Modern Dating Is Changing People in a Weird Way - Louise Perry (4K)

there's a Wall Street Journal column about marriage as a mirror of human nature that says 40% of young adults say marriage has outlived its usefulness what do you think's going on I mean I'm not surprised cuz these are young adults who've like I think so I think in London now and this will be true in lots of parts of the West um about half of kids will reach the age of 15 not living with their biological father half so I guess these young people just look around and they're like well it's like evident to me that marriage isn't working Mary eat's got this idea about um motherhood and family life as a mimetic desire that the death of mothers and families causes fewer people to see them which causes fewer people to want them which causes fewer people to to I think that's definitely true and you can see that in dat actually with um like if your sister or your close friend has a baby you're more likely to have a baby in the year or two following and vice versa so if if the people around you are not having children you're less likely to have children yourself I think and that's I think that's so interesting because there's always been this assumption by demographers up until birth rate started really crashing in recent decades that people would just spontaneously decide once they had access to contraception or whatever to have 2.1 kids that that was like the natural settling point for the human species that we'd all we'd all reach there and we' just stay there and that's clearly not true because so many countries now are falling way below replacement and I think it's because actually there's no law of nature that says that people should want 2.1 kids people look around them and they're like oh okay everyone here has one or zero or six and then that becomes as you say the mtic desire I think that becomes what's considered normal and humans are completely obsessed with what's normal which is why I'm just genuinely quite generally quite skeptical of the idea of um of people having this like absolute agency or AB I mean we do clearly have we do clearly have free will but I think that what we consider to be desirable normal the life template is so incredibly dependent on what other people around us think um which is I think exactly why we've got into this downward spiral in terms of fertility there's uh I love your analogy or your conception of prudishness and licentiousness that we kind of flip-flop between the two mhm which one do you think we're in now uh Lous transitioning to prudishness okay is this like the uh Perry pilled equivalent of the Hard Men create strong times weak men weak times blah blah blah loose women create yeah right again yeah maybe I mean I think it's kind of natural to have I think there's always a bit of a roller coaster within culture because you reach a point where um you know whatever particular excess becomes obvious and then people start quietly thinking hang on I don't really like this and then some people start saying loudly I don't like this and then you know everyone kind of joins in you know so on forever through history um what's different about this one of course is that we invented the pill so previous periods of licentiousness they didn't have the technological means to sort of go all the way with it there was a glass ceiling on how Lous you could be without incurring it t a costs yeah like you always had some people some I mean because it's women who like carry the literally carry the consequences of um of sex of marriage right there were always some women who are either because they had to because they were in prostitution because they were poor or because they were like crazy Aristocrats who just could be eccentric and get away with it who would who would behave unusually but most women in the middle you know having sex is probably the most consequential thing a woman can do without contraception so most women would take that decision very very seriously for obvious reasons up until the 60s and then it's all out the window and we can't uninvent that like the pill is not going to get uninvented even if all these I mean there is a little bit of a reaction of the kind of what I think of as the goop class right women who really into women who are really into Wellness the goop class yeah like really into into grin of paltro yeah yeah what's what why is goop what's she got to do with goop what's that because there's this recognition which I think is true that hormonal birth control is bad for you basically mhm and so there's a it's it's not coming from traditional Catholics or anything like that it's coming from women who are I think justifiably concerned about the health effects who are doing things like fertility tracking rather than hormonal birth control like that's happening but I don't think that I don't think that Herald is a mass sort of rejection of the pill okay dig into the goop class for me then what are they doing so like natural cycles for instance if you heard of this I have yeah yeah Sarah Hill did a great talked about a great study that was done to do with uh attraction to the partner when you were got together on the pill versus off the pill etc etc yeah I know okay so two things I know I know quite a lot of women who have who have who've abandoned hormonal birth control and have ended up doing whatever kind of well more like wellness maximizing means of ftil you you can also do things like tracking your like making your exercise regime gel with your your menstrual cycle and things like that yeah so there's a whole there's a whole wealth of like technology enabled um uh reproductive Wellness available which is which is good I have nothing against it um I also know so many women who've got pregnant from doing that accidentally what from their exercise routine no got pregant um it doesn't work that well it doesn't work that well like realistically natural cycles is uh thermometer under the tongue right yeah yeah yeah I mean it's it's like a more sophisticated version of just tracking the Catholics have done forever um but like there's quite a good chance who knew it was just Catholic technology all over again okay so prudishness prudishness to licentiousness and you think that we're what sort of tumbling just over the top of that super sex positive into what's coming next I think that I think that we're yeah I I think the reason my booked it unexpectedly well is because yes we're at that Tipping Point where everyone's been privately well not everyone but a lot of people have been privately thinking this is weird and then they and then someone starts saying it and you're like yeah this is weird I think that that I think that's probably the point that we're at I the only thing is though I don't know if it's going to be as radical a period of prudishness as we've seen historically because we've got the pill one right so that's like a completely different material situation and two because we've got the internet we've got porn like is that really going to be my suspicion is probably what we'll see is we'll see Elites reacting against the lenes period we'll see you know the goop class like the but also the male equivalent you know the I mean you know this the impulse control is such an important element of living in our kind of technological landscape like if you can't put down your phone you're never going to do well professionally do anything yeah so the people who are best able to resist all of the various Temptations including sexual Temptations of our new material conditions other people who are most likely to find themselves in the elites tell you what's interesting conscientiousness is moderately heritable like all psychological dispositions and yet what you're saying here is that the people who are going to best be able to control that reproduction are the people who are are high in conscientiousness which means that you're going to select for people low in conscientiousness who are going to be having more kids on average yes this is the future talk talking about the the decline of um of birth rates you know all of the people who are uh anti-natalist or anti- children or family creation but also from the left need to read one book on behavioral genetics to realize that if you want your particular Phil philosophical ideology political ideology to keep going in the space of a 100 years it's just going to be ashkanazi Jews and Mormons and and you guys are going to be because again political ideology is like 60% heritable I agree with you and people have been worrying about this for like 150 years it's just that that like you're familiar with Francis gon's the you know the Father the father of eugenic he he was like as far as I I'm aware I mean this was before they even what a gene was he was the first person to sit down and draw up family trees and realize that what he called genius was heritable and wasn't it hereditary genius was that not his first thing that sounds right yeah and so particular families were particularly likely to generate these you know prominent figures and obviously that the sort of methodology he was using now is seems really archaic and how do you measure genius or all whatever um but he was basically right he was basically recognized that all of these things were just basically every psychological trait is heritable to some extent and I mean that's where the the thing that people forget about the agenics movement is that it was it was Progressive it was like self-consciously Progressive that's how people understood themselves and it was often anti-religious it was anti-conservative it was seen as like this Brave new scientific Frontier that so many people into like it's it's i' I've been um reading about this at the moment for a pce I'm writing and the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century is like mindboggling and has mostly been memory HED branding problem just needs needs a new branding problem well I mean we well what they were talking about mostly the Genesis of the period was using the state to either encourage some people to reproduce or discourage other people from reproducing and there were some really particularly in the states the use of force sterilization did you come across that um that particular lady who had had I think it was uh the statement was uh three generations of idiots are enough yeah you saw that one exactly I can't remember her name but yeah that was like important case law in the states um and yeah like really a lot of people were sterilized during that quite brief period in America not so much in the UK but of course it was the Nazis that just completely made that line of thinking completely Unthinkable branding problem I'm telling you so looking at this sort of Lous prudishness Paradigm which I think is really important I think it's not anything that kind of has a flip-flop seems to be accurate to me because it always swings back and forth yeah I found this article that said looking for Nance study finds teens want less sex in their TV and movies have you come across this that's very interesting so younger Generations don't think sex is necessary to the plots of most movies and TV shows that's according to a recent study from UC La researchers interviewed 1500 individuals between the ages of 10 and 24 about the way that they're interacting with media those between the ages of 13 and 24 were asked if they thought sex was needed for the plot in entertainment and 47.5% of respondents said it was not they also said they wanted to see less romance on screen 44% and more content centered around platonic friendships 51.5% in a video UCLA released in conjunction with the survey 16-year-old respondent Anna said when there's media with too