#1064 - Dr Dani Sulikowski - The Brutal Tactics of Female Sexual Competition

How do you describe your area of research focus? So my research focus is the evolutionary psychology of human behaviour. And in the last few years in particular, I've really narrowed that focus down a bit to look at female intersexual competition, which is just a big fancy word for how women compete with each other to see who gets the largest share of the population's reproductive success. okay what is it trying to achieve fundamentally what does female intrasexual competition try to do so the currency of evolution is reproductive success the genes that promote reproductive success increasing frequency in the population and so whatever mechanisms and behaviors they produce will also increase in frequency so female intrasexual competition is the suite of behaviors that have evolved to maximize an individual's relative reproductive success, not absolute reproductive success. And that's a pretty important point. So you don't need to have as many babies as it's humanly possible to have to win the evolutionary game. What you do need to do is reproduce at a greater rate than the average reproductive rate for your population. And if that continues to happen in your lineage generation after generation, then you increase your representation in that population and you win the evolutionary game. So it's relative reproductive success that matters. So you can win by increasing your own reproductive success or attempting to inhibit the reproductive success of rivals. Both of those will increase your net reproductive success. Okay, so you can put your foot on the gas of how many surviving children you have, or you can try to put your foot on the brake of how many surviving children other women have. Exactly. Okay. This doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light. How conscious is this? Is it all women? Oh, excellent. You've hit on my least favorite question straight away. How conscious is this? Fuck me. Okay. Thanks, honey. No, that's okay. No, that's fantastic. It's the question I get the most often, and you'd think I would have invested some time in coming up with a better answer. I try to answer it a little bit differently each time in the hope that it's a more satisfactory answer. So how conscious people are, unclear. Unclear, it varies from person to person, and it probably doesn't really matter very much. So understanding what, very briefly, understanding what consciousness is and for is a really difficult question, and there's no consensus. How it operates with respect to sort of evolved behavioral tendencies is it develops kind of post hoc justification for what you've done and why you've done it. In fact, that's sort of what consciousness does with all behaviors, really. You ask people why they've done something they don't know, right? We can do an experiment where we manipulate the information that people get and they don't know we've manipulated that. And then we ask them why they made their decision and they just make something up and they don't know they've made something up, right? So people generally don't know why they're doing what they're doing. So the majority of people, not just women, but people generally, really don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They don't know why they find this particular person attractive. They don't know it's because the shape of their face signals that they have particular levels of testosterone or estrogen that contribute to fertility and predict behavior in really nice adaptive ways. They just look at someone and go, oh, he's hot, she's nice. But they don't have to understand why. And so women and men, because intersexual competition applies to men as well, it's just a completely different ballgame when it comes to men. They don't have to understand that the consequences of their behavior is inhibiting the reproductive success of other women. They just have to be compelled to behave that way. So it doesn't necessitate that women be sort of overtly aware of some nastiness in their behavior. Having said that, though, women are definitely overtly aware of much nastiness in their behaviour, as most women will attest to. Most women have been the recipients at some point or another of the bullying behaviour from other nasty women. So women certainly have the capacity to be absolutely directly, overtly and knowingly nasty and awful to each other. I mean, that's a given. So maybe they're sometimes conscious of the consequences of what they're doing. Sometimes, you know, if you look at it through a feminist lens, which is something else that I've talked about a little bit, women are very conscious of what they're doing in terms of how the ideologies affect the reproductive success of other women, but they think that's a good thing, right? They think motherhood is a form of oppression and marriage is a form of subjugation. And so if you can free women from those things, this is obviously certain branches of feminism, not necessarily all, but if you can free women from those things, well, that's a great thing. So they can be well aware that this is, you know, reproductively inhibiting ideology without necessarily thinking that they're being mean or nasty or whatever by doing it. Yeah, I think as well, some women would agree that they have been mean and nasty and that other women have been mean and nasty to them. But that's almost kind of like, it's not even not quite right, but that's like the proximate explanation. she's a bitch i don't like her she she's annoying she's a slut whatever the leap from that to some of that behavior is trying to suppress the future child having potential of that woman the more ultimate explanation i guess yeah uh that that feels like a a big leap that i think very few women would be able to make themselves even when they've been the recipient of it i don't know whether many women would say well the reason that she ostracized me at work or the reason that uh she vented and did the uh bless her heart thing to a mutual friend of ours that was going to tell the rest of the world that i had casual sex last week Like, those things are, it's the game within the game. It's not the game itself. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does to some extent. And I think that even though you're right that most women might not make the connection between what's happening and ultimate reproductive success, a lot of women do and very rightly make the connection between what's happening and physical appearance and physical attractiveness. So, as I'm sure you're well aware, you know, as would be your listeners, I'm sure that physical attractiveness is a big part of female mate quality right and so that becomes a big part of your sort of value on the mating market if you like and women are very well aware that the way that they treat other women and the way other women treat them um is very strongly determined often by their appearance versus the other women's appearances so that is you know that is something that women are very aware of explain how that explain what that dynamic would be they're aware of other women's appearances? People are very, I mean, I assume this is my impression, but I think women are very aware of the phenomenon by which an attractive woman introduced into a workplace or a social setting or something, you know, is very likely to raise the ire of, you know, potentially many other women simply because she's attractive and women will understand that. And, you know, sometimes when, you know, someone's being picked on or bullied or whatever, they say, look, it's just because she's jealous. And that's frequently correct to some extent. And so I think that there is a sort of understood relationship between female nastiness, bullying, interactions, whatever you want to call it, relational aggression, and female appearance. And it's not just how attractive she is, but it's also how she dresses. How much skin she's got. Yeah, exactly. Who did the study where the participants were actually outside of the study waiting to go in? A woman comes past in one version wearing lots of clothes in one version, being quite exposed, asking for directions. And the behavior of the woman is completely different, despite the fact that it's the same woman. Who did that one? I want to say Marianne Fisher, but I don't think it actually was. She's done almost all of the great one. I don't think it was. I think it was someone else. I feel like I'm wrong about that. what it goes to show is that um women respond differently to the same woman who presents in a different way and i'm gonna guess that your explanation would be the smaller clothes wearing more skin on show woman presents more of a potential sexual rival and therefore mating threat to these women than the more demure version therefore ostracizing her helps to make her more hesitant maybe lowers her self-perception pushes her outside of the friend group makes guys not be so attracted to her etc etc in an attempt to bring that um big advertising billboard of sexual availability down yeah i mean more or less all of the above so it's really important to understand female, intracsexual competition signaling. So most of what women do that is sort of, I guess, under conventional wisdom thought to be done to impress men, so beautiful clothes, makeup, all that dolling up, much of that is actually not targeted towards men at all. It's actually targeted towards other women. So it's interpreted by other women as signals of intracsexual aggression and social aggression, dominance, those types of things. And if a woman is attractive, it's interpreted in a reasonably negative way. If a woman is less attractive and she's engaging in this sort of type of dolling up behaviour, it's actually seen potentially a little bit more positively. So it will be seen in a sort of dominant leadership competence type of way as opposed to a more aggressive sort of way, which is how it's seen amongst attractive women. So when a woman turns up in a social scenario and she's signaling some level of sexual availability and looking quite attractive while doing it, that is itself actually an intersexual competition signal. She's basically sending a signal of sexual aggressiveness out to the women around her. So the women around her respond to that aggressive signal with a form of aggression, a form of counteraggression of their own. I wonder how many women that are listening have purposefully dressed down when they've been introduced to a new group of girl friends or have been newly placed into a different office with different co-workers and stuff like that. I have to guess if you have recognized the game, even if you don't fully understand the ultimate explanation of fertility suppression and ostracization, blah, blah, you will know if I turn up with my boobs out. throughout my experience of life being a woman, I've noticed that women don't seem to like it so much when I turn up with my boobs out. So I'm going to wear something that's a bit different. So you've just been trained like a LLM over time to behave in one way as opposed to another. Yeah, that's right. And I would suspect that most women, even whether they realise it or not, would certainly moderate their dress in different social circumstances for the benefit of other women, not just for the benefit of men, but specifically for the benefit of other women. And it is no doubt experientially tuned, but I suspect too that these would be evolved tendencies. These are part of the evolutionary game. All evolved tendencies rely on having appropriate experiences for them to develop properly. And so I wouldn't want to put it down to a socialization effect necessarily. How does female intersexual competition differ from male intersexual competition? You're sort of laying at the feet of women, this fertility suppression thing, but surely the only job of men's genes, the currency that matters, is also reproductive success. So is it not just the same for guys too? No. So there's a few differences between male and female intersexual competition, but I'd say that the fundamental one that matters is that for exactly the same reason that societies can send large numbers of men off to war, have them die, and recover the population within a generation is the same reason why men don't tend to engage in manipulative reproductive suppression of rivals. So if a man seeks to suppress the reproductive success of another man, of a group of another man, and even say, let's say he does that successfully, He convinces some large proportion of the population to effectively withdraw themselves from the gene pool. The remaining men, even if he has tremendous success, the