rollo tomassi rational male

State of the Manosphere 2018

On October 12th, 2018 I delivered what a lot of men told me was the best speech I’ve ever given. I worked really hard on collecting my thoughts and observations of the manosphere, but I’m afraid I’m really not much of a speechwriter. My initial intent was to write a full analysis of the state of the manosphere – as requested by Anthony Johnson and a few others – and then give an impassioned reading of it.

I couldn’t do it. It seemed kind of stale to me to just read what was really a much better essay than a speech. The night before my time to speak I decided to distill the ‘essay’ down to my key points and use them as a roadmap for what I wanted to convey. I’m actually very good at digital media. I’ve been a designer and art director for most of my professional life. I could very easily have whipped up a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote, but for this I want to connect with the audience face to face and distraction free. So I went old school and fell back on my trusty flash cards and notebooks, and then went up to speak from the heart rather than read from my head.

But damn it, I worked hard on my speech/essay. Anyone at the 21 Convention who saw me in the mornings prior to my speech probably saw me, nose in laptop, at the breakfast buffet working on the guts of it. Since it never made it to the podium in whole I thought I would polish it up a little bit for you here and let you in on what my thinking behind the speech was like. This is not the speech I gave at the convention, but it is the thought process behind it.

One key element of my talk was the SWOT analysis I did of the future of the manosphere going forward. This is the only part I’m omitting from this essay because I’d rather it not get confused with the actual talk. And that talk, by the way, will be forthcoming either this month or January of 2019 courtesy of the 21 Convention. I will make a blog announcement when the video becomes available. For now, this is the work behind that talk.

Good morning gentlemen.

There’s a lot I want to cover today, but before I do I wanted to let a few people know how honored I am to once again be here to relate with you all.

First and foremost, I want to thank my friend and co-host of the Red Man Group, Anthony Johnson. With out Anthony there is no 21 Convention, but most importantly I want to thank him for believing in what I alway hoped this convention could be. The 21 Convention has become what I believed would be necessary a while ago. There was a point right after I began to see how my first book, The Rational Male, was being received that I knew how needed an event like this would be.

If you read me on Twitter or you’re a fan of my blog you’ll know I’ve developed a reputation for predicting the future. I joke around about it, but one of my quotes is “I hate being right all the time”. I’ll tell you now, I don’t actually have super powers to predict the future. However, I like to think I’m fairly adept at seeing trends and recognizing patterns. I knew there would need to be some sort of Red Pill Summit. The manosphere was expanding then, as it continues to today and something would need to develop if the message was to expand with it.

As most of you know, I’m not a fan of seminars; particularly now. The motivational speaking and the self-help industry has exploded with the rise of the internet – and with that the number of gurus intent on cashing in on the insecurities of others (mostly young men, the ‘Lost Boys’ generation) has exploded too. I knew then that I didn’t want to have anything to do with 21st century snake oil reheated to be relevant in today’s age. So whatever this Red Pill Summit would be, I knew I wanted to avoid the selling of good-vibes. It needed to be real, and that meant taking chances.

When I met Anthony I was skeptical. 

That’s a nice way of saying I thought his old format was essentially nine years of Purple Pill seminars which were exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid in a Red Pill summit. So I turned him down that first time. To his credit, Anthony wasn’t put off by that. He had every reason to be, but he’d had his life changed by my own work, was becoming Red Pill Aware and he was determined to take the chance on radically shifting the direction of the ‘old’ 21 Convention toward something that had more substance than just being an advertisement for some over-priced non-credentialed ‘coaching. So we looked to find the right men to create this summit.

This year, and with this roster of men, that idea for a Red Pill summit is finally coming to fruition. So, I want to also thank all of you, the people who believe in this venture, the people who work hard to make it possible and the men who make this convention a priority to attend. 

All of this might seem like a long winded way of telling the story of this new convention, but I snuck in a lot of the key points I’ll be addressing today. It’s an important story to tell because not enough men really understand what it is they’re a part of today. I’ve been part of what we call the manosphere since its inception. Now that’s not me trying to establish red pill street credit; it’s to say that I was a part of what’s now known as the manosphere from the beginning. But it’s important to look back on where we came from to understand where we’re going.

I’ve been called The Godfather of the Red Pill. I’ve been called one of the three ‘R’s of the manosphere – Roosh, Roissy and Rollo – and while this is still an honor for me, it’s also a reminder of who I am, what I’ve become and how this community has shaped me and the millions of men who’ve “unplugged” from the Matrix of a feminine-primary social order. 

I don’t relish the role of being the manopshere’s chronicler, but I understand why it’s necessary, so I accept it. I would much rather be connecting dots and developing ideas to consider about what we call intersexual dynamics and the true Red Pill. But that term, “The Red Pill”, has become bastardized to serve as an ad-hoc brand for many pet ideologies and personal beliefs recently. I don’t care to talk about the manosphere – I would rather be doing the real work – but I’m one of the few men who have the history to do so accurately.

As the manosphere expands and more men are drawn to this tribe the need to accurately know where we’ve come from is more important. Even I fall into the trap of assuming that men just come equipped with a foreknowledge of Red Pill history and a grasp of the fundamentals of Red Pill awareness. When Anthony and I, and later Rich Cooper, started the Red Man Group podcast I quickly became aware of the need to go back over the basic Red Pill 101 for men who have become a part of the tribe. 

I also became aware that if I didn’t step up to tell the real story of the Red Pill that it would be told for us by others who see this community as a convenient niche to exploit and to twist to their messages.

So, here I am. 

What is the Manosphere?

For as much as the mainstream would like to demonize it, the manosphere is really a collection of the minds of men. The manosphere is a Gestalt. That’s going to be an important word going forward here. A Gestalt is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. And there are many parts of the manosphere.

For some, the manosphere is a convenient collection of like-minded men who share a common ideology. This is where the mainstream gets the idea that the manosphere is a gathering of misogynists. To our ideological opponents any collection of men, no matter the intent, is always suspect of misogyny. We’ll get back to misogyny later, but even a gathering of 200 of us here, no matter our purpose, is enough to make a feminine-primary social order very nervous. 

To them, men gathered together has dangerous implications. 

Keep this point in mind; it is a means of control over the Gestalt Masculine.

The primary strength of the ‘sphere is that we are a consortium of men’s experiences. We are gestalt; an aggregate of men who’ve come together to share, debate, to improve, to fight and to agree or disagree on the realistic state of men everywhere –  all based on observations, empirical evidence and commonality among all men’s collected experiences.

Usually a man’s first experience with the manosphere is through his becoming Red Pill aware. I mean this in the sense of intersexual dynamics. I know the “Red Pill” has been bastardized to mean whatever ideological or political bent a person may have, but this isn’t where the term originated. Men generally find the ‘sphere because they want to improve their understanding of women. 

Some become so distraught that they’re on the brink of suicide.

It may be from a life long confusion about the decisions they’ve made with women; a girlfriend, a wife, an Ex. What they find in the manosphere is answers. Maybe they find the works of any number of the men speaking here today. Maybe they find MGTOW, or the Men’s Rights Movement. 

