be understood as a neoliberal response that capitalises on women’s demands for empowerment. It rests on the claim that feminism has achieved its main goals, making collective feminist politics seem unnecessary and outdated. Rather than a collective identity, postfeminism functions as a cultural sensibility produced through media discourses.

It blends feminist and anti-feminist ideas within a strongly individualistic framework. 

As Rosalind Gill (2007) argues, postfeminist sensibility is deeply contradictory. It celebrates female empowerment, yet treats femininity as a personal asset to be perfected for success. Therein, empowerment isn’t about collective struggle or structural change but a matter of individual self-management, confidence, and achievement.

Until recently, postfeminist culture has utilised progressive themes such as inclusivity, body positivity, and the figure of the “girlboss.” It has repackaged selective feminist ideas within consumerism and hollowed them out, creating a shallow cliche of “strong independent woman.” Today, however, postfeminist discourses are shifting in a striking way. Increasingly, they embrace traditional ideals of womanhood.

In this newer version, trad-wife aesthetics and hyper-femininity become markers of empowerment, choice, and self-actualisation. Their appeal for women also lies in the promise of relief from wage labour. Yet this dynamic reaffirms patriarchal norms of female desirability and domesticity. As such, it updates neoliberal womanhood ideals in accordance with the conservatism and masculinist restoration of the present moment.

What is unique in this case is the promotion of a strategising, cynical, and pragmatic femininity. Idealised feminine traits no longer only pertain to moral virtues or expressions of self-sacrifice. Instead, women-oriented self-help recasts those as instrumental resources at women’s disposal to be strategically performed in pursuit of survival and success. 

For example, echoing the dating scripts of red pillers, female dating influencers encourage women to unlock their “dark femininity,” which refers to women’s supposed innate capacities for seduction, emotional manipulation, and control. The goal here is not simply romantic success. These influencers openly present securing “high-value” wealthy men and compelling them to invest materially in relationships as a financial strategy for women.

Esra Ezmeci, a popular Turkish self-help influencer, neatly exemplifies the elevation of strategising femininity and the neoconservative turn of postfeminism. Despite affirming gender equality, Ezmeci argues that equal participation in public life and the job market has de-feminised women. In her view, the destabilisation of traditional gender roles has weakened relationship stability and reduced men’s willingness to commit.

The result is women’s growing disappointment in romance and marriage.

As a remedy, she prescribes women to “pretend” and use tactics to secure men’s emotional and material investment and commitment. In her advice, women should exaggerate reliance on their partners to make them feel more masculine. They should continuously maintain their sexual appeal and self-presentation. Ezmeci’s cosmetic products are readily available for this purpose, with hyped promises to enhance women’s femininity and ignite men’s passion and commitment.   

Overall, Ezmeci encourages women to act in soft-spoken, compliant, and seemingly naive ways with their husbands and romantic partners. Yet this is not an innocent performance. It involves carefully planned emotional self-restraint and deliberate withholding of attention to sustain male interest, such as “playing hot and cold,” “not always being available,” and expressing discontent with emotional distance instead of arguing or fighting.  

Contradiction and cynicism run throughout Ezmeci’s advice. She takes issue with male privilege and often describes contemporary male behaviour as unreliable, narcissistic, and avoidant of responsibility. Despite this, she still encourages women to shoulder the emotional burden of making relationships work. For instance, she morally criticises men’s infidelity, yet treats it as preventable through women’s self-improvement. 

Ezmeci calls her audience to understand the “male nature” and its alleged contemporary degeneration. Women should craft their seduction and relationship art accordingly through updated bargains with patriarchy. The main contradiction here is that she recommends undertaking elaborate emotional and bodily labour to attract, manage, and retain precisely these “flawed” men. 

Ezmeci’s postfeminism is neoconservative as it excludes political consciousness and structural understandings of gender inequality and gender-based violence. Her definition of empowerment as personal achievement displaces collective feminist struggle. Instead, she encourages a cynical performance of traditional femininity to retain male attention, ideally from those who are generous with their financial and emotional offerings. 

