Androcentrism and the Shameful Slut
What's Wrong With Red Pill's Worldview Part 3.2
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The word “patriarchy” has become so divisive that people either roll their eyes or feel their blood start to boil. For such a hot button word to then be applied to a movement as controversial as Red Pill, it may make you wonder what that even means. Some have even said that Red Pill means nothing more than looking at the world through evolutionary psychology. That’s biology, not some feminist bugbear. In this essay then, I’m going to justify why I believe Red Pill is undeniably…androcentrist.1
I’m using this word, androcentrism, because I think it speaks more clearly to a specific dynamic. Red Pill is a reactionary movement that has arisen precisely because patriarchy has been challenged and deconstructed so thoroughly. I’m definitely not saying we live in some kind of post-patriarchal paradise, but their flavor of androcentrism can only exist as a response to the history of feminism up to this point.
So, to be very clear, I am being pedantic, but this is meant to help us see that Red Pill is a very specific form of patriarchy that the term 'patriarchy' obfuscates. This is going to be very clear to you by the end of this essay, but here’s some evidence for Red Pill’s androcentrism upfront. In his book “The Rational Male”, the Godfather of Red Pill, Rollo Tomassi, capitalizes the word “Man”. He also capitalizes the word “woman”, but only when referring to the idealized fiction of the “Quality Woman”.2
Firstly, the reason he capitalizes Man, is specifically to differentiate lower-case man and upper-case Man because he’s making a distinction between beta men and his ideal Alpha Man. He’s creating a hierarchy between lesser classes of men and the highest class of Man, and the behaviours, personality traits, and lifestyles that separate them. Secondly, woman is only differentiated between all women who exist and the fictional “Quality Woman” that exists only in the minds of lower case men who hope to one day find a woman of legitimate quality.
Funny enough, he’s actually kind of giving good advice when he tells men to stop looking for a perfect woman and instead realize that women are imperfect. Great. However, the implicit assumption here is that there is an ideal for Men, who by their mode of being earn domination over the lower classes and choose among the women they desire. And yet, none of these women have this same access to such unilateral power.3 This exclusive access to real power begins to reveal the androcentrism of Red Pill, so let’s go deeper into the specific form that it takes for them.
The Madonna-Whore Complex
Before I get into that, my name is Will. I’m a Theory Artist and Mythwright and on this substack we craft new ways to think about masculinity through psychological development and Jungian psychology.
The irony of Tomassi’s recommendation that men get rid of the “Quality Woman” ideal is that it simultaneously acts as good advice and as a perpetuation of the very psychological complex from which it emerges. In his book he states the following:2
“[Men] want to believe [the Quality Woman] exists among a sea of vapid, self-absorbed sluts looking to cash in before they hit the Wall. She’s not the prudish Madonna and she’s not the Whore of Babylon, she’s the cute good girl somewhere in between.”
Here he references Freud’s Madonna-Whore Complex, which occurs when a man has difficulty viewing his romantic partner as a complete sexual being. She’s either the pure, respectable woman his parents will one day meet or she’s the degraded slut that isn’t worthy of a serious relationship.4 In a very curious twist though, Tomassi is saying that the “Quality Woman” is somewhere in between Madonna and Whore.2
One way this “Quality Woman” manifests is the desire guys have for a woman who is an absolute freak, who loves doing all the kinky shit they see in porn, but who’s also a virgin when they meet and has no desire for other men. Obviously there’s a little bit of a contradiction there.
However, what Tomassi is trying to teach is that no woman is perfect or ideal. Guys either search endlessly for this unicorn that doesn’t exist or they try to convince themselves that the woman they currently have their eyes on is that ideal woman. That can be a woman they’re actually dating who is abusive or simply incompatible, or it could be the infamous friend zone situation where they merely long to be the guy she finally realizes she loves.
Once guys become aware of this idealization, they can start meeting women as the complex human beings they actually are. Tomassi talks about how marriage and kids aren’t always this super exciting adventure, and so you want to look for the woman who is going to be there during those difficult or banal times.2 As I said, that’s good advice and that’s really a sad part about Red Pill. Sometimes they really do have good advice for guys. It’s just that it’s buried under all of this toxic garbage that perpetuates the very problem of the idealized “Quality Woman”.
To help you understand why, I first need to say that Tomassi has explicitly said that promiscuity in women damages their ability to be in long term relationships and that a lower body count is preferable.5,6 This is a common meme in the Red Pill community that Alex of Date Psychology has analyzed, finding that there is no evidence that promiscuity damages a woman’s ability to commit. However, there is a correlation between promiscuity and poor relationship outcomes…for both sexes. It seems that very promiscuous people tend to find each other and things can go downhill from there.7
Furthermore, this is correlational and we don’t know precisely why high promiscuity is related to poor relationship outcomes. However, what we can say is that it doesn’t seem to have much to do with only the biology of women specifically. If you remember from the first essay in this series on Red Pill’s Ontology, then you already know that Red Pill grounds their entire belief system in the idea of innate, unchangeable sex differences. So, if their preference for low promiscuity in women can’t be justified by the biology of women, what can we begin to say about it?
Another quote from Tomassi can help us out:2
“There is no Quality Woman, that’s an idealization. Some are better than others of course, but you don’t find the perfect woman, you make the perfect woman. […] the point is to mold yourself and any woman who you do exclusively end up with into your own frame.”
It seems like maybe finding a woman with a low body count is meant to facilitate molding her into the perfect woman by your own standards, which she is supposed to be biologically predisposed to desire or at least prefer choosing, as I’ve argued against previously. Both Alex of Date Psych and I agree that this is likely a case of jealousy, and he’s covered findings that sexual frustration is associated with the desire to restrict sexual freedom.7,8
Red Pill often disparages women who’ll have a one night stand with some random guy, but then make a guy she’s really interested in wait. In a debate on the Red Pill podcast Fresh and Fit, Destiny, a political streamer, made a really good point that a woman who’s just looking for some dick obviously isn’t that concerned with what he thinks of her. She’ll likely never see him again. With a guy she is interested in, she’s likely going to fear his judgement if she gives it up too soon.9 The fact that Red Pill spends so much time talking about a woman’s chastity as a biological necessity means she has a few reasons to fear that men will view her as fundamentally damaged.
My point is that jealous men, who would use this exact same promiscuous strategy, get mad when women do it, and then say that any woman who doesn’t give it up right away to them isn’t really interested. They use evolutionary psychology or evopsych to declare that this is her preferred mating strategy (fuck the alpha right away, use a beta for his money).
And yet never once do they consider the possibility that the difference is not in mating strategy, but in the desire for short-term pleasure vs. the desire for a relationship. For them, all human behaviour is primarily biological, so a person’s sexual decision-making can only be explained through the goal of reproduction. Maybe her desire for that quick one-night stand had little to do with what she is biologically predisposed to look for in a sperm donor. She was just looking to masturbate with a body.
Again, with only evopsych as an explanatory framework, they’ll also often interpret a woman’s promiscuous behaviour as a sign that she’s met an Alpha male, which means that if they are the man a woman sleeps with quickly, that must mean they’re an Alpha male.
Notice the great irony. They are selecting for women who may simply be looking for some dick and excluding those women who are looking for something more serious. He’ll then only have dating experience with these women in this context and then walk away thinking all women who “really like him” are really like that, or at least, only when they meet an Alpha male such as him.
Now, I do want to be clear that I am not judging women or men for having sex. I’m just pointing out one of the dynamics that may be causing the issues Red Pill is so set against. We already talked about this in the essay on Red Pill’s Epistemology, but we can again see how the jealousy Red Pill has contributes to a culture in which women’s promiscuity is punished. Through their own relationship standards they create the very conditions in which they have poor relationship outcomes with those women promiscuous enough to disregard the stigma. This then makes them feel justified in punishing any promiscuity in women.
This is how Red Pill perpetuates the Madonna-Whore Complex. While they do sometimes appeal to religious morality, they primarily perpetuate the Complex through evopsych. Their definition of the Quality Woman fantasy is, ironically, the complex, multifaceted women who actually exist somewhere between Madonna and Whore. They demand that women be whores for them while shaming them for being whores for any other man, and then seek endlessly for the chaste woman with a low body count who is fit for reproduction. And yet, if she in any way feels, thinks, or acts in a way that violates their interpretation of evopsych, she’s just been brainwashed by feminists.
Dr. Hartmann has written that we heal this Madonna-Whore Complex by making the boundary in between permeable. To do that we have to let go of the jealousy that has us demand that women be perfectly untouched or else they’ve been spoiled. However, within Red Pill’s androcentrism, all things must be interpreted in a way that only benefits the most Alpha of men and whatever emotional whim they subject themselves and women to.
