Why Does The Female Orgasm Exist? - Dr Robert King

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Dr Robert King is a psychologist, professor at University College Cork, and researcher on the evolutionary function of female orgasm. What makes the female orgasm so mysterious? For generations, men across the globe have sought to decipher it, and many women share their curiosity as well. So why does the female orgasm even exist? What’s its evolutionary purpose? And have scientists like Dr. Robert King finally cracked the code? Expect to learn what most people don’t understand about the female orgasm, why women have multiple orgasms and men don’t, the biggest predictors of the female orgasm, how much female desire of men is driven by other female’s desire of those men, what women want in men sexually, if penis size and length are as bog of factors as men tend to think, if there are similarities in reproductive anatomy across males and females, and much more… - 0:00 How Do You Get into Studying the Female Orgasm? 2:23 What Does Sex Research Look Like? 4:42 Misconceptions About the Female Orgasm 11:16 How is the Female Orgasm Adaptive? 24:38 What are the Biggest Predictors of Female Orgasms? 28:26 Intrasexual Competition 46:27 Catherine Salmon and the Dark Romance Genre 52:42 Romanticisation of the Lesser Man 54:45 Does Size Matter? 58:59 Why is Ease of Orgasm So Varied? 01:11:22 Do Orgasms Differ Depending on Sexual Relationships? 01:16:19 Characterising Modern Sex Culture 01:27:23 Find Out More About Dr Robert - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at ⁠https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at ⁠https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at ⁠https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How do you get into studying the female orgasm?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Just to go to a good dive straight in. Okay, so my background was I was a school teacher for 20 years and I was interested in psychology and maths. That's what I taught. About 20 years ago, I came across a really interesting book by a woman called Elizabeth Lloyd. It was a bias in the science of evolution. I was on holiday in Thailand. I read it. The book told me that female orgasm did nothing, had no function. And to say I was surprised would be an understatement. And I just I got interested and I started studying evolutionary biology and I approached some prominent figures in the field and said, I think I haven't I you seem to have an issue

• 0:43Speaker 01

  here studying this subject. I think and it and you know, just sort of, I'm obviously quite a nerdy kind of character. I delve into these things. I read the original stuff. And once I started reading the original stuff, it became obvious that there were two very distinct traditions of studying human sexuality, particularly female orgasm. One of them went down this this strange route of saying it did nothing. And another one, which had been somewhat sidelined, suggested that she had some really interesting functions.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  What was your what was your intuition? What was it that you thought early on, huh, this this seems to be a fruitful area to research more into?

• 1:23Speaker 01

  It became obvious from a fairly early stage that a number of the people who are pining about female orgasm were not studying sex at all, not in any kind of, you know, sense of actually being in the room with other people having sex. That's why I start off the book by talking about animals in zoos and mating captivity, because what was being studied in laboratories just felt a lot like studying mating in captivity. And that doesn't doesn't capture the range of what humans are up to or interested in. It doesn't capture the range of other animals are interested. It makes them interesting either, to be honest. I mean, it's, you know, that's why I start off the book talking about COVID and the fact that I live next to Fota, which is a terrific wildlife

• 2:03Speaker 01

  park, and I recommend it highly. And we have the breeding group of a number of animals, giraffes, cheetahs, we've got some new tigers there. What else have we got? Lions. And they've all had babies. And one of the reasons they have babies is because they have privacy. They can hide away from humans when they don't don't want to play with us and do want to play with each other.

• 2:23Chris Williamson?

  What does sex research in the lab look like when it's done well, when it's done badly? What are the mechanisms of how you do this?

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna reject all lab-based research, but one of the primary platforms on which a lot of sex research is based is, listeners will probably have heard of Masters and Johnson, because there was a TV series about them. I think it's called Masters of Sex a few years back, and they are the sort of the famous sex researchers from the 60s. And the essence of their research into female orgasm was to get half a dozen women, to get them to masturbate to orgasm in a lab. And they inserted a glass tube, which they called Ulysses, inside which had a camera. And they measured the results. And genuinely, that was the, that was the platform on which they based the whole idea that female orgasm didn't really have any function.

