The Rational Male - Preventive Medicine - Rollo Tomassi 2015

Hierarchies Of Love

INTERSEXUAL HIERARCHIES

One of the withdrawal symptoms of unplugging from the Matrix of a Blue Pill existence is usually an overwhelming nihilism that results from being torn away from the previous Blue Pill preconceptions a man has been conditioned to for most of his life. It’s my hope that in the future Red Pill men will make the necessary interventions and apply what they’ve learned from their unplugging and Red Pill truths in general towards their sons (and daughters) as well as other men they know or are related to. Unfortunately, until then, the process of breaking away from that conditioning is usually going to begin as the result of a traumatic break-up, a divorce, or having had the relational equity a man thought he’d built a long term relationship on proved worthless in the face of Hypergamy.

It’s a sad reality of unplugging that it most often starts as a result of emotional anguish, but to pour salt in those wounds is then having to live with the harsh real-ties that the Red Pill makes men aware of — that more or less everything they’d held as an ego-investment up to that point was founded on a feminine-primary conditioning. I summed this up in the first book with The Bitter Taste of the Red Pill:

The truth will set you free, but it doesn’t make truth hurt any less, nor does it make truth any prettier, and it certainly doesn’t absolve you of the responsibilities that truth requires. One of the biggest obstacles guys face in unplugging is accepting the hard truths that Game forces upon them. Among these is bearing the burden of realizing what you’ve been conditioned to believe for so long were comfortable ideals and loving expectations are really liabilities. Call them lies if you want, but there’s a certain hopeless nihilism that accompanies categorizing what really amounts to a system that you are now cut away from. It is not that you’re hopeless, it’s that you lack the insight at this point to see that you can create hope in a new system — one in which you have more direct control over.

Try to keep this last part in mind as you read what I propose in this section. I read a lot of guys in various forums getting despondent after having the Red Pill make sense to them, but that despondency is really a simple lack of not having a path already preset for them to follow. Instead of the easy answers and prerequisite responsibilities that the Blue Pill and the Feminine Imperative had ready for him to follow, now in his new awareness he’s tasked with making a new path for himself, and that’s both scary and exciting at the same time.

Love Styles

In almost four years of blogging and a book written, my three most popular posts have been the Love series — Women in Love, Men in Love and Of Love and War (found in The Rational Male). Though my SMV graph gets the most link backs, the Love series are easily the most viewed posts on the Rational Male blog. Unfortunately they’re often the most misquoted and misunderstood.

One of the toughest revelations of the Red Pill is coming to terms with the difference in experience and concept that men and women apply to love. The core principle in Women in Love is usually misunderstood upon first reading. For different reasons, deliberate or otherwise, both men and women critically misunderstand the main premise of that essay:

Iron Rule of Tomassi #6

Women are utterly incapable of loving a man in the way that a man expects to be loved.

In its simplicity this speaks volumes about the condition of Men. It accurately expresses a pervasive nihilism that Men must either confront and accept, or be driven insane in denial for the rest of their lives when they fail to come to terms with the disillusionment.

Women are incapable of loving men in a way that a man idealizes is possible, in a way he thinks she should be capable of.

Most critics of this assessment of how either sex interprets and considers love tend to blow past this last part. They oversimplify my meaning and sputter out something to the effect of, “That Tomassi guy thinks that women can’t ever really love men, what preposterous crap!”

Of course that isn’t my assertion, but I understand the want to dismiss this notion, particularly for men and women invested in the ideal of egalitarian equalism. It’s a threat to the ego-investment that men and women are anything less than co-equal and fully rational agents who come together for a mutually agreeable benefit. The simple mechanics of women’s innate Hypergamy puts the lie to this presumption, as well as confirms the relevancy of women’s constant, qualitative conditionality for whom (really what) they’ll love.

I think it’s ironic that the same people who disparage this concept are among the first to readily embrace the pop-psychology notion of “Love Languages”.