remaining men will be able to pick up that slack, if you like. The same thing doesn't apply to women. In exactly the same way, populations don't send 40, 50, 60% of their women off to war to fight because if they did that, they would take them generations to recover because female reproductive success is capped. So male intersexual competition focuses much more on the side of the equation of maximizing your own reproductive success. It's much more just like a sprint race. Men are just like in their lane. They only have a gas pedal. They don't have a brake. Yeah, they're in their lane. They're running hard and they're just trying to get to the finish line as quickly as they can and get there faster or with more children than the other men. Women is like a running race, except every competitor is spending most of their time sticking out their arms and legs, trying to grab the other competitors, pull them back, trip them over. And the end result is that the entire field doesn't necessarily really go anywhere, which is why net reproductive success is so important. The entire field as a whole cannot move and everybody can have relatively low reproductive success. But whoever is at the top of that relatively low number wins. so it never the games are very different it's fascinating look i've had candace blake joyce benenson cory clark tanya reynolds like i've had a big suite of uh intracsexual competition researchers on the show and i never realized that the asymmetry in the ability for men to reproduce and for women to reproduce means that fertility suppression for men doesn't make sense because give a guy a good half hour break in a new glass of water and he's probably okay to go again uh that's not the same for women uh and that means that the uh both value potential profit and potential cost of uh improving or restricting yours or a rival's mating success as a woman is so much more valuable because you've just locked in what? That's a two-year contract maybe of gestation, breastfeeding? Oh, way more. Yeah, yeah, and way more. Okay. But, I mean, you can have another kid. Like, you can have two under two, right? You can have two under two, but there are still massive opportunity costs involved in the fact that you've got one under two in terms of the two under two and your prospects of, if you didn't hold on to whoever the first mate was, your prospects of getting another mate, your prospects of being able to actually re-subsequent children needing more resources to do that and things like that. So it's not even just restricted by the basic biology, which is obviously a massive restriction, but there's all of the flow-on effects as well, whereas men simply don't have those same concerns. Men can have, you know, I mean, it's not quite as simple as that, especially in the modern world with, you know, courts enforcing sort of child support payments and things like that. But essentially, men can have children from previous relationships, and it is a much less serious impediment to them then embarking on a future relationship that might be more long-term that might then yield more long-term children in a more family-like environment. That's not really an option that's available to women unless they're prepared to wear the massive costs that go with it. Yeah, I'm thinking about Tracy Vienko's work. And there was that recent study that came out about men are more accepting of their political rivals than women are of their political allies. I think maybe it was Joyce Benenson or maybe it was Tracy that did the study looking at female basketball players. Sorry, male basketball players showed more physical affection to opposing team members on the court than female players did to their own team members. And you think like, OK, like this is, you know, it's an interesting data point. Do we really need to read into it all that much? What does this mean? um but when you have this underlying narrative of the brake pedal for women being something that is really useful for them savage and and and mean and malignant but uh useful from a reproductive standpoint but it's not there for men i think it explains a lot or it's starting to explain to me a lot of the differences in male and female behavior sort of this very much you said sort of a sprint race this single thrust make self as rich famous well known as possible must gain more muscle must continue to go in the as opposed to this entire suite of social skills that women have that men not only don't have but can't even recognize you know when you you and your girlfriend go into a workplace and she says something she picks up on something that some girl did to him you know i I didn't even know that there was a person here. I wasn't even looking. I was busy having fucking aplerotifs. I think that it really begins to explain what drives that asymmetry. And it is one of the sexes has a brake pedal and a gas pedal, and the other just has a gas pedal. Yeah, and I completely agree. And I think the intersexual competition angle, I think, is, well, I mean, obviously it's kind of my thing. So I'm going to see it as a fundamental explanation for almost everything, and I do that. So people can level criticism at me for that if they want to, but I do think that it's the fundamental explanation for why, you know, it's kind of well understood and accepted that women have better social skills generally than men, right? So, you know, better social manipulation. Oh, yeah, better lie detectors, better at lying themselves, better manipulation, much better at following the, you know, the social intricacies, like, you know, remembering who's friends with who and who said what, when, and did this person. Like one of my favourite little anecdotes, and I said this to a guy and his response was, oh, my God, that happened to me too. So it's not just my husband, but my husband had a falling out once. It's not interesting, but he had a falling out once with a neighbour. And then, I don't know, about six months later or something, he bumped into him at the local supermarket and they had a chat. And he came home and he said, oh, I saw such and such today. And I went, oh, I said, oh, are you two friends again? And he sort of looked at me. Like he'd just forgotten. He'd just forgotten that they hadn't spoken for six months because they weren't talking to each other and had a falling out. That is something that women would never do, that they would simply never forget that someone is not their friend anymore. It just doesn't happen. And so I do think that this intersexual competition game that women play is a fundamental organizing principle of female social behavior. I really do. I think it dictates much of what women do much of the time, whether they realize it or not, of course. 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Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. upgrade your business and get the same checkout that i use with newtonic on shopify right now you can sign up for a one dollar per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom all lowercase that's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today that's a lovely description uh an organizing principle of female social behavior uh i think that's really cool i before we even get into what are some of the different ways this behavior shows up i imagine that there's many women listening who don't like the sound of their entire sex and much of their social behavior being painted in this kind of a light given that you're a woman how have you found it best to not even soften the blow but to explain this in a manner that women become receptive to as opposed to saying and you do this and you're trying to get your friend to break up with her husband and she's eating herself out of a fertility window and blah, blah, blah. It's an interesting question, actually. Surprisingly, I get, well, so far, and so far I've been exposed, I think, by the nature of social media and whatever. I think I've been exposed to very friendly audiences, both male and female. So I think I've been spared, not entirely, But I've been largely spared too much of vitriolic pushback or even resistance. But actually, I get more resistance from men than I get from women. Most women look at me and just nod and just go, yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Do you think that's because they've been on the receiving end? And every woman's been on the receiving end. Every woman, I think, has to some extent engaged in this, certainly with big individual differences. but I don't think there's any women who escape it either. And so women are very, very ready, even if they, what I imagine, would be almost definitely less ready to admit that they do it and less ready to admit, you know, particular instances in which they've done. Although still in conversations, most people are pretty ready to admit to rather stupid or unkind or whatever things that they did, especially when they were younger. The cover of youth always gives you some, you know, some willingness to admit horrible things you did as an obnoxious teenager. but women have been the recipient of it and so women you know just sit many women just sit there and and just look at me and just nod and they're just like yep yep I actually get most pushback from men who whose impulse I guess and I sort of have this sort of verified from one man at least because he came back to me later and explained this to me that this is exactly what was going through his head I get pushback from men because their impulse is to defend women their impulse is to say, you're a woman, but I'm pretty sure this is sexist. I can't quite square those two things at the moment, but I don't like what you're saying. And actually get much more pushback from men wanting to just somehow not accept that this actually is a fundamental explanation of how women behave. I think men are going to be blind to much of this behaviour because they don't pick up on the frequency at which it's happening. they are almost never going to be on the receiving end of it at least in quite the same way and also you've got like oh i guess maybe men would be on the receiving end of something but they're not going to interpret it in that sort of a manner that's um uh because they're blind to it and you've just got the general women are wonderful effect showing up here that men and women prefer women uh for for all things okay so talking about some of the ways that it shows up in this competition shows up in behavior what about women's dating advice how does it show up there oh so yeah so it definitely shows up in women's dating advice um i've done a few sort of not boring but some sort of you know formal academic studies on this showing that in a number of different scenarios so whether it's relationship formation or deciding you know when to start having children, deciding whether to get married, when to start having children, once you've had children, whether to sort of stay home at a stay-at-home mom or go back to work. I have done a bunch of studies looking at relationship advice in these different scenarios. And the basic take-home finding is that, yes, almost without exception, yes, women give more reproductively inhibiting advice to hypothetical women, whether these are sort of framed as friends or colleagues or whatever in the study. They give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women than what they say they would do themselves in those scenarios. So we use what women say they do themselves, what they say they would do themselves as like the benchmark for what they presume would be the most adaptive. And then compared against that, they give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women. So they're more likely to tell other women about the importance of not staying home as a mum, but going back to work than they are to say that they would see it as important for themselves to go back to work and they're more likely to tell other women that they should delay having children and invest more in their career until they build up more career success than what they would say they would invest in career success before having children. So we see that formally, but I think it's perhaps more compelling or at least more interesting in the way we're beginning to see it informally sort of across mass media and social media. So it's been getting a lot of attention lately that I'm sure you would have seen them. the numerous articles just coming out with various titles like, you know, I had an affair and it was the best thing I ever did for my relationship. And, you know, those that did the rounds a few days ago, Target, I think, have released their Valentine's Day range and there's a