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say it was done badly, but I would just say that it wasn't the final word.

• 3:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And what does better sex research or female orgasm research in a lab look like?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Well, at the same time, Masters and Johnson were doing their stuff in labs, there was a team in England, the Foxes, who were both doctors, they were also, they were married, and they were having sex in their own marital bedroom. And they're very intrepid kind of pioneers and heroes of the field. So Dr. Fox's missus inserted a telemetry device and a pressure change device inside herself, and had sex with her husband on the marital bed, and then measured the pressure changes.

• 3:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay, that sounds like, yeah, pioneering work.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Yes. And they, and they, and they found some very interesting, I mean, I'm just giving one example of the work that was done. But it was, they, they, they found something that Masters and Johnson didn't, which was that female orgasm is associated. I mean, they studied oxytocin action, and they studied pressure, uterine, intrauterine pressure changes. And that provides a mechanism for orgasm to increase fertility. So in many ways, they were sort of the foundation of the, of the thread that we picked up 50 years later. There are other people in that thread, you know, it's not, not just sort of me and our team in the Foxes. There's, there's a huge team in Central Europe led by a guy called Ludwig Wilt, who did a whole load of stuff on oxytocin throughout the late 80s and 90s as well. And, you know, they, they sort of amplified this research.

• 4:42Chris Williamson?

  What do most people get wrong when it comes to understanding female orgasm?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Oh blimey. Well, I think that because it's they think because it's comparatively difficult to bring about, there has to be something wrong either with women or with nature in general, or with, no, actually, no, those are the those are the two dominant fields. So rather than thinking that women are picky and choosy in other fields, and you could apply that principle to their orgasmic response, they sort of go, well, either women are sort of psychologically broken, which is basically Freud's theory, or that they're just badly designed by a capricious nature, which is the by-product theory.

• 5:22Chris Williamson?

  Go a little deeper on the by-product theory for me.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Okay, so, starting off in the 1970s with a pioneer called Simons, it was, he wrote a book called The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Back in the 70s, it was the full structure and nature of the clitoris. You might have been mistaken for thinking that it was as he described it, which was something a bit like a male nipple, and i.e. sort of small, functionless, external, and not particularly, not particularly interesting. Now, actually, if you if you delved even even into the specialist research at the time, I mean, that that story would not have got off the ground, because actually, there were people who knew that wasn't true. But it was possible to believe that in the 1970s. By the time

• 6:09Speaker 01

  we got to the 1990s, it really wasn't possible to believe that. However, the idea has sort of taken root, that the the the main area of sensitivity in women was was external, and then therefore it was plausible, for example, that it was almost impossible to generate orgasm through normal penetrative intercourse. And the the idea behind it was, and you, Steve Gould, I mean, partly this was publicized by Steve Gould, who was an extremely famous and popular paleontologist. And because he was considered to be a big supporter of evolutionary theory, and particularly in the States where evolution is sort of massively politicized, and it also became a religious thing, the fact that he was a supporter of evolution meant that people were were willing to elide over the fact that he was

• 6:54Speaker 01

  politically very opposed to the applying of Of evolutionary theory to human beings. I mean, to to put it bluntly, he thought that if human beings started applying evolutionary theory to themselves, they'd all turn into fascists. So that the important thing to do was to stop them doing. And this isn't, this isn't me saying this. I mean, his, his evolution for the people group sort of pretty much, pretty much said that. And he championed this idea that, that female orgasm was a byproduct. And Elizabeth Loy was, was his sort of protege and colleague. And so her book was the one I read.

• 7:24Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  That was, that was the one that started me off.

• 7:26Chris Williamson?

