The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable - #1133

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(upbeat music) - According to a study by Northumbria University, the dancers women found most attractive were ones who moved their head neck and torso the most while also mixing up their moves creatively and showing more variation in rhythm. To test this, researchers use motion capture technology on 30 male dancers turn their movements into computer avatars and the best dancers were the ones who used their whole body naturally instead of awkwardly repeating the same almond-like movements. - Looks like they're dancing to me. (laughing) - Well, Asian people have got natural rhythm. Rob, so imagine that's how you dance. - What I was noticing is he's keeping his elbows close to the body so it looks like he's like taking a femoral out from him. - He might be a trained boxer. - Which could be you as well. - That could be you as well. - I didn't know the guy who did this study. Funnily enough, I was just at H.B.S. with him. He's my friend, Ismail. And one thing that he was actually talking about was that the dance is quite feminine and this mirrors something that you sometimes see in facial attracting this research where the initial assumption is like, oh, masculinity is just gonna be amazing as much masculinity as possible. But then in some areas with some traits, femininity is favored. And I think it seems like dancing in-- - Dancing, femininity would be favored. - Well, what would a masculine dance look like? - That's a question. - That's a question. - Throwing yourself around in a mosh pit is that particularly sexy? - Shadowboxing. - Shadowboxing. - Shadowboxing. - Shadowboxing. - Yeah. - There's two things that British guys do that I think must give women the "ick" more than anything else. One is shadowboxing on the way to a night out. And the other one is football chance in the queue of a nightclub. Like doing football chance as you walk down the street, I think is just the most vaginally repulsive thing that you can do. But second, don't need a shadowboxing. - Why shadowboxing? What is it about shadowboxing that would give them the-- - Well, it's this-- - I share that intuition, but what is it about? What I think is, it's guys posturing how hard they are. Look at how formidable and aggressive I would be. If only it wasn't air that I would fight. - There's no opponents. - Yeah. - I think that it ruins the positive illusion that they actually could win a fight. It's like-- - It's the shadowboxing. - They're even losing the shadowboxing time. - Yeah, exactly, exactly. - They're like this. - How many punches do you have to throw at this invisible person? (laughing) - Does the looks maxing give women the "ick"? - Rob, I think it does. I'd be curious to hear Mackin's thoughts, Steve, as well, on this, which is the clavicular, the looks maxing influencer. He became very popular through propagating this idea of looks maxing, bone smashing, optimizing. He told the New York Times that he is now sterile because he's injected himself with so many chemicals. Presumably, he thinks it's worth it, though. I recently wrote a piece suggesting that this gives women the "ick" and that people mistakenly think that clavicular is attracting women because he revamped his physical appearance. I actually think that most of that attention he's receiving from women is due to the fame. He got famous through promoting looks maxing, and people mistakenly think it's the looks and not the fame that draw the women to him. For an ordinary man, like the clavicular fan, who's doing all of the same looks maxing protocol, the bone smashing, the ejection. - The name's the fame. - The, the, the, (laughing) just clavily bone smashing. - He recently, I think, got a nose job. I saw something going around an accident. And an ordinary guy doing all of that stuff, optimizing for appearance, I think most women would find that kind of guy very vain, very self-centered. Someone who is maybe uninterested in a relationship and is more just interested in themselves. And so maybe it works for a clavicular because it made him famous, but for the average guy, I think that amount of looks maxing would be counterproductive. What do you think it signals? - I mean, I would say that it signals narcissism, vanity, maybe sort of short-term oriented, mating orientation, kind of you're more interested in being immediately attractive to someone rather than someone who you would be interested in forming a long-term bond with. - Yeah, and some of this is a bit weird as well, right? The bone smashing, that kind of thing is just odd. - Yeah, well, I saw this clip recently. He was, clavicle was in this interaction with this girl at this bar in New York, and she was telling her how reading is a total waste of time. I don't read, that's ridiculous, that's absurd. And I couldn't help but comment at how shocking is it that the guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer is interfancy. (laughing) - Sometimes people surprise you. - Yeah, that's funny. It actually, it's funny that you say that because on the main forum, looksmax.org, it actually, if I'm not mistaken, it used to say, first rule of looks maxing, don't talk about looks maxing. - Right. - Which reflects a open understanding like, never say that you're doing any of this stuff. Like looking good helps but being transparent about the things that you're doing to look good probably won't improve your life. - It's the reason for that though, so I'm, you know, I'm looks maxing but I don't tell you about it, is that because what, like to bypass all of the, what the prejudice is involved there, like I don't want you to think on the vein, I just want you to think that I'm naturally good looking, is that the natural beauty, is that an artificial beauty? - Yeah, so I believe that that was part of it. Then a second facet was actually that they didn't want, I mean, a lot of the methods that they use are such as bone smashing, or do you mentioned are probably very dubious. But I think that part of it is that they wanted to protect it with the, honestly, a view that a lot of us might agree with, which is that the mating market is competitive, and so if everyone gets better looking, it may be the equivalent of everyone's, like kind of running faster, but stangies. - But they were worried that other guys would learn the exploit. - Yeah, basically, yeah, it's like, if other guys figure out that wearing makeup makes you more attractive, then everyone's gonna do what they're doing. - They'll do what they're doing. - They'll do what they're doing, but then there's just a hassle on it. - Yeah, exactly, and you've seen that, you've seen that already happen to women. I mean, women, this is something that I said on your podcast three or four years ago that women have been looks maxing for decades and decades and decades. This is before it came in as a real trend. And that's kind of what's happened, right? Is that all women are wearing makeup and now, or almost all of them are, and now if you skip that part of your routine, it almost comes across, and it shouldn't, it's unfortunate, but it almost comes across as unprofessional in a workspace. I mean, it's just this extra burden of-- - The invocation is being raised to what it's presentable is. - Yeah, exactly. So if all men start doing the same thing, then yeah, I would say that the minimum bar probably. I think that intuition, even if some of the methods that they're coveting and protecting are ineffective, I think that the intuition about competitiveness and how it works is probably correct, you know? - So we should just shouldn't talk about it. - Yeah, exactly, yeah. - The thing that I wondered is whether or not it's to protect the costliness or the reliability of the signal, that if you find out that the only reason that this guy is good looking is not because of what you might intuit is the ultimate reason of got good genes, strong immune system, sort of a natural sense and way of him, but it's too contrived. You actually think, "Well, what am I dating?" I think this is the same thing. There is a kind of it that women had, where if they learned a guy was doing real social dynamics or reading the game by Neil Strauss and doing pickup artists for you. Even if you'd said I went away to a sex train, an intimacy training, sex training course weekend thing, that was all professional and not creepy, but that means that when you go and do something in bed, it's not because of your sort of natural proclivities, it's because you've crafted and curated it. We're happy for people to learn to become better at playing the piano. We're less happy at people learning to become better at being themselves. In a way, does that make sense? - Yeah, well, with beauty, we're not. And with beauty, there's actually some evidence for this in women already. I'm not aware of any study that's been done on this in men, but Zia and colleagues in China, they actually tested, so it was makeup and plastic surgery that they tested on real women's faces, and they had men assess their attractiveness, their dateability, et cetera. And what they found was that these methods worked to make them more attractive, but when men were informed, meaning once men knew like, oh, this woman looks better, but she's had plastic surgery, they had a reduced dateability effect. So it was an increase that was attenuated. So the attractiveness boost was still present, like they were still considered more dateable. - Okay. - That effect was attenuated when you were aware of the effort that it got in. - What was the net? - The net was still that there was a benefit. And you could see in these faces that the attractiveness difference, I can send you the study, the attractiveness differences in their example were large, but it was an attenuated effect where it's like, oh, if they know, if they detect it, then they're less interested. And it may be because of what attractiveness evolved for, where it's like it's meant to be this health signal, youth signal, et cetera, but if we have this cognitive knowledge of like, oh, this isn't a real youth signal, right? This is a woman with facelift that may change the valence slightly, But I'd be interested in Steve's thoughts. - Yeah, so I mean, I completely buy that that effect is real, but I'm not sure if that's an evolved tendency to, 'cause the evolved tendency, it's just a gut level reaction to cues of health and fertility. I would argue, rather than a tendency to think that that person's healthy and has good qualities that I would want to mix my genes with to create offspring. And so finding out that it is not a real signal. I'm not sure if that would, like I say, I think that would, does have the effect of reducing attractiveness judgments, but I'm not sure if that we've evolved for that to be the case. - Do you think we might have like a general kind of cheater detection thing where it's like, oh, this person is, it's not like a cheater detection refers to a specific phenomenon that's different, of course, but in terms of just general, just general, what do you think would drive the effect of false beauty being a slightly less preferred compared to natural beauty? - I think it could be that. I think it probably is something more general like that. It's a general tendency to be wary of deception. I guess, yeah. - I mean, I'm intrigued by this finding that it was attenuated, but still overall in that benefit. And I think this suggests, at least to me, and I'm curious what Steve thinks about this, is that we evolved to respond more so to signals than to the underlying property. So I'm imagining a sort of a variation of the study you described where you see someone who's very plain looking, and for whatever reason, as it can drive scenario, but they used to be very hot, and then they got some surgery, and now they're unattractive. And you have a choice between sleeping with this, artificially unattractive person who's naturally hot, or a person who is artificially hot, but naturally is unattractive. Who do you choose? I think most people, especially the most man, I think, would choose the artificially hot one, because we respond more so to the signals than the underlying sort of trait that it's meant to communicate. - Yeah, that's a lot of level. I have a lot of level. I think it's so as well, actually. And I'm thinking maybe it's not deception, exactly the produces the attractiveness, but maybe the inferences that we make about the personality of the person. - Well, the non-season insecurity, exactly. - Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking from memory about the study, but I actually think that's precisely right. I'll check it after and send it to you over WhatsApp, but if I'm not mistaken, it actually was, that there was a negative personality inference, and that that was part of the story. So it was like, yeah, they're more attractive, but now I'm not as impressed by their personality. - So under this condition. - And they might be just as impressed by the looks, but we don't judge people just on looks. And so the looks elevated, the personality takes it down. - And that's the characteristic of the study. - It was of a dateability, it was either a dateability or it may have been overall personality perception, but it was some variable in that mix, for sure. - I mean, it's probably worth saying that a lot of this stuff is going to be either subconscious, or sort of like parry subconscious, to sort of thing that you ensue it. You don't really know why, it gave me the ick. Right, what the ick is is a kind of nebulous, ephemeral, really hard to grasp onto. I'm not so sure about that thing, but that might actually be pretty evil. You know what would be great? An evolutionary theory of X would be wonderful. - I've got a PhD student who's working on it right now. - No fucking way, dude. I don't fuck with me on evolutionary psychology, dude. I'm on the fucking frontier. - There was a guy, I don't know if he was the same one, but he was presenting a poster at HBAS on the evolutionary psychology of the ick. So it's something that people are interested in. - It's up and coming, yeah. - There's been a couple of publications on it already. - So it's my student, Louisa Lee, there's no publications when she started, and then one has come out that, you know, she got scooped, we got scooped basically, but yeah, she's doing some good work. - Well, what is the evolutionary psychology view? - She's trying to explain in terms of a made choice, she's predicting that because women on average choose the women are more prone to the ick, which is, I don't think anyone would disagree with that intuition, and we've now got good evidence that that's the case. Yeah, and she's looking at in terms of evolved disgust reactions. - That's interesting. - Yeah, it is interesting, right? And still looking at it in terms of. - Behavioral immune system. - Yeah, behavioral immune system and evolved disgust reactions and response to sexual stimuli to sort of stuff that's gross associated with disease and the life, and moral disgust as well. - I was gonna say that maybe something in that women are more adept at reading social cues, which means that if a guy does something which is socially ungainly, he might be able to breeze through it or his friends might be able to breeze through it, or if a woman was to do it, it's the partner of a guy, he might not notice it, whereas if she's able to pay more attention more closely to how people are responding, understanding that sort of social hierarchy a bit more. So it's fascinating, and yeah, there's lots of things that you could do, being unhygienic, being unhealthy, being rude, but the funny things are, a guy trying to pick up a moving ping pong ball. But why is that an egg? Or why is a guy who misses a turn in a car, it doesn't drive dexterously? Why is that a particular, like stuff that's a bit more lifestyling and certainly more. Yeah, more modern novel. I mean, Diana Fleischmann said this before. She's very, very, attuned to her husband, Jeffrey's sort of social status in his level of competence. And if he misses a turn when driving, she literally feels her attraction to him go down for a little while, and then it comes back up. If he says a joke that doesn't land at a dinner table, she's like actively unattracted to him for a little while. And then comes, I have some psychopathic tendencies. I'm aware of that. And then blew through, just kept on going. I can't see that going the other direction as much I can't see. Oh, my