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

17:52Dr Dani Sulikowski:I think it explains a lot, or it's starting to explain to me a lot of the differences in male and female behavior, sort of this very much, you said sort of a sprint race, this single thrust, make self as rich, famous, well-known as possible, must gain more muscle, must continue to go in the set, as opposed to this entire suite of social skills that women have that men not only don't have, but can't even recognize. You know, when you and your girlfriend go into a workplace and she says something, she picks up on something that some girl did to her. And you're like, I didn't even know that there was a person here.

18:32Dr Dani Sulikowski:I wasn't even looking. I was busy having fucking pluritifs um i think that it really begins to explain what what drives that asymmetry and it is one of the sexes has a brake pedal and a gas pedal and the other just has a gas pedal

18:48Chris Williamson:yep and i completely agree and i think it's i think the intersexual competition angle i think is well i mean obviously it's it's it's kind of my thing so i'm gonna say it as as a fundamental explanation for almost everything and i do that so people can level criticism at me for that if they want to but I do think that it's the fundamental explanation for why it's kind of well understood and accepted that women have better social skills generally than men. Better lying detectors. Oh, yeah, better lie detectors, better at lying themselves, better manipulation, much better at following the social intricacies, remembering who's friends with who and who said what when and this person.

19:31Chris Williamson:that like one of my favorite little anecdotes and I said this to a guy and his response was oh my god that happened to me too so it's not just my husband but my husband had a falling out once it's not interesting but he had a falling out once with a neighbor and then I don't know about six months later or something he bumped into him at the local supermarket and they had a chat and he came home and he said oh I saw I saw such and such today and I went oh I said oh are you two friends again and he sort of looked at me like like he'd just forgotten he'd just forgotten that they hadn't spoken for six months because they weren't talking to each other and had a falling out.

20:04Chris Williamson:That is something that women would never do. They would simply never forget that someone is not their friend anymore. It just doesn't happen. And so, and I do think that this intersexual competition game that women play is a fundamental organizing principle of female social behavior. I really do. I think it dictates much of what women do much of the time, whether they realize it or not, of course.

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21:03Dr Dani Sulikowski:Shopify takes care of all of that and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling an awesome product. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that I use with Newtonic on Shopify. Right now, you can sign up for a$1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today. That's a lovely description, an organizing principle of female social behavior. I think that's really cool. Before we even get into what are some of the different ways this behavior shows up, I imagine that there's many women listening who don't like the sound of their entire sex and much of their social behavior being painted in this kind of a light.

21:52Dr Dani Sulikowski:Given that you're a woman, how have you found it best to not even soften the blow, but to explain this in a manner that women become receptive to, as opposed to saying, and you do this and you're trying to get your friend to break up with her husband and she's eating herself out of a fertility window and blah, blah, blah.

22:18Chris Williamson:It's an interesting question, actually. Surprisingly, I get, well, so far, and so far I've been exposed, I think, by the nature of social media and whatever, I think I've been exposed to very friendly audiences, both male and female. So I think I've been spared, not entirely, but I've been largely spared too much of vitriolic pushback or even resistance. But actually I get more resistance from men than I get from women. Most women look at me and just nod and just go, yeah, that's exactly what it is. Do you think that's because they've been on the receiving end? Yeah, and every woman's been on the receiving end.

22:58Chris Williamson:Every woman, I think, has to some extent engaged in this, certainly with big individual differences, but I don't think there's any women who escape it either. And so women are very ready, even if they, what I imagine, would be almost definitely less ready to admit that they do it and less ready to admit particular instances in which they've done. Although still in conversations, most people are pretty ready to admit to rather stupid or unkind or whatever things that they did, especially when they were younger. The cover of Youth always gives you some, you know, some willingness to admit horrible things you did as an obnoxious teenager.

23:32Chris Williamson:But women have been the recipient of it. And so women, you know, just sit, many women just sit there and just look at me and just nod and they're just like, yep, yep. I actually get most pushback from men whose impulse, I guess, and I sort of have this sort of verified from one man at least because he came back to me later and explained this to me that this is exactly what was going through his head. I get pushback from men because their impulse is to defend women. Their impulse is to say, you're a woman, but I'm pretty sure this is sexist. I can't quite square those two things at the moment, but I don't like what you're saying.

24:09Chris Williamson:And I actually get much more pushback from men wanting to just somehow not accept that this actually is a fundamental explanation of how women behave.

24:19Dr Dani Sulikowski:I think men are going to be blind to much of this behavior because they don't pick up on the frequency at which it's happening. They are almost never going to be on the receiving end of it, at least in quite the same way. And also, you've got, I guess maybe men would be on the receiving end of something, but they're not going to interpret it in that sort of a manner. That's true. Because they're blind to it. And you've just got the general women are wonderful effect showing up here that men and women prefer women for all things. Okay. So talking about some of the ways that it shows up in this competition shows up in behavior.

25:00Dr Dani Sulikowski:What about women's dating advice? How does it show up there?

25:04Chris Williamson:So, yeah. So it definitely shows up in women's dating advice. I've done a few sort of, not boring, but some sort of, you know, formal academic studies on this showing that in a number of different scenarios, so whether it's relationship formation or deciding, you know, when to start having children, deciding whether to get married, when to start having children, once you've had children, whether to sort of stay home at a stay-at-home mom or go back to work. I have done a bunch of studies looking at relationship advice in these different scenarios and the basic take-home finding is that yes or almost without exception yes women give more reproductively inhibiting advice to hypothetical women whether these are sort of framed as friends or colleagues or whatever in in the study they give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women than what they say they would do themselves in those scenarios so we use what women say they do themselves, what they say they would do themselves as like the benchmark for what they presume would be the most adaptive.

26:03Chris Williamson:And then compared against that, they give more reproductively inhibiting advice to other women. So they're more likely to tell other women about the importance of, you know, not staying home as a mum, but going back to work than they are to say that they would see it as important for themselves to go back to work. And they're more likely to tell other women that they should delay having children and invest more in their career until they build up more career success than what they would say they would invest in career success before having children. So we see that formally, but I think it's perhaps more compelling or at least more interesting in the way we're beginning to see it informally, sort of across mass media and social media.

26:42Chris Williamson:So it's been getting a lot of attention lately that I'm sure you would have seen them. The numerous articles just coming out with various titles, like, you know, I had an affair and it was the best thing I ever did for my relationship. And, you know, those that did the rounds a few days ago, Target I think have released their Valentine's Day range and there's a jumper for women that just says dump him. Yeah, of course, in giant text. And, you know, we're just being bombarded with the – and another good one too was I think it might have been called the article something to the effect of is having a boyfriend right-wing coded and things like that.

27:22Chris Williamson:So we're seeing this sort of devaluing of, certainly devaluing of monogamous relationships and devaluing of committed relationships in public rhetoric. And it also translates into the sort of individual one-on-one advice that women give to each other and it translates to the lab situation when we sort of try to go to formally measure it as well.

27:46Dr Dani Sulikowski:Okay. Many of those articles will justify the points that they're putting forward as emancipating women from relationships that they shouldn't be in, encouraging their independence. Like, why not go back to the workplace? 50 % of marriages end in divorce and you're going to be stuck with no money and the kids look after and all the rest of it. You need to have your own life. It's important for you to do that. You can, you should get out of relationships that you shouldn't be in. maybe you've got some questions about whatever it might be. I guess there is a pretty socially acceptable, positive sum, almost like socially philanthropic.

28:27Dr Dani Sulikowski:I'm bestowing on you some of this interesting and useful advice that helps you push back against these like archaic and heavily structured, restrictive ideas and norms that are holding you in place. what you're saying i think is that would be all well and true if the women who said that also endorsed their beliefs and their behavior is that so is that the sort of right

28:57Chris Williamson:almost so i think so yes you you are correct that in some senses if there was no evidence at all that there was any discrepancy in what women thought was best for themselves what was best for other women, then we would just say, well, this is the female judgment of the trade-offs of the costs and benefits of staying in a relationship versus reserting. Yeah, fair enough, fine. And to some extent that's true, except that, of course, if we're talking about a game of sort of manipulative intersexual competition, which we are, then there will be winners of that game, which are the women we're talking about, the women who espouse these anti-natal, anti-relationship ideologies, values, whatever you want to call them, but don't embody them themselves.

