The Rational Male review by Josh

I don’t usually review books without finishing them, but I feel like I got the gist of The Rational Male—and I don’t have the attention span to endure the rest.

I bought it on a whim—a 2-for-1 Audible sale, and I couldn’t find anything else.

The target audience seems to be men who want to have sex with women but can’t find women who want to have sex with them. The author, Rollo Tomassi, spends much of the book lamenting that no one wanted to sleep with him until he became an “alpha” and developed his “game.” Now, the reader is told, he is irresistible to all right-thinking women.

The book begins with a false dichotomy: all men are either confident, successful Alphas or pathetic, effeminate Betas (a.k.a. “average men”). According to Tomassi, attractive women only want Alphas. “Game” is whatever men do or say to convince someone to sleep with them. Both Alphas and Betas have game, but Betas are bad at it and women naturally loath them for how pathetic they are, so they rarely get laid.

Tomassi takes this basic framework and runs with it. Once you understand these “fundamental psychological principles,” he claims, it’s just a matter of practice and persistence—until a woman has sex with you or gets a restraining order.

This book is a minor addition to the already vast corpus of social Darwinism and scientific sexism. Stephen Jay Gould wrote eloquently about this strain of thinking in The Mismeasure of Man, a critique of “the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness— invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status.”

Gould, likely a Beta by Tomassi’s definition, noted that refuting these arguments is tedious because their “individual claims are usually so ephemeral.” That’s why I’m focusing on the book’s structure rather than its individual claims, which are both flimsy and wrapped in jargon.

Gould was addressing far more sophisticated thinkers than Tomassi. If The Bell Curve represents the academic apex of scientific racism - with its charts, math, and hundred pages of citations - The Rational Male is the nadir of scientific sexism. In some ways that’s a good thing - there’s no risk of this book being taken seriously in academia. But they’re really just speaking to different segments of the same audience, and Tomassi’s segment is surely larger.

If the whole pickup-artist/Alpha-male phenomenon is of any interest at all, it’s for anthropological reasons. While Tomassi’s argument is a train wreck, he’s not entirely wrong that some women are attracted to the type of men he encourages readers to become.

But he takes this much further. It’s not just that some women are attracted to “Alpha” men—all women are (whether they realize it or not), and they always will be—science proves it, apparently. In other words, he believes there’s enormous latent demand for men who are assholes.

This seems implausible to me. I’d guess that many of the men who read books like this are shy and have trouble talking to women. The book does them a disservice by insisting there’s one “rational” way to engage with women - the way Tomassi prescribes. That’s both wrong and harmful; it results in a surplus of men behaving more assholishly than they otherwise might.

Maybe I'll get around to finishing this someday and change my mind, but I doubt it.