The Best of The Rational Male

January 19, 2021

The Rational Male – Religion

After 3 years the time has finally arrived. I pushed the button on the official publication of The Rational Male – Religion on January 4th, 2021. I know, I know, it’s been a long time, and try as I might I think the blog suffered a bit for it. The good news is I’ll be getting back to my writing here on the regular again, but I will admit this project consumed me more than I had ever anticipated. The process of writing a book of this caliber taught me a lot of valuable lessons, not just as a writer, but as a researcher and a thinker (if you’ll grant me that). I bit off way too much for me to chew in a lot of ways when I embarked on this project. I’m proud to say I had the commitment to chew it all eventually, but writing a book more or less from whole cloth was something I was less prepared for than my previous 3 books. So, for this Return to the Blog post I’m going to tell you about the book itself, my approach to it, the process of researching and developing it, and what I learned along the way.

The Rational Male – Religion has been available on Amazon (print) and Kindle for a little over 2 weeks now. It’s been the #1 New Release in the Science and Religion category since I published it, and it’s been #1 through #6 in some of the Religious subcategories as well. This is a big compliment to me since my intent from the beginning was to open the Red Pill up to an audience that wasn’t likely to be savvy of the Manosphere. Thus far the dozen or so reviews have all been 5 star, but moreover the comments have been overwhelmingly positive – to the point that some are calling it my best work since the first book. Flattering as that is, it’s the result of a degree of planning, research, discussion and attention to detail that I’ve learned is needed to have anyone outside the ‘sphere take Red Pill praxeology seriously. It’s one thing to discuss the often unflattering truths about women’s nature and the latent purposes of mating strategies; it’s quite another to assert that our personal beliefs and religious faiths are intertwined with them. I knew from the start that I’d be navigating a minefield of readers’ preconceptions, and ego-investments in them. This was my challenge: convey the Red Pill praxeology of intersexual dynamics in the context of personal beliefs while being mindful that the past four generations have had Blue Pill conditioning inform a lot of these beliefs. I also had to bear in mind that the convictions, values and faiths being informed by Blue Pill conditioning aren’t just limited to those with a belief in God.

This was my prime directive in writing Religion. I wasn’t about to sugarcoat or dance around the tough, ego-investment challenging aspects of the Red Pill. I have an obligation to objective truth, but I also didn’t want the book to become a “Rollo bashes religion in this one” effort. The most common hesitation I get from people curious about this 400 page book is “Hey man, I’m an Atheist, religion is just a bullshit cope, should I just skip this one?” Likewise, I have Believers ask me, “Is this book just about bashing Christianity and traditional values?” The answer to both is ‘No’. In fact from the Introduction I anticipated this response. It’s why I wrote the book actually. The Rational Male – Religion is an exploration of human intersexual dynamics and their influence on spiritual belief, religion and social values. Empiricists and Believers alike will get a lot from this book. It is a Red Pill look under the hood at the roots of men and women’s “need to believe” in love, God and the metaphysical to solve our mating imperatives. I don’t try to convert anyone to religion, nor do I try to convince you to abandon your beliefs. As always, it’s about connecting dots and seeing correlations.

Religion is structured differently than any of my previous books. The Rational Male was originally a collection of what I believe are the most imperative Red Pill truths for men to understand in this new era of information. These were drawn from my past essays on this blog, which were prompted by long discussion threads on the SoSuave and other forum posts from as far back as 2002. I then reworked and curated these essays into what is now the Bible of the Red Pill. For Religion I had to take a new approach. Although I drew upon some prior essays, the majority of this book I wrote from scratch. Dalrock of course was a major influence throughout the book, but even for the older ideas it was necessary to rewrite the concepts both to modernize them for the coming decade and to make them accessible to a reader who may not be familiar with the Red Pill we take for granted now. This meant that I had to start from a point of explaining Red Pill root concepts in the beginning chapters and build chapter by chapter to the greater concepts. The overarching theme of the book is the need to recognize that we are now 20 years into a New Age of Enlightenment brought about by the internet, social media and an accessibility to information unprecedented in human history. I make a distinction between old order thinking versus a new order understanding that challenges (and confirms) those old order belief sets. This is the first hurdle most unfamiliar readers will have to consider. Most old order thinking is what constitutes our beliefs, convictions and values, but the data age (for better or worse) access to information (accurate or not) is challenging these ego-investments. Whether or not you think these challenges confirm your beliefs isn’t the point; the point is that this new order information is forcing the past 4 generations – and future generations – to reassess how we’ll progress as a globalized society by accepting new truths or clinging to old order thinking.

The book builds chapter by chapter up to the most salient parts in the final chapters. This is by design. I needed old and new readers to digest the way I come to the bigger concepts of the book before I get to them. This book is by far the most meticulously researched and sources-cited book I’ve ever written. In my prior books and on this blog I’m accused of not having peer-reviewed, har data to back up my assertions. Most of this is just disingenuous filibustering by lazy critics who don’t have the time to click on the links I put in my essays. However, I wasn’t going to have that in this book. I footnote every source I used in the research of this book. If you’re wondering why a book like this took 3 years to produce, a good portion of that time was spent reading and archiving the research. I should add that this aspect of the book is something I don’t see any writers in this sphere doing to such a degree. This process taught me to be very detail conscious about what I was writing. Most people don’t really care about the sources you cite, they just want to know you did look something up. In the TL;DR generation no one will take the time to read through the 20 page, peer-reviewed, meta-analysis they require from you to prove your assertion. They just find one study that reinforces their beliefs, link it, and dismiss you. So, my intent in citing sources in this book was more in the interests of thoroughness and less about trying to change anyones mind about their beliefs.

On Authorship

The biggest change you’ll note in this book is my writing style. I’ve learned to kill my darlings and only rarely pepper in a $10 word when I thought it served. This came from my reading Writing without Bullshit by Josh Bernoff. This book made me realize the importance of presenting my ideas with clarity. The cardinal rule of writing is this; never waste the reader’s time. In the past I’ve used some complex terms and, lets just say long-form, sentence structures to get an idea across. Too many people thought that I was trying to sound intelligent by using words they had to look up afterwards, but I’ve always thought that the English language was too rich to be limited to basic ‘caveman’ words. I don’t write for the 8th grade reading level most journalists are taught to do, however, I realized my ideas were too important not to be accessible to everyone. This book is 400 pages of tight, concise, cohesive writing in a way I really had to retrain myself for. Gone are the superlatives, qualifiers and needless reinforcer adjectives I used to think were useful. I had ample material to use and I knew where I wanted to go with the book from the start, so content wasn’t going to be a problem. The challenge was making it intelligible to all readers, not just the ones who already knew the Red Pill lingo. My purpose then became making the read engaging enough to give readers an Ah-ha! moment about the prior chapter when they got into the following chapter. It became an effort in knowing what to throw out, what to keep and how to simplify saying the same thing in fewer words. As a result, my outlines and my drafts are littered with dead darlings that I wouldn’t have thought twice about keeping in my prior books.