miss is missing a turn in the car. I'm sorry, darling. I can't have sex with you this evening. I could never, the way that you would press the indicator, I could never, I mean, we placed more value on look. So would it be something like, you know, seeing, you know, if you're spouse, you know, gain some weight or maybe first thing in the morning, what's a little dish-evil? There's something along those lines that. Maybe, but the men and just men is so much less choosier. Yeah, even in long-term relationships. I think that that gets offset. I think that gets out the right. Yeah, I think that the, it's a reflection. This sex difference in the equit, which Steve says is now, you know, backed by good data. And it is also something that everyone knows anecdotally. I think we reflect different risk levels between men and women, where for men, the biggest risk is, and this is something that a lot of evolutionary psychologists talk about. Biggest risk is that you miss a mating opportunity. Whereas for women, the biggest risk is that you mate with the wrong person. And so it's more important to have like this visceral response, where it's like, oh, you know, that last thing just pushed me over the threshold. And you're now selected out, like I do not want to. Multi-surning. Yeah, exactly. What's the, speaking of the sort of current world of. Luxemaxing, guys trying to rise to the top of the level as much as they can. What's the myth of the Chad? Well, so I wrote this piece, The Myth of the Chad. And I think it dropped it in the, the, the group chat, which is, for a long time, we've heard this story. I think you and I talked about this on a previous podcast, Chris. Because it made some level of intuitive sense that as the dating marketplaces become more deregulated, people can meet each other. The idea of a deregulated mating. We live in sexual capital. Late sexual capitalism. And so now you have, you know, with dating apps, online dating, people can meet each other more easily. We are, you know, supposedly placing more value on looks as a result of social media and dating apps and so on. So the story was, and we saw some statistical trends that supported this notion, at least initially, that a small percentage of men were getting the majority of female attention. And that men are sort of on the lower end of mate value were getting increasingly less female interest. And so the story was, what was it? Like 20% of men are getting 80% of the attention. There was some truth to that, at least with regard to sort of match rates and swipe rates on Tinder and so on. But if you look at the actual data, you dig into it and, you know, more statistics and findings have come out since you and I've had those discussions a few years ago. Suggest that actually that story isn't completely true. That in fact, this has been going on for a long time. That very attractive men have always had the opportunity to mate with more women. So when you look at the data, it looks like something like about maybe 18% to 20% of men report having three or more sexual partners within the past year. And that really hasn't changed since about the year 2000, which is as far back as I could find data on this. And so you might think, okay, well, that's there you go. You got the chats. The 20% of men are getting three or more partners a year. Those are the guys hogging all the women. But then when you look at the sexual behavior of women, you find essentially the same pattern, which is that something like 12 to 18% of women also report three or more sexual partners a year. And what this means is that the vast majority of men and the vast majority of women have relatively unexciting sexual lives. The most common response to the question of how many partners have you had in the past 12 months is one followed by zero. So most sex is going on in relationships, followed by people not having sex at all. And then a small fraction of men and a small fraction of women who are high in sociosexual orientation, very promiscuous and open to short term mating. They're having a lot of sex with each other. - At least partly attractive as well, presumably. - Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure you're physically attractive. And what I suggest is that because dating apps have made this sort of frictionless and because social media has created this kind of panoptic on where men in particular, where you got sort of the pick up artist and red pill guys who claim to be very successful with women bragging about how many women they've hooked up with. And then you have the insults. cells on the other side of this, who are not bragging, but I guess whining and complaining about how little sex they're having, this gives the impression that, oh, wow, you got one segment of guys who are having all of the sex, and then you have this other section of guys who are having none of the sex, and then women are just passive bystanders who are maybe getting, you know, duped by the pickup artists or the chads or something, but what this suggests actually is that, you know, there is a kind of a chad, but the myth of the chad is that, yeah, that, oh, one segment of guys are having all of the sex with all of the women, and it's not the case that there are, you know, there are femme cells, there are women in relationships, there are women who are just uninterested in dating, and any kind of see the mere image of this for men as well, that, you know, weirdly, this suggests that men and women are more alike than many think, which is maybe a point to your book. It's one of the key ideas in my book, yeah. And I think that, you know, the average number of sexual partners that men have, if you exclude sex workers in life, is somewhat higher, but do things a very important point, that, yeah, among the guys who are having sex with lots of women, generally having sex with the women who are having sex with lots of guys. And, yeah, the sociosexual few, right? So, the pre-mistuous 10% is the kind of meme version of it, but I actually, so I think that tons of people at home and in the YouTube comment section are like, I 100% think it's interesting and take for granted that what you're saying is true. But what do you think the myth actually originates from and what do you think explains the, because it's not, it's not just necessarily the myth of the chat, it's also the illusion of the chat, where it's like people have this profound felt sense that they're being excluded from the mating market, where some other, you know, some gorgeous guys are having tons of fun. Well, I think a part of it is the trend of dating apps. So, you know, the swipe rates are very easy to measure. There's been a lot of research on this, and we mistakenly kind of overinterpret the findings of what people see on Tinder or on Hinge, which do show, you know, on Tinder, it's something like a 4% of the men get the vast majority of the swipes. And then much smaller numbers, or rather a larger number of women get liked versus men. Same thing on Hinge, that the top 10% of male users on Hinge gets 60% of the likes. And so it's very easy to come away from that thinking like, oh, that's reality. That's 10% of the guys are getting 60% of the female attention. There was that other finding about male attractiveness, you guys have probably seen this. That's kind of, it's a little outdated, but it also kind of makes sense in a way that people would come away from that thinking like, oh, most women are only attracted to that small section of fragmented guys and, you know, men are much more even and kind of fair in their assessment of women. And then I think social media as well that you're seeing guys like they take these very anomalous interactions where women suddenly lose interest in them or ghosts them or something. And they tell this, you know, elaborate story. And it's very attention grabbing. And then those stories go viral. But the reason they go viral is because they're anomalous and atypical normal stories of, hey, like I've met this girl and we really liked each other. And now we're engaged. We're getting there. You post that. You'll get, you know, 17 likes, but you post, you know, I had this one like stand with this girl, but then she goes to be or like I, you know, she was leading me on on the app, but then she grew up, but then she didn't talk to me anymore. And you tell those stories like, oh, it's over boys or whatever. Like those are the stories that go viral. And then the other point I want to make about this is that, you know, this, this promiscuous 10% this on the side of the women, that is a highly sought after group. And, you know, there is, you know, a small fraction of women who are more promiscuous than other women. And the very attractive men have access to that group. And the unattractive men who see this, they get jealous and they want access to that small group of women as well. But they mistakenly think that that's all women that all realizing there's a huge cohort of women that have had zero or one pot. Yeah, it's sort of this, you know, this availability bias thing of like, well, I'm seeing all of this step happening online, all of the chatter about sex and chads and whatever, but you're not seeing this dark matter of women who aren't posting, who aren't on the app, like, living their lives dark matter. Yeah. I've learned from over a thousand podcast episodes that the easier you make your health routine, the more consistent you'll be. It's like golf, right? You want to keep it simple and not mix a bunch of pills. You want the eye of the tiger, not the DUI of the tiger. That's why I'm such a huge fan of AG1. One scoop contains 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food source ingredients in a single daily drink. And now they've taken it a step further with AG1 next gen, back by four clinical trials. 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But if there's some degree of big bucket of attention going towards small number of guys, historically, does that mean that monogamous marriage was basically affirmative action for men? So there was a recent paper about this where they suggested that marriage was affirmative action for sexual redistribution, sexual redistribution of women. They also used the phrase DEI for men that by definition, most guys are not in the top 10% or top 20%. And so monogamous marriage was a way to sort of pair men up with women one-on-one and it was a form of, sometimes tongue-in-cheek call, it's sexual communism, sexual social justice for the deregulation of the the beginning marriage in place. And now that we've, you know, we've kind of let the sexual capitalism is now we're in, yeah, we went through a, I think maybe arguably starting in the 1960s, we deregulated things and now we're in the sort of the late state. And I think now people on, well, for a while, on the right, the kind of, I don't know, the manosphere right have been calling for some kind of a return, return with that V thing. And then on the left increasingly, I think women are becoming fed up and they're sort of, you know, finding ways to, you know, reinvent, you know, what's that phrase, demisexual, through this phrase demisexual? I'm only going to sleep with people that I'm emotionally connected to. Yeah, I'm not going to have sex with a stranger, you know, it requires it's own. And then there's, yeah, very, very, very, sepio-sexual that's being attracted to people that you're intellectually simulated by. And then there's solo poly, solo poly, solo poly is my favorite. It's fucking hilarious. Solo poly is just one person sleeping around. Yeah, or, or like it just like a normal authority. I do. Manhore. Yeah, exactly. Just manhore about. But yeah, the, I wonder whether part of some of the pushback against reintroduce sexual norms, regulate the sort of mating marketplace from women that you do sometimes see online. I mean, it's pushing back against freedom, independence, it kind of harkens back to pre 1960s type of restrictive expectations, gender stereotypes, etc. But I wonder if another part of it is that there is this implicit understanding that it may be benefits men more than it benefits women to have marriage norms because it redistributes. It means that if it's going to be one to one, then maybe I'm going to be less able to compete. Whereas if there's a little bit more free flowingness in the casual sex marketplace, I may be able to show traits that aren't immediately obvious to a partner and be able to get somebody of a higher value. Because with guys, they're always going to struggle a little bit more because women are choosier. I'm not sure because I think if that were the case, then women wouldn't be so keen on the idea. And women often are very keen on the idea of having just one guy to themselves rather than having a guy who's going to have other women as well. I think that's why it was a puzzle to me about why it would be pushed back against to encourage mannogamous norms from women. Yeah. Given that the benefits at least traditionally, I'm trying to go through late stage everythingalism to work out where the culture has sort of come into line. Do you understand what I mean? I do. I do. Yeah. I've seen a paper arguing that polygamy actually can be beneficial to women because women can choose to marry a high status guy who's already got a wife and a high status rich kind of guy rather than having to either not see me be able to have a thousand totally. Yeah. Yeah. It takes away that choice if somebody wants it. And it means that the only choice is have no partner or have somebody further down the token pool. Yeah. I will highlight that this discussion is bordering on a really controversial debate in the evolutionary social sciences, which is whether humans are more like maximally constrained polygenists, where it's like we're naturally an animal where males mate with multiple females and accumulate wives, so to say. But cultural practices and cultural evolution has restrained us. And then the other perspective is that, you know, in as much as we like obviously humans have a menu of mating systems is a lot of evolutionary psychologists like to say. But in as much as we have a default state. it's pretty clearly monogamy. And you'll hear different evo social scientists from different backgrounds argue for very different cases. I personally, and I think in reading Steve's work, he's actually been quite influential to me in this, I personally think that the monogamy case is stronger for a few reasons that I could speak of. And one of them actually is just that what we've said in this conversation is like, yeah, in theory, we've deregulated the market. So it's like, look, if an attractive man, honestly, even if a kind of good looking man wants to just have infinite sexual partners, essentially, that is on the table for him, right? He can spend a lot of time doing that. But in the data, we're not really seeing people do that. Even though you're now as sexually permitted to do basically whatever you want with minimal judgment, most of what people do is still just do the boring thing and make an argument. I fall in love. I'm largely interested in one other person for at least for a while. Yeah, I agree. I agree with Matthews. Which you gave me, then I repeat them. Are we serial monogamous, though? I mean, I've seen some ethnographies, hunter-gatherers, where it's common to pair bond with one person, maybe have a child, maybe two children, and then the romantic feelings can dissipate and then form a new relationship. That is very common. That is. Very common. I've seen data as well. In those kind of societies, though, often like a small number, a small, but non-trivial number, five percent or so, our first marriages do last for life. So I think serial monogamy is probably more common. And I think we know that because most people fall in love more than once in their lifetimes. But it does sometimes happen. And we have a polygenous streak as well, I think. But yeah, so when the guardrails are off and there are no strict rules, you tend to find that most relationships are pair bonds and largely exclusive pair bonds. But you do also find that you have a small level of polygene and a small level of, and yeah, small level of full-life mating. But switching is more common. Can you jump up? GPT, how many people, how many romantic partners does the average person fall in love with across their lifespan? Because until you had reliable contraception, anybody that you fell in love with presumably you were having sex with, and outside of either infertility issues or fertility compatibility issues, pretty much all of those people eventually would get pregnant if it was more than, I don't know, a couple of years, something like that. The honeymoon period typically lasts for around about that long. So 85 percent fertility for a couple for one year, then it jumps up to in the 90s after two years. 