29:42Chris Williamson:But they will also be the losers of this intersexual competition. And these are the women who effectively buy into these ideologies all in and both then espouse them but also embody them. So we would actually expect to see both because if nobody is actually falling for this stuff that's right it wouldn't work it wouldn't work exactly then there's no

30:04Dr Dani Sulikowski:payoff oh that's so good so there are we're great yeah i fucking love when the penny drop you have just seen a 3 000 ton penny fall into my head okay makes makes complete makes complete sense right that if every woman that was uh putting forward some anti-family creation anti-reproductive stories, ideologies, and norms, if all of them weren't adhering to them, that's just another level playing field. There's no competitive advantage between that. So there have to be, we could call them leaders and followers.

30:42Chris Williamson:Leaders and followers, winners and losers. In terms of thinking of it as a competition, there are effectively people who are winning this competition and there are people who are losing this competition. And I guess the most extreme example i think of of women who uh in the in our world um of women who are losing this competition in a massive way and it is a it is a pretty extreme example i'll grant you that but more common than you might think is women who are going out and in their very young and naive you know early 20s um going out and getting themselves made sterile getting their tubes tied or severed or whatever that's um yeah yeah oh my god yes no that that is a thing because it's not like it's not a massive thing but oh no that is i promise you that is absolutely definitely a thing um but you know with this idea that um they're now free that they can now have all the sex in the world they want and they don't have to worry about contraception failing they'll never be tied down they will you know they'll never um have children and what's interesting about this phenomenon is it again it's not just about them doing this to themselves clearly doing this has tremendous signaling value because once they go and do it it then gets signaled it then gets talked about and it gets celebrated and it gets shared upon social media and all the other women come in and tell them how you know what a wonderful liberating decision they've made especially women in their late 30s with three or four kids.

32:16Chris Williamson:Tell them what a wonderful liberating decision it is that they've made. No, this is definitely a thing. So I had a look at, I was looking up the stats on this for a research project I was sort of doing, a talk I was doing actually, based on a research project a couple of years ago. And the tubal ligation procedure is actually, was sort of invented, if you will, because the fallopian tubes is where, is the tissue that actually is responsible for ovarian cancer. and ovarian cancer which you probably know is a pretty bad one it's really hard to detect until it's late stage and so it's you know it's not good it's not good to get ovarian cancer and so a lot of women once they are post-reproductive and they've finished having kids will just go and get their tubes taken out because that basically eliminates the risk of ovarian cancer and so that's why the procedure exists but of course once that procedure exists it now becomes a tool that can be used.

33:10Chris Williamson:And it is absolutely a thing that women are going and getting this. And so one statistic that is quite telling that I was able to locate is that depending on the data set, somewhere between 15 % and 30%, which is a lot, of the women who have this procedure make inquiries about having it reversed. So I'm guessing that none of the women who are post-reproductive age who took these tubes out because of ovarian cancer fears are amongst those looking to have it now reversed. So we're talking about somewhere between 15 % and 30 % of women who have had this procedure. Now, not all of those will have had it for some misguided form of permanent contraception, but some people may have had this procedure for ovarian cancer reasons when they were very young, thinking they wouldn't want children and now really regret it.

34:02Chris Williamson:But there is certainly a substantial proportion of women who are having this procedure thinking that they're going to be very happy being permanently sterile their whole life, only discover at some point that they're not happy with that decision anymore.

34:14Dr Dani Sulikowski:Wow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it really does put a different angle on articles like that Vogue one that went absolutely interstellar is having a boyfriend cringe now.

34:28Chris Williamson:Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. Yeah.

34:30Dr Dani Sulikowski:Oh, that was the one about the right wing. I think so, yeah. No, it was cringe. It was cringe, which I think is maybe equally toxic or maybe even more toxic than being right wing because at least if you're right wing, the other right wing chicks might like you. But if you're cringe, no other chicks like you.

34:44Chris Williamson:Well, have you seen the stats on political orientation though? There are no right wing chicks. This is the problem, right?

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35:27Dr Dani Sulikowski:It adjusts your weight each week based on your progress. And there's a 30 day money back guarantee. So you can buy it, train with it for 29 days. And if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get up to$50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. give me just using that is having a boyfriend cringe now article which almost everybody saw is it your suggestion that many of the proponents of that perhaps even the author of that is going to endorse but not follow that lifestyle and because of that they are able to gain from the relative reproductive success compared with the ones that don't get into relationships that take this dating advice?

36:27Chris Williamson:I think that understanding the balance of who wins and who loses, I think, is really difficult. Because this is the thing. You know you've got that salesman. I always call it a Ponzi scheme, and it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's got a different name. But you know that sales technique, that business model, where you kind of sell what's effectively some form of snake oil, right? You sell some sort of snake oil to somebody, but the people you sell it to, you convince them sufficiently well. Oh, it's an MLM, multi-level

36:56Dr Dani Sulikowski:marketing.

36:57Chris Williamson:Thank you. Yeah, that's right. There we go. And so you convince them and they then become the sellers. So they're now selling snake oil, but they believe in the snake oil, right? So the same thing happens with these reproductively inhibiting, you know, memes, ideas, whatever you want to call them. Many of the people who are then promoting them have also embodied them and taken them on board and genuinely believe them. But from an evolutionary perspective, it's still, you know, their contribution to the game has not finished. So even though they may be effectively, depending on how well they actually embody this particular ideology, potentially for their entire reproductive capacity and end up genuinely on zero, that doesn't mean they're done for, right?

37:41Chris Williamson:They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes, assuming that they have relatives of any kind. They can still improve the reproductive success of their genes by continuing to promote this reproductive suppressive ideology to other women. so they would be selected for to promote it and sell it and pass it on irrespective really of whether they're a winner someone who's not going to embody it or a loser someone who is so whether someone yeah supports this stuff doesn't tell you says they support this stuff doesn't actually tell you which strategy they're adopting the winning strategy or that they've been manipulated and they're on the losing team yeah i suppose

38:27Dr Dani Sulikowski:it makes for a much better smokescreen or it makes your argument seem like it's coming from a much more philanthropic positive someplace if you believe the ideology that you're espousing. For instance, I don't know whether you know Alex Cooper. She does this podcast called Call Her Daddy. I've said some stuff about that I actually disagree with myself on in the past. I think it must have been a very difficult world for her to be in where she started off doing this podcast talking a lot about casual sex and sleep with him and not catch feels, et cetera. Like the classic twenties, like young girl, casual sex thing.

39:06Dr Dani Sulikowski:Um, and then she was having this kind of secret relationship behind the scenes. And then one day kind of revealed that she was engaged and had this very big library of episodes, but was like, he proposed to me in a rose garden and it was beautiful and this is the ring and I'm now doing the family pivot thing uh I don't think that for a long time she would have been thinking anything other than I believe in this I believe in this like I she's not I don't think to see it and this is where I changed sort of what I'd said retrospectively I I don't think that she was going I'm going to encourage women to behave in this way.

39:47Dr Dani Sulikowski:It's just a pretty effective meme. It sounds very positive some, it's much more progressive and modern and contemporary and sort of socially acceptable than the opposite, which kind of sounds restrictive and bourgeois. And then you get to the stage where, oh, I now need to embody this and my life is pulling me in a different direction. And that's the point at which it becomes really interesting because you say, I said all of this stuff in the past. Do I now still agree with me previously? Do I wish that I'd said something different? Was I too militant with the way that I was saying that stuff?

40:26Dr Dani Sulikowski:So all of that together, I thought was pretty interesting. But one other angle to this, I suppose, that isn't necessarily dating advice for heterosexual relationships, but I wonder if the broad elite female support for LGBT or sort of non-typical relationship preferences is also a type of fertility suppression. Because I guess having a boyfriend or a husband might be cringe, but I bet that having a girlfriend or a wife wouldn't be cringe.

40:55Chris Williamson:Correct. I agree 100%. So I have spoken a little bit before how I think that not just the sort of LGBTQ movement, but broadly, which I think it is but also the the transgenderism as well is also that the reason why I think that the I mean and the you know the data on this I think reasonably well known that it is almost by and large exclusively women who are really strongly in favor of gender ideology and are the pushes of gender ideology which is why it has taken hold in industries and workplaces and whatever that are dominated by women. And I think that too is because it has very clear reproductive suppressive implications.