Maybe they find the Red Pill forum on Reddit (or maybe not today since the forum is still quarantined). 

Maybe they discover more of the same in Purple Pill hacks – life coaches – who are feeding them just enough Red Pill awareness to them so that it seems novel. 

Or maybe they find my blog and books.

Regardless, each of them is looking for a means to improve their lives. We don’t advertise in the manosphere. Not much anyway. The Red Pill, by its nature, is something that a man has to be looking for. Anyone who’s ever tried to “red pill” his friend or brother to help them avoid a life-ruining decision knows what I mean. It’s an unfortunate truth that men are often Zeroed Out and at their lowest when they become most open to introspection.

Men are often looking to understand women, but this eventually becomes an education in understanding themselves. It’s never enough to simply learn some PUA techniques. Game is integral to a Red Pill awakening in a man, but it is an incomplete act without internalizing the truths that the practice of Game reveals to men. As men learn about the nature of women they also come to realize why they did what they did, and why men do what they do. I often have men tell me how they wished they had the knowledge of the Red Pill before they made some debilitating decisions in their lives. 

And this is what I’m talking about.

Eventually the man who just wanted to learn enough Game to get his ‘dream girl’ interested in him, that guy comes to see that solving the problem of himself is the key to that challenge and so many more. 

It leads to him seeking mastery of himself.

Men unplug from their life-long Blue Pill conditioning, but in doing so they come to question more than just their conditioning. They question what they’ve been taught to think of themselves. That self-revelation is often a very rough experience for men who’ve invested so much of themselves in a paradigm set against them.

The Red Pill, the manosphere, saves lives in a literal sense. As my friend Pat Campbell has related, men are living today as a result of their having read my work and the works of others. The manosphere is a vital community that not only saves men’s lives, but it points them to a better one. The Red Pill is a set of tools for men to use to improve their lives. It is not a set of rules or a formula for guaranteed success. It is a map to follow while you make your own path as a man. It is concrete, evidence based, and always open for debate among the tribe that is the manosphere.

As the manosphere has evolved there have been various subsets of the community that have hived-off to form their own sub-tribes. I could probably devote entire talks to just these sub-groups. But the nature of men is tribal. Not to steal any thunder from Jack Donovan, but it is in men’s nature to form tribes and coalitions of like men. No matter what a certain misguided pop-psychologist would tell us about individualism, men evolved to be stronger within tribes. The manosphere itself is a tribe and within that tribe sub-tribes will establish themselves.

As I mentioned earlier, restricting men from gathering as a tribe, cutting those tribes off from communicating, is one way a gynocentric social order exercises control over the Gestalt Masculine. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that women feel an obsessive need to either join and assimilate, or outright destroy male-exclusive (Male Space) organizations while insisting on the gender-exclusivity of their own, look no further than their instinctive, base understanding of male tribalism. Together we grow stronger, we test each other, we form pacts and coalitions, we collaborate in ways that challenge what I call the Feminine Imperative. And the largest gestalt of that Feminine Imperative is now what we refer to as the Gynocracy.

In the beginning of the Red Pill, in the beginning of what’s now the manosphere, the Gestalt of masculinity, was beneath the notice of our feminine-primary social order. 

We were – and sometimes still are – “those small-dick losers who don’t know how women work”. We were dismissed as Incels (now re-popularized), misogynists, neck-beards, or “dude-bros”. It was the convenient ridicule stage. And that was made all the easier by the decades of masculine ridicule in sit-com deliberate misunderstandings about masculinity that began in the early 70s.

Now things have changed. 

The manosphere has evolved into something that’s much more of a threat to the Gynocracy. Once Trump defeated Hillary, the stakes were raised. I’m not here to debate politics, but the gender landscape has undeniably, unignorably, altered in the two years since a hyper-masculinized man put down the bid of a hyper-gynocentrist female-supremacist woman for the presidency she believed she was entitled to. We didn’t witness Trump defeat Hillary, we witnessed HIM defeat HER. The Gestalt Masculine prevailed over the sure-thing, “her turn” presumed victory of the Gestalt Feminine.

Gender Warfare

Do you understand what I’m saying? 

This was the first test in a larger gender war that was to come. And make no mistake, we are in a gender war today. 

Granted, it is a cold-war at this stage, but the Gestalt Masculine is at war with the gestalt feminine today. Both those gestalts found their perfect embodiment respectively in Trump and Hillary. This defeat gave rise to what is called the #resistance. The ‘resistance’ is another name for the Gestalt Feminine; replete with “allies” (Vichy Male collaborators), sloganeering (The Future is Female) and uniforms (Pink Pussy Hats).

You can witness this resistance, the Gestalt Feminine, in every Women’s March, in every face wearing a pink pussy hat, in every ludicrous new, weaponized, MeToo allegation that strips men of their basic civil rights not in a court of law, but in the court of social media. 

There are more manifestations of this Gestalt Feminine than I have time to list in this talk, but each has the express purpose of destroying conventional masculinity. It is no longer enough to inconvenience men or to spray paint “smash the patriarchy” on a stall in the women’s bathroom. The true intent is now unmasked, and that is the systematic removal of ALL masculinity.

“Men need to be actively disadvantaged for equality to be achieved” 

These were the words I read on a college chalkboard not too long ago. This is the sentiment that’s become normalized. This generation sees the advantage of a cover story like “equality” as if it were a nuisance today. They almost begrudgingly speak about equalism as if it’s the necessary wink and a nod before they move on to how justified the Gestalt Feminine is in disadvantaging men in the name of equality. But we’re expected to know that ‘achieving equality’ is the backstory to systematically removing men from all narratives. In a feminine-correct social order men should already know this is a facade, but go along with it anyway.

Today, we’re moving past the questions of whether or not the Gestalt Feminine should care about issues of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. That was a nice distraction, but making a distinction between the two is important, if only insofar as who you’re debating it with actually has the capacity to change their minds about anything. The Gestalt Feminine wants what it wants, like the sum total of all the Ids of women who believe in anything they’ve ever seen, heard or read about their own oppression.

Never in human history has there been such polarization between the sexes. In our contemporary gender landscape the Gestalt Male is the openly declared enemy of the Gestalt Female. And no one raises an eyebrow about it.

This isn’t how we would have it, because it’s my belief that the sexes are far better off as complements to the other. We can be, we have been, better together than adversarial of each other.

But any issue of gender conflict, any slight, any instance when a woman’s power may be challenged, any time a man might dare to raise a questioning awareness of an issue that is uniquely concerned with men is when the collective awareness of the Gestalt Feminine is roused into action.

I’ve called this phenomenon The Sisterhood Über Alles – the sisterhood above all other considerations. Before religion, before race, before political stripe, what benefits the Feminine Imperative is the prime directive of womankind.

As a result of continually feeding this beast we find ourselves in a state of sexual polarization that has gotten so bad that even “woke” male-feminists are now viewed as “stealth misogynists”. The stereotypical Nice Guy isn’t ‘nice’ anymore, he’s an operative that’s trying to fool women’s Hypergamous filters. The old trope of men getting in touch with one’s feminine side is now viewed with suspicion. Why would a man be motivated to identify with the feminine if not to use it to his manipulative advantage? Identifying with the female is almost more distrusted than openly Gaming women today.