2026 Kinsey Institute's study of over 10,000 US adults found the average number of passionate love experiences is 2.05. 14 percent reported never having been passionate in love, 28 percent reported being passionate in love once, 30 percent twice, 17 percent, three times, 11 percent, four or more times measured passionate love, the intense falling in love experience, not long-term attachment or commitment. Some people can fall deeply in love only once, others do multiple times, people are at all so experienced, renewed feelings of love within the same long-term relationship, which is harder to count. So about two times on average, throughout your life. So that would suggest, like if you don't have reliable contraception, if having sex leads to having babies, and if you're having sex when you're in love with somebody, you know, 11 percent of people just going through the machinate, forget culture, forget anything over the top, like those people would have cycled through multiple partners across their lifespan. But surely this is just the most unencumbered that you don't get to dictate your attachment system, unfortunately, as much as lots of people would want to not fall out of love with a partner that they're attached to or fall in love with a partner that they can or whatever. This seems to just suggest like that's what our system is doing. Most people, by a distance, only is it so 14 plus 28, so 42 percent, so only 42 percent of humans, less than half, have said that it's only happened once or not, that it hasn't happened twice or more. I think that's interesting because it aligns with the data I had mentioned about a number of sex partners as well, that most people say that in the past 12 months, they've had sex with one person or zero people, and that a small number of people, I don't know what the number exactly was, if they're three or more times, it was a small fragment of people who say that they've had sex or rather have sex have had three more sexual parts in the past year, but then also fallen in love three or more times in their lives. So I think this is like, we wouldn't see really monogamous. What's going on now? We tilt toward monogamy, but then maybe a small percentage of people are more polygenous or high-sose sexual orientation. Less or less. Yes, so I guess one thing, and this kind of discussion is to remember individual differences. Yes, yeah. Yeah, that humans aren't all the same. We have different mating strategies. Yeah. What's this new study that shows preference for resourceful partners softens when women are richer? Are you talking about the P&S paper that we did? Well, I mean, this is something that I could talk about for hours, so please tell me to shut up after 30 to 50 seconds if you can manage it, but basically 30 to 50 minutes. That's funny. Yeah, so there's been a long standing debate over the last, I would say, 37 years. I mean, it's been intense for 37 years, but it actually predates that event about the causes of sex differences in make preferences and a huge variable that people consider in this topic, probably be variable if you were going to pick just one is gender inequality. And if you're going to pick a second one, it's probably income. And bases gender inequality mean. Well, I'm glad you asked because it means different things depending on which social scientist you're talking to. So there have been so we know and anyone who listens to this podcast has heard a million times that men have a stronger make preference for looks on average, at least certainly in their state of make preferences and in some revealed measures as well. And then women have a stronger state of make preference for resources. And then obviously there's the sex difference in age preferences where men have a preference for youth and then and then women have a preference for slightly older than them throughout their lives. So you've got all those differences. And there's been this very long standing debate over the extent to which this is explainable with reference to social and economic factors and the extent to which it's explainable by evolutionary factors. So what we did, if you go through this debate, there's been tons of cross cultural studies. There's been there's been seven really, really big ones. And those have generally found that I mean five out of the seven have found something there with regards to make preferences for resources and gender inequality. All of the ones that checked age found that when gender inequality is lower, age make preferences and age gaps get smaller. And then the beauty basically doesn't move. In fact, there's even some evidence that it goes in the opposite direction and one of those analyses. So you've got this kind of mixed result there. And then you can look at the individual level studies as well where you look at when people have more money, what happens to their make preferences. And I could talk about that more. It's actually a bit controversial. So there's different ways of measuring this. But basically what it finds is that it does not move in the way that you would expect from the social role theory perspective where it's like, oh, when women have more money, they're going to start wanting young, gorgeous men, individual women who are rich. That doesn't seem to happen. However, there are some caveats there. So we did, we've got all this cross-sectional data. Basically, you're hearing about correlational study, correlational study, correlational study, until the cows come home. And we said, well, we're testing causal relationships. And we know what's happening correlationally. And there's been critiques both from the evolutionary psychologists and from the social role theorists about the correlational nature of these studies, depending on which ones they don't like, essentially. And so we said, okay, well, we'll do an experiment. And so we did a really complicated, unfortunately complicated complexity is not a virtue, but it's just necessary for this sort of study design. We did a 45-condition experiment that varied people's individual income and local gender economic inequality. And then we tried to see how those variables would predict changes and make preferences. So basically, participants were put inside of a virtual environment where their economics were different. Now, I'm sure the timer has probably gone for five minutes. I feel like I'm giving a massive speech here, but it is just a complicated background to review. And what we found was actually something that was slightly inconsistent with the evocyte perspective, slightly inconsistent with the social role perspective, and actually most consistent with a perspective that's been common in behavioral ecology for a very long time, which is that people will adjust their make preferences strategically based on what the environment incentivizes them to want. And what we found is that when people are poor, as individuals, they're poor, or as in the opposite sex rich and their sex is disenfranchised, they upregulate their make preferences for resources. So they wanted, they wanted, this is true in ranked preferences, in rated preferences, and also in hypergamous preferences. So desire to mate with someone who's richer than yourself. And this goes for both men and women. For both men and women, yes. Is the effect the less of a man than it is for women? The effect, it's really complicated, and it depends on which specific measure you're talking about. And so it depends. We could kind of go into detail in there. Our main analyses were testing the effects of the variables on both sexes. It's interesting. And we didn't find beauty preferences moved, which actually, it didn't wouldn't make sense to a social role theorist. It would make, but can you explain? As in. And social role theorists, they generally say, oh, the reason that mate preferences for beauty are different is because there are social and economic gender differences. But those experimentally, it doesn't really show up in the cross-cultural data to begin with, but also doesn't show up in the experiments. And then weirdly, the age differences didn't move. The age preferences, those didn't move. And I really expected them to, because the cross-cultural, we pre-registered that we thought that was going to happen, because that's what the cross-cultural literature showed. But it didn't, however, mate preferences for resources, which is really what you'd expect to move in this sort of experiment, because that's the strategic variable that's being adjusted. It makes a lot of sense. I think verbally, like I could talk about the modeling work, and I could talk about it in like a really obscure way. But at a very basic level, I find it very intuitive that it's like, if I was poor, and if women were rich, yeah, I would want to-- >>Get a cross-cultural, yeah. >>Yeah, I would want to date someone rich more than I currently do now. And vice versa, like we even saw this in our qualitative data where, you know, when women were in conditions where it's like, oh, you have a lot of money, and men are really poor, they're like, well, then I don't really need to do it for money that's fine. >>And just interesting. But do you think that that's an evolved tendency? I would kind of think that there's evolutionary push toward women being more interested in resources and status than men are. But they're also just, you just think about things, but reason was the best way for me to make a living in life while I'm poor. So I'm just going to reason about the fact that it would better for me to marry this person who's wealthy than to measure-- than to marry someone who's poor. If you see what I mean, so you could just-- >>Yeah, I mean, it has a rational thing, a reason to think rather than-- >>Just game theory. >>Yeah, so I take an evolutionary anthropological approach, my whole background is anthropology. And so it's slightly different from the evo-cycle approach where there's actually this maneuver that's used in evo-entharo work, which is called the phenotypic gambit, where you basically say, well, I don't really know what's happening inside the mind. The mind is a bit of a black box, but I'm interested in the inputs, and I'm interested in the outputs. So let me see what the inputs-- let me change the inputs and see if the outputs match what you would expect from a strategic perspective. So look, it could be the case that it was purely conscious strategic thinking, which is also an evolved trait, right? That's an evolved ability that we should use presumably in ways that help our fitness. Otherwise, it couldn't have evolved. If strategic thinking didn't improve fitness, it wouldn't evolve. But there happens some scholars like Gangastead in 2006 who have played with the idea that there might actually be a domain-specific evolved psychological module in the mind that is designed to essentially detect scarcity and change your resource preferences to some degree. I'm not sure if he focused on scarcity. He looked at a couple variables, but I do remember that he did posit this. So I'm open to the idea that there's some evolved resource scarcity detection thing, but I don't know, because the experiment didn't test that. Consider that the reason that the age didn't show up is that the single biggest predictor of wealth is age. And if you control for wealth, much of what is added by age gets taken away. That's exactly what we wrote in the paper. Dude, don't fucking test me, okay? I know this shit. I'm just point about resources. 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Right now, you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com/modernwizdom and using the code modernwizdom, check out that's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwizdom, modernwizdom, check out. Yeah, this is generally sort of controversial, but the idea of the evolutionary, adapted environments or the environment of evolutionary adaptation, it wasn't scarcity more or less the norm. And so this idea that we have involved module to detect scarcity versus abundance, I mean, everyone was roughly equally poor because in these communities, people shared just about everything. Yes, you had touted hunters, but generally my understanding is they shared their spoils. And it wasn't until, after the agricultural revolution, that we were able to stockpile large amounts of resources. Well, this is actually something that's controversial and anthropology because it's true that if you go off of modern hunter-gatherers, then you do get this impression that like, oh, scarcity is the norm. But all the good places became agricultural. So it's like, you look at there are animals where it's like they're in environments that they're very well adapted to, and they're not really struggling. And I would say that that had been around for long enough for us to have been able to develop modules that would be baked in to be adapted to. Well, again, I personally don't have an opinion on the module thing, so it's not something that I'm, it's not, it's actually not something that I think is true. It's just something that I'm kind of putting out there. Like, I'm genuinely open about mechanisms, I could hear any side of the story, but I do think that it's like, there are some, there is some interesting shape here. Like, for example, there's the studies that we've talked about before where when men are primed with scarcity, such as when they're hungry, or when they're acutely poor, or whether when there's a local famine, they shift to preferring larger women, right? And that seems to suggest that there may have been some fluctuations in how valuable larger women were that selected for some reason. Also, it suggests that there was fluctuations in how large women were. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes we spoke about this earlier on, there were times of surplus to the point where people could at least gain a little bit more body fat. Yeah, and there are very realistic depictions of obese people in prehistory. I know it's, I know it sounds surprising, but it's true. Dude, if you manage to be fat in prehistory, that is a real accomplishment. Yeah. Real accomplishment. Yeah, so I think that there probably were some, I think that there probably were some cases. I don't, you won't find it in modern hunter-gatherers because they've been pushed out by the agriculturalists to these places that are really difficult to live for the most part. That's so fucking interesting. Okay, so when we do studies of modern hunter-gatherers by design, they're not in the desirable locations. No, there are locations that have all been populated by modern people. So modern hunter-gatherers are in the scraps, the bottom of the barrel, from an ecological perspective, from a soil condition perspective, from how much wildlife they've got to hunt. So that's just not, whereas you could have the equivalent of a Galapagos valley type thing with no natural predators and an abundance of food and fresh running water, and even if you're not yet at the point of doing agricultural induced abundance, you're still so overwhelmed from just from a resource perspective, this fucking deer running everywhere and rabbits and berries. And there is paleoanthropological evidence of these massive kill sites where it's just light. You wouldn't believe how many animals they were killing. So it's like, it seems like they may have been doing okay in some cases. But I don't know, again, the module thing, it's tricky. Right. It's not something that I genuinely, not something that I've thought very deeply about. Sure. It's not an interest area for me. So what's the depth of rationale, though, if there's lots of abundance, you would want a more attractive, a more heavier woman. Oh, right. Well, that's separate from the, separate from the PNAS paper. The date, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the rationale there. Yeah, exactly. So the, so some people call it that, and others call it the insurance hypothesis. And there's some kind of disagreements as to what exactly is going on there. It's on scarcity, specifically. So in environments of scarcity, they prefer. Yeah. So you can say the other way around. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting. It's something that shows up with a lot of different study designs, which is pretty cool, right? Like you can do the cross-cultural anthropological stuff and see like, oh, yeah, among the South African Zulu, they're saying that up to, or in Jamaica, or in St.Kitts, they're saying that, you know, women who have BMI's in the thirties are quite beautiful. And then you go somewhere like really like affluent Singaporean women or something like that. They have different preferences. So more career or someplace. Then you see it experimentally where when men are hungrier, they have a preference for larger women. Yeah. And the idea is that it's like, well, what is fat? Fat is literally like a bank account filled with calories. And so if you're in an environment where it's, and also we know that when. Women are acutely starving, they become infertile, right? So it's not just like, oh, this person knows where food is and will be able to feed me and offspring and do provisioning and stuff. It's not just that. It's also like a practical thing of like, oh, if we're in a famine right now, these women can definitely get pregnant. These women definitely can't. Definitely can't. That's a good point. That's a good point. So what is it flip then in conditions of non-skeleton? Yeah, so this is what's so much more difficult to explain. And the leading hypothesis, I would say, for why thinness is preferred in abundance is because it's a very reliable signal to youth and null parity. Yeah. So it's one of those things. But isn't that the case in all societies? And isn't some degree of chubbiness assigned in all societies, regardless of then, abundance or scarcity that the person is going to be able to get pregnant? I'm just not sure why. I'm not really persuaded by that. The rationale for why it was switched, and also why it was switched so quickly. And you just get a little bit hungry in some of the preference of the switch. And then you eat some food and then they suddenly switch back. The switches are very small in those studies. So we're talking about that. a 10 pound difference. I believe the dining hall study, for example, which has been replicated, it is pretty cool, where it's men going into a dining hall versus coming out. It was a small shift. It wasn't like they were preferring completely different looking women, but the cross-cultural stuff where it's a really big difference in environment, then you're seeing genuinely different beauty standards. A lot of people say it's interesting how much Western male psychology often resists this. Like, I've had interviewers really push back on me like, you know, isn't this just that they're taking what they can get, like these men don't have options, and so they have to go with the bigger women. And I'm like, no, no, you're not understanding. It's not, it's not, they are, they are given a chart of body types and asked what's attractive, and it's to what degree. That's what they prefer. Yeah, true, that's all that's left. Yeah, that's which is the biggest thing, right? I wonder if it's that certain body types get linked with status in different cultures. And the culture is where there's not a lot of abundance to be able to get bigger indicates that you have good access to resources, it becomes associated with status, and it's the reverse and more abundance of science. On this point, total conjecture here, but in both environments, fatness or thinness could signal conscientiousness. So if you are in an environment of abundance and you're thin, that signals impulse control and the ability to, you know, withstand temptation, conscientious personality, and then an environment of scarcity. If you're big, that means you're conscientious because you went out and acquired the calories and you're a hard worker. That's really cool. Yeah, I like that. So the status, the status link is really interesting, what you're saying is really interesting, and it does fit with the cross-cultural beautification research as well, where what we see is that I would say broadly, this isn't based on one study, but many, you know, individual sites, essentially. So maybe you do like a true cross-cultural regression, and it doesn't come out. But it does seem, based on reading individual accounts, that in environments where food is abundant, the signal is like, oh, I'm going to increase movement and restrict calories. And then you go to some places where, you know, they have the fattening huts, for example, where it's like restrict movement and increase calories in order to try and be more driving. So this is something that's seen in some cultures where women before marriage will restrict their movement and increase their caloric intake in order to be out of a hut. I don't know if it's always literally the case, but yeah, there's actually even, I was reading one account, and I can't remember which, I think it was Mauritania, but I'm not sure, where it was them talking about how, and I really realized like, oh, this is a beauty preference, like this is real, because they were having to stop the men from spying on the women who were in the fattening huts, because they were coveting, they were coveting, so it was like, so it was like, they really wanted to see a supermodel beauty pageant going on. That's a scent, yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's not a dog eating contest. Yeah, so it's just a really, I imagine an actual supermodel contest as well, the same thing. Yeah, so I would say that the state, the state's thing is interesting. I have no doubt that there's, that there, that could be part of it. But when I look at the full range of evidence and include the hunger studies, it's like, well, the status benefits of thinness or fatness are the same going into the dining hall versus coming out and the mate preferences still shifting. I think there's probably some kind of mechanism there. I got, I got fucking ripped on the internet, until the guy realized that the clip had been cut both before and after what I meant, what I actually said, about saying, I think the ozemic is more pushed back against by people who are in shape than people who are out of shape because it derogates the signal of, I got here naturally, and there is a sense that that is somehow superior, that is somehow better. And that whole world of what does, when you can manipulate the smoothness of your skin using makeup or face tune or cosmetic surgery, when you can get limb lengthening surgery, or you can wear boots that have got heels on them, all of my friends, all of my friends wear cowboy boots because it's a two-inch height advantage whilst wearing a cool piece of footwear and in practice, you can get away with it. All of these different ways, it's arms race that's permanently going on, but what you need to do is actually scrutinize now, and maybe this is part of the reason that people are more hypervigilant, that there are more ways to cheat the system, to bypass what this signal is supposed to mean. Are you actually in good shape or are you on a lot of TRT? Do you actually have the ability to gain muscle or are you speed running that? Are you actually youth for kundity, nulliparity, or have you got reduction surgery and if you know what I mean? All of the different, I didn't really, I found this out a couple of weeks ago, I didn't realize that women's feet grow when they have kids, that women's feet get bigger, which is why there's a preference for smaller feet. Did you hear this from Warkostello? Yeah, is it true? Well, you always got the sex doll study as well. That's what brought his sex dolls have tiny feet, and it's like why would that be? It would mean like unusable feet. It's part of the super similar type of thing. Yeah, exactly, fish are running away, but in reverse. No foot at all. Going back to the inequality thing, what is the state of the gender pay gap in big cities now? Because I saw some data, been for a while, it was 29, that women were out earning men by about a thousand pounds. I think now it's up to 31, 32. Does anyone know this? Don't know these set numbers, but I do know that in a lot of cities it's reversed and that young women are only more than young men. Yeah, major metro areas in the US, so New York, DC, Boston, LA, in Seattle as well. I don't know the state of Austin, but it wouldn't surprise me if Austin showed the same pattern as well. For under 30s. Yeah, I think it's squeaking into the 31s, 32s now. That's what's going to be really interesting. Maybe you're right, and we've managed to preference for resourceful partners has reduced as women have gotten richer. There was some studies a little while ago, Vincent Harrinam put this one out in his paper from articles from six years ago that suggested that very high-powered career women had an increased preference for more high-powered men. So ambitious people design more ambitious partners, specifically women to men or the effect didn't reverse. But it seems that what you're suggesting here, maybe for the middle bit of the bell curve, perhaps when you get to the top 10% of hyper ambitious people, that somehow flips because they've warped so much of their sense of self-worth around ambition that inevitably it's going to bleed into what they find sexually attractive to, or the desirable in a partner, or maybe there's such an outlier that they breach some threshold of being able to talk to the normies about what they're going through. You know what I mean? All of these things, like an elite athlete would probably be good if their partner at least understands how the game with American football is played. Yeah, right. I think you can take the gender-economic inequality findings of ours to the bank, because they're consistent with the cross-cultural literature. The income finding is very interesting, but it's matched with the cross-sectional literature on individuals. I don't know what any of this means. Okay. So it is true that higher income women, so in our experiment, there was a broad, like they were less interested in mating up economically. So higher income women less interest in mating up, but it's true also that in the wild, higher income women tend to still have strong, make preferences to resource this. Yeah, so that's what you see in the real world is, like, high achieving, highly educated, high income women tend to marry men who are still doing at least as well as they are. So there's a couple caveats on that broad pattern. One thing that's interesting that comes from the social world theorists is that they say, well, richer women are qualitatively different from poorer women in that they are different in lots of ways. And so to say, oh, they're different in this way, it's not really controlled. That's part of the reason we did an experiment, by the way. But then also, richer women have stronger mate preferences in general, like in Koyoma's research, in Luz research, they want hotter guys too. And in fact, things going on there. Well, I mean, I think that literally said, like attractive women want it all, like that was the time. But rich women also want it all. And I think that part of it is that people who are good at getting stuff, probably are confident in their ability to get stuff, people who are, you know, high achieving. I think that it's very like my older sister is a successful banker. If she has a preference for a guy who's doing well economically, it's like, that's a very realistic preference. Whereas for a woman who's working at a gas station, that's a very unrealistic preference. And then also, when you look at the ratios of preference, as opposed to just the absolute preference, I do have to kind of tip my hat to the social role people a little bit on that where it's like, it does seem that even though richer women have a stronger mate preference for resources, they have a lower relative mate preference for resources in Luz data, for example. So it's like playing English. It's like, I want, so it's like, you talk to, I'll put it in a kind of imaginary example. It's like, you talk to a poor woman, exemplary poor woman. And she says, you know, I kind of want a rich guy. And I kind of want a hot guy. And then you talk to an exemplary rich woman and it's like I really want a rich guy and you say oh it doesn't match the thing but then they say but I really really want a hot guy and I also really want a guy who's going to take care of the kids and I also want a guy who shares my same political beliefs and it's like oh man so they just have higher standards across the board and as a relative preference it seems to decline also I would say that there's the that sounds like it increases not declines so it's increases absolutely but then maybe decreases relatively so it's like yeah so it's like if I they're they're they're they're maybe able to relax that preference relative relative to other preferences but not relative to that own level yeah exactly it doesn't drop away though it doesn't drop away I think they used to protect that it would that it's just there because women are poor there's a house that has guns that we need to hit yeah and we can portion this out however we want between the two different parties and as much as there's a winner yeah and as much as there's a winner on that bickering between the evosykes and the social psychologists the evosykes won that one because it was pretty clearly predicted like hey richer women are going to have a reduced make preference for resources and then they tested it in a bunch of different ways and it didn't what's but there is some caveats what's fascinating here is it's just people with high standards have high standards yeah the high standards that got them to be valedictorian the high standards that got them to get a high powered degree and then a good career and then to work at it to get promotion and to make it to see sweet or become partner and then when it came to choosing a partner they have high standard high standard high standards it's like just kind of like it's the sort of thing that your parents would understand they have high standards for themselves and their own for everything else then also for partners you see this with the research on perfectionism the perfectionists it comes in at least two broad buckets but maybe three I think actually the first one is perfectionism around your own behavior and your own standards but the other is perfectionism for the people around you's behavior and standards to this is one of the problems that perfectionists have built themselves into a more perfect life it's not one to one might actually be net negative but you have pushed yourself and reasonably to raise your standard of living and then as you become more of an outlier in terms of your perfectionism in your own life you look for more perfectionism from a higher baseline which is your new one in the people around you and that happens more on average from people that are perfectionists you might not believe me but this is what peak sleep optimization looks like I'm not talking about the nightgown it's just for sex appeal I'm talking about my eight sleep the eight sleep pod five comes 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checkout that's e i g h t sleep dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout another thing I'll say on that is that the there is also the caveat of the I mean I actually really would love to hear Steve's thoughts on revealed preferences data versus if we can if we can gently steer the conversation if I can ask the captain take a fucking left to steer that I've actually wanted to hear his opinion but there is the there is the there is a this is going to be terrible my head but there is the um revealed element where it's like if you look at women now today in a with this is from the Institute of Family Studies where they it's kind of it's a kind of a way of visualizing the data more than anything but they bucketed different income brackets yeah and in the top 20% of women like the top quintile uh they are already on average are dating down very slightly economic two quintiles of men are doing the same thing yeah they're dating up they're dating up dating up dating up dating up so there's this really weird kind of thing there where it's like um you can say in the abstract and and I'm teeing you up for some thoughts on stated verse revealed that you can say in the abstract oh richer women they have a stronger make preference to made up let's say but then you see what they're doing and it's like oh they're less likely to do it so it's like what is what is stronger mean in that context but they're necessarily the fact that they um on average uh uh going with somebody who's somewhat earning somewhere less than them isn't necessarily because that's what they prefer what's available there's not add those kind of echelons they're just not much available at all tall girl problem tall girl problem you know exactly okay always sorry if there's a shortage of tall man then you'll settle for a guy who's not like tall women are probably also less likely to exactly not because they prefer shorter men so i don't think that's revealing a preference necessarily well what about the uh what would you could you i don't know if you've been following uh Paul Eastwick's work i have on stated verse revealed preferences i've been you know i've been reading a lot of his uh scientific work i haven't read his his book yet uh but i would love a rejoinder to his so he makes the claim that essentially i'll summarize that other than maybe you can tell me what you think about it um but he makes the claim that yes in survey data you see these consistent sex differences in what men women want but when you measure it through speed dating or through how these stated preferences predict romantic evaluations of partners well then women care a lot more about looks than they say and men care a little more about resources than they say such that there's essentially no sex difference and i think i even saw an excerpt from his book where he says well how could how could these sex differences in preferences have evolved if uh they don't result in behavior if they're just resulting in survey items and i don't necessarily buy that that kind of i buy his data i don't necessarily buy the follow up part of the argument but i'd love to hear what's your with your billion years of sex difference background what's the what's the rejoinder well first of all let me say i think he's a he's a great scholar i don't i don't agree with him on this but i do think he's a very good scholar he's worth taking seriously and reading his work um so i think he he seems to be he seems to focus a lot on the two lines of evidence that don't show sex differences in mate preferences um and exclude pretty much everything else so one thing he focuses on the speed dating data that he's personally done um and often doesn't find the differences that you might expect um i'm not sure if it's uh representative samples for a start like a lot of the studies that he've done he's done have been university students all of whom are quite possibly i mean presumably do have pretty good career prospects so there's not going to be a huge amount of variance there necessarily um and a speed dating context you don't get to know somebody uh particularly well so their looks are going to be a large part of what shapes your assessment of them um he points out that uh a lot of the data the evolutionary psychologists look at dating uh app data for instance is evolutionarily novel so the speed dating it's an evolutionary novelty it's nothing like what happens in reality um but he's happy there because you don't find the differences that you expect to find um so he focuses on that and actually there is some um speed dating research that does show some of the standard differences um rock curse man i think did one study that did find it so it's mixed rather than showing no effect at all of the standard uh evolutionarily psychology predictors stuff um with the reveal preferences i think that um well i don't know it's also i'm a bit dubious about it uh partly just because it goes against the 90 percent of other or 95 percent of other research including real world data uh that does find directions uh effects in the direction you'd expect like women are more likely than men to leave a guy who is unemployed who becomes unemployed or uh fails to earn a decent living um and actually there's one one reason that the revealed preferences data might not be accurate is that when you're looking at how how important it is in a relationship that the guys earning quite a bit among current couples those current couples and and it's going to be a bunch of uh couples who partnerships that are dissolved already and you've got to catch them as they lose their job oh before they do exactly and so you're just looking at the subset that remains after after those kind of processes have happened so you're going to have reduced variance in terms of ability to make a living and earn a good wage and reduced variance therefore means that the uh the correlation is going to be weaker and other things are going to um become more important seem seemingly more important but maybe that's probably the data rather than the fact that women actually don't care more about that after all than men did you see the uh worldwide preference matching paper i think i did yeah yeah lots of yeah right yeah so that was one to kind of remind people i know that i know that you spoke to you spoke about it on the show so people people may already know the first episode that i did with yeah so it was basically he had people and i'm summarizing someone else's work so there's there's a chance i make uh an agreement or an academic yet so it's so the directionally correct so the directionally correct summary is that he had people assess their romantic partners on various traits and then saw how much those assessments correlated with their overall romantic evaluations of them and in that he found no sex difference um and he also found some weird findings like that the number one thing people wanted was someone by that measure was someone good and bad yeah so that the overall overall romantic evaluation was most which is intuitive but and it's very difficult it's very difficult to separate that out from the fact that you're in a relationship with some. and needing to be physically intimate with them regularly. Like almost all sex for all the myth of the charge and the fucking girls being run through and guys are manhors and all the rest of it. Almost all sex. The whole galaxy, the whole fucking galaxy of sex occurs in relationships. And then there's one brown dwarf star on the outside that's casual sex from a light portioning the sex across. - The sex so planet. - Yeah, it is. Am I wrong? - That everyone on the other planet is like that. - Almost all sex occurs inside of relationships. Right, like the global amount of sex that happens. - In a relationship. - It's almost all inside of one form of relationship or another. Do you see Jake Kuzlowski from Keeper AI put up the ask men if they'd marry down on three axes? - I think I DM him every time he tweets out, and I'm like, "Can I get another look at that?" Can I get another look at that? - Jake's got the possibility to be a really fascinating source of stated preferences. With real world results, real world incentive. So for the people that don't know Keeper AI is an AI matchmaking service, it's 50 grand. The guy pays the women don't. It's five grand per date for the first, for each date. For the guy at the top of the 50, it's credited against it. But it's only credited against it up to the first five. So if you have like 10 date in order to get there, then you're going to pay 75. Anyway, they have a pretty comprehensive psychometric evaluation, personality testing, all of these sorts of things. Pull up the Keeper AI website. Jared, it's kind of fun. Anyway, because he's got this raw data and he's happy to aggregate it and presumably the terms and conditions, just say like, "Hey, open this sucker up." As if they'd marry down on three axes, women say no far more than men every time, earns less, women are 12 more likely, 12 times more likely to refuse, less intelligent, six times more, less educated, four times more. Marrying down is a near deal breaker for women and a non-issue for men consistent across all three, right? So especially when you bundle those together, like that is a real fucking covariate bastard, but a multi-variate bastard. What I realized, thinking about Eastwick stuff, if you're in a world where the new ecology involves this ability to sterile, artistically design what it is that you want, like stated preferences become revealed preferences. Does this make, am I, you know, it makes sense? And what's funny is that I actually DMed Jake that exact point where it's like, "Don't fuck with me, dude, I'm on the fucking level of the academics all day, I'm on fire today. I'm in a half-Newtonics, don't fuck with me." You've been anticipating a lot of things. And it's interesting 'cause it's not, I don't really think it is a stated preference in the traditional sense because it's a stated preference with consequence. And if you actually look at the traditional incentive. - Yeah, so I'm very interested in stated versus revealed preferences. I'm very interested in which people assign to what? And there's actually precedent for the scholarly precedent where in bus and schmitz make preferences and behavioral manifestations, I think that they had classified ads as a behavioral manifestation essentially where it's like it's not like an expression of like what people are actually shopping for. - Skin and the gun. - And so that's, yeah, exactly. So it's like, if I tell my matchmaker, can I please have a young wife? That's more than just a statement, like that's an action, yeah, in a way, but I don't know. - Is it a matchmaking, I guess, arranged marriages are a kind of matchmaking but they're not done with, hey, here's my fucking list of requirements, type thing. Is this a new category that's somewhere in between stated and revealed preferences? When we look at something like Keeper AI and you go in with your preferred list of things? Is it stated? Is it revealed? - It's inverting your stated preference and to reveal preference by going out of the world and making it happen and putting skin in the game to do so. - So it feels closer to stated, I mean revealed would be because you can be my coach or whatever the matchmaker and I can give you the list and then you show me someone and I can still choose. Actually, I may give you this list but then I meet this person and this actually isn't what I want. Let me scratch these two things off the list and add this other thing and then go that way. So it still feels more stated. The two slamming lines I've seen recently, one from Jake that says being good at dating apps is mostly orthogonal to being a good spouse. But the people that we're in on dating apps are actually probably not the people that you want to get into a relationship with and then Diana Fleischman. Female dating strategy tells the women today only men who ask first, text within three days, pay and reliably plan the next date. Sure, this might be a good filter to make sure he's really into you, but it's also a way to select a man who is great at wooing side chicks. - Right, right. - Just the ability to play the game. But the Jake one about being good at dating apps is orthogonal to being a good spouse. Would be a fantastic study to do. How many swipes have you got? How many first dates have you got? It doesn't even matter really about conversions and then how likely were you to cheat, infidelity, level of relationship satisfaction with your other partners down there. I like tell me about your online dating era and tell me about your spouse's relationship satisfaction now and the quality of your relationship. Like it might actually be that the traits that make you good on a dating app opposite country to what make you a good spouse. - There was a study a few years ago on Tinder users. Back when I think Tinder was still the number one dating app in the late 2010s. And this was only on college students and they looked at students who had never used Tinder and students who were currently using Tinder and they looked at the dark triad personality traits and found that the users of Tinder scored significantly higher. Pretty sizable effect sizes and 0.3.4 higher for the Tinder users and the non-tinter users. So these are more psychopathic, more mocky value and more narcissistic. But I didn't say, as I recall, they didn't say anything about sort of were the successful users higher on the dark triad traits than the less successful users. But this is presumably people don't want spouses who are high on dark triad traits. But that's what those are the people who are using these apps. - I'll just use them. - There is plenty of research, I think, though that shows revealed preferences for some of the traditional evocyt predictions. Like the fact that guys who are wealthier, more likely to get married, more likely to stay married, more likely to have kids, more likely to get remarried if they divorce, whereas it doesn't predict that anywhere there as well for women, women's wages don't. And women's looks are a better predictor whether they get married and the wealth of the marital partner than is the case for men's looks. Don't predict that anywhere there as well. And all of that's revealed preferences, right? That points to the end of that witness study looking at facial attractiveness whose 12 times more influential on swiping behavior than height is. - Facial attractiveness. - Yeah, so they did. So I tweeted that and someone replied, photo competition app shows photos for the most important factor. And I was like, oh, you did kind of get them there, but it is an interesting study, right? - Trying to find some white pills. - Yeah, so what they did was they tried to, so what they did was they tried to essentially set up a gamified dating app. Importantly, there was no height filters on this app. So that's usually how people see height in a dating app. That's usually how it has in a real dating app that's usually how it has an influence. And it actually be interested in Rob's opinion on whether kind of testing the intuition of whether a height filter is a stated or revealed preference because that's also kind of in between. But yeah, they set up this game and then they, and it was very sophisticated. I had a lot of people come back to me asking including really prominent scholars coming back like kind of challenging the study. And I had to open the study back up again and check and I was like, no, they actually thought of that too. And yeah, they found that essentially face was everything and anything else was, you could put anything in your bio, you could have any height and it wouldn't really make that much of a difference with the caveat. With the caveat that filtering for height wasn't an option. And then it had a typical dating app interface. So it's like if you're looking at 50 different faces as a participant in this study and it's literally like face, face, face, tiny details, tiny details, there is kind of a click through temptation of like, I mean, this is what happens on real apps though. I mean, it's it's it's actually on real apps. People are doing the same thing. So I think it's methodologically. It's very ecologically sound. If you want to find out what's trading talked in. Yeah, exactly. I want to ask you to your question. I wonder after the introduction of height filters did users come away more satisfied or less satisfied or the same compared with prior to the introduction of height filters on the apps? Like our women happier are simply meant aren't happier, especially the men who aren't at all. So they tend to release the height filter as a April fools about a decade ago and then just as a feature available to premium users like three years ago. And for that six foot mark is like it's somewhat arbitrary because I read this and I don't know exactly. Guys just lie. Well, guys lie. But then the six, it's just because it's a round number and I've heard that in Europe, the number is 180 centimeters, which is something like 5, 10 and a half or 5, 11. And they just go 180 because it's a nice, clean number. They want it six feet, they go 182.5 centimeters. And so even the six foot thing is somewhat arbitrary. So what you're saying is that we should change the units of measurement to make more guys, six fuzz. Gotta get on the metric system. So scientists, drug dealers, and short pings, you go to Europe maxing. You're not metric maxing, dude. What the fuck are you doing? That would really be DEI for a man if we could change it to the-- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts performance, which is why, for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with element. is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet salty, orangey nectar and I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there have been no questions asked, refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want and if you don't like it for any reason, I'll just give you my money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements, most popular flavors with your first purchase. We're going to the link in the description below, heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwistum. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwistum. What about that, um, mate budget study that normally did? Because that was about trade-offs, right, and typically, some people generally have good things that come along with good things, but for the most part, there are some sorts of trade-offs with someone's, spent an awful lot of time dedicated on one thing, that maybe neglected another part of another area. It's an interesting study there, right? So basically. Can you explain for the. Sean. Sean. Sean. Sean. So, yeah, normally, normally he did a study where he gave people a budget of mate dollars and then asked them to create the ideal mate that you can with this budget. Some people got a big budget, and where that was the case, many women, they both wanted everything. They wanted good looks, they wanted a good job, high status, blah, blah, blah, blah that works, but if they had a smaller mate budget, which I think is probably more like most people's situation in life, no offense, if they had that they, sex differences became more pronounced. And so, people, men would spend more to get an attractive partner, whereas women would spend more to get a partner with resources and status. Yeah. Yeah. He also did a study where he had people allocate for themselves, who I'm not mistaken, and it mirrored that same pattern, where it's like when men were kind of RPG style building their own character. I think it was him. I don't mean to give him credit if it wasn't, but basically men tried to make themselves richer relative to women, and women tried to make themselves pretty or relative to men. But the reason why we don't see women turning up in supercars with expensive Rolexes at an eye glove, or guys spending tons of time doing the beautification thing, we know we have an intuition about what is effective, it's the failures just continue to stack up in really interesting ways. Well, this is something that we proposed actually on our PNAS paper in the discussion section. We talked about this where it's like it is interesting and quite conspicuous, but also quite circumstantial, that over the 1900s, there's pretty good data from David Bus. It's hard to do. It's hard to gather this survey data, but it does seem that over time, throughout the 1900s, especially in the period after women's kind of financial emancipation, let's call it, make preferences converged quite a bit between men and women. And then also we're now seeing this tremendous behavioral convergence where it's like women aren't doing sports cars and flashy watches, but they do have pretty nice handbags, pretty nice shoes and they are pretty ritzy in terms of their finances, but that's only signaling to women. Well, maybe, but men are definitely, even if you say for the women's side that's not true, on the men's side, we see the men have tripled their parenting effort since the 1970s. And male beautification, I know that it's really trendy right now with the whole looks-maxing thing, but this is actually just the newest instantiation of a documented trend going back to the 1990s, you can read the historian Lynn Luciano's work on this, where male beautification has increased decade on decade to a point where basically everyone, even like a normal man who doesn't consider himself like a beautifying person, his daily routine would be unrecognizable to his grandfather. Like the average. Maybe you had to. Maybe you had to think about it. We did a little data analysis on using health data, essentially seeing like how much has weightlifting actually increased. That's generation on generation, it's like you go from basically not a behavior to every young man is now like every other member of Gen Z, essentially, is like a recreational bodybuilder. That's right. Well, to find that attracted though, they do find some masculinity attractive and good grooming attractive. They find parenting attractive. But I'm not persuaded at all. In fact, I don't think it's the case that men think that she's really hot. I love that handbag. Yeah. I don't think so either way. But those are a bit cheeky. But I do think that it is. I do think it's conspicuous and so it's worth pointing out where it's like I don't think that women are necessarily signaling their resources to attract men, but it's interesting that they're signaling resources more over the same time period. It could. And in the male beautification, I would really put my foot down and say no, that is to attract women. I think it is because they have their own money. Right. Okay. But because the socioeconomic imbalance between men and women has been reduced or even reversed, men need to find a different way. They need to compete on another domain of attractiveness. And that has been self-beautification. I'm going to make myself look nicer. Now, beauty is the beauty is the flashy one. Parenting is the quiet one that's actually better evidence where it's like men used to. Exactly. Yeah, exactly where it's like. This even in Lee's 2015 study, where it does seem that when women have their own money, they recognize where it's like, well, I have the financial thing kind of sorted. I really need like a helper at the nest a little bit more. And that's been the preference shift. And men have definitely responded to that. I mean, men have tripled. A man today spends more time with children, I believe. I think I heard this from you that it was then women did in the 1950s. Correct. And the difference though, at least in the US context, I've read that this differs by socioeconomic status and education, where educated upper middle class men are spending far more time with their children than fathers in the past, whereas non-college men are spending the same amount as decades past, or even slightly less. The average is getting brought up, not a primarily by college educated men. And just like. All those women don't necessarily have as much money. Yeah. But then the men are also spending less time with, yeah. It's part of it though. Just the people, guys are thinking it's only fair. You know, they're responding to arguments that have been made by feminists and others, just that guys haven't been pulling their weight and the past, and they think that they should. Two degree. Can I. On this handbag point, I think I heard this from Tonya Reynolds that she suggested that it's not that men all these aren't attracted to, you know, these luxurious handbags. And in some cases women, you know, they're buying these handbags or wearing them to impress women. I know what you get. But it's about deterring. Deterring. Look at how much my husband is in the hole for this stupid bag that he doesn't understand what it is. None of his friends understand what it is. I'm not even doing it for other guys. Yeah. It's not my boobs, right? Which would be the sort of thing that wouldn't be a deterrent. It would actually probably be the cause of ayer from other women. Whereas women would compliment handbags more than they would compliment boobs. Yes. Yeah, 100%. I mean, I imagine that we're in an environment of, you know, increasing made competition. If you were in, if you were a engagement man, why the massive engagement then look at how much he's in the hole. Yeah. For ultimately stately. But what's the benefit though of intimidating other women and saying, look at this great handbag. To keep them away from the partner. But why if guys don't care about it, why would other women think, well, I better stay away? I have as nice a handbag. Well, if he's so invested in her that he's spent 20 grand on a handbag, then it's probably not worth my time to coach him or to attempt to coach him. I see. So it could be a mate, it could be mate poaching deterrents. It could also be just kind of classic high status to low status threat behavior. Yeah. I remember literally first day of my PhD arrived in Melbourne and went for a walk with Candace. And I asked her this exact question. I was just like, why do you think women love the handbags? Because I knew that she was really into the beautification stuff and that she really had her head around those things and just immediately said to scary young women. Just immediately, and so I was like, okay, interesting. And I do think that it is, I feel like I've since then maybe tried to observe it as like a second order thing. And I think it's kind of maybe the male equivalent of like, like I was really jacked walking into the room when a woman walks in and she's very glamorous. She's got the expensive shoes, the expensive bag, she throws it on the table. It's like, I run this shit. It's kind of like that atmosphere. There's also a sense at least with guys, guys that have got a ton of muscle on them. You have to have spare time. You have to have spare money to be able to afford the food and the PDs. You need to be at least somewhat disciplined. You need to have the time to be able to plan your training sessions and, you know, not be at work every single hour of the day in the same way as the long nails that a woman might have in the well done hair and the good beauty regime is costly in terms of time. And that indicates an awful lot more about lifestyle than just resources to, but I totally didn't think about the fact that guys going to the gym is a form of male beautification. If you class that in, which I just, like, totally did not consider, if you add in guys going to the gym is a form of male beautification, it's going to be 4x, 5x, 6x, 10x, what it would have been 100 years ago for male beautification. Yeah, I mean, that's what the best study on beautification did. It's it's Maricopa Wall study. And she found that in all except for seven countries women beautified more, there were, there were seven that men beautified more slightly. And this was the weightlifting side of it essentially. was what was the behavior where men were-- - It's the big Pac-Man chunk that's been taken out of the side. - Yeah, it is. And some might say, "Oh, well, a lot of men hit the gym." Sorry, for health, not beautification, and some of them do it for status competitions. They actually, but they thought of that. They had a question in there that it's like, "Okay, doing it for beauty, though. Basically, how much time are you spilling bodybuilding?" And so they really were able to drill down on that. And there was one other behavior. This is so counterintuitive, where among the people who did it, men actually did this behavior more. So think about different beautification behaviors. I won't bore you by making you guess, but it was makeup. Among people who wear makeup, the men who wear makeup spend way more time on it than the women. - Just because that less good did it. - Even grown up on YouTube tutorial. - Yeah, I think that it's what she said to me, was that she thinks that it's some-- essentially men who wear makeup have some kind of special qualitative difference. Maybe it's that they're like a sense. I told her, "Look, you're picking up on male beauty influencers." Essentially, like, who is? And so they just have different-- - It's gonna be a small pool, yeah. - But I thought that was interesting is that the-- is that in terms of numbers among the people-- - Just James Charles on repeat. - Yeah, it's just James Charles clocking in 16 hours a day and causing the difference. So it was interesting. So it was basically, yeah, there was this-- The second biggest difference, technically, was the weightlifting. The biggest was the makeup. But it was because of that effect. - Going back to the clavicular thing, it's kind of fascinating the weightlifting being the biggest change because I don't know whether guys increasing their upper body strength makes a bigger impact on attractiveness or fermentability. Like, if you were to just to rank it, starting at a baseline of this, and you gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass, are you more attractive or more more formidable to other guys? That would be fascinating to work out because I don't know what the net gain is. And obviously you get both and that's what's great. But certainly when we look at sort of the myth of chatting and Louis Thru's documentary and sort of the caricature of hypermasculinity at the moment, a lot of what guys are doing, it's the male-to-male transexual as Mary Harrington calls it. It's like the most caricatured parts of the masculine look to the point where that hypermasculonized face we know from tons and tons of data is not as attractive as a average or slightly feminized face on a man is to women. And all of these other things to me seem to be just signaling for middability, signaling status and for middability to other men. It's the handbag of the face. Is that the David Puts' work would suggest it's more about for middability? Or rather, the increase in for middability would outpaste the increase in the screen. Jonah, we dropped it on the show like 10 times but it's the fucking-- The fact that boy's done it? The best. Can you do, do you know it? Do you know how I know it? Yeah, I can do it. So David Puts and his colleagues famously did this study where they brought in a group of men and recorded them in these videos and very, very short clips. And then they brought in a different group of men to watch the men in these videos. And then they asked these men who were watching these other men in the clip. They asked them a question which is how likely is it that this man that you're watching in this clip could beat a man in a physical fight. And it was arranged from very likely to very unlikely. And then they showed a group of women these videos as well of these men in these short clips and they asked these women, okay, if this man in this video, how sexually attractive is this man? And then these researchers followed up with those men in the videos 18 months later and collected data on them including how many sexual partners they'd had over the previous 18 months. And they found that how formidable they were predicted how many sexual partners they had whereas how sexually attractive they were to these women had no relationship at all. That's the most fucking insane study. Now, as we mentioned, this was on college students, you know, fraternity members. But it was like a specific frat wasn't it? It wasn't. I think so, I'm not sure. Okay, but you know, this is consistent with David Puts' other work showing that formidable it seems to have this huge effects on sexual sex. This is my take. This is my take on clavicular and the looks maxing wall. Yeah. They have closed their eyes, thrown the dart, and hit the bull's eye. If they've fluked, optimizing familiar ability for male attention over attractiveness to only land in the middle of David Puts' study finding out that familiar ability is better predictive of male mating success than attractiveness. Fame is also this form of like psychological formidable ability too, where, you know, I've seen-- I'll regard it now. Yeah, and they'll keep their distance from, from Aleo, like a famous person, you know, like if there's a famous man who's getting a lot of attention from women, ordinary men are going to be intimidated by that fame, and they're probably not going to try to interrupt him or compete with him for attention and that kind of thing. But if you're famous and you're jacked, then it's like, you know, like imagine the rock being surrounded by how many men are going to be like, oh, I could take that job. I can push that girl from the rock. Like, he's famous and he's jacked. And so no one will attempt to interfere with his mating success. Yeah. Haven't you been studying female teacher sex scandals? [LAUGHS] Studying. That was behind the paywall, but I love Chris Williamson and I love modern wisdom. So, you know, let's-- Bring it out, yeah. Yeah, this was my, you know, kind of-- this is my conjecture. I don't have hard evidence for this. But I was building on something that Luis Perry had written. I believe this was in the spectator. You know, she was kind of riffing on this idea of only fans and how sexual attention for women can be as satisfying as, you know, actual sex can be for men. So, you know, men really like to have sex. Women really like sexual attention. And these can be sort of equally powerful incentives. And, you know, in the context of only fans, it's this super-normal stimulus in the way that porn is for men. So, porn, you