  Is this, is this similar to sort of looking at it like a spandrel of some kind?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. Yes. The whole spandrel thing. Yeah. Um, this, that would be a very good example of, of Gould's kind of thinking on this. Um, I mean, you know, they're not called spandrels. In fact, this would be typical of Steve Gould. I mean, he, he, his famous paper is called The Spandrels of San Marcos. And it's this idea that these, these ornate structures weren't actually integral to the, the, um, the structure of the cathedral. They're just byproducts, but actually the, the structures in question aren't even called spandrels. Um, uh, they're called pendentives. Uh, and in fact, they are integral to the structure.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, for fuck's sake. Right. Okay. So I'm wrong twice.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you're not, you're not wrong at all. Um, yeah, you're, you're, you're, you're accurately reporting what the literature says. It's just that Steve, Steve Gould is, is just notorious for this. He will, he will sort of drop these things into, and, and then people will sort of pick it up and they'll, they'll go around and they'll, they'll say things like, oh, well, you know, these, these things are just spandrels or, um, or these things are just, I mean, one of his favorites is just so stories. And he, he's done huge amounts of damage in, in the, in the literature because people just sort of dismiss adaptive, adaptationist ideas and they think that they've got Steve Gould backing for, for doing so.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. We are talking the same language here. Um, okay. So to, to recap what we're up to now.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Show you briefly why Steve, why Steve is, Steve Gould is wrong. I've, I've just taken the carry. So this, this, this here is a clitoris. Um, and I can't remember whether I said.

• 8:50Chris Williamson?

  That's not, that's not, that's not a clitoris. That's a Pokemon.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Well, this is a life-sized clitoris, and I've been giving these away with the book. And because I've got chapters in the book that are obviously devoted to looking at the nature and structure and form and function, all the rest of it. But there is nothing quite so dramatic as just sort of going, the clitoris isn't what you think it is. You think it's something like a male nipple, you know, and it isn't. Look at the size of it. It's about four inches long. Most of it is internal. It's got ducts. It's multiply innovative. It's got its own somatosensory cortex associated with it in the brain. And none of those things are true of male nipples.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  Is it correct to say that the clitoris is the only part of the human body which is exclusively designed for pleasure?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Um, no, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it is just exclusively designed for pleasure. I think it's non-accidentally designed for pleasure. But, and, but, oh, hello, I lost you there for a second. But pleasure always does a job, doesn't it? If something is pleasant for humans. Dan Dennett does a nice talk on this, on a TED Talk a couple of years back. So was it called Sweet, Cute, Sexy, Funny, I think is the name of the talk. The order might be different. And his point, which I think is a very good one, is that if nature needs you to do a job, which would otherwise be a chore, then it makes it pleasurable, or it makes it, you know, there is a dose of pleasure.

• 10:14Chris Williamson?

  Right. Maybe I should have reworded what I said. The proximate reason for the clitoris is pleasure. And are you aware of any other areas of the human body where the proximate reason for their existence is also just pleasure?

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Um, that's an interesting question. I think you're almost certainly right in sofar as it's got the highest concentration of nerve endings associated with pleasure. So women are lucky that way. And there is this old story, isn't there, that the guy Thereseas, who was the prophet, apparently, the reason he was made blind by the gods was because he'd been a man and a woman various times. And somebody asked him, so, you know, give us, what's the $64,000 questionnaire? Who has the most fun during sex? And he went, oh, women, easily. And so they blinded him, because you're not allowed to say that in public if you're a Greek prophet.

• 11:16Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, I remember listening to a podcast talking about...

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  Either men who transitioned or women who transitioned. And the difference in the experience of orgasm when they had different hormonal profiles. And the pivot, I think it was female to male. And the difference being much more local. Well, actually, you can tell me, have you looked at this? Is this something?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  It's not, I mean, I don't, I hang around people who do a lot of that kind of research. I don't, I don't do it directly. But the glands of the clitoris is so the bit that a lot of people are talking about is so if you imagine sort of the walls of the lips of the vulva sort of around there. The bit that's visible is what people think of as the clitoris. And it's the glands of the clitoris. And that's where the bulk of the nerve endings are. And that's, that's a bit which you, you want to keep. If you're doing a vaginoplasty, you want to make sure that that stays around. Because otherwise, or if you're doing phalloplasty, that's where a lot of the nerve endings are. But, you know.