41:43Chris Williamson:It was really interesting what you were saying about that podcast, if I can go back to that for just a second, because that also raises a really interesting dichotomy or an interesting contrast. And that is because that for the vast majority of women, it would not be adaptive to reproduce when you become biologically able to reproduce. So there is this sort of tension in the sort of human mating system that is created by the fact that women become biologically able to get pregnant long before it's actually adaptive necessarily for them to do so under most circumstances. There are circumstances where it would be adaptive.

42:26Chris Williamson:But under most circumstances, it's not adaptive to do that. And so women do definitely have a stage of life where it actually makes sense for them to engage in self-reproductive suppression and to be discouraging themselves. And obviously that used to manifest. That's interesting. Yeah, that used to manifest in encouraging young girls not to have sex effectively. But now it sort of manifests in quite different ways. And so we've actually got a situation where there is sort of already built into the system, there is this period of sexual maturity in which it's actually adaptive for women to, you know, even though they are capable of reproducing, it would actually be, you know, in terms of their long-term lifetime reproductive success, it would under most circumstances for most women be maladaptive to get pregnant during that time period.

43:18Chris Williamson:And so it's not, therefore, to me, looking at things through an intersexual competition lens. It's completely unsurprising that that is the time period that feminism and women's lib has targeted as encouraging women to really, really heavily engage in risky sexual behavior. Because that is the one time period in which you don't actually want to get pregnant. And so we then see these same women's lib feminist type talking heads when it comes to talking about sex within marriage. And all of a sudden, that's unpaid labor and emotional labor, and that's oppressive. And, you know, husbands have no right to demand sex off their wives.

43:56Chris Williamson:And yet, when you're in your early 20s and unmarried, sleeping with, you know, every single man that gets within three feet of you, apparently that's some form of liberation. situation um it's it's an interesting it's interesting dichotomy the other really interesting thing that it raises it's also worth thinking about is that there is actually always attention when you want to signal something manipulatively the best way to signal it is to is to do it or to look like you're doing it or to appear like you're doing it and of course the most effective way to appear like you're doing it is to actually do it so any kind of manipulative signal in some sense is potentially costly to the signaller because they need to do this to themselves to some extent in order to convince their rivals to do it to themselves to a greater extent.

44:45Chris Williamson:And so there is this dangerous, very dangerous sort of cost-benefit payoff matrix that women have to navigate when they're engaging in this type of manipulative signaling. And some manipulative signalers might just really, really get that cost-benefit calculation very wrong and simply just engage in the manipulative behavior that the costly signal to a much greater extent than they can tolerate and effectively score a massive own goal.

45:16Dr Dani Sulikowski:Give me an example of how that might manifest.

45:18Chris Williamson:so it's so going back to the example of women who are getting themselves sterilized in their early 20s and then shouting all over it on social media and there was there was one um instance in particular i remember of a girl who got her tubes set into resin so she could wear them around her neck as a necklace so that she could tell everybody she met that they were her Jesus Christ Yeah. Poor girl. Anyway, but see, I imagine that is, you know, that is potentially, that is clearly a case of a woman who has now lost the intersexual competition game. I mean, that is just a massive own goal right there.

45:54Chris Williamson:It's finished. It's over. But I imagine that the tendency to behave in these types of ways and to do these grand social gestures of, oh, yes, I'm never going to have children. Children are terrible. That's not the life path that you should choose. It's not the life path I've chosen. The selective pressure on women to be highly intersexually competitive women, to be compelled to engage in these kinds of grand gestures would potentially lead them to do things like get themselves permanently sterilized. Exactly, they massively overshoot because the mechanisms have not evolved to deal with every individual instance of signaling behavior, you know, opportunity that might present itself.

46:39Chris Williamson:And so what could be engaged in, you know, motivated by mechanisms that involved to effectively promote manipulative signaling might actually do the self a lot of harm. Because those mechanisms are not sensitive to their own outcomes.

46:53Dr Dani Sulikowski:Okay.

46:54Chris Williamson:So we've got manipulated losers and we've got people who basically, you know, beat themselves in the game. There's two types of losers.

47:04Dr Dani Sulikowski:So you said it's a massive own goal. again I think it's worth restating that what you mean when you say own goal is in terms of the currency that evolution cares about because if you take contemporary culture people might say what does it matter that she's got her tubes tied she can have as much sex as she wants she doesn't need to worry about child care she doesn't need to worry about a nanny she can work and she can go out and she's never going to get pregnant like that sounds like liberation it sounds like

47:31Chris Williamson:liberation um I mean I would argue that it's not and and I'm not the only person who argues that But it's not. I mean, I think Louise Perry has done a pretty good job of mounting the argument that women who engage in that type of behaviour are typically not actually very happy. In fact, they're quite miserable. And fast forwarding to much later points in life, because this has now been going on for long enough, that we do have cohorts of women who are at the end of their, beyond the end of their reproductive years and who are now realising that they've seriously missed a really important vote.

48:05Chris Williamson:and are miserable and depressed and unhappy, having sort of realised where these types of life choices lead you. And so, yeah, I'm speaking in terms of the evolutionary consequences of these decisions, and that is, reproductively speaking, obviously an own goal. But it's not that that is just some esoteric evolutionary calculation. these decisions have real life impacts on women as well, which we are now, which I mean, really, I think should have predicted they weren't going to be a net positive. But now we are seeing that they are absolutely not a net positive. So these are absolutely having, you know, real life, individual proximate impacts on the women who take these decisions as well, that generally don't seem to be good ones.

48:55Dr Dani Sulikowski:It is a fascinating duality to hear that casual sex is a form of sexual female liberation, but sex with your husband is unpaid labor or it's oppressive or subjugative or whatever. It is really interesting, the duality of these things. I have a question. Regardless of whether or not it would be evolutionarily useful from a resource perspective to try and do, do reproductive suppression strategies work against men?

49:27Chris Williamson:that's an excellent question so i would so i i think there's a there's a two-part answer and that the first part is generally no because of the reasons we've already already described so in the limited circumstance where you where as a as a man um you are looking to actually get the partner of arrival so you're looking to like mate poach um yeah then you know harming another man's you know potential reproductive output you know and doing things to him um might help you um if it helps destroy that really are sabotaging his relationship the way women sabotage each other's relationship that that might help you um but but again the the reason you're doing that is not really because you care about his reproductive success it's because you've decided you want his partner for whatever reason um so you know for the reasons we talked about before the fact that other men can pick up the slack the fact that there's very little men can do within themselves to actually move the dial on the population's background reproductive rate just means that the payoff matrix isn't there.

50:28Chris Williamson:However, there's a second part, I think, to that answer. And that is if we fast forward a little bit, or maybe, better way, zoom out a little bit. And instead of thinking at the moment, we've sort of thought and spoken mostly about this being kind of an individual-on-individual interaction or many-on-one or one-on-many. But once you reach the stage of reproductive suppression that I argue that we're at, so I know that you're aware that the birth rate is well below replacement level and is declining. And my argument is that in itself is because of manipulative reproductive suppression that that is in fact the ultimate explanation for what we're seeing and i think that once you actually reach that point then you perhaps do get to see um a benefit to men of engaging in their own type of because your reproductive suppression your weapon is now sufficiently powerful that you're able to do it at a broad enough scale

51:36Dr Dani Sulikowski:that this might actually work. But how would that, we wouldn't have an evolved mechanism. We wouldn't have anything in our programming as men to be able to understand that. Surely we can't adapt to a novel situation that quickly.

51:49Chris Williamson:That's a really good point. And that's why I don't, that's why my argument is that this is not a novel situation. This is actually, so what we're experiencing now with birth rate decline and the rise of feminist ideals and the feminisation of the institutions. All of this is part of a repeated pattern that we see in civilisation after civilisation after civilisation. This is not a unique idiosyncratic issue that has appeared in the West as a function of the particular social and technological forces that we sort of find ourselves living with. This is actually the human mating system. It goes through these cycles.

52:30Chris Williamson:And so actually, yes, we have been here before and there has been selection pressure operating. And this is actually the system. This is not a bug. This is a system operating as intended.