much sex in me and my friends often feel uncomfortable she later added I feel that it is way too graphic the survey also quoted pop star Olivia Rodrigo answer to the question of whether or not she watched the HBO series the idol I don't have the desire to I remember walking out of Barbie and being like wow it's so long since I've seen a movie that is female centered in a way that isn't sexual or about her pain or her being traumatized what' you make of that um so is it just the girls who are who are reacting against I'm not sure uh say 1500 individuals uh no it seems like it was it seems like it was both uh males and females that were saying that oh I've got three possible explanations come to mind the first is it's the girls not liking porn culture fair enough I think that it's not hard to find women young women who've been raised in this you know who had the internet access from the get-go who absolutely hate porn culture like hey what the boys are expecting from them all of this it might be that it might be um differential fertility rates already having an impact in terms of the conservatism and religiosity of young people because you know um like in America for the first time in 60 70 years you've actually seen a decline in Pro LGBT attitudes among young people wow where's that coming from well my guess is that it's coming from the fact that basically since the pill more conserv conserv more religious people having kids yeah and then that's already starting to play out in terms of the younger generations to being more religious and conservative we're seeing that male female uh liberal conservative divide amongst kids as well though right so presumably if you split that polling down but it seems like everybody shifting a little bit further right that's plausible yeah yeah all right what was the third one uh like Xeno estrogens it's possible everything all roads lead back to Alex Jones ultimately I mean he was sort of onto something wasn't he I mean that it is possible that the sex recession soall is partly hormonal it's partly caused by I mean it might partly be caused by women being on hormonal birth control which is changing their sexuality might also be caused by men being lower tea so the low testosterone for men do you want to hear my real horseshoe theory for this okay right so I learned this whilst talking to Dr Sarah Hill who wrote this is your brain on birth control right and um she taught me that male testosterone levels are mediated by the fertility of the women in their local ecology so if you were a uh male in their 20s but you happen to be around a bunch of other men or a bunch of other grandmothers perhaps are a bunch of children your testosterone levels drop interesting and what you have are women who are very highly artificially suppressing their fertility so men are able to smell the T-shirt of a woman and be able to pick the one the one that they're most attractive to is the attracted to is the one who is currently at that stage of her cycle she's currently fertile etc etc they can see they've done studies where men watch women's Silhouettes walking and the women who are currently during the 7day you can get me pregnant period they're the ones that they're most attracted to the [ __ ] silhouette of the way they walk display high heels replicate that that's the idea the high heels make you walk distin make you look so you have this recursive uh feedback loop of hormonal birth control causes women to select for men who are more providers rather than protectors they want provisioners right they want the um academic and the resources more agreeable they then either come off or don't come off birth control but find that they come out this [ __ ] hormonal Fugue State oh my God who am I in a relationship with but you also have this effect on men too not only socially in I noticed that lots of women seem to be attracted to Timothy shalamay who's painting his nails and kind of blah blah blah blah blah yeah but the genuine physiological hormonal response to men just being around lots of women who are on hormonal birth control now processed foods not enough time outside not enough time with D not enough time with friends but there's a big X Factor apparently amongst testosterone researchers who don't know why men's tea levels have dropped the amount that they have right it's about 1% a year every year since I think 1950 wow so it's like and then that goes to 100 and then it's that again and it goes to 100 so it's not how we're in minus [ __ ] uh testosterone soon but uh yeah so hormonal birth control has a lot to answer for I think it's really tricky tradeoff isn't it because like there are clear downsides to having a bunch of low te men you know in terms of in terms of fertility in terms of men and women just fancing each other and like having functional relationships but also like high testosterone is also associated with crime and violence yeah so which you know do we choose to have a society of kind of sexless incredible like online Placid soy people yeah who also are quite chill and don't CA like enormous problems I don't know that's like that's like a genuinely hard thing to choose yeah you could almost look at it kind of like a disposition sterilization yeah in a way yeah yeah [ __ ] yeah but then we had problems with like like this is a real problem with the military I'm sure you know like massive recruitment problems I thought that was because everyone's fat and got diabetes Well that too right but also not being interested in it men just don't want to wage war yeah we can do it from Modern Warfare or um I'm on Reddit it's probably also partly to do with lack of like faith in the nation like being less patriotic in general like the pool of potentially great soldiers just gets smaller every year and it's sort of fine I guess we get away with it because if we're not actually in a hot war and if we have loads of technology but you can imagine a scenario where that becomes an enormous problem like a mass mobilization I don't know how we actually Fair the uh Chinese government banned K-pop you see this cuz they didn't want what was it they called them it was like [ __ ] men we don't want any more [ __ ] men so it was all of the Chinese male role models were like super high te jacked dudes and they didn't want this be TS like soy like culture infecting them that's how they that's what they saw it as something I learned about that from um I had a um r m who's a professor of Chinese history and politics Oxford on my podcast I didn't know this um in China there's a very strong association between communism and masculinity and actually it's the old pre-communist like Confucian soy boys basically you know the sort of the sort of like intellectual indoorsy that's associated with pre-communist China and so some of the reaction against feminization through K-pop or whatever is associated with um anti-communist bu so this sort of jenzy push back against romance this is what I thought was super interesting right so we've got uh your spectrum of prudishness and Lous but it's not just the uh short-termism of physical desires being satisfied there's also another level to this which is to do with romance and how Central your connection to another person a significant other is right because that kind of fits on the prudishness licentiousness scale but it's also not exactly the same like that would be something that's slightly different like how important is it that you find a significant other and I think that at least a little bit of that UCLA study probably is Rachel Zigler Ziggler as the new Snow White saying we don't need a prince to come and save her she didn't have a prince she had a stalker um like a Sleeping Beauty can't consent uh like I wonder if it's not just a push back against the sex side of stuff but the no man right just against romance culture in general uh HSBC got Emily radowski the tennis player to come and do uh fairer Tales uh princesses doing it for themselves which was a rewriting of Cinderella Rapunzel and Snow White where instead of waiting for a prince the princesses went and started their own businesses on their own and invested their money wisely so because HSBC is really where we go for like modern [ __ ] dating culture so yeah I just think that this jenzy push back against what May on the surface appear to be about sex may actually run deeper the thing is that they're sort of right the sort of a man a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle old line or the line from glorious Dum I always thought was really clever which is we became The Men We once wanted to marry I.E second way feminists were able to do that and I mean I always I always think this about the sort of the disposability of men in modern culture which is totally real you know the like that that basic red pull position is true there is this problem of men basically not feeling having purpose not feeling needed whatever women not feeling as if they need husbands because like they kind of don't you know if they don't have to if they're not having children or even if they do have children you know they can participate like it turns out that actually women being slightly more conscientious than men are for instance and slightly more agreeable than men are is actually really great in a sort of laptop job yep economy brain based instead of brwn based yeah like women are actually slightly better not not not at the T you've still got overwhelmingly male CEOs and things like that but in the kind of the the the median range women are actually kind of better employees in service economies you know the problem that men are facing is not actually feminism as such although feminism has kind of accelerated some of these phenomena it's just it's basically technology and affluence in highly technologically sophisticated and affluent societies men who are not in this incredibly you know far right tail super successful intelligent whatever just normal men have less to do we don't need brw like when we invented the internal combustion engine the importance of male muscle power dropped like a stone diminished yeah yeah and then as soon as you had equality in terms of access to education and employment and you pivoted already from that Bron based to brain-based economy it turns out that women have a kind of a genetic unfair Advantage with the current working environment which meant that the you like this is something that the manosphere of the red pill never really gets right like when they talk about how uh women in the past and the culture that they applied to their dating made them happier they forget the fact that women were largely Financial prisoners of their partner because they had nowhere else to go so yeah maybe they were able to remain loyal and make better sandwiches but how much of that was by choice and how much of that was Stockholm syndrome uh it's probably better I think was so the big problem with the status quo right now where we have you know women are actually earning more than men are at most points along the income distribution just not at the very top like the gender pay Gap is basically a result of the fact that you've got a handful of male CEOs who make an enormous sums and you see that the current PM of Iceland the country not the uh [ __ ] company uh is on strike along with all other Icelandic women at the moment over the gender pay Gap right anyway you were saying yeah along pretty much pretty much everywhere the outside of Iceland and CEOs the gender pay Gap is an artifact one of the fact that there are some a small number of very very high earning men and two of it's basically it's basically a maternity Gap it's actually just the fact that having children yeah having children means that you can't operate