"Rollo Tomassi"

From a film I really must watch again. I only have it on video, but our VCR still works:

(“Rollo Tomassi”)

There is a “Rollo Tomassi” who runs a big manosphere blog, here.

I made a comment there today and I also saw a comment I liked.

My comment was on the Captain/First Mate concept of husband/wife relations. I wrote of this expression on a comment at this post:

“Yes, I have always disliked those terms. They are twee. I can’t imagine a woman really wanting to be a First Mate. For starters, most women do not read about Captain Jack Aubrey and think in naval terms. Also, it is not “hot”. I can’t imagine Christian Grey saying to Anastasia, “you can be my First Mate”.

Either treat her as a full equal or as distinctly inferior. She is not your First Mate. She will never be promoted to Captain. As a goodish woman I know wrote, “if my husband were to abandon his place as head of house, I would not try to step in and wear the pants”. (similar words)

A pope in the 1940s referred to the husband as “he who commands” and the wife as “she who obeys”. I can’t improve on that.”

I was also intrigued by this comment at this post:

“Evolution has largely selected-for human females with a capacity to form psychological schemas that preserve an ego-investment that would otherwise afflict them with debilitating anxiety, guilt, and the stresses that result from being continuously, consciously aware of their own behavioral incongruities. Evolution selects-for solipsistic women who are blissfully unaware of their solipsism.”

I have long suspected that one of the reasons that men and women (especially women) are so infuriating in their life tactics is that they have no self-insight. They don’t just lie to men; they lie to themselves (this is partly what manosphere people call a woman’s “hamster”, which I take to be her capacity for self-delusion; but it is also that way in which women will consciously believe that they only want a nice guy who brings them flowers while they actually lubricate for a cocky bastard who smacks them on the arse). The evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers came up with the idea, not long ago, of adaptive self-deception:

The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

AND this looks like a good critical review of that book, which seems to have divided readers as to its quality:

https://www.academia.edu/2222358/Review_of_Robert_Trivers_The_Folly_of_Fools_The_Logic_of_Deceit_and_Self-Deception_in_Human_Life_

“true information is preferentially excluded from consciousness … false information is put into the conscious mind”

The basic idea is that to be a really good liar, you are best off believing the lie yourself. The purest example may be the sociopath, who really believes his own mythology.

It is not impossible that women are fundamentally solipstic, but completely unware of it. I don’t think that is inevitably true, of course. Women are capable of self-awareness and behaving morally. But it may not come naturally to them. It is often suggested that women are teleological moralists (“the end justifies the means”), perhaps more so than men, who sometimes are too idealistic for their own good.

As my wife once said, in a moment of self-awareness, “women have to be pragmatic because we have children”.

Do men self-deceive? Yes, I am sure we do. One area in which men seem to lack insight is in overvaluing their physical capacity as fighters and their attractiveness to women. This could be adaptive, because men need confidence to carry out their traditional role. One thing which always amazes me (most recently when I was watching a documentary on the American Civil War) is how men will go into battle so readily, and how rarely they mutiny. One reason seems to be that they overestimate their chances of survival and believe themselves to be personally invincible.

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