jumper for women that just says dump him. Yeah, of course, in giant text. And, you know, we're just being bombarded with the – and another good one too was I think it might have been called the article something to the effect of is having a boyfriend right-wing coded and things like that. So we're seeing this sort of devaluing of, certainly devaluing of monogamous relationships and devaluing of committed relationships in public rhetoric. And it also translates into the sort of individual one advice that women give to each other and it translates to the lab situation when we sort of try to go to formally measure it as well okay many of those articles will justify the points that they're putting forward as emancipating women from relationships that they shouldn't be in uh encouraging their independence like why not go back to the workplace 50 of marriages end in divorce and you're going to be stuck with no money and the kids look after and all the rest of it you need to have your own life it's important for you to do that um you can you should get out of relationships that you shouldn't be in maybe you've got some questions about whatever it might be i guess um there is a pretty socially acceptable positive some um almost like socially philanthropic i i'm bestowing on you some of this interesting and useful advice that helps you push back against these like archaic and heavily structured restrictive ideas and norms that are holding you in place what you're saying i think is that would be all well and true if the women who said that also endorsed their beliefs in the behavior is that so is that the sort of fun right almost so i think so yes you you are correct that in some senses if there was no evidence at all that there was any discrepancy in what women thought was best for themselves what was best for other women then we would just say well this is the you know this is the female judgment of the trade-offs of the costs and benefits of staying in a relationship versus um yeah fair enough fine um and to some extent that's true except that of course if we're if we're talking about a game of sort of manipulative intersexual competition, which we are, then there will be winners of that game, which are the women we're talking about, the women who espouse these anti-natal, anti-relationship ideologies, values, whatever you want to call them, but don't embody them themselves. But there will also be the losers of this intersexual competition. And these are the women who effectively buy into these ideologies all in and both then espouse them but also embody them. So we would actually expect to see both because if nobody is actually falling for this stuff, that's right, if nobody is actually falling for it, then there's no payoff. Oh, that's so good. So there are winning things that are losers. I fucking love when the penny drops. You have just seen a 3,000-ton penny fall into my head. Okay, makes complete sense, right, that if every woman that was putting forward some anti-family creation, anti-reproductive stories, ideologies and norms, if all of them weren't adhering to them, that's just another level playing field. There's no competitive advantage between that. So there have to be, we could call them leaders and followers. Leaders and followers, winners and losers. in terms of thinking of it as a competition, that effectively there are people who are winning this competition and there are people who are losing this competition. And I guess the most extreme example, I think, of women who, in our world, of women who are losing this competition in a massive way, and it is a pretty extreme example, I'll grant you that, but more common than you might think, is women who are going out and in their very young and naive, you know, early 20s going out and getting themselves made sterile, getting their tubes tied or severed or whatever. That's how you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God, yes. No, that is a thing. It's not a massive thing, but, oh, no, that is, I promise you, that is absolutely, definitely a thing. You know, with this idea that they're now free, They can now have all the sex in the world they want and they don't have to worry about contraception failing. They'll never be tied down. They'll never have children. And what's interesting about this phenomenon is that, again, it's not just about them doing this to themselves. Clearly doing this has tremendous signaling value because once they go and do it, it then gets signaled. It then gets talked about and it gets celebrated and it gets shared upon social media. and all the other women come in and tell them how, you know, what a wonderful liberating decision they've made, especially women in their late 30s with three or four kids. Tell them what a wonderful liberating decision it is that they've made. No, this is definitely a thing. So I had a look at, I was looking up the stats on this for a research project I was sort of doing, a talk I was doing actually, based on a research project a couple of years ago. And the tubal ligation procedure is actually was sort of invented, if you will, because the fallopian tubes is the tissue that actually is responsible for ovarian cancer. And ovarian cancer, which you probably know is a pretty bad one, it's really hard to detect until it's late stage. And so it's not good. It's not good to get ovarian cancer. And so a lot of women, once they are post-reproductive and they've finished having kids, will just go and get their tubes taken out because that basically eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer. And so that's why the procedure exists. but of course once that procedure exists it now becomes a tool that that can be used and it is absolutely a thing um that women are going and getting this and so one statistic that is quite telling that i was able to locate is that depending on the the data set somewhere between 15 and 30 percent which is a lot of the women who have this procedure make inquiries about having it reversed so I'm guessing that none of the women who are post-reproductive age who took these tubes out because of ovarian cancer fears are amongst those looking to have it now reversed so we're talking about somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of women who have had this procedure now not all of those will have had it for some misguided form of permanent contraception but you know some of them some people may have had this procedure for ovarian cancer reasons when they were very young thinking they wouldn't want children and now really regret it. But there is certainly a substantial proportion of women who are having this procedure thinking that they're going to be very happy being permanently sterile their whole life, only discover at some point that they're not happy with that decision anymore. Wow. Wow, yeah. I mean, it really does put a different angle on articles like that Vogue one that went absolutely interstellar. It is having a boyfriend cringe now. yeah that's the one I was thinking of oh that was the one about the right wing I think so yeah it was cringe which I think is maybe equally toxic or maybe even more toxic than being right wing because at least if you're right wing the other right wing chicks might like you but if you're cringe no other chicks like you well have you seen the stats on political orientation there there are no right wing chicks we're going to get into that so I guess in other news this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. 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Just using that is having a boyfriend cringe now article, which almost everybody saw. Is it your suggestion that many of the proponents of that, perhaps even the author of that, is going to endorse but not follow that lifestyle? and because of that they are able to gain from the relative reproductive success compared with the ones that don't get into relationships that take this dating advice? I think that understanding the balance of who wins and who loses I think is really difficult because this is the thing. You know you've got that salesman. I always call it a Ponzi scheme and it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's got a different name. But you know that sales technique, that business model, where you kind of sell what's effectively some form of snake oil, right? You sell some sort of snake oil to somebody, but the people you sell it to, you convince them sufficiently well. Oh, it's an MLM, multi-level marketing. Thank you. Yeah, that's right. There we go. And so you convince them and they then become the sellers. So they're now selling snake oil, but they believe in the snake oil, right? So the same thing happens with these reproductively inhibiting, you know, memes, ideas, whatever you want to call them. Many of the people who are then promoting them have also embodied them and taken them on board and genuinely believe them. But from an evolutionary perspective, their contribution to the game has not finished. So even though they may be effectively, depending on how well they actually embody this particular ideology, potentially for their entire reproductive capacity and end up genuinely on zero, that doesn't mean they're done for. They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes, assuming that they have relatives of any kind. They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes by continuing to promote this reproductive suppressive ideology to other women. So they would be selected for to promote it and sell it and pass it on, irrespective really of whether they're a winner. someone who's not going to embody it or a loser someone who is i suppose someone yeah supports this stuff doesn't tell you says they support this stuff doesn't actually tell you which strategy they're adopting the winning strategy or that they've been manipulated and they're on the losing team yeah i suppose it makes for a much better smoke screen or um it makes your argument seem like it's coming from a much more philanthropic positive some place if you believe the ideology that you're espousing right like for instance i don't know whether you know alex cooper she does this podcast called call her daddy i've said some stuff about that i actually disagree with myself on in the past i think it must have been a very difficult world for her to be in where she started off doing this podcast talking a lot about casual sex and sleep with him and not catch feels etc like the classic 20s like young girl casual sex thing um and then she was having this kind of secret relationship behind the scenes and then one day kind of revealed that she was engaged and had this very big library of episodes but was like he proposed to me in a rose garden and it was beautiful and this is the ring and i'm now doing the family pivot thing uh i don't think that for a long time she would have been thinking anything other than i believe in this i believe in this like i she's not i don't think to see it and this is where i changed sort of what i said retrospectively i i don't think that she was going i'm going to encourage women to behave in this way it's just a pretty effective meme uh it sounds very positive some it's much more progressive and modern and contemporary and um sort of socially acceptable than the opposite which kind of sounds restrictive and bourgeois um like and then you get to the stage where oh i now need to embody this and my life is pulling me in a different direction and that's the point at which it becomes really interesting because you say i said all of this stuff in the past do i now still agree with me previously do i wish that i'd said something different was i too militant with the way that i was saying that stuff so all of that together i thought was was pretty interesting but one other angle to this i suppose that isn't necessarily dating advice for heterosexual relationships but i wonder if the broad elite female support for LGBT or sort of non-typical relationship preferences is also a type of fertility suppression because I guess having a boyfriend or a husband might be cringe but I bet that having a girlfriend or a wife wouldn't be cringe. Correct I agree 100% so I've I have spoken a little bit before how I think that the not just the the sort of LGBTQ movement but the you know broadly which I think it is but also the transgenderism as well is also the reason why I think that I mean the data on this I think reasonably well known that it is almost by and large exclusively women who are really strongly in favour of gender ideology and the pushes of gender ideology which is why it has taken hold in industries and workplaces and whatever that are dominated by women and I think that too is