in the workplace in the way that a man can like at the very least when you're very pregnant and you just give birth you know but women are choosing not to do that right so if you if you if you don't have children and you are a sort of typical woman in terms of being slightly more conscientious slightly more agreeable having all of these you know being more probably me more punctual being a better employee you do basically have more of an advantage in the workplace than another man but this is completely unsustainable because of going back to the whole birth rates thing like any culture that just stops reproducing itself is not going to last it's either going to just wither away and die or it's going to be overtaken by some other culture and and I sort of think like that that the answer to the riddle of why every cult that we see on historical record that has sustained itself and flourished has being patriarchal is possibly because a culture has to be patriarchal in order to reproduce itself like that's my black pill reading this stuff dig into that because it's very hard to be to have lots of kids as a woman you can maybe have one or two just about and not let affect your career but there's just a straightforward clash between the labor market and reproduction for women that you can kind of get away with if you make enough money because you can pay for nannies and all this kind of stuff but for most women it's just like that's just that's that they're they're almost irreconcilable you have to you have to trade off something and what most women are choosing to do it seems is that they're having few children which for them personally might actually you know the truth is like children are expensive and knackering like they're wonderful they are wonderful but if you've not had them you don't know how wonderful they are like once you've had your children you just love them more than more than life itself like every mother I know says I would unhesitatingly die for my children but if you've never experienced that kind of love and it's kind of thetical yeah then why wouldn't you say actually no I'd rather make this next promotion well the modern culture prioritizes pleasure in the Here and Now short term ISM over everything else I think human beings just do that as well yeah but maybe there was I don't know maybe you're right but it seems like there was definitely a preparedness to uh invest now for returns in the future more so our ability the marshmallow test was more effective 100 years ago for most I think because culture kind of I think culture serves good culture serves the purpose of channeling people's making people more long- termist because our natur inclination is to be short-termist most of us and or I mean the thing is with having children is like you you're short-termist cuz you want to have sex and then oh whoops a baby came along like normally you don't have to think about that yeah that was Evolution's big trick wasn't it yeah exactly but now thought you were just having fun guess what the next 19 years of your life are locked off and I know there's like there's a certain Elegance to that right but we've lost that because of contraception and now there are still groups there are still cultures there are still there are still people who just love babies and will have loads of kids because they just get so much joy from babies which is great um like I'm one of those people I would rather have loads of kids and earn less money I've like made that rational decision but a lot of people for a lot of people that's not an obvious choice some cultures are still channeling people into being more traditionist being more long- termist but the mainstream culture absolutely isn't doing that and the the very likely consequence of that is that I mean like like I can't remember the numbers exactly but South Korea you'll know has the lowest fertility rate in the world for every 100 South Koreans there will be four great-grandchildren right like there's never been a plague that has knocked out that many people the 96% Extinction rate over the next 100 years incredible of Koreans remembering that we shut down the entire world for something that kills 1 to 2% of people yeah it's crazy yeah is the most incredible evolutionary bottleneck that we're going through in other news this 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earth.com slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 35 a checkout cozy earth.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout the interest thing about declining birth rates is that it's a it's not an existential risk in the traditional sense of permanent unrecoverable collapse it's not a classic version of it but it's it's a uh population risk that's very unique in that there's no smoke in the sky there's no asteroid heading toward Earth there's no there's no lead measure if you're looking until it's way too late yeah right you don't feel it getting warmer you don't even feel it getting uh quieter because we've got an aging population whilst a reducing uh birth rate which means that you can have more people on the planet while fewer are being made so you can almost predict out that it feels really counterintuitive yeah yeah is it demography is Destiny yeah right yeah I I definitely think that a big chunk of it is this prioritization of the Here and Now of pleasure of meaning did you see uh the girl with the list on Tik Tok no in this this needs to for the Perry pilled out there this needs to be a part of it uh this girl wrote a 3508 page long list and printed them out on Tik Tok of all of the reasons why she didn't want to have kids uh and these aranged from things like literally a parasite living inside of my body to can't wear cute heels anymore to uh unable to do brunch with the girls uh and then she printed off like a one-page list of reasons to have kids and now like hashir with the list on Tik tok's got millions and billions of plays amazing yeah I mean I guess she's kind of right but the problem is that the thing you have to have on that that reasons to have kids is like like inexpressible joyful experience of my life yeah which to me does cancel out like brunch with the girls or you can bring your baby to brunch with the girls you look and when it comes to heels look at the shoes that you've got on today are indeed I never wore heels anyway overrated sparkly things so you know one of the promises I had Mary eat on the show a couple of weeks ago who's just phenomenal um uh I feel like she's your spirit animal um and she was talking to me about very similar sorts of things that the promises that women were given previously uh you know the freedom The Liberation ultimately do you think that most women on average are more more happy with modern sexual culture than they were previously let's say 60 or 70 years ago um I think no but the outliers are quite um striking so there are some the thing is that having the kind of let's say like mildly patriarchal kind of structure where the assumption is that the men do participate most in public life and do the bulk of well I mean it depends on what era you're talking about materially right so in subsistence cultures women do actually do loads of economic work they just do economic work that is compatible with also looking after little children so like the man goes out in the field and collects raw materials and the woman processes the raw materials at home while minding the Toddlers and like sharing the the burden of of chalk with her sisters and cousins or whatever um the more recent model of the bread winner where the man goes out and ears all the money and the woman stays at home and does all of the housework is is kind of hysterically unusual it's not that it's not that bad like actually it's it's it's fine if and only if your husband isn't a tyrant but if your husband is a tyrant it's completely disastrous so it's like for most people it's fine for most women it's fine and probably is actually better than like the current the St the status quo where women have to still do disproportionate amounts of child care and housew work and all of the you know all the pregnancy obviously all the breastfeeding obviously plus going out to work right this is what feminist called the second shift that you end up doing two jobs that's I think worse actually what was it didn't you say you'd worked it out that you were doing a full-time job breastfeeding yeah you doing 40 hours a week of breastfeeding yeah yeah that's the third shift yeah exactly like crazy level breed shift of crazy levels of work that you have to do which is obviously you know joyful meaningful ET but there are only so many hours in the day you like you need it isn't feasible unless you have loads of money available to you or whatever it isn't feasible to not have a husband father who goes out and does all of that and still be as good a mother as you want to be it's I'm so interested in paradoxes you know Mary Tau me about a ton of them uh you have the pill gets introduced increase in single motherhood increase in abortions like Paradox interesting another one that I found from Candace Blake who's over in uh Australia is that gender inequality in the pay gap between men and women positively predicts both male and female satisfaction in relationships yeah that the more unequal the earning opportunities are for men and women skewed in the direction of men not women the happier both men and women are in their outcomes in relationships and stay at home dads is a very strong predictor of divorce yeah if the uh woman is the primary bread winner man a 50% more likely to use a rectile dysfunction medication uh you know increases in domestic violence the women are more likely to be uh on the receiving end of domestic violence if they're the primary bread winner because the male partner switches from from a benefit affording to a cost inflicting mate retention strategy you know if you begin to feel a disparity in mate value you have two choices right you can either start to raise yourself up or try to drag the other person down and you know making them fearful of you was a pretty good way to drag them down but that be you know that's kind of dark that being said the patriarchy is so powerful that we've somehow convinced women that they both need to earn the money and that we can stay at home while they bear the burden of children so maybe this is just a scop from all of us to not have to do anything except for Xbox now uh what we've worked what what what we've discovered all right so I don't really believe in okay patriarchy clearly has like a strict anthropological meaning in that societies where only men are allowed to to be in positions of power and authority have traditionally been described as patriarchal by anthropologists we don't live in one of those anymore we haven't lived in one of those for Century now in that I mean this country we've had like three female prime ministers and so forth right but I think that there's also a different way in which people use the word patriarchal which still to some extent applies to contemporary culture which is that there's this quite deep-seated feeling shared by both men and women and I think cross-culturally that masculine things are higher status than feminine things and that's why you see this great eagerness actually of women now that they can to participate in like masculine coded things to be what link well professional work right there's been this Rush of women into into into the into public life into traditionally masculine roles there has not been a rush of Men In traditional feminine roles not at all because there's no status associated with them because there's no status associated with it and I think often that's what feminists