Articles from September 2013

The Rational Male

RM_Cover

It took me much longer than it probably should have, but considering this book has been 12 years in the making I wanted something well designed with all the attention to detail it has due. I’m a perfectionist and an artist which makes for a very difficult combination when producing something I really care about. In my career I have been responsible for the concepts and branding of many successful products and projects, most of which I have no doubt the bulk of my readership would recognize were I to be completely honest. As tempting as it would be to boast about them, in the interests of protecting the integrity of those brands I can never really be specific about them, but for all of the products I’ve ever launched, for all of the promos and marketing I’ve done, for all of the money I’ve made for other (already wealthy) men, nothing has made me so nervous as clicking the ‘publish’ button on Createspace to approve the final draft of The Rational Male.

One thing I learned very early in my career was to never invest too much of myself into a brand or a project that was someone else’s idea. I’ve been instrumental in many collaborative ideas, but this book is the first work that I’ve been solely responsible for. I pray that it will make the impact I hope it will and reach the people who would otherwise never find this blog.

Roosh posted this on twitter this morning:

The manosphere may be divided, but its reach exploded in 2013. In 2014, its ideas will begin to infiltrate mainstream society. Bet on it.

I’m both scared and excited that The Rational Male might be included in this reach into the MSM. I’ve of course repeatedly written about the inherent dangers that red pill ideologies will only be vilified and ridiculed in a public forum controlled by the feminine imperative, but that’s something I’m going to have to come to terms with if red pill thought is to ever be taken seriously. I worry about how the impact of this book will affect my personal life, my career, and probably a lot of other aspects of my life that I haven’t yet considered.

For now the book is available on the Createspace store at this link:

https://www.createspace.com/4450847

In about a week it will be listed on Amazon and I’ll announce it when it hits.

Late Edit: The Rational Male is now available on Amazon Thanks to the preorders on Createspace the book was expedited to Amazon – and yes you can buy it internationally.

And now Kindle is good to go too:

 

There will be a Kindle version as well, but I think an e-format kind of defeats the purpose of the physical book. I probably fucked up a few things grammatically, I had an editor and a proofer, but this is a rookie effort. I’d also like to apologize to all the reader who’ve emailed me for advice or consults in the past 6 months. The book has been my primary focus for the last 8 months so I look forward to getting back to the blog again – I haven’t forgotten any of you and I’ll be getting back to you soon.

I’ve never written a book before, but I’ve been writing for almost 14 years now. It’s been a real learning process. Reading material I’ve written and rewritten since 2000 is a little like reading the thoughts of someone else.

What you’ll read are a refinement of the core ideas and concepts I’ve formalized on The Rational Male. I began The Rational Male at the request of my readers on various men’s forums and comments on blogs in the ‘manosphere’ in 2011. After the popularity of the blog exploded inside a year it became apparent that a book form of the basic principles was needed for new readers as I moved past them, and built upon the prior concepts.

For the most part I’ve rewritten and edited for publishing the blog posts of the first year at Rational Male. I’ve left in most of the jingoisms and acronyms that are characteristic of the blog and are commonly used in the manosphere, however I’ve made every attempt to define them as I go along.

Furthermore, many of the concepts I explore in this book came from a question by one of my readers. As with most commenters, their anonymity is assumed in the form their online ‘handle’. The important thing to remember is the concept being discussed and not so much the importance of who is proposing or contradicting a concept.

Before you begin reading

The primary reason I decided to codify the Rational Male into a book came from a reader by the name of Jaquie. Jaquie was an older, married woman, who genuinely took to what I proposed about inter-gender dynamics on Rational Male. Jaquie wasn’t exactly a typical reader for me, but she asked me to help her understand some concepts better so she could help her son who was about to marry a woman whom she knew would be detrimental to his life. Jaquie said,

“I wish you had a book out with all of this stuff in it so I could give it to him. He’s very Beta and whipped, but if I had a book to put in his hands he would read it.”