I feel like I’m a better writer for it now. Most of my essays average between 1,800 and 2,800 words. My process usually starts with a hand written outline of concepts I want to hit on and I go from there. Some of these outlines can get really complex as I move from point to point, which create further concepts sometimes. I’ve learned that I don’t necessarily need to cram all of the outline into one essay or one chapter. While I’ve always crafted each post on this blog, I recognize the need for brevity now. The Red Pill praxeology and intersexual dynamics span many subfields, and while I try to be comprehensive in relating the data that makes up Red Pill concepts, at some point I have to trust my readers to get it. Either that, or I have to link what I can and let the bigger ideas carry the concepts into future posts. My challenge now is balancing being thorough with being concise – and all while considering what counterarguments will arise.

I finally feel like an author now. To be an author requires a certain amount of conceit. You read that right; in order to be an author you’ve got to be at least somewhat conceited. Not necessarily in a bad way, but you’ve got to make some presumptions about yourself before you can get past the sticking point of actually typing out ideas on a blank page. The first presumption is the hardest. You have to ask yourself, “Do I actually think I’m so important, worldly or wise that anyone should take me seriously enough to care about what I have to say?” Even if you’re just blogging about something you know well enough, or you just like the topic enough, you have to get past the the hesitation in thinking other people who know better, or are bigger fans than yourself about something you love might be considered better authorities or authors than you.

I don’t really believe in fear being the biggest stumbling block for would-be writers. Most people aren’t fearful of failure or ridicule when it comes to becoming an author. Fear is a stupidly common theme for motivational speakers. Fear is the easiest rationale to target for the ‘go getters’ trying to build a brand on positivity. Fear just sounds like something people would deal with. Athletes, artists writers, everyone’s fearful of failure, right? Wrong. It’s about hesitation in thinking anyone should take you seriously. Then hesitation turns into procrastination and would-be authors turn into pundits or critics, or else they endlessly pontificate about how wrong other authors are and how they’ll correct them in the book they’ll eventually write,…eventually. If you think would-be authors are fearful of failure just look at how easily people blather on for multi-Tweet threads on Twitter, 280 characters at a time. The truth is, damn near anyone can write, but few people are actually authors.

Getting past that hesitation is becoming much easier in the internet age. First it was user groups, then discussion forums, then blogging was the thing that got us past the hesitation. We had to presume that someone, somewhere, might actually read our thoughts and care about them. While social media and Twitter destroyed our critical thinking and insight about what we were writing, it did help to kill any hesitation about presuming someone might think we were unqualified to have an opinion on anything. Fan fiction was one of the first genres of writing to evolve along with the internet. 50 Shades of Grey was literally the work of an amateur fan fiction writer who took the time to become an actual author. Her book was roundly criticized as fan pablum by critics, but you couldn’t argue with the numbers. At some stage a writer has to say screw it and just go for broke. Readers and critics be damned, when we become and author we write a book we want to read.

Once you get past the hesitation, and trot your ideas out in the open it comes down to honing your craft. The craft of writing is the next stumbling block to becoming an author. Anyone can write Tweet or a blog post and be entertaining. It takes an author to hold a reader’s attention for 300 pages. Most writers today are little more than word processors. The self-published “authors” of today were the cubicle jockeys of yesterday writing fan fiction or political screeds from their workstations on company time when they got bored. Just the self-appointed title of author has a romance to it. Few writers today actually know the craft of writing or storytelling, much less a comprehensive knowledge of what they’re relating most of the time. Even learned professors with lots of letters in their degree’s titles who find a new popularity in the Hustle Economy really have a grasp of how to write well.

I’ve often wonder when I could start thinking of myself as a real author. One book? Three books? How many pages do those ‘books’ need to have for me to be considered legitimate? Hemingway’s, Old Man and the Sea is 128 pages long. Hmm,…so, not pages. What about word count? 27,000 for that book. Nope, not word count. Damn, what makes a book a book and a writer an author? Inspiration? Sincerity? Drive, moxie, perseverance? Probably all of those and a few more adjectives I can muster, but when should a guy start calling himself an author? The best answer I can come to is when he’s honest with himself. When you’re honest with yourself about the reasons why you write, why you feel you need to write, when you have mental conversations with yourself about what you’re going to write, all without the pretense of how anyone will misinterpret your words or any thought to what your grandchildren will think about you in the future – that’s when you’re an author. When you’ve filled your 7^th little notebook to remember ideas in because your sick of forgetting the brilliant things that came to you at 2am when you woke up to take a piss in the middle of the night, that’s when you’re an author. When you write to yourself and not for your readers, that’s when you’re an author. When you sit down at your iMac with no inspiration and write for 4 hours anyway, then you proof read the brilliant, inspired, words that came to you during the last 30 minutes, that’s when you’re an author.

That’s all very prosaic, but being an author needs to be defined now more than ever. It’s easy to write — it’s a calling to be an author. Lord knows, I never planned to be an author. The Rational Male wasn’t published until I was 45 years old. It took a lifetime to come to the knowledge and craft necessary to write it. Few people actually read books today. They’d rather listen to them, or they skim through them, watch the movie or just read the outline to form an opinion of the ideas or material. I’ve called this the TL;DR Generation – Too Long; Didn’t Read. Feed me the salient points so I can see if you’re full of shit, call you on it or give you praise, and then move on to the next post. Actually writing something that stops a reader in their tracks is the hallmark of an author. Writing something that inspires genuine conversation, debate or writing a story that a reader can lose themselves in is the craft of an author. Writing something a reader actually internalizes, especially in this generation, is a rare, practiced, gift of an author. Being an author is difficult today. The distractions are endless. It’s not enough to just write ideas and relate them with skill, you have to be engaging and accessible to your readers in ways that authors from past eras never imagined. This is why most writers never become authors. Writers lose themselves in the distractions. They get lost in building identities, brands and images of themselves they believe their fans expect of them. Authors write in spite of themselves. Authors are so enveloped in their ideas and craft that they don’t care if they come off as assholes for ignoring distractions. Writers get off on the image of being writers, authors are too busy exploring and relating ideas.

June 25, 2020

The Rational Male – Blog Update 2020

The Commentariat

I hate to start a post off with apologies, but I feel like I have to hash out some things with my long time readers. In the wake of all this worldwide civil unrest and amplified Cancel Culture online I thought it prudent to disable comments on this blog for a couple of weeks. As expected, the usual suspects who are still obsessed with destroying this blog, attacking my books with review bombing, and creating torrents of my books’ for pirated downloads took the opportunity to start race-baiting in my comment threads. I can only conclude that this was the beginning of an effort to plant inflammatory racial sentiments on my unmoderated discussion threads to be complained about to the authorities at my blog host to have my 9 years of Red Pill work deleted in much the same way Chateau Heartiste was last year.