You are never a ‘man’ to the resistance. To call you a man would be too old school patriarchal and aggrandizing. “Man” is reserved for the Alpha men women want to fuck. No, you are just an ‘ally’ and even then you’re only an ally so long as you remain useful. When that usefulness ceases, when you serve your purpose and look for approval from your mistress, when you hope to enjoy some reciprocal intimacy in return fo desired behavior, there’s now a new and much improved social convention ready made to remove you from the resistance.

My Twitter feed is littered with stories sent to me about infamous celebrity male-feminists who are now facing MeToo allegations. We don’t even call them misconduct allegation now – MeToo is synonymous with rape, harassment, even social missteps. 

To get “me too’d” is now a verb.

Segregation

The mistrust this war is engendering, is leading to a new form of gender segregation. In some orthodox churches it’s customary for the sexes to be separated in worship. Being the intelligent, evolved progressives we are, we call this segregation barbaric or demeaning of women. Yet MeToo is leading to a similar, more stringent form of segregation in our workplaces, in our social engagements and now even coming full circle back to the church. But this segregation isn’t about honoring old ways of religion, it’s based on distrust of women who now possess an immediate means to the personal destruction of men. 

So we cordon ourselves off from women for fear that we might say something that could be interpreted in an unintended way – not by a court of law, but the court of social media. We don’t fear the expense of an actual court case, we fear the far more expensive costs of having our bread, our reputations and our capacity to make a future living taken from us by the court of social media and the politics of wanton personal destruction.

These are some things I feel we need to wrap our heads around before I consider where the manosphere is going next. Because, in essence, this state, these conditions will guide this tribe into the future.

The mainstream is controlled by the Gestalt Feminine today. In our present gender Cold War that Gestalt is looking for a concrete enemy to fight. The Sisterhood Über Alles united behind blocking the nomination of Bret Kavanaugh recently and with that straw man enemy behind them they are now looking for a concrete enemy to unite against today. My fear, gentlemen, is that the manosphere will become the face of the enemy the resistance so desperately needs as a focus for its anger.

Lets face it, we’re the antithesis of what the Gestalt feminine would teach men they should be. We resist their unending efforts to contain conventional masculinity. We are the last line in keeping that male-defined masculinity viable. We’re an easy enemy to vent on, and the more we continue to grow, the more we will be that focus. The mainstream wants crazy and the manosphere is a made-for-TV villain that looks a lot like the people Women’s Studies professors tell their students it’s OK to hate.

How do we, the men of this tribe, define what we call the manosphere?

I’ve always made it a point to never directly involve myself in issues of politics, religion or race on The Rational Male. The only time I address such topics is when they cross over into issues of intersexual dynamics. Now I see just how much cross over there really is.

They say everything is about sex except sex; sex is about power. Think about that in the context of today’s gender Cold War.

If we do not define the manosphere it will certainly be defined for us by others who only see it as a niche market to exploit. The manosphere will fall prey to the Brand of Me. The Success Porn gurus, the Cassie Jayes, the Purple Pill Life Coaches, the Men’s Rights Movement – even Vichy male organizations like The Good Man Project or We Are Man Enough will claim an authority over the manosphere that they’ve never merited all in order to build their own brands.

And I’ll leave you with this as a primer for the rest of my State of the Manosphere talk I delivered at the 21 Convention, October 12th, 2018.

Body Language

I have a feeling I’m going to get myself in trouble with this post. One thing I’ve learned from sixteen years of writing in the manosphere is that people take the issue of Looks are very personally. I think there’s something engrained in how our minds evolved to make us aware of where we fit in as far as image is concerned. I think maybe that’s the root of where we get the idea of leagues with respect to sexual market value. I’ve mentioned before that it’s my belief that everyone is keenly aware of their personal conditions on some level of consciousness and how we look to others is part of that awareness.

My friend Tanner Guzy wrote a great book this year titled The Appearance of Power and I learned quite a bit from it with respect to the, often derided, subconscious choices we make in how we present ourselves to others. A lot goes into what we think is the very simple task of dressing ourselves each day and the message we’re conveying to other men, women, our families, our coworkers, our church, etc. We all have at least a peripheral awareness of what we’re communicating with our clothes, our behaviors and our speech.

Another great book I’m presently reading is the new title from Joe Navarro, The Dictionary of Body Language. Joe was one of the speakers at last year’s 21 Convention and I had the pleasure of talking with him for a bit there. For 25 years he worked as an FBI special agent in the area of counterintelligence and behavioral assessment. Today he is one of the world’s leading experts on nonverbal communications and this book is a very good resource for a lot of reasons. I’m not sure Joe likes being affiliated with the manosphere, but there’s no doubt that what he’s studied and written about for so long can be an invaluable tool for reading the sub-communications of women in Game applications. 

Way back in 2011 I wrote a brief essay called Learn to Read. At that time my focus was on emphasizing the need to be aware of the information a guy could glean from his surroundings, understanding the social environment and also the sub-communications a woman might be relaying to him in that moment. We tend to take it for granted, but there is a lot of information our brains need to process in social settings. For the most part our subconscious minds push out the background noise and less important information to our peripheral awareness so our conscious minds can focus on what we think is most important. Sometimes the part we take for granted, the information that our subconscious processes can be at least as important as what our consciousness is sorting out.

I’m calling attention to this process (as well as Joe’s work) because I want to stress the importance our Instinctual Process plays in interpreting what we see with respect to social interactions, but more importantly for our purposes, when we see men and women interact with one another. For the past 12 years my career in the liquor and gaming industries has put me in the unique position of being able to people-watch and study the unspoken communications that goes on between men and women in settings where they’re primed to apply their interpersonal skills (or lack of). However, it wasn’t until I started contrasting what I was seeing with what I understood about behavioral psychology, evo-psych and the sexual strategies men and women evolved for.

And this, this is the part where I get myself in trouble. In that time I think I’ve developed a pretty good ability to read what men and women are communicating with their clothing, expressions, posture, physical positioning, etc. and interpreting it with a Red Pill Lens. I get in trouble with this because, like I said, people tend to take my reading into things very personally. Even if I’m reading the photograph of a couple they know nothing about they associate something in the image that with how they perceive themselves.

Most of us were taught from an early age never to “judge a book by its cover.” We were taught it’s wrong to be judgmental and it’s what’s on the inside that counts. This has never really sat well with me, but you run the risk of sounding catty when you judge a person by their looks or whatever it is they’re doing in a picture. They say you sound like a gossipy woman, or else it’s supposedly some indication that you’re projecting your own insecurities onto whoever it is you might be critical of. This is unfortunate because our Instinctual interpretive process makes judgment calls all the time in our peripheral awareness. We all make comparisons in our hindbrains, it’s just impolite to give voice to them. This does nothing to help us objectively assess what sub-communications are taking place.

So, fair warning, I’m going to make some reads on some pictures here and if what I interpret seems a little self-serving or judgmental just know that I’m doing my best to stay objective.

