Rollo Tomassi - The Rational Male - Positive Masculinity

The Rational Male Volume III Positive Masculinity , first edition copyright 2017 Rollo Tomassi.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher and author. The Rational Male is a registered trademark.

ISBN-13: 978-1548921811

ISBN-10: 1548921815

Published by Counterflow Media LLC, Reno, Nevada

Design and layout by Rollo Tomassi.

It was the first week of August, 2013, when I first listened to the actual voice of Andrew Hansen. Id known Andrew as an online personality for some time before this, but Id never really listened to the guys voice. Andrew was a fellow blogger in whats popularly known as the Manosphere today an online community of men that spans the globe and seeks to develop a better understanding of conventional masculinity, the nature of women and how best to develop oneself with this collective knowledge. Andrew was The Private Man and was the proprietor of a blog of the same name. Private Man was his handle on Twitter as well as many other online forums. That name was going to stick with him, and likely will be the one hes remembered by the most.

Before this particular podcast Id had some inspired debates with Private Man. He was always a good guy to hash out ideas with because hed had such a wealth of experience with regards to intersexual relations, divorce and dating as a mature man after his divorce. Ill say right now, there were some issues Id had strong disagreements with him about. More than once I had to take issue with his take on things from a watered down, Purple Pill perspective. That was always the concern, the want to temper ones Red Pill message to be more palatable to a larger audience (usually for the want of not offending women) at the expense of broader truths. But with Private Man, there was always a willingness to listen to the uglier side of things, the more objective, less palatable truths and to embrace them in spite of what his experience was. Hed have a penchant for writing an article critical of some fluff piece hed come across, try to measure his response and Id be there to push him to see the real latent message in it and why it was really bothering him enough to write about it.

Andrews Manosphere niche was his appeal to older gentlemen. That may seem like an easy fit for a guy who really came into the sphere already in his late 50s, but you have to consider that the men who he was connecting with were largely guys like himself coming into a very rude awakening of their Blue Pill conditioning well past middle age. This is a hard demographic to reach. When a guys been plugged in since the early 1970s and has based his intersexual existence on a set of rules that he discovers no one has really been playing by for as long as hes been around, its very easy to fall into the bitter and burned category of men. Private Man couldve easily been one of the same guys he was trying to reach, but his own unplugging, late as it was in his life, was something different, something positive, for him. In a way I think his positive Red Pill awareness was something unavoidable for him. This hopeful, though educated, attitude is something he brought to his writing. When I wrote the last book, Preventive Medicine, I did so in an attempt to address a common question men had been asking me for as long as Ive been writing:

Where was all of this knowledge when I was younger? Why didnt someone make me aware of all this before I got married, got divorced, had a messed up relationship with my kids, etc.?

This question is usually a casual joke amongst older men in the Manosphere, one that usually stems from a need to reconcile regret for not having realized the truths of the Red Pill sooner. But with Private Man, I never really got the same sense of regret from him. It was as if his unplugging were something he accepted without much regret for the experiences and decisions hed made for his life up to then. He acknowledged and accepted his role in his own plugging-in without much pause for the nihilism that comes with it.

We often talk about the several phases a man usually progresses through when hes processing the new awareness the Red Pill presents to him. One of these is a phase of nihilism, where a man must reconcile that his past decisions were uninformed (or deliberately misled) and from there on its up to him to remake himself. This nihilism comes from a sense of lost investment, lost value, and the prospect of having to rebuild himself after being cut away from Blue Pill idealism. Private Man never really seemed to go through this phase or if he did he did a good job of hiding it. In fact, if there was one thing that defined Andrews character it was his positive attitude about damn near everything. That may seem like the right thing to say about a guy in retrospect, but for Andrew it was true. Id encourage my readers to peruse his blog and decide for themselves.

So, there I was on an August day, hobbling my way back to my car, iPhone and earplugs listening to Private Man on a podcast called, I think, Manosphere Radio or something. I say hobbling because Id suffered a dancers fracture on my foot a week earlier and I usually had a slow, mostly painful, walk to my car in a parking lot at a casino I was doing contract work for at the time. I downloaded the audio and listened to it while I walked and drove home that day. This may seem kind of insignificant, but its the memory Ill always associate with Andrew because here was one of a few men from my online life who was putting himself out there. Sure, there was Roosh and a few others, but Private Man was a guy I already had a connection with. You have to remember this was about 3 months before Id published The Rational Male. It was at a time when I didnt know how it would be received, and while I had confidence in what I was doing, it was still something new for me. There were a lot of what ifs I had to consider then. Hearing Andrew go into what he always did, I knew then that hed be a guy I could share a beer with. A guy that was accessible.

I think thats important, accessibility. Its very easy to get wound up in the idea that the text we read on our monitors are just cold expressions of ideas. Its easy to forget theres a human behind those ideas. Sometimes that human might be someone youll click with immediately, sometimes its a person youre glad to get away from. Their ideas may be genius, but who they are is very much subjective. Hearing Andrews delivery, much of it dead pan, you just knew he was a good dude. I wish I could say I know more than I do about him. He was a very open guy and I honestly wondered what woman would ever have a reason to divorce the guy. It certainly wasnt his lack of approachability.

It makes you wonder why he chose the moniker Private Man. He was anything but private.

Between 2013 and Andrews passing this year, 2017, Id talked with him personally on several occasion. It was actually Andrew whod hit me up for my cell number. He lived alone with a dog and Im fairly sure he just wanted to talk with someone outside his immediate circle the first time we connected. Hed hit some tough times financially, asked me to help him with a cell phone bill, but moreover it was about the time he knew hed be losing an eye to cancer. Its interesting to see pictures of him now without the eye patch since it quickly became the look that made him most recognizable. Cancer is a shit disease. Its alters you in many ways even if you beat it. Talking to Andrew on this occasion, I knew there was likely something more he was holding back, but even in a time he was obviously hurting and sorting things out for himself he still pressed on with the same upbeat determination Id always known.