Those still in the dark, who are still taking their cues on the manosphere from its Haman will fault me for it, but I have long followed Rollo Tomassi and his blog, TheRationalMale, and not only do I follow it, I admire Mr. Tomassi, I consider his writing and analysis penetrating and I reckon his writing to be humanist - even though he seems to claim to try not to make it so. Rollo’s most recent piece on “Possession” is concerned specifically with both how bad an idea it is for men to be possessive of women and why it is such a bad idea. I do not mean so much to respond to his piece as to use it as a perch from which we can take his ideas into some other directions. Rollo describes a condition and diagnoses the problem. We agree with the problem. Here, I offer some balm.
By making this reference some will demand I turn in my “man card” or else that I spit up my “red pill”, but what comes to mind when I read “Possession” is Joni Mitchell and her iconic song “Both Sides Now“. I think Tomassi’s readers can profit from Googling the lyrics and reflecting on Mitchell’s poetry, particularly the metaphor of how the transient, illusion-like nature of clouds – real and yet featureless and ever-changing – informs our understanding of love and life, as here:
I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all
Specifically what has made Rollo’s blog so penetrating, in my view, has been the perspective that (a little) age has given me where with each and every “red pill truth” that he unpacks I am able to look back on my experiences as an adult and all the way back through to adolescence and see that really what Rollo has done is he has put into relief a remarkably simple truth:
Women … are just like men
It might surprise Rollo or his readers – and I hope it will make those who are new to the manosphere think and reflect before they take Haman’s cue and dismiss the manosphere forthwith as a cesspool of woman hating, anti-progressive misogyny – that often when I have read Rollo’s blog I’ve been reminded of the popular feminist bumper sticker that confronts us with the contention that:
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people
The insights Rollo provides bring to mind for me another manospherian writer who the splitting Manboobz would tell you is evil, evil, evil, but who I think you should read and take seriously as a thoughtful conservative with whom you simply may disagree with on a number of things – hardly a source of moral panic (see Haman’s “Boob roll”) but very much a good source of perspective you won’t find elsewhere: Dalrock, who’s written that grasping the “red pill” actually has the effect of making one more empathetic to women, to their specific configuration of virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, motivations and temptations. One could say that if you cannot start with a clear understanding of the very narrow ways that women are different from men, it is impossible to get a handle on how total and all-encompassing is the humanity that they share in common with men. It’s this narrow on-ramp to a superhighway of cross-gender human mutual understanding that is what the manosphere has taken to calling “red pill”.
So when Rollo dresses down some of the ulgier realities of hypergamy in “Possession” or his earlier similar treatment “Casualties” or his controversial and hard-hitting “War Brides“, what comes back to me is that just a generation ago you heard women all the time complaining of men who divorced their aging wives to “trade up to a newer model”. So somehow this talk among men of the otherwise scientifically acknowledged hypergamy is misogynistic but … haven’t women been making the same complaint of men, for such a long time, that we pretty much take it for granted?
The phenomena of women “hypergamously” “trading up” which Rollo explicates in these articles …is not meaningfully different from the long-accepted-as-truth phenomena of men, “trading up” – trading up to “new models” as it were
Huh. ”Looked at love from both sides now“, “love’s illusions”, indeed.
It seems that two groups of people need some reminding when it comes to this topic which, I guess, is an uncomfortable subject for many.
One one hand: those who self-righteously declare that men talking about hypergamy are being misogynistic – particularly when men talk about how women will trade their current partner for a better model – such people should remember that women have long talked about how men will trade their current partner – their long time devoted but aging wife – for “new models” … and we don’t think this is women hating on men … we think it’s women, who have a stake in men’s decisions, talking disapprovingly about men who are giving in to their baser, prurient interests – specifically as those base and prurient interests express themselves in the male gender
On the other hand: Those in the manosphere who obsess over hypergamy and who seem to be surprised and shocked to realize that women, like men, come too with base, prurient interests and who seem to take this as evidence that women are somehow a creature set apart as a special manner of adversary to men … can bear to be reminded that men have matching, damn-near perfectly analogous base, prurient interests, and have long been known to act in ways based on those interests that are deeply hurtful to women who care about them
In other words: we, male and female … are human
Of course the manosphere is replete with rebuttals that this phenomena – men trading to “newer models” – is much less common than alleged … but who doubts it’s truth?
Human beings – do inhuman things to one another – chiefly on account of weakness of character.
This is true of women, and true of men.
In her song Mitchell does well to invoke the metaphor of clouds to express the illusory nature of our fragile existence, but often when the metaphor of an illusion is invoked to make sense of our existential dilemmas, many people are too prepared to be dismissive of the real, underlying existential question because they collude cloudiness with unreality and they conflate unreality with nihilism – the belief that actions and choices do not matter. Many are too ready to invoke “it’s just an illusion” as if it were an escape clause.
To the contrary …
We are not rocks!
We are not stones!
Stones have nothing. Stones cannot be found reading Heartiste’s nihilistic nonsense on the web trying to decide if its meaningful or not.
In contrast, we are conscious beings – and specifically unlike rocks – which have nothing: we have clouds!
That means it is up to you. There are clouds all around you. It’s true enough many are clouds you can’t control and we do no one any favors when we reduce ourselves to glassy-eyed New Agers who would deny that the world can visit misfortune on a person from the outside – who deny that external misfortune can impute itself on vulnerable, sometimes helpless people. These denials, common as they are, are in no sense compassionate or humanist. Humanism contends with human frailty with honesty about the reality of human frailty, not with the bombastic denials of a drunkard that he is invulnerable like some demigod.
But death – our common future as dust, rock and rubble – is a given, so the question is:
What will you do, with your present, your life?
What do you do with the agency granted of you?
Rejoice, young man, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young manhood. And follow the impulses of your heart and the desires of your eyes. Yet know that God will bring you to judgment for all these things.
Ecclesiastes, 11:9 (NASB)
You cannot really be said to have much – but unlike rocks which have nothing – you have this one thing: choices.
What will you do with them?
Will you stir up storm clouds?
Will you live in the dark?
Will you follow the example of Haman and treat those in your stead with darkness and storms because others treated you with darkness and storms?
Will you just allow yourself to fall, aimlessly at the mercy of others’ agency?
Or will you use what agency is granted you:
To dance in clouds,
To visit sunlight on those who chance favored with your company? Your friends, family, colleagues, customers, employers, … your girlfriends and wives … your children.
There may or may not be a god. From Stardusk to Heartiste there is no shortage of writers in the manosphere who make entirely too much of the fact that, indeed, there may not be any deity at all. Honesty and integrity requires that we acknowledge faith for what faith is and assess openly that not only is the absence of the existence of god possible – it is probable.
But you need not be affected by them or by their nihilism. You may know and be confident that they make too much of their agnosticism to conclude nihilism from it – that indeed the belief that a deity is required to banish nihilism is a point of religious philosophy that has long been noted to be shared between fascist, nihilistic atheists, and the most zealous religious fundamentalists. Is it any wonder they celebrate a “dark enlightenment” together?
Their peculiar convictions needn’t matter because either way – whether there is a god or not – the choice of what we do – whether we create meaning with our clouds in the finite time we have while we still live among them – while we live above and apart from dirt and rubble – that choice belongs to each of us.