The Primordial Man
Understanding exactly what Tomassi means by Alpha male is a little difficult. It’s pretty clear that he thinks being muscular, rich, and successful is important.2 On the other hand, he also has an infamous debate with Destiny and Sneako where he says that it was up to each individual man to decide for themselves given their specific environment and goals.6 I would probably agree with the idea that every person should define their ideal character in that way. However, I think the most important point is that he believes that the Alpha male is one who is better than women.10
This is the notion of hypergamy, that women will only date men who are more financially successful than them, who are more muscular and athletic, who are taller, more educated, again, better than them.11 He even goes so far as to say that gender roles cannot be changed because no woman would be attracted to a man who stays at home while she goes to work.10 Once again, he uses biology as the sole determining factor in authentic sexual desire and as a justification for a specific social order.
Dr. Garcia-Favaro criticizes this use of evopsych to limit romantic and erotic creativity within culturally determined patriarchal standards. If you remember from the Red Pill Ontology essay, she discusses the experience of women who sought help for their boyfriend’s porn use. They are told that it’s a man’s biology to desire constant novelty in sex, so it was really up to women to adapt themselves to the immutable sexual appetite of their boyfriends.12
This androcentrism manifests within Red Pill’s glorification of male promiscuity through the concept of “spinning plates”.2 As a man, your goal ought to be sleeping around with as many women as possible, spinning them like plates. This is so that you can find out what you like and choose among a high volume of women who will be the best one to settle down with. Once you do, there is also the recommendation that you keep the relationship open, but only on your own side. Tomassi writes the following:2
“As men, our biological impetus is a desire for unlimited access to unlimited sexuality with females bearing the best physical attributes.”
This assumes that our desire for more, emerging from our biology as men, is indicative of a primordial, and thus authentic, desire and so the satisfaction of this ravenous more is justified as that which defines the most Alpha male. The androcentrism here is obvious, “I want sex, I can justify why I should want all this sex with evopsych, so to be the best man I can be I should get as much sex as I can acquire.”
However, this argument for male lust doesn’t apply to male gluttony, with muscular physiques being a prerequisite for Alphahood. Red Pill wants sex, they don’t want to be fat, so even though the satisfaction of ravenous gluttony for sugar, salt, and fat can be justified with evopsych they don’t make that justification.
You might say that evopsych is about survival and reproduction, so lust is justifiable whereas gluttony is not, but this lust isn’t just reproduction. It is the ravenous, endless more that a man is entitled to satisfy merely because he can get many women pregnant in a short amount of time while a woman can only get pregnant once at a time. Given his Schrodinger’s recommendation that men get a vasectomy, it’s clear that for him that satisfying this “biological impetus” really has nothing to do with reproduction.6
My own opinion is to eat and fuck as much as you want as long as you’re happy, healthy, and not hurting yourself or others. The issue is that it’s androcentric to advocate for insatiable male lust simply because it can be justified by evopsych, but to then denigrate gluttony and female lust because you don’t like it. The issue however, is that Tomassi doesn’t allow you to believe things that don’t align with his androcentric interpretation of evopsych, saying:2
“Bear in mind that monogamy is a dictate of the feminine imperative. It is the social contract that the feminine ultimately needs in order to quell a constant desire for security in a very chaotic world. When you [as a man] are predisposed to monogamy-as-goal thinking, or trying to break yourself of this, understand that this is a tool of the feminine imperative.”
Firstly, we have to question the idea that every woman’s most authentic, unchangeable desire is to be in a monogamous relationship completely defined by the man’s goals and frame. The fact that they use a rose-tinted hyper-patriarchal past in which her agency in the public sphere was taken from her, is another example of how Red Pill creates the reality that justifies their belief system. To be clear, this is not an argument against monogamy, but against monogamy as the sole driver of a women’s sexual and romantic decision-making.
Think about it. You’ve made a woman completely dependent on a man for financial support to raise the children he can force her to have, because again, she is completely dependent on him for financial support. You then say that her desire for monogamy is only ever a biologically determined strategy for stealing resources from Alpha males (or a duped beta). Do you see the issue there?
The second issue with that quote is that it assumes that you either agree with Rollo's values about real masculinity or you must have been brainwashed. This is all bound within the notion of the Alpha male as the Primordial Man. Somewhere in our evolutionary past there exists a Man that is the pinnacle of all men, which acts as a sort of Platonic Form of Man, a perfect ideal that all men must reach for and only the select Alpha few are actually able to become. All it really offers is a new conformity under the guise of masculine individuality.
