Sifting through the language and sorting out the truth.
Readership: All
Theme: Problems with The Red Pill / Misunderstood Models
Length: 3,200 words
Reading Time: 18 minutes
Foundations
To kickstart our discussion here, I’ll quote a passage from Rollo’s essay, Men in Love (2012/9/10), which I believe is the main focus of ArchAngel’s post, Lovebreaker (2024/3/20).
“Men want to believe that they can be happy, and sexually satisfied, and appreciated, and loved, and respected by a woman for who he is. It is men who are the real romantics, not women, but it is the grand design of hypergamy that men believe it is women who are the romantic ones.
Hypergamy, by its nature, defines love for women in opportunistic terms, leaving men as the only objective arbiters of what love is for themselves. So yes, men can’t tell when a woman doesn’t love them, because they want to believe women can love them in the ways they think they could.”
The Rational Male: Men in Love (2012/9/10)
This paradigm is often speed referenced in the phrase, “Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically.”
For the readers’ convenience, here’s a short list of Rollo’s most important essays about ‘love’. There are others but this will probably suffice for our discussion.
- The Rational Male: The True Romantics (2011/8/26)
- The Rational Male: Women in Love (2011/12/27)
- The Rational Male: Men in Love (2012/9/10)
- The Rational Male: Of Love and War (2012/9/11)
- The Rational Male: Love Story (2013/10/8)
- The Rational Male: The Burden of Performance (2014/9/23)
- The Rational Male: Commodifying Love (2015/1/2)
- The Rational Male: The Love Experience (2015/1/5)
- The Rational Male: Managing Expectations (2015/4/14)
- The Rational Male: Deep Conversion (2016/11/11)
- The Rational Male: Love and Ambition (2018/7/23)
Notes
- Rollo is describing ‘romantic love’ and the dynamics of carnal attraction, not Christian love.
- Rollo defines Intersexual Hierarchies as the basis for romantic love, having the structural hierarchy of Man > Woman > Children. (See next image.)
Dalrock’s Assessment
Also relevant, Dalrock elucidated how the preeminence of ‘romantic love’, as described by Rollo, has been elevated to an idol that has replaced Christian morality.
- Dalrock: Lovestruck (2013/4/15)
- Dalrock: But we were in love! (2013/4/18)
- Dalrock: Who loves best? (2013/12/27)
In the last post, Dalrock discusses how Rollo’s description of women in love isn’t a problem of a deficiency inherent to women, but a problem of men’s unrealistic expectations.
He wrote,
“Rollo is discussing the mis-set and unrealistic expectations of men. This isn’t a problem of a deficiency inherent to women, but a problem of men’s unrealistic expectations. […] One of Rollo’s core areas of focus is disabusing men of their foolish expectations regarding women and romantic love; and here Rollo is right as well. Romantic love is truly wonderful in the appropriate context, but we have elevated it beyond all sanity. Modern men now expect women to experience romantic love (desire) for them in an unconditional, selfless form. This is profoundly foolish, because this is not the nature of romantic love / desire. As Rollo regularly reminds us, you can’t negotiate desire.”
Dalrock: Who loves best? (2013/12/27)
IOW, men’s ideation of love is a psychological projection of desire.
ArchAngel and Jack’s Assessment
ArchAngel’s post, Lovebreaker (2024/3/20), addresses the continuing confusion surrounding Tomassi’s model, in which he proposed that Tomassi invented a new sense of the word ‘love’ that isn’t love at all.
It is true that ‘love’ is a misnomer. Rollo’s thesis would be better described as a comparison of men’s and women’s psychological dispositions, motivations, and expectations that directly affect intersexual dynamics. But that’s rather awkward, technical, and wordy, and not as catchy as calling it ‘love’.
In another sense, the psychological metadynamics that Rollo describes truly represent what most secular people believe about ‘romantic love’, which taps into the public obsession with gynocentric Aphroditism and the idolatry of ‘romantic love’. In this view, Rollo has put into words the disappointments and frustrations that many men have experienced and felt with what is called ‘romantic love’.
