Why Men Are at the Top of Society (and the bottom) - Roy Baumeister - #1075

30:41But that's life as a man. In fact, it's true, I think, in many other species.

30:50so the male is a riskier one because

31:03you had to succeed in order to be attractive and have children now there are other aspects of this Joyce Benenson and her colleagues at Harvard did this terrific paper a year or two ago about safety concerns which are much higher in women than men. Physical safety? Physical safety? I think social too. I mean, the article dwelt on physical and medical things. But I think it applies in the social realm too. Women don't like to take chances. I have a colleague who is arranging getting researchers together to do what she called adversarial collaborations. where say, you and I are both working in some area and we have a theoretical disagreement.

31:51You think your theory is right and I think my theory is right. So one thing we could do is get together and do an experiment together that will agree this will be the critical test, okay? And people don't usually do this because they don't reach out to their rivals who they often don't like or whatever. But this woman, Corey Clark, was at Penn and she had a big grant and could encourage people to do it. And she said, yeah, people often once, she said, why don't you do a collaboration with them? I said, yeah, that's a great idea. But that was the men's reaction. She said, I just couldn't get the women to do it.

32:28She had something like 30 or 40 of these things going. And I talked to her at one point. She said, I finally got a woman to agree to be part of one of these things, but it was only on the condition that she would be the neutral third party. So she could not be proven wrong. And so taking that chance, she elaborates that women want to exclude someone they disagree with rather than confront them. And you bring your data, I'll bring mine, and we'll duke it out. That's more a male strategy. So in a way, science has become much more about excluding and silencing, which to the detriment of the scientific enterprise.

33:14What's your concept of the imaginary feminist? Oh, all right. That was in that book I did 15 years ago. There's this conventional wisdom that we all have. And when I start to say things about gender, you can immediately imagine, oh, but a feminist will object to this. So they taught people very well to have a kind of automatic internalized representation of a feminist. It says, oh, you can't say this, you can't say that. It's mostly silencing and disallowing things. So the problem if you try to deal with feminists on a scholarly basis, well, there are multiple problems. but they disagree to some extent amongst themselves about various things so they can easily say well that's not what what feminists believe or at least not what all feminists believe but i wanted to address this sort of internalized um feminist watchdog that uh pretty much everybody is brought up right now and you know you can't say this you can't say that that's misogynistic or that's unfair or sexist or whatever.

34:37Like you were saying earlier, to say that they're more stupid men than women, well, that's fine. But to say they're more brilliant men than women, oh, oh, oh, you can't say that. So that's what I was trying to get at with the imaginary feminist. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. Eight Sleep just released their brand new Pod 5, which includes the world's first temperature-regulating duvet. Compare it with their smart mattress cover, which cools or warms each side of the bed by up to 20 degrees, and you've got a climate-controlled cocoon built for deep, uninterrupted rest.

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35:41Right now, you can get up to$350 off the Pod 5 by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modernwisdom at checkout. out. Do you think modern gender discourse is missing the concept of trade-offs? What is it that's going wrong when it comes to talking about men and women? Absolutely. I was convinced of trade-offs fairly early in my career. And I think social science in general, they want to say this is good and that's bad. And not all of them. There are lots of people who believe in trade-offs.

36:21But sort of the dominant view is, well, this is a problem and we have to do this to fix. I started seeing, well, you fix one problem, you create another, and it isn't so easy just to solve problems. So they have this view. Some social scientists see it as our work is a way of making society better, and so they have a clear idea of what's going to be better, and don't want to acknowledge that if we make a change to bring about this better state, well, maybe it'll make some other things worse. So, students are happier with grade inflation where everybody gets an A, but then they learn less. There's less incentive to study and less punishment.

37:08Schools get rated on how many of your students graduate and graduate on time and things like that. Well, but that puts pressure on the institution to put out, you know, to make sure everybody passes whether they deserve it or not. And then they're more uneducated or poorly educated people out there. I was just reading something in this morning's paper, I think, about the Chicago schools, which a number of them, they don't have a single pupil who is reading or doing math at grade level. so it's nicer for the teachers to give everybody a positive grade the students like it too but there's a clear trade-off that you don't have to work as hard It's such a strange kind of sort of toxic compassion I had this idea in my head you remember the study that was done where some feminist scholars had tried to reanalyze the big game hunting data of hunter-gatherer tribes.