For the past 3 months I’ve gotten into the habit of reading the images of various couples that guys on Twitter have been sending me. If you want a brief primer for this I talked about it with Tim Wenger last August here. For the most part these guys wanted me to determine what they were seeing were Alpha Tells or Beta Tells in the body language between the couple. In the majority of these shots, the Beta male body language was fairly evident even to the untrained eye. What was less evident was what the woman’s sub-communications were conveying.

Leaning In

Of the more than a hundred shots I read, the number one most common position for men was the lean in. This posture is something Roissy once called attention to as the hallmark of a Beta subconsciously manifesting his mindset in his body language:

The lean-in is easily identifiable, and while I don’t think it is always a Beta Tell (depends on context) it’s certainly the starting point for other manifestations of men with a necessitous subconscious. What I mean by that is that the lean-in is a physical display that illustrates how a man’s subconscious has decided that his woman’s Frame is the dominant one in the relationship. He feels the compulsion to put himself into her space as his natural impulse.

It’s also important to bear in mind that when we are photographed with others, in this case women, we are, or would like to be intimate with, there is a subconscious recognition that anyone viewing the image will infer a relationship context. More on this later, but for now keep in mind that some of these inferences will be related to mate guarding behaviors.

The reflexive critique of this lean-in is usually “Well, that’s just that one shot” or “The photographer told him to lean in” to which I can only say that the predominance of couples shots, candid and staged alike, most consistently pose a man as the leaner.

Lean out

The counter to this leaning-in is a woman leaning out or away from the man. It’s almost as if there is an unspoken conflict of hindbrains going on. A (Beta) man leans in to find inclusion and acceptance in a woman’s Frame while her own hindbrain instinctively reacts and attempts to lessen any inference of intimate acceptance to a larger audience.

Above are some examples of the lean-out. In some of these the latent message the woman’s hindbrain is conveying is almost “Get him offa me!”, but with a smile so as not to be too obvious. Also notice the positioning of the free hand in most of these pictures. We’d like to rationalize this as a gesture of affection after the fact, but in the context of these shots the unspoken message is a defensive one against the man’s lean-in. Again, this is one more manifestation of a war playing out between the couple’s subconscious.

The Eyes Have It

I also want to draw attention to the facial expressions of these women. Notice the commonalities in gaze direction and the message their eyes and expressions are sub-communicating. Women are keenly aware of the permanency of an image and what that image communicates. I’ve pointed out in many a prior essay that women’s brains evolved to give them a much fuller capacity for communication and a sensitivity to nuances than men. Men prioritize the content (information) of communication while women prioritize context (feeling) of communication. This is a truth we have to consider when we analyze the expressions and physical communication of women in photos.

I joked with the guy who sent me the second image here that she looks like she wants to bang me, not the guy doting on her. There’s more than a bit of truth in that assessment. Women today are hyperaware of how an image can be used to facilitate or handicap their sexual strategy. It’s no accident or casual glance when a woman directs her attention towards the viewer. It’s not a person behind the camera that she has in mind when she knows she being photographed, it’s the potential audience – an audience that’s grown exponentially in the age of social media. 

In all these shots the woman’s attention is on how she will be perceived by any viewer of the shot. In some other images I was sent the woman’s focus was on anything other than the men whose only focus was her. In advertising there’s a presumption that when two or more people appear in an ad the one with the presumed dominance is always the one looking away or out at the viewer. The submissive party was the one whose attention is directed at the dominant person. The dominant person is the one telling the story in the ad. A common complaint among feminists about magazine ads in the 60s through the 80s was that it was women who were always disempowered as a result of being posed in subservient positions where they focused on a male in the ad image. The only exception to this was in what feminists still refer to as the Male Gaze wherein the dominance a woman was afforded was limited to her sexual viability and her capacity to hold the attention of any men in the ad and men viewing the ad. 

These concepts are an interesting contrast to the millions upon millions of photos girls and women post of themselves on social media every day. Think of the gender power dynamics in all these shots. It may seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but the reflexive impulse a majority of women default to is one of advertising themselves for potentially better options in the sexual marketplace.

Whether or not this is a practiced or unconscious tact, the latent purpose of women’s responses to their men’s Beta Tells is to advertise their sexual availability to the audience. Some guys have said that women default to these expressions as a means of ego aggrandizement and I’m willing to accept that there’s undoubtedly an element of egoism (certainly solipsism) involved. No doubt women often enjoy the envious attentions of other women on Instagram in the right context. However, these ‘ego shots’ almost universally center on the woman in the power dynamic. In each of these images the power belongs to the woman.

Mate Guarding

Another common Beta Tell is the death grip pose many men will opt for in their couple’s photos. This is a position where the man locks an arm around his woman or drapes an interposing forearm barrier between the viewer and the woman who is trying to coyly escape his mate guarding message. 

In a lot of these the woman often has her hand on his hand as if trying to pry him off to release her. It seems like a reciprocation of affection – similar to the hand on the chest pushing him away – but this is afterthought rationalization. Death grip is a clingy positioning, but again the battle between his and her subconscious centers on the guy mate guarding and her own subconscious desire to broadcast her sexual availability in spite of him.

I Love Mommy

In almost all of these images the male is focused intently on the woman. From a Red Pill perspective, I see this as a manifestation of how these men have been Blue Pill conditioned to make their women their Mental Point of Origin.  Even in the images where the man is looking at the camera his sub-communication is one of clear abasement to, or guarding of, his most important priority.

However, the most disturbing trend I’ve seen in couple’s photos is what I’ve dubbed the I Love Mommy pose. Maybe it’s my instinctual interpretation of it or maybe its’ an obvious Freudian connotation, but in these shots the Beta assumes and almost childlike position of kissing on his woman. 

Okay, so the last one is a press shot, but you get the idea. You can see the I Love Mommy positioning in a few of the prior photos above as well.  I could probably dedicate an entire essay to all of the psychological implications of this phenomenon. I had one critic on Twitter ask me if I genuinely thought this tendency was due to unresolved issues these men had with their mothers; it wasn’t until later he admitted he had a tendency to do the same and was honestly concerned. 

I’m sure the possibility exists, but more importantly I think this habit is due to men internalizing the myth that vulnerability is endearing to women. There’s this persistent lie that accompanies the vulnerability myth. That’s the lie that men can let their guard down and ‘relax’ around the woman they feel securely paired with. As a result they mentally revert to the boy who didn’t need to qualify himself for his mother’s love and they regress to a subconscious comfort in that vulnerability they believe will endear them to their woman. They sub-communicate all this in the I Love Mommy position.

I’ll have to return to this Mother Issues concept in a future essay, but for now, how do you suppose a woman’s hindbrain imperative for Hypergamy will perceive this habit, particularly in light of how image conscious women are in the Instagram generation? My first impression is that it would be one of revulsion, apprehension and resistance. Nothing turns off a woman more than a man indicating that he’d rather be her child than her lover or husband.