know, you can do novelty, all these different naked women. And so on, it's very exciting for men, whereas only fans as a creator can be very exciting for women because you're getting large, huge amount of sexual attention from thousands of men and all of them are praising you and telling you how beautiful you are. You could imagine this would be extremely enjoyable for some women. Now, the female sexual scandal thing, the female teacher, sexual scandal, I should say. In every few months, we see these stories come out of some surprisingly attractive female teacher who sleeps with a male student, some 15, 16-year-old kid. And, you know, all these, you know, the online discourse around this always goes crazy. It's also important here to remember that male teachers are still far more likely to commit this transgression of sleeping with an underage student than female teachers are. The reason why those stories go viral is because, again, they're anomalous. My suggestion for, at least in some cases, why these female teachers sleep with their male students is because the response that they get from the male student is a one-of-a-kind unique sort of super-normal stimulus, where, you know, if you're an attractive 25-year-old woman and you get naked in front of, you know, your typical 28-year-old guy who's seen naked women before, whatever look on his face, whatever attention he gives you is not going to be nearly as potent as when you address for the first time. As you see, and you see a, now that look like a chef, that look with your race. Yeah. Half of what's, you know, half Asian. Does not scream captain of the ship when it's facing backward. I don't know what it is. You look like the guy out of Tenton. Wait, I don't know this. Pull up the fucking, pull up the dude from Tenton in the heart. You can keep going for that. Oh, I lost. Okay, so, you know, so the response, right? So you're an attractive 25-year-old woman. You get naked in front of a 25-year-old guy. You know, the response is, you know, he's going to be like, wow, cool, because, you know, women, men like seeing naked women. But a 16-year-old male who has seen very few naked women in his life, he sees a fully grown, you know, woman at the peak of her fertility and so on. For the first time, the attention he gives you is going to be extremely potent. And it's the kind of look and level of attention that most people wouldn't have access to. The reason that this is interesting is what is the motivation for these female teachers to do it? For male teachers, we have at least a little bit more of an understanding. Yeah. I think there is a question, and that's one of the reasons it's fascinating. It's so anomalous, like, why? Yeah. Why you could go and get anyone's? Yeah, well, well, so sure. So sure, if you're, you know, if you're a predatory male teacher, you know, it's sort of this warped extreme version of the typical male, which is, you know, you want, you know, someone who's attractive and whatever, and then like, you know, there's that kind of like vulnerability and a power asymmetry and so on. Whereas I think if you're a predatory female teacher, you get your rocks off through this extreme level of attention. It's not so much the sex in and of itself, although that may be part of it, because again, you get to see this teenage boy have his first sexual experience with a full grown woman. And I think that in itself, that kind of power that you have over him and that level of attention is so unique that you couldn't replicate in any other situation or context. In the same way that for the male teacher, right, like, sleeping with this under each girl, you couldn't replicate that in any other situation. Dude, I read, I mean, to, like, horrendous chick books, like, just like, like every freedom McFadden book, I just blast through. And I've read the teacher, have you read the teacher? Dude, it is, I mean, freedom McFadden is the person that did the housemaid, right? Of which Sydney Swini just starred in, and then she did the housemaid's revenge, and then she did the housemaid, come us back up and she's done like. the patient and the teacher and a bunch of other and it's just easy reading, right? It's my guilty pleasure. And this one about the teacher, the main guy that usually all the guys in the books turn out to be the bad guy, like the shock horror freedom of fact, like the guys turn out to be the bad guys and they're all scumbags the way that they're presented. So like rightly so. But this one takes it to another level and it turns out this teacher's being like wooing, first off he's wooing a 16 year old. And then you find out that he was wooing another 16 year old, but doing it when she was 15 and then it turns out that he's one when she's 40 and I'm like, this is the it completely changed. Even the 16 thing, you're already like, fuck me and it's in the first few chapters like, whoa, that's, okay, that's a little strange. The final for people that want to read the teacher, listen, listen away. The final, final, final fucking bit of it, the whole twist at the end is that the young jock who's in high school has been sleeping behind the back of the guy that was the nasty teacher with his wife and the jock was 16 to and I'm like, the only reason, the reason that you had to put in, oh, and he slept with this other student when they were 14 is to even the scales. But even them when I read it, there's a bit of like retribution that guy was real mean and then he's like, tried to kill people and whatever, whatever. Like, yeah, to come in and fuck him. But that, even this example that we've got in front of us, as I read it, I was like, good for her. She got railed in the shoe club. He's a guy that worked in like the local shoe store or whatever and at the end you find out it's the high school jock. I was like, yeah. Is that really the, it just completely lays out, like however ethically dubious it was. I mean, maybe she means it as a something for people to think about because it definitely made me think, made me go, huh, how do I feel about that? Do I feel, does the fact that it was being done by her husband before and younger make this less, because she's like a 32-year-old woman, the 16-year-old boy. I should have described as attractive, but yes, yes, and classically overlocked, you know, like, um, she wants the attention. So that's where you're there. Well, I mean, this idea of, like, so I don't know, like, because every time we see a story, it's always an attractive female teacher and maybe it's possible, again, there's this dark matter. The unattractive ones just don't make the headlines. Yeah. Because no one wants to click on an unattractive teacher who sleeps with some kid. But if she's hot, people will click on the story. But if it's the case that more attractive teachers tend to do this, I think that to sort of aligns with, well, well, two, two things here, which is one, like they are likely to get that sort of intense reaction from male students because they're attractive. And then the other thing is they just have more opportunity, right? Like, if you're an attractive person, you just have more opportunity than general. And so, you know, that also sort of, you know, maybe there are ugly teachers who would like to sleep with their teachers, they just don't have, you know, very many chances. Didn't you have a Twitter poll on this regarding, um, it was, it was really interesting, would you rather, where you found a big sex difference on like, would you rather sleep with someone very attractive or someone who's very attracted to you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, um, I put it, uh, two different, uh, polls on Twitter. Um, first, uh, for men, and I asked, you know, this is a forced choice, this contrived scenario. Uh, would you rather sleep with someone who you find, uh, intensely attractive, but they are not at all attracted to you? Or would you rather sleep with someone who finds you very attractive, but you are not attracted at all to them. So I administer that poll first to men and to women and literally got the exact opposite, where something like 75% of men were like, give me the hot person who finds me ugly. Uh, that's way more preferable than, uh, sleeping with an ugly person who finds me hot. Whereas women, it was the opposite, women were about 75% of women said they would rather sleep with someone who they find ugly, who finds them attractive, then to sleep with a hot person who was unattracted to them. Um, so it's almost like men and women were made for each other. This was something that, this was a mess up that I, uh, this is a mess up that I did in my conversation with that step or all, uh, where she said something to the effect of when have you ever, she was talking about desire and what makes a woman feel desired, said something to the effect of when have you ever heard of a woman being turned on because her partner was like aroused in front of her, like, women need to be wooed. And I was just, like, in, I wasn't in my EP hat, I was in my relating and she's the expert hat. And, uh, I should've just said, too, like being desired is probably the number one thing that women want as a turn on, uh, or the other thing that women want as a turn on, just put this hat back on backwards for me. I've worked out who it is that you look like. I got it wrong. I thought I'm backwards. I got a, you know, I got a big dome, man. You do, both of you do, actually. I can't believe it. No, no, no, no. So I thought that it was a tenten. It's not tenten. It's Indiana Jones and it's this. I'm just glad you got it. It's that not you. I mean, oh wait, but don't I have to wear it like this? Yeah. No, he's good on backwards. Does he know? No, he's got it the right way. Yeah. Okay. Well, it's not a captain's hat anyway. I knew that I was right. Yeah, I uh, where that's tenten. No, no, no, it's fucking the kid from Indiana Jones. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm like, I'm kind of fascinated by what's going to unfold over the next few years with what's happening with increased socioeconomic successful women male beautification. I actually think that what guys think they're doing, even if it doesn't work with the fermentability, double-loop, close-eye, bullseye thing is, uh, I think that it's a kind of rejection of the female gaze in some ways like it's just male-to-male intersectional competition. Do you ever remember Ziz, Ziz, that he was a kind of the original Luxemakser in some ways. He was a bodybuilding icon in 2010, 2011, 2012, and died. Ozzy guy, real good luck in dude. Just trained in the gym. He wasn't like doing the hardcore Luxemaks and stuff. It just trained in the gym. And he had this line, which was disregard women acquired dance moves. And it was just him talking about, you want to go out with your boys and have a good time. And these saying this is a naturally very attractive man who then done some weightlifting to make him look real adonis Greek body. But I get the sense that it is kind of a rejection of I'm just going to focus on becoming the most like mug, you know, where that comes from, you know, the etymology of mugging is a mug alpha male of the group. That was what it came and then that short into mugging. So alpha male of the group is referring to your status within the hierarchy of other men. Not, like Chad of the group Chad is almost rejected as a term. Like I'm not doing this for anybody else. And this is, you know, this is a there was that the the clavicular profile. And you know, I don't know how representative he is, but this is a this lines with what you're saying here, where he says that two interesting things one, he said something like, you know, I my the main thing is mugging people like that's where he gets is wrong. I want to do is walking mom. That's like that's what's fun for me. The second thing he said was knowing he could have sex with a woman was more satisfying than actually having sex with a woman just the knowledge that he could is is good enough for him. So yeah, it's like disregard women, you know, get, get jacked, fire dance moves or whatever, mug other men and and not have sex with women. How come is that ever going to be the how they can be that comment? Yeah, you've got to be a real extreme to say I'm going to do all of the work to be able to have sex with a woman, but it's somehow more enjoyable to me to not do it. I mean, this might be part of the medical castration thing that's going on or the performance enhancing castration. Yeah, how much do you think a denial of sex differences at the moment has led to the current mating crisis. Is that something that you've drawn a lineage through you're looking at me because I'm talking quite a bit in my book about the denial of sex differences, but I can't see a direct line. I mean, you've talked about in your book superb you you discuss the dangers of ignoring minimizing sex differences, but you, you know, you also sort of acknowledge that that historically people have sort of overstated the sex difference. The dangers of overstating can be particularly harmful to women, but to to men as well. And so so what yeah, yeah, curious what are the dangers of minimizing and then overstating. The dangers of minimizing so we've talked about this right. So one danger is that just as people used to try to force boys and girls and men and women into traditional gender roles, even if they didn't quite fit them, you can get the reverse. You minimize or deny sex differences and just think that they do two discrimination. You're going to think that actually we should be trying to minimize them. We should be trying to push boys and girls and men and women out of traditional gender roles. And that is a problem if they don't fit into them. That's one problem. Another one if you minimize sex differences is that you might fail to notice physical problems and psychological problems that present differently in one sex than the other. So a classic example is carry of vascular problems like heart attacks. The symptoms are different for men and women. And the male symptoms are better known. So the pain and the sort of chest and down the arms is quite well known. That's much less common in women. Shortness of breath is a much more common symptom in women. People don't tend to know that. They often in the past especially just didn't know that. And so women would have heart attacks and not be aware of it until they progress quite a long way down the road. And so it cost lives. But by not noticing sex differences rather than noticing that. On that point, like minimizing sex. I'm thinking about with Chris's question of something like if you truly believe in sort of blank slatism for men and women. And then you're lucky you're a young naive girl you go off to college and you assume oh you know men and women are basically the same and you go to a frat party and get really drunk and you assume you know guys are kind of like girls and there's no real and you don't understand. that there are predatory men. The average difference, as you mentioned in your book, aggressiveness is not that large, but in the tales, the most extremely aggressive, sexually predatory people tend to be men. And if you go to get drunk at a frat party in your 18, you don't understand, there are sex differences here in terms of motivations around sex and so forth that this can, you know, - So it doesn't matter if you're a denial of sex differences between the sex, it's a denial of where they come from. - Well, there is both. - I think the one you're talking about is where you might fail to see the sex difference at all regardless of where it comes from and open yourself up to certain kind of risks that you otherwise might not. But you are right. There are a lot of sex differences, people will acknowledge the differences, including that difference, but just think you can attribute it entirely to largely the socialization. - What's happening with the dual mating and mate switching hypothesis race at the moment? Is there been any update? Do we know if there's anything here? - I can't spoil their party, unfortunately, but there's no. - I'll fuck you, dude. - I genuinely can't. - You move behind the seat under the bus, that's because you've got special behind the seat. - No, it's not that. It's just that I recognize that when people present work that's, you know, like at a conference, it's like, oh, it's preliminary, oh, we're gonna have to roll it out in its own time. - This is the modern wisdom conference. - I know, I know. I mean, I'll happily tell you the full kind of update - All