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

27:43I mean, it's pushing back against freedom, independence. It kind of harkens back to pre-1960s type of restrictive expectations, gender stereotypes, et cetera. But I wonder if another part of it is that there is this implicit understanding that it maybe benefits men more than it benefits women to have marriage norms because it redistributes. It means that if it's got 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.

28:23Whereas 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 monogamous norms from women, 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.

28:55Do 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 be married. Oh, it's like Elon Musk being able to have a thousand wives. Totally, yeah. It takes away that choice if somebody wants it. That means that the only choice is have no partner or have somebody further down the totem pole. 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 polygynists, 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.

29:48And then the other perspective is that, obviously humans have a menu of mating systems, as 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.

30:24So 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 monogamous. They fall in love. I'm largely interested in one other person for at least for a while. Yeah, I agree. I agree with my views. Your views, which you gave me, then I repeat them.

31:00Are we serial monogamists 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 with someone else. Yeah, yeah. Very common. I've seen data as well. In those kind of societies, though, often a small number, a small but non-trivial number, 5 % or so, of 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.

31:39but it does sometimes happen and we have a polygynous streak as well i think um 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 um but you do also find that uh you have a small level of polygyny and a small level of and yeah small level of full life mating but Can you chat 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.

32:32and the honeymoon period typically lasts around about that long. Yeah, it's like 85 % fertility for a couple for one year, then it jumps up to in the 90s after two years. Here we go. 2026 Kinsey Institute study of over 10 ,000 US adults found the average number of passionate love experiences is 2.05. 14 % reported never having been passionate in love. 28 % reported being passionate in love once, 30 % twice, 17 % three times, 11 % 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.

33:06People also experience 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 % 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. 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't or whatever.

33:48This 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 so only 42 percent of 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 up there, three or more times, it was a small fragment of people who say that they've had sex, or rather, well, have sex, have had three or more sexual parts in the past year, but then also fallen in love three or more times in their lives.

34:32So I think this is like - If you weren't serially monogamous, what's going on there? We tilt toward monogamy, but then maybe a small percentage of people are more polygynous or high socio-sexual orientation, less monogamous. Yes. And I guess one thing in this kind of discussion is to remember individual differences Yes, yeah. Yeah, that humans aren't all the same. We have different meeting strategies. Yep. What's this new study that shows preference for resourceful partners softens when women are richer? Are you talking about the P &AS paper that we did? Yeah, well, I mean, this is something that I could talk about for hours.

35:06So please, you know, tell me to shut up after 30 to 50 seconds if you can manage it. But basically... I was going to say 30 to 50 minutes. I was like, all right, kick back, crack open a new time. That's funny. Yeah. So there's been a longstanding debate over the last, I would say, 37 years. I mean, it's been intense for 37 years, but it actually predates that even about the causes of sex differences in mate preferences. and a huge variable that people consider in this topic, probably the variable, if you're going to pick just one, is gender inequality. And if you're going to pick a second one, it's probably income.

35:47And what does gender inequality mean? Well, I'm glad you asked because it means different things depending on which social scientist you're talking to. So we know, and anyone who listens to this podcast has heard a million times that men have a stronger mate preference for looks on average, at least certainly in their state of mate preferences and in some revealed measures as well. And then women have a stronger state of mate preference for resources. And then obviously there's the sex difference in age preferences where men have a preference for youth and then women have a preference for slightly older than them throughout their lives.

36:24So you've got all those differences and there's been this very longstanding debate over the extent to which this is explicable with reference to social and economic factors and the extent to which it's explicable by evolutionary factors. So what we did, if you go through this debate, there's been tons of cross-cultural studies. 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 mate preferences for resources and gender inequality. All of the ones that checked age found that when gender inequality is lower, age mate preferences and age gaps get smaller.

37:11And then the beauty basically doesn't move. In fact, there's even some evidence that it goes in the opposite direction in 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 mate 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.

37:46Individual 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 rule 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 uh 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.

38:49And what we found was actually something that was slightly inconsistent with the evocyte perspective, slightly inconsistent with the social war 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 mate preferences strategically based on what the environment incentivizes them to want. and what we found is that when people are poor, as in as individuals they're poor or as in the opposite sex is rich and their sex is disenfranchised, they upregulate their mate preferences for resources. So they wanted, this is true in ranked preferences, in rated preferences and also in hypergamous preferences.

39:28So 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 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 on there. Our main analyses were testing the effects of the variables on both sexes. That's interesting, man. And we didn't find beauty preferences moved, which actually wouldn't make sense to a social role theorist. Can you explain? As in 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.

40:10But 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 we pre-registered that we thought that that was going to happen because that's what the cross-cultural literature showed, but it didn't. However, make 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.

40:36I think verbally, I could talk about the modeling work and I could talk about it in 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 - You got to prioritize it, yeah. Yeah, I would want to date someone rich more than I currently do now and vice versa. We even saw this in our qualitative data where 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 date for money. That's fine. Interesting. But do you think that that's an evolved tendency?

41:04I would kind of think that there's an evolutionary push toward women being more interested in resources and status than men are. But you just think about things and you just might reason, well, what's the best way for me to make a living and life while I'm poor? So I'm just going to reason about the fact that it would be better for me to marry this person who's wealthy than to marry someone who's poor. If you see what I mean. So you could just explain it as a rational thing, a reasoned thing rather than an evolved thing. Just game theory. Yeah. So I take an evolutionary anthropological approach.