38:17And they basically said, women not only did just as much big game hunting as men, but sometimes they did even more. And this was their reanalysis of existing data. It was about five years ago, and it sort of broke through. And I remember looking at it at the time, and I thought, this doesn't seem to make sense to me, I don't really understand why, but I, you know, I'm not a scholar. I can't read the data. Someone analyzed their reanalysis and there was so much fuckery with the data. It was one contribution to a single hunt was counted the same as an entire lifetime as hunting from the men. There was no difference made for the size, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

38:56And what I realized was there's a kind of soft bigotry of male expectations around this stuff, that whatever men do is implicitly preferred. That's seen as the desirable thing. That women did just as much big game hunting as men implies that big game hunting and the male default is somehow more desirable in the same way as there are just as many female CEOs are on the rise and this is something that should be celebrated. Well, because that's a position that's been typically held by men. Now, it's the prestigious ones. You wouldn't see this for there are just as many female addicts and homeless people as men.

39:38There are just as many women in jail for violent crimes as men. You wouldn't get that in the same way. But I realized for a society that's increasingly obsessed with talking about equality, which is not equality. It's trying to make men and women the same, not to make them equal. It really is. It slips so much low-key misogyny in by just tacitly derogating whatever it is that women tend to do naturally. That, oh, alloparenting, gathering. Gathering is not as important as hunting. Raising children is not as important as war uh staying at uh building the hr department is not as important as being the ceo there is always this sort of implicit prioritization this soft bigotry of male expectations and i saw it happen with that hunter gatherer uh big game hunting thing and i just i once i've seen it i can't unsee it really okay a couple things uh first uh in terms of hunting and gathering um they're both important and gathering sometimes yields more calories it certainly does much more reliably but from what i'm told protein has this particular higher value and so men gather too for sure especially the modern ones because i don't think there's as much big game to hunt anymore for the remaining hunter gatherers anyhow but um um but protein is a particular need so if you want to make women look good you just count the calories and then the difference is smaller uh but protein which you need to grow the brain and the muscles and everything else that is a higher prestige food it's a more valuable kind of food and so there is a genuine superiority in getting food or getting protein food which would come from mainly from hunting and our women do i understand sometimes hunt small game um so there's some degree of overlap as you would expect.

42:03But it's not that the men made up that hunting is better than gathering. Being the good hunter, again, is what made the man attractive to women so that he could get his choice of mates and have a tassel of children and we'd be descended from him. And the women knew this too. I'm sorry, Joyce said they all know who's the best hunter, and they all want him. So there is some benefit to protein. And in terms of what makes a corporation succeed, the HR department just manages things internally, but it doesn't improve the bottom line. You got to work on the manufacturing technology and the sales opportunities.

43:00And those are the things where the corporations make money so that they can afford a human relations thing, which will make sure there are no office romances and things like that. Which, incidentally, is something of a recent issue I've been thinking about. I wonder if young people aren't marrying and mating nearly as much as they used to. And I wonder if the prohibition on workplace romance threw out a lot of real babies with the bathwater. I mean, it was done to protect women from a few abusive guys who would take advantage of their position. And I sympathize with that. But I think I, like most men, our guests, like you two, we hate those guys who abuse their positions because they discredit the rest of us.

43:52And again, I was visiting at Harvard and a woman there said, you know, our friends are all these long, happily married couples, but none of those marriages would be allowed today. A lot of them started off with professors and students and things like that. And so they pushed more and more to prohibit that. But often the woman initiated that herself and women like to marry somebody like that. And again, a lot of long, happy marriages are being prevented. And the dating apps aren't doing an adequate job. Yeah, I think another interesting element here is modern feminism has encouraged women to turn into the sort of man that they want to marry.

44:38very much encouraging dominance assertiveness independence uh derogating nurturing soft sensitive skills unless they're in a man obviously and um i the lack of polarity you just can't sort of re-engineer this out and it's interesting to see how many of the um cultural commentators online that will endorse a view that they don't embody uh how many of the the people that are writing about this stuff, if you were to look at the inner dynamic of their relationship, it probably looks quite traditional. But from the outside saying, you don't need to have a family, you don't need to be a mother, you don't need to be in any way submissive or follow or be led by the partner, all the rest.

