The Rational Male - Preventive Medicine - Rollo Tomassi 2015

Conditioning

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EARLY EDUCATION

In late 2014 I had a post on Rational Male that began with a picture of a projection screen being presented to a grammar school classroom. This projection was a list of the collected, learned experiences of a group of 9-year-old boys who had been conditioned to a self-loathing of masculinity in a feminine-correct social order.

The question, “What I don’t like about being a boy” seemed fairly innocuous, but in a feminine-correct social awareness it becomes a litmus test to gauge how well these boys have internalized feminine-correct, conditioned beliefs. The list of offending grievances were:

• Not being able to be a mother

• Not supposed to cry

• Not allowed to be a cheerleader

• Supposed to do all the work

• Supposed to like violence

• Supposed to play football

• Boys smell bad

• Having an automatic bad reputation

• Grow hair everywhere

The list reads like the table of contents from the textbook of exactly what I’d expect from an organized feminine-primary conditioning, however we need to look deeper. It’s important to bear in mind that these uniquely male attributes are grievances these boys wish they could alter about themselves. These boys believe their lives would be improved (perfected) if they could be less like boys and more like girls. Masculine incorrect, feminine correct.

I’m often criticized of being conspiratorial for my assertion that the Feminine Imperative conditions men from a very early age to accept their eventual Beta supportive role later in life. While this masculine grievance list from 4th grade boys is a good illustration, it’s simply one example of the earliest parts of the feminine-correct landscape men are raised not just to internalize, but to evangelize about to other boys / men as well.

One fundamental aspect of coming to terms with our Blue Pill, feminine-primary ego-investments is understanding where they stem from. Every Red Pill aware man I know has run into the frustration that comes from the desire to help his fellow man (and a few select women) unplug from what really amounts to a lifetime of conditioning.

This is a tough aspect of the Red Pill for most people to follow. We want to believe we’re intelligent, educated individuals with a remarkable capacity to judge, compare and weigh the merits of the ideas presented to us by others. We don’t like to think we’ve been fooled or we haven’t considered enough about our beliefs that constitute who we are as people and how those beliefs are part of our personalities.

In most popular stories Beta men may be protagonists, but they’re never really heroes. Every movie, that I can remember, that has a Beta as a protagonist has been a comedy; Beta males are good for laughing at — no one actually admires them.

The same situation exists with Beta men you know. If you tell them the truth they’ll say you hate women, or you’ve dated the wrong types of women, or whatever else they can come up with to protect the mental model under which they operate. They’re invested in that mental model and they’re happy with it; to challenge it is to, almost literally, destroy the world they live in. Not only will how they view the world be destroyed, but how they view themselves will be destroyed as well.

Ego Investments and Denial

The psychological term for this is called ’ego-investment’. I use this term a lot so I think it deserves a bit of explanation.

When a person internalizes a mental schema (see belief) so thoroughly and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to literally attack the person. This is why we see such polarization and violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, etc. beliefs — they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with ireful-able evidence that challenges the assertions of their belief.

One common frustration that the Red Pill-aware express is how difficult it is to open their Blue Pill friend’s eyes as to why he’s not hooking up, why he’s not getting dates (or second dates if he is), why he’s constantly getting LJBF rejections, etc., and the flaws in what is really ego-investments and conditioned internalizations. As I’m fond of saying, unplugging chumps from the Matrix is dirty work, and this is made all the more difficult when a person is in a categorical state of denial.

People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy some-thing they hold dear. In the case of a cheating partner, denial allows you to avoid acknowledging evidence of your own humiliation. Short of catching your spouse in bed with your best friend, evidence of infidelity is usually insubstantial. It’s a motivated skepticism. You’re more skeptical of things you don’t want to believe and demand a higher level of proof.

Denial is subconscious or it wouldn’t work. If you know you’re closing your eyes to the truth, some part of you also knows what the truth is and denial can’t perform its ego-protecting function.

One thing we all struggle to protect is a positive self-image. The more important the aspect of your self-image that’s challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into a state of denial. If you have a strong sense of self-worth and competence your self-image can take hits but remain largely intact; if you’re beset by self-doubt (a hallmark of Beta thinking), however, any acknowledgment of failure can be devastating and any admission of error painful to the point of being unthinkable. Self-justification arises from the dissonance between believing you’re competent, and making a mistake, which clashes with that image.

Therefore we see Blue Pill men tenaciously cling to a moralistic sense of purpose in their methods which is only reinforced by popular culture in our media, our music, eHarmony, our religion, etc. What they fail to realized, and what becomes cemented for them in denial, is that what they believe are their own, indigenous, self-righteously correct beliefs were modified for them by a feminine-centric influence.