41:36My whole background is anthropology. And so it's slightly different from the evo-psych approach where there's actually this maneuver that's used in evo-anthro 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. Yeah. So look, it could be the case that it was purely conscious strategic thinking, which is also an evolved trait, right?

42:09That'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 have evolved. But there have been some scholars like Gengestad 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 of 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.

42:49Yeah, it just tested the inputs and outputs. Have you considered 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. On this point about resources, so if you... 95 % of people don't get enough fiber, which is why Momentus built Fiber Plus, because hitting your daily fiber target through food alone is actually kind of hard, even harder than your last toilet trip. Fiber isn't just a digestion thing.

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43:58Right 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 livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. You know, this is generally sort of controversial, but the idea of the evolutionary adapted environment or the environment of evolutionary adaptation, wasn't scarcity more or less the norm? And so this idea that we have an evolved module to detect scarcity versus abundance, I mean, everyone was roughly equally poor because in these communities, people shared just about everything.

44:40Yes, you had talented 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, yeah, this is actually something that's controversial in 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 there could have, 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.

45:10Would that have 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 actually not something that I think is true. It's just something that I'm kind of putting out there. I'm genuinely open about mechanisms. I could hear any side of the story. But I do think that there is some interesting shit here. 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 when there's a local famine, they shift to preferring larger women.

45:48And that seems to suggest that there may have been some fluctuations in how valuable larger women were. And also it suggests that there was fluctuations in how large women were. Yeah, exactly. There were times, 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 sounds surprising. If you manage to be fat in prehistory, that is a real accomplishment. Real accomplishment. Yeah. So I think that there probably were some cases. 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.

46:29Oh, 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, they're usually in. Desirable locations 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-conditioned 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 just from a resource perspective.

47:10There's fucking deer running everywhere and rabbits and berries. And there is paleoanthropological evidence of these massive kill sites where it's just like you wouldn't believe how many animals they were killing. So it seems like they may have been doing okay in some cases. But I don't know. Again, the module thing, it's... It's tricky, right? It's not something that I... It's genuinely not something that I've thought very deeply about because it's not an interest area for me. So what's the adaptive rationale? If there's lots of abundance, you would want a more attractive, a more heavier woman.

47:41Oh, right. Well, that's separate from the PNAS paper. Indeed. Yeah, yeah. So the rationale there. Yeah, exactly. 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 in scarcity specifically. So in environments of scarcity, they prefer heavier women. Yeah, so you can say it the other way around. Yeah, yeah, but scarcity. 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.

48:20Kitts, they're saying that women who have BMIs in the 30s are quite beautiful. And then you go somewhere like really affluent Singaporean women or something like that. They have different preferences. So, or Korea or someplace. Then you see experimentally where when men are hungrier, they have a preference for larger women. 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, um they they they become infertile right so it's 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 definitely can't so that that's that's that's what does it flip then in conditions of uh non yes this is what's this is what's so um this is what's so much more difficult to explain.

49:20And the leading hypothesis, I would say, for why thinness is preferred in abundance is because it's a very reliable signal to youth and nulliparity. So it's one of those things - But isn't that the case in all societies? And isn't some degree of chubbiness a sign in all societies, regardless of their abundance or scarcity, that the person isn't going to be able to get pregnant? I'm just not sure why. I'm not persuaded by the adaptive rationale for why it was switched and also why it was switched so quickly and you just get a little bit hungry and suddenly your preference is switched and then you eat some food and then they suddenly switch back the switch the switches are very small in those in those studies so we're talking about like a 10 pound difference like it's like i believe the dining hall study for example which is the has been replicated it is pretty cool um where it's men going into a dining hall versus coming out yeah it was a small shift um like it wasn't it wasn't like they were preferring completely different looking women.

50:16But the cross-cultural stuff where it's really big differences in environment, then you're seeing genuinely different beauty standards. And a lot of people say it's like, oh, they're like, 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, no, you're not understanding. It's not – they are given a chart of body types and asked what's attractive and to what degree.

50:50That's what they prefer. 2am at the bar, that's all that's left. Yeah, that's what they're thinking. It could just be a status thing, right? I wonder if it's that certain body types get linked with status in different cultures. And cultures 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 in more abundant societies. 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 withstand temptation, conscientious personality.

51:26And then in environments 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. I like that. So 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 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.

52:06And then you go to some places where they have the fattening huts, for example, where it's like restrict movement and increase calories in order to try and be more attractive. What's a fattening hut? 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 - The beauty of a hut? um i don't know if it's i don't know if it's always literally the case um but but but yeah yeah there's there's actually even i was reading one account and i can't remember which um 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 this is real um 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 this right so it was like so it was like they really wanted to see supermodel beauty pageant going on that's a sense yeah yeah yeah so it's 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 status thing is interesting i have no doubt that there there's that that could be part of it yeah 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 when you're going into the dining hall versus coming out and the mate preference is still shifting.

53:32I think there's probably some kind of mechanism there. I got fucking ripped on the internet until the guy realized that the clip had been cut both before and after what I actually said about saying, I think that Ozempic 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 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.

