In this article I interview Rollo Tomassi author of The Rational Male trilogy, blogger at The Rational Male and expert on the Red Pill.

This article is part two of a five part series from the upcoming Life Lessons Podcast, this article will focus on Red Pill truths.

Let’s begin:

Red Pill Truths

Michael Frank: What are some of the biggest myths that the average blue pill guy believes about women, or that society promotes about women?

What are some red pill truths that the average guy needs to know?

Men and women are different

Rollo Tomassi: I think probably the biggest one is blank slate equalism. It’s this misguided feminist idea that men and women are the same, we just have different plumbing, and what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

No.

Men and women are different. We are not the same. We are more dissimilar than we are similar. And people hate it when I say that, because it goes against everything you hear “Well, yeah, we’re different, but we’re more alike than we are different”.

No.

We are more different than we are alike. And I can show you research after research and study after study that proves that men and women are different, but we don’t dare say it right now for fear of losing our jobs, for fear of losing our tenure at school, you name it.

I think that blank state equalism is a bullshit concept that needs to die a very quick death, and I think that a lot of guys in academia right now realize this, but they’re too afraid to say what I just said.

I think that’s definitely one thing that blue pill guys need to wrap their heads around.

People want to have this sort of Pollyanna belief in equality. I don’t believe in equality. I don’t believe in equality because it presumes a vacuum. It presumes that everybody’s the same and the environment is all the same, and that it’s a mutual challenge, with two people having mutual strengths and mutual weaknesses. It’s bullshit.

There are things I’m not going to be able to do because I’m male, but there are also things that I’m going to excel at, and vice versa.

If you put me in a survival situation where I need to use my masculine strength to get me out of it, I am more valuable than a woman who doesn’t have it.

In fact, I’m more valuable to her, because I can get her out of the same situation because that’s what my masculine strength allows me to do.

However, if it comes to childbearing, I suck at childbearing and that’s just the way it’s going to be because I wasn’t born to have children.

Men and women are different. Our brains are different. We’re complements to each other, but we are different from each other. We are not functional equals of each other.

There are only two genders, and they are different from each other, and they have different strengths and different weaknesses, and oddly enough, they offset each other, depending on what is being asked for at a particular time.

Men and women love differently

Here’s another red pill truth: Men and women love differently.

When we’re blue pill conditioned, we’re led to believe from a very early age that men and women experience love similarly, but we don’t.

Men perceive love idealistically, whereas women perceive love opportunistically. And again, this goes back to their sexual strategies.

Men are concerned with the outside world, with what can be, what can we build, and wouldn’t it be great if I could find a woman who loves me as much as I love her. That’s the idealistic Disney love concept that men have.

Women on the other hand will not allow themselves to fall in love with a guy unless he meets her hypergamous criteria in some way, and that’s why I say that women see love through an opportunistic lens. Whether he did or not, maybe he was deceiving her, but she fell in love with the guy because she thought he was one way, because he got past her hypergamous filters.

Women get really pissed off when I say that, but I don’t know how else to describe it.

Women will not allow themselves to fall in love with a man unless he meets certain hypergamous conditions that makes him somebody that maybe she wants to settle down with and she can fall in love with, and that could be on either side of the hypergamous equation of Alpha fucks and Beta bucks.

It could be that she fell in love with him because he’s really good looking and great in the sack, or it could be that she fell in love with the guy because he’s a good provider, and although he’s not the most exciting guy in the world, he’s got a lot of money, he’s really good with the kids, he’s loyal, and he’s never going to cheat on me.

There is no such thing as “the one”

Here’s another red pill truth: There’s no such thing as “the one”.

There are some good ones, and there are some bad ones, but there is no one one.

There is no soul mate. I’m sorry to ruin that fantasy for anybody who still believes in soulmates.

A lot of people hate this and they say “That’s not very romantic! There’s someone for everyone!” Well, yeah, in an enforced monogamous society there has to be, because if there’s not, then nobody reproduces. So I mean there’s the mechanics side of that.

And usually it’s women who say this, but I hear feminized guys say this too, “I think she might be the one”.

Well where did you get that from? You got that from your blue pill conditioning.

There are even guys out there who are devout atheists will still believe in the one. They’ll be like, “I don’t believe in God, Tarot card readings, or any of that superstitious mumble jumble”.

But if you say, “Do you believe that there’s a girl out there for you that’s the perfect girl?” They’ll say “Oh yeah!” So I think that the whole concept of “the one” or “soulmates” guys need to get out of their heads.