because it has very clear reproductive suppressive implications. It was really interesting what you were saying about that podcast if I can go back to that for just a second because that also raises a really interesting dichotomy and that, yeah, an interesting contrast and that is because that for the vast majority of women it would not be adaptive to reproduce when you become biologically able to reproduce. So there is this sort of tension in the sort of human mating system that is created by the fact that women become biologically able to get pregnant long before it's actually adaptive necessarily for them to do so under most circumstances. There are circumstances where it would be adaptive. But under most circumstances, it's not adaptive to do that. And so women do definitely have a stage of life where it actually makes sense for them to engage in, you know, self-reproductive suppression and to be discouraging themselves. And obviously, that used to manifest. That's interesting. Yeah, that used to manifest in encouraging, you know, young girls not to have sex effectively. But now it's sort of manifesting quite different ways. And so we've actually got a situation where there is sort of already built into the system, there is this period of sexual maturity in which it's actually adaptive for women to, you know, even though they are capable of reproducing, it would actually be, you know, in terms of their long-term lifetime reproductive success, it would under most circumstances for most women be maladaptive to get pregnant during that time period. And so it's not, therefore, to me, looking at things through an intersectoral competition lens. It's completely unsurprising that that is the time period that, you know, feminism and women's lib has targeted as encouraging women to really, really heavily engage in risky sexual behavior. Because that is the one time period in which you don't actually want to get pregnant. And so we then see these same women's lib feminist type talking heads when it comes to talking about sex within marriage. And all of a sudden, that's unpaid labor and emotional labor. And that's oppressive. And, you know, husbands have no right to demand sex off their wives. And yet when you're in your early 20s and unmarried, sleeping with, you know, every single man that gets within three feet of you, apparently that's some form of liberation. it's an interesting dichotomy the other really interesting thing that it raises that's also worth thinking about is that there is actually always a tension when you want to signal something manipulatively the best way to signal it is to do it or to look like you're doing it or to appear like you're doing it and of course the most effective way to appear like you're doing it is to actually do it so any kind of manipulative signal in some sense is potentially costly to the signaller because they need to do this to themselves to some extent in order to convince their rivals to do it to themselves to a greater extent. And so there is this dangerous, very dangerous sort of cost-benefit payoff matrix that women have to navigate when they're engaging in this type of manipulative signalling. And some manipulative signallers might just really, really get that cost-benefit calculation very wrong and simply just engage in the manipulative behaviour that the costly signal to a much greater extent than they can tolerate and, you know, effectively score a massive own goal. Give me an example of how that might manifest. So going back to the example of women who were getting themselves sterilised in their early 20s and then shouting all over it on social media and there was one instance in particular, I remember of a girl who got her tubes set into resin so she could wear them around her neck as a necklace so that she could tell everybody she met that they were her fellow kids. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Poor girl. Anyway, but, but I imagine that is, you know, that is potentially, that is clearly a case of a woman who has now lost the intersection for competition. I mean, that is just a massive iron goal right there. That's just, it's finished. It's over. But, um, I imagine that the tendency to behave in these types of ways and to do these grand social gestures of, oh, yes, I'm never going to have children. Children are terrible. That's not the life path that you should choose. It's not the life path I've chosen. The selective pressure on women to be highly intersexually competitive women, to be compelled to engage in these kinds of grand gestures would potentially lead them to do things like get themselves... themselves right they overshoot exactly they're massively overshoot because the mechanisms have not evolved to deal with every individual instance of signaling behavior you know opportunity that might present itself and so what could be engaged in you know motivated by mechanisms that involved to effectively promote manipulative signaling might actually do the self a lot of harm because Those mechanisms are not sensitive to their own outcomes. Okay. So we've got manipulated losers and we've got people who basically, you know, beat themselves in the game. Yeah. There's two types of losers. So you said it's a massive own goal. Again, I think it's worth restating that what you mean when you say own goal is in terms of the currency that evolution cares about. Correct. Because if you take contemporary culture, people might say, what does it matter that she's got her tubes tied? She can have as much sex as she wants. She doesn't need to worry about childcare. She doesn't need to worry about a nanny. She can work and she can go out and she's never going to get pregnant. Like that sounds like liberation. It sounds like liberation. I mean, I would argue that it's not. And I'm not the only person who argues that it's not. I mean, I think Louise Perry has done a pretty good job of mounting the argument that women who engage in that type of behaviour are typically not actually very happy. In fact, they're quite miserable. And fast forwarding to much later points in life, because this has now been going on for long enough, that we do have cohorts of women who are beyond the end of their reproductive years and who are now realising that they've seriously missed a really important vote and are miserable and depressed and unhappy, having, you know, sort of realised where these types of life choices lead you. And so, yeah, I'm speaking in terms of the, you know, the evolutionary consequences of these decisions, and that is a, reproductively speaking, obviously an own goal. but it's not that that is just some esoteric, you know, evolutionary calculation. These decisions have real-life impacts on women as well, which we are now, I mean, really, I think should have predicted they weren't going to be a net positive. But now we are seeing that they are absolutely not a net positive. So these are absolutely having, you know, real-life individual proximate impacts on the women who take these decisions as well, but they generally don't seem to be good ones. It is a fascinating duality to hear that casual sex is a form of sexual female liberation, but sex with your husband is unpaid labor or it's oppressive or subjugative or whatever. It is really interesting, the duality of these things. I have a question. Regardless of whether or not it would be evolutionarily useful from a resource perspective to try and do, do reproductive suppression strategies work against men? That's an excellent question. So I think there's a two-part answer, and the first part is generally no because of the reasons we've already described. So in the limited circumstance where you, as a man, you are looking to actually get the partner of arrival, so you're looking to, like, mate poach. Yeah, then, you know, harming another man's, you know, potential reproductive output, you know, and doing things to him might help you if it helps destroy that, you know, sabotaging his relationship the way women sabotage each other's relationship, that might help you. But again, the reason you're doing that is not really because you care about his reproductive success. It's because you've decided you want his partner for whatever reason. So, you know, for the reasons we talked about before, the fact that other men can pick up the slack, the fact that there's very little men can do within themselves to actually move the dial on the population's background's reproductive rate just means that the payoff matrix isn't there. However, there's a second part, I think, to that answer. And that is if we fast forward a little bit or maybe, better way, zoom out a little bit. And instead of thinking at the moment, we've sort of thought and spoken mostly about this being kind of, an individual on individual interaction or many on one or one on many. But once you reach the stage of reproductive suppression that I argue that we're at, so I know that you're aware that the birth rate is well below replacement level and is declining. And my argument is that in itself is because of manipulative reproductive suppression, that that is in fact the ultimate explanation for what we're seeing. And I think that once you actually reach that point, then you perhaps do get to see a benefit to men of engaging in their own type of manipulative reproductive suppression. Your weapon is now sufficiently powerful that you're able to do it at a broad enough scale that this might actually work. But how would that – we wouldn't have an evolved mechanism. We wouldn't have anything in our programming as men to be able to understand that. Surely we can't adapt to a novel situation that quickly. That's a really good point. And that's why my argument is that this is not a novel situation. This is actually what we're experiencing now with birth rate decline and the rise of feminist ideals and the feminization of the institutions. All of this is part of a repeated pattern that we see in civilisation after civilisation after civilisation. This is not a unique idiosyncratic issue that has appeared in the West as a function of the particular social and technological forces that we sort of find ourselves living with. This is actually, this is the human mating system. It goes through these cycles. And so actually, yes, we have been here before and there has been selection pressure operating and this is actually the system. This is not a bug. This is the system operating as intended. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look and feel good when you're in the gym. 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So certainly declining birth rates are part of the sort of suite of things that have been sort of pointed to as things that we see in civilizations that are declining and degrading and reaching their end point. same as, you know, we see, like, you know, the price of sex going down and art becoming vulgar and we see marriage rates declining, we see birth rates declining. So Rome, towards its very end, a little bit earlier than its very end, but it had, you know, many policies in place that sort of what we're sort of calling a baby bonus to try to motivate women to get married and to have children because the fertility rate was declining so severely. and what happened in Rome and I would hazard a guess it's a similar thing that's happening now is the birth rate declined sharply primarily because the women were choosing to be liberated and to be free and to not be married and to not be mothers and to have careers and everything else and that left a relatively small number of women having a relatively small number of children which meant that those women were able to have sort of their pick of men. And so reproductive success amongst men, especially to some extent amongst women as well, but especially amongst men, became restricted to the very elite of men. And the rest of men just basically got kicked out. All right, okay. So women, that cultural adjustment, which was anti-family, anti-coupling, anti-mating, affected women more than it affected men. many men wanted to mate but fewer women did and that basically skewed the sex ratio so that women had more power but also so that the high as happens with the tall girl problem the high status men also relative get more power than they would have done okay so reproductive suppression may work against men we're not quite sure how ingrained that mechanism would be evolutionarily so comparatively it's easier to influence women in this regard why is it the case then that women haven't developed a defense mechanism to this like why would you leave the keyhole in there if that vulnerability we already know what is it uh f to m is like five times as many transitions