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53:13Dr Dani Sulikowski:If you go to the link in the description below or head to gym.sh slash modernwisdom, use the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's gym.sh slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 at checkout. When you say we have been here before, as far as I'm aware, we haven't really seen birth rates decline really ever below replacement. There's been incidents where... No, that's not true.

53:38Chris Williamson:So certainly declining birth rates are part of the suite of things that have been pointed to as things that we see in civilizations that are declining and degrading and reaching their end point. same as we see the price of sex going down and art becoming vulgar and we see marriage rates declining, we see birth rates declining. So Rome, towards its very end, a little bit earlier than its very end, but it had many policies in place of what we're calling a baby bonus to try to motivate women to get married and to have children because the fertility rate was declining so severely. And what happened in Rome, and I would hazard a guess, it's a similar thing that's happening now, is the birth rate declined sharply, primarily because the women were choosing to be liberated and to be free and to not be married and to not be mothers and to have careers and everything else.

54:42Chris Williamson:And that left a relatively small number of women having a relatively small number of children, which meant that those women were able to have sort of their pick of men. And so reproductive success amongst men, especially to some extent amongst women as well, but especially amongst men, became restricted to the very elite of men. And the rest of men just basically got kicked out. Right. Okay.

55:05Dr Dani Sulikowski:So women, that cultural adjustment, which was anti-family, anti-coupling, anti-mating affected women more than it affected men. Many men wanted to mate, but fewer women did. And that basically skewed the sex ratio so that women had more power, but also so that the high, as happens with the tall girl problem, the high status men also relative get more power than they would have done. Okay. So reproductive suppression may work against men. We're not quite sure how ingrained that mechanism would be evolutionarily. So comparatively, it's easier to influence women in this regard. Why is it the case then that women haven't developed a defense mechanism to this?

55:57Dr Dani Sulikowski:Like, why would you leave the keyhole in there if that vulnerability, we already know, what is it? F to M is like five times as many transitions as M to F. uh the ROGD rapid onset gender dysphoria thing um women eating disorder social contagions as well yeah the social contagion thing is there especially during puberty right I'm looking around I'm scanning my environment I'm vigilant for what's cool what's hot what's not I need to make sure that I'm on trend why would human evolution not patch that bug so that females wouldn't be susceptible to this because surely that would be the ultimate game.

56:38Dr Dani Sulikowski:Like I'm just a reproduction machine and you can't suppress my fertility no matter what you tell me.

56:47Chris Williamson:Because it's not a bug, it's a feature. And this is the problem. So it's a bug for the women who lose, but the women who lose, it's not their genes that get passed on. for the women who win, who are engaging in this behaviour, it's a feature because it promotes their reproductive success and so the genes perpetuate. The fact that there are losers.

57:09Dr Dani Sulikowski:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm totally right. Would that not suggest then that we are the progeny of the women who are the least susceptible to these sorts of things, given that they are the genes of the ones who didn't necessarily embody, even if they maybe did endorse?

57:25Chris Williamson:Yes, potentially. But the other part of the sort of system that makes this make sense is that human civilizations have got like this cycle. And so we only are able to see this type of female manipulative reproductive suppression that we see now under certain circumstances. And those circumstances include affluence and safety. And so when you've got societies that are not very affluent and not very safe, then the payoff matrix isn't there. Women are investing all of the resources that they have and all of the resources that they get to accrue into their own reproduction and into their own offspring.

58:08Chris Williamson:It's once you get to a point where we have the affluence of organized society that women have an opportunity to be able to accrue more resources than what they just need to pour in. You get like a law of diminishing returns. The resources that the elite women are effectively able to accrue, it's no longer adaptive to just keep pouring all of those into their own individual reproductive success. It now becomes more and more adaptive to start pouring this time, effort, and energy into manipulative, reproductive suppression of rivals. And the more affluent and the safer the society gets, the more the scales tip in that way.

58:50Chris Williamson:So because this is not an adaptive strategy under all circumstances, it doesn't reach fixation, if you like. And so what you sort of end up with is, well, according to my theory, I should probably be careful to preface that. because much of what I'm saying is not the sort of thing that you will be finding other people reaching any kind of consensus on. I think most people understand that's pretty far out stuff. But according to the way I see it, the winners of this game effectively enter a sort of genetic bottleneck. So as fertility rates drop and the fertility rates are well below replacement, then the size of the mating pool is actually much, the effective population size is much smaller than the actual population size.

59:40Chris Williamson:So it may not necessarily look like a genetic bottleneck because we're not actually necessarily seeing a massive population crash. But when large numbers of the population, large numbers of women in the population are not reproducing, and that does appear to be what's happening. So I think there might be modest falls amongst women who have children. I think there might be sort of modest falls in the number of children they're having, but I think that's largely being maintained. What's causing or what's sort of accounting for the large fall in birth rates is the massive increase in the number of women having no children.

1:00:15Chris Williamson:So what we're seeing is large numbers of women actually withdrawing themselves.

1:00:19Dr Dani Sulikowski:If you have one, the likelihood is you have 2.5, but the number, the proportion of women who don't have one at all, that is the big cohort that's contributing to birth rate decline.

1:00:29Chris Williamson:Yeah, exactly.

1:00:30Dr Dani Sulikowski:Is it possible to have these sorts of conversations publicly? Without getting heat.

1:00:39Chris Williamson:Yes, it is almost impossible to have these types of conversations. And look, I think the sole explanation I would say for me not yet having sort of really encountered any serious blowback is just lack of exposure. And you're right, that may well change. Good luck after this. So be it. That's fine. That's fine. You know, my life's been boring up until now. Why not have some fun? Wonderful. But no, you can't. And I think one of the reasons, I think one of the main reasons why, well, according to my theory, one of the main reasons why we can't have this particular conversation about birth rate declines, motherhood and reproduction, you know, maybe other aspects of intersexual competition speak to more women directly and they can empathise with it and they can understand it.

1:01:29But once you start talking about birth rate decline and you start talking about women having children in particular, you're getting, you're really just cutting straight through to the heart of the issue.

1:01:42Chris Williamson:Everything else is just peripheral, right? Everything else is just in service of birth rate decline. All the other aspects of female intersexual competition, they're just ultimately in service of birth rate decline, right? So, you know, giving women poor relationship advice, that's so that they will have either poor relationships or no relationships, which greatly reduces the likelihood of them reproducing or at least reproducing successfully. Because, you know, I mean, I'm sure you're aware that the stats are pretty clear on the costs of fatherlessness to children, right? The outcomes are just systematically substantially worse across the board for fatherless children.

1:02:21Chris Williamson:And so if you can encourage women to, you know, to engage in behaviours that result in them being single mothers, that's not quite as good as resulting in them being not mothers at all, but it's pretty good. It's a pretty good way to damage their ultimate reproductive success. So, you know, we talk about all the other issues and, you know, sometimes we can have a little bit of fun with it. people had a lot of fun with that haircut study that I did where you know women will advise other women to cut off more hair and they you know they focus this kind of most strongly towards women that are perceived to be as attractive as they are so like they're direct rivals on the mating market and we can have a little bit of fun with these types of conversations and I can have a little bit of fun with feminists sometimes about certain things but once you get down to talking about birth rates and children and motherhood now you're getting to the heart of the issue and that's not fun anymore.

1:03:14Chris Williamson:Now you're a serious threat to the ultimate reason for the strategy and it gets women very angry.

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1:04:29Chris Williamson:That's join.whoop.com slash modernwisdom.

1:04:33Dr Dani Sulikowski:what is your perspective on women being encouraged to enter the workplace by other women, how that plays into your perspective here?

1:04:43Chris Williamson:So, yeah, so I think that is, I mean, I think that, you know, that talk by her and then the essay she wrote, she's done a couple of podcasts. I mean, I think that was fantastic. So she's, I mean, she's like almost 100 % correct in most everything that she says, all of the observations that she makes about workplaces, what she says happens when women reach sort of a critical mass, you know, and it's not, I mean, I think at some point she was sort of, she did, I think, emphasise, if I remember correctly, that, you know, the sort of the points in time where these workplaces, you know, became sort of more than 50 % female and that she sort of pointed that as the tipping point.

