Reading The Rational Male

I’ve just completed my last swipe-left on the Kindle version of The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi; it was essential that I got the book in electronic format because then I could read it while sitting on the can at work. Now usually I only read ebooks while taking a dump but I was enjoying the read so much it spilled out into my downtime elsewhere. Not only that but it turns out that my work internet doesn’t block his website, so I’ve been poring over that too.

That’s great and all TC, I mean, we love hearing about your bowel movements, but why did it take you so long?

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to read The Rational Male. In fact, when I started in Game and as I was getting accustomed to the names which were thrown around carelessly, I went to Tomassi’s website. The problem was that I couldn’t get a quarter of the way through his latest post… it just seemed so turgid. I had to stop and re-read each sentence three times while I understood what was being said. I quickly gave up on the latest post and went to one of the categories in the sidebar and picked an article at random. The same thing happened again!

In that moment I decided not to read Tomassi and then over time I told myself that doing so would actually be bad for my vibe. I was caught up in the myth that the Manosphere was a den of ‘bitter misogynists’ and that in exposing myself to it I would become one of them. I promised myself I would read it in future because his book is a seminal Manosphere text, but I also promised myself I’d read it while taking a hibernation period from Game because I didn’t want it to hurt my vibe and therefore my Daygame.

Two and a half years later I’ve made good on that promise. I won’t go into the content of the book but the first thing that struck me was ‘now was the right time to read this,’ and that’s not because of a vibe buffer hibernation period. You can pick up a book today and dislike the first 50 pages, but pick it up a year later and love the whole thing. That’s what happened with me and ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle. To begin with I thought it was wooly, esoteric and up its own arse, but then I tried reading it again after a year of Daygaming and the lessons struck home because of the inner peace required to walk the streets for hours looking for sets. The context of consumption appears to affect demand.

So why was this the ‘right time’ to read The Rational Male? A few reasons spring to mind. First, I now understand those terms which tripped me up to begin with. In effect, reading Tomassi didn’t make me feel stupid and tired because I didn’t have to re-read sentences (now I only have to do that when he switches perspective within the same sentence). On top of that I’ve taken these words into my life and use them when I write, think and speak and so mentally I’m much more comfortable with them.

The second is that I don’t see the Manosphere as an overly politicised den of ‘bitter misogynists.’ Undoubtedly there are people who actually hate women who are part of the Manosphere but I see now that they’re just the guys who can’t see beyond the bitter taste of the red pill and into the opportunity that it opens up. The word ‘misogynist’ was just a word programmed into my brain as an absolute bad which had to defended against immediately. I thought that being associated with those elements of the Manosphere (those beyond the boundaries of PUA) would corrupt my vibe and affect my Daygame results. I now see it for what it is: just a shaming tactic used by men and women who want to keep you inside the pen. It’s a meta shit test to see if you accept their frame and in passing the test, by rejecting their shaming, you show yourself to be high SMV.

Now, that’s not to say that delving into the Manosphere can’t negatively affect your vibe, but this is what I referred to earlier in ‘opportunities’ and it dovetails into my third point nicely. I read The Rational Male after two and a half years of Daygame and all of the positive reference experiences it entailed. I’ve rolled the boulder up the hill on enough occasions for me to read Tomassi and relate the positives of doing so back to my own life. I wasn’t reading his book and associating with the screwed-over beta, instead I was associating with the rewarded alpha. I can imagine that for a guy who’s just unplugged, a guy who hasn’t rolled the boulder up the hill many times if at all, would have Tomassi’s book cut much closer to home.

Perhaps that’s because of some natural advantages I have: the ability to overlook negative experiences and only remember the positives, thus building purely positive reference experiences; my taking/acceptance of the red pill at a relatively young age (23); the fact that I’ve always believed my gut to be right, even if I haven’t acted in accordance with it, which meant that the feminine imperative never sat right with me anyway. For example, with my ex-girlfriend there were many occasions where we argued and I wouldn’t give up because I had an gut-instinct conviction in my beliefs.

And that’s why I’ve included The Rational Male in the recommended books page under Inner Game. It’s codified my latent entitlement and brought it into the real world through rhetoric. I can look at myself and my actions and see that by rejecting the worldview everyone ascribes to that I should expect abnormal returns in life.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown