Renouncing the “High-Value Man”

One of the trendy taglines from certain “conservative” or so-called “traditional” influencers is “high-value.” It is used to describe men (and sometimes women) who fit particular criteria.  

As I investigated this term, I found that when applied to men this term describes someone who is driven, generous, dynamic, and has goals; it’s a seemingly good list. 

But the more I tuned into this “high-value” jargon, the perverted dehumanization lurking behind this new movement reared its head. 

According to some, a high-value man is described as “the man women want to bang.”

The definition started to boil down to sex, power, and money.  

The more I looked into it, the more I stumbled upon platforms and influencers essentially getting to the same thing: high-value men make loads of money and get girls. He’s the player that everyone loves because he’s so darn charming and has financial status. 

When I was growing up, this man was the bad boy—the guy who could smoothly talk, had the girls fawning over him as he struggled to remember their names, and yet, somehow, charmed everyone.

Now the player we had hoped matured and put aside childish things is lauded for his bad-boy status; we just call it “high-value.” 

Even female speakers have affirmed this disturbing definition. Pearl Davis, who considers herself “traditional,” has stated on multiple occasions that high-value men cheat. According to Pearl, if you want to marry a high-value man, you might expect some infidelity because a.) men “need” sex and b.) it’s readily handed out to these chaps. 

Based on these assertions, Pearl believes that women should almost anticipate cheating:

I feel like we should just let these men cheat in peace…I just think life’s about choices and trade-offs and men I just think are biologically predispositioned to sleep with a lot of women…if we’re going after the guys with all of these qualities, do you think we should maybe expect it on some level? 

The deeper you peer into the beliefs behind these terms, the more warped definitions emerge. 

Rollo Tamassi, the self-proclaimed “rational male,” wrote on X (Twitter) that the path to becoming a high-value man is:

1. Do not get married
2. Avoid family creation
3. Vasectomy in your 20s
4. Lift consistently
5. Eliminate all sedations
6. Learn Game & Networking
7. Play to your strengths, build wealth
8. Resist easing up on your focus

In other words, high-value men are charming womanizers who prioritize self and wealth. Their values are based entirely in materialism. While claiming to be disciplined, they succumb to their animalistic desires by prioritizing worldly pleasure and sex without consequences.  In other words, high-value men are charming womanizers who prioritize self and wealth. Their values are based entirely in materialism.Tweet This

The irony is that these men also demonize promiscuous women, even though the promiscuous woman is vital to their mode of existing. 

These self-proclaimed traditional conservatives are neither traditional nor conservative. 

After all, what are the traditional values they’re seeking to conserve? Rather, they float under the guise of some good habits (working hard, taking care of your health) but ultimately toss virtue aside for their own quest for pleasure. 

As Alasdair MacIntyre states in his essay “Moral Philosophy, What’s Next”:

We inhabit a culture which was at an earlier stage informed by a shared belief in a summum bonum. And that belief had classical, in particular Aristotelian, as well as biblical, sources. They combined to provide morality with a point and a purpose, in virtue of which the moral life could be treated as an intelligible pursuit for a rational being. But when shared belief in the summum bonum is lost, the question of the point and purpose of morality also becomes one for which answers have to be invented, and to which naturally enough rival and incompatible answers are given.

We no longer have a shared moral belief. Through modernism, we have shifted our focus away from the Divine and placed an overwhelming emphasis on man and his desires. Meanwhile, authentic tradition rejects the sins of modernism and upholds virtue for the good of society. 

This faux-conservative-traditionalism is rooted in nothing substantial—cherry picking what it likes from past eras and misusing words like value. As a result, it certainly does little to conserve true virtue. 

It’s time to toss out these shallow terms. At the end of the day, utilizing this language simply treats people as commodities. 

We see this in the way that the “high-value” culture prioritizes the male sex drive and insinuates that women decline in value once they hit their mid-twenties. 

Instead of saying, “get married young,” the belief is men can and should live out their twenties, be it debauchery or what have you, but a woman, if she fails to find Mr. Right by twenty-five, loses value. And by value, they mean sex appeal.  

While their arguments may technically be pivoting around the fact we should encourage women to marry and be mothers (and marrying young makes the most sense), their language is unhelpful at best. 

Botox, fillers, and the like are becoming more and more popular among young women in their early twenties. 

But we have to ask ourselves, what does all of this tell us? For one thing, young women are clearly terrified of growing old.  

We see women hungrily clinging to their youth—petrified of waking up to see a wrinkle in their reflection. 

We’ve become crazed consumers ready to purchase any elixir promising youth.  

Growing older isn’t viewed as a gift but a curse, something that decreases our value. We view ourselves as commodities; if we have any crease or dent, our worth automatically plummets. We fail to see the gift and dignity of our lives and how each wrinkle tells a story—the joys and sorrows we encounter here on earth.  

Entering into our wiser years is something to be cherished, not condemned. Not everyone lives to experience old age. And while we seemingly want to live forever, it has to be on our terms: forever young and beautiful. 

But if we view our personal value in terms of our sex appeal, we’re going to be hung up on rating our looks and “hotness.” We’re going to be drunk on vanity, reciting: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.” 

And yet, it is baffling that these faux “high-value” experts fail to acknowledge they are not just contributing to the problem, they’re nurturing it. 

More and more women are regretting “living out their 20s” in pursuit of a career. Videos over social media continue to crop up of women in their thirties admitting that they were fooled by modern feminism.  

These are women admitting they were wrong; they want a family, and they were duped into believing that a self-centered life was worthwhile.   

It’s important to ask: What is the response waiting to greet them?

Is it: “You’ve lost your value!”?

There’s no forgiveness and there’s no compassion in this outlook. A human body might as well be a utensil or an appliance. Toss it out if something seems amiss. 

It is true that we desperately need good men. Masculinity is a good and necessary gift from God.

But we need masculine men. We need men of virtue—not charming players—leading our culture in reform. 

The school of “high-value” men places an overwhelming emphasis on worldliness and male sexual license. While in one breath it may be said that marriage is good, comments excusing infidelity and even encouraging men to acquire vasectomies fail to help men step up to heroic virtue. Instead, this philosophy believes that the so-called “best” and most highly sought after men will always be effeminate. 

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that effeminacy is refusing to do the difficult thing because of an attachment to pleasure. The effeminate man is “ready to forsake a good on account of difficulties.” 

Attachments to lust, objectification, and promiscuity are all forms of effeminacy. The high-value man is oppressed by vice because he is told that part of what makes him such an asset is his sin.

What a depressing and dehumanizing outlook on men. God calls us by our names, but this movement wishes to identify men by their worldliness and sin.  

As Catholics, we understand that sex belongs to God. As Dietrich von Hildebrand writes in his book In Defense of Purity:

The pure man always lives in an attitude of reverence for God and His creation, and therefore reveres sex, its profundity, and its sublime and divinely ordained meaning. Indeed, and we have now reached the factor which is decisive both for purity and for the character of sex, the pure man understands that sex belongs in a special manner to God, and that he may only make such use of it as is explicitly sanctioned by Him. 

At the end of the day, this new fad that claims to help men is ultimately hindering them.  

It encourages us to think of one another as commodities—any blemish, and your worth diminishes. There is no room for reverence for God and His creation—just egoism.

It’s not a path to virtue but to self-destruction. 

It is time to toss out this unhealthy language and restore virtue.  
Let’s become men and women of virtue, knowing that our value is in God, who loves us into existence and calls us to perfection (Matthew 5:48).