1:05:21Chris Williamson:And we have a small point of difference there. I think that you don't need women to be at 50 % in workplaces to get the ball rolling, to see these changes begin to emerge. Women don't need to be at those. The mechanisms by which women use to make these changes in the workplace are not democratic and so they don't need a democratic majority to do it. I think the critical mass of women is actually substantially lower and their ability to manipulate both their male and female colleagues allows these types of things to happen well before you actually get to the 50%. So that's a small point of difference.

1:05:57Chris Williamson:But everything that she was saying, other than that, I think about what's happening in these workplaces and the fact that it's because of the proportion of women in them, I think is absolutely 100 % bang on. And I think it's fantastic that she got so much traction that she was able to effectively start a conversation on something, which I think people had been either unwilling or unable to really get a conversation started on. And I think maybe the fact that she was a woman coming out saying that.

1:06:28Dr Dani Sulikowski:Oh, God. If a man had written that article, it would have been absolute death. But, I mean, look, you're a woman who is professionally accomplished. Is it not a good thing for women to be able to get into the workplace, to be able to have their own careers, be financially independent, have a life, all of that?

1:06:47Chris Williamson:Depends what you mean by good. Depends what you mean by good. So, you know, if we sort of think about human societies from first principles for a moment, in order for societies to grow and stay healthy, they need to reproduce, well, in order to exist, they need to reproduce at least replacement. Ideally, they need to grow, right? Growth is great for prosperity, which means they need to reproduce at above replacement. Now, depending on the costs of reproduction, you know, in a society like ours, you know, individual people are able to accrue the resources needed for successful reproduction quite easily.

1:07:25Chris Williamson:And in societies gone past, you know, reproductive success was relatively much more expensive. And all that excess wealth is one of the reasons why we have this massive manipulative reproductive suppression. So if you're in a society where you need to maintain, you know, an investment in reproduction that will ensure that the reproductive rate stays at above replacement levels in order to continue prosperity and the women in your population who are the ones who basically are the limiters on your reproductive output decide to invest a certain amount of time and effort and energy in non-reproductive activities such that it becomes impossible for your society to reproduce at the levels required to maintain prosperity is that a good thing or a bad thing it's the end of it's the end of the society.

1:08:14Chris Williamson:The society simply cannot sustain itself. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

1:08:18Dr Dani Sulikowski:Yeah, no individual is going to think, I'm going to not do the thing that seems exciting and independence enabling to me in order for me to serve. It feels almost like some kind of social reproductive conscription that you're asking me to do where I don't get to do this thing because the world civilization needs me to be a birthing machine.

1:08:44Chris Williamson:So feminism has certainly done a really stellar job of making sure that that's the way people think. And, you know, props to it. But forgetting about the imposition on individual people for a moment, because we could say exactly the same thing. In fact, I think we could say much more about what's needed about the male commitment to keep a civilisation profiting. I mean, you think that it might be bad news for women that they need to have children and families in order for civilization to prosper. Well, what do men need to do in order for civilization to prosper? They need to work themselves to the bone, frequently die, get sent off to war.

1:09:27Chris Williamson:If civilization is going to prosper, men have got a pretty raw deal. So it's not as though we're talking about it's all fun and games for men and women have to carry some sort of burden. So if we're able to put that bit aside for a moment, even just answering the question of is it good or is it bad if a society moves in a direction that effectively dooms that society after a couple of generations, is that a good thing or a bad thing? That's not an easy question to answer. If your argument is that, well, it's better for the individuals who are in that society at the moment because they'll have a more fun life, it's worse for the continuation of the society.

1:10:13Chris Williamson:But if we're going to prioritize the individual, then maybe that's a good thing.

1:10:18Dr Dani Sulikowski:It's a very individualistic society at the moment, right? I mean, that's an awful lot of the well-meaning and bad-meaning pushback that I get online is saying something along the lines of you're trying to remove agency, taking women out of the boardroom and putting them back into the kitchen, etc. It's very much, the language is almost exclusively framed around independence.

1:10:45Chris Williamson:Yeah, of course it is. And it's a very effective way of framing it. it's probably a little bit of a different conversation, but the notion of individual freedom and decision-making around these things is also a little bit, is also just a little bit of a fallacy and a little bit quality. It's kind of the libertarian fantasy, right, that if you just let everybody do what they want, then everybody will do what they want and everybody will be happy, when in fact that the vast majority of people only know what to do based on what everybody else does anyway so if you don't actually have which we're sort of seeing now um when you abandon that the kinds of sort of you know societal institutions that you know placed guardrails on what people should do and had to do um you just end up with people being really vulnerable to manipulation by others because actually the majority of people don't sort of make their own decisions about what they would want to do anyway they they go with the crowd and they follow the norm um but to get back to your question about you know is it is it a good thing or is it a bad thing to have women generally in the workplace um and you know it's it's hard to it depends on what you mean by good or bad if you mean good or bad for the society well then there's definitely i mean it's definitely bad for the society if the inevitable result of it is that it's terminal i think we can argue that that's definitely bad at the level of the society.

1:12:18Chris Williamson:So then we have to move down to the level. So let's move down. We don't have to, but let's say now we move down to the level of the individual and say, well, is it good or is it bad for the individual? And so, well, have a look at the state of women at the moment, massive mental health crisis, not generally not happy, ending up childless, partnerless. So we're not, you know, and we sort of spoke about this earlier in this discussion as well, that, you know, the end results of these strategies for women, you know, I think sensible people, I think would have predicted that they may not have been very positive, but we're now seeing, you know, that the happiest women are the women who are married and have children and the least happy women are the women who are not married and don't have children.

1:13:04Chris Williamson:So once again, it depends on what you mean by good. What's the most, just on that, what's the most robust data

1:13:12Dr Dani Sulikowski:that you've seen around the comparative happiness levels between coupled women with kids and single women without kids?

1:13:22Chris Williamson:I couldn't answer off the top of my head. I would have to go and look it up. My understanding of it is that it is pretty robust and it's been out there for a while. It's not just one recent study or anything. It's kind of multiple studies out for long periods of time. It's pretty well understood that in terms of life satisfaction, self-reported well-being self-reported mental health problems like it's not just one dv either it's multiple dvs are all pointing to married women with children being happier than single

1:13:52Dr Dani Sulikowski:women who are not mothers the the interesting thing that i and maybe it was just because of the cohort of people that were commenting on this little storm in a teacup what i was surprised by was in the same way as you have pro-life and pro-choice, you should still have pro-motherhood and kind of anti-motherhood or pro-natal and anti-natal. And I was just surprised at how few people stand up and say something to the extent of mothers are important and having kids is a good thing. That there's kind of a soft misogyny to saying that the highest contribution that a woman can make is behaving or working like her father and having sex like her brother.

1:14:41Dr Dani Sulikowski:Like it is a kind of soft misogyny. And I don't think that that's necessarily seen as the call coming from inside of the house all the time. Okay. So what are some of the more under-recognized methods of intrasexual competition that women engage in? What are some of the elements that people typically don't think about?

1:15:02Chris Williamson:So I think perhaps the least, I think probably one of the least well recognized because it's sort of framed as a man-hating thing I would say is or is the whole kind of toxic masculinity little cottage industry that's appeared so that's you know frequently and and you know not without good reason um it's frequently framed as like an anti-male movement it's you know it's the man-hating you know stream of feminism that wants to brand not just men as toxic but boys as toxic and I don't know um I don't know what your experiences are and what you've seen but certainly in Australia um and I believe the UK there's lots of talk and I think it's sort of actually happening now they're introducing effectively like pre-emptive education into schools for young boys so they can teach them not to be toxic and these are you know exactly what you would imagine um and you know there was a made a little bit of a splash um just the other week there was a study that came out um saying you know talking about how terrible it is that you know our young boys the young boys have just got all of these you know toxic attitudes it was an Australian study young boys got all these toxic attitudes and and of course the the attitudes were were things like you know some women lie about you know sexual assault allegations like that's not a toxic attitude that's just happens to be the truth so so you know we're sort of seeing this you know real branding of male toxicity uh which is and i'm don't deny that that's having terrible effects on men so i'm you know i'm about to suggest that the men are actually the collateral damage of that whole little enterprise.

1:16:51Chris Williamson:And just because it's collateral doesn't mean it's not serious, doesn't mean I'm minimizing the impact it's having on men.

1:16:56Dr Dani Sulikowski:So explain to me how branding men and masculinity as toxic is female intrasexual competition.

