The “manosphere,” a loose agglomeration of internet personalities who opine on a range of issues related to women, dating, sex, and relationships, resembles the early Wild Wild West years of the internet. A continually multiplying plethora of websites and “coaches,” gurus, and other self-help saviors offer a multitude of books, courses, coaching, and conferences for men. Some of it might be good, but many of these products may, for all anyone knows, be grifts and scams preying upon gullible, vulnerable, heartbroken men.
Over and above the unruly riffraff of the manosphere sits Rollo Tomassi (not his real name), a blogger, author, and, most recently, YouTuber. Tomassi first rose to prominence through his highly trafficked “Rational Male” blog, and his first book, The Rational Male, a 2013 collection of essays from his online writing, has come to be considered the unofficial bible of the manosphere. Two more books in the Rational Male series followed in quick succession: Preventative Medicine in 2015 and Positive Masculinity in 2017.
Tomassi is an adherent of “the red pill,” a body of thought purporting to offer men the unvarnished truth about women and relationships. The term is taken from the 1999 movie The Matrix, wherein the protagonist, Neo, is offered a red pill that will wake him from his delusions and force him to see the world as it really is. According to Tomassi, most men go about their relationships with a “blue pill” mentality, seeing women as quasi-angelic creatures whom they might be lucky enough to reel in as long as they act like a nice guy. This, says Tomassi, is not only a false but potentially destructive view of women because it gives men unrealistic expectations that, when disappointed, can lead them to depression, nihilism, and even suicide. Women, Tomassi teaches, are by nature “hypergamous” — they seek the best man they can get from both a genetic and economic provisioning perspective; in the psychologist Jordan Peterson’s terms, they seek to mate “up and across” social dominance hierarchies. Although this view may sound harsh and even cynical, its practical upshot, for Tomassi, is that men should not expect women to just love them for who they are. They must accept the “burden of performance,” which means making themselves into attractive potential partners by performing, i.e., developing confidence, self-reliance, and real-world skills.
Tomassi, however, is quick to tell anyone within earshot that the red pill is a “praxeology,” not an ideology. It is not a set of beliefs but a set of open-source working hypotheses designed to help men deal with the challenges of relating to women. Unlike many other manosphere merchants, Tomassi, who holds a day job in the liquor industry, appears to have hit on a proven formula and a well-tested set of guidelines that truly work, as evidenced by the hundreds of testimonials from men around the world thanking him for literally saving their lives.
In his fourth book in the Rational Male series, Tomassi turns his attention to religion and assumes the role of the manosphere’s Martin Luther, censuring mainstream organized religion for having lost its way. Whereas Luther’s primary antagonist was the papacy, Tomassi’s bete noire is feminism, which he describes as not only a social movement but also “a new syncretic religion.” Mainstream religions, according to Tomassi, have either consciously or unconsciously assimilated the “feminine imperative,” elevating women’s interests above those of men. Whereas most monotheistic faiths were once patriarchal, Tomassi believes they have become progressively more feminized to the point where many men feel that there is really “no place for them” in today’s church.
Tomassi, who has been happily married for 25 years and counting, also attacks the institution of marriage, at least as it is practiced today. He analogizes it to an unconscionable contract, an agreement that cannot be legally enforced because the terms are so punitive to one party (men, in this case, in the event of divorce) that no rational party could be said to have willingly consented to such an agreement. Because of the way divorce laws in most Western countries tend to favor women and severely disadvantage men, and with approximately 50% of marriages in the United States now ending in divorce, marriage, according to Tomassi, “has statistically become the worst decision a man can make in his life at present.” “Marriage is a good idea,” he writes. “It’s how we execute it in the 20th and 21st centuries that makes it one of the worst prospects imaginable for men.” As Tomassi’s manosphere compatriot Richard Cooper is fond of saying, if you’re going skydiving, would you take a parachute from someone who tells you that this particular parachute only has a 50% chance of opening?
Tomassi’s take on feminism may be overly conspiratorial for even the most masculine of readers, and his attitude toward marriage may be overly pessimistic. But he does martial some disturbing facts, including that over two-thirds of Christian men, according to one poll, report viewing pornography every month, leading to what Rian Stone, another manosphere figure, has termed an epidemic of “sexual diabetes.”
Tomassi’s grasp slips too frequently, though, when discussing the Bible. There is no such thing as “the Jewish Pharisees of the Old Testament” — the Pharisees were a Second Temple-era sect that did not exist when the Hebrew Bible was composed. In another passage, he misidentifies Abraham (rather than Jacob) as the founding patriarch of the tribes of Israel. And he at times misrepresents religious teaching to make it seem more red-pilled than it really is. “Biblically,” he writes, “women are supposed to submit to their husbands authority and not deny him her sexuality. As a believer women are obligated to have sex with their husbands. This is a staple in the Abrahamic religions.” I cannot speak for Christianity and Islam, but as far as Judaism is concerned, this is patently untrue. According to Jewish law, it is the husbands who are obligated to provide their wives with sex and decidedly not the other way around. And the idea that all people are of equal value to God is not an idea “born from secular parents”; it is a religious idea that can be traced as early as the Mishnah, the first portion of the Talmud, dated to about A.D. 200.
The great medieval Jewish sage Moses Maimonides maintains that one must accept the truth from wherever it comes, and there is no doubt that Tomassi’s work, in spite of the controversial nature of some of his claims, contains a great amount of truth. In order to appreciate that truth, however, readers must be prepared to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and an ordained Orthodox rabbi. His next book, Soloveitchik’s Children, will be published by the University of Alabama Press.