54:18All 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 Texas, you can get away with it. like all of these different ways this 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 hyper vigilant that there are more ways to cheat the system to bypass what this signal is supposed to mean well are you actually in good shape or are you on a lot of trt like do you actually have the ability to gain muscle or are you somehow are you speed running that are you actually youth fecundity nulliparity or is have you got foot reduction surgery and and have you been you know what i mean like all of the different i didn't i found this out a couple of weeks ago i didn't realize that women's feet grow like when they have kids like women's feet get bigger which is why there's a preference for smaller feet did you hear this from will costello yeah yeah yeah is it true well yo he's got the sex doll study as well where that's what he brought in sex dolls have tiny tiny feet and it's like why would that be and he's like unusable feet super normal it's part of the super super normal yeah exactly fish area runaway but in reverse no foot at all yeah it's just some yeah that's our optimal going back to the the sort of 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 the exact numbers but i do know that in a lot of cities it's reversed and that young women are earning more than young men.

55:55Yeah, major metro areas in the US. So New York, DC, Boston, LA, I think 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. I think it's squeaking into the 31s, 32s now. And that's what's going to be really interesting. Like, yeah, 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 harranham put this one out in his paper from like what his article from like six years ago that suggested that very high-powered career women had an increased preference for more high-powered men so ambitious people desire more ambitious partners yeah uh specifically women to men, the effect didn't reverse.

56:46But 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 they're 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 of American football is played.

57:21Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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.

57:58But it's true also that in the wild, higher income women tend to still have strong preferences for resources. this. What you see in the real world is 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 rule 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.

58:38But then also, richer women have stronger mate preferences in general. Like in Koyoma's research, in Lou's research, they want hotter guys too. And in fact - What do you think is going on there? Well, I mean - There was an old David Buss study that literally said like attractive women want it all. Like that was the title. But rich women also want it all. And I think that part of it is that people - So if you're rich and attractive, you're fucked. Yeah. People who are good at getting stuff probably are confident in their ability to get stuff. People who are high achieving. I think that it's very – my older sister is a successful banker.

59:14If she has a preference for a guy who's doing well economically, 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 and lose data, for example. So it's like I want. So it's like you talk to I'll put it in a kind of imaginary example.

59:52it'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.

1:00:22So it increases absolutely, but then maybe decreases relatively. Like sort of the rank ordering. Yeah, so it's like they're maybe able to relax that preference relatively. Oh, relative to other preferences, but not relative to their own level. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't drop away though. It doesn't drop away. And I think they used to predict that it would. Then it's just there because women are poor. There's a house politics that we need to hit and we can portion this out however we want between the two different partners. indeed. In as much as there's a winner on that bickering between the Evo Psychs and the social psychologists, the Evo Psychs won that one because it was pretty clearly predicted like, hey, richer women are going to have a reduced mate preference for resources.

1:01:03And then they tested it in a bunch of different ways and it didn't. But there is some caveats. What's fascinating here is it's just people with high standards have high standards. 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 C-suite or become partner. And then when it came to choosing a partner, they have high standards, high standards, high standards. It's just kind of, it's the sort of thing that your parents would understand. They have high standards for themselves and their own accomplishments, then also for partners.

1:01:36You see this with the research on perfectionism, that 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 too. 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 unreasonably 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.

1:02:15And that happens more on average from people that are perfectionists. Yeah, interesting. 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 8sleep. The 8 Sleep Pod 5 comes with a smart cover you throw on your mattress that actively cools or heats each side of the bed up to 20 degrees. And now they've added the world's first temperature-regulating duvet and pillowcase. So you've got 360-degree coverage for deep, uninterrupted rest. It's like being Walt Disney without the cryogenic chamber.

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1:03:18wisdom at checkout that's e-i-g-h-t sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at 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 state adversary if we can if we can gently steer the conversation if i can ask the captain of the ship to steer stuff that i've actually wanted to hear his opinion but there is the uh there is the there is a oh this is going to be terrible in my head but there is the um revealed element where it's like if you look at women now today and 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 uh 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 economically two quintiles of men are doing the same thing yeah they're 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 versus revealed but you can say in the abstract oh richer women they have a stronger mate preference to mate 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 does stronger mean in that context but they don't necessarily the fact that they um on average uh uh going with somebody who's somewhat earning somewhat less than them isn't necessarily because that's what they prefer.

1:04:44It's what's available. At those kind of echelons, there's just not much available at all. Tall girl problem. Tall girl problem, exactly. Okay, so if there's a shortage of tall men, then you'll settle for a guy who's not as... Yeah, 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... What would you... Could you... I don't know if you've been following Paul Eastwick's work on stated versus real preferences. I've been reading a lot of his scientific work. I haven't read his book yet, but I would love a rejoinder to his.

1:05:19So he makes the claim that essentially, I'll summarize it and then maybe you can tell me what you think about it. But he makes the claim that, yes, in survey data, you see these consistent sex differences in what men and 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 these sex differences and preferences have evolved if they don't result in behavior, if they're just resulting in survey items?

1:06:00Now, I don't necessarily buy 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 with your billion years of sex differences background, what's the rejoinder? Well, first of all, let me say I think he's a great scholar. 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. So I think he seems to focus a lot on the two lines of evidence that don't show sex differences in mate preferences and exclude pretty much everything else. So one thing he focuses on the speed dating data that he's personally done and often doesn't find the differences that you might expect.