So it is for the sons of Jaquie’s that I decided to put this book out. And it’s in this spirit that I’ll need to ask you, the reader, to clear your head of a few things before you begin to digest any of it.

The Rational Male literally has millions of readers world-wide, so there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll buy this book to keep on a shelf and loan to friends because you’re already familiar with its concepts. There’s a certain power and legitimacy that the printed word has that a blog or some online article lacks, so if you already are a Rational Male reader be sure you do loan the book out, or encourage the plugged-in to read and discuss it.

If you are picking this book up for the first time, or had it handed to you by a friend or loved one, and have never heard of the Rational Male or the manosphere or have had any exposure to the ideas I put forth here, I’ll humbly ask that you read with an open mind.

That sounds like an easy cop out – open your mind – it kind of sounds like something a religious cult would preface their literature with. We all like to think we already have open minds and we’re all perfectly rational, and perfectly capable of critical thinking.

I ask you to clear your head of the preconceptions you have of gender because what you’re about to read here are very radical concepts; concepts that will challenge your perspective on women, men, how they interact with each other, and how social structures evolve around those relations. You will violently disagree with some of these concepts, and others will give you that “ah ha!” moment of realization. Some of these concepts will grate on the investment your ego has in certain beliefs about how men and women ought to relate with each other, while others will validate exactly the experiences you may have had personally with them. Some are ugly. Some are not complementary of women and some of men, you’ll think I’m a misogynist on first glance because it’s the default response you’ve been taught to react with. For others, you might feel some kind of vindication for getting burned by your ex and realizing what was at play when it happened. I realize it’s a tall order, but strive not to let your personal feelings color what I lay out for you here.

You’ll love me and you’ll hate me. You’ll think “well, not in my case, and here’s why,..” or you’ll think “wow this is some really ground breaking stuff.” I’m not a psychologist, or a PUA, or a men’s rights activist, or a motivational speaker. I’m just a guy who’s connected some dots.

The Curse of Potential

potential

One of the most frustrating things I’ve had to deal with in this life is knowing men with incredible potential who, for whatever reason, never realize it (or as fully) because they deliberately limit themselves due to a Beta mindset . Whether it’s potential for success due to a particular talent, the potential of their socio-economic state and affluence, or simply dumb luck that put them into a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, their blue-pill ignorance or pride, or rule-bound duty to the feminine imperative thanks to their Beta frame of mind, hold them back from really benefitting from it.

God forbid you’d have to cooperate with a guy like this in a business or creative endeavor where your own livelihood might be attached to his inability to move past his Beta frame or his feminine conditioning. One of the benefits of becoming red pill aware is a heightened sensitivity to how the feminized world we live in is organized; and part of that sensitivity is becoming a better judge of Beta character and avoiding it, or at least insofar as minimizing another man’s liabilities as a Beta to how his malaise could affect you.

I used to work with a very rich man who owned a few of the brands I became involved with in my career. While he was wealthy and had a certain knack for developing some very creative and profitable products, the guy was a deplorable chump with regards to his personal and romantic life. He was very much a White Knight Beta bordering on martyrdom when it came to his wives and the women in his life, who were all too happy to capitalize on this very obvious flaw. At one point he was attempting to launch a new product for which he needed some financial backing, but simply couldn’t get it from investors because they weren’t convinced their part of his venture wouldn’t end up as part of his next divorce settlement since he was planning his 3rd marriage.

His self-righteous ‘love conquers all’ White Knight idealism chaffed at the suggestion he would need a pre-nuptial affidavit for anyone to even chance being involved with him professionally, but his proven Beta mindset was a liability to his realizing his full potential. His story is an exceptional illustration of this Beta limitation dynamic, but there are far more common examples with everyday men I know, and you probably do too. That limitation may not even be recognizable until such a time that it becomes an impediment to some future opportunity that opens up to you.