1:17:05Chris Williamson:Because it destroys female mate choice preferences. It's what it's targeting, what the toxic brand is being attached to is every aspect of men that women should actually, that women, I won't say every single aspect of men because it obviously gets targeted at actually bad behavior, but most of the regular, all of the regular masculine behaviors that this toxic label gets thrown at are exactly the type of masculine behaviors that women should actually be looking for in a high value partner. And so it is skewing women's mate choice preferences.

1:17:41Dr Dani Sulikowski:Can you explain how that manifests or how that comes into land?

1:17:46Chris Williamson:Men who are socially dominant and socially aggressive make for excellent providers and for excellent protectors. But any kind of social dominance or aggression shown by men is being completely demonized and labeled toxic. to the point where I was, I won't say who, but I was having a discussion the other day with a guy who was sort of explaining that one of the things that really upsets him the most about what he sees amongst kind of, you know, his peers, and he was American, what he sees amongst his peers is the lack of men policing each other's behaviour anymore because from where he sits, his sort of impression of what's going on is that any kind of male aggression and male dominance is so, has been deemed as so inappropriate and such terrible behaviour by women or just by society at large that men don't even feel it's appropriate to be aggressive and dominant with other men who are behaving badly.

1:18:53Chris Williamson:So he was sort of using the example of how, you know, there are men who would, you know, he was sort of saying that, you know, when he was a bit younger, you know, back in his day, you know men who didn't treat women well or men who showed any kind of inappropriate interest in children would be you know taken out a back shed and be beaten to within an inch of their life and then they wouldn't do it anymore or at least would you know think really hard about about doing it again and he said that sort of stuff simply doesn't happen now because people are as concerned or even more concerned about demonizing the behavior of taking him around the back of the shed and beating him to the inch of his life than they are about demonizing the behavior that needed to be policed in the first place and so what we're seeing is is you know society feminism whatever you want to call it having reshaped the positive aspects of male dominance and male strength and you know even what they've decided to to label uh benevolent sexism which just because they've called it benevolent they don't see it as it's good um which is basically all of the etiquette around gender role interactions that happen to favour women, they still decide that sexism that is inherently bad for women but even the benevolent sexism, all of that stuff has been demonised and been sort of, you know, labelled sort of, you know, no longer socially acceptable.

1:20:14Chris Williamson:And so men can no longer behave in the kinds of ways that they used to behave in order to be able to demonstrate their quality as a prospective mate to women. And so men are responding by actually engaging in what you might call beta behavior just to demonstrate that they're not a strong masculine man. And women are being taught to reject men. They're taught to recognize signs of masculinity and mate quality as red flags to be avoided.

1:20:44Dr Dani Sulikowski:If women are influencing men to be more docile and women are being taught to get into relationships with men who are more docile and less aggressive, how is this not just a changing of the mating landscape and the preferences moving over time? How does this suppress anything? It seems to be a set of instructions being given out and a set of preferences being adjusted.

1:21:09Chris Williamson:because i don't think that we're because we're not necessarily seeing the it's not as though the women who would have paired up with the high quality men who were able to you know uh able to signal all of those signals of strength and dominant because they're costly signals right they're real signals that's the signals of effectively harmlessness uh don't differentiate between mate quality because you don't actually have to have anything or do anything or be anything In order to be physically dominant and socially dominant and be able to be aggressive, you have to be big, you have to be strong, you have to have good leadership, you have to be competent.

1:21:47Chris Williamson:You don't need anything to not be competent, to not be strong, to not have good leadership and to not have social dominance. And so it's not that it's sort of one set of reliable, costly signals now just having to be signaled a different way. It's obliterating all of the male ways and sort of de-socializing all of the male ways of advertising their own mate quality. And it's leaving men with ways of advertising their own mate quality that are not reliable indicators of mate quality, which makes it very difficult for women to actually choose quality mates. And any reliable indicators of mate quality that do manage to bleed through are being systematically de-preferenced by women rather than being preferenced.

1:22:29Dr Dani Sulikowski:Okay. So it's... Let me see if I've got this right. You're suggesting that women are saying these sorts of traits, typically masculine, dominant, prestige, go-getter traits, are things that men shouldn't engage in and that women shouldn't like. But the problem is that women aren't as capable at getting themselves to not like those things or, more specifically, to like the reverse of those things.

1:22:57Chris Williamson:That's right. And so women might make these explicit sort of, you know, make choice decisions where, you know, they might be encouraged by their friends or whatever to sort of, you know, go out with this guy, even though they're not especially attracted to him or to not go out with that guy, even though they might be attracted to him. and therefore they end up in relationships where the relationships are either not compatible, they don't work very well, they don't last very long and they don't end up becoming long-term stable relationships in which you can raise families because the other thing that sort of happens, if women make, I think this happens to a reasonable extent to men as well but more so with women.

1:23:37Chris Williamson:Women are by far the sex that terminates relationships more commonly if women pair up with someone who they then later decide is not sort of of their mate quality the relationship doesn't work and they're not satisfied and they do attempt to trade up at least in those you know early stages before it's complicated by having children and and things like that and so it's you know if you can convince women to perpetually date men that her brain is going to tell her no this is not the person that you should be reproducing with then she's going to find it very difficult to end up actually having a nice, profitable, stable, long-term relationship that will work.

1:24:20Dr Dani Sulikowski:I think what would be interesting would be to look at the women who are proposing, whatever you want to call them, cinnamon roll husband, golden retriever husband approach.

1:24:32Chris Williamson:Look at their husbands?

1:24:33Dr Dani Sulikowski:Look at their husbands. Yeah, exactly. Who is it that you're marrying? who is it that the women are ultimately getting with. And, you know, part of this you could see as well, it's people don't know what they want. And they're, I thought I was right in the past. I thought that the casual sex thing, the sleep at them and not catch feels thing. I thought that was right then, but it's not right now. I think when you do see that it does show some women may reach like realization, escape velocity to get out of that mindset and into the one that they end up in. But other women may just cycle through a series of medium-term relationships with guys who are not a type that they want to keep going because they've seen this meme and they've committed to it.

1:25:16Dr Dani Sulikowski:And they think that that's the way. So yeah, I can see how it's difficult, right? Because I mean, one of the biggest insights that I learned when thinking about Me Too was that blanket advice doesn't land on people evenly. So when you say to guys, don't be pushy, the guys who really could have done with a little bit more gumption and less approach anxiety will take that to heart while the guys that were blowing through boundaries all along don't think that it's meant for them in any case.

1:25:47Chris Williamson:That's right. Exactly. If you're going to blow through boundaries, then putting up an extra boundary is not going to change your behavior. If you're the type of person who doesn't blow through boundaries, well, as you say, putting up a boundary just pushes you even further back.

1:25:59Dr Dani Sulikowski:Yeah. Going back to the benevolent sexism thing, did you see there was a video i think it might be in a cctv video of a girl in vietnam she was traveling and she got her bag tried to be taken off by a guy with a knife it looked like there were two travelers a man and a woman young maybe 20 something like that this video was maybe a

1:26:20Chris Williamson:month ago a month and a half ago and he hides yes he hides but he hides behind the pillar yeah yeah

1:26:27Dr Dani Sulikowski:So I thought that was really fascinating, looking at the response from that in particular, because so many of the responses were, this guy's not worth your time of day, men are trash, girl, just leave him, this is what's the current generation of men. And trying to square that circle with dominance in men, benevolent sexism, sort of a patriarchal, classically masculine protectionist belief about women being delicate and special and needing men to use their increased robustness and resilience to be able to wall them off from the world. in one headline it says that that's oppressive and in another headline it says that it's a marker of like modern men not being up to standards well yeah it feels like talking out of both sides of

1:27:28Chris Williamson:your mouth it is and that's this is why men can't win right this is there is this is why i think many men are almost sort of self just just deciding to just self-remove from the making mating market entirely because they've seen the writing on the wall and you know they they understand in some cases perhaps perhaps misunderstand and perhaps overestimating the risk but I don't know I think I think the risks are real um and it's hard to know what what weight men should put on those but you know it's it's really difficult because there's very little that men can do that they're not going to be criticized for, right?