Alpha Tells

So, if all of this reads like the overly-critical projection and nitpicking I told you most critics will accuse me of earlier, maybe I can assuage your own judgment by presenting some Alpha sub-communications examples here. Finding these examples can be a tall order in an age where any man photographed in a position not entirely focused on his woman runs the risk of being called ‘toxically’ masculine. Today, men who are confident enough to default to body language that communicates they are their own mental point of origin get accused of ‘abuse’ or at least being self-centered. But as you’ll see this isn’t such a bad thing.

The best example of Alpha Tells in couples photos focus on the man being the center of importance in the shot. Yes, this is Vincent Cassel (51) and his wife Tina Kunakey (21). I have no doubt some hater will come up with some reason in the comments why Vince doesn’t align with whatever their interpretation of Alpha is, but for our purposes these images illustrate the opposite of a lot of the Beta sub-communications we just went through. So try to look past the celebrity and see what’s being displayed here.

First off, notice how Tina’s focus of attention is always on Vince. Women who hold genuine admiration for their men consistently make them the story in photos. Even in the shot where they look at each other her focus is on him. It’s not difficult to assess the power dynamic in their relationship, but you can also feel a genuine desire emanating from Tina.

Also, women who genuinely admire their men are unconcerned that their actions in a shot might be read as subservient or ego-abasing by women’s audience. I’d go so far as to suggest that the attention a woman receives from a man her Hypergamous hindbrain confirms as Alpha is far more valuable to her ego than any lower quality attention she might temporarily enjoy by appeasing her audience. Much of this observation is rooted in the Desire Dynamic. Hypergamy cannot afford to have a high SMV man be confused about her desire or motives. A woman who is proud of the association with man she’s paired with is less concerned about the perception other women might have of her actions – in fact, she’ll convert any disparaging opinion of them into a point of pride, if that man is above her own sexual market value.

When a little girl thought a little boy on the playground was cute her reflexive response to him was not something she had learned to consciously control at that age. That response is often reflected in the expressions of adult women when when their peripheral awareness of an attractive man connects with their Hypergamous hindbrain. The biting of the lip, the beaming admiration, the laser eye focus and the hopeful smile followed by a coy embarrassment of what she’s doing when she regains her composure are all the physical cues of a woman whose primary concern is the man she’s with.

Now, contrast these images with the earlier ones in which the men are clearly the hangers-on of the women in those photos. I’ve mentioned before that a natural Alpha man is almost never aware of his own Alphaness and that’s what really stands out in these photos – the men aren’t trying to evoke the reflexive responses of the women. They fluidly (almost Zen-like) prompt these reaction in women. There is no pretense or the obvious mugging for the audience that you see in shots where the Frame is clearly being directed by the woman while the hapless Beta tries to prove how in love he is by kissing on her while she finds something more interesting to occupy herself with. When a woman admires her man he is literally all she can think about.

In closing here I want to reiterate that I’m aware that all of this is going to come off as self-serving or catty. It’s impossible to objectively interpret body language without someone resorting to point & sputter insults about how they think you’re just being petty or you’re jealous of some celebrity’s life. Be that as it may the discouraging of anyone attempting to understand sub-communications only serves the the party that has the most to gain from a larger ignorance of them. So I hope this breakdown has provided at least some useful references to consider your own, or your woman’s, default behavior when the cell phone cams come out at a party.

But if you learn nothing else from this post, and you need one take-home message, please, whatever you do, don’t be this guy in your next couples shot.

Equalism and Masculinity

masculinity

What a lot of feminists hate about red pill theory is that it simply does a better job of predicting social behavior than feminism ever has. I’d like to think that red pill awareness has fundamentally altered (or enlightened if you’d like) intergender interpretations and understanding in a relatively short time, but that would be a mistake.

There’s a distinct group of self-evincing red pill guys who like to remind us in various comment threads that it hasn’t always been thus. Their story is our forbearers “knew better” with regard to how men and women ought to interact with one another, and essentially spelled this out for future generations in the religious and philosophical texts of antiquity.

While I can’t deny the merit of this, I also know that the men of those bygone eras didn’t have anything approaching the mass of information and the connectivity men possess today. It’s easy to get caught up in the romanticism of the idea that back in some Golden Age of manhood, men knew about the dangers of allowing women’s hypergamous natures to run amok. I’m sure those men knew of the consequences of allowing women to control their fates. I’m sure there were Beta men and cuckolded men as well, but even the most wise Alpha among them could never, for instance, understand the impact that a unilaterally feminine-controlled form of birth control would effect upon a globalized society.

The sages of manhood-past may still have many relevant lessons for the men of today, but they simply lack the compounded experiences and understanding men possess now. Though they undoubtedly were keen observers of human behavior, the greatest thinkers of antiquity simply didn’t have an inkling as to the evolved, biological motivators of the sexual strategies our psyches developed in our hunter-gatherer human past.

What frustrates the advocates of this bygone manhood wisdom is that for all of our collective experience and knowledge, for the past sixty or so years, men struggle to come to terms with what that masculinity should mean to them. For all of the accumulated male experience and relation of it that’s led to red pill awareness, men still grapple with ‘what being a man means to them’.

Undoing of a Man

When I do consults with men of all ages I have to begin from a presumption that what these men’s concept of masculinity is usually is the result of a deliberate attempt by the Feminine Imperative to confuse men about what being a man should be for him.

Even the men who tell me they were raised by the most dominant, positively masculine fathers still suffer the internalized effects from this feminized effort to cast doubt on men’s masculinity.

Recently NPR began a series of articles attempting to suss out what it means to be a man in the 21st century. I do listen to NPR, and while I know bias will always be an inevitable part of news stories, I couldn’t help but assess what a morass attempting to define masculinity has become for contemporary men. Each story, each attempt to redefine masculinity, relied on the same tired tropes the Feminine Imperative has been using for men since the start of the sexual revolution.

Weakness, vulnerability, is sold as strength. Submissiveness and compromise to the feminine is sold as “support” and deserving of praise and a reciprocal appreciation (which never manifests in women). Beta is Alpha and Alpha is insecurity, bluster and compensation.

Those are the main premises, and, to a large degree, most red pill aware men realize that behavior is the only true determinant of motivation, and reject the feminized, egalitarian equalist messaging. However, what still surprises me is that this same, deliberate effort to cast doubt on what masculinity should be for a man hasn’t changed its message or methods of conditioning men to accept this masculine confusion for almost 40 years now.

Through the late 80’s and up to now, the idea of anything positively masculine is either ridiculed, cast as misogynistic, or implies a man might be gay if he’s too celebratory of his maleness. Since the start of the sexual revolution, any definition of what masculinity truly should mean has been subject to the approval of the Feminine Imperative.

In the absence of a clear definition of what masculinity is for men, the Feminine Imperative is free to create as grotesque a straw man of ugly masculinity, or as beatific a feminized model of masculinity as it needs to serve its purpose. With the aid of the Male Catch 22, blurring and distorting masculinity, raising and conditioning men to accept ambiguity and doubt about the security of a ‘manhood’ they’re encouraged not to define for themselves, are all the methodologies employed to ensure a feminine-primary social order.

Equalism vs. Complementarity

Agreeableness and humility in men has been associated with a negative predictor of sex partners.