I get why this idea pisses off women (and feminized men); it’s very unflattering to be accused of loving men from a position of opportunism. However, it’s important to understand that I don’t make this observation to condemn the way women approach love — although I’m sure it will follow, my point isn’t to presume a ’right’ or ’wrong’ way for women to love men or vice versa. There are beneficial and detrimental aspects of both women’s opportunistic approach to love, and men’s idealistic approach to love. That said, I happen to believe that the differing ways men and women love each other evolved to be complementary to the other — each sex’s strengths compensating for the weakness of the other.

For all the “OMG! I can’t believe this Red Pill asshole thinks women can’t really love men” misdirection, I should point out that well intentioned men, especially the newly Red Pill, are often guilty of a similar oversimplification.

Theirs is an attempt to find validation in the (usually recent) trauma of having been cut away from their prior Blue Pill conditioning. A similar sentiment of, “Rollo says women can’t really love men. Of course! It’s all so clear to me! Now I know why she left me” satisfies a simplistic need for confirmation of their former condition.

And again, it’s not a right or wrong way of loving — it’s the lack of recognizing there is a difference in men and women’s concepts of love and being on the punishing side of that lack. Most men will want to apply their concepts of honor or justice in assessing how ’right’ men’s idealistic love is, while women will still see the inherent value in loving what a man is as a prerequisite for loving who a man is.

Hypergamy doesn’t care about men’s idealistic expectations of love, but neither does men’s rationality make concessions for what facilitates women’s opportunistic approach to love.

Romantic Souls

I pulled the following quote from a post on The Red Pill subreddit forum:

My whole life, I’ve had it nailed into me that I would be able to find true love if I was honest and hardworking. As I grew older it was, “If I’m some-what fit and have a good job making 60k-80k a year, I’ll find that beautiful girl that loves me as I love her“.

As I’ve stated on many occasions, it is men who are the True Romantics. Granted, it’s the indeliberate result of centuries of evolved ’courtly love’, but in the realm of what qualifies as a true act of romance, it’s men who are the primary actors; it’s men who ’make’ (or want to make) romance happen. And of course therein lies the problem, a man cannot ’make’ romance happen for a woman.

For all a man’s very imaginative, creative, endeavors to manufacture a romance that will endear a woman to him, his ’trying’ to do so is what disqualifies his intent.

For every carefully preplanned ’date night’ after marriage, there’s a college girl swooning to bang her boyfriend living in a shit-hole, sheets over the windows, furniture from the dumpster, pounding shitty beer and sleeping on a soiled mattress on the floor. Romance isn’t created, romance just happens, and it’s a tough, but valuable, lesson when men come to realize that a happenstance bag of Skittles, or a ring made from a gum wrapper in the right place at the right time meant more to a woman than every expensively contrived ’romantic getaway’ he’d ever thought would satisfy her need for lofty romance.

An important part of the Red Pill is learning that the most memorable acts of love a man can commit with a woman are acts of (seeming or genuine) spontaneity and never apparently and overtly planned (and yes, that applies to sex as well).

This is a source of real frustration for a man since his Blue Pill conditioning expects the opposite from him, and his romantic nature — the nature that wants her to “love him as he loves her” — conspires with his problem solving nature, thus prompting him to ever greater romantic planning for what he hopes will be an appreciated, reciprocated love.

The Hierarchy

The true source of a man’s frustration lies in his misdirected hope that a woman’s concept of love matches his own. His ideal is a beautiful girl that loves him the same way he loves her. The presumption (a romantic one perpetuated by the myth of egalitarian equalism) is that his concept of idealized love is a universal one which women share with men in general and him in particular.