What ArchAngel calls an ‘Interpretation Game’ is a quality of philosophy that is unavoidable if one is to be entirely objective in analyzing data and using a theoretical model. At some point, meaning and morality must be assigned (and this is the ‘interpretation’), and this is usually done at the grassroots individual level. This is precisely why men must be careful about constructing and interpreting models.
ArchAngel concluded that Tomassi’s concepts of love do not describe anything real. This is true of course, because of the inductive nature of modeling. When a model is implemented, whatever is then revealed is seen through the lens of that model. The benefit is that something of a framework is revealed. Without the aid of a model, nothing is revealed at all and no greater knowledge can be obtained. How well this information truly reflects what is real determines the power, value, and applicability of the model. Furthermore, the perceived accuracy of the model will be different for each man, as every man has different life experiences.
Meta
In response to ArchAngel’s post, RPA wrote,
“I’d like to know exactly what Rollo’s definition of female love is and how he changed it from the male version. I didn’t see this in the essay and I’m not buying that RT is wrong without a closer look at what he actually wrote.
The essay would benefit from laying out RT’s thoughts and definitions…”
Initially, I shared the same complaint about ArchAngel’s post.
Normally, this approach would be considered logically inadequate — a failure to properly present an argument to be discussed. However, in writing Lovebreaker (2024/3/20), ArchAngel intentionally omitted Rollo’s arguments — partly because he wanted to present an opposing argument that would be received without bias, and partly because he wanted to see what would spill out in the comments. This stratagem revealed all the confusion that surrounds this model. In effect, by omitting a definition of love from his essay, ArchAngel motivated readers to think more critically about Rollo’s model and to offer their own views about how their concept of love differs from Rollo’s. Indeed, we did see a lot of confusion and misunderstanding happening in real-time in the comments under this post.
Summary of the History
Rollo Tomassi’s generalized concept of romantic love in a sexually competitive transaction has stirred up much confusion and controversy over the concept of ‘love’.
Dalrock settled the issue with his post, Who loves best?, and Rollo has agreed with Dalrock’s assessment in many of his subsequent posts.
Since then, the Christian Manosphere has introduced a superior model that replaces Rollo’s model — namely the Headship model using the Christ : Church :: Husband : Wife analogy (Ephesians 5:22-33). (See preceding image.)
Nevertheless, Tomassi’s concepts of romantic love have continued to rock the Manosphere.
Analysis
Here, I’ll pick apart Rollo Tomassi’s Concepts of ‘Love’ as a case study of how Red Pill mythos is misunderstood. In doing so, I’ll attempt to offer readers a full unabridged assessment, not only of Rollo’s writings about ‘love’, but more to the point, the underlying model that his writings convey and how readers might misinterpret it. In doing so, hopefully it will become apparent to readers how writings such as these are misunderstood.
The general process of data collection, model formation, and knowledge dissemination is depicted in the following graph.
There are 5 aspects that must be examined here.
- The basic structure of the model
- The context of the model
- The accuracy of the model
- Tomassi’s description of the model, and the terminology used.
- The popular comprehension of the model
It is easy to assume that this is an evo psych model, since Rollo peppers his descriptions with evo psych applications. However, it will be shown that this is essentially an economic model. It will also be evident that Rollo plays fast and loose with terminology, i.e. ‘love’, to appeal to his audience’s false notions about ‘love’.
1. The Basic Structure of the Underlying Model
This model assumes men are providers and women are consumers* (according to an economic model). Thus, men see themselves as hopeful investors, which Rollo smoothly terms ‘idealistic’, and women are viewed as being considerably less altruistic and less reliable beneficiaries, or as he says, ‘opportunistic’. This is not to say that men are never opportunistic (e.g. taking that ONS on offer) or that women are not idealistic (re: solipsism), but that there is a strong pattern of behavior, like saying men are rational and women are emotional, or that men have more moral agency than women.