I will not allow that to happen. I will not allow half a dozen adolescent haters and pathological liars to remove this blog and its 18 years of aggregate Red Pill information. Unfortunately, this necessitated the temporary closure of the comment sections on this blog until I could implement a better filter of the content, bot-spam and overt sock puppeting of user accounts. At present I’ve reverted back to the original Jetpack comment plugin that comes standard in WordPress. No bells, no whistles, but it’s security is far better than the wpDiscuz plugin I installed so commentors had a better control over editing and content. Sorry, the assholes and race-baiters have ruined that for us now. Take it up with them.

Until such time as I think the woke-mob threat is over, or the career-liars have filed for bankruptcy, the comments on this blog will be moderated until further notice. I don’t take this decision lightly. The comments on this blog have been unmoderated since the day it began. Open discussion has always been one of the core strengths of The Rational Male. When I opened this blog I knew I wanted to keep the same dedication to debate alive that SoSuave had started with. As I’ve always said about the comments, it’s a hot kitchen, stay out if you can’t take the heat. That was fine and well in an era when everyone commenting came to the table with an earnest opinion in the spirit of hashing things out. Even personal attacks could sometimes be beneficial if they sparked a novel debate. But that’s not where we’re at now. Today, adults with the maturity of 12-year-olds are using the opportunity of today’s social climate to use a forum of honest debate as a means for the politics of personal destruction. I find it the height of irony that some of the people who were railing about threats to free speech and the injustice of Social Justice Warriors just 3 years ago are the first to use their same cowardly tactics they warned about then when the opportunity for petty revenge comes along.

So, until such time as I think we can go back to an unmoderated format I will be assigning mods and being much more proactive in deleting any comment that could in anyway threaten the future of this blog. I will also actively ban any user who uses a sock-puppet account, attempts to create multiple proxy accounts, impersonates myself or another registered user, and any user who I even suspect is attempting to attack this blog. I tried to do this your way. 8-9 months ago I said fuck it and unbanned, and de-blacklisted everyone and everything. I decided to go full hands-off and let users deal with the obvious troll accounts, spammers, and ubiquitous bots in the comments. It got to be too much work to untangle the endless proxy accounts and outright liars in the commentariat. No more. That was my bad, and the predictable attacks came along as soon as the time was right.

If your account is banned now, I won’t apologize to you. You fucked up. If it comes down to you baiting other users as a threat to the viability of this blog, I choose this blog. I’m a very patient man, but I will not allow The Rational Male to go down. I distanced myself from Heartiste back in 2012 because of exactly the racial and political sentiment that defined his comment threads. You will not bring that shit here.

The Rational Male – Religion

My upcoming 4th book Religion is in the final stages of edits and I’m presently finishing the Forward and Afterword sections of the book. This book has been consuming my life for almost 3 years now. It’s the first book I’ve written virtually from scratch; meaning it’s not solely a collection of prior essays. I had every intention of publishing the book in March-April and that’s when the whole world decided to go to hell. I took the opportunity of the quarantine to revise and reedit the book. I wanted to be sure that parts of it reflected the current state of the global sexual marketplace and be relevant to a post-crisis readership. Since then it’s become clear that 2020 will be a chaotic reset for a lot of things we’ve taken for granted for a long time. I’d be lying if I said I thought the world I began writing book 4 in would necessarily be the same world that I finally published it in. This has been foremost in my mind since mid March.

I had originally asked my friend Pat Campbell to write the Forward section of Religion. I like to have a peer write the Forwards to my books and I thought Pat would do a Red Pill book on religion justice. Then, in January, Pat had his car accident, seizure and a tense ICU stay in an Oklahoma hospital. Real life is a lot different than online life, I had thought my friend would be dead or in a coma, and that really did a number on me at that time. We’d been friends and partners on his show and my YouTube channel, as well as convention speakers, for over 2 years by this time – I was aware he had the brain tumors and they were malignant the week of the accident. Pat has cancer; just like the last person I asked to write the Forward to my 3rd book, Andrew Hansen (The Private Man). Andrew’s cancer took him before he could do the Forward to Positive Masculinity and I ended up making the Forward a dedication to him and his life. Pat Campbell is one tough son of a bitch. Thus far he’s been beating the odds and I would attribute this to his stubbornness and bullheaded tenacity. That’s what makes him a badass. I will likely dedicate book 4 to him as well.

Facing down your own mortality really puts things into a new perspective for a man. Most men don’t get this opportunity. I love Pat like a brother, but I get the feeling that this experience changed him significantly. I saw the same change happen in Andrew 4 years ago and I’d looked at book 3 differently because of it. I was having a similar experience with book 4, and then the pandemic hit, and then the world went batshit insane. The irony that book 4 is about the Red Pill in religious contexts isn’t lost on me here.

Religion will be a thick book. The biggest complaints I get about The Rational Male is the formatting and grammar, syntax, and yes, I know, the print book’s type size. I’ll be focusing on a 2nd edition (and a hardback version) of book one once I release Religion. However, this book will be the most bulletproof addition to the Rational Male series in terms of editing, proofing and citing sources. I’ve made a lot of effort in providing proof of concept in this book. Not that I think this will dissuade my disingenuous haters from blathering on about the validity of the sources they don’t necessarily like, but they won’t be able to say I didn’t do my due diligence. The topic of religion and making correlations to Red Pill concepts (to say nothing of evolutionary concepts) is a really dicey prospect. I’m definitely going get things wrong with the ‘true’ believers – there’s no way I can get them right without full confirmation of various beliefs – and this is another aspect of the book I have to be very careful with. And this takes time.

This is why I’ve scaled back my blog posts here. My writing time is directed wholesale towards book 4. I am doing my best to keep this blog fresh with new content, but a once a month post bothers the hell out of me. I’m also considering going to a once a week show on my YouTube channel until I’m published. That’s also something I don’t want to do, but I may need to. I’m an author first, public personality second. One blessing about the quarantine/lockdown is that my ‘real’ job liquor promo gigs have been basically nonexistent since all this began. I was starting to get new offers to do work in Vegas and then the riots happened. Back to the book.

Body Language Mastery 3

Lastly, I will again be endorsing Modern Life Dating’s upcoming program Body Language Mastery and the online community that it facilitates. Since I’ve been so invested in the new book I haven’t had the time to really do much one-on-one counseling with guys sending me requests. I honestly want to do these Skype consults, but I can only really do them as I have the opportunity. I swear, I read every one of your emails. That said, the program Jon from MLD has going is a great opportunity for guys to get this kind of advice/counseling via the weekly group chats that are part of the program. Not only do you have access to myself and guys like Rich Cooper, Rian Stone, Jon and Troy Francis, but there’s a community of dozens of guys in the group who are there to help, live in real time.

I did a 90 minute show with Jon to cover the details of this new round of the program. If you’re waiting for a counseling session with me, please consider joining July’s group and bringing your circumstances here. I will be available to you in much the same capacity, but you’ll get a lot more input from the community. The registration just opened today June 25th and it will close on midnight June 29th.

