Rollo has one of the finest minds in the manosphere. He’s given us well articulated original contributions that sprung from his original insights. He continues to put in effort to help men, and he does help men.
However his website is now basically a MGTOW handbook, geared at recovering betas.
In his conception of the world, you are either the guy that women want to have no strings attached sex with in the nightclub bubble pool, or you are a chump who can at best offer security for a woman who does not sexually desire you.
Guess which guy the married with a great high status job former rock star implies that he is?
I’m not dissing the guy for drama, or as some king of the hill move. I respect him and am able to recognize his brilliance, good works, and hard effort. I trust that he is a genuinely good man who genuinely wants to, tries to, and does help men, and to the best of his ability.
But in building his map of the socio-sexual marketplace territory he has created a finely crafted diorama, and now lives in that diorama. His map is now his territory, and it has come to pass that his map is now more wrong than it is right. It resembles reality so closely that he believes that it is reality, and quite unfortunately so do many other people.
As a married man he flirts but does not date, and so has limited scientific feedback with which to test his theories. His favorite feedback comes from low socio-sexual marketplace value disaffected betas. He helps to save them from suicide. He warns people of the pitfalls of marriage and is careful to point out how hypergamy tirelessly works.
I won’t go into details of my disagreements with his views in this post. They were mentioned on his blog in the comments section, and instead of organizing my thoughts coherently I just copied and pasted my comments onto my own blog post here .
Regardless of if you agree or disagree with the finer points of the map of the sexual marketplace, you will agree that
- Rollo’s blog is not about self improvement.
How many of his blog posts are about what he is doing to self improve as a man?
If you are not rolling the stone up the hill, then you are sliding down it.
It’s a fine thing to very occasionally mention that game can improve a mans overall chances. I can see that he very occasionally concedes that wealth can increase a man’s opportunities with women (though Rollo will not concede that it increases a mans sexual attractiveness in the same way that looks can). He has mentioned that working out can improve a man’s options. But none of those very occasional concessions to sexual marketplace class fluidity change the general gist and tone of his blog.
Rollo is trying to keep men down, and in their place.
His blog is about alpha fucks, and beta bucks, and you may as well give up and realize that you have been a beta all along and that you are a beta now and that you will always be a beta.
Because his blog is not about self improvement, it is not a blog about how to take advantage of hypergamy.
Because it is not about how to take advantage of hypergamy, but endlessly talks about hypergamy, it is a blog about how to protect yourself from hypergamy.
Therefore it is an MGTOW blog.
Which self improvement project is Rollo currently passionate about? What are his socio sexual goals? Does he want to arrange threesomes with model quality girls? Does he want to build up a harem of women who are in love with him? Does he want to train his current wife to be a devoted love slave?
He talks about none of these because none of these are his ambition.
In fact I will dare to take it further. As he made a blog post devoted to saying that it was an impracticality to be an alpha provider, that he is not one. I can’t know that, and it’s not a generous assumption, however if his life were like that I think he’d tend to see that as a possibility for other people, and if his life were not like that I’d tend to think he’d rather not see that as a possibility for other people.
He teaches very rudimentary red pill truths in an EXTREMELY high contrast, cartoonish way. I used to read cartoons as a kid, and when you are a kid they are a very entertaining way to learn about the world. You learn about good guys and bad guys, and the bright colors, sharp well delineated lines and huge pixels are soothing and simple. But as an adult I see that the world of cartoons is only barely representational of reality. Just because it is in many ways representational does not make it accurate – it is more wrong than it is right.
If you use Rollo’s world view, and put in perfectly good data, you will get out garbage predictions.
But that doesn’t much matter for what it is. As an MGTOW blog, you don’t need to predict what happens when you strongly escalate on the bed with a woman who has not yet shown any overt sexual interest in you. That’s irrelevent.
I’m a firm believer in class mobility.
It’s not for everyone. Some people are permanently damaged, stupid, or otherwise fucked up and may as well go ahead and give up now. For such people I would recommend therationalmale.com . You’ll feel better about yourself and believe that you have every reason and right to just lay down and give up.
For everyone else, there are endless ways to self improve and to constantly increase your sexual market value and your sexual access and your sexual skills and the number and quality of women who want to spend time with you, fuck you, fall in love with you, and attend to you.
If a blog is not ABOUT all the ways a man can self improve, then it is a blog ABOUT stagnation, resignation, and fail.
We all get older, and sooner or later that means we all decline in physical attractiveness. But men can still increase their romantic and sexual options into their forties, fifties, and sixties. Maybe even their seventies. Maybe more. And it pains me to have to say that I mean sexual options that include the women genuinely lusting. I blame Rollo that that even needs to be said at all. Fucking cartoonish meme of Alpha Fucks and Beta Bucks!