Thanks mostly to men’s Blue Pill conditioning, what men fail to ever consider is that women’s hypergamic based love always considers what he is, before she invests herself in who he is. This is the root of the intersexual hierarchy of love

The Conventional Model

Before the rise of feminine social primacy, the above ’flow chart’ of love prioritization would hardly have been an afterthought for a man. Through any number of evolutionary and sociological progressions, the base understanding of how men’s love began from a position of protecting, provisioning for and stewarding the lives of both his wife and children wasn’t a concern worth too much of his conscious consideration. Neither was a prevailing desire for a reciprocal model of love the overshadowing concern it is for men today.

To be sure, a baseline requirement of a returned love, sex, respect and fidelity were important elements, but this wasn’t the originating basis of male desire for being loved. There was no expectation of a woman loving him as he loved her (and by extension their children). To be a man was to have the capacity to provide and sustain a surplus of resources beyond his own provisioning while providing a sense of protection and security.

In the series Breaking Bad, an interesting dialog is exchanged between the characters of Walter White and Gustavo when he convinces Walter to cook meth for him in order to ensure the support and security of his family before he dies from cancer.

“A man provides, and he does it even when he’s not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it, because he’s a man.”

You can look the clip up on YouTube, but Gustavo’s monologue seems like an anachronism, especially in the light of a Red Pill awareness of the potential for injustice and the veritable certainty of a provisioning arrangement that will be a one-sided proposition for a man — whether he’s loved, respected, appreciated, married or divorced.

Undoubtedly there’ll be men reading this bristling at the idea of a non-equitable model for love, but know that this idea of an equitable model is the result of the conditioning that an egalitarian equalism has predisposed men to believe is even possible.

Before the rise of feminine primacy, a man’s expression of love through his sup-port and guidance simply weren’t things women or children had the capacity to reciprocate. The advent of women’s independence, real or imagined, has served to strip men of this core understanding of the differences between male and female concepts of love. In the effort to feminize men more fully, and position men in a condition of confusion about what constitutes masculinity, this concept of love was replaced by a feminine-primary model for love.

While a woman’s respect, and a degree of love may flow back to her man, her primary love and concern is directed towards her children.

One reason we’re still shocked by women who kill their children (pre or post natal) is due to an inherent acknowledgment of this natural dynamic. Women’s brain function and biochemistry largely evolved to predispose them to bonding with their children, and thus ensure the survival of the species. Beyond the rigors of physically gestating a child, raising children to self-sufficiency required a considerable investment of effort and resources — not to mention constant attention. Nature selected-for women with an innate, biological and psychological capacity to nurture and direct love primarily towards their offspring.

The internal psychology women evolved to vet for men who displayed traits for both Alpha physical prowess and parental investment / provisioning potential are a result of children being a one-directional priority for a woman’s love. While a degree of maintaining a man’s continued personal investment and commitment to the family unit requires her attentions in the form of sex and affections, a woman’s primary love focus is directed towards children.

Granted, not all women are capable of having children (or some even desirous of them), but even in these instances substitute love priorities still supersede directing her primary attention towards a man. It may seem like I’m attempting to paint women’s love as callous or indifferent, but this ’directioning’ isn’t a conscious or deliberate act, but rather it’s due to her innate understanding that a man is to direct his love towards her as a priority.

The Feminine Primary Model

“Don’t wait for the good woman. She doesn’t exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd.

Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts. The female loves to play man against man, and if she is in a position to do it there is not one who will resist. The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lies a living hell.”

— Charles Bukowski

For my more optimistic readers, you’ll be happy to know I don’t entirely agree with Mr. Bukowski’s sentiment here, however Charles gives us a great introduction to the next progressions of intersexual hierarchies.

While I’m not sure every woman is as skilled as the next in “betrayal, torture and damnation” as Charles’ waxes poetic about, I do believe that his understanding of the male nature is not only accurate, but that same male nature is actually the source of his equating women with betrayal, torture and damnation. It’s not that women are inherently evil, it’s that men’s idealism make them so available to being betrayed, tortured and damned.