This is the registration link: Body Language Mastery 3 – July 2020

So, that’s the Rational Male update for 2020 thus far. I hope you can bear with me for just a bit longer. I’ll have a new essay incoming by Monday. Thanks.

January 14, 2020

The New Age of Enlightenment

The Old Order

I can remember a time back in the 1980s when I would visit my mother for a weekend and she’d insist my brother and I go to her church on Sundays. At this point in her life she was very much an Evangelical Christian. I would go with her because my mom’s side of the family had always been the religious side, and that was just part of who my mom was. I did have a basic faith in God and Christianity at the time, but my father was a card carrying atheist (and nominal Unitarian) for his whole life, so I had a pretty eclectic religious education when I was a teenager.

My father was a skeptic by nature and a lot of my own questioning nature was indirectly influenced by him. I can remember going to my mom’s church and suffering through the worship music to get to the sermon. I actually enjoyed the sermons because they gave me something to chew on intellectually. Not that the 15 year old Rollo was much of a thinker at that time, but I always had basic questions for these guys after the speech. When I got a bit older, in my early 20s, I started wondering who these ‘pastors’ really were as people and what made them qualified to deliver sermons. I really wanted to talk with these guys, but doing so meant I had to sit through their hard sell about how Jesus had saved them from themselves. I always thought this was kind of silly considering most of these guys weren’t much older than me. How hard a life could these guys really have lived by 25?

Most of these pastors weren’t used to was really having to engage much with their congregations beyond what was required of them to maintain appearances. I don’t mean that they were inaccessible; most of them had something outside of church that kept them involved with people. It’s that prior to the internet the way a pastor, or a church, did business usually centered on a man delivering a message (presumedly inspired by God) and then shaking hands with the faithful after the sermon was over as they filed out the door. End of sermon. End of discussion.

If you wanted to talk about the sermon, or, heaven forbid, criticize the interpretation or message in some way that was a conversation relegated to your family, or perhaps a home group discussion. Assuming you even were in a home group or had a few peers you could discuss it with, you always risked running afoul of someone whose ego-investments in his/her faith would put them on edge by questioning it. The old order of religion, not just Christianity, used to be based on respecting the man delivering that message as God’s ordained spokesman, or reading whatever book he might’ve published, processing it yourself or with a handful of other believers, sussing things out and waiting for the next message on the next Sunday. There was very little engagement about articles of faith or doctrine unless you were a guy on the inside.

All of this changed with the advent of the internet and the globalization of mass media and communication.

Today, there’s hardly a pastor (mainstream or obscure) who doesn’t have a blog or a YouTube channel on which he (or she) contemplates his last/next sermon. In the 80s-90s even the most introspective religious leader would have only a handful of people to bounce ideas off, but today a sermon is almost focus grouped before the guy walks up to the pulpit on a Sunday. Meanwhile, that same pastor is engaged on two or three social media accounts discussing everything from religion, to politics, to praying for his favorite NFL team to make the playoffs.

The old order of how religion was done has given way to a new, globalized process of how we do religion. Today anyone, believer or not, has access to that pastor on a moments notice. Didn’t like the message? Thought the interpretation was inaccurate? You can tell him on his blog’s comment thread or fire off a tweet to start a discussion about it before he can even drive home from church.

This is the age of globalized engagement – and this new paradigm is fundamentally altering old order institutions. What the Guttenburg press did for religion by publishing the Bible for the masses, now the internet has done for the old order way in which people can engage with the process of their beliefs – and not just religious belief.

The New Enlightenment

February of last year I wrote an essay about the Global Sexual Marketplace. In that post I described how globalization isn’t just about economics or demographics – globalization also applies to intersexual dynamics. Gone are the days when a young man or young woman could expect to meet one of the handful of eligible, single people in their high school, small town or limited social circle to pair off and start a family with. In the old order young people were stuck with the choices of a limited Local sexual marketplace. Today, with our instant, robust forms of communication, a worldwide sexual marketplace has now opened up the romantic prospects of virtually anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection. Don’t like your prospects in your hometown? Now there’s a whole world of men and women waiting to meet you. The old order of intersexual dynamics has fundamentally shifted and all in less than 20 years.

The rapidity of this shift is what I believe is at the root of the problems that surround the new way of doing the old order institutions. As a global society we are still reluctant to let go of the falsehoods of those old order institutions; even in light of the new order evidences and data collected as a result of this unprecedented access. While we attempt to reconcile our old order beliefs with what a global information network confronts them with, we cling evermore tightly to what we thought we knew because it formed the foundation of who we are. And as we try to make sense of it we are presented with both true and false narratives that pander to the fact that this information and technology is progressing at a rate that most human beings’ minds were never evolved to keep pace with.

My good friend Aaron Clarey (Captain Capitalism) recently published a tour de force article on women entering into and dominating most of the future of Corporate America, and how men ought to welcome this change. It’s a great post, so definitely go read the whole thing, but after I’d finished it I was struck with the idea that what Clarey was on to was describing an old order institution (Corporate America) and how we still perceived it from an old order understanding. On the surface it seems counterintuitive to think of women assuming authority over what was the Male Space of Corporate Culture as a good thing. Cap was being facetious for the whole thing, but his point was really this: women have coveted the reigns of Corporate America for a long time now, but their feminist thirst for power (Fempowerment) is based on an old order understanding of what Corporate America really is, or will eventually become. Like a debutant late to the party, the status and prestige that the Feminine Imperative sells women to believe is inherent in Corporate America is all old order bullshit. So, yeah, have at it ladies. The information age has stripped back the curtains on the Corporate America you assumed all that student debt to participate in.

Academia is another area in which this old order vs. new enlightenment understanding is taking place. Prior to 2000 if you heard a particular professor had a reputation for being tough, you had to get it from a third party. Today we have rate-the-professor.com or something similar. Now you can see how well a teacher performed from students who took their classes from a decade ago.

GlassCeiling.com is an aggregate of current and ex employees rating the work environment of damn near any company today. Yelp.com does something similar to a businesses performance. And as a result most of these companies hire specialized personnel to maintain their online reputations – and this is the paranoia that comes from presuming old order impressions of a company are relevant in a new order paradigm.

Analog Thinking vs. Digital Thinking

“In the future, everything that can be digital will be digital.”

I’m not sure who originated this quote, but I can remember it being tossed around in graphic design circles as early as 1993. Back then the print industry was transitioning to a digital way of production. Adobe Photoshop was at version 3.0 (when I started using it) and QuarkXpress was revolutionizing pagination for pretty much every publication at the time. The writing was on the wall. I was fortunate to be coming into my career on the cusp of the old order traditional ways of creating ads and publications (stat cameras and pasteup galleys) and learning their digital equivalents in design applications. I had to get real good, real quick, not only in terms of understanding the hardware, software and networking, but also in using it to create effective, creative, advertising. A lot of my contemporaries struggled with this transition. My mentors in design were old school designers. They taught me a lot with respect to effective advertising and design, but they couldn’t teach me the new tech that was changing every 6-8 months. Whereas in the old order a design agency only focused on print media and employed a full complement of professionals for each aspect of production (photography, typography, pasteup, pressmen, etc.) now I was responsible for all of these jobs and more to come as the internet opened up more new media to desktop publishers like me.