are describing when they talk about things being patriarchal like they they recognize the fact that there's that kind of status Gap remember who's describing that at least 50% of society is describing that like on their own behalf right yeah you know like I this is what Richard Reeves's book was so interesting where he talks about heal right what was it like health education maybe like Administration or something else yeah feminine jobs yeah yeah for more feminine jobs that there are four times more female fighter pilots in the US Air Force by percentage than there are male kindergarten teachers in America yeah makes sense yeah yeah cuz there there just hasn't been this rush for men to try and attain feminine status right and I think that I don't think that our culture is misogynist right like Mis misogynists exist there are there like there are some of them out there but that's not typical I think though that this sort of Deep assumption that women are that you familiar with the women a wonderful bias yes so this is the the cognitive bias where people will tend to actually prefer to sort of show kindness and generosity to women over men in various scenarios so like you know you see a stranger drowning you're more likely to jump into the water and save them if they're female than if they're male but both men and women are more positively predisposed to news stories that complement women's outcome comes or say that a woman achieved something than say that a man achieved something exactly and vice versa is true too right which doesn't fit at all with the idea that we live in like a myogenous culture I don't think that we hate women I think though the way that women are sort of regarded all else being equal is as um like your mom like you love your mom you don't want toey her necessarily you don't necessarily respect her I think that's the I think that's the common way in which like that I think that the the puzzle basically as to why women are so consistently regarded in a particular way cross-culturally as being like lovable but also a bit like lower status is that women are considered to be kind of adjacent to children so in the same way that we love children but we're not going to let them vote right I think that what the human brain does is it has this like it's like there's men there's women there's children so women are in a kind of intermediary position and very often I basically have kind of childlike legal status which is why I suppose ties into something that I've been saying for a while uh modern women have been taught that true freedom is having sex like their brother and working like their father that's the Pinnacle because it's this like clambering up trying to retain that masculine status which for some women particularly women who have a more masculine temperament you know like some women are more disagreeable and competitive and not maternal and those women have done well out of the changes we've seen since the sexual revolution in that they can basically live they can basically you know live like their brothers now pretty much most women aren't like that though and aren't made happier by trying to be more male well Chelsea conoboy in the New York Times last year wrote that article maternal instinct is a myth that men created no that's not true yeah right like yeah you can go around sort of pretending that's true blw in the face but I just don't think it's true it's such a a hydra-headed problem that we're talking about because it's the convergence of the denial of sex differences uh this sort of tyranny of the minority uh a selection for the most outspoken gregarious amongst a group to focus on the outliers it's not even tyranny of the minority as in some underspoken class that's speaking up for themselves but also tyranny of the minority that appears to have have outsized achievements like the male CEOs that oh well that that's exactly what we've got going on here that will skew data that people will focus on and use January January or February of this year is the highest percentage number of new female CEOs ever in America it was 34% of new of CEOs in America were female new CEOs you go like that's insane that's so that I would guess if you to actually poll from a uh nature predisposition perspective that that's over indexing for it like how many women actually want that life that job CEO sounds like a fantastic title but what's the reality of ceoing I would hate to stress you know it's horses for courses and again like this is Peterson [ __ ] two 2018 stuff you know what I mean right like how many times do we need to bang this drum evidently more because it's not happening one other thing I wanted to really dig into what do you think the Fallout of me too has been now approaching 10 years hence I often hear from men that they are now more reluctant to go up to a woman in a bar or whatever that there's this problem of fear of being falsely accused of something and so I think I mean I believe them you know if that if some men are experiencing that I'm sure though what's gone on is that the men who were already sexually aggressive and likely to actually be you know me too perpetrators haven't changed their behavior at all and the men who started being really careful were probably fine to begin with if you were a raper the social media campaign probably well they've got a hashtag on Twitter I'd better stop going around raping yeah which is I mean there's a I always I wrote about in my first book and it applies to this as to loads of things the problem of normal distribution where you have some trait which is arranged on a bell curve and the problem is that if you apply some intervention so whatever that is like a a social movement like me too or some policy change or whatever probably what you want to do is you want to actually Target one of the tals you want to like oh so we've got the you know we've got bell curve of sexual aggression and there's this this like most aggressive end who are causing no end of harm what we want to do is make them stop but it's you can't just apply an intervention to that to that point on the normal distribution like it's going to shift in one way or another and everyone is going to be affected you're smearing the entire group with the same solution so what you end up with is moving the threshold for being like reluctant to go up to a woman in a bar or whatever slightly just to mean that like some of the nice guys are not doing it but it doesn't actually improve it doesn't affect the rapists and it doesn't improve women's experience of it David bus's book badman talks about uh it's one man doing a thousand sexual assaults not a thousand men doing one sexual assault you know to repeat offenders over and over and over and over again uh and unfortunately as well repeat victims there is something about the way that again this isn't victim blaming but there's like something about the way that women hold themselves where they showed this to I think maybe criminals in prison or assaulters or assault yeah men that had assaulted people and showed them a number of women walking and they asked them to pick which one they would attack if they were going to m and they converged on the same women uh so you know for all that we can say you know it's not about wearing the skirt it shouldn't be about being in the dark alley at the wrong time all the rest of it like correct but there is something about particular women that causes predators to see them as viable prey does that excuse it no does that you know is that them choosing it also no but like this is just the way that the world appears to be yeah ruthless yeah and it drives me mad that we tell lies to girls all the time about this because we're so desperate not to appear to be victim blaming that will say oh no you can you know you can behave like a man you can do whatever you want go back to some random guy's house it'll be fine and then when it inevitably isn't fine we're like oh well you know he shouldn't have he shouldn't have been such aggressive I was like yes obviously but we don't you know I would love to just like delete every rapist from the world all at once can't do that like if the advice that I'm going to be giving my daughters is is going to be unfortunately different from the advice I'll give my sons what would be the advice that You' give them so like for instance don't go back to a random man's house that you've just met like basic okay like complete considered to be completely common sensical up until up until even like the 1980s you know this is like recent stuff but basically unsayable now in feminist circles at least except everyone quietly says it you know well again it's the stated and revealed preferences thing like how many parents that will prze about this on CNN and say that you know we shouldn't be telling women oh so you're saying that we should just accept the fact that men are going to do this it should be it shouldn't be that women should change their actions men should change their behavior okay what did you tell your 17-year-old daughter to do last weekend did you did you say make sure that you text me when you get home make sure that you're home before 11 Etc don't get an unlicensed taxi whatever yeah St didn't reveal preferences yeah and what drives me bananas is that we there are some girls who don't actually have parents or friends or whoever who are privately telling them the truth you know all they get all they hear is is is is the public misdirection oh this is like the luxury beliefs of me too in a way yeah and so I I feel as if actually we have a duty people who who are speaking publicly to tell those girls the truth on the assumption that they're not going to hear it from anyone else the cultural surrogate mothers in a way yeah you've got this line between consensual and good which I think relates to me too as well what's that I think that a lot of what so I mean there's a lot of things that came under the me too Banner um some of it was just unambiguously criminal and you know Harvey Weinstein or whatever got sent to prison for for criminal acts a lot of what came up though a lot of the stories that got shared with things that weren't actually strictly criminal they were just it was just like bad behavior it was behavior that actually in another era you probably would have been probably would have been called ungentlemanly or something like that but but that vocabulary isn't available to a sort of contemporary feminist who's really bought into the to to the sex positive message and so they'll tend to just talk about things being consensual or not consensual and actually the consensual not consensual bar is is like a low one it's a legal bar it's not actually a moral bar really like there's a lot of there are a lot of things that a man can do on a first date or whatever that are legal but are bad plenty but we don't really have the vocabulary to describe them which is why I try and make you know like the feminist case for chivalry we shouldn't have got rid of that as a concept like when you have as Stark a physical difference and psychological differences between the Sexes you know 99% of men can kill 99% of women with their bare hands and not vice versa we have to operate with that with that recognition chivalry in those circumstances is obviously in women's interests even if occasionally it will mean being feeling slightly patronized like who cares I'm so happy to have my the door held open for me and my bags carried it's completely fine if it means that someone's not going to assault me yeah yeah I mean this is I I quote you and Mary about this all the time that it is a straight line from you should hold the door open for a woman to you shouldn't beat your wife it is one just