Hypergamy (“Alpha fucks and Beta bucks”)

Hypergamy is another red pill truth that guys need to understand.

Michael Frank: Can you please define hypergamy for those not familiar with it.

Rollo Tomassi: Hypergamy gets misdefined I think. The classical definition of hypergamy is women’s tendency to marry up in a socioeconomic status, in strata.

Women are not looking for somebody of their own socioeconomic level. They want somebody that’s higher. But hypergamy goes much deeper than that.

The way I define hypergamy is:

“Alpha fucks and Beta bucks”

What that means is that women are looking for two things in their sexual strategy. They’re looking for the Alpha guy who is the good breeding potential that they want to reproduce with. And then they’re looking for the Beta bucks guy who is a good bet for parental investment. The Beta bucks guy has a steady job, he’s emotionally stable, he has a sense of duty and honor and loyalty, and he’s always available, and he’s going to be there for you, but he’s boring as hell.

Women need both of those things, and if they could find that in the same guy, that would be ideal, but they can’t. They want the excitement and danger of the Alpha bad boy who’s hot and fun in bed, but he’s never going to be the guy that’s going to be faithful and loyal and is going to be there to take care of the kids, and is a good parental investment opportunity for them.

Ovulatory shift

The other part you need to understand about hypergamy is that it’s inspired by a women’s biology and menstrual cycles.

Women’s brains, their emotional states, and their predispositions cause different behavioral changes at different stages of their menstrual cycle.

When a woman is in her proliferative phase, which is about approximately 12 to 14 days before she ovulates, she is more interested in Alpha guys who have more masculinized features, a strong jaw line, muscularity, physical prowess, social dominance etc. and women will put themselves into positions where they are more likely to get into a breeding situation with a guy who is an Alpha male during that time.

After ovulation, when a woman is in her down cycle, when she’s flushing all of that out of her system, that’s what she tends to look for more comfort, rapport, loyalty, more feminized features in a guy, that’s when she’s looking for the Beta side.

So when I say “Alpha fucks and Beta bucks” that is defined by the behavior sets that women have in ovulatory shift.

When a woman is in the proliferative phase, that’s what I call the Alpha phase. When she’s in the luteal phase, that’s what I call the Beta phase.

Dr. Martie Hasleton proposes that when a woman is in the luteal phase, that’s when she wants her Beta orbiters and nice guys to be a shoulder to cry on, because she wants to cry about the bastard Alpha who she had sex with a week before. So that guy is more feminine, has more feminized features, he’s more comforting, he’s the stuffed animal that she gets to squeeze and hug at the end of the bed when she wants someone to cry with.

Dr. Hasleton has proposed that that is a nesting instinct, because once that woman has had sex, her body doesn’t know the difference as to whether or not she has been impregnated or not, and so her body switches into a short term nesting mode, even if she didn’t actually get pregnant.

And this is because back in our evolutionary past, a woman could not afford not to presume that she wasn’t pregnant. And so that’s where those feelings of a need for security come from. And that’s the Beta bucks cycle. That’s when women are looking for security in a very chaotic world. That’s when they want to know that the guy’s going to be there and help them. And why would she feel that way? Well, because her body thinks that it’s pregnant, even if it’s not, it presumes that it is. And those are the feelings that are prompted by the chemical cocktails that go through a woman.

So when a woman is looking for the Alpha seed at one point of her menstrual cycle, and she’s looking for the Beta need at the other, that sort of dictates her lifetime sexual strategy.

Now whether he’s an Alpha or a Beta, a woman wants someone who is at least one step above her in sexual market value, and this is because hypergamy does not seek its own level. It’s always looking for something better than whatever a woman believes is her sexual market value. So for a woman thinks that she’s a six, she thinks that she deserves a seven, an eight, or a nine.

And that’s the definition of hypergamy. That’s the two sides of hypergamy. That’s the hypergamous equation of Alpha fucks and Beta bucks. And so what women are trying to do is to optimize that. They’re trying to find some way to either find that in one guy, or to get the best of both worlds in two guys, and try to work it out that way.

Now hypergamy has been something that has defined womankind ever since we were in our hunter gatherer days, but there used to be social buffers for it. There used to be the church, their used to be social stigmas, like if a woman was to have a child out of wedlock before 1968 or so, we would take that woman and put her away, and we’d give the baby up for adoption because it was such a shame on the family.

And now we have a changed society because of hormonal birth control. We’ve basically said, “Okay women, you get to decide who gets born and who doesn’t, and here’s the hormonal birth control and you’re in charge of that. You are now in charge of your own hypergamy. Please police yourself accordingly”.