1:06:38I'm not sure if it's representative samples for a start, like a lot of the studies that 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. In a speed dating context, you don't get to know somebody particularly well. So their looks are going to be a large part of what shapes your assessment of them. He points out that a lot of the data that evolutionary psychologists look at, dating app data for instance, is evolutionarily novel. It's not a speed dating, it's an evolutionary novelty.

1:07:18It's nothing like what happens in reality. But he's happy there because you don't find the differences that you expect to find. So he focuses on that. And actually there is some speed dating research that does show some of the standard differences. Rob Kurzman, I think, did one study that did find it. So it's mixed rather than showing no effect at all of the standard evolutionarily psychology predictors stuff. With the revealed preferences, I think that, well, I don't know. It's also, I'm a bit dubious about it, partly just because it goes against the 90 % of other, or 95 % of other research, including real-world data.

1:08:00that does find directions, 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 fails to earn a decent living. And actually that's one reason that the revealed preferences data might not be accurate is that when you're looking at how important it is in a relationship that the guy is earning quite a bit among current couples, those are current couples and there's going to be a bunch of couples who, partnerships that have dissolved already. Oh, you've got to catch them as they lose their job. Yeah, before they do, exactly.

1:08:37And so you're just looking at the subset that remains 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 correlation is going to be weaker and other things are going to become more important, seemingly more important. But maybe that's the problem with 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 yeah uh last year right yeah so that was one to kind of remind people i know that i know that you spoke to eastwick 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 a an egregious error academics yet so it's Directionally correct.

1:09:27So 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. And he also found some weird findings, like the number one thing people wanted by that measure was someone good in bed. Good in bed. Yeah, so the overall romantic evaluation was most— Which is intuitive, but— It's very difficult to separate that out from the fact that you're in a relationship with someone and needing to be physically intimate with them regularly.

1:10:03Almost all sex, for all the myth of the chad and the fucking girls being ran through and guys are man whores and all the rest of it, almost all sex. 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 portioning the sex across. This exoplanet. Yeah, it is. Am I wrong? That everyone on the other planet is looking at it. It's almost all sex occurs inside of relationships. Yeah. Right? Like the global amount of sex that happens. In a relationship. It's almost all inside of one form of relationship or another. Yeah.

1:10:36Did you see Jake Kozlowski 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 new AI. I'm like, can I get another look at that? Can I go a little bit closer on this? Jake's got the possibility to be a really fascinating source of stated preferences with real-world results, real-world incentives. So for the people that don't know, Keeper AI is an AI matchmaking service. It's$50 ,000. The guy pays. The women don't. It's$5 ,000 per date for each date for the guy. On top of the$50 ,000. It's credited against it, but it's only credited against it up to the first five.

1:11:16So if you have like 10 dates in order to get there, then you're going to pay$75 ,000. 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. And 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, fucking open this sucker up. Asked if they'd marry down on three axes. Women say no far more than men every time. Earns less. women are 12 times more likely to refuse, less intelligent, six times more, less educated, four times more.

1:11:53Marrying 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 multivariate bastard. What I realized thinking about Eastwick stuff, if you're in a world where the new ecology involves this ability to sterile, autistically design what it is that you want, like stated preferences become revealed preferences. Does this make, am I insane? Yeah, no, 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.

1:12:32I'm on the fucking level of the academics. All day, I'm on fire today. One and a half new tonics, don't fuck with me. You've been anticipating a lot of things. and it's interesting because 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 tradition. Proper 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 this, scholarly precedent, where in Buss and Schmitt's Make Preferences in Behavioral Manifestations, I think that they had classified ads as a behavioral manifestation essentially where it's like it's not like an expression but like what people are actually shopping for skin in the game 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 it that's an action yeah in a way but i don't know is this unique is because 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?

1:13:48Is it stated? Is it revealed? What is it? I reckon it's converting your stated preference into a revealed preference by going out of the world and making it happen and putting skin in the game to do so. Something's 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 direction so it still feels more stated two 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 win on dating apps are actually probably not the people that you want to get into a relationship with and then diana fleishman female dating strategy tells women to date only men who ask first text within three days pay and reliably plan the next date sure this might be a good 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 just the ability to play the game uh 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 the line.

1:15:06Tell me about your online dating era and tell me about your spouse's relationship satisfaction now and the quality of your relationship. It might actually be that the traits that make you good on a dating app are opposite, contrary 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. This was only on college students. 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, 0.3, 0.4 higher for the Tinder users and the non-Tinder users.

1:15:50So these are more psychopathic, more Machiavellian, 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 presumably people don't want spouses who are high on dark triad traits, but those are the people who are using these apps. They're more likely to use them. There is plenty of research, I think, though, that shows revealed preferences for some of the traditional Evo site predictions, like the fact that guys who are wealthier are more likely to get married, more likely to stay married, more likely to have kids, more likely to get remarried if they divorce.

1:16:31Whereas it doesn't predict that anywhere near as well for women. Women's wages don't. And women's looks are a better predictor of whether they get married. And the wealth of their marital partner, that is the case for men. Men's looks don't predict that anywhere near as well. And all of that's revealed preferences, right? Did you see that witness study looking at facial attractiveness is 12 times more influential on swiping behavior than height is. Facial attractiveness. Yeah. Yeah, so they did. So I tweeted that and someone replied, photo competition app shows photos for the most important factor.

1:17:11And 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 I'd 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.