continuous women are worthy of protection and there is an asymmetry between what men and women can do and again Rob Henderson's coming a couple of days later than you it's like luxury beliefs all over again the women who come from societies where their husbands already knew that beating your wife would be a bad idea or they had the support networks where that wouldn't be accepted were trying to deconstruct a support structure that was needed for the underclass women who husbands had grown up without a father and whose stepdad had beaten them who just presumed that the way that you was supposed to be in a relationship was to hit your wife yeah I mean I just like Cheston fence like the wisdom of it you know this this idea from GK chest you know you come across a fence in a field you don't know what it's there for the the progressive the reformer whatever vocabulary he uses says we don't need this fence let's tear it down whereas the conservative says no let's find out what it's for and then maybe we might tear it down if it turns out that it really isn't necessary I mean just the whole last 100 years has been like non indication of chesteron Spence principle yeah and and I and I honestly think that most of it actually has to do with technology like much as I love to to complain about my political enemies like actually the main thing that's changed for people has not been the intellectuals of the 1960s it's been um the disolution of the family has as much to do with the pill as it does with anything any feminist has ever said you know like the real I I'm I'm I'm very sort of materialist in the sense I think the real engine of history is is technology or as as Mary Harrington our friend likes to say it's um material reality plus memes mem first explain later me and Mary are on board with that what was it that you told me the last time we spoke the washing machine has done more to liberate women than any feminist ever did that was Phyllis Schlafly's observation Phila is such an interesting figure because she who is this person so she was the 60s uh when was she been born she she she was at her height in like the 7s um and she was a I mean she was one of these really interesting women American well so she build herself as like an American housewife and she was she had I think she had five kids um but she also was like a foreign policy expert who'd worked in in in um um not Westminster Washington um and had like incredible degree actually a professional expertise but she always build herself as like you know a lonly housewife whatever and she led the campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment which was a second way feminist effort to basically enshrine in the US Constitution that men and women are equal in ought to have equal rights and Schlafly said in retrospect not unreasonably men and women aren't the same and so actually if you were to enshrine this in the Constitution you would frequently end up with things with with you know having to do things actually B not in women's interests so the example she like to give because this was during the Vietnam War was you want to get you want to see women drafted because that's that's where that ends up if you say that men and women are the same then why wouldn't you draft women why wouldn't you be sending pregnant women into combat men and women you know men and women the same whatever and second feminists used to say cuz they were land to war they say well we don't think any should be drafted I was like okay okay but if you're trying to like future proof your Constitution which is I think very much the point of the Constitution that does seem to be an obvious I mean I don't completely agree with schafle one of the things she used to do which I find so cringe is whenever she showed up at a public event she used to thank her husband for allowing her to be there I I don't do that when I go to public events so like she was she was of a different time in that sense okay so I'm not I'm not going to hold fer Schlafly up as like poster girl but she did like she had insights at the time which on which she has been proven right um and the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed because of her efforts what do you think about this lack of approach at the moment uh Alexander one of my friends Alex staty uh put a study up recently uh 50% of men aged 18 to 24 have never approached a woman in person in their life and uh like even higher percentage 18 to 30 haven't approached woman in the last year is this Downstream from me too I have a sightly weird take on this which is that actually the thing you hear about as sort of the thing that Gen X people talk about of going up to someone in a bar and this being a way of striking out relationships I think that was a very brief period of History sort of post-sexual Revolution but pre- internet where that was considered normal um and I'm slightly too young to have ever actually experience that the normal way actually that people start relationships in the vast majority of cultures is to be like is like semi- arranged marriage right like not the full you've never met this person before you know 13y olds whatever getting betrayed like not like that but the sort of you're introduced by family members mutual friends you're known in the community you go to the same church whatever it is and then your both of your families like consent to the marriage and it works out okay but that the expectation isn't like the expectation of marriage up until relatively recently was that you would have an economic relationship a you and a reproductive relationship but you weren't best friends and actually I don't think I don't think husbands and wives used to talk to each other as much as they do now I think people used to have much more hom social kind of lives you'd hang out with other men you'd hang out with other women you wouldn't necessarily hang out a lot with the opposite sex including your spouse um so this idea that like the going up to a person in the bar is like the normal and natural way of starting relationships I don't think is historically accurate that's interesting so the male aversion felt fear of approach anxiety which every guy listening is aware of apart from the Psychopaths right there is a girl that I find attractive that I either know or don't know or partly know or whatever yeah hi how are you nice to meet you is kind of like a miniature war that you have to go to and the felt sense of palpable fear is just ripping you apart inside that isn't or the modern aversion to that isn't some novel new problem it was a in your opinion here a bar that kind of never really needed to be gotten over in the first place in some regards because you had seen each other at church for ages or her father owned the farm next to your father's land and you guys had known blah blah blah like yeah yeah people have much more kind of static social lives so yeah just approaching some stranger and ending up getting married to her is not I had this uh I had this conversation with a guy called mads Larson who is a mating ideology researcher I'll send it to you it's phenomenal and he talks about about this all of the different uh Arrangements that people went through and the uh romantic to the confluent which is what we've moved through most recently has left us with a really interesting vestage which is previously it was they own the the farm next door it was almost like a tactical marriage between the two of you and then it's no no no no you're supposed to you guys are supposed to be together forever you know there is supposed to be deeper meaning instantiated in this but then as soon as you have the sexual Revolution you have Confluence so for as long as you can benefit me and I can benefit you I think even Mia Khalifa who obviously Paragon of sexual virtue uh said on a recent interview that um people think that marriage is some sacred thing it's not it's just a piece of paper and if this person isn't helping you grow it's time to move on um so they just confluent like uh ideology there helping you grow front and center you need to be helping them grow I'm not sure yeah helping you prepare for your next porn scene I don't know whatever she meant um so you have this really interesting thing which is that both the two most recent cultures have kind of got like conceptual inertia inside of our heads that we have this sense and we were kind of told and maybe some people think that it's true that you're supposed to find a person who fulfills you who is your Confidant your best friend your the sexual Paramore you're the co-owner of your children and the household and all the rest of the things yeah and yet modern culture is this more Confluence thing which is they're supposed to benefit you and help you grow and these two things kind of bounce off against each other and then you know if we look back ancestrally at what we're predisposed for it's [ __ ] neither of those two right like you can say what you want about the truthfulness or utility of both of those it wasn't that and it seems Seems like serial monogamy is what we built for some combination of Po polygyny and serial monogamy uh and all of these the existing base rate of what we are plus the two most recent cultures are just like like the B Bermuda Triangle of mating ideologies inside of our mind yeah there's this book called the um the All or Nothing marriage which is about sort of yes this modern conception of marriage where where exactly this you put so much expectation on your spouse that they will be you know you will be perfectly sexually compatible perfectly like conversationally compatible per you know everything everything is perfect and obviously for loads of people that isn't going to be true and that's not going to be true for 60 years or whatever that you might be together um and so you end up with this All or Nothing thing that like some people have absolutely fabulous marriages and some people just they can't possibly take the strain and so they collapse and the authors compare it to um maso's hierarchy of needs where like if you're in a position if you're in a situation of economic subsistance you basically just see your spouse as like your economic partner with whom you have children but your expectations are not that high and then you reach the point where you're so affluent right in contempary culture where you kind of regard marriage as yes as fulfilling all of these like esoteric psychological needs which is just not reasonable so I honestly this again Mary Harrington endlessly quotable she has this uh this this this saying that we should abolish big romance yeah that the idea of having these incredible like romantic expectations of your spouse is just pretty much setting yourself up fail one woman meme machine isn't she she really is um what was your thing it was you that reminded me of a story that I'd forgotten from my childhood about uh ladies dropping handkerchiefs oh right as a way of like demonstrating interest yeah so I had this thing with me and David bus came up with this solution uh around women cultivating receptiveness if they want to improve their dating prospects now in a post me to world where we're worried about women's safety especially sexually this is something that is kind of difficult to say but again if you want to work within the confines of how reality is not how you want it to be I think that women cultivating receptiveness accounts for the male approach anxiety problem right that you know a slightly lingering a longer lingering eye than you think or like you know smiling at somebody as opposed to doing the why men love [ __ ] treat him mean keep him Keen kind of approach men are going to be so bad at receiving those signals though don't you think