And as a result, we no longer have the stigmas that we used to have for single mothers. We have 42% of children being born every year to unmarried mothers. We have sperm banks. We freeze eggs. We have all of these facilities and these modern conveniences for women so that they can have children based on how well they can optimize that hypergamy.

We’ve built laws around it. One of the reasons I feel that we have the latent purpose of safe legal abortions, is because women want to have that fail safe. They want to be able to have the babies they want, and reject the babies they don’t want. How do they do that? It’s based on their hypergamous selection of the guy that they’re with. If you’ve got a guy like Jeff Bezos, he’s a pretty good bet for that long term provider, so maybe you’re going to have his kid if he knocks you up.

We’ve also removed the stigma of single motherhood. We tell guys today that they’re “heroes” if they step in and marry a single mother and take over the responsibility for a child, after some callous evil chad impregnated this woman.

Well, what that guy is doing is deciding to select himself out of the evolutionary gene pool to feel like he’s a hero. These are social conditions that are manufactured to facilitate hypergamy.

Paternity

I think paternity is another red pill truth that guys need to grasp. We throw around the term cuck or cuckoldry in the manosphere quite a bit whenever we want to insult somebody, “You’re a cuck!”, but I think that we don’t really realize what is behind that.

Men have this almost obsessive need to know that the kid is our damn kid. And the reason for that is hypergamy and that is women’s evolved sexual strategy.

People think that hypergamy is like this horrible thing, like, “Women are atrocious! I can’t believe they’re so duplicitous!” “These hoes ain’t loyal!”

But hypergamy is what it is. I don’t see hypergamy as evil or good. It just is. It’s just what the nature of the game is. And if it hadn’t been for hypergamy we wouldn’t be the species that we are today, because women need to filter for that. If they don’t filter for quality, who else is going to filter for quality?

In evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, the sex that has the highest investment cost is usually the one that does the selection, and it’s women that get pregnant, and are vulnerable for nine months, and women that have to bear the responsibility of the cost of putting their lives on hold, and doing whatever they can. Whereas we men don’t have that investment and reproductive cost that women have.

That’s why I say that women have to rely on each other, but they also have to rely on men to raise a child from at least say birth until that kid is like eight or somewhat self-sufficient, and then guys can move on to the next. That was the way it used to be back in the day. And I’m saying that’s the way it always was.

Women’s sexual strategy is hypergamy, and men’s sexual strategy is unlimited access to unlimited sexuality, and if don’t believe me, go look at any online porn site and you will see that in action right there.

The reason that online pornography is free and ubiquitous right now, is because that is the male sexual strategy, or men would like it to be that, if they could figure out how they could get women’s genuine desire, if they could just be that natural good looking muscular actor that all the women swoon for, if he could be one of people magazine’s sexiest man alive, if he could be that guy, he would be that guy.

80% of men are unattractive to women

But most guys aren’t that. In the manosphere we talk about the 80/20 rule. This is Pareto principle. 80% of men are rated as unattractive to women. These statistics come from a book called Dataclysm by OkCupid founder Christian Rudder.

Multiple polls and statistics show that most women rate most men as “unattractive”. Not as average, not as ‘meh’, but at least 80% of men as “unattractive”. So that sort of proves what pickup artists and guys in the manosphere have been saying for a long time, not that 20% of the guys are doing 80% of the fucking, they’re not, but it’s only the top 20% of guys that women want. That’s who they have a genuine desire for. That’s who they are generally aroused by and attracted to.

So if 80% of guys are rated as unattractive, what do all those guys do?

Well they’ve got to find some way to reproduce. And that’s how you get socially enforced monogamy. That’s how you get what is called strategic pluralism theory.

And what that means is that if a guy is unattractive, he has to invest more of himself into one woman as opposed to investing in many women. So for the 20% of guys who are attractive Alphas, those guys have a different sexual strategy than the guys who are the 80% of unattractive Betas, and those 80% of Beta guys have to invest themselves into only one woman, or at least fewer women, and this is what is called K-selected.

The 20% of guys who can spread the seed, those guys are R-selected so they can go and have sex with more women, and I’m not saying in this day and age this is what happens, but they can potentially reproduce more because they have higher sexual market value. So their sexual strategies going to be a little different.

But for both the Alphas and the Betas, their natural evolved strategy, if they could work it out, would be unlimited access to unlimited sexuality. And again, online pornography bears that out. The problem is that if that’s their strategy, then for a woman to complete her strategy, something’s got to give. Either a woman has to accommodate that strategy, or she has to insist on her own, and that guy has to abandon his strategy.