I had to get real good, real fast, and maintain my creative edge all while expanding into more and more new areas and methods of producing what I do. The old order designers either adapted or went extinct. Since the early 90s this narrative has played out across countless professions and trades. I can remember listening to Lars Ulrich from Metallica complain about how Napster’s peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s was going to be the death of the music industry. The old order musicians weren’t ready to accept the realities of “everything that can be digital will be digital”.

Analog business models, analog thinking, that have formed the basis of who we are as a society are still in place today. In some ways we can force-fit those old order ideas into our new order digital reality, but eventually that old order thinking reveals its age. College professors, church pastors, your 9-5 corporate American cubicle supervisor, the self-help guru you think has some sort of relevance, the old pop psychologist whose heyday was in the last millennium, all these personalities and an endless number more are all struggling to stay relevant against the information that the new order of 2020 confronts them with.

It’s not that these people are luddites. They embrace the technology and the new means of disseminating their craft, their ideas, their ideologies, in the digital age. It’s that their thinking is still mired in the analog age – an age in which ideas were formed on information that was limited to what generations that came before could gather with the means they had available to them then. The ideas of an analog age are what we’re presently trying to force-fit into the new understanding presented to us by this digital age. We enjoy the luxuries, sensations and entertainment that the digital affords us, but we immerse ourselves in it without realizing how our old order thinking defines why we enjoy it. Our analog selves, the product of millennia of evolution, still defines what our digital selves are without realizing the dangers inherent in our engaging with it. As such we get digital addictions – pornography, social media, ‘engagement’ – and we make our analog selves dependent on a digital economy.

How many YouTube content producers rely on their ’side hustle’ revenue to pay their bills today? How many self-published authors have quit their day jobs to write for their new employer, Amazon, today (Amazon owns 86% of the publishing market today). How many former cubicle workers decided it was more lucrative to start an internet business than continue slaving away at a corporate gig that only made their bosses rich? Today, we’ll readily shift to the digital world to sustain us financially – in the end we don’t have much choice – but it’s the old order thinking that pervades this new “reality” and causes problems.

The number one way that couples meet, since 2005, is online. Via Tinder or Match or other net based ways. Gone are the days of boy-meets-girl, eyes fixed on the other across a crowded high school gym dance floor. Gone are the days of meeting your “bride” at church camp. Those are old order romanticisms, and ones that we still want to force fit back into our new order reality. We think in analog, but we live in digital.

Barriers to Entry

Another thing I did at age 15 was play a lot of guitar. My teenage, MTV fueled, mind really had a love for music. The heavier the better. But the barrier to becoming a “Guitar God” like my heroes was something that was very prohibitive at that time. If you wanted to get good; good enough to actually get a band going, you had to seek out a guitar instructor at the local music store who hopefully shared your taste in music. Beyond a once-a-week, 1-hour lesson, you had no other means of learning an instrument than practicing on your own, buying a book of guitar tablature from the music store, or endlessly wearing down a cassette tape by going back over the song you wanted to learn again and again. And all this was the process of learning to play just a song you liked. I had to learn how to compose a song, write some lyrics, form a band, learn to promote it, and somehow figure out how to scrape up enough money to record a demo in a music studio. The barrier to entry was very steep. You had to love the art so much that you would dedicate a good portion of your life to mastering it.

Today I can go on YouTube and find a 9 year old girl in a country I’ve never heard of before play Eruption by Eddie Van Halen, note for note, because she learned it from another YouTube “content provider”. We have far more resources to understand how to be competent in, if not master, virtually anything today than at any other time in history. We have access to the entire world’s aggregate of information in a device that fits in our pocket.

In his book, Mastery, Robert Greene describes how the barriers to entry into previously prohibitive arenas of life are gone in the digital age. And just like the music industry of the 70s through the 90s, old order industries and institutions have had to cope with the restructuring of their businesses and lifestyles as new generations of digital savvy (if not digital thinking) people become competent in, sometimes master, what took them decades of perseverance to master themselves. What we see in this shift is the Barons of the old order media, industries and institutions – who jealously guarded their own knowledge-base – attempting to force-fit their analog thinking into a digital mold.

As a result, conflicts arise. When Über revolutionized the idea of ride-sharing in the digital age, the old order taxi companies enlisted every legal tool in their arsenal to fight the inevitability of their old revenue model disappearing. We see the same scenario play out in everything that can be digital becoming digital now. Even the old order institutions that built their mastery and prosperity on a successful pivot to the digital (the early dot coms) are finding that even newer aspects of the digital now threaten the successes of that initial pivot.

Content is King

Mastery is now easier to attain than at any other time in human history. The old order, analog thinking masters strictly limited teaching their secrets to anyone but the most worthy of apprentices. Those apprentices had to had the most serious dedication to their interests and would likely do menial tasks for much of their apprenticeships just to be in the presence of their mentors. That hard-won mastery is gone in the digital age. That’s not to say that practice and dedication aren’t still necessary for mastery today, but the barriers are largely removed. As a result, we are now encountering a generation of self-appointed “masters” in arenas wherein previously the title of that position of mastery implied respectability. Again, old order thinking predisposes us to believe that if a self-declared master online grants himself a title we should presume he “did the work” to earn that title.

For all this easy access to competency, mastery, information-based skills, what we find lacking is real, valuable content. It’s great that we have access to the tool boxes of old order masters, but what do we build with those tools? Thus far, not very much. Usually those tools build rehashes of old order ideas to be sold as something novel in the digital age. When I’m critical of the Success Porn grifters of this digital age, what I’m really drawing attention to is the reselling of old order, tired ideals. Motivational speakers, new age gurus, self-help “coaches” of today, are really only selling the same old order thinking in a more convenient, more easily disseminated digital method. The content is old. The religion is old. The thinking is old, and it’s thinking that is still firmly rooted in an old order understanding of how the world ought to be based on the limited information set available to the people creating it at that time.

The ease of the digital new order makes us lazy. For all of the access we have now, for all of the information we have, we’ve never been more unmotivated. The process of mastery, the process and dedication needed to attain it, used to contribute to the creative impetus required to use it. Today we’ve never been less creative in our thinking. It’s why we keep returning to old order stories and movie franchises. We just retell the same old order thinking stories in more advanced and colorful ways with the technology of the digital order. But we just repeat ourselves; or we add some social justice twist to stories that were timeless because the art took precedence over any other consideration.