1:28:07Chris Williamson:If you go and approach a woman, you know, then in some cases, you know, you're sort of automatically being demanding and sexist and presumptuous. Like I'm not sure if you remember, I remember because they went up around my university, that little fad where they started putting up pictures of, you know, various women's faces with certain statements underneath and supposedly being things that, you know, men needed to hear from women and one of them was is you know i don't owe you polite conversation so you know the very idea yeah the very idea that a man you know expecting that if he goes and talks to a woman she might at least be polite even that was a sexist presumption right like there is very little that men can actually do that is not going to lead to them being potentially criticized and sometimes quite seriously by one or other branch of you know the talking heads the progressive collective progressive talking heads you know from various feminist angles and so it has become incredibly difficult for men and then you know they do have genuine fears about you know i think you know i don't want to sort of necessarily sort of speak on behalf of men because i suspect i don't really know feel free to um yeah i suspect speaking for the male community speaking for the male community sure let me just go right off um no i think that there is a very real fear of false accusations of sexual harassment or sexual assault.

1:29:27Chris Williamson:And I think that that is probably, in a really confusing way for a lot of young men, is probably blended with, you know, sort of coupled with genuine fears of maybe actually accidentally

1:29:38Dr Dani Sulikowski:committing a sexual offence or sexual assault.

1:29:40Chris Williamson:And it's really difficult to tell those two things apart, I think, especially for a lot of young, inexperienced men. And so they're scared of the false accusation, but they're also scared of the, you know, accidental commission of an offense, which is a crazy position for young men to be in.

1:29:57Dr Dani Sulikowski:Well, on that, is it a crazy position for men to be in? There are certainly times where guys can be fumbling around and coercive, emotionally manipulative in a way that doesn't cross anything close to a legal boundary or even something that's ethical, but there's a bit of gamesmanship. She said no. So he took his arm out from underneath and stopped cuddling her and turned over on the other side of the bed and said, well, if we're not going to do it, I'm going to go to sleep. Like, is that, like, what's that? Because that's an effective strategy of kind of the retreating, the removal of emotional comfort and physical touch because you didn't want to do that thing.

1:30:44Dr Dani Sulikowski:But I, like, is that, you know, we just create this entire spectrum. I think as a perfect example, this was probably five years ago or six years ago now. I was out in London with a friend who was 20, 21. And there was a group of girls up by the bar. And I said, we should go and talk to them. I'm bored of you. We should go and talk to the girls by the bar. And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go and kill them, put them in a bag and bury them in a pond. It was like, you're kidding. Like, no, they look nice. There's three of them. There's two of us i'm sure we can take them like let's we should go we should go and talk to them and uh he was like i have been told under no circumstances to ever approach a woman in public and that was it blew my mind because i'm i'm 37 and when i was at university we didn't even have iphones so that was a very different sort of mating environment it's the only way it's the Like I get it on the challenges of guys sort of balancing this new world that they're entering into and the fact that they decide to check out as opposed to potentially do something.

1:31:59Dr Dani Sulikowski:I think it's a great point to say that guys not wanting to accidentally do something that they would later regret, the hypersensitivity to the, and less forgiveness to the sort of innate, bumbly, white, chaotic world of young people mating. if you're 20 and you're trying to work out like you both had a drink what like is should we i we've met before like it's all it's the devil really is in the details with these things and as you try and navigate through all of this if you basically make the fear setting higher uh guys as my friend i've been told under no circumstances ever go up to a woman in in public Like, that's a real thing.

1:32:53Dr Dani Sulikowski:So, yeah, it does make it difficult. It makes it a difficult environment for men to navigate. And then, unfortunately, I don't think that women's preferences have updated themselves to be the ones that want to come up and talk to guys.

1:33:10Chris Williamson:No, of course not.

1:33:12Dr Dani Sulikowski:I think 86 % of women say that they want a man to make the first move. Yeah, yeah.

1:33:17Chris Williamson:And this is why sort of one of the reasons why I'm sort of really convinced that this sort of attack on male masculinity, dominance, whatever you want to call it, this attack on being a man, it's been so effective in disrupting that, you know, human courtship behavior. It's been really, really effective. Women are not, you know, for the most part are not going to initiate these relationships or these interactions, I should say. um and so if you can stop men from initiating them then that goes a long way towards stopping them from a long way towards stopping them from happening and that i think does that not mean that

1:33:57Dr Dani Sulikowski:you as the proponent of this idea would be on the receiving end of it too that doesn't seem like a particularly good thing like you're also curtailing the men that would come up and approach you

1:34:08Chris Williamson:yeah so so this is a so no that's a that's a really good question and it's good because it gives me a chance to sort of explain a sort of important principle that kind of wraps around all of this so what's happening with all of these things that the devaluation of motherhood the devaluation of marriage the demonization of of men that would actually make excellent husbands and fathers the you know the the valorization of of careers for women and all the rest of it But one thing that the end result of all of these sort of individual things that are happening is that they're feeding into creating an environment that is really hostile to reproductive success.

1:34:50Chris Williamson:So we just have an environment in which the rules that we've sort of, you know, the social etiquettes and the rules that we've sort of developed and built over time and over generations have all of a sudden just been thrown out. So now that the guardrails have gone and, you know, those rules of etiquette, they were really important because people understood what you were and weren't allowed to do and people understood that you could do this and you couldn't do that and we sort of had a way that two people who didn't really know each other could navigate a potentially romantic interaction with some certainty and some guidance and that's been chucked out the window.

1:35:23Chris Williamson:So we've got an environment now, a social environment, that is incredibly hostile to reproduction and, yes, that impacts everybody negatively but all of these things will always impact those who generally have lower reproductive potential more. So if you are from a reproductive perspective, an elite, if you are, let's just say as a woman, if you are highly attractive, you can do a crazy thing, like decide to get a little pixie crew cut, which for most women would massively decrease their attractiveness. You can probably do that and start setting that as a fashion trend. And yeah, it's going to decrease your attractiveness a little bit, but you're still going to be pretty hot it's going to be much worse for all the less attractive women who are now copying this trendy pixie cut and that same principle applies across the board to all of these things so yeah it hurts um everybody but the people who can the people who have the most reproductive potential because they have the highest mate quality and they're the most fertile and they already have you know they're already in a position in society which gives them social access to the best men you know those women are hurt the least and so they are the ones who are pushing and setting all of these trends so if you imagine that like if you sort of think we've got this kind of linear scale and the odds of reproductive success are you know those that have the highest odds the highest likelihood of the most reproductive success are at the top and you can line everyone up right down to those people that have really low prospective reproductive success.

1:36:54Chris Williamson:The more hostile you make the environment, the higher you lift the bar along that linear scale to a point where people are not having any reproductive success, which is exactly what we're seeing, right? More and more people are just not able to navigate their life to lead to reproductive success in this really antenatal environment that they find themselves in. Whether it's because they devalued finding a mate when they were at their peak mate quality and it should have been the easiest, whether it's because they delayed having children when they're at their peak fertility and that would have been the easiest, whether it's because they made bad mate choice decisions, bad life choices, ended up investing a lot in their career, thinking that they would somehow magically find a partner and be able to have a family between the ages of 38 and 39 and then that didn't happen.

1:37:41Chris Williamson:We have a social environment that is very hostile to reproduction and therefore the only people in there who are able to reproduce are the ones that have the most reproductive capacity to begin with by virtue of a whole bunch of factors that contribute to that. So yes, it hurts everybody, but the ones who benefit are the relatively small number of those who survive it and successfully reproduce and they benefit because large numbers of their competitors simply can't reproduce in such a hostile environment.

1:38:09Dr Dani Sulikowski:So that's your line from the very beginning saying that running the race results in everybody moving more slowly.

1:38:16Chris Williamson:Yes, exactly. The female race slows everybody down, but someone still wins. And so it doesn't matter that the whole reproductive output has dropped for the fact that they still continue to win this individually based race.

