Poly Folly

A Minor But Substantive Criticism of Rollo Tomassi's "Cuckoldry is a Beta Male Mating Strategy" Substack article

[Full disclosure (edit: 6/11/25): I own all five of Rollo Tomassi’s books, I formerly subscribed to his channel, I went into reading this essay a huge fan of Tomassi, and it was in that spirit that I challenged one particular aspect of his April 11, 2023, Substack article, which echoed assertions in his books and livestreams. Subsequent to publishing this request for correction, Tomassi blocked me on Twitter/X.]

Mr. Tomassi, your article title is right on the money, and I applaud you for honing in on the degree to which cuckoldry can be a voluntary male strategy. Nor do I question your assertion that Poly (polygamy in general) is frequently at heart an approach in which men cuckold themselves — and I’ll even go out on a limb to assert that most forms of polygamy are detrimental to both marriages and children. However, you’ve substituted an incorrect term in your essay about poly’s role in cuckoldry, so this is an invitation for you to correct it.

Polygamy is a broad-category term that includes any other sexual approach within marriage that doesn’t entirely restrict intimate behavior to sex between one man and one woman who are married to each other. We know this as monogamy, so sex between marital partners and any other human being constitutes one form or another of polygamy. Polyamory is a subset of polygamy and refers to the more open-ended forms of bringing in others — and currently receives the most attention in our culture; every metropolitan area has an active polyamory subculture within which participants formally gather to experience sex outside of marriage; some there are married, and others single; in fact, the old standbys of swinging and wife swapping are forms of polyamory.

Worldwide, however, polyamory is far from the most common form of polygamy; that would be polygyny, which your article mentions as a term but is actually antithetical to how I’ve read and have heard you use that term on your podcasts. Sometimes you even seem to use ‘polygyny’ when you more properly should mean ‘polyamory,’ but the word I believe you’re searching for in this case in point is ‘polyandry.’

Polyandry is the proper term for a married woman being married to more than one man. As you would describe it, this is Open on her end/Closed on his end — and can loosely be applied even outside of marriage in other committed or semi-committed relationships. The men in such a relationship are expected to have only the woman as a partner, but the woman is permitted to have each of them as a partner. (I’m sure you would agree that most polyamory actually tends to function as polyandry, given that, no matter what the intention is on the part of the married couple entering into a polyamorous event, it will always be far more likely that the woman will get laid by as many men as she wants, whereas the man can never assume unlimited partners and often the man will be lucky if he has sexual contact with even one woman other than his wife.)

Polygyny, on the other hand, is the proper term for a married man being married to more than one woman. Within Judaism, Christianity and most other religions, this is frequently referred to simply as ‘polygamy’ (or, for example, ‘biblical polygamy,’ because most religions — much like most logical secular constructs based on common sense — consider polyandry to be unacceptable), but polygyny is the most technically correct term, and it is also often used to refer to committed or semi-committed relationships that include one man and more than one woman (Open on his end/Closed on her end).

Thus, while your other two bullet points are logical, whether the arrow indicates one leading to the other or just an association between them, Female Promiscuity and Polygyny are not associated or positively correlated — and this is something I would think you’d recognize as a man so thoroughly grounded in behavioral psychology or even as one dabbling as much as you do in the much-more-loosely-grounded evolutionary psych. Structurally, polygyny is far from tolerant or encouraging of female promiscuity, because polygyny requires females to limit their sexual intercourse to one man. (And in the case of the vast majority of polygyny-accepting cultures, even the promiscuity of males is decreased, because the expectation is that, if a man engages sexually with a woman, he’s expected to marry her, whether he already has another wife or doesn’t. Consistent with this, in Judeo-Christian Scripture, adultery strictly refers to sex between a married woman and a man to whom she’s not married; unless he’s having sex with another man’s wife, a man can’t be considered adulterous, because if he’s married and has sex with another woman who was unmarried up until that point, he would generally just be considered now married to her as well.) We can save for another time arguing about the unfairness of one man having multiple wives when it’s rarely considered preferable or acceptable for a woman to have multiple husbands, but I suspect there wouldn’t be much argument about this between us — because it’s just biological imperative, whether one believes that’s a matter of intelligent design, of Darwinian natural selection, or of both.

Therefore, your bullet point should have been:

• Female Promiscuity —> Polyandry

Furthermore, polyandry and polygyny can’t realistically be considered two equal and opposite sides of a coin, mostly because of the imbalance between male and female natures. Any attempt to create equivalence between the jealousy a woman experiences in a polygynous situation and the jealousy a man experiences in a polyandrous one is doomed to failure. Fundamentally, male and female sexual jealousy are predominantly (albeit not entirely) distinct: oversimplifying it, female jealousy elevates selfishness over legacy/offspring, whereas male jealousy elevates legacy over selfishness. Thus, the ‘insecurity’ taunt pointed toward men unwilling to be cuckolded is a projection from the true inner nature of women. As you point out in regard to cuckoldry being an (ineffective) reproduction strategy for beta males, men are currently being bamboozled by our gynocentric culture into accepting that they must be insecure if they don’t want to watch their women getting f***ed by another man, but that entirely glosses over the much more relevant fact that what is at stake is the significantly more substantive possibility of being expected to sacrifice time, money and other resources toward raising another man’s offspring. That has nothing to do with insecurity and everything to do with the wise use of limited resources, not to mention the issue of prevention of producing one’s own legacy children.