The problem inherent in applying reciprocal solutions to gender relations is the belief that those relations are in any way improved by an equilibrium between both sexes interests.

The Cardinal Rule of sexual strategies:
For one gender’s sexual strategy to succeed the other gender must compromise or abandon their own.

The mistake is applying a humanistic, egalitarian equalist ideal to human sexual strategies that evolved over millennia to be complementary to each other, not an equitable exchange of resources to be negotiated over. This is one reason genuine desire cannot be negotiated – this fundamental is rooted in our most primal, complemetary understanding of sex.

The point at which egalitarian equalism (the religion of feminism) fundamentally fails is presuming that intergender relations should ideally exist in a goal-state of egalitarian equalism and / or a reciprocally equal state of mutually supportive interests.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about equalism and reciprocity.

The sexes evolved to be complementary to each other for the betterment of the species. Why do you think women form the most secure emotional attachments to men 1-2 SMV steps above themselves? Why is masculine dominance such an attractive male aspect for even the most feminist of women who’d otherwise plead for equality among the sexes?

I have a bit of a weird relationship with “traditional masculinity”. I’ve looked critically at it enough to know how much damage it does as a paradigm. I’ve seen the harm it can do to both men and women on an individual level. I’ve been subject to the violence it encourages. But despite all that, holy shit does it ever turn me on.

[…]

There’s just something about assertiveness (let’s be real, sometimes flat out arrogance) that does it for me. No matter how much I can be attracted to someone emotionally and intellectually, my swoons only happen when confronted by a powerful, competent man.

This has lead to some issues in my personal life. Who knew being attracted almost exclusively to men that inherently make bad partners wouldn’t work out well for me?

What we’re observing here is a rudimentary conflict between an internalized humanist idealism (the way equalism teaches thing’s should be) versus evolved, impulsive realism (the way things are).

The doctrine of equalism presumes a socialized expectation of being turned-on or attracted to men exemplifying a ‘gender equitable’, equalist-correct, mindset and the evolved, visceral arousal / attraction to a man exhibiting the dominant characteristic traits of masculine complementarity.

Another example of this conflict can be found in my essay on Choreplay.

In 2008 the transactional nature of sex-for-equitable-services was an over blown meme. The message then was that men needed to do more feminine-typical chores around the house, and the equitable exchange would be his wife reciprocating with more frequent and more intense sex as a result of his “equitable” participation in that negotiation.

Fast forward to 2013 and now (by the same author mind you):

Hey, fellas, put down those vacuum cleaners and pull out the lawn mowers.

Married men may think helping around the house may up their hotness quotient in the bedroom, but what really matters is the type of chore. Heterosexual married men who spend their time doing yard work, paying bills and changing the oil have more sex than husbands who spend their time cooking, cleaning and shopping, according to a new study on the subject of housework and sex.

“Households with a more traditional gender division of labor report higher sexual frequency than households with less traditional gender divisions of labor,”…

So what you see illustrated here, in just the space of 5 years, is the frustration and conflict between an equalist idealized model vs. the evolved complementary model of gender relations. It’s not about the equitability of like for like exchanges or like for like reward/benefit, but rather the way that equitability is expressed and how it grates against instinctually human expectations of behavior.

Sex differences, biologically and psychologically, didn’t evolve for hundreds of thousands of years to be co-equal partnerships based on humanistic (or moralistic) idealism. They evolved into a complementary form of support where the aspects of one sex’s strengths compensated for the other’s weaknesses and vice versa.

For every behavioral manifestation of one sex’s sexual strategy (hypergamy in females), the other sex evolves psychological, sociological and behavioral contingencies to counter it (mate guarding in males). The ideal state of gender parity isn’t a negotiation of acceptable terms for some Pollyanna ideal of gender equilibrium, it’s a state of complementarity between the sexes that accepts our evolved differences – and by each individual gender’s conditions, sometimes that’s going to mean accepting unequal circumstances.

Feminists (and anti-feminist women), humanists, moral absolutists, and even red pill men still obliviously clinging to the vestiges of their egalitarian blue pill conditioning, will all end up having their ideologies challenged, frustrated and confounded by the root presumption that egalitarian equalism can ever, or should ever, trump an innate and evolved operative state of gender complementarity.

And thus we come full circle, back to a new model of masculinity that is found upon the evolved complementary order and aided by red pill awareness. I have no doubt that it will be an arduous process of acceptance for blue pill, masculine-confused men vainly attempting to define their own masculinity under the deliberately ambiguous contexts laid out for them by the Feminine Imperative, but I do (hopefully) believe that red pill awareness is already making a positive impact on countering a presumption of equalism that only truly serves feminine primacy.

It’ll take time, but with every aware man utilizing red pill awareness to realign his masculine identity and benefit from it, other men will begin to come to the same awareness or else fall off into their own ambiguity.

20 Questions

 

RT

Back in May of this year I was asked to do a second installment of the red pill Reddit forum’s AMA (“ask me anything”) and I’m not really sure too many of my core readers were aware of it. Unless you follow me on Twitter you probably didn’t know I’ve done two now.

After I’d closed out that discussion thread it reminded me of another ‘interview’ I was asked to participate in at my home forum of SoSuave back in December of last year. I hate to say, but I never really got around to posting my replies back to the original thread, however I did save the questions as a post draft so I could do the interview some justice later.

Well here we are. Next week will mark the three year anniversary of my launching Rational Male, and as always I’ll be doing another year’s retrospective post as well as another Best of Rational Male – Year Three links post.

I make it a policy not to go into too much personal detail on Rational Male unless the topic is something I can illustrate better with a personal story. I’ve never wanted the Rational Male to about me, but rather the experiences and input of my readers. However, after almost three years and one book later, I figure I’ll open up once and publish these question I was asked back in December with the hope that maybe something I answer will give someone some new insight themselves.

 

 

1) What brought you to SoSuave and how did you find the site?

Unlike a lot of SoSuave guys I actually found the forum because someone suggested to me that I might be able to reach more guys who needed help there.

Most guys go searching for answers about how they can get back with an ex, or why their last LTR imploded on them because they went too Beta or didn’t understand the basics of red pill awareness. I found SoSuave through the old Ladder Theory site as I was toying with the idea of psychology as a second major when I was at university. A lot of people don’t know the SoSuave of today is actually the second version of the forum. My understanding is that Alan, the forum admin and owner, had to expand to a larger server and forum architecture due to the site being so overwhelmingly popular.

There really wasn’t a manosphere or what we term Red Pill back then, just Mystery Method, PUArtistry, FastSeduction, RSD and the collected experiences of guys just posting their Field Reports and hitting upon commonalities of those experiences.

Mystery had made some conjectures with regards to the psychology involved in pickup and I just happened to come across it while I was studying behavioral psychology and personality studies. I also found that making the connection between the two, at least publicly amongst teachers and classmates, was a very contentious prospect. I got called a misogynist a lot back then just for proposing the germs of the ideas that have built the foundation of what the Rational Male and the red pill have become now.

2) Any special reason for your SoSuave username, why you chose it?