• 12:26Chris Williamson?

  So if Freud, women are psychologically broken, that's another thing. If we're saying it's not a spandrel, that it's not some byproduct like male nipples. How is the female orgasm adaptive? Can you make the case for the other side of this argument?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I think, I mean, I think one of the difficulties is that if you ask women about their orgasms, quite often they'll say, well, you know, which ones do you mean? So just park that for a second because they does their, their experiences are more multifaceted than the male ones. But parking that for a moment, the, the, the common thread that runs through pretty much all of this is oxytocin mediated peristalsis. So we, and the thing that's, that's kind of interesting about that is. So peristalsis is the, the pulsing which creates pressure changes. And administering oxytocin artificially, which is what the the Vilt team did in the 90s, will will create those those pressure changes and they'll they'll create movement in the the

• 13:30Speaker 01

  oviduct. But orgasm creates a big flow of oxytocin. It has it has the same effect. And we've known about this in humans for 50 years. That was the basis of the Fox studies. And we've known about it in animal models going back nearly 100 years. There's particularly there's there's there's German research going back into the late 20s, early 30s, looking at rapid sperm transport in in rats, dogs, rabbits, and then animals that are important for agriculture like sheep and pigs and cattle and horses. Now, we don't know what those animals are experiencing. And that's that's the advantage of being a human ethologist is you can go up and you can sort of go, you know, to your to your human participants, do you feel, and you've got a big, long list of things that we know oxytocin does, like it makes you feel floaty,

• 14:13Speaker 01

  it gives you a sense of trust, it creates breath apnea, or yes, and you can also say, do you, you know, they can they can tick these things off and go, yep, I get that. Yep, I get that. They can't, you can't ask that of of dogs and horses, but you can you can still measure the oxytocin levels. Does that, does that answer the question? Or am I going around it completely?

• 14:32Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all. I think it increases oxytocin levels. But when most people think about oxytocin, we're thinking about pair bonding, we're thinking about sort of lovey dovey sense of buy-in, we're thinking about, well, you know, we need to stick together if we're going to eventually have kids and I need to be invested in you and I need to see you not as an old, a stranger, but as kin. But you're talking about other stuff. You're just not just talking about pair bonding's effects of oxytocin. So what is it doing?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  It's it's even more basic than that. The the it looks, it looks like, and this this is going back phylogenetically, it it looks like the origin of oxytocin is milk production. So it is, it's the basic mammalian hormone. And the the thing that it seems to have been primarily associated with is producing, producing milk. So that, you know, that we are mammals. It just, it has these other functions as well. And as the as the milk production started coexisting with the other features of of being mammals, like, for example, having altruistic young, or not, not all, not all mammals have altruistic young, but some of them do.

• 15:39Chris Williamson?

  What's altruistic?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  So they they need a lot of, they need a lot of care. So they, I mean, they need, they need to hang around, I'm sorry, all, all mammals need to hang around the mother a bit because they're, they're being mammals, they're, they're sucking milk, but some of them need a lot more care than others. And human babies need the most care of all. And creating a bond between the, the mother and the baby is, is another function of oxytocin. And it looks like nature is just lazy. And it's just, well, we can, we can, we can do this with, with, with mothers and offspring. This is one of the, this is one of the things that's, that's interesting about Freud. Freud sort of thought that males would be, would be shocked if they realised that they're the sort of the, the nurturing instincts, the sex instincts were being turned into nurturing instincts. And like a lot of things with Freud, I think he got it precisely the wrong way around. The primary instinct

• 16:24Speaker 01

  was bonding with offspring. And some of that is just sort of overspilled into going, oh, it's probably nice to keep a guy around as well.

• 16:30Chris Williamson?

  Right. So what is happening mechanically that is adaptive with regards to female orgasm? Presumably it's doing something to do with likelihood of conception or something else? Before we even get into the interpretation, the sort of like, uh, social relational aspects of this, what like mechanically, how does it help or hinder?