have you ever heard that a uh the average man of 130 IQ has the like emotional social receptivity of a woman with 70 IQ like the difference this is what my husband so you're saying that we're actually socially [ __ ] yeah my my husband and I that my husband calls me a witch because I can like I'll be able to like sense there's something off you are particularly witchy today with the with the olive as well yeah I think it's just women I think we are just witchy witchy that's why you were burned at the Stak you can just like sense that something I don't know facial expressions whatever something which most men are just oblivious to Blink with with some exceptions clearly okay so yeah well let's take that as the again the thermodynamics of the situation that men are uh their EQ is 50% of what a woman's is essentially um if that is the case leaning in even further to not being receptive is going to make said blinker man even less capable of understanding that maybe you're interested oh yeah yeah right so I just think that again another Confluence of the hydra's head of lots of stuff that's going on the multifactorial problem uh women are maybe being a little bit more masculine working in more masculine environments thinking they need to be more disagreeable to be more effective at work concerned about their unsafety uh generally skeptical of of men that come up to them strange men that come up to them in a bar which has led to absolutely less receptivity from women and it's like look if you are complaining like where are all of the Good Men at look around a little bit if you can when you're at your CrossFit class or you're doing yoga or you're doing whatever and if someone if some guy comes up to you and asks some awkward clunky question but he's kind of cute like don't just presume that he's asking the question like use the witch Clairvoyance right tap into the astral realm or whatever it is that you do and think oh yeah have you heard of the the male overperception and the female under perception bias is this with sexual interest correct yeah yeah that's in David David bus's book that men uh overestimate the degree of interest that women have to them and women underestimate which is largely why you have awkward passes by uh male co-workers and stuff well what do you mean like her eyes and you saw the way that she looked at me every time we went to the copy machine or whatever and you know alcohol exaggerates that does it really yeah wow so men are more likely to falsely perceive sexual interest when they're drunk fantastic which again just makes so much sense of all the you know like were you um you know that there was like me too but for schools in the UK a few years ago it was called everyone's invited it was like a website that some some girls set up to to describe like bad sexual experiences that they'd had with um what they in school well not also not normally in school this was the thing so it ended up being a big um headache for teachers and head teachers because parents were obviously really upset understandably um and they said you know you should be teaching consent workshops in schools you should doing all these things and the teachers were like this isn't happening in school very rarely is this happening in school this is normally happening happening Friday night at some house party the parents aren't there everyone's drunk and like it's kind of the parents responsibility honestly to stop that step yeah and it's like look you've got horny young men raised on porn plus alcohol young women often giving confusing signals I mean one of the things that like teenage girls just don't understand bless them is like if you if you say dress in revealing clothes because you want to attract a particular man that the blast radius of that signal dirty bom yeah like I was I was getting a train recently London and there was a school girl who was probably like 16 who was walking ahead of me and she was going up the stairs and she was wearing such a short skirt going to school that I could see absolutely everything and I like I almost jogged after her just to say like you're lucky it was me who was walking behind you and I know that you're doing this because you want to Fe I like there is a kind of thrill of feeling sexy that young women experienced for the first time and they have no idea how potent and dangerous that that tool is so you know you do it because there's like a particular guy who gets the same train as you who you want to catch his eye or whatever fine but like I could have been a creepy bloke and this is why I think parents have to be banning their daughters from leaving the house looking like that basically because they have no idea like teenage girls are just I mean teen you know teenagers are dumb the the sort of me too conversation around victim blaming and and and stuff is such a deep hole when you get into it to talk about should things be this way no are things this way yes do you want to play within the confines of the thermodynamics of this particular system well you probably should right and to thread that needle especially because I I often think about this um Douglas Murray once taught me that it doesn't really matter who makes the best logical argument in a debate if you manage to get two or three big laughs you win yes that's true and it's almost all Vibes yep it's Just Vibe you're a Vibe architect right and the problem with this discussion if you have somebody who is very anti- this and is saying that's victim blaming you absolutely you saying that you're giving men a pass you're saying that women should be fearful of what they should wear and it's like that particular talking point is so empathetically robust in its signaling that it almost always wins yeah because the most obviously caring argument upfront that sounds like the one that sounds right that sounds like the one that you will get the most support for on Twitter it's so tough to put it's like right yeah yeah no I don't disagree but look at the outcomes that we get from this one of the things that um progressives really have on their side rhetorically is that if you're if you're a conservative who's saying look actually you know there was a line that one of my readers sent me from a from all places it was a book about um uh making wine and the line was um Traditions or experiments that worked you can say that when you're talking about wine making and it's not too like politically explosive but you can obviously apply that to to to to social issues as well experiments that work exactly but what you end up if you're trying to make that argument and if you and if you're you know proposing anything remotely conservative is that you have to you end up having to defend other cultures or cultures of the past so you'll say look actually you know there was a lot to be said for the sort of slightly arranged marriage there's a lot to be said for teenage girls being encouraged to dress more modestly whatever and people say oh what so you're saying that you support domestic violence you're saying that you support you know chalera and imperialism and like everything that might have happened during the era that you're talking about and you have to say no no no I don't you I mean you just end up at the back foot whereas if you're a progressive you can say I can see this Vision you know like in the future we'll have this amazing Society everything's great and the fact that this is this has never happened and is never likely to happen means that you never you're never in the position of having to defend anything unfortunate you never have to talk about tradeoffs I think that like acknowledging the existence of trade-offs is a fundamentally conservative trait yeah Thomas Soul there are no Solutions only trade-offs yeah it's really painful but it's true unfortunately you'll have seen a lot of the stats coming out about the happiness or lack of amongst young girls you know 60% of girls aged 12 to 16 have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness and stuff like that what's your assessment of the current mental health of young women I mean it seems to be really bad the the I mean there's all the obvious stuff um about why you know young people they don't go outside enough they don't do enough exercise all that but that's that's true for boys as well I think um Jonathan Heights ons of work on this that the main thing that's going on for girls is social media because girls use social media differently from boys one of the ways that girls use social media is to torture each other right girls are so like you know that all basically all contagious mental illnesses start among and predominate among teenage girls things like some anorexia for instance is like a classic example or or like now apparently all these teenager girls have got T reps that they've acquired from Tik Tok there was a period where uh multiple personality disorder and there that others were coming out on Tik Tok too precisely and I think it's because it's kind of like that witchy thing we were talking about earlier like women being very very socially sensitive for obvious evolutionary reasons you know that women being smaller not having the kind of physical capacities that men do the main advantage you have in terms of your own Survival and survival of your children is making alliances particularly among other women you know recruiting other women to assist you in your endeavors and whatever requires this social sensitivity and I think that that can misfire in terms of say being so receptive to whatever getting Tourette from Tik Tok that you that you know you do you do yourself harm basically I mean it's not terrible harm but like anorexia is terrible harm right that you might acquire sort of mimetically um and I think also it means that girls I mean one of the things I always think about in Instagram like the it's the image based social media which seems to be particularly bad for girls um Twitter is bad for journalists it sends them completely insane Tik Tok and Instagram sends teenage girls insane I think it's because um one of the things that uh looking at these these these platforms one of the things it does to girls is it gives them a completely false impression of their intersexual competition pool that normally they would look around at the young women they actually know who are as like plain and normal as them skinny and acne ridden as they are yeah and think oh okay right yeah this is like this is basically my my like competition pool for acquiring whichever like equally mediocre looking man right whereas now you look at Instagram and you see the most beautiful woman in the world airbrushed and having her plastic surgery and you think that's your intersexual competition so I think just kind of I think it just plays complete Havoc with their minds this also explains the uh social contagion theory for f to M transitions yeah because if the you've heard of the uh left-handedness argument for Trans people right that as soon as you remove the societal impositions and judgment people can truly be the real selves okay if that's the case and that very well may contribute if that was entirely the case why is it four girls that all sit together at the same lunch table in school right like why is it not evenly smeared across the entire populace it's not it clumps together right right um it's also gone from being like diagnosis of G dysphoria have gone from being primarily a male thing to being primarily a female thing like by a big margin like the huge explosion has been one teenage girls specifically there was a a study in Finland that I found that I put in my newsletter last last week uh that said they could attribute 15% of the negative mental health outcomes of teenage