If you’re at all familiar with Charles Bukowski, you’ll know he was one of the last true son’s of bitches — the unapologetic epitome of gloriously arrogant self-concern and masculine independence. For what he lacked in polish he made up for in talent and a brutal honesty that could never be acknowledged in the feminine centric social order of today. In the mid 60’s he was a feral, instinctually Red Pill Man.

Charles, for all his musing on women, knew that it was the male nature that facilitated women’s damaging of men. The feminists of his generation and today simply dismiss him as a relic of a misogynist era, but his real insight wasn’t about women, but rather about men’s inner workings.

“The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love.” I’d like to believe that Bukowski was ahead of his time with this, however I think it’s more accurate to presume that, due to a constant Femi-nine-primary socialization, men have been conditioned to interpret love in feminine pretexts, rather than acknowledging men and women approach love from different conceptual perspectives.

In light of these differing, often conflicting, concepts of male-idealistic and female-opportunistic love, it’s easy to see how a man might find women duplicitous, torturous and damnable — particularly when his feminine ’sensitivity training’ pre-disposes him to believe women share the same love idealism he’s been encouraged to believe.

The Feminine Primary model of love is the idealistic fantasy the vast majority of men have been conditioned to presume is a universal model of love. In this fantasy a woman reciprocates that same idealism he has about how she should feel about him based on his masculine-idealistic concept of love. That love eventually must (potentially) include children, but the fantasy begins for him with a woman’s concept of love agreeing with his own love-for-love’s-sake approach, rather than the performance-based, opportunistic approach women require of men in order to love them.

The best illustration I can apply to this model is found in the very tough lessons taught in the movie Blue Valentine. Look this film up on IMDB or Netflix. The plot of this film graphically outlines the conflict that occurs when a man conflates his idealism of the feminine primary model of love with women’s opportunistic model of love. That idealism is exacerbated by a feminine-primary conditioning since early childhood that prepares him to expect girls and women will share in it.

When you look at this model objectively you can’t help but see the Disney-esque, Blue Pill promise of a mutually reciprocated love. Men being the true romantics predispose themselves to wanting to believe this model is really the only mutually acceptable model. The dispelling of the fantasy this model represents is one of the most difficult aspects of coming to terms with Red Pill awareness — in fact one of the primary reasons men become hostile to the Red Pill is an inability to imagine any other possible model.

For most men the dispelling of this fantasy comes after he’s reached the ’happily ever after’ part of this schema and he realizes the conditionality his wife places on her terms for loving him. Too late he’s forced into the realization that women’s love model is based upon what he is before who he is.

While there is a definitive conditionality placed on her love, men don’t necessarily expect an unconditional love. It’s usually at this stage that men are conveniently expected (or expect themselves) to ’Man Up’ and earn a woman’s mutually reciprocated love by adopting the male responsibility aspects of the first, conventional model. “A man provides” and for all of his previous equalist conditioning that made him believe a woman would “love him as he loves her” he blames his inability to achieve that idealistic love on himself for not living up to being a “man” deserving of the feminine primary model of ideal love.

What he’s really done is convinced himself of accepting a woman’s opportunistic model while retaining the idealism he’s been conditioned never to reject

— thereby leaving her blameless in her own concept of love and making him accountable to it.

It’s hard to consider this model without presuming a woman’s manipulative intent of a man, but let me state emphatically that, for the better part, I believe most women simply aren’t specifically aware of the subconscious, instinctual mechanics behind this intersexual hierarchy model.

Through any number of ways women are socialized to presume that their Femi-nine-primary position implies that men should necessarily take the life and maturity steps needed to fulfill women’s Hypergamy-motivated, opportunistic approach over the course of their lifetime. We like to bemoan this as feminine entitlement, and yes it can get, and is getting more so, abusively out of hand, but this entitlement and expectation originates in women’s opportunistic approach towards love.

Men are the “romantics pretending to be realists” and women, vice versa.

The Subdominant Model

Finally we come to male subdominant model wherein a man, by conditioning and circumstance, expects love from a woman as he would from a mothering dynamic.