as m to f uh the rogd rapid onset gender dysphoria thing um women eating disorder social contagions as well yeah the social contagion thing is there especially during puberty right i'm looking around i'm scanning my environment i'm vigilant for what's cool what's hot what's not i need to make sure that i'm on trend why would human evolution not patch that bug so that females wouldn't be susceptible to this because surely that would be the ultimate game like i i'm just a reproduction machine and you can't limit you can't suppress my fertility no matter what you tell me because the because it's not a bug it's a feature and this this is the this is the problem so it's uh it's a bug for the for the women who lose but the women who lose it's not their genes that get passed on for the women who win who are engaging in this behavior it's a feature because it promotes their reproductive success and so the genes perpetuate the fact that there are losers yeah yeah yeah i i told you right yeah would that not suggest then that we are the progeny of the women who are the less or the least susceptible to these sorts of things given that they are the genes of the ones who didn't necessarily embody even if they maybe did endorse? Yes, potentially. But the other part of the sort of system that makes this make sense is that human civilizations have got like this cycle. And so we only are able to see this type of female manipulative reproductive suppression that we see now under certain circumstances. And those circumstances include affluence and safety. And so when you've got societies that are not very affluent and not very safe, then the payoff matrix isn't there. Women are investing all of the resources that they have and all of the resources that they get to accrue into their own reproduction and into their own offspring. It's once you get to a point where we have the affluence of organized society that women have an opportunity to be able to accrue more resources than what they just need to pour in. you get like a law of diminishing returns. The resources that the elite women are effectively able to accrue, it's no longer adaptive to just keep pouring all of those into their own individual reproductive success. It now becomes more and more adaptive to start pouring this time, effort and energy into manipulative reproductive suppression of rivals. And the more affluent and the safer the society gets, the more the scales tip in that way. So because this is not an adaptive strategy under all circumstances, it doesn't reach fixation, if you like. So what you sort of end up with is, well, according to my theory, I should probably be careful to preface that because much of what I'm saying is not the sort of thing that you would be finding other people reaching any kind of consensus on. I think most people understand that's pretty far out stuff. But according to the way I see it, the winners of this game effectively enter a sort of genetic bottleneck. So as fertility rates drop and the fertility rates are well below replacement, then the size of the mating pool is actually much, the effective population size is much smaller than the actual population size. So it may not necessarily look like a genetic bottleneck because we're not actually necessarily seeing a massive population crash. But when large numbers of the population, large numbers of women in the population are not reproducing, and that does appear to be what's happening. So I think there might be modest falls amongst women who have children. I think there might be sort of modest falls in the number of children they're having. But I think that's largely being maintained. what's causing or what's sort of accounting for the large fall in birth rates is the massive increase in the number of women having no children. So what we're seeing is large numbers of women actually withdrawing themselves. If you have one, the likelihood is you have 2.5, but the number, the proportion of women who don't have one at all, that is the big cohort that's contributing to birth rate decline. Yeah, exactly. Is it possible to have these sorts of conversations publicly without getting heat. Yes, it is almost impossible to have these types of conversations. And I think the sole explanation, I would say, for me not yet having sort of really encountered any serious blowback is just lack of exposure. And you're right, that may well change. Good luck after this. So be it. That's fine. That's fine. You know, my life's been boring up until now. Why not have some fun? But no, you can't. And I think one of the reasons, I think one of the main reasons why, well, according to my theory, one of the main reasons why we can't have this particular conversation about birth rate declines, motherhood and reproduction, you know, maybe other aspects of intersexual competition speak to more women directly and they can empathise with it and they can understand it. But once you start talking about birth rate decline and you start talking about women having children in particular, you're getting, you're really just cutting straight through to the heart of the issue. Everything else is just peripheral, right? Everything else is just in service of birth rate decline. All the other aspects of female intersexual competition, they're just ultimately in service of birth rate decline, right? So, you know, giving women poor relationship advice, that's so that they will have either poor relationships or no relationships, which greatly reduces the likelihood of them reproducing or at least reproducing successfully. Because, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're aware that the stats are pretty clear on the costs of fatherlessness to children, right? The outcomes are just systematically substantially worse across the board for fatherless children. And so if you can encourage women to, you know, to engage in behaviours that result in them being single mothers, that's not quite as good as resulting in them being not mothers at all, but it's pretty good. It's a pretty good way to damage their ultimate reproductive success. So, you know, we talk about all the other issues and, you know, sometimes we can have a little bit of fun with it. People had a lot of fun with that haircut study that I did where, you know, women will advise other women to cut off more hair. and they focus this kind of most strongly towards women that are perceived to be as attractive as they are, so like they're direct rivals on the mating market. And we can have a little bit of fun with these types of conversations and I can have a little bit of fun with feminists sometimes about certain things. But once you get down to talking about birth rates and children and motherhood, now you're getting to the heart of the issue and that's not fun anymore. Now you're a serious threat to the ultimate reason for the strategy and it gets women very angry. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. I've been wearing Whoop for over five years now, way before they were a partner on the show. I've actually tracked over 1,600 days of my life with it, according to the app, which is insane. 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That's join.whoop.com slash modern wisdom. What is your perspective on women being encouraged to enter the workplace by other women? How that plays into your perspective here? So, yeah, so I think that is, I mean, I think that, you know, that talk by her and then the essay she wrote, she's done a couple of podcasts. I mean, I think that was fantastic. So she's, I mean, she's like almost 100% correct in most everything that she says, all of the observations that she makes about workplaces, what she says happens when women reach sort of a critical mass, you know, and it's not, I mean, I think at some point she was sort of, she did, I think, emphasise, if I remember correctly, that the points in time where these workplaces became more than 50% female and that you pointed that as the tipping point. And we have a small point of difference there. I think that you don't need women to be at 50% in workplaces to get the ball rolling, to see these changes begin to emerge. Women don't need to be at those. The mechanisms by which women use to make these changes in the workplace are not democratic and so they don't need a democratic majority to do it. I think the critical mass of women is actually substantially lower and their ability to manipulate both their male and female colleagues allows these types of things to happen well before you actually get to the 50%. So that's a small point of difference. But everything that she was saying, other than that, I think about what's happening in these workplaces and the fact that it's because of the proportion of women in them, I think is absolutely 100% bang on. and I think it's fantastic that she got so much traction that she was able to effectively start a conversation on something, which I think people had been either unwilling or unable to really get a conversation started on. And I think maybe the fact that she was a woman coming out saying that. Oh, God, if a man had written that article, it would have been absolute death. But, I mean, look, you're a woman who is professionally accomplished. is it not a good thing for women to be able to get into the workplace to be able to have their own careers be financially independent have a life all of that depends what you mean by good depends what you mean by good so you know if we sort of think about so if we sort of think about human societies from first principles for a moment in order for societies to grow and stay healthy they need to to reproduce well in order to exist they need to reproduce at least replacement um ideally they need to grow, right? Growth is great for prosperity, which means they need to reproduce at above replacement. Now, depending on the cost of reproduction, you know, in a society like ours, you know, individual people are able to accrue the resources needed for successful reproduction quite easily. And in societies gone past, you know, reproductive success was relatively much more expensive. And all that excess wealth is one of the reasons why we have this massive manipulative reproductive suppression. So if you're in a society where you need to maintain an investment in reproduction that will ensure that the reproductive rate stays at above replacement levels in order to continue prosperity and the women in your population who are the ones who basically are the limiters on your reproductive output decide to invest a certain amount of time and effort and energy in non-reproductive activities such that it becomes impossible for your society to reproduce at the levels required to maintain prosperity is that a good thing or a bad thing it's the end of it is the end of the society the society simply cannot sustain itself but no individual yeah no individual is going to think i'm going to not do the thing that seems exciting and independence enabling to me in order for me to serve, it feels almost like some kind of social reproductive conscription that you're asking me to do where I don't get to do this thing because the world's civilization needs me to be a birthing machine. So feminism has certainly done a really stellar job of making sure that that's the way people think. And, you know, props to it. But forgetting about the imposition on individual people for a moment, because we could say exactly the same thing. In fact, I think we could say much more about what's needed about the male commitment to keep a civilisation profiting, right? I mean, you think that it might be bad news for women that they need to have children and families in order for civilisation to prosper. Well, what do men need to do in order for civilisation to prosper? They need to work themselves to the bone, frequently die, get sent off to war, like if civilization is going to prosper, men have got a pretty raw deal. So it's not as though, you know, we're talking about it's all fun and games for men and women have to carry some sort of burden. So if we're able to put that bit aside for a moment, even just answering the question of is it good or is it bad if a society moves in a direction that effectively dooms that society after a couple of generations, is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's not an easy question to answer. If your argument is that, well, it's better for the individuals who are in that society at the moment because they'll have a more fun life, it's worse for the continuation of the society. But if we're going to prioritise the individual, then maybe that's a good thing. It's a very individualistic society at the moment, right? I mean, that's an awful lot of the