girls to their use of birth control and I I realized this when I spoke to uh Dr Sarah Hill last year uh as she's talking to me about how uh young forming brains can have particular types of negative mental health outcomes locked in for life if you're on hormonal birth control during this particular period And I remember thinking about the coddling of the American mind at the time and going I 100% bet that no one's factored in the base rate of the increase of hormonal birth control and the uh predisposition that it's caused amongst young girls yeah yeah yeah I'm sure that that's true this sounds random but that I there's this debate you might be familiar with about whether or not it's ethical to use chemical castration for pedophiles in some countries they do so like Germany I think is an example of a country that will that will offer chemical castration as an alternative to prison time and actually oh it's an alternative yes or maybe you have it when you're on pretty sure Alan churing got something similar like that which is one of the reasons why I think it's not popular in the UK right because cheering is a famous example of it being used um against gay me yeah um but a lot of pedophiles will say that they would prefer that and that actually they're really tortured by that I mean I I I am generally of the opinion I think that this is scientifically sound that it it is an innate sexual orientation is found and a small number of men and a lot of them report being absolutely tortured by it it's awful it's like the most stigmatized like you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy what what a horrible curse right they would actually choose chemical castration to relieve them of that and and yet there's a there's a general feeling at least maybe in the anglosphere that there's something really dodgy about using sort of pharmacological punishments right and you can imagine of course using in other context as well you aggressive you know whatever um I was talking to a friend about this who works in politics and who's a gay man and and I was saying well you know you could use like you know that the arm the implants you get in your arm you could you could use that to sort of release small doses of this every day and he said the implants you get in your W and so well you know you can get hormonal contraception either you get in your arm or you get the like the the the um int usine devices or whatever which secretes more he had no idea because he's like innocent to these these M um but it occurred to me like isn't it crazy that we're so it seems so outside the Overton window to um use pharmacology to like alter the minds of criminal offenders and we've had teenage girls on these drugs for decade like we know them to be mind altering to some extent wow and we put like no hesitation about putting an arm implant in like a 15-year-old girl um it's basically quite an experimental drug I mean the argument against is to say yeah but pregnancy is also a pretty like poor outcome for a 15-year-old that but also quite an extreme thing to go through full stop physically mentally Etc so if the choice is pregnancy or hormonal birth control hormonal birth control has fewer side effects it's you know there are no Solutions only tradeoffs right and it's rough man I I think about some of my friends who've got young girls that are you know maybe 12 or 13 and are going to be starting to around boys that can get them pregnant and they going to become sexually active at at some point in future but also know about the risks of hormonal birth control and don't want to condemn their beautiful daughter to a life of potential you know 10% more anxiety and depression risk plus the weight gain and the all the rest of the stuff but also really don't want them to get pregnant at 15 and you go okay are you again playing within the confines of the world it is not as we want it to be saying well make sure that you use protection and make sure that blah like you don't get too drunk and blah it's like they 15 or 16 or 17 or something you know yeah you said there about the um uh sexual predisposition of the pedophilia being a sexual uh orientation Peter te's got a famous question which is what do you believe that most people would disagree with and for a long time that was mine that uh non-offending pedophiles need need way more sympathy than we give them uh because I've had a bunch of neuroscientists on the show and they've put people in fmis with arousal responses uh and they can show non-offending pedophiles everything they can throw every sexual Kink Under the Sun at them nothing and then they are able to show them something that tickles her fancy and it's really disturbing isn't it it be so it would actually be so much more like psychologically reassuring which is why I think most people prefer this explanation to think that it's just some manifestation of evil or something or it's under people's control cuz it's just it's awful to think it's so uncomfort imagine being cursed with that yeah awful I remember learning about it I was at Uni and there was I was dating this girl a smart doctor a medical student girl and she taught me about this and she'd given a presentation on stage basically saying like you know the we need to give these people more sympathy uh because it wasn't that long ago that gay men were seen basically as the same now the difference being that gay men could enact or not they couldn't but they were in the right future able to enact it without doing something that was taking advantage of a person that can't consent yeah but ever since that I've always had this in the back of my mind as one of those and yeah the discomfort it was the same reason I think that even before the lab leak hypothesis was something that was put forward people were so prepared to lay CO's Origins at the feet of a malign scientist because it was so much more comforting than believing that it was the chance mutation of some silly little microb because one or normal failure one at least was just not chaos yeah yeah uh uh and it felt like it was more in your control with the right intervention we could have fixed it yeah it's like no you can't yeah yeah I read someone I forget who now but um I read someone um writing about um uh Israel this is relevant I swear the and the the failure to the the failure of the of of the the Gaza borders and and the fact that Hamas were able to get through on um uh on 7th of October and that so many people have assumed that there was some sort of conspiracy at play you know that it was that there was it was it was either you know some faction within the Israeli government or the Americans or you know whatever conspiracy you fancy for deliberately permitting Hamas to do this in order to whatever justify flattening Gaza whatever it is and this writer said isn't you know isn't it telling that people will jump to that conclusion rather than the much more likely conclusion which was normal failure which is that when you have any kind of complex system like sometimes blow a Brisk yeah and that that's actually true of everything like what a horrible thought but but that that's actually our entire civilization is basically resting on these very very delicate complex systems no one really understands Matthew Sayad wrote in the times the bias is called compensatory control uh so when things seem like uh outside blowup risk has occurred we want to lay it at a sequence of events that at some point we could have interjected a compensatory control it's almost like magical thinking isn't it it's like you know praying to the gods to send rain or whatever it's that feeling of wanting to have some kind of external agent who controls all of this because it's actually so much worse to think that it's that it's random you spoke about uh intr seexual competition I've got a pretty spicy theory about body positivity go for that I want to teach you about so this is the Rivalry theory of body positivity the tldr is female support for body positivity is at least in part R deep down by female intersexual competition which pushes other women out of the dating pool by discouraging them from losing weight I mean yes but I also think to some extent it's just cope it's just it's just trying to it's just because it is because sexual attractiveness is like brutally hierarchical it just is for men and for women I mean for women it's more physical for men it's more to status and whatever but it like is just brutally hierarchical um and no one particularly if you have a generally egalitarian Outlook if you're on the left um no one wants to face up to that particularly if you're at the bottom of the hierarchy and so trying to say oh no the hierarchy doesn't exist actually I'm trying to persuade men to agree with you is one way well exactly but it is one thing that you can do um you probably can't persuade men to think differently but you can I don't know get into like Lulu Lemon ads or no one's no one's ever been guilted into an erection I don't think doesn't work no well you you try you can try harder but this whole I mean like there's a there's there's also a deeper principle there isn't it that like human nature is kind of immovable not completely like we do have a little bit of control over ourselves and there are like there is there are cultural structures that will incentivize some things and not others and whatever there is room for maneuver but we basically have some fairly tight um controls around us at all times well it's what I've got in my head is kind of human nature is easier to constrain than it is to enable in that regard like it's already operating at Max RPM and you can bring that down with social norms and and judgment and stuff uh but going the whole argument of uh a m Toof transition if you as a straight man are not attracted to that person regardless of how they present you are that's homophobia transphobia or whatever uh actually don't know which of those two it is um it just doesn't play within the confines of of reality yeah right and actually that's one of the things that I think is so cruel about so much of the sort of discourse around trans like there's this line actually there's this great um there's writer called Andrew longu who's who is trans and who disagrees with me on absolutely everything but I would say he's a great writer right really really good pros and Shu has this line when you are trans you become permanently dependent on the kindness of strangers in the sense that basically no one passes it's really hard to pass convincingly particularly if transition as an adult it'll always be kind of physically obvious that you're not actually a natural female what you depend on is people playing along every single time every social interaction for the rest of your life so as not to feel dysphoria and sometimes people won't do that little children aren't going to do that or like some elderly person with Alzheimer's isn't going to do that you know people aren't always going to CAU and on that they're supposed to play along yeah and so it means you have this incredibly fragile yeah it's a social mindfield it's terrible yeah and what you're basically and and that's what's being inflicted on people when they're encouraged to go through irreversible surgeries living their entire life dependent on the kindness of strangers for for like to avoid complete psychological dissolution douas Murray's got this quote that he throws around saying um you know when you've reached true equality because you have to put up with the same level of [ __ ] that everybody else does that's true yes and um the lack of special dispensation is the exact opposite uh and you know I think it's all about dispositions but I think if it was me and I was being coddled I