The Red Pill

In the earliest days of the seduction community the forums that sprang up around men looking to get laid was an extension of this old order vs. new order thinking. The internet and conversation forums dedicated to Game, pickup artistry and dating were a predictable application of attempting to solve old order problems (getting laid) with new order information. Men in particular wanted to figure this out, so, as expected, they would coalesce and compare notes across the planet, each sharing their personal experiences with other men. Then further combining that experience with data available from psychology, anthropology, sociology, evolutionary theory and dozens of other related fields of study to provide a global consortium of men with a more accurate database on intersexual dynamics than they’d ever had available to them in any prior era.

Up to this point (I estimate 2001 or so) men had to figure out the dynamics between themselves and what women were becoming since the Sexual Revolution. And most of that “figuring it out” was based on limited information, based on old order thinking. The old challenges of understanding ourselves doesn’t change, but the way we think about those challenges is in constant flux; and that changing has become increasingly more rapid in a global age.

With that change comes conflict with the old order thinking. In terms of the Red Pill, old order thinking manifests itself as Purple Pill regressiveness. Often times the new Red Pill awareness conflicts with the old order thinking that present generations have based their existences on. They refuse to acknowledge the data we have access to now that we didn’t when they were forming beliefs and ideals that would form their personalities and ego-investments. Yes, there are certain timeless truths, but we must hold “common sense” to the same scrutiny we would apply to new ideas in this age. When I identify a person or a concept as Purple Pill this is what I mean by it; usually, it is an old order ideal being force fit to conform to align with new order data.

We desperately want our belief sets, our ideals, to be confirmed by the information we have access to in the digital age. Sometimes this does happen and we feel validated for it, but more often we see that our efforts in building a life according to the old social contract or an old order way of understanding ourselves and the world is invalidated. And this is what either builds us up anew or forces us into stasis in our lives.

The Red Pill has been redefined in many ways on many occasions over the past 20 years to fit the sensibilities of people who really want to give a new validity to whatever pet ideology they think it should apply to. Most of these people have no business calling anything “red pill”, but they’re attracted to the concept as a proxy term for ’truth’.

Initially, in the earliest days of the SoSuave Forums, we used the Matrix analogy to describe how a guy who still believed and still behaved according to his old order understanding (his conditioning) of intersexual dynamics was stuck in his ignorance. The old way of thinking about women – that up to that point was based on limited and largely inaccurate information – was still what a Blue Pill guy would accept as reality. It required a guy to “unplug” himself from that old order-informed way of thinking and transition to a new awareness of intersexual dynamics. Hopefully that guy could live a better life (even save his own life) by using the information in that new order tool box. Thus, we have the Red Pill analogy, but what the Red Pill really describes is exactly the casting off of an old order ignorance in favor of a new order thinking predicated on information we were limited from in prior ages.

We are entering a new, digital Age of Enlightenment. I know a lot of the Manosphere would tell us we’re heading for a new Dark Ages of degeneracy and decay. Enjoy the decline, right? If this is true and we are spiraling to more ignorance, depravity and superstition on a now globalized scale it will be the result of not changing our ways of thinking according to the new data we have access to today. It’s never been easier to become what we want to become today, but with that facility comes lethargy, a lack of creativity and insight, and self-gratifying sedation. Just because we’ve been enlightened by this new, globalizing knowledge-base doesn’t mean we know how to apply it.

If we do enter a decline it will be the result of an inability to unplug from a comforting old order way of thinking.

This essay is from an abridged preview of my upcoming book The Rational Male – Religion.

January 29, 2019January 29, 2019

State of the Manosphere 2018

Tonight at 10pm eastern my State of the Manosphere address goes live. I’ll be answering question in real time in the chat, but once this is up and on the 21 Convention You Tube channel I’ll be answering Q&A primarily on the comment thread of this post.

As I’ve mentioned in my last few posts, much of what I predicted to come for the next two years, with respect to our gender politics landscape, has come to pass far sooner than I expected. I fully expect the 2019 Super Bowl advertising to be a parade of misandrous hate directed at what the Feminine Imperative perceives as their ideological and political enemies – conventionally masculine men.

Furthermore, the scope of the APA’s guidelines about masculinity is revealing itself to be much more extensive with respect to ideological purity than any real science.

The APA ruling ‘traditional’ masculinity as a psychological disorder is also proving itself to be a part of a much larger coordinated attack on who the #resistance and #MeToo believe will be their primary opposition in the coming election cycle. The Gillette agitprop video and the PETA video were only the opening salvos to build the groundwork against conventional masculinity. I’ve seen damn near every article decrying ‘toxic’ masculinity since the beginning of the new year refer to the APA guidelines as a kind of Papal bull for their believers. Expect to see more media use this as a basis for their further demonizing men as we move into the election cycle.

Speaking of which, in the first 3 weeks of 2019 we’ve also seen an almost entirely female set of candidates declare themselves as running for their party’s nomination. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Karen Gillibrand, and a few others couldn’t wait for the clock to strike midnight on December 31st, 2018. This was also something I alluded to in our December 29th episode of The Red Man Group; a vagina will be a prerequisite for consideration for the Democratic nomination in 2020.

Anyway, those were just a few things I saw coming last Fall. Let me know what you think about this talk. A lot of convention attendees told me it was one of my best. I hope you think so too.

November 16, 2018

Positive Masculinity – Now on Audible

Okay, okay, spare me the ‘better late than never’ jokes. The third installment of The Rational Male series – Positive Masculinity – is now available for purchase and download from Amazon / Kindle. The book is once again narrated by Sam ‘The Voice’ Botta and as with the other two books I’m sharing the royalties with him to help him with his absolutely insane medical expenses due to his injuries sustained from his hit & run “accident”.

The book logs in at 23.7 hours and is presently $29.99. A lot of work has gone into making this title the best we could make it. In addition to Sam’s medical challenges ACX / Amazon has really stepped up their quality assurances requirements with respect to the audio quality. We went through several rounds of edits and approvals, but the end result is really something worth the wait I think. In audio time alone this book exceeds The Rational Male.

Now, all that said, and with the time and effort we put into this title I need to ask my readers & listeners a special favor. If you are starting a new Audible subscription with this audio book, it is imperative that you use the link here to start your sub.

The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity

In August Amazon/ACX altered the bounty payment structure they have with their content providers, authors and narrators. Prior to August of 2018 content providers were guaranteed $50 per each new subscription. Essentially Amazon rewarded it’s best authors for helping them create what is now the biggest self-publishing monopoly ever known, and authors could rely on the popularity of Amazon to help promote their own work. As of August, all this changed and not for the better. Now ACX pays a bounty of $75 per subscription, which on the surface seems like a great deal, but now authors/narrators only get that bounty if the sale comes exclusively through this affiliate link – the one I’ve posted here.

