Checkmate, Trad Con-Artists
How the Gold Pill Will Change the Conversation Forever
May 14, 2025
The Gold Pill Emerges…
On May 10, 2025, ThisIsShah launched the Gold Pill philosophy on his YouTube channel, offering a seismic shift in how we talk about men, marriage, and meaning. The Gold Pill challenges both Red Pill nihilism and the so-called “solutions” offered by traditional conservatives.
A few days later, on May 14, Shah and Jon from the It’s Complicated YouTube channel were invited onto Coach Greg Adams’ Twitch livestream. This broadcast amplified the discussion, pitting lived experience and cultural insight against the clichés of trad-con orthodoxy.
For decades now, young men have been scolded with the same prescription: get married, settle down, and do your duty. Trad Cons — especially Christian traditionalists, sometimes called “Christ pillers,” claim that men have failed society by refusing to marry and protect women. But here’s the sleight of hand: these same figures conveniently ignore the fact that historically, marriage was a contractual alliance between families, not a romantic leap of faith made by two inexperienced individuals.
The real question is: if marriage was so sacred and stable in the past, what did it actually look like? Because when we look deeper, we find something they never mention — the dowry.
What Is a Dowry?
One of the most viral moments in recent Manosphere discourse came from the It’sComplicated YouTube channel, in an episode titled “What Is a Dowry?” In it, men and women are asked to explain what a dowry is — but most can’t define the term based on any historical evidence. In fact, many people can’t even recall what marriage looked like before the 1950s.
Why is that? I found myself wondering. “It’s not so difficult to look past the 1950s to see how our ancestors managed to get us here, despite the odds stacked against them.”
The clip exposed a cultural blind spot: modern women expect everything from a man, yet many have no idea what their great-grandmothers were once expected to bring to the table.
This clip revealed a cultural blind spot: modern women expect everything from a man, but don’t realize what their great-grandmothers were expected to bring to the table.
As It’s Complicated put it:
“Why is it that women brought more to the table when they weren’t working… and less to the table now that they are working?”
This moment sparked reflection across the manosphere — and helped fuel Shah’s critique of both feminist and traditionalist frameworks.
Why the Traditional Conservative Narrative is Failing Men
Trad Cons and Christ pillers love to tell men they’re failing women, failing civilization, and failing God. But their “solution” amounts to a recycled 1950s fairytale, not a serious answer to today’s problems. They offer a simple checklist:
- Get married, provide, protect, ignore the past, be the bigger man, and expect NOTHING from from your soon to be “wife”
This is not traditional, it’s delusional. If you suggest dowries, chastity, family vetting, or marriage as an alliance between families— they scoff. Why? Why are they less concerned with bringing back traditional obligations for women and focus so heavily on guilt-trip men into unfair deals?
As Shah put it on the twitch stream with Coach Greg Adams:
“The Trad-Cons want to shame young men and tell them they need to man up and get married, work two jobs, marry a woman with a past [for the sake of saving civilization]. The question I want to ask is: ‘how much of a dowry have you saved for your daughters?’ And if they say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ — then guess what? You’re not traditional. You’ve been lying to us about what traditionalism even is. That’s how I’m coming at this, I want to chop them at the feet.”
Shah calls this out clearly: if you didn’t save a dowry for your daughter, you’re not traditional. You’ve been sold a fake gospel of “man up and suffer.”
Describing the Problem Before Prescribing a Solution
On his YouTube streams, Shah makes an important distinction: don’t rush to prescribe solutions until you’ve honestly described the problems. This step is often skipped, so he asks:
What is the actual problem? Is it male loneliness? Is it the collapse of marriage? What about hypergamy, or simping, or the sexual marketplace? Surely feminism, right?
These questions aren’t rhetorical. They require serious reflection.
Dr. Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power, and Dr. Scott Galloway have both done important work in highlighting the growing crisis facing men. Farrell points to systemic disadvantages for men: less custody, more dangerous jobs, fewer college degrees, rising suicide rates. Galloway has sounded the alarm on sexless young men and the “winner-take-all” dynamic of modern dating.
Their honesty is appreciated — and they are more truthful than the so called “traditionalists’ and the “leaders” of the current Red Pill Manosphere. But even their frameworks sometimes fall short. They often point to economic and structural inequality, while underestimating the deep impact of gynocentric conditioning that trains society to prioritize female needs and male sacrifices.
And yet… traditionalists and Red Pillers alike ignore even those insights. They say, “Just man up,” or “Go to the gym.”
As a society, we have to come to the realization that we cannot fix a sinking ship by handing out more buckets. we have to plug the leak.
The De Beers Effect and the Fall of the Dowry
On the question of how we got here, the Gold Pill is still piecing together the full picture. But there are clear inflection points in modern history worth examining. One such moment occurred in the mid-20th century, when a groundbreaking advertising campaign by De Beers — developed in partnership with the New York agency N.W. Ayer — reshaped societal norms around marriage and courtship. This campaign not only popularized the diamond engagement ring but also contributed to the decline of traditional dowry practices by promoting a new romantic ideal.
This campaign shifted the financial dynamics of marriage. Traditionally, dowries involved the bride’s family providing wealth to the groom’s family. But the De Beers model positioned the man as the one who must spend a small fortune to win a woman’s heart — with an expensive diamond.
This didn’t just change marriage. It changed gender roles. It helped reframe marriage around male obligation, and female entitlement.
Why do we have cultural amnesia about what marriage looked like before 1950s? Perhaps it’s due to cultural engineering, the effects of capitalism, gynocentric favorability — or a combination of all these forces.
Shah explores these themes in deeper detail on his stream and in his conversations with Paul Elam, Peter Wright, Jon of It’sComplicated, and even Pearl Davis.
Dowries as a Check on Hypergamy
What many overlook is that dowries weren’t just about money — they were part of a sophisticated system where parents, not naïve teenagers, negotiated the terms of marriage. They acted with wisdom and foresight, aligning the interests of both families.
That system acted as a check on the tendency for women to seek partners of higher status. A wealthy man, for example, was incentivized to marry if the bride’s family brought serious value to the table.
By removing dowries and letting people “follow their hearts,” we handed the keys of lifelong decisions to the least experienced people. And then we wonder why marriages fail.
Checkmate, Trad Con-Artists
The Gold Pill doesn’t just critique feminism, it challenges the lies of traditional conservatism. It exposes the romanticized, cherry-picked history and asks the real questions. It seeks structural solutions, not moralistic shaming. And most importantly, it calls for balance and fairness — not just more sacrifice from men.
With one simple question — ’how much dowry did you save for your daughters?’ — Shah flipped the script.
Checkmate, Trad Con-Artists.