would feel incredibly patronized uh and this is how I think you know to even put regardless of whether the L's the G's the B's the t's as groups want to be together it's not like T is just a group or G is just a group right within that you have a number of different factions of people and uh yeah I I don't think that I that wouldn't be how I would want to be treated what was your what's your theory on the normalization of cosmetic surgery I think that unlike other Industries which are more obviously Supply demanded whatever I think that there is a completely bottomless desire from women in particular for beauty enhancing treatment and they will basically spend as much money as they can right on average and that the thing that really drives the beauty industry is technological innovation so like as soon as something new comes on the market and it's typically very expensive and then celebrities use and it trickles down whatever like I didn't know this for instance it wasn't that long ago that actually dying your hair was considered to be quite unusual for women who are going gray that was considered to be kind of in the Realms of like quite not extreme but like quite uh you know expensive time whatever like it was at the edges of what was considered normal for women say in their 50s or 60s now everyone dies their hair basically now going gray is a weird statement and we've had this like ratcheting up of the things that you have to do in order to be considered well groomed and the sky is the limit and so it's and and and it's just driven by what's available so now it's not just wearing makeup it's also fillers it's also Botox it's also weird wonderful facials whatever like all the all the things that you can do having your you know having your nails down as like a standard as a completely standard thing right it's really expensive to have like perfectly manicured all the time and women women who don't have much money will send so much money on this it's amazing um and I mean what a wonderful time to have invested in the beauty industry CU honestly the tech that the tech that they do is actually incredible what you mean what like like okay Nails one example men won't know this the the the bottles of nail vage that you can get in the pharmacy for like a few pounds they'll the manicure will look really bad and it will last you a few days so presumably back in the 50s when we used to do that but no one does that now maybe 10 years ago it started to become possible to get manicures that would last for 10 days but they're quite bad for your nails because they have to like sore away at it basically when they remove it but yeah it's not very nice and it doesn't feel very nice so you don't necessarily want to do that now you can get nail varnish which lasts you a month and it's more expensive and yada yada but like the technological breakthroughs to feel he's always talking about like um technological stagnation right like we haven't improved on the Jet Engine and whatever we have improved so much on beauty Tech in that period it's amazing and I think it's just because there's a there's a bottomless market for it people don't actually care about flying across the Atlantic slightly more quickly you know that's why they nail varnish that lasts for another two weeks yeah yeah and fillers that look more natural and never to get wrinkles and yada y y like right so it's a race it's not only a race to the bottom which women have an endless desire for how much uh enhancement they will go for the minimum bar like the Overton window uh the minimum base rate of that has also been raised up and it's because of inter seexual competition it's because now if you only did the beauty routine of 40 years ago you would look relatively bad compared to the other women in your p group this is precisely the same but not disincentivized instead it's just an unspoken about cartel across the board as why women [ __ ] shame more than men it's a price enforcement mechanism but instead of it being price enforcement it's just competition yeah but that is related to the female rivalry theory of body positivity right that if you can somehow manage to get competitors to eat their way out of your horizontal competition League um there's this bill bit he's Live at Red Rocks some the theater and he says uh if you ladies could only support the WNBA like you support a fat chick that keeps on gaining weight and is no longer a threat to you they'd be doing more numbers than the NBA it is amazing whenever you go on and women post selfies for other women yeah because you look at the comments underneath any woman who's posted a selfie ever and it will always be like baby look amazing baby look amazing and and the expect I think is that then when when when those women post selfies they get the same thing back um and it's all very kind of you know like I it's funny like this is the nature of sort of human instinct right you'll you'll do things with having no idea why you're doing them and then sometimes you'll look back and be like oh okay like you you read David bus or something I'm sure you've had this experience and you're like oh yeah I've done that there I am there I am and you'll keep doing it anyway well think about why women buy luxury goods like why is it that women are so concerned about having a a YSL purse it's for the girls in the gays not for men a mulbury handbag so there was a really interesting study that I looked at that uh showed the the gift that highly inter sexually competitive women with wealthy spouses wanted the most was a gift card to an expensive department store so they could choose it themselves precisely correct because they want to use the signal of my mate is so invested oh you want to go after my mate yes yes yes he spent five grand on this tiny piece of leather that I carry my phone in he spent 10 grand on this wedding ring or whatever right it's an intersexual inter sexually competitive threat display of mate investment yeah even when the mate's not around y yeah and because men are completely insensitive to they don't you think we know the difference between a [ __ ] mulbury handbag and from like primar I don't think men notice things like manicures either I think a lot of the beauty stuff like some of it yes is orientated towards looking younger you know that's like that's always going to be sexually attractive but I think a lot of the looking really well-groomed is about signaling to to girls and gays cuz they're the ones who are actually receiving the signals did you see my uh post that study that was floating around last week to do with uh that hairdressing uh experiment that had been done this is phenomenal so this is where I uh originally Justified using science my rivalry theory of be female uh body positivity support a recent study published in personality and individual differences found that women who are high in intersexual competitiveness are more likely to advise women who they perceive as potential mating threats to cut off more hair in an attempt to sabotage their attractiveness the researchers studied 450 women who are presented with hypothetical Salon clients participants were asked to recommend the amount of hair to be cut cut off for each one women who reported high levels of intersexual competitiveness were more likely to recommend that clients have more hair cut off when the hair was in good condition and the clients expressed a preference for minimal cutting another Finding is that women advise clients of similar attractiveness as themselves to cut off the most hair participants effectively targeted women they perceived as being on the same attractiveness level potentially to try and reduce their attractiveness longer hair is a to to Youth and health yeah men love long hair like I don't think women realize how much men love long hair like if you if if you read the men are actually incredibly easy to please right in terms of like physical cues but the problem is that there are two parallel stat status games going on when it comes to female Beauty and appearance one is attracting men which is basically just looking youthful like fine and fertile and then the other is is is the much more difficult game which is the intersexual competition game which is about making yourself look high status in other ways and that's where the brands come in that's where you know like keeping up with fashion comes in men don't care about that but but you have those two things going on Parallel and occasionally they'll come into tension occasionally there'll be some Trend there are no Solutions only the trade on which makes you fashionable but the men don't like yeah that's interesting yeah like short hair would be an example of that although it's quite a rare for that to be really popular but as you know like baggy clothes or something yeah I was going to say like boyriend jeans and stuff exactly men aren't going to be interested in that but that might that might like occasionally come around guys would be happy with girls just permanently wearing leggings like hot leggings like gym shark leggings or something like just just just go out in those with heels yeah like it's very basic but then again but then I mean also part of what's driving fashion is the fact that gay men are so overwhelmingly over represented in fashion and they don't have absolutely no interest no so that's why you have like really skinny women on catwalks and stuff like it's partly because the clothes kind of hang it's easier if if everyone's a small sample size to deal with the clothes like fitting everyone um but I think it's also because the more androgynous look is just considered to be more beautiful by gay man you see that uh Victoria's Secrets have made the radical decision to go back to using hot models they tried 300 pound mannequins they tried a trans person they tried a man they tried the captain of the US soccer team and radically now they're just going to use hot chicks you know you know the gym brand lemon like expensive gym where I can't tell you how much L and I own it's disgusting anyway um they used to have a rule that they didn't even stock sizes over like a UK size 12 or UK 14 like the average woman is a 16 that's a smarter version of what abian Fitch did where they wouldn't give away their clothes to homeless people they' just burn them yeah we don't even give them away to un like acceptable customers let alone yeah no I really think that lul L and actually the guy who founded it would say it's quite soly like want fat chicks wearing my clothes basically like they they knew that having it being associated with skinny women was aspirational but then they changed that in like 2020 is could survive couldn't survive and now they have now they have loads of plus-sized models and stuff um it's a fashion though it won't last Lou Perry ladies and gentlemen Louise I love you I I really really enjoy bringing you on your podcast's great your writing's great where should people go if they want to watch the stuff that you're doing uh so my podcast is called made mother matriarch it's on YouTube substack all the places you get your podcasts my first book was the case against the sexual Revolution which came out last year I'm working on another one as well which is going to be out um uh in about 18 months which is on motherhood fertility birth rates all of this stuff um and uh I I just write I I work too much I write for too many places like countless places I'm on Twitter everyone should go and read the case against the sexual Revolution was phenomenal and I'm excited to see what you do with your next one thank you for today thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you will love my full length 2hour long podcast with Douglas Murray go on press it