1:17:45But 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 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.

1:18:31I mean, 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 happening. Pokemon trading talk time. Yeah, exactly. 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, are women happier? Presumably men aren't happier, especially the men who aren't that tall. I've said this before. They tend to released 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 i've heard that six foot mark is like it's somewhat arbitrary because i i read this and i don't know exactly guys just lie well guys lie but then the six foot 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 you know if they wanted six feet they could you know 182.5 centimeters yeah uh and so even the six foot thing is somewhat arbitrary what you're saying is that we should change the units of measurement to make more guys six foot gotta get on the metric system so it's gonna be scientists drug dealers and short kings you've gotta be europe maxing if you're not europe maxing if you're not metric maxing dude what the fuck are you doing that would really be dei for man if we could change it to the yeah yeah yeah most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element.

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1:20:30Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. What about that mate budget study that Norm Lee did? Because that was about trade-offs, 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. Someone's spent an awful lot of time dedicated on one thing. They've maybe neglected another part of another area.

1:21:06It's an interesting study there, right? Can you explain for the normies? Sure. The normlies? So yeah, Norm Lee. Norm Lee, he did a study where he gave people a budget of made dollars and then ask them, create the ideal mate that you can with this budget. Some people got a big budget, and where that was the case, men and women, they both wanted everything. They wanted good looks. They wanted a good job, high status, blah, blah, blah, the 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, sex differences became more pronounced.

1:21:50And so men would spend more to get an attractive partner, whereas women would spend more to get a partner with resources and status. He also did a study where he had people allocate for themselves, if 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 Sam. 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 prettier relative to men. That's the reason why we don't see women turning up in supercars with expensive Rolexes at a nightclub or guys spending tons of time doing the beautification thing.

1:22:34We 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 in 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 Buss. 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, mate preferences converged quite a bit between men and women.

1:23:12Oh, that's interesting. 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. So yes, 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 that 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.

1:23:48You 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 - Shave your head, dude. Shave your head, you don't need to think about it. We did a little data analysis on using health data, essentially seeing like how much has weightlifting actually increased. And generation on generation, it's like you go from basically like not a behavior to every young man is now like every other member of Gen Z, essentially, is like a recreational bodybuilder.

1:24:30Women do find that attractive though, right? They do find some muscularity 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. I don't think so either. Maybe that was 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.

1:25:03And in the male beautification, I would really put my foot down and say, no, that is to attract women. And I think it is because they have their own money. Okay, so this is your pet theory, right? That 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, I - Beauty is the flashy one. Parenting is the quiet one that's actually better evidenced where it's like men used to - Dad not share it.

1:25:35Yeah, exactly. And we see 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 than women did in the 1950s. There's a dramatic difference, though. So at least in the U.S. 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.

1:26:22And the average is getting brought up primarily by college educated men. All those women don't necessarily have as much money. Yeah. But then the men are also spending less. It's part of it, though, just that guys are thinking it's only fair. They're responding to arguments that have been made by feminists and others, just that guys haven't been pulling their weight in the past, and they think that they should. To a degree, on this handbag point, I think I heard this from Tanya Reynolds, that she suggested that men obviously aren't attracted to these luxurious handbags. And in some cases, women, they're buying these handbags or wearing them to impress women.

1:27:03I know what you're going to say. But it's about deterring. Deterring rivals. 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. 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 ire from other women. whereas women would compliment handbags more than they would compliment boobs 100 % imagine that we're in an environment of increasing mate competition big engagement ring why the massive engagement ring look at how much he's in the hole but what's the benefit though of intimidating other women and saying look at this great handbag to keep them away from the partner if guys don't care about it why would other women think well I better stay away because I don't have as nice a handbag.

1:27:56Well, if he's so invested in her that he spent 20 grand on a handbag, then it's probably not worth my time to poach him or to attempt to poach him. I see. So it could be mate poaching deterrence. It could also be just kind of classic high status to low status threat behavior. I remember literally the first day of my PhD, arrived in Melbourne and went for a walk with Candice and I asked her this exact question. I was just like, why do you think women love their 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 scare young women.

1:28:26Just immediately. It's like scare young women. 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 a guy who's really jacked walking into the room when a woman walks in and she's very glamorous. She's got the expensive shoes, the expensive bags, throws it on the table. It's like, I run this shit. Like it's kind of like that atmosphere. But there's also a sense, at least with guys, these guys that have got a ton of muscle on them, you have to have spare time.

1:28:58You have to have spare time. You have to have spare money to be able to afford the food and the PEDs. You need to be at least somewhat disciplined. You need to have the time to be able to plan your training sessions and not be at work every single hour of the day in the same way as the long nails that a woman might have and 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 totally did not consider, if you add in guys going to the gym as a form of male beautification, it's got to be 4X, 5X, 6X, 10X, what it would have been 100 years ago for male beautification.

1:29:40Yeah, I mean, that's what the best study on beautification did. It's Marta Kowal's study. And she found that in all except for seven countries, women beautified more. There were seven that men beautified more, slightly. And this was the weightlifting side of it, essentially, was the behavior where men were - It's a 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 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, like bodybuilding?