This influence began in our most formative years. Our Blue Pill ego-investments were taught to us as part of our earliest socialization.

For women and men steeped in this feminine correct conditioning, just being presented with the possibility that their ego-investment in that correctness is the result of a childhood and young adulthood conditioning that predisposed them to it will seem preposterous because making them aware of it challenges who they are as a person. If you attack the belief you attack the person.

While I was writing this section I got into an exchange on Twitter with a very pro-feminist girl who’d asked me why I thought feminism was anything other than ’equality for both genders’. While I knew that her conditioned ego-investments in feminism would make any real revelation for her impossible, I proceeded to make my case that the latent purpose of feminism was to unilaterally facilitate Hypergamy by removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

Needless to say that made her apoplectic. Her simplistic gut-response was some-thing to the effect of “You think feminism is all about limiting dicks?”, but it did make me aware that any Red Pill truth I could confront her with was going to offend her preconditioned, feminine-correct sensibilities.

By even suggesting that the better part of western culture is conditioned from its formative years to default to the feminine seems conspiratorial, but as I stated in the prior book, that conditioning isn’t the result of some shadowy cabal of feminist social engineers, but rather an evolving social undercurrent that is by far stronger without any kind of centralization. In fact that’s what makes this conditioning so endemic — there is no single source to trace it back to.

What makes unplugging so difficult is coming to realize Red Pill awareness in what feels like a natural state of feminine deference. Our earliest education teaches boys to gender self-loathe, while simultaneously teaching an unquestioning, unqualified value of the feminine (Mother, sister, girlfriend, wife). For women, respect is taught to be a presumed given, not earned as it must be among boys.

It’s also important to consider that this default respect is an integral part of men’s male-as-protector psychological predisposition. Protect mom, protect sister, protect the girls, carry their books home from school and unwaveringly give them the deference their natural weaknesses should afford them, is part of the protectorate mentality boys are both taught and have a natural affinity for.

This aspect of the male mind which predisposes boys to pedestalize girls is really less about respect and more about culling intimate approval from girls (i.e. The Savior Schema). It’s the first manifestation of male deductive logic in solving the problem of earning a girl’s favor.

The Feminine Imperative has learned how to recognize and exploit this natural deference by including it as an integral part of future men’s early conditioning.

Pedestals

One of the first things men are made aware of when they come into a Red Pill awareness is their own predisposition to pedestalize a woman they’re interested in. When this tendency to pedestalize is paired with a scarcity mentality and a learned soul-mate romanticism, this can develop into a state of ONEitis a man will have for a woman.

This pedestalization is usually the first barrier a man must break in order to move on to other aspects of Game and Red Pill understanding, but it’s important to high-light this tendency because it is such a deeply internalized aspect of a man’s earliest conditioning. That feminine-primary conditioning plays on his natural protectorate instinct and then pairs this with a subtle valuation of the feminine that always exceeds his own. From that point a boy can extrapolate a woman’s intrinsic value in relation to his own capacity to attract a particular woman as a man.

This is really the heart of ONEitis, an unhealthy all-or-nothing devotion based psychosis that distorts a woman’s valuation to him beyond all realistic appraisal. Depending on his own valuation to women on whole, this has the potential to exacerbate a scarcity mentality that was also part of his early conditioning.

He’ll “never find another girl so fine” and he literally “can’t live without her.”

Pedestalization conditioning can be learned in the home, but commonly it’s school, church, the media, popular culture, an adolescent’s peer group and even former Male Spaces conventionally reserved for only boys/men as the feminine influence pervades into them. The Feminine Imperative is the priority, even when it seems the boy’s self-importance and arrogance supersedes it.

That’s not to say boys don’t resist this influence or hold themselves in higher respect in given social contexts, but it is to say that the conditioning influences of the feminine sets the context in which it can be resisted. In other words, those boys’ actions are only “incorrect” based on a feminine-primary definition of correctness. Not prioritizing, not pedestalizing girls/women is the incorrect (shameable) behavior.

Early feminine conditioning predisposes boys to ego-invest themselves in becoming men who will prioritize women’s wants and needs above their own.

The “Ladies First” response is the conditioned response to any intergender exchange. This then becomes the first germ of a Beta mindset for men — deferring to the feminine part of his intrinsic personality. This deference becomes an unquestioned part of “just who he is.”

Chivalry

Much of what men believe is, or was, chivalry is really a bastardized form of the initial concept courtesy of Hollywood and romanticizations. The concept of chivalry play well with our first conditioning of feminine deference.

This chivalry is simply one of many ideologies that was subsumed by western-ized romanticism. Chivalry also applied toward things such as not hitting a man while he wasn’t looking or attacking a blatantly undefendable inferior, or even a respected, foe.