45:26And you look internally at what a lot of these commentators online do, especially as they grow up a little bit more. And you realize that those positions aren't held. There was a really interesting situation. I don't know if you saw it. It went viral about six months ago. There was a man and a woman, young pair traveling in Thailand, some sort of East Asian country. And it was CCTV footage. And the woman was attacked by a man with a knife. And he was trying to steal her bag off her, some of her possessions. And the man that she was with hid around the side of a pillar. so there was a sort of a bollard or something and this guy hid over there as the woman was fighting trying to sort of hold on to a bag and this guy's got a knife and that i don't really remember how how it finished all of the comments were basically saying girl just leave him he's trash this guy absolutely no respect at all and i don't i i wish that he had protected her i wish that it hadn't happened.

46:30I don't think that she should have had to go through it. But it is difficult to diminish the protector provider elements that men typically take value from. And in the same breath say, yeah, but if it happens, you should stand up for the woman. Because if you've been trained for your entire life, well, women don't need the doors holding open for them. Women don't need you to make sure that they get home safe at night they can do everything that a man does sometimes even better just as much big game hunting what is the where are the training wheels for men to learn to step up in those sorts of situations right right yes yes yes very much um yeah my generation we were told we've got to take care of the girls and the women and hold the doors for them and protect them.

47:24And if there's danger, you put yourself into it. There's a funny story by Warren Farrell, who I guess initially was one of the main male feminists. He was. But he kind of woke up to that. But he talked about being at a conference on feminism and he was out for a walk with one of the top women feminists and they're walking down in a park or something. A man jumped out from behind a tree. It turned out it wasn't dangerous, but it suddenly was. And immediately the woman ducked behind him and he stepped forward.

47:57And he said, oh, we had such a long, awkward conversation after that. How could... Anyway. Oh, my embodied misogyny just pouring out of me. The patriarchy came and pulled her back behind me. Okay, I'm not sure I believe in either misogyny or patriarchy. but those are common terms, which, yeah, maybe that's what she blamed or something like that. But I certainly don't know any men who hate women. No. I know men who hate specific women, ex-wives and whatnot, and often for understandable reasons. But a man who hated women in general, I don't do it. And if there's any gender hatred, it's feminists hating men in general.

48:48uh and in terms of i think there's i think there's subcultures now unfortunately there are subcultures of men who hate women you know you look at sort of some of the darker corners of the internet now guys that are um they're upset uh uh entire sex that they think has rejected them or their friends or is meant made a society where they're no longer wanted um i do think that the more militant edges of feminism have been mirrored now on the men's side? Yeah, that could be. I wouldn't be surprised. And if a woman who'd been raped a couple times hated men in general, we wouldn't be that surprised.

49:26I kind of see those involuntarily celibate incels somewhat in the same category. I'm less sympathetic. But I mean, the experiment it would be if a woman would take one of these incels and strike up a relationship with him and start having sex with him, he might come around very rapidly and all these women are bad would just evaporate. It's a spicy theory that we can fix inceldom by just getting women to have sex with men more. But I do agree that, I mean, it's even discouraged in the world of incels. I'm not sure how familiar you are with it, but one of my best friends is the number one researcher on the planet, William.

50:13And they have this term called ascending. And ascending is no longer becoming an incel by being attractive to a woman and getting her attention, getting her in a bed, being found to be attractive in this way. And it's actively discouraged. And I think the reason it's actively discouraged is if somebody else that you saw as an equal is able to ascend, is no longer involuntarily celibate, that means that maybe you're not doomed. and if that's the case, your sort of fatalistic view of why things are happening this way might not actually be so fatalistic. It might be more self-imposed and maybe there's something you could do and as soon as you have hope, you also have the opportunity for disappointment.

51:00And without the hope, there can't be disappointment. So removing the hope and saying, I'm a genetic dead end, there's nothing that I can do, women are X, Y, and Z and that's not going to change. that it's misery-inducing, but predictable, consistent, and reassuring in some ways. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, I would like to know more about the incels. It's an odd corner of the world, and I don't know people, and I don't know much about them. But we can't take them as typical of men. They are usually not the powerful people. They are not running society. Powerful men usually have no shortage of interested women.

51:48It's the ones who lack resources and successes and status and so on. If your theory is correct, what do you think happens when societies stop rewarding male sacrifice? Well, that would be a weakness. I remember my professors remembering World War II when it was declared, and all American men rushed to sign up and volunteer to go fight the war, and I don't think that would happen today. the men have been brought up to think they're bad and the women are just as good and society, we teach our kids that America and the UK and so on are bad places who've done bad things and don't stress the positive accomplishments so that would be a vulnerability as long as there's no war ironic to say this, there's no war going on Yeah, I mean, it's so true that the reason that we're able to sort of play around in this kiddie pool with roles and switching of sacrifice and who's supposed to do what is literally because there aren't any intense selection pressures going on.