1:30:23And 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 um among people who wear makeup the men who wear makeup spend way more time on it than the women just because they're less good at it they've been growing up on youtube tutorial yeah i think that it's um what she said to me was that she thinks that it's um 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 like male beauty influencers essentially like like who is and so they just have different yeah but i thought that was interesting is that the um is that in terms of numbers among the james charles on repeat it's just james charles clocking in 16 hours a day yeah and causing the difference but it was it was interesting so it was basically yeah there was this uh that was the second biggest difference technically was the weight lifting the biggest was the makeup um but it was because of that effect going back to the clavicular thing it's kind of fascinating the weight lifting being the biggest change because I don't know whether guys increasing their upper body strength makes a bigger impact on attractiveness or formidability.

1:31:41Like 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 and more formidable to other guys? That would be fascinating to work out because I don't know what the net gain is. Now, obviously you get both and that's what's great. But certainly when we look at sort of the myth of Chad and Louis Theroux'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 transsexual, as Mary Harrington calls it. It's like the most caricatured parts of the masculine look to the point where that hypermasculinized 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.

1:32:26And all of these other things to me seem to be just signaling formidability, signaling status and formidability to other men. It's the handbag of the face. The David Putz work would suggest it's more about formidability or rather the increase in formidability would outpace the increase. Do you want to just redo it? I mean, we've dropped it on the show like 10 times, but it's the fucking, it is the best. Do you know it? Yeah, I know it. Yeah, yeah, I can do it. So David Putz 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.

1:33:06And 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, 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.

1:33:50And 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. So formidability - That's the most fucking insane study. Now, as we mentioned, this was on college students, fraternity members, but - It was like a specific frat, wasn't it? Oh, it wasn't. I think so, I'm not sure. Okay. But this is consistent with David Putz's other work showing that formidability seems to have this huge effect on sexual success. This is my take. This is my take on clavicular and the lux-maxing world. They have closed their eyes, thrown the dart, and hit the bullseye if they've fluked optimizing formidability for male attention over attractiveness to only land in the middle of David Putz's study, finding out that formidability is better predictive of male mating success than attractiveness.

1:34:47Fame is also this form of like psychological formidability too, where, you know, I've, I've seen, and they'll, they'll keep their distance from, from, you know, like a famous person, you know, like if, 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 girl.

1:35:13I can poach that girl from The Rock. 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? Studying. That was behind the paywall, but I love Chris Williamson and I love modern wisdom. So, you know, let's say. 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 Louise Perry had written, I believe this was in The Spectator, you know, she was kind of riffing on this idea of OnlyFans and how sexual attention for women can be as satisfying as, you know, actual sex can be for men.

1:35:55So, 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 OnlyFans, it's this supernormal stimulus in the way that porn is for men. So porn, you know, you get novelty, all these different naked women and so on, it's very exciting for men, whereas OnlyFans as a creator can be very exciting for women because you're getting large, huge amount of sexual tension 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.

1:36:25Now, the female sexual scandal thing, the female teacher sexual scandal, I should say, 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 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 supernormal stimulus, where if you're an attractive 25-year-old woman and you get naked in front of 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 undress for the first time that you see um and you see a uh now that look like a chef that look with your race yeah half half latino half asian does not scream captain of the ship when it's facing backward i don't know what it is you look like you look like the guy out of tintin wait i don't know this pull up the fucking pull up the dude from tintin in the hat you can keep going for now um oh i lost Okay, so the response, right?

1:38:02So you're an attractive 25-year-old woman. You get naked in front of a 25-year-old guy. The response is he's going to be like, wow, cool, because 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 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 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.

1:38:39I think there is a question, and that's one of the reasons it's fascinating. It's so anomalous. Like, why? Why? You could go and get anyone. Yeah. Well, so for this, 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 this there's that kind of like vulnerability and that 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 um 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 underage girl you couldn't replicate that in any other dude i read i'm into like horrendous chick books like just like like every freedom mcfadden book i just blast through and uh i've read the teacher have you read the teacher dude it is freedom mcfadden's the person that did the housemaid right of which sydney sweeney just starred in and then she did the housemaid's revenge and then she did the housemaid cometh back earth and she's done like uh the patient and the teacher and a bunch of other and it's just easy reading right it's my guilty pleasure and um this one about the teacher the protect the main guy that usually all the guys in the books turn out to be the bad guy like that shock horror freedom of fat 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 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 too and i'm like the only reason the 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 then when i read it there's a bit of like retribution the guy was real mean and then he's like tried to kill people and whatever whatever like you had 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 cupboard you know what i mean 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 i 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 she described as attractive in the book yes yes and classically overlooked okay you know like she wants the attention so it fits with your theory yeah 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 too sort of aligns with, well, two things here, which is one, like they are likely to get that sort of intense reaction from male students because they're attractive.

1:42:45And then the other thing is they just have more opportunity, right? Like if you're an attractive person, you just have more opportunity in 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, it was a 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. Yeah. So, um, I put it, uh, two different, uh, polls on Twitter.

1:43:13Um, first, uh, 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 administered 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. That's way more preferable than sleeping with an ugly person who finds me hot. Whereas women, it was the opposite.

1:43:47Women were about 75 % of women said they would rather sleep with someone who they find ugly, who finds them attractive than to sleep with a hot person who was unattracted to them. So it's almost like men and women were made for each other this was something that this was a mess up that i did this is a mess up that i did in my conversation with esther perel 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 i was just like in i wasn't in my ep hat i was in my relating and she's the expert hat.