1:38:31Dr Dani Sulikowski:The genes aren't smart enough to realize that if there is no future civilization, your progeny have a bad future. we've evolved under circumstances where that hasn't been an issue therefore if you relatively have more kids than the next woman that's good for you when you start to scale this across an entire civilization what ends up happening is it's good for you but over time this is going

1:39:01Chris Williamson:to become very bad for everybody including you yep that yes you're correct but with one with

1:39:08Dr Dani Sulikowski:one caveat though i always get something wrong it's okay yeah no no no you didn't get anything

1:39:12Chris Williamson:wrong you're correct so far but um except that he's so he's a he's the kicker right so you you you would be correct if the end point of this was actually that it's just bad for everybody because you're right evolution is not it's not teleological and it cannot see the consequences if a if an individual population finds itself in a local you know a local maxima some sort of local adaptive thing it will be selected for to stay there even if the inevitable outcome of of that trait or that behavior is that the entire species goes extinct you know evolution has no mechanism for protecting against that so you would be right if the end point of this manipulative reproductive suppression was in fact just the end of all of these lineages but it's not and this is where it gets perhaps even well i think i think gets even more interesting so this is what i so what what What happens at the end of, you know, when civilizations crash and fall, you don't actually see an end to those genetic lineages.

1:40:11Chris Williamson:What you see is those genetic lineages, some of them, a small number of them, those who are there at the end, actually becoming the founder population or a part of the founder population of what rises. So you can sort of think of it as like almost like this really kind of dire game of musical chairs. Now, if you can sense that the musical chairs play and each round, you know, someone doesn't get a chair and a lineage drops out, you know, each round, somebody doesn't reproduce and a lineage drops out. If you can sense that the end is near, then you actually want the end to come before you end up being the one that doesn't find a chair in one of the rounds.

1:40:51Chris Williamson:So once female behaviour reaches this really intense reproductive suppression stage and we start seeing all of the social signs that this is happening, like a massive drop in the price of sex, increased casual sex, vulgarity, decreasing marriage, decreasing birth rates and a whole bunch of other social factors that all point to this being the stage of society where we're at, they all act as cues to sort of intensify this behaviour as everybody vies for a chair at the end. Everybody wants to be one of the lineages left standing because what's the genetic prize if you are one of the lineages left standing is that you get to be part, if you're a woman, you will get to be, because when you get invaded it's the women who survive and reproduce, it's not the men, you get to be part of the founder population of a new society that will go through a large expansion phase.

1:41:52Chris Williamson:So you may have started off, your lineages may have said, like, you know, lineages are not this separate, but for sake of argument, your lineage may be, you know, one of 10 ,000 in the population at the start of this game. But if you're, you know, one of just 50 lineages that are left and you become that as part of the founder population, then your representation in the population went from 1 in 10 ,000 to 1 in 50. And this is why it's the winners that just become, the winners of this game become the founder population. And so it is in the interests of these winners to maintain genetic capacity for there to be losers so that they can win in the end, if that makes sense.

1:42:34Chris Williamson:It's a little bit like a kin selection. Almost like a kin selection strategy.

1:42:39Dr Dani Sulikowski:Yeah, as the competition gets more fierce, you behave more fiercely because the gains relative are going to be greater because there are fewer people to compete with. And you want the game to end too. Once it gets down to a relatively small birth rate, you want the game to end.

1:42:57Chris Williamson:You want the society to collapse and the next society to come in and start growing. You don't want your lineages to fall out two or three rounds from now because the game went on for two or three rounds longer. You begin to want it to end. That's what we're seeing. I'm getting a little bit off topic, but jumping back to Helen Andrews' great feminization, I think that greater representation of women in society's institution as opposed to pouring their efforts into society's reproduction is an inevitable result of this female intersectoral competition and manipulative reproductive suppression. and then an inevitable result of that is the gutting and the decline and the eventual collapse of these institutions.

1:43:38Chris Williamson:And so these things follow on necessarily from each other. And this is where I think this is the bit that I think Helen doesn't get quite right. She attributes, as do many other people, I'm not sort of trying to single her out here, but she sort of attributes female behaviour in the workplace to these misplaced motherhood motives and I've got a few kind of theoretical problems with that. I don't think, to me, I don't think it looks like motherhood behaviour and I don't think that that argument sort of works especially well once you sort of scratch the surface of it. But I think an argument that does work very well is if we think that what women are actually selected for to do in these institutions is to actually completely flatten the meritocracy and to deprioritise productivity because that's actually what explains female behaviour in these institutions.

1:44:24Chris Williamson:and that I think is part of women realizing that the game of musical chairs is nearly at the end and they want to hasten the end before they end up finding themselves in a losing route. That's what I think is happening in the great feminization of the institutions. It is actually the systematic dismantling of those institutions.

1:44:41Dr Dani Sulikowski:Right. So Helen's perspective is that this is a quite pro-social or at least pro-child maternal instinct that's being a co-eyed to the workplace erroneously your perspective is that it's much less pro-social than that it's actually highly competitive it's into intracetual competition and this is happening almost as designed as

1:45:08Chris Williamson:opposed to a misfiring exactly right i think i mean so a big central sort of part of what I'm proposing is that what we're seeing now across the board is not a misfire. It's not something going wrong. This is actually how human societies play out. This is actually what happens again and again and again. And so it can't be a misfire again and again and again. This is how the system operates. And so what I've tried to do is come up with an explanation that actually explains why it operates in this way and who actually would win such a genetic race in such a way that this kind of a system could then perpetuate cycle after cycle.

1:45:50Dr Dani Sulikowski:I suppose one perspective is the environmental mismatch is so great that an effective strategy is being applied erroneously and yours is that the mismatch is still great, but the system is sufficiently adaptive and able to adjust that it's still performing kind of as intended, even under novel circumstances.

1:46:26Chris Williamson:Exactly. And look, I will sort of say that I am much less amenable, I think, than perhaps a lot of people to the basic idea of this evolutionary mismatch. This idea, the idea that we have changed the world so much that it now somehow is just, you know, it is somehow no longer adapted to us or us to it. And so we just see all of this, you know, we just see all these things happening that can't really be sensibly accounted for because we've just got a human, you know, a human system operating in an environment where, you know, it just doesn't work. It's just so weird things, you know, unselected for maladaptive things just happen.

1:47:07Chris Williamson:I'm not especially amenable to that basic principle because everything about the world that we live in can be sort of seen and considered as the human extended phenotype. The world did not just grow up spontaneously around us, completely independent of our own biology and psychology and behavior. This is the world that we created. And so, yes, it has changed quite quickly, but it's changed in ways that our own evolved psychology and evolved biology decided to change it and responded to certain things. And so I'm much less, you know, I think the types of things that, you know, took off, that became popular, that became part of how we live versus those things that didn't, itself was very strongly influenced by our evolved biology and psychology.

1:48:01Chris Williamson:so I'm just much less amenable to this idea that we can safely assume that there's just this massive mismatch and that allows us to write off a whole bunch of human behavior is just oh that's just because we've got smartphones now and that's just because we've got the internet that's just because we've got the pill and that's just because just because just because um I don't you know I've never really seen that as a very profitable way and I think one of the main problems with that type of thinking is it just makes it too easy to write off anything that you can't sort of explain as part of an adaptive functioning complex system as, oh, yeah, but that's just because the world is weird.

1:48:38Chris Williamson:I much prefer an argument where you at least try to not give anything that you see a free pass to not require an explanation for what's going on there. You've got to at least try to see. And I think if you do try to apply explanations, you actually find a lot of coherence in what has previously been dismissed as, oh, you know, this is just this new evolutionary thing we've got and so now people behave like this. But, you know, there's no function to that behaviour. There's no other explanation behind it. It's just because the world is different now. I'm not really amenable to that approach at all.

1:49:12Chris Williamson:So I don't really have a lot of sympathy. I think they're kind of, you know, people who are trying to understand behaviour dealing themselves get out of jail free cards. Yeah.

1:49:23Dr Dani Sulikowski:Well, we'll see how much sympathy the internet has for the things that we've talked about today. If my recent track record is anything to go by, I already don't have a fucking career. Dr. Danny Solikowski, ladies and gentlemen. Danny, you're fascinating. I really appreciate you explaining this stuff. There's a lot of conflicting narratives at the moment, and someone who's spent so much time thinking about this is really cool to get some time to dig into. Why should people go to check out all of the stuff that you do?

1:49:52Chris Williamson:Follow me on Twitter. so Dr. Danny S and anything else I do always gets put up there so if you just go there and you just follow me then you get to see everything that there is to see Heck yeah

1:50:03Dr Dani Sulikowski:Danny, I appreciate you Thank you

1:50:05Chris Williamson:Brilliant, thanks very much

1:50:23Dr Dani Sulikowski:now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.