well-meaning and bad-meaning pushback that I get online is saying something along the lines of you're trying to remove agency, taking women out of the boardroom and putting them back into the kitchen, etc. It's very much – the language is almost exclusively framed around independence. Yeah, of course it is. And that's a very – it's a very effective way of framing it. It's probably a little bit of a different conversation, but the notion of individual freedom and decision-making around these things is also a little bit, is also just a little bit of a fallacy and a little bit quality. It's kind of the libertarian fantasy, right, that if you just let everybody do what they want, then everybody will do what they want and everybody will be happy, when in fact that the vast majority of people only know what to do based on what everybody else does anyway. So if you don't actually have, which we're sort of seeing now, when you abandon the kinds of sort of societal institutions that placed guardrails on what people should do and had to do, you just end up with people being really vulnerable to manipulation by others because actually the majority of people don't sort of make their own decisions about what they would want to do anyway. They go with the crowd and they follow the norm. But to get back to your question about, you know, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing to have women generally in the workplace? And, you know, it depends on what you mean by good or bad. If you mean good or bad for the society, well, then there's definitely, I mean, it's definitely bad for the society if the inevitable result of it is that it's terminal. I think we can argue that that's definitely bad at the level of the society. So then we have to move down to the level. So let's move down. We don't have to, but let's say now we move down to the level of the individual and say, well, is it good or is it bad for the individual? And so, well, have a look at the state of women at the moment. Massive mental health crisis. Not generally not happy. Ending up childless, partnerless. So we're not, you know, and we sort of spoke about this earlier in this discussion as well, that, you know, the end results of these strategies for women, you know, I think sensible people I think would have predicted that they may not have been very positive, but we're now seeing, you know, that the happiest women are the women who are married and have children and the least happy women are the women who are not married and don't have children. So once again, it depends on what you mean by good. What's the most robust data that you've seen around the comparative happiness levels between coupled women with kids and single women without kids? I couldn't answer off the top of my head. I would have to go and look it up. My understanding of it is that it is pretty robust and it's been out there for a while. It's not just one recent study or anything. It's kind of multiple studies out for long periods of time. It's pretty well understood that in terms of life satisfaction, self-reported well-being self-reported mental health problems like it's not just one dv either it's multiple dvs are all pointing to married women with children being happier than single women who are not mothers the the interesting thing that i and maybe it was just because of the cohort of people that were commenting on this little storm in a teacup what i was surprised by was in the same way as you have pro-life and pro-choice you should still have pro-motherhood and kind of anti-motherhood or pro-natal and anti-natal um and i was just surprised at how few people stand up and say something to the extent of mothers are important and having kids is a good thing um that there's kind of a soft misogyny to saying that the the highest contribution that a woman can make is behaving or working like her father and having sex like her brother like it is a kind of soft misogyny um and i don't i don't think that that's necessarily seen as the call coming from inside of the house all the time okay so what are some of the more under-recognized methods of intrasexual competition that women engage in what are some of the the elements that people typically don't think about? So I think perhaps the least, I think probably one of the least well recognized because it's sort of framed as a man-hating thing, I would say is the whole kind of toxic masculinity little cottage industry that's appeared. So that's frequently, and not without good reason, is frequently framed as like an anti-male movement. It's the man-hating stream of feminism that wants to brand not just men as toxic, but boys as toxic. And I don't know what your experiences are and what you've seen, but certainly in Australia, and I believe the UK, there's lots of talk, and I think it's sort of actually happening now. They're introducing effectively pre-emptive education into schools for young boys so they can teach them not to be toxic. and these are, you know, exactly what you would imagine. And, you know, it made a little bit of a splash just the other week. There was a study that came out saying, you know, talking about how terrible it is that, you know, our young boys, young boys have just got all of these, you know, toxic attitudes. It was an Australian study. Young boys got all these toxic attitudes. And, of course, the attitudes were things like, you know, some women lie about, you know, sexual assault allegations. Like, that's not a toxic attitude. That just happens to be the truth. So, you know, we're sort of seeing this, you know, real branding of male toxicity, which is – and I'm not going to deny that that's having terrible effects on men. So, you know, I'm about to suggest that the men are actually the collateral damage of that whole little enterprise. And just because it's collateral doesn't mean it's not serious. This doesn't mean I'm minimizing the impact it's having on there. So explain to me how branding men and masculinity as toxic is female intrasexual competition. Because it destroys female mate choice preferences. It's what it's targeting. What the toxic brand is being attached to is every aspect of men that women should actually, that women, I won't say every single aspect of men because that obviously gets targeted at actually bad behaviour. But most of the regular, all of the regular masculine behaviours that this toxic label gets thrown at are exactly the type of masculine behaviours that women should actually be looking for in a high-value partner. And so it is skewing women's mate choice. Can you explain how that manifests or how that comes into land? Men who are socially dominant and socially aggressive make for excellent providers and for excellent protectors. But any kind of social dominance or aggression shown by men is being completely demonised and labelled toxic to the point where I was, I won't say who, but I was having a discussion the other day with a guy who was sort of explaining that one of the things that really upsets him the most about what he sees amongst kind of his peers, and he was American, What he sees amongst his peers is the lack of men policing each other's behavior anymore because from where he sits, his sort of impression of what's going on is that any kind of male aggression and male dominance has been deemed as so inappropriate and such terrible behavior by women or just by society at large that men don't even feel it's appropriate to be aggressive and dominant. dominant with other men who will be behaving badly. So he was sort of using the example of how, you know, there are men who would, you know, he was sort of saying that, you know, when he was a bit younger, you know, back in his day, you know, men who didn't treat women well or men who showed any kind of inappropriate interest in children would be, you know, taken out a back shed and be beaten to within an inch of their life and then they wouldn't do it anymore or at least would, you know, think really hard about doing it again. And he said that sort of stuff simply doesn't happen now because people are as concerned or even more concerned about demonising the behaviour of taking him round the back of the shed and beating him to the inch of his life than they are about demonising the behaviour that needed to be policed in the first place. And so what we're seeing is, you know, society, feminism, whatever you want to call it, having reshaped the positive aspects of male dominance and male strength and, you know, even what they've decided to label benevolent sexism, which just because they've caught it benevolent, they don't see it as good, which is basically all of the etiquette around gender role interactions that happen to favour women. They still decide that sexism that is inherently bad for women, but even the benevolent sexism, all of that stuff has been demonised and been sort of, you know, labelled sort of, you know, no longer socially acceptable. And so men can no longer behave in the kinds of ways that they used to behave in order to be able to demonstrate their quality as a prospective mate to women. And so men are responding by actually engaging in sort of what, you know, what you might call beta behaviour just to demonstrate that they're not a strong masculine man. And women are being taught to reject men, you know, they're taught to recognise signs of masculinity and mate quality as red flags to be avoided. and I think that if women are influencing men to be more docile and women are being taught to get into relationships with men who are more docile and less aggressive how is this not just a changing of the mating landscape and the preferences moving over time how does this suppress anything it seems to be a set of instructions being given out and a set of preferences being adjusted because I don't think that we're because we're not necessarily seeing it's not as though the women who would have paired up with the high quality men who were able to signal all of those signals of strength and dominance because they're costly signals, right? They're real signals. The signals of effectively harmlessness don't differentiate between mate quality because you don't actually have to have anything or do anything or be anything. In order to be physically dominant and socially dominant and be able to be aggressive, you have to be big, you have to be strong, you have to have good leadership, you have to be competent. You don't need anything to not be competent, to not be strong, to not have good leadership and to not have social dominance. And so it's not that it's sort of one set of reliable, costly signals now just having to be singled a different way. It's obliterating all of the male ways and sort of de-socializing all of the male ways of advertising their own mate quality. And it's leaving men with ways of advertising their own mate quality that are not reliable indicators of mate quality, which makes it very difficult for women to actually choose quality mates. And any reliable indicators of mate quality that do manage to bleed through are being systematically de-preferenced by women rather than being preferenced. Okay, so it's, let me see if I've got this right. You're suggesting that women are saying these sorts of traits, typically masculine, dominant, prestige, go-getter traits, are things that men shouldn't engage in and that women shouldn't like. But the problem is that women aren't as capable at getting themselves to not like those things, or more specifically, to like the reverse of those things. That's right. And so women might make these explicit sort of, you know, mate choice decisions where, you know they might be encouraged by their friends or whatever to sort of you know go out with this guy even though they not especially attracted to him or to not go out with that guy even though they might be attracted to him and therefore they end up in relationships where the relationships are either not compatible, they don't work very well, they don't last very long and they don't end up becoming long-term stable relationships in which you can raise families because the other thing that sort of happens, if women make, I think this happens to a reasonable extent to men as well, but more so with women. Women are by far the sex that terminates relationships more commonly. If women pair up with someone who they then later decide is not sort of of their mate quality, the relationship doesn't work and they're not satisfied and they do attempt to trade up, at least in those early stages before it's complicated by having children and things like that. And so if you can convince women to perpetually date men that her brain is going to tell her, no, this is not the person that you should