I have over 800 posts on this blog, and many of them touch in on ways to do well in LTRs with women. A big part of doing well is becoming as attractive as possible. And being attractive is about continual self improvement.
In a recent post I mentioned some areas of potential self improvement that came to mind
We can develop:
- Mathematically
- Musically
- Socially, within many distinct and overlapping contexts
- Physically in sports and muscle training
- In various forms of mind training meditations
- In various forms of body centered mindfulness meditations
- Financially
- In sexual prowess and refinement
- Intellectually
- Psychologically
- Creatively
- In knowledge
- Philosophically
- Aesthetically
- In interpersonal connections, networking, influence and power
- As a family man
- In skills at having sustainable hand in long term passionate relationships
- In affect and mood and in virtuosity of emotional range
- In writing and speaking and communicating in body language and vocal tones clearly and persuasively
And on and on.
If you are only developing your game, you aren’t pushing the rock up the hill in a sustainable way. It will start rolling down on you and eventually crush you.
If you are only developing your finances, personality, style, physique, location, and free time but aren’t developing your pipeline then you are also treading water and will eventually sink.
If a guy is talking about the sexual marketplace, he is either talking about how to constantly and in all possible ways improve ones position in it, or he is talking about how to Men Going Their Own Way opt out.
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I’m fairly new to this website, but what exactly do you mean by: “…developing your pipeline..”?
Something I’m failing at currently.
Meeting new girls who you want to be intimate with. And then of course seducing them.
The metaphor is of a pipe, like an oil pipe, that delivers you a stream of women.
Stream is an important portion of the metaphor.
Even pure love can only come in seasons and streams.
Do you think that developing your game to eventually rely on daygame, is a solid pipeline?
For some stages of life some people have shown it to be.
I’m not sure if all men can make it so, regardless of age.
And I am sure that no man can make it so in old age.
I think/feel/believe that most men are best suited with LTRs and MLTRs. Long term relationships such as girlfriends, and multiple long term relationships.
I doubt that anything else could be satisfying, and I doubt that men who seek otherwise are capable of feeling satisfaction.
Agree, but you can still form LTRs off of day game.
I have also gained a much better insight as to why women do and think they way they do by reading Rollo. He is an above average writer with phenomenal analytic skills. I can’t tell you how many times I have read “Saving the Best,” and “Good Girls DO.”
BUT
About two-thirds of the way through almost all articles, I feel like I have traveled farther down the Jungian rabbit-hole than I ever intended. The SMV theory becomes clouded with completely unnecessary ids and unconscious psychology and, at that point, the articles lose their utility.
Still read him though.
He can be a difficult read and it’s not always obvious if it’s because he is too lazy to be concise, or if it’s because he can’t tell how far he’s shoved up his own ass.
As time goes on it becomes more and more of the latter.
I used to take pride when people told me that I talked like a professor.
Later I realized it was a failure in communication. I now talk simply.
I thought him a fool the first time I read him.
If you thought so then you can’t recognize genius.
Rollo should be respected.
He is a great one.
I would expect him to continue to make important and valuable contributions that we all repeat.
If you read a bit about Newton you’ll read that he was one of the brightest light bulbs that ever burned, and at the same time one of the most deluded and fucked up. We all owe a hell of a lot to Newton, and none of us are a Newton.
Contributions that are beyond the abilities of nearly all of us.
Everyone one needs helpful criticism.
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There is now a full blown anti-Rollo movement.
http://patstedman.com/2017/11/22/what-is-upstream/
My comment on there:
I’ve also come to have negative views, on the whole, towards Rollo.
Yes, his value is nearly solely towards betas who have no red-pill orientation yet.
No value to men who seek to change their social-sexual status class.
And his viewpoints are EXTREMELY high contrast, to the point of cartoonish.
He’s also a TERRIBLE writer. Rambling, repetitive, sometimes nearly
incoherent. The less educated will assume his style is professorial,
but that’s a flaw in his writing, not a sign of mastery.
He’s a midwit. A high functioning midwit, with way too high an opinion of his intellect.
And yes, an angry beta.
Also he has made some associations that show a profound lack of insight, especially with the dolt Yareally.
———————————————-
From a comment thread on rooshvforum
(not me writing)
RE: What’s the beef with Rollo Tomassi?
Aurini-
Rollo, on the other hand, is a god-awful writer. Most people don’t
realize it, because most people don’t really analyze writing style when
they read something. They just notice that it was hard to follow, or
that maybe they didn’t understand very well. Given Rollo’s
pseudo-academic posturing, a lot of people probably just assume they
don’t know about his “field of study” to fully comprehend it. Some
probably just think that there’s a lot of long words, jargon, and
complex sentences, and so that must mean the author is really smart.