This model is a juxtaposition of both Biblical and Worldly paradigms. It is Biblical in its assumption that men are providers and women are consumers, but it is Worldly in its assumption that women are free agents, executive decision-makers, and have no binding responsibilities to the men with whom they are in a relationship. It is also Worldly in the sense that ‘love’ is viewed as transactional, and the methods of attaining ‘love’ are immoral (to be discussed in more detail in another section below).
Rollo’s exploration of this model explains why men willingly sacrifice themselves for a female proxy of their fantasies, as well as women’s self-serving behaviors like keeping a bevy of beta orbiters, free drinks and dinners deceptively called ‘dates’, settling for a man in marriage and then divorce gr@ping him, and so on.
2. The Context of the Model
In general, this applies to all men, high and low SMV alike. The obvious application is for the relationships women have with men they perceive to be ‘under’ them, as shown in this image.
But it also applies to high SMV men as well. If the woman happens to esteem and respect the man (men represented by the blue apex in the image), then it is because the man has certain traits that men might consider superficial but women are strongly attracted to, specifically traits that generate limerence / Tingles. But when this wears off (and it always does), then her default setting is to salvage / take what she can from the relationship and come out ahead of him if at all possible, without any consideration at all for his welfare.
All in all, men experience this as women being ‘opportunistic’ because of the investment costs involved — all of which are spent on or transferred to the woman.
In summary, although the basic hierarchical structure in this model is sound, IRL, the hierarchical structure is often flipped to women’s advantage and doesn’t play out the way men expect.
3. The Accuracy of the Model
The characterization accurately reflects reality within the context studied, given some degree of individual variance.
Many men, but of course not all, can find evidence in their experiences with women that suggests this model is more or less valid for them. I mean, how many “free dinner” dates followed by ghostings does it take for a man to recognize this? How many divorce gr@pes? The sooner a man recognizes this, the better.
For a long time (since women’s liberation, but maybe forever), men have been disappointed with women because they haven’t received a good return on their sociosexual investments. But over the last decade or two, women have been continuing to take men’s investiture but have failed to deliver anything in return. Hence why we hear women being described as divorce thieves, entitled princesses, leeches, parasites, etc. Net losses have accrued so regularly and predictably that men have decided to pull out of the venture en masse. All this feeds into Rollo’s description of women being ‘opportunistic’.
4. Rollo Tomassi’s Description of the Model
Rollo has used a few key words euphemistically and parabolically. This is confusing if these words are assigned a denotative or doctrinal definition, but are quite clear if they are interpreted as coded speech. Here I’ll attempt to define and explain some of this code.
“Opportunistic”
First of all, the commonly used catchphrase, “women love opportunistically”, misrepresents the basic model discussed above which Rollo’s writings address. It would be more accurate (to both the model and to certain contexts of reality) to say that women enter into relationships for how it makes them feeel and for what they can get out of it, and NOT because they truly love the man himself.
A woman who genuinely loves / respects / esteems / honors the man in her life would clearly be an exception to this model, and in this rare case, the model is no longer valid. However much a man may desire this type of woman, unicorns are so rare that for most purposes this possibility can be dismissed as an outlier. If a man does indeed have a unicorn, this does not invalidate the model, but rather indicates how much favor and grace he has received from the Lord.
As the richest and wisest man in the world (during his day and age) once said,
One man among a thousand I have found,
Ecclesiastes 7:28 (NKJV)
But a woman among all these I have not found.
It is guesstimated that approximately one in ten thousand women are unicorns (i.e. NOT ‘opportunistic’).
Projected “Love”
The basic gender mismatch that Rollo addresses is that different things make men and women feel loved. (A man feels loved when a woman respects him and submits sexually to him. A woman feels loved when she is humbled by an attractive and/or dominant man.*) So here, ‘love’ is better understood as code for ‘felt love’.
Rollo refers to the dynamics of this model as ‘love’ (or ‘felt love’) because that is what men are expecting out of a relationship and they are disappointed to find that women do not experience love in the same way, and therefore they do not share the same expectations. To be more precise, men are expecting an affectionate sexualized relationship, but they’ll call this ‘love’ because sex is what makes men feel acutely loved.