be reproducing with, then she's going to find it very difficult to end up actually having a nice, profitable, stable, long-term relationship that will work. I think what would be interesting would be to look at the women who are proposing, whatever you want to call them, cinnamon roll husband, golden retriever husband approach. um look at their husbands look at their husbands yeah exactly like who is it who is it that you're marrying who is it that the women are ultimately getting with and you know part of this you could see is well it's people don't know what they want and they're i thought i was right in the past i thought that the the casual sex thing the sleep with them and not catch feels thing i thought that was right then but it's not right now i think when you do see that it it does show some women may reach like realization escape velocity to get out of that mindset and into the one that they end up in but other women may just cycle through a series of medium-term relationships with guys who are not a type that they want to keep going because they've seen this meme and they've committed to it and they think that that's the way so yeah i can see how it's difficult right because i mean one of the biggest insights that I learned when thinking about me too was that blanket advice doesn't land on people evenly so when you say to guys don't be pushy the guys who really could have done with a little bit more gumption and less approach anxiety will take that to heart while the guys that were blowing through boundaries all along don't think that it's meant for them in any case and that's right exactly if you're going to blow through boundaries then putting up an extra boundary is not going to change your behavior if you're the type of person who doesn't blow through boundaries well as you say putting up a boundary just pushes you even further back yeah going back to the benevolent sexism thing did you see there was a video i think it might have been a cctv video of a girl in vietnam she was traveling and she got her bag tried to be taken off by a guy with a knife it looked like there were two travelers a man and a woman young maybe 20 something like that this video was maybe a month ago a month and a half ago and he hides yes he hides but he hides behind the pillar yeah yeah yeah yeah so i thought that was that was really fascinating looking at the response from that in particular um because so many of the responses were this guy's not worth your time of day men are trash girl just leave him this is what's either the current generation of men and trying to square that circle with dominance in men benevolent sexism sort of a patriarchal classically masculine protectionist belief about women being delicate and special and needing men to use their increased robustness and resilience to be able to wall them off from the world in one headline it says that that's oppressive and in another headline it says that it's a marker of like modern men not being up to standards well yeah it feels like talking out of both sides of your mouth it is and that this is why men can't win right this is there So this is why I think many men are almost sort of self, just deciding to just self-remove from the mating market entirely because they've seen the writing on the wall and, you know, they understand. In some cases perhaps misunderstand and they're perhaps overestimating the risk, but I don't know. I think the risks are real and it's hard to know what weight men should put on those. But, you know, it's really difficult because there's very little that men can do that they're not going to be criticised for, right? If you go and approach a woman, you know, then you're, in some cases, you know, you're sort of automatically being demanding and sexist and presumptuous. Like I'm not sure if you remember. I remember because they went up around my university, that little fad where they started putting up pictures of, you know, various women's faces with statements underneath and supposedly being things that, you know, men needed to hear from women. And one of them was, you know, I don't owe you polite conversation. So, you know, the very idea that a man, you know, expecting that if he goes and talks to a woman, she might at least be polite, even that was a sexist presumption, right? Like, there is very little that men can actually do that is not going to lead to them being potentially criticized and sometimes quite seriously by one or other branch of, you know, the talking heads, the progressive collective progressive talking heads, you know, from various feminist angles. And so it has become incredibly difficult for men. And then, you know, they do have genuine fears about, you know, I think, you know, I don't want to sort of necessarily sort of speak on behalf of men because I suspect I don't really know. Feel free to. Yeah. Speaking for the male community. Speaking for the male community. Sure, let me just go right off. No, I think that there is a very real fear of false accusations of sexual harassment or sexual assault. And I think that that is probably in a really confusing way for a lot of young men is probably blended with, you know, sort of coupled with genuine fears of maybe actually accidentally committing a sexual offence or sexual assault. And it's really difficult to tell those two things apart, I think, especially for a lot of young, inexperienced men. And so they're scared of the false accusation, but they're also scared of the, you know, accidental commission of an offence, which is a crazy position for young men to be in. um but you know on that is it a crazy position for men to be in there are certainly times where guys can be fumbling around and coercive emotionally manipulative in a way that doesn't cross anything close to a legal boundary or even something that's ethical but it's there's a bit of gamesmanship she said no so he took his arm out from underneath her stopped cuddling her and turned over on the other side of the bed and said well if we're not going to do it i'm going to go to sleep like is that like what's that because that's a an effective strategy of kind of the retreating uh the removal of emotional comfort and physical touch because you didn't want to do that thing but i did like is that and you know we just create this entire spectrum i think yeah as a perfect example this was probably five years ago or six years ago now i was out in london with a friend who was 20 21 and there was a group of girls up by the bar and i said we should go and talk to them i'm bored of you uh we should go and talk to the girls by the bar and he looked at me like suggested that we go and kill them put them in a bag and bury them in a pond it was like you're kidding like no they they look they look nice there's three of them there's two of us i'm sure we can take them like we should go we should go and talk to them and uh he was like i have been told under no circumstances to ever approach a woman in public and that was it blew my mind because i'm 37 and when i was at university we didn't even have iphones so that was a very different sort of mating environment it's the only way it's the only way you could do it exactly yeah yeah so i look i get it on the the challenges of guys sort of balancing this this new world that they're entering into and the fact that they decide to check out as opposed to potentially do something I think it's a great point to say that guys not wanting to accidentally do something that they would later regret, the hypersensitivity to the and less forgiveness to the sort of innate bumbly white chaotic world of young people mating if you're 20 and you're trying to work out like you've both had a drink what like is should we i we've met before like it's all it's the devil really is in the details with these things and as you try and navigate through all of this if you basically make the fear setting higher uh guys as my friend i've been told under no circumstances ever go up to a woman in in public like that's a you know it's a real thing so yeah i it does make it difficult it makes it a difficult environment for for men to navigate and then unfortunately i don't i don't think that women's preferences have updated themselves to be the ones that want to come up and talk to guys uh no of course not i think 86 percent of women say that they want to make want a man to make the first move. Yeah, yeah. And this is why sort of one of the reasons why I'm sort of really convinced that this sort of attack on male masculinity, dominance, whatever you want to call it, this attack on being a man, it's been so effective in disrupting that, you know, human courtship behavior. It's been really, really effective. Women are not, you know, for the most part, are not going to initiate these relationships and or these interactions i should say um and so if you can stop men from initiating them then that goes a long way towards stopping them from a long way towards stopping them from happening and does that not mean that does that not mean that you as the proponent of this idea would be on the receiving end of it too that doesn't seem like a particularly good thing like you're also curtailing the men that would come up and approach you yeah so so this is a so no that's a that's a really good question and it's good because it gives me a chance to sort of explain a sort of important principle that kind of wraps around all of this so what's happening with all of these things that the devaluation of motherhood the devaluation of marriage the demonization of of men that would actually make excellent husbands and fathers the you know the the valorisation of careers for women and all the rest of it. One thing that was the end result of all of these sort of individual things that are happening is that they're feeding into creating an environment that is really hostile to reproductive success. So we just have an environment in which the rules that we've sort of, you know, the social etiquettes and the rules that we've sort of developed and built over time and over generations have all of a sudden just been thrown out. So now that the guardrails have gone and those rules of etiquette, they were really important because people understood what you were and weren't allowed to do and people understood that you could do this and you couldn't do that. And we sort of had a way that two people who didn't really know each other could navigate a potentially romantic interaction with some certainty and some guidance and that's been chucked out the window. So we've got an environment now, a social environment that is incredibly hostile to reproduction. And yes, that impacts everybody negatively. But all of these things will always impact those who generally have lower reproductive potential more. So if you are, from a reproductive perspective, an elite, if you are, let's just say as a woman, if you are highly attractive, you can do a crazy thing like decide to get a little pixie crew cut, which for most women would massively decrease their attractiveness. you can probably do that and start setting that as a fashion trend. And, yeah, it's going to decrease your attractiveness a little bit, but you're still going to be pretty hot. It's going to be much worse for all the less attractive women who are now copying this trendy pixie cut. And that same principle applies across the board to all of these things. So, yeah, it hurts everybody, but the people who can, the people who have the most reproductive potential because they have the highest mate quality and they're the most fertile and they already have, you know, they're already in a position in society which gives them social access to the best men, you know, those women are hurt the least. And so they are the ones who are pushing and setting all of these trends. So if you imagine that, like, you sort of think we've got this kind of linear scale and the odds of reproductive success are, you know, those that have the highest odds, the highest likelihood of the most reproductive success are at the top, and you can line everyone up right down to those people that have really low prospect of reproductive success. The more hostile you make the environment, the higher you lift the bar along that linear scale to a point where people are not having any reproductive success, which is exactly what we're seeing. More and more people are just not able to navigate their life to lead to reproductive success in this really antenatal environment that they find themselves in. whether it's because they devalued finding a mate when they were at their peak mate quality and it should have been the easiest, whether it's because they delayed having children when they were at