right. - All fair and robust. - You know what it's like? It's like, when I bring Navy SEALs on and they go, dude, I know exactly what happened with the summer. - That's how you wanna act. - Well, it's not me trying to or a farmer and it's literally just like. - I know that, I know that Ryan Dobson and his party are gonna be rolling out some cool research pretty soon. - Is it not public once it's been put out of the conference? - Well, I was told by Candice, no, but maybe that's kind of a social intuition. - I'm on Candice, but I'm a new academic. So you bet it, so I don't necessarily have that. - This is the issue. - This is the issue that Macon's got. Macon and Williams the same. And I don't understand it, but I kind of get it. There's sort of the mafioso of the human behavior and ecology world, and you don't wanna step on the toes of anybody as just a mere underling. But if you were the boss, right, or an under-boss. (laughing) If you're David, but if you're David, boss, you can just start spouting theories that whenever you want. But if you're sort of a new entrance at the bottom of the conference - That's constantly signaling. - Yeah, yeah, it is. - Okay, well, I've got a question. I've never been able to work out. Why do you think women's sexual desire declines faster than men's in relationships? - I genuinely don't know. I tweeted it as a question. I'm hoping to maybe Steve or Rob here have better answer that. - I genuinely don't know either. - Bro, if I had the briefest three years, this is fucking money. - I mean, would it not make sense that women at the peak of fertility would have the strongest desire for sex? I mean, for just recognizing. - This is not effect exists as well. But this effect is even more peculiar where if they remate again later, the sex drive goes up again. It's just that it's like, oh, the first year or two - Well, that is a sort of a meat retention strategy, right? You're in a new relationship. You would want to boost your sexual, whatever, libido. - And you're getting an adaptation to get them on the hook to say if you mate with me, they'll be sex all the time. - Yeah, but once you have a guy locked in and you've been married for 20 years, and you're no longer fertile. And the risks to you are very low, if you're in, yeah. - I wish it was 20 years. The decline is the decline. - For as much as it is within the first year, I think it dropped by half, and then it drops again, and then it drops again. But I talked about this earlier on, your risks of pregnancy are much higher the older you get too. - Yeah, there's not a big cost for men. So maybe looking at the women's side as the wrong, maybe just doesn't decline for men, 'cause there's not such a big cost for men. - Maybe sex starts as a bargaining strategy, but then, sorry, a retention strategy, but then becomes a bargaining chip later. I don't know if that's too, I don't know if that's too out there, but maybe the strategic function of non-conceptive sex, 'cause there's two types of sex, right? There's conceptive sex and non-conceptive sex, and humans are weird that we do both. And this non-conceptive sex, I could see it having this retention function early, but then once you're in the relationship, it's like, well, what am I doing with this? And maybe it's a bargaining chip? - I remember that study that you tweeted, which was women say that inside of relationships, they have around about the amount of sex that they want, and men self-report that they would like to have about twice as much sex as they are, which suggests that the couple zero in on the preferable level of sex that the woman wants, and that the man is making a compromise. - Yeah, that was from Roy Balmeister, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, I think he does, he does offer this as an idea that sex can be a bargaining chip and that kind of as the relationship prolongs and endures and so on, that sex is essentially used initially, the reason why it's so high is to lock the male partner in and to get the commitment. And then once he's committed, then you don't have to have as much sex. It was thinking about the cost and benefits of sex in general, and the costs are relatively low when you're in your 20s and early 30s, but then as you age pregnancy get higher, and then you hit menopause and-- - But if you can presumably, these studies have controlled for age though. - Yeah, again, there is the age effect is real. There's actually some new data on that, which is kind of weird actually, but we can talk about that separately. But yeah, no, it's a within a relationship time span effect, and it's surprisingly quick. So it wouldn't necessarily just be like, fertility decline, it seems to be like genuine disease. - Maybe it's just non, maybe there's not much evolutionary storytelling to be told here, it's like boredom, but I don't know what's the-- - Well, are we talking like in absolute terms, like how much is it actually decline, absolutely? - It'll be on my Twitter a few more times. - If it's around two, it's gonna be hard to find. Because like relative to men, it totally makes sense, that men are always going to have a stronger sex drive, like in relationship, single, whatever the situation is, just because, you know, like an air management perspective, it's better for men to just sort of be ready to go at any time, but for women, I'm just wondering, like how much of the decline occurs from time one to time two, time three, and so on. - Not sure. Could I say, do you know the idea of women using sex to get guys into relationships? I think it's a bit more symmetrical than that. I think we're gonna have sex bonds, both parties, both partners to each other. - I think, yeah. - The king of sex differences telling us, I don't think there's a sex difference there, there's always gonna be one. I wanted to ask something, and then you can tell me, if this is taking us too far a field here, on our earlier discussion, something occurred to me, which is, you know, like what's the question we're interested in, like regarding sex differences? Is it, you know, how interesting that men are different now than they were decades ago, or how interesting is it that sex differences are larger in this context, but smaller in that one, or are we interested in, you know, what's like the true sex difference? You know, you strip away everything, and like once you really drill down, here's what it is. And I remember, I had this conversation, I think it was in college, working as an RA years ago. And, you know, we were reading about weird societies, Western educated industrialized rich democracies. And, you know, there was this thing going on, both of you, you know, all of you are aware of this, of like, oh, we can't really learn anything about, I mean, I'm simplifying some, we can't really learn much about human psychology, studying weird societies, because this is a very sort of peculiar time in history. These are very strange, you know, weird societies in both senses of the term. And so we need to collect data from other countries and other parts of the world and, you know, look historically and so on. And I wondered, like when we're trying to study, psychology, when we're trying to study human nature, what is more reflective of human nature, too? Is it, you gotta look at the hunter-gatherers, you know, whether extant hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers, you know, in pre-agricultural times, when they were sort of scattered all over the world, and had access to different kinds of land and territory and so on. We gotta study the hunter-gatherers in environments of relative scarcity, because that's how humans lived for most of our evolutionary history. That's what human nature is. Or is it, that can't be human nature because they lived in relative scarcity, and they're only behaving that way, because they're stuck in this kind of, you know, archaic, pre-industrial, pre-literate society, and actually we should be studying rich societies, because now that you have all of your needs met, now sort of the true underlying traits and attributes and characteristics can finally emerge and, you know, instantiate themselves. - So it's kind of like a gender inequality paradox, but it's kind of like the abundance paradox, let's say, we're becoming, you know, interesting. - I mean, yeah, or does the question not even make sense that there is no real true human nature, and that it'll always kind of interact with environments in weird ways? - Yeah, both of the ideas came to my mind, as you were saying that. In terms of what the evolutionary pushes, just directionally, I think, it's good to look at all the different types of societies, do you find it and hunt together as, does it persist even in weird societies? Well, sometimes that's quite good evidence of, and weird societies often, you have a push against traditional sex differences, and they often emerge anyway, suggesting that there is an innate nudge. Yeah, if they get bigger in abundant societies, it may be that they're expressing themselves more than the little for which they were selected to be expressed. So it could be that human nature is able to express itself to an unnaturally extreme degree, potentially. Yeah, does it? - Yeah, that's quite interesting. - Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I spoke to the anthropologist William Buckner about this, and he actually had a real gripe about the evocyte studies on, on sex differences and make preferences. And his gripe was that if the logic is that, the E.E.A. is what forged these, then they really should be more consistent the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, which isn't, which is, you know, it's a, it's a, it's, it's a good, yeah, it's caricatured as like, oh, there was like 10,000 years in the police to see and where we're really, but it's really, it's like a composite of all selection that has happened essentially. And Steve could probably summarize it better than me. But his perspective, which I think is really fair, was that these sex differences and make preferences are less consistently found in these small scale hunter-gatherer societies, and they're more consistently found in these industrialized populations. And that feels like it gives me a gut feeling of like, there's something, something's a little odd here, because really if it was like these are formed by, you know, these sex differences and make preferences evolved in a hunter-gatherer context, and then you go and ask the schwar, and they're like, hey, we actually don't really agree with you about that. That's, that's real alarm bells. It's not necessarily a quality paradox, but just across time. - Exactly, and you don't find this at all, and some of those societies, right? Some, some sex differences aren't found. And some of them even seem to be reversed, like among the, among the Wodabe of the Sahel region, it's men who are, you know, wearing tons of makeup and looking incredibly glamorous, and they actually stand side-by-side in male beauty pageants, and the females actually pick a partner based solely on the physical appearance, or not solely, but you know, quite a lot. - Speaking of some odd rituals, Craig Jones, BJJ guy was telling me he went to go and see a, I don't know whether we're talking hunter-gatherer, but certainly something that's got some primitive elements to it, and the young women would walk through and a alleyway of men, guys on either sides, and the guys would pick sticks of a particular width, and they would whip the girls as they walked past, and the girls were not to make a sound, and if the girls didn't make a sound, they were seen as high as status, because they could endure, their pain tolerance was higher, and every woman that was in this tribe, maybe hunter-gatherer stuff, I'm not too sure, every girl that was in the tribe that back was to, looked like some saying her end is out of the 17th. - So their signaling may value through vermitability, as a pain tolerance, like with your childbirth. - Oh, specifically, I can endure childbirth. - We are very varied as a species, culturally, right? It's amazing. - Yeah, it does give me pause that may preferences aren't found as consistently among hunter-gatherers, definitely does give me pause. The reason I don't just automatically just say well, then it didn't evolve the way evolutionary psychologists have said is that even though you do more consistently find them in non-hunter-gatherer societies, you do find them very consistently in those societies, which I think would be surprising if there was no innate push. So I'm not exactly sure how to square the circle there, and it does give me some degree of pause, but yeah, I do think there's something there. And also, there are other lines of evidence that do find it in more traditional societies that do find sex differences and made preferences, maybe not in sort of self-report contexts, but if you look at folk tales of various stories from right across the world, different world regions, you do find very consistently that people put more importance on women's appearance than they do on men's, and more importance on men's resources and status than they do on women's. So a lot of it does depend on the kind of data that you're looking at. - It just occurred to me, Stephen, your book, I think you point out one line of evidence for the sex differences being sort of evolutionary in origin and not entirely socially constructed is the way that gay men, what they find attractive, appearance in youth and so on. But do gay women, like what are they attracted to? Do they like resources and status in their female partners? Does anyone know of this? - Yes, I think that they do. And I don't think they put like huge amounts of weight on the parents, even though they're evaluating women rather than them. - Yeah, that makes sense to me, because I've seen gay men tend to be very fit and so on, and gay women less so. But then, are they attracted to the kinds of things that heterosexual women are attracted to in a partner? - Right, it was a career ambition and success and those kinds of things. - You know what I would love to see? - Don't think so. - I would love to see a sex toy study between what straight women like and what gay women like. Because there's no reason that the sex toys should in any way resemble a male. - Yeah, except for female anatomy. - Yes, but the way that it's put together, the humanness of it, shouldn't actually matter. Unless you manage to say that, well, this is true, the penis is the optimal vagina penetrating machine. It's been shaped across a billion years. A billion years of penis evolution. Speaking of the ways that humans are quite different, back in, can you tell me what this hamster thing is? - What hamster thing? Oh my gosh. - What's this hamster thing? - There's something to do with the hamster from you as a kid. - Were you not obsessed with hamster? - It was, yeah, but I didn't realize that this was going to be a huge hour. - I didn't realize this was going to be a huge hour. - It's interesting that you say that because. - Oh my gosh. - Oh, nice. - Too lovely. - That's incredible. - Well, I didn't realize that this was public. This is, I feel like I'm in a fever drink and I'm like this is happening. But yeah, no, I think that I was obsessed with hamsters as a child. - Not sexually, right? Just to be clear, right? - Not sexually, I was just. - I pivoted from the penis thing to the hamster thing seamlessly there, but it wasn't sex. This is an incredible gift. Thank you so much. - Yeah, my dad got me a shirt that said hamster man on it. And I think that there are some photos on Google images floating around with me as a. - Be careful when you put on the internet. - So I didn't even put it there. This is, I'm going to put this on right now. - I appreciate you all. You're all awesome. What do you want to plug? Where should people go to check it out? - Rob Henderson's newsletter on substackrobgehenderson.com and the paperback of my first book, "Troubled a Memoir of Foster Care Family in Social Class." - Nice. - My new book, "A Billion Years of Sex Difference" is my previous book, "The Eight that Understudy Universe" and "My Substack", which is the nature, nurture, nature newsletter. - Yeah, man. - "Nothing to sell, follow me on TikTok." - Yeah, you do. Hamster man on TikTok, or at Mac and Murphy. Boys, I appreciate you all. These roundtable things are so fucking fun. It's the best. It's the best. I love you all. Thank you for coming. - Thanks, Luke. - See you next time, everyone. - Boys, yes. - That's great.