53:07if there was something more extreme happening and imposing itself on us from the outside, shit would get real, really quick. I mean, look at the Ukraine war, right? The Ukraine war kicks off and men were being turned away at the border, including trans men were being turned away at the border because, hey, no, sorry, buddy, women and children get to go, but you got to stay. I don't know how progressive thinking Ukraine was prior to the war kicking off. I'm unsure about the cultural landscape there. But yeah, it seems to me like we might be entering a period where male motivation collapses. And obviously you wrote this book in 2010 and 16 years later, the male motivation collapse, which you could have seen, it just would have been a natural by-product of you rolling the clock forward from what you'd already seen, has completely come to fruition.

54:01So I guess I can congratulate you on being Cassandra in that way. If it's true that ego depletion is one of the most successful findings in social psychology, that willpower is a limited resource, which when used can be sapped and takes time to come back online. If it's true that it's one of the most successful findings in social psychology, how come it keeps on being attacked? This is replication crisis. It doesn't repeat. Why is that the case? What are people getting wrong? I don't know. People do like to tear down other things, and there's a lot of petty jealousy and so forth.

54:46But evidence in favor is overwhelming. There must be a thousand successful findings in the research literature, which hardly any point has that much support. I heard somebody was really saying, well, that must have just been all been by chance, that maybe by accident the statistics turned out this way. Well, chance works equally both ways. Half the findings should be in the opposite direction. There are essentially none in the opposite direction. I mean, saying that it's a chance where there's that much. there was the the one initially big multi-lab replication which was reported as a failure and so that got a lot of publicity because people like negative publicity and they never correct it when the positive comes around even those data were reanalyzed a couple years later and somebody said oh no actually they didn't get people depleted enough to really show any effects.

55:54But to the slight extent that they did deplete people, they did what the theory predicted. So that was confirmed. A quick aside, if your sleep's been off, you're taking ages to fall asleep, waking up at random times, feeling groggy in the morning, Momentus's Sleep Hacks are here to help. They're not your typical knock-you-out supplement, just overloaded with melatonin. It only has the most evidence-based ingredients, perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly, stay asleep throughout the night, and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning. These things are an absolute game changer.

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57:00That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom, modernwisdom at checkout. How much is true of the fact that ego depletion works, either only works or works more if you believe in it, that it's this self-fulfilling thing? If you believe that you have a limited amount of willpower, then it sort of manifests. But if you don't believe that, it's a protective mechanism. Well, that's a really interesting idea that some people at Stanford published some work on that. And we were intrigued by that. And so we tried to copy their experiment. And we did find that if you give people a really strong sales pitch that your willpower is unlimited, then, at least when they first get depleted, they don't show the effect.

57:52We did show when you get seriously depleted, then you show an even worse effect. So that belief that you have unlimited willpower is helpful. Think of the analogy of physical energy. If you somehow could be convinced that you have unlimited physical energy today, and then you go out for running a race. But first, when you start to get tired, it'll probably help you continue to do it. But at some point, it may backfire. My thought in the big picture is if it were true that believing in unlimited willpower would give you unlimited willpower, you'd think most societies in the world would have that belief.

58:38because... They would have created some sort of cultural meme around it because it would have conferred such an improvement for everyone. So much benefit to society, to having people with better self-control. And yet most societies don't. Now, there was some argument that some people in India have the opposite belief, and I wish to see more there. But it's very rare most people seem to know. And I think they just have the experience that trying to exert control over a long period of time, you just can't keep it up. What, if anything, has been accurate in some of the critiques around the original research?

59:24Or what's been most accurate or has given you most reason to what you said? Well, at first we thought, at first we were thinking that willpower is kind of a metaphorical thing. but uh well okay the brain has a limited amount of fuel and it used it up so it has to recover but then people started showing you get people depleted and then you offer them a big financial reward if they can still perform well well they can they're extra depleted afterwards but it's not that the brain is out of fuel it just goes into a conservation mode it turns out physical muscles are the same way. They're lab studies where you come into the lab and do physical exertions where you have to press, and after a while your muscles get tired, and then the researchers will say, well, I'll tell you what, I'll give you$10 if you can do it once pressing as hard as you did when you first walk in.