From Letting Go of Invisible Friends:

I can’t begin to list the number of otherwise intelligent and ambitious men I’ve known who’ve drastically altered the course of their lives to follow their ONE. Men who’ve changed their majors in college, who’ve selected or switched universities, men who’ve applied for jobs in states they would never have considered, accepted jobs that are sub-standard to their ambitions or qualifications, men who’ve renounced former religions and men who’ve moved across the planet all in an effort to better accommodate an idealized woman with whom they’ve played pseudo-boyfriend with over the course of an LDR; only to find that she wasn’t the person they thought she was and were depressive over the gravity that their decisions played in their lives.

And again from Dream Killers:

It never ceases to amaze me when I talk with these young men in their teens and 20s and they try to impress me with their fierce independence in every other realm of their lives, yet they are the same guys who are so ready to limit that independence and ambition in exchange for dependable female intimacy. They’re far too eager to slap on the handcuffs of monogamy, rather than develop themselves into men of ambition and passion that women naturally want to be associated with.[…]

All of this is limited by a man’s attitude towards the opposite sex. Women are dream killers. Not because they have an agenda to be so, but because men will all too willingly sacrifice their ambitions for a steady supply of pussy and the responsibilities that women attach to this.

Social feminization and the Feminine Imperative both play an active role in curtailing a man’s potential, but more often than not it’s with a willing male participant. It’s important for red pill Men to remember that the Feminine Imperative is more concerned about women’s perpetuated long-term security than it will ever be about Men actualizing their true potential – even when it means his sacrificing that potential to sustain her security, and by doing so makes him progressively less able to sustain it.

Women who read my Appreciation essay and try to wrap their heads around my assertion that women will never appreciate the sacrifices men will readily make to ensure a feminine-primary reality never take this equation into account. They think I’m attacking the sincerity of their commitment by pointing out a less than flattering truth — hypergamy wants the security of knowing (or at least believing) that a woman is paired with the best man her SMV merits, but the fundamental problem is that her hypergamy conflicts with his capacity to develop himself to his best potential.

Turnkey Hypergamy

Hypergamy wants a pre-made Man. If you look at my now infamous comparative SMP curve, one thing you’ll notice is the peak SMV span between the sexes:

SMV_Curve

Good looking, professionally accomplished, socially matured, has Game, confidence, status, decisive and Just Gets It when it comes to women. Look at any of the commonalities of terms you see in any ‘would like to meet’ portion of a woman’s online dating profile and you’ll begin to understand that hypergamy wants optimization and it wants it now. Because a woman’s capacity to attract her hypergamous ideal decays with every passing year, her urgency demands immediacy with a Man embodying as close to that ideal as possible in the now.

Hypergamy takes a big risk in betting on a man’s future potential to become (or get close to being) her hypergamous ideal, so the preference leans toward seeking out the man who is more made than the next.

The problem with this scenario as you might guess is that women’s SMV depreciates as men’s appreciates — or at least should appreciate. As I outlined above, the same hypergamy that constantly tests and doubts the fitness of a man in seeking its security also limits his potential to consistently satisfy it.

Developing Potential

Just Four Guys (fast becoming my most lurked blog) had an interesting article on Quantifying Sexual Market Value:

Rollo Tomassi at Rational Male has a differing graph of SMV based on his personal estimation. While his evaluation of female SMV with age matches both these graphs quite closely, the same cannot be said of male SMV. However, the difference is that he is measuring potential SMV, rather than actual SMV, and he believes that older men who maintain a proper lifestyle can maximise their SMV to far higher levels than younger men can.

By age 36 the average man has reached his own relative SMV apex. It’s at this phase that his sexual / social / professional appeal has reached maturity. Assuming he’s maximized as much of his potential as possible, it’s at this stage that women’s hypergamous directives will find him the most acceptable for her long-term investment. He’s young enough to retain his physique in better part, but old enough to have attained social and professional maturity.

Thus, what we’re seeing here is the SMV that is actualized by the average male, whereas Rollo’s SMV is what a man could theoretically achieve with good inner game.