It was actually a hold-over from my old online persona from some other forums and it stuck. If you watch the movie L.A. Confidential you’ll get the meaning of it. It actually seems more fitting now with the book’s release. Rollo Tomassi was the generic name given to a nameless criminal who got away with his crime.

I also understand that Rollo was the name of an infamous viking. I found this interesting since we both descend from Danish heritage.

3) What’s the best and or worst advice you’ve ever received in regards to chicks?

JBY, Just Be Yourself is definitely the worst advice because it’s so endemic of people who are ignorant of Game. It’s such a passive, easy dismissal of a guy wanting to know why what he’s been doing isn’t getting him the results he wants, but at the same time it illustrates the belief and trust of the person saying ‘just be yourself’ in the conditioning that brought them to it.

It’s a very uncomfortable revelation for anyone to embrace in thinking they should need to change and/or improve themselves in order to get the results that they want. The foundational mistruth of blue pill conditioning is that a nebulous ‘being of oneself’ should be enough for anyone (or ‘the right ONE‘) to be attracted to, and discourages any real self-analysis or improvement. ONEitis and Just Be Yourself tend to be codependents and, in tandem, really fuck up a lot of guys lives.

Best advice is more difficult, but for me personally it was “believe what a woman does, not what she says.” For most red pill guys this seems kind of remedial now because it’s a foundation for really unplugging I covered almost 11 years ago, but it can’t be stressed enough.

This basic truth is what inspired The Medium IS the Message and as stupid-simple a truism as it is, it’s often the most difficult part of Game-awareness that blue pill guys first struggle with. They struggle because their earliest feminized conditioning has always taught them that women are fundamentally the equal, rational agents that men are and they will relate to boys / men in full confidence and reason (just as they would expect from men) if they themselves don’t play games with them and communicate in full confidence and full disclosure.

It’s believe what she says and ignore, forgive or get over your judgementalism for what she does because she’s (supposed to be) being equitably honest, forthright, and knows exactly why she does what she does in spite of herself.

I don’t believe men and women are equals of each other in an egalitarian sense – there are simply too many empirically provable differences in both sex’s psychology and biology to draw any other conclusion; and as such each sex has it’s own imperatives and strategies for achieving them.

I do however believe that the sexes evolved to be complementary to each other, one sex’s strengths compensating for the other’s weaknesses. It’s this overreaching social impetus (idealistic humanism and feminine social primacy) that encourages us to believe we are independent, autonomous and self-sufficient entities (founded in feminine solipsism), equal in biology and psychological potential that imbalances that mutually beneficial complementariness.

4) Have you ever posted in or lurked in other seduction forums/blogs etc?

I occasionally post on Dalrock’s, Just 4 Guys, Chateau Heartiste, Roosh’s forum, The Red Pill reddit, Return of Kings and a few others. I sometimes track back to forums my articles get linked to, but I honestly don’t have time to respond to everything I read.

5) How many chicks have you slept with?

My N count is public record; more than 40, less than 50. I’m not trying to be ambiguous, it’s just that when I try to make an accurate count I just don’t remember some names – mostly just places partners and experiences.

Just for some red pill perspective, most of that experience was between the ages of 17 and 28 in the late late 80’s to mid 90’s when there was no formal Game, manosphere, internet, cell phones, Tinder, etc. – getting laid was all analog and mostly instinctual.

It’s kind of funny to think that my N count is well above average, but I expect in comparison to many of the single, active, members of the manosphere / PUA community, 40 individual sex partners might be so low as to disqualify me from being taken seriously with regards to Game.

By the time I was 21-22 I’d figured out how to get laid with some relative predictability. Mostly because I was a fairly good looking, semi-professional musician playing in Hollywood with a bit of social proof and a practiced ability to pick out women who’d be into me.

I should also mention that of those 40+, four were long term relationships, including my wife.

This’ll sound facetious, but I’ve never thought of sex as being “validating” or ego-affirming. I honestly think a lot of that expectation comes from a feminized conditioning about “how sex should be” for men. I was, and still kind of am, more into sex as experience. It’s always been something fun to enjoy with a woman for me, not some meaningful act of cosmic significance. I’ve had sex with women I loved and women I didn’t, some were memorable, some were…meh. Even in my bluest of blue pill days my ‘validation’ came from other sources, not sex.

6) What was your worst and best experience with a chick? (wife, girlfriend or not)

The worst was the 4 years I spent with a BPD girlfriend. I did a post on it. I was in the pit of blue pill hell and pushed to the brink. I didn’t know what borderline personality disorder was back then, in fact I don’t think the DSM even recognized the complex as a psychological disorder in the early 90s.

My best experience is hard to put a finger on. It’s interesting to think about definitively bad experiences, but hard to put a “best” title on a good one. All of my best experiences would have to be with Mrs. Tomassi, our wedding, our daughter’s birth, the fact that even in her late 40s she’s still in fitness caliber shape and we genuinely enjoy each other.

Pre-marriage, I had my share of rock-club women, and when it was on, it was really ‘on’. I can think of at least 4 very memorable women, one was a fuck-buddy who was easily the most sexually hungry (and not just with me I came to find out).

I know the trope is that older women are supposed to be better in the sack than younger women – this was never my experience at all. In fact the younger the girl, the easier time I had bedding her, and the more adventurous a lover she usually was. I think even marginal social proof has a greater impression on younger women and they’re more eager. The older women I’ve been with have always been much more self-conscious.

7) Have you ever gotten friendzoned by a chick and if so were you able to get out of it?

Of course, particularly in my teenage years. In my early 20s I had enough female interest that I’d simply blow off the women I learned weren’t worth the investment. There was one exception though; a girl I knew from a community college who “didn’t date rocker guys or guys in bands.”

In hindsight I know she was leaning into her Epiphany Phase (maybe a bit early) and was trying to do things “the right way” after getting after it with various guys in her early 20s.

I was kind of surprised at getting a LJBF since it hadn’t happened to me for years by then, but all it took was right place, right time, a little social proof and the competition anxiety of other interested women, and I got the lay – which, by comparison at the time was kind of underwhelming. Still, I went back to pursuing her afterwards, got re-LJBF’d and I moved on to other plates.

8) Have you ever had a chick or chicks offering their pussy to you on a platter and you blew them off for whatever reason? And why? (i.e. they offered the pussy on a platter to you at a bar in conversation or even at your or their place and you blew them off.)

Yes, but mostly due to logistics rather than from spite or wanting to up the urgency with a girl as most guys think denying women sex will do. Most often it was because I had a better offer somewhere else or I was just plain tired. When it’s happened to me in the past the girl was a) on the cusp of my maximum weight limit, or b) there was something a bit off about her personally – as in she didn’t seem right mentally.

I once left a DTF girl in a hot tub because I just couldn’t bring myself to hitting that big of a girl (but, in her defense, I have what I think are exceptionally high physical standards for women)

9) How did you handle chicks who’ve flaked?

It depends on what time of life we’re talking about. In my younger, hungrier days, I tolerated flaking because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know the medium was the message, and I thought it was caused by something I fucked up, which I guess it was. Later I simply didn’t care because I had other plates going at the time, but I found that the more options I had going (or had the potential to get going) the less women were likely to flake.