1:00:19Well, they can. It's still that there is a point at which your muscles can't work anymore. There's probably a point like that at which your willpower is so badly depleted that you can't do it. But in the laboratory, we'd never get people to that extreme situation.

1:00:41So one big switch early was to shift from being out of fuel to conserving remaining fuel. And it makes sense. We evolved under conditions of uncertain food supply. And then people started linking it to the glucose, the chemical in your body that carries the energy from your stomach to your brain and muscles and so on. And found, oh, this was kind of a surprise to me when this worked, but if people would eat something after they were depleted, that would get them back to perform well again. so that was intriguing wasn't there a great study done around the the The length of time of somebody being sent to jail by jurors or judges and how long it had been since they had their breakfast.

1:01:41Basically, if you end up in court, you probably want to go in at about 1.45 p.m. just after the lunch break or at 9 a.m. just after they've come in for breakfast. Yes, yes, yes. Some people argue about that. It's hard to get a perfect study done with real-life data. but the curve was quite striking and just about every experiment we've used where we give people some glucose in the middle it does restore their performance and they often don't know we started doing it with giving people lemonade it was at Florida State and it was hot so people were glad to have a glass of lemonade and you can mix it with Splenda or sugar and it tastes the same and it can be double blind So the experimenter just pulls one out of the refrigerator and says this for you.

1:02:33The experimenter doesn't know if it's got glucose in it, is it sugar or just a sweetener. It tastes the same. People can't tell the difference. They're glad either way. But the Splenda had no effect on the data, whereas the sugar wiped out. That's so good. That's so good. The glucose is the energy that's also used for your immune system. but it uses very uneven amounts. So when you're fighting off a cold, that's often why you want to go to bed and just sleep it off and let your immune system have all the energy in there. Well, in our evolutionary history, you didn't have antibiotics or anything like that.

1:03:15If you got a cut on your foot and got infected, your body needed to fight that off. if you didn't get a cut then you don't need an extra immune system activity but you'd need extra fuel for it to fight an infection or to survive a fever or anything like that so it made sense to err on the side of conserving as much as possible there is an interesting alternative theory here

1:03:43which most people don't talk about but I read and I thought it's it's really quite good it fits everything, but this is the best alternative theory, which is that

1:03:58the sections in the brain that do self-control are really important because self-control is really valuable for success in life in many different ways. And if you have high glucose around some nerve cells for a long period of time, it starts to kill them. It's best known. diabetics in the past they would lose all feeling in their feet their blood sugar would run high and so you would start to kill the nerve cells and you wouldn't feel it so you'd hurt your foot and infections would happen and you wouldn't notice them so it could be that after you exert self-control the depletion effect is the brain letting itself cool off as it were you say okay we've been exerting self-control using willpower that means those nerve cells in the front of the brain have been exposed to a high level of glucose well we don't want to burn them out so not let's not use self-control for a while let them cool off and then that i can use them again um that really fits a lot of the evidence.

1:05:18It's the most plausible alternative theory and would still mean most of the glucose or most of the depletion phenomena are real. It would just have a different interior mechanism that the brain automatically conserves its energy, but rather it needs to use different parts of the brain so that the nerve cells don't get wear and tear from an extended period of high glucose. Beyond having more glucose across all of the work that you've done, what are the best, most evidence-based ways for people to improve their willpower? Okay, well, improving self-control, which is the real goal, you can do that without improving willpower.

1:06:05Can you distinguish for me the difference between self-control and what? Okay, so willpower would be the energy that you exert. But self-control also depends on keeping track of the behavior. So the easiest way to improve your self-control is to keep a record of what you're doing. Even my grandmother told me a long time ago, well, when you're a poor student, you don't have money, you just write down everything you spend and then you know how much you're spending and what you're spending it on. Or if you're trying to lose weight and keep it off, well, you've got to weigh yourself more carefully.

1:06:45Or if you're trying to take up an exercise program, tell your friends you're going to do it and you're going to tell them each day, did I exercise today? So improving the monitoring will improve self-control without needing any more willpower because it gives you more feedback. I was going to try to jog three times a week, and I haven't jogged all week. So I better do it. It's easier to fool yourself if you don't keep track. And certainly if you don't know, it's very hard to regulate something that you don't know. In terms of improving the willpower, it seems to work like a muscle. And a lot of people have produced findings like this that if you exercise self-control on a regular basis then you do you get better at it I didn't know if that would work we had an early study where it did work and then done a fair number of others and other people have too there are a couple of meta-analyses combining results of a great many studies and saying yes it does practice self-control To design the study properly, you have to exercise self-control on one sphere and then measure self-control in something else to show that it's a general improvement.