1:44:23And I should have just said, dude, being desired is probably the number one thing that women want as a turn on. 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. Put it on backwards. Put it on backwards. Hold on. I got a big dome, man. Both of you do, actually. I couldn't believe it. No, no, no. So there it is. So I thought that it was uh tintin it's not tintin it's indiana jones and it's this i'm just glad you is that not you i mean no oh wait but don't i have to wear it like this yeah no he's got it on backwards does he not no he's got it the right way there okay well it's not a captain's hat anyway i knew that i was right um yeah i uh wait that's tintin no no that's fucking the kid from indiana jones

1:45:15Yeah, I'm kind of fascinated by what's going to unfold over the next few years with what's happening with increased socioeconomic success for women, male beautification. I actually think that what guys think they're doing, even if it doesn't work with the formidability, double loop, close eye, bullseye thing, is I think that it's a kind of rejection of the female gaze in some ways. Like it's just male to male, intersexual competition. Do you ever remember Ziz? He was kind of the original Lux Maxxer in some ways. He was a bodybuilding icon in 2010, 2011, 2012, and died. Aussie guy, real good looking dude, just trained in the gym.

1:45:55He wasn't like doing the hardcore Lux Maxx and stuff, but just trained in the gym. And he had this line, which was, disregard women, acquire dance moves. And it was just him talking about, you want to go out with your boys and have a good time. And he was saying this as a naturally very attractive man who'd then done some weight lifting to make him look real adonis greek goddy but uh i get the sense that it is kind of a rejection of i'm just going to focus on becoming the most like mog mog you know where that comes from do you know the etymology of mogging is yeah a mog alpha male of the group that was what it came and then that shortened to mogging 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 it's like i'm not doing this for anybody else and this is you know yeah this is uh there was the the clavicular profile and you know i don't know how representative he is but this is this aligns with what you're saying here where he said two interesting things one he said something like um you know i my the main thing is mogging people like that's where he gets his rocks all i want to do is mog 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 good enough for him.

1:47:09So yeah, it's like disregard women, get jacked, hire dance moves or whatever, mog other men and not have sex with women. How common is that ever going to be though? I don't think it's going to be that common. 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. 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 the lineage through?

1:47:42Hmm. 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 from that. You've talked about in your book, Superb, you discuss the dangers of ignoring, minimizing sex differences. But you also sort of acknowledge that historically people have sort of overstated the sex difference. The dangers of overstating can be particularly harmful to women, but to men as well. And so, yeah, I'm curious, what are the dangers of minimizing and then overstating? The dangers of minimizing, so we 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.

1:48:33If you minimize or deny sex differences and just think that they're due to 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 it's 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 cardiovascular problems like heart attacks. The symptoms are different for men and women, and the male symptoms are better known.

1:49:11So the pain in 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, you know, it costs lives by not noticing sex differences rather than noticing them. On that point, like minimizing sex difference, I'm thinking about, with Chris's question, if something like, you know, if you truly believe in sort of, you know, blank slate-ism for men and women, and then you're, like you're a young, naive girl and you go off to college and you assume, oh, you know, men and women are basically the same.

1:49:54And then 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 like, you know, predatory men, you know, the average difference isn't, as you've 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, yeah, get drunk at a frat party and you're 18, you don't understand there are sex differences here in terms of, you know, motivations around sex and so forth that this can, you know, So I don't know whether it's the denial of sex, of differences between the sexes, it's the denial of where they come from.

1:50:25Well, 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? Has there been any update? Do we know if there's anything new? I can't spoil their party, unfortunately, but there is, there's new, I heard.

1:50:57Oh, fuck you, dude. I genuinely can't. Who behind the seat, under the busses, because you've got special behind the seat access? No, it's not, 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 going to have to rule it out in its own time. This is the Modern Wisdom Conference. I know, I know. I mean, I'll happily, I'll happily tell you the full kind of update. All right. 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 summit.

1:51:24I'll tell you on air. Well, it's not me trying to ore a farm or anything like that. It's literally just like, I know that Ryan Dobson and his party are going to be rolling out some cool research pretty soon. Is it not public once it's been put out at a conference? Well, I was told by Candice, no, but maybe that's kind of a social intuition. Come on, Candice. but I'm a new academic, so to say, so I don't necessarily have the... This is the issue that Macken's got. Macken and William's 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 want to step on the toes of anybody as just a mere underling.

1:52:08But if you were the boss, right, or an underboss, if you're David Buss, you can just start spouting theories whenever you want. But if you're sort of a new entrant at the bottom of the pyramid. That's costly signaling. Yeah, it is. Okay, I've got a question that 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 that maybe Steve or Rob here have better answers than I do. I genuinely don't know either. Bro, if I'm three for three here, 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.

1:52:49I mean, for reproductive agents. But this isn't, so that effect exists as well. Yeah. But this effect is even more peculiar where if they remate again later, the sex drive goes up again. Oh, it does. It's just that it's like, oh, the first year or two. It's sort of a mate retention strategy, right? You're in a new relationship, so you would want to sort of boost your sexual, you know, whatever, libido. So you're getting, it's an adaptation to get them on the hook to say, If you mate with me, there'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.

1:53:26I wish it was 20 years. The decline is precipitous. 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 of it is the wrong. Maybe it's just it doesn't decline for men. because it'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, because there's two types of sex, right?