Here’s a randomly chosen Rational Male paragraph: the opening to his hit piece on Roosh.
“Well I finally had a chance to watch Roosh vs. the bloggers – there are
no journalists left in the world – debate (it was anything but a press
conference) and it was about what I expected. Every opportunity these
bloggers had was to call him on his beliefs and his position on the
state of the world with the intent to dismiss, marginalize or ridicule
him.”
This is terrible, terrible writing. You could spend an hour talking
about all the things he’s done wrong here in just two sentences.
I’ll skip the obvious ones, like the fact that there needs to be a comma
after the word “Well”. It’s a blog post, and all blog posts have
grammatical errors. It’s a fact of life.
But even if you ignore the grammar errors, look how clumsy it is.
There’s not one, but two parenthetical asides in the first sentence.
Overuse of parenthetical asides is a crutch for writers who can’t
organize their thoughts. It pulls the reader away from the main idea of
the sentence.
Worse, the content of the asides is stupid. In the first sentence, he
redefines two terms here: “journalist” becomes “blogger”, and “press
conference” becomes “debate”. But both of these redefinitions are wrong!
If you work for Martha Stewart Living, and they send you out to cover a
press conference, you are a journalist. That’s what the word means. And
Roosh didn’t hold a debate, he gave a press conference. He gave a short
statement to the press, followed by a question and answer period.
That’s what a press conference is.
Rollo goes on to use the word “blogger” instead of “reporter” for the
rest of his piece. It’s weird and distracting. Occasionally, people at
RoK will call particularly bad female journalists “typists”, but that
works because “typist” is an obvious word of contempt. Rollo himself is a
blogger, so why is he using it as an insult?
If Rollo wanted to say that the reporters were unprofessional, and they
were so argumentative that what should’ve been a press conference turned
into a debate, he could’ve easily done that without inventing his own
dictionary. Now whenever the reader sees the word “blogger” for the rest
of the piece, he has to remind himself that, “Oh, they aren’t really
bloggers. Rollo just doesn’t like them.”
The second sentence is even worse.
“Every opportunity these bloggers had was to call him on his beliefs and
his position on the state of the world with the intent to dismiss,
marginalize or ridicule him.”
This is a run-on non-sentence. “Every opportunity… was to call him on
his beliefs”? Huh? What? But even if you were to fix that to something
more reasonable, say, “These bloggers took every opportunity to call him
on his beliefs…” It would still be a terrible sentence. It takes him 30
words to say, “The reporters were consistently dismissive.”
Aurini, your writing is complex ideas, backed up by simple sentences.
“There’s a distinction between rape and misogyny. Here’s how they
differ.” Rollo is simple ideas obscured by complex sentences. “I saw the
Roosh press conference. Man, those reporters were a bunch of dicks.”
I shouldn’t have to say which one of these is better.
I didn’t really realize how terrible a writer Rollo was until I
actually went and looked. I remember reading his stuff in the very early
days of the manosphere and thinking it was good, if a little academic.
When I went back and actually looked I was stunned. It’s not “academic”,
it’s “pseudo-academic”. It lacks precision and clarity of thought. It’s
squid ink intended to obscure, and make Rollo look far smarter than he
really is.
———————————————-
As far as I know I was the first voice against Rollo
August 2015, 100 of my comments on Rollos blog, outlining my main disagreements:
https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/100-of-my-comments/
Feb 2016
https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/why-rollos-therationalmale-com-is-an-mgtow-site-that-is-trying-to-keep-you-down/
https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2016/04/30/rollo-tomassi-thinks-all-old-men-must-pay-for-young-ass/
https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/does-the-manosphere-teach-learned-helplessness/
And more comments about Rollo here:
https://rivsdiary.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/what-is-this-thing-called-upstream/comment-page-1/#comment-3628
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The idea that “provider-betas” get shitty sex was created by betas that get shitty sex.
It wasn’t created by men who have their shit together and have extra-ordinarily devoted love slaves who they in turn love and care for. The guys in great relationships never bothered to get into the conversation.
Or when they did, they were shouted down by the know-it-all know nothings, who wave in their fists at blasphemers their copy of the Rollo certified sexual marketplace map, and have spent years debating the finer points of the map, and know all the rules of it, inside and out. And who have never had a good relationship, and so blame it on women for viewing providers as betas.
I consider it psychologically impossibility for the long married Rollo to both consider being an Alpha Provider an impossibility, and to consider himself to be one. In other words, he doesn’t consider himself alpha in his relationship, and blames it on his provider status, and proclaims that therefore no other provider could be alpha either.
Why even the best pump and dump artist is considered relatively low sexual market value https://xsplat.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/why-even-the-best-pump-and-dump-artist-is-considered-relatively-low-sexual-market-value/