Upon realizing this difference, it is not uncommon for men to lament this as an existential human tragedy, or think that “God made a mistake”, etc. But in fact, we should rejoice in this gender difference, because this is exactly what creates the conditions in which a man and a woman can show real genuine love to each other. That is, men and women must make a dedicated effort to look beyond their own desires, consider the needs of the other, and then operate outside their comfort zones in order to make the other feel loved. The real lament is that there are so many men and women who fail to do so for whatever reason, and that we all suffer as a result of neglecting this love.
* Rollo uses an evo psych analogy to make this distinction, but even without this, the basic concept holds true and can be expressed using other types of models.
Euphemistic “Love”
This difference in how men and women experience love leads to another point of confusion. Rollo uses the word ‘love’ euphemistically. Rollo doesn’t mention that his paradigm of ‘love’ is actually ‘felt love’ (which would appear wimpy) or that it is not real love, but instead leaves that up to the readers’ interpretation. Astute readers might recognize this incongruency and call this a lie of omission (Oscar), or a lie of substitution (ArchAngel), but more astute readers will recognize that he is speaking the soul language of a specific audience of men who are frustrated with ‘felt love’. You see, to the average male reader, Rollo’s thesis resonates as true, largely because men are painfully unloved* (in the true sense of love), and are therefore blinded by their own desire for ‘love’, using whatever meaning this word might have for him.
All this is blithely referred to as romantic ‘love’ because this is how participants in the secular SMP get their sociosexual itches scratched. Yes, to the emotionally needy, spiritually immature, secular person, this is called ‘love’.
* On a side note, it is my belief that there is an epidemic of unloved men right now, primarily because they had feminist mothers who never genuinely loved them or their fathers, and this is compounded by the present condemnation and ostracization of men due to cultural feminism.
5. Popular Comprehension of the Model
Overall, Rollo’s thesis is uniquely a male perspective that has a LOT of male-specific subtext that is glossed over, which is not surprising at all.
The popular comprehension of the model through Rollo’s interpretation is invariably read through the twin lenses of meaning and morals, although this almost always goes unstated, and is often processed subconsciously by the audience.
It is difficult for some readers to accept that Rollo’s paradigm of “Men love idealistically, women love opportunistically” is a greatly simplified model of worldly attachment that many men falsely believe to be ‘love’. Readers become confused as to whether love is opportunistic, or women are opportunistic, or whether men are equally opportunistic as women. Although there is evidence for these views to be true, all of these viewpoints stray from the basic model and therefore create confusion. Some readers think that Rollo was redefining love, or that he was talking trash about agape love. No, Rollo’s concept of ‘love’ is just a theoretical model that describes one prevalent phenomenon that has occurred in the West, and it is conveyed in colloquial language native to Westerners.
Some readers have pointed out that Rollo’s concept of ‘love’ is not real love (which is true), but they could not explain how or why very clearly. It is because men and women using each other to achieve ‘love’ (i.e. ‘felt love’) is immoral. That is, treating another person as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself constitutes immorality, according to Kant’s Categorical Imperative. In this case, men use women to get female companionship and sex, and women use men for all kinds of purposes — basically anything she wants that she is able to extract from a man — and men for the most part are quite willing to give it all up in the hope of a profitable exchange. Both positions are immoral.
The inherent immorality of these social conventions is never explicitly mentioned because these sorts of social transactions are assumed to be the social norm, and to question them would expose one as being clueless … or Christian.
Without going into all the tedious details regarding morality (a subject which he categorically avoids in order to remain objective), Rollo assumes men are providers and women are consumers (according to an economic model). Rollo spins his description of the model to appeal to his audience — disgruntled, ‘love’ starved creditors (men), and jumps to the conclusion: Men are typically the more altruistic sex and women the more self-centered sex in this endeavor. Not only is this true to life, it is also Biblical, according to the Christ : Church :: Husband : Wife analogy.