1:08:07But it does seem to work. Some of the biggest effects I've seen were this Australian group. They did several studies. One was they took students who had money trouble and they trained them to manage their money better. And they met with them once a month for several months or something. and taught them how to manage their money. And so they did get better at that. But their measure, one key was they came to the laboratory and had to do self-control tasks that had nothing to do with money. It was just like maintaining focus on this while you're being distracted by that. They were better at that.

1:08:44They also reported on the questionnaire that they started studying better just because they're working on managing their money better, But they also study their study habits improved. After they finished dinner, they would clean up rather than just stack the dishes in the sink. They even said they ate healthier, which, again, is a sign of self-control. But as they point out, healthy food is more expensive than junk food. So it kind of went against what they were training self-control for, which is to manage their money better. but that also improved their diet. So they saw a whole variety of positive changes in there that came from it.

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1:10:49That's drinkag1.com slash modernwisdom. I've been completely obsessed with this series that you've been doing on Substack about sexual novelty. What did you learn there? I was intrigued with the idea that it's partly with thinking about pornography. It's so widely available. I've seen over the course of my life that become more and more available, for better and for worse.

1:11:23But the novelty of it, it might have been Naomi Wolf or one of those who remarked that her generation, which I think was about the same as mine, was the last time a woman could have this huge effect on a man just by taking off her clothes and letting him see her naked body. but it was such a thrill to see it you know when I was a kid we didn't see pictures of naked women you know one of my buddies would find a playboy that somebody had thrown away or something they didn't even show the full nudity so you really didn't quite know what a woman entirely looked like and even if you could find an occasional picture or something.

1:12:08It's not like endless amounts of pornography and lots of women and ads where they're showing everything. So some of the mystery is gone. And it made me think, well, maybe there's some loss there. That novelty is arousing, but it's a limited amount of novelty. So you can only do something the first time once. There's only one first time. So in a way, it's a bit sad for young men to have all this available to them. And if it had been available when I was young, I doubt I would have resisted. I probably would have been curious enough to look at it all and so on. But in a way, I think I'm lucky that it wasn't available.

1:13:04but that way there was still novelty as i got into my 30s and 40s which i hadn't explored yet but if you've you've seen everything by the time you're 25 or even by the time you're 20 um there isn't there isn't as much novelty available um on the different sex partners and that seems to be what people are shifting that's kind of what i came to after writing those columns that people are blazing through all the novelty and pornography, they're not doing as much of capitalizing on novelty within the relationship. So the second base plan, you know, that you just sort of gradually go from one step to the other.

1:13:49One of my young friends said, yeah, today I just did it again, from first contact on the dating app to having lots of sex under a week. just a few days. Whereas, you know, back in the day, the earlier day, you had to practically be engaged before you could go all the way. Certainly, I grew up in the 70s. You had to have a series of interactions and, you know, you had the relationship. And so the step-by-step, the novelty, you could appreciate. So the first time you undo her brassiere or whatever, that's really exciting. But if you've had sex and done it all right away, that doesn't, I think, strengthen the relationship in the way that shared novel experiences, a series of them, will do.

1:14:50I can't prove it on that, but that's a speculation. But going for novelty in terms of lots of different partners rather than novelty within one relationship of gradually exploring many different activities, that seems much less well-designed to produce healthy families, which is what society needs. and I started to think for those fortunate young men who had sex with lots and lots of different women is this really good preparation for marriage

1:15:27I think it would cycle through women rapidly and get tired of them and settle down with one woman for 40 years yeah do you think that that predisposes men who've had a high body count before getting into marriage that even trying to titrate, let's say that they've taken the red pill of your substex post series, and they're going to slow, you can only get to second base once. And if you hit a home run first time, then you've rounded all of them basically. And we're going to slowly titrate the sexual novelty over time. We're going to get more experimental, but it's going to be over a much more protracted timeline uh do you think that you can be sort of predisposed to not finding that as exciting is there a basically is there a lifetime coolidge effect as well yeah somebody commented that on one of my sub stacks that after you've had sex with a dozen different women then to go slow and get to second base with the next one is probably not that that exciting that is plausible Well, I'm not sure it's true.