If the Primordial Man is the evolutionarily justified goal state for all men to aspire to, then it’s who all women aspire to be with. Again this is hypergamy, the notion that women can only truly desire the most Alpha of men who are better than them. However, the evidence doesn’t support the form of hypergamy that Red Pill talks about.
Let’s start with education. Dr. Scott Alexander has written that 50 years ago marriages were less likely to be successful if the man was less educated than the woman. Hypergamy. However, since then, this has completely disappeared because the average woman is more likely to be more educated than the average man. There were some people who thought this would negatively affect the dating market, but it simply hasn’t.13
However, is this also true for income? Well, at least not yet because men on average still earn more than women. Even if that’s not true in every situation and is shifting, the fact remains that any random man is likely to out-earn any random woman.13 So, the fact is that women becoming more educated than men removed hypergamy based on education, whereas income hypergamy stayed the same because women are still earning less than men. The evidence is simply more in favour of the idea that hypergamy has more to do with environmental conditions than Red Pill seems to think.
What we do tend to find however, is that women have greater erotic plasticity or have sexual desires that are more malleable and open to changing. For example, there’s the stereotype that a woman will kiss other women even if they’re not gay, whereas men do not. In her dissertation, Dr. Benuto found that women were more likely to experience a greater degree of malleability in what they found sexually exciting.14
She writes that women may be more sexually motivated through communion, meaning once they connect with someone, they are more open to greater variety. Female erotic plasticity may be far more about how sex becomes an avenue for deeper connection.14 In other words, what we can take from changes in educational standards and from women’s malleable sexual desire through communion, is that hypergamy is not the immutable biological prison Red Pill claims we’re condemned to.
Androcentrism Revivifies Patriarchal Standards
Before I get into that though, if you like this essay so far, I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a like. It really helps the algorithm get this message in front of people. Thank you so much.
I began this essay with the claim that calling Red Pill patriarchal obfuscated their specific brand of patriarchy, and that we can get a better look at it by focusing specifically on androcentrism, or the privileging of men’s desires and interests. There has been a steady change and challenge to patriarchal cultural standards and in gendered divisions in education and income. The men of Red Pill are simply not patriarchs in the sense of even recent memory. They are the feeble spawn of patriarchs, seeking desperately to hold onto whatever power they have left and reclaim what has already been taken from them.
As such, as the dating landscape changed faster than we were able to keep up with, it became all too easy to confuse patriarchal standards with biological immutabilities. From this perspective, your issues with women are not because you simply lack a map, but because of evolutionary dogmas that feminism has broken. If we just returned to the previous standard where men were the breadwinners and women were mothers, hypergamy could play itself out, and sexual desire and romantic satisfaction would return.
This hope is used to motivate men to aspire to lifestyles that put them at the top of the hierarchy where the hypergamous female’s sexual desire is directed. If we succeed, then the nature of this hierarchy becomes justified because if we made it then anyone else can too. If we fail, we depend on faith in the hierarchy to justify our continued action despite failure. However, what all of this does is perpetuate the belief that men seek power over others and women seek men with power over them.
Let’s return to the idea that marriages in which the woman was more educated than the man were more likely to fail. Remember that this isn’t the case anymore because women are more likely to be more educated than men. Women are now hypo-gamous, where they date men who are less educated and this doesn’t lead to worse off marriages. Dr. Alexander has this to say:13
“My interpretation is that there’s nothing inherent about educationally hypo-gamous marriages that makes divorce more likely. But when hypo-gamous marriages are weird, only weird people will marry hypo-gamously, and weird people are more likely to divorce. This is a constant pattern across sociology. There is a stigmatized thing. Statistics show the stigmatized thing has bad outcomes. Then the thing becomes unstigmatized, normal people start doing it, and then the outcomes are fine.”
Connect that with what I said before about how high promiscuity is connected with bad relationship outcomes. Could that be a consequence of a culture of shame around promiscuity and a lack of a sufficient map to guide people through its emotional complexity?
As such, as the environment changes we see a change in the cultural standards, and begin to realize that these cultural standards were not unchanging biological facts. They are instead far more dependent than we thought on the environment being a certain way. With enough time, eventually women start to date hypogamously where previously they dated hypergamously.
Unfortunately, Red Pill men have been raised into a value system defined by an androcentrism that places male interests above female interests. As such, they are likely going to resist these changes. They fear how it’s going to affect their power to live the value system they believe is the one right and true value system for authentic happiness and fulfillment. As Tomassi says:2
“Gentlemen, you will establish frame in any monogamous relationship you have. You will enter her reality or she will enter yours.”