1:54:03There'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 of some kind. I remember that study that you tweeted, which was women say that inside of relationships they have a roundabout 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 preferred level of sex that the woman wants and that the man is making a compromise.

1:54:38Yeah, that was from Roy Baumeister, 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. You know, thinking about sort of the costs and benefits of sex in general. And, you know, the costs are relatively low when you're in your 20s and early 30s. But then as you age, pregnancy gets higher and then you hit menopause.

1:55:22But if you can, presumably these studies have controlled for age, though. Yeah, again, 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. um but yeah no it's a 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 um design 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 like in absolute terms like how much does it actually decline absolutely it'll be on my twitter if you want to pull up the graph too 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 relationships single whatever the situation is men are just because you know like an average error management perspective um 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 uh the decline uh occurs from time one to time two to time three and so on not not sure um can just add you know the idea of uh women using sex to get guys into relationships i think it's a bit more symmetrical than that.

1:56:29I think that sex bonds both partners to each other. The king of sex differences telling us, I don't think there's a sex difference there. There's always got to be one. I wanted to ask something, and then you can tell me if this is taking us too far afield here. On our earlier discussion, something occurred to me, which is, what's the question we're interested in regarding sex differences? Is it 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?

1:57:07You 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 I 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.

1:57:36These 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 got to 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.

1:58:09We got to study the hunter-gatherers in environments of relative scarcity because that's what humans, 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.

1:58:44So it's kind of like the gender inequality paradox, but except with the abundance paradox, let's say. 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 push is, just directionally, I think it's good to look at all the different types of societies. Do you find that in hunter-gatherers, does it persist even in wed societies? Sometimes that's quite good evidence in weird societies. Often you have a push against traditional sex differences, and they often emerge anyway, suggesting that there is an innate nudge.

1:59:23Yeah, if they get bigger... In abundant societies, it may be that they're expressing themselves more than the level 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 that make sense? Yeah, I mean, I spoke to the anthropologist William Buckner about this, and he actually had a real gripe about the evo-psych studies on sex differences and mate preferences. And his gripe was that if the logic is that the EEA is what forged these, then they really should be more consistent. EEA. The environment of evolutionary adaptedness, which isn't, which is, you know, it's caricatured as like, oh, there was like 10 ,000 years in the Pleistocene where we're really.

2:00:19But 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 mate 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 um because really if it was like these are formed by you know these sex differences and mate 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 i it's not it's not necessarily equality paradox but just across time exactly and you don't find it at all.

2:01:12And some of those societies, right? Some sex differences aren't found. And some of them even seem to be reversed, like among the Wodabe of the Sahel region. It's men who are wearing tons of makeup and looking incredibly glamorous and 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 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.

2:01:47And the young women would walk through a kind of 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 a status because their pain tolerance was higher. every woman that was in this tribe, it may be hunter-gatherer stuff, I'm not too sure. Every girl that was in the tribe, their back looked like something horrendous out of the 1700s. So they're signaling mate value through formidability? Through pain tolerance.

2:02:24I can withdraw childbirth. Specifically, I can endure childbirth. We are very varied as a species, culturally, right? It's amazing. Yeah, it does give me pause that mate 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.

2:03:01And 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 mate preferences, maybe not in self-report contexts, but if you look at folk tales and fairy 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 in women's. So a lot of it does depend on the kind of data that you look at.

2:03:34It just occurred to me, Steve, in your book, I think you point out one line of evidence for the sex differences being 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, 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 huge amounts of weight on the parents, even though they're evaluating women rather than... 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.

2:04:16But then are they attracted to the kinds of things that heterosexual women are attracted to in a partner? Career ambition and success and those kinds of things. You know what I would love to see? 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, and this is true, the penis is the optimal vagina penetrating machine, right?

2:04:52It's been shaped across time. A billion years. Yeah, over a billion years of penis evolution. Speaking of the ways that humans are quite different, can you tell me what this hamster thing is what hamster thing oh my gosh what's this hamster thing does something something to do with a hamster from you as a kid what hamster thing were you not were you not obsessed with hamsters i was yeah but it's i didn't realize that this was going to be a huge it's interesting that you say that because oh my god oh nice that's incredible well i didn't realize that this was public. I feel like I'm in a fever dream when I'm in this thing's happening.

2:05:30But 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 for a sex. Yeah, I mean, 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 of me as an eight-year-old. Be careful what you put on the internet as an eight-year-old. I didn't even put it there. This is, I'm going to put this on right now. Heck yeah.

2:05:57Boys, I appreciate you all. You're all awesome. What do you want to plug? Where should people go to check up to you? Rob Henderson's newsletter on Substack, robkahenderson.com, and the paperback of my first book, Troubled, A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Nice. My new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, my previous book, The Eight That Understood the Universe, and my Substack, which is the Nature, Nurture, Nietzsche newsletter. Nothing to sell. Follow me on TikTok. Yeah, you do. At Hamsterman on TikTok, or at Mack and Murphy. Boys, I appreciate you all. these round table things are so fucking fun it's the best it's the best i love you all thank you for coming thanks see you next time everyone boys yes we've done it close your eyes exhale feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today well i'm letting go of the worry that i wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class i got them delivered free from 1-800 contacts oh my gosh they're so fast and breathe oh sorry i almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order.

2:06:57Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-CONTACTS.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-CONTACTS.