1:16:32It does seem likely. What was that story about the couple where the woman had never used her hand? Oh, right. Yes, I remember reading that. I think it was in the Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, but We're Afraid to Ask book, which is one of the first bestsellers to the public about sex. and she'd written to the physician and said they'd had a good sex life with her husband and then gradually couldn't, you know, perform as well. It got weaker and weaker and it stopped altogether and it was kind of sad. She felt bad for him and, you know, and then she thought, you know, morals, women didn't do sexual things.

1:17:18But she said, well, I love my husband and, you know, we've been married a long time. I'm not going to worry about morality. and she went and bought a book about sex, which back in those days there weren't that many things available. And it said if you put your hand on the man's genitals, it was exciting to them. So I tried that and he got harder than he had for years. And so it was a very nice kind of sweet story. So that's the opposite extreme of novelty. They'd hardly done anything. and we forget if we go back a century the amount of female flesh a man would see in his lifetime is less probably than you can see in an hour of I was fascinated by that what a weirdly I guess it would be impossible to do that study now because sexual culture is so permissive and so sort of widely promoted that no one would have gone their entire life without what is sort of termed as second base, right?

1:18:27Actually, I lied. I lied. Apparently you can get to fourth base without going around second base. That is, you just go from home base to first and then you go straight back again, apparently. And there's other bits that you can miss off. But I loved that story that you told about a series of experiments that were done showing pornography, normal pornography, BDSM pornography, and then educational sexual videos. And the increase in sexual frequency happened when everybody saw the porn for the first time, because again, this was in the 60s or the 70s, I think, where porn was basically not available.

1:19:08But if you went from the extreme stuff to the more vanilla stuff, you didn't see the concordant increase in sexual desire, but if you escalated it, and this kind of goes to prove your theory that ever-increasing but steady escalation of sexual novelty over time, doing new things, exposure to that, not only within partners, but presumably across your lifetime, it seems to make sense. This isn't just a dyadic situation. It's going to be stuff that you've done. If you have an explosive 20s where you're just on the career run of your life and then you settle down and you begin to start to titrate again, I have to assume that you need to almost treat yourself like you're someone whose sexual novelty needs to be shepherded with at least a little bit of care because you want to still be excited to do things over time.

1:20:07And unfortunately, as much as you can say, you should love me so much, It should just be the excitement, the raw attraction and the romance and the rest of it. You need to respect the psychology. You need to respect Coolidge effect. You need to respect the way that we look at variety as being a stimulus. And yeah, I think it's just such a - And ration it. And what? And ration it over time. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you've done, I love the disclaimer and I'm going to start to use it when I'm talking about spicy stuff too. You say at the top of pretty much all of the posts, this is a treatment on men.

1:20:44A separate treatment will be needed for women, but we can save that for another time. It's such a nice way to not have to caveat through. And we must remember that this would be important. Have you got any inclination? Because we're talking about men, the Coolidge effect, what's the refractory period from partner to partner? And for men, if they go from one partner to a different partner, they're able to perform more quickly as opposed to if it's the same one and they've got to go again. Have you got any idea what sexual novelty does to female sex drive? It's much harder to get convincing data, anything on that.

1:21:26And so I can write what we do know about female sexuality and so on. But the role of novelty, I mean, it's not nothing, but it doesn't seem to be as powerful a driving force. I recall some years ago, someone reported a survey, I think it was first-year college students at Southern Cal or one of the California universities, and they asked, how many people would you like to have sex with for the rest of your life, assuming no constraints of marriage or laws or disease or anything like that if it were up to you. And the women's response average was two and a half. So they wanted to have a fling or two and then settle down.

1:22:14The average for the men was 64.

1:22:23And that's the average. So you've got some impressive outliers there to bring that back down. Yeah, there definitely were. Because they said actually a lot of people just said one. Presumably these were people who were still virgins. And they were just hoping to have the first one. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So both men and women, there were a lot saying, I would like to have one. But a lot of the men wanted to have a really high number. And not very many women were saying, I want to go have sex with 100 men.

1:22:57someone are doing it now. There was that woman in the UK who did it all in one day, right? A thousand, yeah, Bonnie Blue. I had a debate with her on the show. I moderated a debate with her on the show. It wasn't a thousand in one day, right? No, it was. You're talking about Lily Phillips who did a hundred and then Bonnie Blue had sex with a thousand men in one day, which even if you just run the numbers is insane, but the whole thing was recorded. It's, yeah, it's a real, I mean, more than anything, it's an endurance feat, more than it is one of sexual novelty. But I mean, what you're looking at there is basically someone who's kind of the Michael Jordan or the LeBron James or the Tiger Woods of sociosexuality.