One misinterpretation I diligently tried to avoid in estimating men’s relative SMV is in using sex (or the capacity to attract potential sex partners) as an exclusive metric for evaluating men’s overall SMV. Notch count in and of itself is not the benchmark for SMV, rather it is a Man’s actualization of his real potential (of which notch count is an aspect) that determines his SMV. Hypergamy wants you to fulfill your best potential (the better to filter you), but it doesn’t want to assume the risk of protracted personal investment that your fulfilled potential will eventually place your SMV so far above her own that you leave her and her investment is lost.

This then is the conflict between male potential and feminine hypergamy. I detailed this in The Threat:

Nothing is more threatening yet simultaneously attractive to a woman than a man who is aware of his own value to women.

On the blue pill reddit forum I recently read a criticism of my SMP graph, dismissing it by stating that an early to mid-thirties guy was far more likely to look like your average schlub, with an average low wage job than some mature, successful guy, who’s kept himself in shape and maintains some GQ lifestyle. I have to say I’m inclined to agree; most men, average men are men who haven’t realized the potential they could. Whether this lack is due to motivation, the limitations of a feminine socialization, or an inability to come to terms with their blue-pill reality, they never actualize the potential that would make them higher SMV men. The blue pill redditors can’t see that it’s Men’s potential that sets them apart on the SMV scale.

I’ll finish this with a quote from New Yorker in last week’s comment thread:

I think that the primary lesson of Game is that one needs to have a life and purpose that makes a man happy and determined to wake up every morning. Once a man takes control of his life, then a woman becomes an interchangeable part of it like anything else. The road to that state only lies through relentless self-improvement and the shedding of prior limitations. Otherwise, the same brutal cycle repeats itself.

The Male Experience

experience

A little over fifteen years ago my wife was pregnant with Bebé Tomassi. For most of her adult life Mrs. Tomassi has been a medical professional (radiology) so when she was knocked up she and her girl-friends at the hospital would take any free moment they got to sneak into the ultrasound room a have a peek at our gestating daughter.  As a result we have about 4 times as many ultrasound pics as most other couples get. I actually have images of Bebé as a multi-celled organism.

It was during one of these impromptu scannings that we discovered what gender our child would  be. We were both more than a bit impatient and didn’t want to wait for the silly build up the OBGYN would make of revealing her gender, so we hit up a girl-friend of my wife to do another ultrasound around the right trimester.

She scanned for a bit and said, “Oh yeah, you’ve got a girl.” We asked how she could be so sure and she said, “Her hands aren’t in the right place.” We were like WTF? Then she explained, “Almost always when the baby is a boy his hands will be down around his crotch once he’s matured to a certain phase in the pregnancy. There’s not much to do in there, so they play with themselves. Your daughter’s hands are usually up around her face.”

After hearing this, it was at that point I began to appreciate the power of testosterone. Whenever I read someone tell me sex isn’t really a “need”, I think about how even in the womb the influence of testosterone is there. For better or worse, our lives as Men center on our capacity to control, unleash, mitigate and direct that influence. Socially we build up appropriate conventions intended to bind it into some kind of uniformity, to prevent the destructive potential and exploit its constructive potential – while personally we develop convictions, psychologies and internalized rules by order of degree to live our lives with its influence always running in the background of our subconsciousness.

Experience

Women become very indignant when trying to understand the male experience. This is due in most part to women’s innate solipsism and their presumption that their experience is the universal one. Part of this presumption is due to social reinforcement, but that social presumption – essentially the equalist presumption – is rooted in women’s base indifference to anything external that doesn’t affect them directly and personally. If everyone is essentially the same and equal, and we’re acculturated to encourage this perspective, it leaves women to interpret their imperatives and innate solipsism to be the normative for men.