In one sense, it is morally correct to speak to men where they are. It is also morally correct to present the true / Biblical situation. The inherent immorality is in the SMP itself and is not misrepresented in the model nor Rollo’s conveyance of the model. The moral shortcoming in Rollo’s conveyance of the model of an immoral SMP is that he affirms men’s participation in the immorality by never calling it out as immoral. Of course, if he did so, he would lose all his idolatrous and/or lovelorn readers, partly because there is no other viable option in a debased feminist culture.
Related
- Σ Frame: Laying out Expectations (2022/10/20)
- Σ Frame: Rollo Tomassi on Female Agency (2022/11/4)
- Σ Frame: What we’ve learned about Female Agency (2022/12/20)
- Σ Frame: Expectations (for LTRs) (2023/1/20)
- Σ Frame: The Godfather undermines Fatherhood. (2023/7/10)
- Σ Frame: Who will Take Care of Men? (2023/8/2)
- Σ Frame: The Essence of the Black Pill (2023/8/11)
- Σ Frame: Ideal Women Don’t Exist (2023/9/23)
ArchAngel
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Σ Frame 
Many human behaviors are mating behavior (even when not noticed by those humans) and mating behaviors aim at successful reproduction of the species, nothing more.
It gets complicated once humans overload that with romantic poetry or religious themes and then being disappointed at that human biology doesn’t live up to the imagined standards. These ideas are usually employed by humans in power to control subordinated humans and their reproduction.
Control of someone’s reproduction is the ultimate expression of power. The tools used – brainwashing or chemicals – might vary, but the goal of the powerful is always reducing reproduction of the powerless to increase their own.
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You mean: I play an interpretation game, where, no matter what anyone does, I construe it as survival-reproductively useful. The behaviors themselves are and have always been unmodified, yet you go home happy telling yourself ‘This is how it is,’ instead of ‘I’m looking at it this way,’ which is what you’re actually doing.
Isn’t that the essence of evolutionary psychology?
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That’s what you’re doing as well.
This blog discusses intersexual dynamics, male nature, and female nature. These don’t change. The only things that change are the contexts in which they’re expressed. That may mean your experiences are different; but it does not mean nature has changed.
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You don’t need any psychology to just throw away all the hamstering others try to force on you to gain control over your reproductive abilities. Regardless of your background can simply throw away all that rom/com brainwashing, convoluted state/church regulations or whatever has been used in the past to control reproduction and just … start to reproduce.
The emperor really has no clothes!
This is the reason this simple truth is persecuted so hard. They need to control your reproduction to stay in power.
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Before I start, I request permission to write a post on female agency (from Jack, of course): such an essay would settle a number of misunderstandings (and raise new ones, as always). Only in such a post will I address the issues raised in this essay. This will be my last comment on this post and I will not reply any responses to my comments here. On that note, and for my next act, I will proceed to refute this entire post using only my comments and writings from Lovebreaker. The quoted comments are from the above essay; the bolded texts are Lovebreaker comments or excerpts.
What is wrong with Freud and Tomassi’s doctrines is that they are properties of the imagination, and not of the world. In practice, our access and knowledge of the world (or reality) is limited to a small set of faculties… We are limited such that we cannot look behind the curtain and see that women’s love is motivated by an opportunism they are unaware of themselves; we have no faculties for that. All we can do is see women behave and consistently imagine it as manifest opportunism. That much we are capable of.
I know you really want Tomassi to be correct (which is impossible), but we weren’t talking about opportunism, we were talking about opportunistic love. Of course women can be opportunistic, they just don’t love opportunistically (also an impossibility).
A number of commenters are using a technique I’ll call the heretic mousetrap. This is done by claiming Tomassi’s (yes, Rollo Tomassi’s) ideas come from the word of God (rather than the RM site). A number of Bible verses concerning love are quoted (although none of them say anything about men and women’s love-capabilities). Finally, I am challenged to criticize Tomassi, knowing I will be labeled a heretic as soon as I do because his word is the word of God… Please stop bringing up Bible verses that do not say “Men believe love matters for the sake of it. Women love opportunistically.”