Male vs female sexual strategies

And this is the cardinal rule of sexual strategies and another red pill truth: For one genders sexual strategy to succeed, the other’s must be at least compromised, if not abandoned entirely.

And today because we feminize our boys, it’s usually the male who abandons his sexual strategy, because we make the female experience the “correct” experience from a social standpoint.

So what that means is those guys have to say, okay, tell you what, I’m going to settle down with you, we’re going to have a kid together, we’re going to raise that kid, and we’re going to complete your hypergamous nature. Hopefully I’m your Alpha fucks, but if not, I’ll definitely be your Beta bucks, and I’m gonna take care of you, and I’m going to take care of the baby. I’m going to get a house, I have a great job, I’m going to do all this stuff, and the only caveat I have for this whole arrangement, is that I need to know that the kid is my damn kid.

I need to know that the kid is my damn kid

And that is why men are obsessed with knowing what the paternity of the child is. They need to know that, because they have investment costs too.

If the guy is putting in 18 years, and it’s probably more like a lifetime of investment into that child, the only upside to that, the only way that is valuable, is for him to know that the child is his. And that’s why we have marriage and arrangements where it’s like, you promise me you’re not gonna have sex with anybody else, I’ll promise you the same thing, because if you want to have kids I need to know that the child is mine, because if it’s not my kid, then that’s sunk cost.

You need to know if the child is going to be your child, because if the kid isn’t yours you could just say, you know what? That’s not my kid. I’m going to try and have sex with as many women as I possibly can because I need to spread the seed. I need to go back to what my sexual strategy is, because if I’m sitting there investing myself in raising this kid and putting all this into a family, that means that I’m missing out on opportunities for reproduction with other women. So if that kid ain’t mine, then the deal’s off, that’s a deal breaker.

And that’s why paternity is such a big deal to guys.

In today’s society though, ever since the sexual revolution when we started feminizing boys, we’ve had this deemphasis on men being actual the actual fathers.

Women still want the option to have the Alphas child, and still have the Betas provisioning even though the kid isn’t his, and that’s why we say, “This guy’s a hero”, because he’s stepping up and taking over the responsibility for this Alpha who she bred with, and you’re going to be a hero because you’ve agreed to be a Darwinistic dead end, and that’s why I think that the definition of cuckoldry needs to broaden as well.

The definition of cuckoldry

A lot of women want to say that cuckoldry should only ever be about a woman who is married to one guy and has sex with another dude and has his kids, and then commits birth fraud and convinces her husband or her boyfriend that it’s his kid.

And some guys will say, “What if I want to adopt? Does that make me a cuck?”

Well, by my definition, that would make you a cuck, because you are investing yourself into the parental investment responsibilities of another man.

However, at least you know, at least you have the luxury of making that choice, instead of having a woman take that choice away from you by a proactively having another man’s kids, and then being a single mother, and then expecting you to “man up” to become the father of those kids so that you can complete her sexual strategy while you don’t complete your own.

So I think the definition of cuckoldry needs to be broadened because I think that there’s proactive cuckoldry, and there’s retroactive cuckoldry.

Proactive cuckoldry

Proactive cuckoldry is when the woman is already committed to the guy, and then she has sex with another guy and convinces him that it’s really his baby. That’s one of the biggest lies and one of the greatest secrets of women: “It’s your baby”

Because that is what suits her purpose, because he is a better provider than the Alpha she had sex with, and although he’s kind of boring and not really fun in bed, she needs him to facilitate her sexual strategy. So that is what I call proactive cuckoldry.

Retroactive cuckoldry

Retroactive cuckoldry is the single mother clause, it’s when that woman has already had the babies of another man, and then she is saved by the Beta guy who comes in and wants to adopt the kids, and doesn’t care that he’s an evolutionary dead end.

Maybe they have kids later on, but the thing is that she is completing her sexual strategy, and he is not completing his, or maybe he is not completing it as well as he could if he had found a woman who had no kids.

And this is why women get really upset when like myself or Rich Cooper say that guys should avoid single mothers.

Well, from a purely Darwinistic pragmatic approach, it does not serve your interests as a man who is interested in having his own kids, and embraces his own paternity as being important. If that is you, then you should avoid single mothers, because you’re exchanging your sexual strategy for her sexual strategy.

This concludes part two of my interview with Rollo Tomassi. Part three tomorrow will focus on framing.