So it often comes with a lot shock and indignation (which women instinctively crave) when women are forced, sometimes rudely, to acknowledge that men’s experience doesn’t reflect their own. The reactive response is to force-fit men’s experience into women’s solipsistic interpretations of what it should be according to a feminine-primary perception of what works best for women. On an individual woman’s level this amounts to denial and rejection of a legitimate male-primary experience through shame or implied fem-centric obligations to accept and adopt her experience as his responsibility. On a social level this conflict is reflected in social conventions and feminine-centric social doctrines, as well as being written directly into binding laws that forcibly enact a feminine-centric perspective into our social fabric.

Feminine solipsism and the primacy of the female experience superseding the male experience begins with the individual woman (micro) and extrapolates into a feminine primary social construct (macro).

Virtually every conflict between the sexes comes back to the rejection of the legitimacy of the male experience. As I’ve stated in the past, for one sex to realize their own sexual imperative, the other sex must sacrifice their own. In virtually every dynamic I’ve ever written about the fundamental lack of understanding the male experience influences women’s perception of our sex. Whether it’s understanding our sexual impulse, our idealizations of love, or appreciating the sacrifices men uniquely make to facilitate a feminine reality, the disconnect always distills down to a fundamental lack of appreciating the legitimacy of the male experience.

It would be too easy a cop out to simply write this disconnect off as an existential difference. Obviously men and women cannot spend time in each other’s skin to directly appreciate the experience of the other. However, since the Feminine Imperative is the normative one in our current social makeup the presumption is that a feminine directed ‘equalism’ is the only legitimate experience. Thus the masculine experience is, by default, delegitimized, if not vilified for simply reminding the feminine that inherent, evolved sexual differences challenge equalism by masculinity’s very presence.

I reject your reality and replace it with my own…

Men just being men is a passive challenge to the feminine imperative; red pill awareness is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of a feminine primary experience. It’s important to recall here that the primacy of the female experience begins on the personal level with an individual woman and then exponentially multiplies into a social (macro) scale. When you assert yourself as a red pill Man, you are asserting your disconnection from that feminine-primary frame. This begins on a personal level for a woman, and then extrapolates into a social affront for all women.

The initial shock (and indignation) is one of interrupting her comfortable, predictable expectations of men in the feminine defined, solipsistic reality she experiences for herself. As even the most rookie of red pill Men will attest, the legitimate female experience rejects this assertion, most times with an amount of hostility. As expected, Men are met with the socially reinforced, prepared responses designed to defend against attempts to question the legitimacy of the primacy of the feminine experience – shaming is often the first recourse, even most passive challenges warrant shaming, but character assassination and disqualifications based upon a feminine primary perspective are the go-to weapons of the solipsistic nature of the feminine mindset (even when men are the ones subscribing to it).

The next weapon in the feminine psychological arsenal is histrionics. Aggrandized exaggerations and overblown straw man tactics may seem like a last resort for women to the man attempting to rationally impose his red pill, legitimized, male experience, but know histrionics for what they are – a carefully design, feminine-specific and socially approved failsafe for women. In the same vein as a Woman’s Prerogative (women can change their minds) and the Feminine Mystique, female histrionics are a legitimized and socially excusable tactic with the latent purpose of protecting a woman’s solipsistic experience. She’s an emotional creature and your challenge to her ego only brings out the hysteric in her – it’s men’s fault that they don’t get it, and it’s men’s fault for bringing it out in her by challenging her solipsism. And thus is she excused from her protective histrionics at men’s cost.

It’s important for red pill Men to understand what their presence, much less their assertions, mean to the feminine; their very existence, just their questioning, represents a challenge to individual, ego-invested feminine solipsism. Always be prepared for the inevitable defense of a woman’s solipsism. Even in the most measured approach, you are essentially breaking a woman’s self-concept by reminding or asserting that her experience is not the universal experience. There’s a temptation for red pill Men to get comfortable with a woman’s who accepts red pill truths, only to find that her solipsism has only accepted the parts of those truths that its comfortable with and benefits from. That solipsism doesn’t die once she’s acknowledged the legitimacy of your experience, anymore than your sexual imperative dies if you accept her experience as the legitimate one.