I didn’t include it for a tactical reason: the particularities of the concepts of love don’t matter, because the very idea of concepts of love is mistaken… Concepts of love are no different from interpretations of dreams… The only facts here are the dream had (if remembered and reported correctly), and that the woman is in love. To interpret or conceptualize is to say: ‘Let’s look at it this way‘ and claim you’re saying ‘This is how it is‘. There is nothing objective about a dream that makes it a wish-fulfilment; there is nothing objective about women’s love that makes it opportunistic.
A Freudian says he’s been testing Freud’s theory on interpreting dreams for over a century and is yet to find a single dream that isn’t a wish-fulfilment… You see what I’m getting at here? You should not be surprised what Tomassi said matched your observations any more than you should be if he said the complete opposite. This is because you are interpreting your experiences to match his doctrine.
All this talk about ‘models’ gets at the real problem here: you still think these things have some relation to reality. They are about as related to reality as my declaring that a woman’s beauty is a function of the goodness of her soul. The fact is she is beautiful; the rest is disposable nonsense.
That you posit evidence for your position makes me think you misunderstand this essay. The point is simple: your position is impossible. It is as impossible for Tomassi to have discovered any real concepts of love as it was for Freud with his wish-fulfilments. These things cannot be. No one can interpret dreams or conceptualize love, they can only invite themselves and others to use certain interpretations.
All Tomassi has done is convince you to describe women’s love in one way, and men’s in another. If we swap our styles of description, the reality remains the same, and suddenly men are opportunistic and women idealistic… A serious problem with Tomassi’s idea is that, even if a man and a woman fall in love under identical circumstances (not to each other), she is opportunistic and he is an idealist.
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Vox Day would reply that producing Walls of Text is the signifying trait of the Gamma Male.
Jokes aside. Men with this specific trait put lots of effort into writing these walls, because it is their mating behavior. They do this to compete for mates and because their offspring competes with the offspring of other men over resources.
The Wall of Text is a (rather ineffective) method to convince women to mate with him and to convince other men to make decisions which are disadvantageous to their own mating and offspring, and therefore advantageous to the mating and offspring of the poster.
This is why there is so much emotion in these long essays – they are reproductive behavior.
The first thing to realize is that angrily posting lots of text on the Internet doesn’t give you any real mating benefit whatsoever. In fact, the powerful encourage this behavior as THE way to prevent you from exactly that.
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Malcolm,
I’ll posit that the walls of words are born from a deep need to be right, an emotional response (as you identified) to contrary opinions that are seen as statements telling the writer he’s wrong, and struggles to control the emotional response enough to contemplate the contrary opinions. Mainly, why is it that so many men can relate to messages like the ones from Rollo and why does this often seem to happen as men’s experience with women increases?
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AA,
I warmly invite you and Derek L. Ramsey to write posts about female moral agency. I will link them to the series on this topic. If you find anything that drastically alters our earlier conclusions, I will be sure to mention it in future posts.
Ahh… But that is the nature of models, and science itself! As I said in an earlier post, science is nothing more than our best understanding of a complex topic. And I wouldn’t call them ‘doctrines’.
This is precisely why we must employ the imagination and devise models that might further our understanding of this. One alternative is prayer and prophecy. Are you into that?
I believe you are reading your own beliefs into the text, and are substituting your own definition of love for Rollo’s coded concept of love, which I explained in the above post. I don’t believe you ever offered your own contrasting definition of love, so it’s hard to tell. If you care to offer your own definition of love, I’m sure the resultant logic will play out much differently.
I don’t think anyone has claimed that Rollo Tomassi speaks for God or has quoted scripture in devising his models. I only pointed out that the model agrees with scripture on a couple points. There are other areas which do not line up with scripture.
Nonsense. Your arguments will stand or wilt on their own merit. Also, you should not refer to Rollo’s writings as the word of God.
WTH? What Bible verses are you referring to?
I hope I have conveyed your reasons and motivations accurately in the above post. Please correct me if I am wrong, or have missed something.
A slight correction. To interpret is to assign significance, meaning, and morality to a body of knowledge and then apply it to a particular personal application. To conceptualize is to say: ‘Let’s look at it this way‘ while also recognizing that, ‘This is just one way to look at the topic. There could be others.‘
You are assuming that other men are incapable of generating independent thought and can only parrot what they are told. Men should be afforded the due respect of allowing them to form their own opinions once properly informed.