It was originally intended (in its westernized form) as a code of ethics determined by the Roman Catholic Church to control the otherwise lawless and violent natures of soldiers and knights who, understandably, had a tendency for brigandism in the middle ages. However, there were also similar codes in feudal Japan (i.e. Bushido).

What passes for most people’s understanding of chivalry is actually a classic interpretation and bastardization of western romanticism and the ideologies of ’courtly love’, which ironically enough was also an effort by the women of the period intended to better control the men of the early and high Renaissance eras. Essentially it amounted to a taming of the over-dominating masculine influence of the time by laying out a system of prescribed appropriate conditions necessary to satisfy a woman’s access to her intimacy.

Functionally this chivalry became the feminism of its time and indirectly served much of the same feminine interests for women who relied on indirect power.

Like today’s push for men to better identify with the feminine, the idea of courtly love was to ’encourage’ men to explore their feminine sides with odes of divine expressions of love, offerings of fantastic (often life threatening) feats to prove one’s devotion or presenting gifts beyond compare to again prove ones worth and sincerity to the “object” of his desire — hers being the only gauge for acceptance.

The articles of courtly love are actually the inception of our tradition of buying an expensive wedding ring for a woman. And just like the women of today, their behaviors rarely matched their stated intents, but far be it from the objective eye to cast a doubt upon them for fear of social ostracization.

You’ll have to forgive me for the history lesson here but it’s an important part in understanding the utility that the anachronism of chivalry plays for men’s conditioning by the Feminine Imperative today. That conditioning predisposes men to a presumption of, and expectation of, an old-order valuation of women (based on courtly misappropriations of chivalry), while simultaneously affording them with the direct power that feminism insists men also defer to.

The selective old-order chivalric concepts that served women in the past still make for useful tools in honing men’s natural predilection for female protection-ism. Chivalry is co-opted to defer to the Feminine Imperative as part of men’s conditioning.

Within a feminine-distorted ethical, moral definition of chivalry there is an imp-plied reward for exchange of feminine-primary deferent behaviors by men. In this undefined exchange, an unconditional expectation of feminine deference is conflated with men’s principle of honor.

Why The Red Pill is Offensive

What women and feminine-conditioned men find offensive about the Red Pill is that it challenges the conditioned ego-investments they depend upon to operate in a feminine primary social order. Women are of course naturally threatened by men becoming too aware of the latent role this order conditions them for and expects them to play to best optimize their sexual selection options and strategy. The more men aware of this strategy, the likelier they are not to cooperate in a strategy that doesn’t hold their true best interests.

Conditioned men cling to those investments because they seem like a noble ideal for which they’ve been trained to expect will be rewarded with mutually shared, mutually acknowledged (hopefully less conditional), love, respect and devotion, but also access, urgency and frequency of “the best sex of their life.”

The Red Pill wipes away the hope inherent in that idealism because it more accurately and reliably predicts human behavior than feminism, or that feminine conditioning, ever has for a man. That’s a tough, offensive, pill to swallow after a lifetime of ego-investment in a wavering, unreliable or failed drive for the promised rewards of Blue Pill ideals.

That conditioning predisposes men to believing what should be true. Even just the objective questioning of feminine primacy beliefs (to say nothing of Red Pill assertions) triggers shock, outrage and disbelief that any sane person could ever ask such a question.

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EQUALISM

As I stated earlier, 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 forums that it hasn’t always been thus. Their story is one of how our forefathers “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 wisest Alpha among them could never, for instance, understand the impact that a unilaterally feminine-controlled form of birth control would effect upon a global-ized society.

While the sages of manhood-past still have many relevant lessons for the men of today, they simply lacked the compounded experiences and understanding men possess now. Though they undoubtedly were keen observers of human nature and 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’.

The Undoing of Men

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

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

In a recent series of articles National Public Radio attempted to suss out what it means to be a man in the 21st century. I listen to NPR, and while I know bias will always be an inevitable part of any media, I couldn’t help but assess what a morass that 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 over 50 years now.

Through the mid 80s 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 arbitrary 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.

Useful chivalrous moralism, blurring and distorting conventional masculinity, raising and conditioning men to accept ambiguity and doubt about the security of a ’manhood’ they’re encouraged not to define for themselves — all of these are 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. Physical attractiveness and egalitarianism are also negatively related in males.

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 sex’s interests. This bears repeating here:

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 millennium 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, complementary 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 or reciprocity.

The conventional gender roles evolved to be complementary to each other as betterment of species survival. 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?

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 own 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 will up their hot-ness 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 versus 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 situationally 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 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.