And, yes, I do recognize that I’m mostly preaching to the choir at this point. I’m just correcting the incorrect use of the world ‘polygyny.’

My only other quibble with your occasional blanket dismissal of the legitimacy of polygamy without properly addressing the significant exception of polygyny isn’t directly related to this particular excerpt from your already-published thoughts on the subject — but to what you addressed in your April 9 podcast and have mentioned elsewhere: yes, limited studies have (intentionally, I might add) produced the result of asserting that, in cultures in which polygyny (one man/multiple wives; open on his end/closed on hers) is acceptable, wives who share a husband report lower marital satisfaction than do wives who have a husband all to herself. Of course they do; other than perhaps the need for social approval, there may be nothing more fundamental to (especially modern) female nature than stinginess, so of course women in general are going to prefer (a) not having to share over (b) sharing. The same thing goes for toddlers when it comes to toys, but we don’t conduct supposedly-empirical studies intended to bolster the notion that children shouldn’t learn to share, nor should we do so with women who live in a world in which they expect to be able to depend on men for almost everything beyond sex and reproduction (for which they’re mutually dependent).

The studies you cite have a fatal logical flaw of rigor, because they very deftly camouflage the fact that, for unmarried women, no tangible absolute choice exists between monogamy and polygyny. Those women who can persuade men to marry them monogamously will do so. The remaining women, however — and they represent a tremendously large contingent that only grows as gynocentrism remains entrenched — are, de facto, incapable of persuading men to marry them monogamously. Many cannot do so because of their own unrealistic assessment of what men they should be advertising themselves to, but perhaps an even larger contingent cannot accomplish that level of persuasion because the pool of men who might be interested in marrying them are never going to be willing to restrict their sexual relations to just one woman — or, at least, not just to one of these women whom high-value men comfortable with monogamy haven’t chosen. Around the edges, exceptions occur, but they only prove the rule.

And one of the rules that matters the most is that single adult women always outnumber single adult men — a problem that only intensifies with age — so studying self-reporting-female satisfaction in monogamous marriages vs. self-reporting-female satisfaction in polygynous ones is a distraction from: What about self-reporting-female satisfaction among all the leftover women relegated to lifetime singledom when the lesser number of potentially-monogamous single men run out?

Mate sorting is multifaceted, but, as you regularly point out, the majority of women consider the majority of men to be unattractive, so those men deemed attractive are nailed down to monogamy the moment women can accomplish it, and the ‘attractive’ men who won’t agree to monogamy aren’t tolerant of women who attempt to pin them down in that manner. Thus, a large part of the ‘warfare’ in the open sexual marketplace consistently occurs between (a) women who have overvalued their SMV and, in delusion, refuse to settle when they wouldn’t actually be settling, and (b) not the highest-value men perhaps but the next echelon down of men who are both alpha and beta (in that dichotomy) but are themselves unwilling to settle for women who either (i) won’t agree to accept something approximating polygyny as a structure and/or (ii) don’t bring anywhere near enough to the table in regards to femininity, looks, loyalty or respectful cooperation.

What the studies thus entirely fail to address that I’m surprised you gloss over is that it’s entirely irrelevant whether women who are sister wives would be more uplifted and/or if their children would be better off if they were married to a monogamous man, because that’s simply NOT an option for most of them. Therefore, the true option is not between polygyny and monogamy — it’s between polygyny and spending the last few decades of their lives alone with their careers and their dogs, occasionally getting desperate and/or drunk enough to slake their sexual frustrations with the men they otherwise look down on.

Or marrying men they incorrectly look down on and proceeding to either create Hell on Earth or commit cuckoldrous adultery and set the poor sucker up for raising the progeny of other men incapable of or unwilling to function as those women’s proper husbands — as per your article’s thesis.

[Not to mention having the card up their collective sleeve of marrying men for the quite-popular intention of stealing their fortunes and children from them before all is said and done.]

Don’t let a small set of poorly-conducted, nonempirical studies dissuade you from recognizing that polygyny is imminently superior to noncommittal baby daddies impregnating uncompromising or undesirable baby mamas — not to mention it being tremendously superior to large swaths of widows (and their orphans), repentant female divorcees and leftover women who just couldn’t accomplish being anyone’s first choice . . . to a lifetime of loneliness, lack of sexual satisfaction and being disconnected from the protective covering of males other than in the guise of government services.

And, for their children, it’s not a choice between being in a polygynous family or being the child of Ward and June Cleaver — it’s between polygyny and either (a) being raised in a single-parent baby-mama household or, perhaps even in most cases, (b) utter nonexistence. Very often, when sympathy is evoked for children with less-than-optimum circumstances, we fail to acknowledge that the only alternative would have been either something far worse or never even knowing the joy of climbing a tree or drinking water from a hose, much less having a daddy all to themselves.

Women most certainly have the potential to behave badly if they get competitive within a polygynous household, but the predispositions within women that generate that kind of catty behavior will just find other outlets in a monogamous one.