To be clear, models are not reality. As I said before, it is an embodiment of our best understanding of reality.
Fantastic! You have imagined a new model! I can imagine that it is true in certain areas and egregiously false in others. Would you care to write an essay about this model? Perhaps there is something to be learned from it.
I agree. Models are only an interpretation of reality.
Tomassi’s representations are truly useful for describing and communicating observations of reality, even if it is tainted or limited by his lens of comprehension. Now, I challenge you to put aside Rollo’s model and imagine / devise a new and improved model and interpretation. Then, please write a dozen essays to explain it to other men. It is not easy to do, and if you take this endeavor seriously, you will see the significance of Rollo’s work.
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Jack,
AA’s comment is like what arguing with my wife used to be like, namely mischaracterizing arguments and then running with the mischaracterization as if it were a direct quote.
His bible verse argument so misconstrues what was really stated, that some of what the secular PUA guy types say does line up with biblical teaching while some does not, that it makes me think that AA is a woman.
He!!, the last time I remember someone using “This will be my last comment on this post and I will not reply any responses to my comments here.” in the comments was Elspeth. This is an attempted power play. My wife has done this with some frequency, mostly when she gets the feeling she’s not making progress with her arguments. Men tend to just leave, rather than feeling the need to state they are leaving.
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Gamma behavior according to Vox Day’s SSH mimics female behavior so well, that it becomes repulsive to both men and women. Nobody can stand male chicks. Just like many women the gamma male usually lives inside a powerful delusion bubble that prevents him from accepting criticism, no matter how constructive.
I reckon that this maladaptive behavioral pattern is probably learned inside a dominant mother household without any male role models present. This includes single mothers as well as families with male chicks as fathers. Single child families probably amplify the effect.
From my evolutionary POV this usually marks a dead end with no further offspring down the line. Women test and reject men not in touch with reality.
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Malcolm,
I think it could be worth you teasing that idea out further incorporating nature nurture arguments.
Thinking off the cuff, if Gamma behavior gets weeded out of the gene pool through assorted mating, why does it persist and even seem to be increasing? In theory, those men with the genetic capacity to be Gammas, given the right environment to nurture those traits, should be been selected against centuries ago when survival and procreation was more dependent on hyper masculine traits and skill at procuring food.
Since the traits persist, it could be possible that there is a corresponding female trait of being overly masculine that is naturally drawn to the qualities of the Gamma. The Gamma traits seem to be too common to me to suggest that their plight is a dead end when it comes to procreation.
I don’t know that there would be any way to test ideas in this area IRL. It could be interesting to dream up possibilities and carry them out to their various logical conclusions.
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Calhoun’s “mouse utopia” Universe 25 experiment suggests, that it takes a number of maladapted generations for the whole population to die off entirely.
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Re: Gamma behavior
RPA asked,
I believe MR gave one possible explanation here.
Add to this what I wrote in the OP.
Also, men are discouraged from developing masculine traits and expressing masculine behavior.
Also consider the reports that testosterone is decreasing and estrogen increasing which would skew males more feminine. I believe this may be caused by birth control pills.
I hope I haven’t Gammafied myself with my long comment above. It must be because my mother took birth control. :)
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@RPA
The Atlantic: Study: Women on Birth Control Pills Prefer Less Masculine Men (2013/3/29)
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Re: Women on Birth Control Pills Prefer Less Masculine Men
I have collected dozens of posts about Abortion and Birth Control. It is definitely pharmakeia.
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Of course, birth control is also a way to control reproduction. In the case of South Korea it lead to unsustainably low total fertility rate, having already led to societal aging comparable with Calhoun’s final cohort in Universe 25.
Result: total extinction.
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Could somebody expound on that a bit? How much does that vary in public and in private? What are the limits on the types of humbling that will work towards that goal of creating “felt love” for a reasonably attractive and/or dominant man?
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