This isn’t a big deal for most low-volume self-publishing authors, but it’s a huge deal for authors (like me) who sell a good number of audio books because this is primarily how men consume Red Pill media. Men tend to like listening above reading this material. They listen on their commutes to work and in the gym when they’re working out. I’ve always stressed purchasing the print copy; it’s not as ‘deleteable’ as the digital versions, it can be passed on to men who need the books and a lot of men tend to highlight and liner-note their well-worn copies. That’s great and it’s exactly what I always intended. However, my subscriptions bounties for Audible went from about 160 per month to around 20 now that this new program – which is being sold to authors as a big advantage – went into effect.

This affiliate link switch has also been applied to all my titles, so if you’re looking to start a new subscription with The Rational Male or Preventive Medicine please use these links. I’ve also switched the links to the Audible files in my side bar too.

For more info on this please read this article: ACX The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

All that said, please pick up the Audible version and let me know what you think about the audiobook here in the comments.

Thanks Sam, and thanks to all of you who make this and all my projects possible.

Rollo Tomassi

June 29, 2018

The Advantages of Now

As of this writing my second talk at last year’s 21 Convention is now available for free public viewing on 21 University. I worked this ‘talk’ a bit differently as you’ll see. I find that I can address what most of my readers are concerned with most in and open discussion rather than my delivering a sermon from the stage. I think I’m more comfortable with this as I’ve been aggregating information with other men in a forum style discourse for so long. My time at SoSuave really taught me the value of that back and forth exchange of information, and it’s really what led to so much of the material I’ve covered on the blog for almost 7 years now.

For the sake of clarity, this talk was the second I did and took place a day after my first, Hypergamy, Micro to Macro. I had originally intended to cover aspects of my third book, Positive Masculinity, since it had been released about 2 months prior. I had an extensive lecture all ready to go, but I decided to switch up my talk that morning. The day and night before I had gotten into at least 8 different “sub-conferences” with spontaneous groups of about a dozen guys that went on for any where between 20 minutes to an hour. It occurred to me then that the best way to address my topic would be to have an open discussion about masculinity with the guys I was talking to just a few ours before.

As much as I liked the first talk – and I still feel understanding Hypergamy in its entirety is a keystone element in understanding intersexual dynamics – I think this talk was much more personal. I’ve always felt that the Red Pill should remain ‘open source’ and be an aggregate of the experience of men from all over the world. To this end I’ll always feel that a roundtable discussion style is the best way to encourage men not just to put in their two cents, but also as the best way for men to learn. I am first a writer and then a speaker, but my speaking will always be better when a man is expressing his concerns, problems, critiques and experiences within a group of men focused on untangling Red Pill awareness. I’m always humbled when an interviewer calls me one of the Godfathers of the Red Pill, but the truth is there is no father of the Red Pill. For as much as some writers would like us to believe they fathered the manosphere, Red Pill awareness is the result of a consortium of men who came together, offered their input to the whole and made it something greater than it was before.

I got to watch both my talks before the post-production and release, and while I was reviewing them it occurred to me how fortunate this generation is to have access to such information today. I’m from a generation that didn’t have the internet when I was in my early 20s. There were no Game Gurus and the only “how to pick up girls” books we’re only available from mail order ads you found in the back of a Penthouse or Hustler magazine. I did read Why Men Are The Way They Are by Dr. Warren Farrell in 1993, but other than that book there was nothing about the nature of women that would ever be published by the major publishing houses then.

After I reviewed my video here I watched a TED talk given by Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, and in it he recounted all of the dead end jobs and life experience he’d accrued up to around 1996 when a friend of his fronted him $30,000 to keep him going while he wrote the book. He’d always wanted to be a writer, but until the mid 2000s publishing was locked by a monopoly of a handful of ‘traditional’ publishing houses. Even the 48 Laws of Power had to get past their review processes. Now I think Robert Greene is one of the greatest minds of our time in his articulating power dynamics, I attempted to model my own writer’s voice on his example, but there was a time when anything resembling Red Pill awareness or truths that would be less than flattering to the status quo would never have seen the light of day. Print on demand and digital publishing (eBooks) wasn’t even a dream at that time, but today we take them for granted.

I never had a childhood dream of being an author, writing is just something I’ve always done as one more outlet for my creativity. I never thought I’d be a published author of one book, much less three. Nor did I imagine I’d have audio versions of them (book 3 is coming soon Sam promises). But now is the time. With digital publishing anyone can be an author so long as their ‘content’ is good.

We are living in an era in which certain things we take for granted are the only time in history that they could occur. That might sound self-evident, but think about it; our technology today is such that certain ideas that could never have been brought into popular consciousness could only be considered because of that technology. We have an advantage of now. It’s kind of humbling in a way – having witnessed the transition from a time when all of the dynamics we invested so much of ourselves in then are now made common, cheapened in some cases, and the legitimacy of having earned them is lessened as a result.

In my rock star 20s it took 4-5 months of all of the guys in my band to scrape together enough money to pay for a 3 song demo tape (no CDs for us then) in a recording studio, and that was with us having friends in the industry. Today I can do everything that very expensive studio could on my iMac. I have tools now to create the dreams I’ve had since I was in high school, but the challenge is no long the access, but the ideas themselves. We live in an age when access to the tools and means of creation has never been greater, but the ideas, the imagination, the abstract unrefined concepts is what I think is lacking today. We can produce masterpieces of music in our homes, but today music is only getting worse.

I’ve seen videos of brilliant instrumentalist virtuosos on YouTube. Kids not older than ten playing complex pieces of music they learned and absorbed themselves online, yet few could actually create an original song with any expressiveness themselves.

We also live in an age where access to information has never been more ubiquitous. We have access to the knowledge of all human history in a device that we can put in our pocket, yet we’re still too lazy to actually use the search feature or cite an easily had source. We have a connectivity today that spans the globe, yet we readily factionalize and atomize our social networks according to ideological biases.

A lot of this disconnect from real genius, from true creativity, I want to chalk up to the constant distractions we’re bombarded with daily. It’s really the price we pay for having unlimited access to information and the tools of creation. Paraphrasing the late Chris Cornell, there are no more writers like Shakespeare because all he had was a table, a candle, a pen and some paper. Today, learning to avoid distractions and focus on a single task is an art itself, but there’s another reason for this lack of honest genius and that is we’re gradually seeing a new generation of men and women who are themselves the product of a social order that has never known a time or condition where this access didn’t exist.

I think it was Dave Grohl who said something like kids today think rock stars are generated from talent shows on TV. Even with all the easy access to creative expression there’s still this idea that the process is somehow out of their control.

So why am I freestyling this post just to introduce my next talk video? Because I want my readers to get some insight about the radical nature of the information that the Red Pill presents today. I’ve written essays about how the 1990s really represented the pinnacle of the Feminine Imperative’s social influence. This was due to the limitations of information inherent in that time. In those essays I wanted to stress just how influential the Imperative was on western culture, but more importantly just how ignorant we were of ever perceiving it then. Today, the jig is up.