If you believe that men ought to earn more, have more social power, be more educated, have more freedom in sexual relationships, etc., etc., etc., then you are going to create the kind of social system and culture in which they do. Then, all that women will have to choose from are men who are doing better than them. You’ll then use that as evidence that women are biologically predisposed to desire more powerful men, which justifies the status quo keeping only a few men up and the rest of men and all of women down.
Furthermore, in our culture, power is defined by the neoliberal capitalist framework we discussed in the last essay. Through neoliberalism we entrepreneurialize ourselves, turning ourselves into hustling entrepreneurs who are constantly trying to achieve the financial success necessary to live dreams given to us through media controlled by the ultra-wealthy. These dreams are achieved by optimizing every facet of our feelings, thoughts, and actions, all so that we can maximize the fulfillment of whatever whim we believe we ought to have given how our desires have been even further shaped by the androcentric subculture of Red Pill.
We’re taught to view women as commodities, objects for sexual pleasure that we are taught to collect as a sign of our own progress in conforming ourselves to the entrepreneurializing standards of neoliberal capitalism. As we gain in social skills and finances, the measure of our increasing status becomes the quantity of highly attractive women we conquer.
Our neoliberal environment pressures us into this kind of self-standard, and thus our cultural standards and our values emerge from this same entrepreneurialization. The more money we all feel demanded to earn, the more we will value how our partners will increase our and our children’s ability to make money. If women make less than men, then this will manifest as income hypergamy.
This all perpetuates the culturally-dependent view that the freest state for human beings is to liquefy all solidarity into dog-eat-dog competition in a marketplace that is ruled by a small, increasingly wealthy elite. As income inequality soars you’ll simply say that it’s up to each individual to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, compete in the “free” market, and become the kind of man that women are condemned by nature to desire.
In the next essay, we’ll extend this argument of neoliberal androcentrism into the bioconservatism of Red Pill.
Until then, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more conversations on masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
References:
1 – Hibbs, C. (2014). Androcentrism. In T. Teo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology (pp. 94–101). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7_16
2 – Tomassi, R. (2013). The Rational Male. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
3 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power – Religion Online. https://www.religion-online.org/article/two-conceptions-of-power/
4 – Sigmund Freud and His Impact on Our Understanding of Male Sexual Dysfunction | The Journal of Sexual Medicine | Oxford Academic. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2025, from https://academic.oup.com/jsm/article-abstract/6/8/2332/6834571?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false
5 – The Rational Male (Director). (2022, March 13). Why Modern Women Lose; your Body Count Matters! [Video recording]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5V3TDXYlkC8
6 – Destiny (Director). (2023, May 11). Sneako DESTROYS The Redpill Godfather On Fresh N Fit [Video recording]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=l1a1Wy4gues
7 – Alexander. (2022, May 5). The Meme of Promiscuity and Pair Bonding—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/the-meme-of-promiscuity-and-pair-bonding/
8 – Alexander. (2024b, November 30). Frustrated Mating, Fear of Extrapair Defection, and Low Sexual Risk-Taking Predict Negative Attitudes Toward Female Promiscuity—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/frustrated-mating-fear-of-extrapair-defection-and-low-sexual-risk-taking-predict-negative-attitudes-toward-female-promiscuity/
9 – Destiny (Director). (2022, August 14). Debate Roundtable w/ 9 Women... Fresh And Fit w/ Sneako AFTERHOURS Show [Video recording]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=juS-lQ3j9B0
10 – The Rational Male (Director). (2020, March 11). What makes a man an Alpha Male? | #therationalmale #rollotomassi [Video recording]. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=7fpruwewGiY
11 – Alexander. (2024a, July 23). Rollo Tomassi vs Evolutionary Psychology—Date Psychology. https://datepsychology.com/rollo-tomassi-vs-evolutionary-psychology/
12 – García-Favaro, L. (2015). ‘Porn Trouble’: On the Sexual Regime and Travels of Postfeminist Biologism. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(86), 366–376. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2016.1150937
13 – Alexander, S. (n.d.). Hypergamy: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. Retrieved April 18, 2025, from https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/hypergamy-much-more-than-you-wanted
14 – Benuto, L. (2009). Exploring erotic plasticity as an individual difference variable: Theory and measurement. UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. https://doi.org/10.34917/2583005
Such a well written piece 👌
Always a fan of connecting with talented writers— subed you ✓