I go into it in Plate Theory, but there are a lot of subliminal behavioral cues a guy gives off (mostly unknowingly) when he’s seeing another (or more) woman that other women pick up on.

Mannerisms, attitude, vernacular, a guy with options just acts different than a guy with none. It’s like women pick up on the subcommunication of a guy who’s less invested in them and associate it with their sexual competition of women who might be interested in him.

10) Most plates you’ve spun at one time?

Actively (meaning I double shifted at the time) 4. Inactively 7 when I was about 23.

11) How did you handle a time of having no plates?

Again, that’s really a question of which time.

Between the ages of 17 and 21, I wouldn’t even consider seeing more than whatever girlfriend I had ONEitis for at the time. However, even before I met my wife, I had some irons in the fire, but when I didn’t I don’t think I worried too much about it since I knew I was probably just one party or gig or business event away from meeting some new talent.

I know a lot of guys get weird or depressed about a dry spell, but I was always kind of optimistic about having no plates because I enjoyed having the freedom to get with whomever, and I looked forward to meeting new women.

12) Dress style you use for going out on the town/ social functions?

I work in the liquor and casino industry so it depends on the event and what time of year it is. Nowadays if I’m out it’s usually because I’m at a promo, a new brand launch or some casino special event I’m involved with.

Lets just say that ‘business casual’ is neither. I either go loose or I go tight, but it really depends on the venue. Loose is jeans, some nice slip-ons, a stylish tailored button down, maybe a casual sport coat. If I’m tight it means I’m somewhere upscale or I’m with the people I work with, so I fall back on well tailored suits.

When you get older, style is much different than when you’re younger. What you wear at 22 is not what you wear at 42; there’s ways for men to capitalize on a maturity in style that women expect from men with the refinement that comes from maturity.

I’m probably not the best guy to hit up about style though – I think I spend way too much on what I could probably get cheaper. Christian McQueen is a better guy to ask about style.

13) Are you currently working out/exercising?

Always. I’m at the gym at 5-5:30am five days of the week, and I haven’t gone more than taking one week off from that schedule for about 15 years now. That may seem like dedication, but it’s really about convenience; early morning is the only time my schedule permits me to work out, and honestly I prefer working out in an empty gym.

For about the last 3 years I’ve been doing kind of a modified Max OT workout. I got into straight Max OT when I lived in Florida after a trainer friend suggested it to me.

I’m not overly huge to begin with, but once I started lifting heavier (and I mean heavy all the time) and my intensity went up, it helped me push past a plateau naturally. I put on a solid 8 lbs. of muscle inside of 4 months. Heh, I had to buy new pants because my thighs got bigger.

It’s probably not for everyone, I just know my body responded well to it. You do have to be careful of injury though, and not just in the lifts. I fucked up my back twice in about 2 years just getting cocky pulling heavier dumbbells off the rack. Just because your focused muscle group can do the lift doesn’t mean your other supporting muscles can. You gotta be careful.

14) For meeting chicks in the past which way was most successful in your point of view and have you tried all venues? Day, Social circle, Online social media/ Online dating, clubs, vacation, through family, work or whatever else.

Again, I’m probably not the best guy to ask about contemporary pickup Game. Back when I was inadvertently spinning plates, my Game at the time consisted of playing in various semi-pro bands and hooking up after a gig. I suppose that would amount to Night or Club Game now, but it was the environment I was in and familiar with. Most of my Game relied on social proof, DHV and looking the part. There was a definite ‘character role’ women liked that I played very well then.

It got to a point where I could get a girl to buy me a drink which I’d nurse for a bit while I talked her up. If I got the right IOIs from her I’d simply say something like “hey, our set’s coming up, watch my drink till I get back will ya?” If she was still there at the bar with my glass after an hour the girl was always DTF.

I should add that, later in life I became very apt at social circle Game, but again, that’s always going to be dependent on social proof, preselection and demonstrating higher value to get a third party endorsement of your SMV.

I know the popular presumption is that if a guy walks into a club/party/social gathering with a ‘hot girl who’s his friend’ it sends some magic preselection vibe to all the other women at the gathering. I’ve never found that to be true. Not that I doubt it happens, but rather if I’m somewhere with a woman (friend) who’s SMV is 1-2 points above the most attractive woman at the event, other women tend to get catty or figure if I can score her why would she bother with me?

There’s a fine line between the benefits of preselection and women simple feeling outclassed by a sexual competitor.

15) Have you ever went full “No Contact”? (Not expecting “results” of getting a chick back but simply cutting all ties.)

Oh yes. I really had no choice but to go no contact with the BPD girl I’d been with in my 20’s, but she’s really the only woman I’ve ever made a conscious effort never to contact again.

For other’s I think no contact really came down to my indifference to the women I really had no more interest in after some event. Though I didn’t do it intentionally, I was spinning plates and had other options to exercise so I’d just become occupied with another woman making no contact just a matter of course.

As I put forth in Plate Theory, non-exclusivity and maintaining your options is your best insurance against ONEitis, which in turn makes for a healthier frame of monogamy for a man later if that’s what you choose to do. No contact is easy when you’re genuinely indifferent to the girl you’re going no contact on.

16) How is married life going for you so far?

18 years on July 20th. I’ve only ever written a couple of direct posts about my marriage, but that’s mostly due to my not wanting men to view it as some model to aspire to. I understand my circumstance aren’t what most guy’s are, personally, family or career-wise, but I don’t for a minute believe I married the elusive unicorn of a woman.

I love Mrs. Tomassi more than anything in this world, we’re a very good match, and red pill awareness has only accented that good match. And for the record, yes, Mrs. Tomassi occasionally reads what I write here and has read my book.

17) Have you read the full DJ Bible? Or some of it/none of it/ participated in it?

The old version yes. The new version not entirely, but I have several of my old essays included in it. I still think it’s a pretty valuable resource for guys new to the red pill.

18) Have you ever met up with or talked to any SoSuave posters offline?

Yes, when I lived in Florida there were about six guys from the forum I used to meet occasionally for sushi or at one of my vodka brands’ promos. Beyond that I do email and (very rarely) phone consults with people who request them depending on my availability and ability to help at any given time.

For the record, I never charge money for a consult.

19) Favorite So Suave posters or posters on your site other blogs etc?

Gawd, I don’t want to play favorites, but in no particular order off the top of my head I think Deti, Dalrock, Novaseeker, Donalgraeme, Good Luck Chuck, Deepdish, Stingray, Morpheus, Han Solo, Obsidian, Mark Minter, Yohami, YaReally, Jeremy, Earl (yes Earl), LiveFree and even the commenters I most emphatically disagree with, all give me something new to think about.

20) How’s feedback coming along for your book, The Rational Male?

Better than I ever imagined. It’s been a success in everything I hoped it would be in the regard that it’s reaching men and helping change their minds and lives. My intent was never to make a load of cash from it, but rather to make it as accessible as possible to have the greatest reach possible and it’s more than done this after only 9 months.