Yet the guidance of Ezmeci and similar self-help influencers remains enticing. In the absence of popular feminist resources and accessible support networks, women need such pragmatic fixes to navigate an unequal and precarious social world. This is especially true now, when intimate misogyny is getting stronger, coupled with growing anti-gender politics. 

Manifesting Power?

Today’s self-help discourses advance a renewed logic of gender essentialism, which finds exceptional grounds on social media. They instruct men and women to restore their sex-specific authentic selves for success in love and life. This dynamic dovetails with the anti-genderism and masculinist restoration of our times. 

Moreover, their emphasis on survival and strategic performance reveals how selfhood ideals change under the growing contradictions of neoliberalism. The imperative to “get what you want” in a chaotic world normalises social cruelty and instrumental thinking. As such, survivalist self-help carries present authoritarian currents into everyday life, shaping how we understand ourselves and relate to others.

The current obsession of popular therapeutic culture with identifying “narcissists” and “sociopaths” is a telling symptom of this overlap. It reflects both deep anxieties about vulnerability and a fascination with dominance, manipulation, and emotional control that conjures fantasies of fascism in personal relationships.   

The "manifesting" trend of popular self-help, the belief that we can think our desires into reality, offers another stark window into this connection. Promoted through a distorted understanding of quantum physics, it claims that pure mental energy can bend matter. Its primary tools are “affirmations,” mantras to program the mind for success. 

Manifesting is extremely popular within digital self-help spaces. The notorious red pill influencer Andrew Tate calls out to men: “Close your eyes. Focus on making yourself feel excited and powerful. Imagine yourself destroying goals with ease.” Elsewhere, white supremacist affirmation videos mobilise racialised fantasies of masculine transcendence: “I have the sense of beyond absolute maximum [...] of Nordic perfection, of active, positive, hard, immanent force on mythic Nordic masculinity.” On the “divine femininity” corner, women are motivated to become their best feminine selves with “goddess affirmations” to ensure that they “radiate powerful magnetic energy.” 

The easy content creation logic and online engagement traps of self-help grifters can partially explain the abundance of manifesting content. The need for control and assurance in an increasingly unpredictable and difficult world is another reason for the widespread demand for such tricks. 

Manifesting feeds social alienation by affirming that survival is a solitary act in our heads alone, requiring us to master the powers of mind and the universe. Here, it is the self-help gurus, mirroring populist leaders, who provide the recipe for summoning these powers and surviving the faith of “beta masculinity,” “wounded femininity,” and being a powerless victim in life.    

Seventy years ago, Adorno (1957) analysed the Los Angeles Times astrology column as a pseudo-rationality medium and traced its ties to social paranoia and authoritarianism. Accordingly, this astrological guidance combined elements of rationality and irrationality in a way that captured the core tensions of social reality and promised a way to navigate them. Hence, the appeal of astrology, and, in our case, manifesting, comes from the assurance that the individual can have some control in an antagonistic and complex world with looming threats. 

However, this sense of control is quite elusive. If the individual fails to manifest positive things and gets caught up in anxiety, their worries will probably come true because of the “power of mind over matter” principle. In this way, a fragile fantasy of individual power, coupled with self-blame for negative thoughts and failure, produces what Adorno termed an “ideology for dependence,” disguised as personal mastery. 

By contrast, the pervasive senses of fear, anxiety, atomisation, and victimhood are pressingly real today, as both lived suffering and feelings mobilised around the renewed gender essentialism and far-right politics. Then, we are faced with the question: how can we collectively address, heal, and reorient these states within emancipatory projects? 

The challenge here is to transform survival into shared struggle; to channel frustration and insecurity not into resentment or domination, but into collective action for social change. Perhaps the task ahead is to make manifesting revolution more compelling than manifesting individual power.