Often this situation seems to result from an overly enthusiastic belief in egalitarian gender equality and parallelism, but the underlying motivation is really an abdication of masculinity and, by association, abdication of conventional mascot-line responsibility. There simply is no presumption of a conventionally masculine ’headship’ prior to, or into a long-term relationship.

These are the men I call pre-whipped; men so thoroughly conditioned, men who’ve so internalized that conditioning, that they mentally prepare themselves for total surrender to the Feminine Imperative, that they already make the perfect

Beta provider before they even meet the woman for whom they’ll make their sacrifice. They’ve internalized a conditioned expectation to acquiesce to a feminine defined frame before any woman accepts him for intimacy.

The social undercurrent of an ideal gender equalism plays an active role in creating these men, and specifically this hierarchical model. Unfortunately, the social and personal illusion of control this model is idealistically based upon is usually overshadowed by the conventional male-dominant / female-submissive expectations of a naturally fluid, complementary love model.

These are the ’house husband’ arrangements, and the ’gender is a social construct’ relationships. While the hope is one of a realized egalitarian equalism within the relationship, the psychological struggle eventually becomes one of dominant and submissive gender expectations in the pairing.

In an era when Hypergamy has been given free reign, it is no longer men’s provisioning that dictates a woman’s predisposition to want to be a submissive partner in their relationships. To an increasingly larger degree women no longer depend upon men for the provisioning, security and emotional support that used to be a buffer against their innate Hypergamous impulses. What’s left is a society of women using the satisfaction of optimized Hypergamy as their only benchmark for relational gratification.

Men with the (Alpha) capacity to meet the raw, feral, demands of women’s Hypergamy are exceedingly rare, and thanks to the incessant progress of feminization are being further pushed to marginalization. The demand for Men who meet women’s increasingly over-estimated sense of Hypergamic self-worth makes the men women could submit to a precious commodity, and increases further stress on the modern sexual market place.

For all of the mental and social awareness necessitated by this equalist fantasy, men subscribing to this model inevitably fall into a submissive (conventionally feminine) role. Underneath all of the trappings that make this model seem imbalanced is the reversal of conventional roles which place women into the love flow state men are better suited for since their approach to love originates from idealism (and not a small amount of martyr-like sacrifice for that idealism).

The expectation of feminized men then becomes one of women adopting men’s idealistic concept of love-for-love’s-sake, only to be gravely disappointed when they discover that women simply lack the capacity for it. Essentially this model forces a woman not only to mother her children, but also her husband.

The most common complaint you’ll hear from women forced into this conventionally masculine expectation is their resentment of having to “play mommy” for their husband because he’s incapable of taking care of himself.

In the beginning of this section I stated that men and women’s approach to love was ultimately complementary to one another and in this last model we can see how the two approaches — idealistic and opportunistic — dovetail together. That may seem a bit strange at this point, but when social influences imbalance this conventional complement we see how well the two should come together.

When a woman’s opportunistic approach to love is cast into the primary, dominant love paradigm for a couple, and a family, that pairing and family is now at the mercy of an opportunism necessitated by that woman’s Hypergamy and the drive to optimize it. Conversely, when a man’s idealistic approach to love is in the dominant frame (as in the conventional model) it acts as a buffer to women’s loving opportunism that would otherwise imbalance and threaten the endurance of that family and relationship.

Arguments about chores, money, sex life, and romance are most common in couples where the woman makes all or most of the family’s decisions. Female decision-making status is an even stronger determinant of relationship dissatisfaction than female breadwinner status. Women can handle making more money in a relationship, but they despise being the leader in a relationship.

Argument frequency decreased among female breadwinners if they were not the primary decision-makers.

When a woman’s love concept is the dominant one, that relationship will be governed by her opportunism and the quest for her hypergamic optimization. The ultimate desired end of that optimization is a conventional love hierarchy where a dominant Man is the driving, decisive member of that sexual pairing.