their peak fertility and that would have been the easiest, whether it's because they made bad mate choice decisions, bad life choices, ended up investing a lot in their career thinking that they would somehow magically find a partner and be able to have a family between the ages of 38 and 39 and then that didn't happen. We have a social environment that is very hostile to reproduction and therefore the only people in there who are able to reproduce are the ones that have the most reproductive capacity to begin with by virtue of a whole bunch of factors that contribute to that. So yes, it hurts everybody, but the ones who benefit are the relatively small number of those who survive it and successfully reproduce and they benefit because large numbers of their competitors simply can't reproduce in such a hostile environment. So that's your line from the very beginning saying that running the race results in everybody moving more slowly. Yes, exactly. The female race slows everybody down, but someone still wins. And it doesn't matter that the whole reproductive output has dropped for the fact that they still continue to win this individually-based race. The genes aren't smart enough to realise that if there is no future civilisation, your progeny have a bad future. we've evolved under circumstances where that hasn't been an issue therefore if you relatively have more kids than the next woman that's good for you when you start to scale this across an entire civilization what ends up happening is it's good for you but over time this is going to become very bad for everybody including you yep that yes you're correct but with one with one caveat though I always get something wrong. It's okay. No, no, no. You didn't get anything wrong. You're correct so far, but except that here's the kicker, right? So you would be correct if the end point of this was actually that it's just bad for everybody because you're right. Evolution is not teleological and it cannot see the consequences. If an individual population finds itself in a local maxima, some sort of local adaptive thing it will be selected for to stay there even if the inevitable outcome of of that trait or that behavior is that the entire species goes extinct you know evolution has no mechanism for protecting against that so you would be right if the end point of this manipulative reproductive suppression was in fact just the end of all of these lineages but it's not and this is where it gets perhaps even well i think i think gets even more interesting so this is what i so what what happens at the end of When civilizations crash and fall, you don't actually see an end to those genetic lineages. What you see is those genetic lineages, some of them, a small number of them, those who are there at the end, actually becoming the founder population or a part of the founder population of what rises. So you can sort of think of it as almost like this really kind of dire game of musical chairs. Now, if you can sense that the musical chairs play and each round, you know, someone doesn't get a chair and a lineage drops out. You know, each round, somebody doesn't reproduce and a lineage drops out. If you can sense that the end is near, then you actually want the end to come before you end up being the one that doesn't find a chair in one of the rounds. So once female behaviour reaches this really intense reproductive suppression stage and we start seeing all of the social signs that this is happening, like a massive drop in the price of sex, increased casual sex, vulgarity, decreasing marriage, decreasing birth rates and a whole bunch of other social factors that all point to this being the stage of society where we're at. they all act as cues to sort of intensify this behaviour as everybody vies for a chair at the end. Everybody wants to be one of the lineages left standing because what's the genetic prize if you are one of the lineages left standing is that you get to be part, if you're a woman, you will get to be, because when you get invaded, it's the women who survive and reproduce, it's not the men, you get to be part of the founder population of a new society that will go through a large expansion phase. So you may have started off, your lineages may have said, like, you know, lineages are not this separate, but for sake of argument, your lineage may be, you know, one of 10,000 in the population at the start of this game. But if you're, you know, one of just 50 lineages that are left and you become that as part of the founder population, then your representation in the population went from one in 10,000 to one in 50. And this is why it's the winners that just become, the winners of this game become the founder population. And so it is in the interests of these winners to maintain genetic capacity for there to be losers so that they can win in the end, if that makes sense. It's a little bit like a kin selection strategy. Yeah, as the competition gets more fierce, you behave more fiercely because the gains relative are going to be greater because there are fewer people to compete with. So in some ways... And you want the game to end too. Once it gets down to a relatively small birth rate, you want the game to end. You want the society to collapse and the next society to come in and start growing. You don't want your lineages to fall out two or three rounds from now because the game went on for two or three rounds longer. You begin to want it to end. And that's what we're seeing. I'm sorry, I'm getting a little bit off topic, but jumping back to Helen Andrews' great feminisation, I think that greater representation of women in society's institution as opposed to pouring their efforts into society's reproduction is an inevitable result of this female interseptial competition and manipulative reproductive suppression. And then an inevitable result of that is the gutting and the decline and the eventual collapse of these institutions. And so these things follow on necessarily from each other. And this is where I think this is the bit that I think Helen doesn't get quite right. She attributes, as do many other people, I'm not sort of trying to single her out here, but she attributes female behaviour in the workplace to these misplaced motherhood motives. And I've got a few kind of theoretical problems with that. To me, I don't think it looks like motherhood behaviour, and I don't think that that argument sort of works especially well once you sort of scratch the surface of it. But I think an argument that does work very well is if we think that what women are actually selected for to do in these institutions is to actually completely flatten the meritocracy and to deprioritize productivity, because that's actually what explains female behavior in these institutions. And that I think is part of women realizing that the game of musical chairs is nearly at the end and they want to hasten the end before they end up finding themselves in a losing round. that's what I think is happening in the great feminization of the institutions. It is actually the systematic dismantling of those institutions. Right. So Helen's perspective is that this is a quite pro-social or at least pro-child maternal instinct that's being applied to the workplace erroneously. Your perspective is that it's much less pro-social than that. It's actually highly competitive. it's inter-sexual competition and this is happening almost as designed as opposed to a misfiring exactly right i think i mean so a big central sort of part of what i'm proposing is that what we're seeing now across the board is not is not a misfire it's not it's it's not something going wrong this is actually how human societies play out this is actually what happens again and again and again and so it can't be a misfire again and again again this is how the system operates and so what i've tried to do is come up with an explanation that actually explains why it operates in this way and who actually would win such a genetic race in such a way that this kind of system could then perpetuate cycle after cycle i suppose one perspective is um the the environmental mismatch is so great that a effective strategy is being applied erroneously and yours is that the mismatch is still great but the system is sufficiently adaptive and and uh able to adjust that it's still performing kind of as intended even under novel circumstances. Exactly. And look, I will sort of say that I am much less amenable, I think, than perhaps a lot of people to the basic idea of this evolutionary mismatch, this idea, the idea that we have changed the world so much that it now somehow is just, you know, it is somehow no longer adapted to us or us to it. And so we just see all of this, you know, we just see all these things happening that that can't really be sensibly accounted for because we've just got a human, you know, a human system operating in an environment where, you know, it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It's just weird things, you know, unselected for maladaptive things just happen. I'm not especially amenable to that basic principle because everything about the world that we live in can be sort of, you know, can be sort of seen and considered as the human extended phenotype. The world did not just grow up spontaneously around us, completely independent of our own biology and psychology and behavior. This is the world that we created. And so, yes, it has changed quite quickly, but it's changed in ways that our own evolved psychology and evolved biology decided to change it and responded to certain things. And so I'm much less, you know, I think the types of things that, you know, took off, that became popular, that became part of how we live versus those things that didn't itself was very strongly influenced by our evolved biology and psychology. so I'm just much less amenable to this idea that we can safely assume that there's just this massive mismatch and that allows us to write off a whole bunch of human behavior is just oh that's just because we've got smartphones now and that's just because we've got the internet that's just because we've got the pill and that's just because just because just because um I don't you know I've never really seen that as a very profitable way and I think one of the main problems with that type of thinking is it just makes it too easy to write off anything that you can't sort of explain as part of an adaptive, you know, functioning complex system as, oh, yeah, but that's just because the world is weird. You know, I much prefer an argument where you at least try to not give anything that you see a free pass to not require an explanation for what's going on there. You've got to at least try to see. And I think if you do try to apply explanations, you actually find a lot of coherence in what has previously been dismissed as, oh, you know, this is this new evolutionary thing we've got. And so now people behave like this. But, you know, there's no function to that behavior. There's no other explanation behind it. It's just because the world is different now. I'm not really amenable to that approach at all. So I don't really have a lot of sympathy. I think they're kind of, you know, people who are trying to understand behavior, dealing themselves get out of jail free cards. Yeah. Well, we'll see how much sympathy the Internet has for the things that we've talked about today. If my recent track record is anything to go by, I already don't have a fucking career. Dr. Danny Solikowski, ladies and gentlemen. Danny, you're fascinating. I really appreciate you explaining this stuff. there's a lot of conflicting narratives at the moment and someone who's spent so much time thinking about this is really cool to get some time to dig into where should people go to check out all of the stuff that you do? Follow me on Twitter so Dr Danny S and anything else I do always gets put up there so if you just go there and you just follow me then you get to see everything that there is to see Heck yeah, Danny, I appreciate you, thank you Brilliant, thanks very much when i first started doing personal growth i really wanted to read the best books the most impactful ones the most entertaining ones the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting but there wasn't a list of them so i scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own and then i made a list of 100 of the best books that i've ever found and you can get that for free right now so if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention just trying to get through a single page go to chriswillx.com slash books to get my list completely free of 100 books you should read before you die that's chriswillx.com slash books