1:23:37It's just somebody that's so far. She is the tail of the tail. She's the Elon Musk of having sex. Yeah. And I had a conversation with her. I sat down. I sat across from her. She was perfectly cordial. she had her defenses up at the start but when she realized it wasn't going to be a cantankerous takedown conversation it was it was really nice and I was looking I mean I think I'm a pretty good judge of character and I was looking for is there some deception going on here is there some secret trauma that's leaking out is there whatever and by the end of it my summary is just she is the most extreme sociosexual being that i've ever seen she just is able to completely detach emotions from having sex it's not alchemizing some childhood wound in a way that i think a lot of bdsm and kink actually is there seems to be a good amount of data coming out that a good bit of bdsm and kink is preferences for that are um predisposed by some situations people have been through in childhood.

1:24:43That was Catherine Page Harden from UT. She was teaching me about that a couple of weeks ago and a couple of other conversations I've had.

1:24:54It's definitely unique, but I mean, yeah, maybe there'll be studies done on her at some point in future, who knows? The one who did 100 said she wouldn't recommend it. The one who did 1 ,000 said that she'd do it again. So again, the people at the extremes, the people who are at the tail of the tail, they'll... Okay, well, that's what she wants. Good for her. And it must have been fun for the thousand men too. I wonder, does she want to get married at some date? That would be, actually, that could be a fix for your incel problem. That could be, we could just put a thousand of the men who were struggling with the inceldom thing in there.

1:25:30And then that's a thousand fewer men who are maybe thinking that sex is inaccessible. Who knows? Yes. my wife thinks they're just caught up by the publicity that great sex is going on all over the place and she says they probably just want the really attractive women which is unrealistic for them she wonders have these insults made a serious effort to date say the fat girls or the others who aren't nearly as much in demand traditionally, historically That's what people sometimes did. They found someone at about the same level. But that was before there was the assumption that lots of people are having lots of great sex all the time.

1:26:18Which I'm told by the researchers who are studying this is that it's not nearly as wild as that. and the Hollywood version of what a young person's sex life is not realistic and it may be realistic even in Hollywood. But, you know, those are beautiful people with lots of money and status and so on. So, I don't know. I don't have to say to you, you said you know an expert on this. Well, have you ever tried to date the less attractive girls who are wishing for more attention and action. If you insist you have to have the gorgeous one, well, you may be disappointed, unless you're a big, rich, handsome man.

1:27:09There was a really interesting article that was posted by my friend Rob Henderson a couple of days ago, and he was talking about people assume that it's this small number of men that are capturing sex from a large number of women, but it's not it's a socio-sexual few at the top and yeah there is there is a little bit of a skew within there but most people aren't having that much sex many people aren't having any sex at all and there is a small number of people having loads of sex with each other and that's that that's just a really interesting wrinkle i think in the sort of 80 20 discourse that's been going on for a while And I knew that this had been, this had got turned upside down three or four years ago by a friend, Alex Datesike.

1:27:57And then Rob re-reported on it the other day and basically found out the same thing. You've just got this group of people who want to have sex with lots of people. And yeah, everybody else is, I don't know, looking at it, maybe thinking it was good. I guess one interesting thing is probably more men would want to be in that group of highly sociosexual people, whereas fewer women desire to be. And most women who want to be in it are in it, presumably, whereas most men who want to be in it can't be in it. Right. Yeah, there's a big difference there, again, with the average man wanting much more of it in terms of variety.

1:28:37yeah I was talking to another expert Eli Finkel and he said yeah the one night stand thing that's it's not entirely a myth but it's way overstated it's quite rare for people to get together and have sex just one time I don't know the basis for that but he knew he knows much more than I do about that sort of thing Roy Biomaster ladies and gentlemen Roy you rule I love your stuff everyone needs to go and check out your Substack, go and subscribe. The Existential Contrarian. Right, yes. Yeah, The Existential Contrarian. It is a crime how, I mean, you're new on Substack, but everyone needs to go and do it.

1:29:16Check out the series on sexual novelty. I'm a massive fan. I read everything that you put out. I think you're great. And I look forward to whatever you're doing next, because every opportunity to read what you do and to talk to you is a real treat. Okay, well, thank you, Chris. It's been a great interview and a total pleasure for me as well. Congratulations, you made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Go on. If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom Reading List.

1:29:49It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life-changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. and you can get it right now for free by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.