The internet has exposed the influences of feminism and it’s opened up a dialog – one that the controllers of the means of it would like to censor – in which it can no longer hide its true intent. The nature of women, the mechanics of intersexual dynamics, the good, the bad and the ugly of everything the Red Pill makes us aware of is increasingly expanding. It’s expanding so much that I fear we’re reaching a point where the means to explore new ideas in the ‘sphere are being limited by the means itself.

When you watch this video, any Red Pill aware video, when you read the latest essay here or anywhere else, keep in the back of your mind that knowing this information is only possible in this time. I wrote Preventive Medicine in response to men telling me how they’d wished they’d had this information back when they were younger and didn’t know better so they could make better, informed decisions. The truth is that the information I’ve been spreading since 2002 could only be realized in this age. Some will say, “yeah, but ancient scholars (and deified psychologists) knew this stuff a long time ago”, to which I’ll say ‘no, they didn’t’. Not to the extent we do today. Not with the degree of accuracy we know now. Only now is this possible, and only later will we have an even greater understanding of the Red Pill – for better or worse.

You are fortunate to be here in the now. Some of what you’re made aware of will frustrate and anger you, some of it will depress you and some of it will bring you to that “Ah Ha!” moment. The Red Pill can enlighten you or stifle you, but you are better off knowing it now in an age where this is finally possible.

August 22, 2017August 22, 2017

The Best of The Rational Male – Year Six

Last weekend (August 19th) this blog entered into its seventh year, and once more it’s time to do the blog retrospective.

The Books

First and foremost last month I released the third installment in the books’ series, The Rational Male – Positive Masculinity. It’s about a month since its release now and I’ll admit it’s already exceeded my hopes and expectations. I know, everyone says that, but as I’ve learned, most authors struggle to match their earlier successes.

While this is still true of the first book (it still stands as the best seller and most popular) Positive Masculinity seems to resonate quite well with readers. I’ll admit I had some hesitation about focusing a quarter of the book on Red Pill Parenting, but this, it turns out, is exactly what’s catapulted it to a best seller in the Fatherhood and Parenting Boys sections on Amazon. For the initial four and a half weeks the book has held the number one best seller rank in Fatherhood and the number two and number five spot in Parenting Boys. And for the first week and a half it held the number one best seller spot in Self Help.

At the risk of sounding like I’m glossing myself here, this is an incredible response when you consider the impact this book, written from a Red Pill perspective, might have in a mainstream reading world. It’s a great honor, but also a bit scary considering the social backlash of recent events. All the books continue to make inroads with men (and women) unfamiliar with Red Pill awareness, but the response to Positive Masculinity has been very promising so far. That said, the book is about much more than just parenting – which also adds to its overall appeal – so I’m hoping it will open some new eyes with regards to Red Pill awareness.

As things stand today, Sam Botta is finishing up the reading and mixing of the second book, Preventive Medicine. Sam is still struggling with medical complications due to his hit and run injuries (I’ll let him explain them in the comments), but the hope is still to have the Audible version of book two available in time for the 21 Convention at the end of September. For the audio of Positive Masculinity I’m still deciding as to whether I’ll do the read myself for this one, but my goal is to have it available in Q1 of 2018.

I should also add that the first book has seen its second retranslation. Beginning in Q4 The Rational Male will be available in Polish as well as the previous Korean version. I get a lot of readers asking for translations into Spanish and German (possibly Dutch too). This will be a priority for me in the coming year, so if you are a translator or know one who would like to partner with me to publish these translations please leave me a message on my About page.

Finally, I do have plans in the works to do a re-edit of the first book to address syntax, grammar and spelling issues. Contextually nothing will change, but once this revision is done I’ll be publishing a hardback version of The Rational Male through Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing format.

Blog Traffic

The blog continues to grow with regard to audience. 2016 had a slight decline from the previous year, and 2017 is on track to eclipse it, but the reach of The Rational Male still continues to grow.

I know Alexa.com isn’t the best metric, but it’s largely what most bloggers in the Manosphere use. These are the stats as of August 22, 2017 and I daresay these rankings are respectable for a Red Pill blog that’s never been monetized or advertised in six years. These numbers put me in good company amongst the most notable writers in the ‘sphere (as well as a few Purple Pill ‘life coaches’) and the blog continues to average just under half a million views per month. My general focus for the blog has always been as a delivery device for the message of Red Pill awareness, Game fundamentals and the unmoderated debate of intersexual dynamics. I’m pleased to see that in six years this discussion has proceeded in the same vein for all of them. Furthermore, I find it very encouraging when I’m told by Manosphere outsiders that The Rational Male is the best (sometimes their only) source for rational debate about Red Pill awareness and intersexual dynamics. I am not now, nor will I ever be interested in a Red Pill echo chamber/hug box and for six years the comment section has proven to be a ‘hot kitchen’ in which both critics and advocates can (largely) hash out the Red Pill details.

A lot has been made of free speech advocacy in the ‘sphere for a few years now. My stand has always been one about the free exchange of ideas. The only way an idea’s strength and merit can be tested is in the crucible of open debate. There are a great many Manosphere celebrities banging the gong about free speech who nonetheless block, edit and censor opinions they disagree with on their own forums. One purpose that this blog has is a free and open debate and (with the exception of spam and blatant trolling) will always be open to counterarguments.

The 21 Convention

As most of my regular readers are aware, I’ll be making my only in-person appearance at this year’s 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida, September 28 through October 1st. For more information on this event have a look at my rundown of it here. Furthermore, I’ve done a couple of interviews with 21 Convention founder Anthony Johnson about my participation and the talks I’ll be giving here and here.

If you haven’t made plans or purchased a weekend ticket I would encourage you to do so soon. The convention is getting close to being sold out, but if you have some issue with cost or you have some kind of hardship consideration and you really want to go, please contact myself or Anthony and we’ll work something out for you.

It bears repeating that I was less than enthusiastic about appearing not just publicly, but at this convention in particular. It’s always been my impression that the 21 Convention was a collection of largely Purple Pill dating coaches and not really in line with what (sometimes ugly) Red Pill awareness reveals to men. However, I’ve come to change my view of this convention in light of Anthony’s much more Red Pill focused line up for this 10th anniversary meet up. I’ll admit I had a hand in helping Anthony get what will amount to a Red Pill summit arranged. I really think this weekend will be a seminal event for Red Pill aware men and it’s my hope it will be something to help men change their lives.

This then is my very brief rundown of the 2016-2017 year for The Rational Male.

So here’s what I thought represents the best posts from year 6.

Let me know what your favorites were in the comments and let me know how TRM has helped you this year.

With humility and gratitude,

Rollo Tomassi

THE BEST OF THE RATIONAL MALE 2017

Interviews

Live with Obsidian & Alan Roger Currie

Mark Baxter, Ed Latimore & Rollo Tomassi

Anthony Johnson & Rollo Tomassi

Christian McQueen & Rollo Tomassi

Mark Baxter & Rollo Tomassi