• 16:54Speaker 01

  So the uterine peristalsis creates pressure changes. And you can, you can, you can actually measure the, the movement of sperm-like product. Now, this is where it becomes, this is becomes where it becomes difficult, of course, to do this in laboratories. So we sort of have to, to measure these things in, in various different ways. The Fox team actually sort of measured the pressure changes directly, um, by, while they were having sex. And then they also measured similar effects by just administering oxytocin. Vilh's team expanded this out and I think eventually they had measured up, uh, and ended up measuring certainly a hundred, it might have been even twice that, women with, with large oxytocin doses and then introducing spermogenic, well, sperm-like material.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And then we came around 2016 and came up with a way of measuring backflow. So there's a phenomenon called backflow, which is up to an hour after sex, the vagina will eject material from the reproductive tract and you can measure the amount that's that's that's come out. Now, if you if you will, people know what a moon cup is, it's a device that you can use for collecting period fluid, if you don't want to insert things. Now, if we just produced a method for injecting something that was like a sperm like material, putting in a moon cup and then creating a deep orgasm inside the woman in question, then measuring up to an hour later, what came out and 15 to 20% less comes out if she's had an orgasm.

• 18:20Chris Williamson?

  Right. Is the timing important? I have to assume that if you've got the fluid in and then the orgasm happens, that that's more effective than the other way around. But that I'm going to guess on average is less likely to happen, given that once the man's done, he's done.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  It's very difficult to measure. We need to come up with a method of injecting a known amount inside. And of course, men will vary in the amount they're producing. So you can't tell how much is coming out unless you've controlled what's going in. And if you're doing that, then then obviously you're moving away from from actual intercourse. So like a lot of these things, you it's extremely difficult to produce one study that just sort of completely.

• 19:04Chris Williamson?

  I mean, in terms of timing, though, I mean, in terms if what you're saying is that there is this change in pressure, which it seems like sort of sucks semen up towards where it needs to go in sort of simple people language. If that is created by orgasm, or if that's more more prevalent when orgasm is reached than when it's not, then I have to assume that it means you need the substance in there and then for female orgasm to occur for that to happen. But that's not the way around that sex works.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. Yeah. Um, right. Yes. No, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it it looks like the orgasm is one thing and the the movement of a material is another. So it there was there was quite possibly an initial movement along with the orgasm. But once orgasm is happening, what's sorry, what's oxytocin levels are raised, then it looks like those pressure changes are actually persist for quite a while. And it's not it's not just the bit where you're you're feeling pleasure that that in suck is happening. Although it's I mean, I would hazard a guess that it's heightened at that moment, but we've not measured that bit directly. And I think I think that it was precisely that that got Baker and Bellis confused in the 90s, because I think they they thought that women were

• 20:22Speaker 01

  timing their orgasm, and the orgasm itself was creating in suck. And that they were they were then generating sperm wars. Have you come across this research? Is this like sperm competition? Yes, the sort of the direct sperm competition. And this is the stuff that that hasn't been replicated. My suspicion is that the what they were looking for was something where the orgasm just caused in more or less an instant hit. So you would have to have you would have to have sperm from rivals in there at sort of the same kind of time and have a sperm wall between them. And it was all it was all exciting and dramatic stuff, but it's defied replication, I'm afraid.

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

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• 22:01Speaker 01

  Okay, you said different categories of female orgasm. What are you talking about there? Right, so when we first started off doing this, and we just sort of really just opened it up to ask women, what should scientists be asking them? And a significant number, not all, but a significant number said, well, that's a dumb question, which ones do you mean? And they said, well, you tell us which ones you mean. And they come up with various kinds of descriptors of of location, intensity, and associated feelings. And so that was that was just sort of qualitative stuff, just to get us off thinking about it. And so we then created a questionnaire which asked people. We're very, very careful because there's been this big history of separating orgasms

• 22:46Speaker 01

  into clitoral and vaginal, and that sort of goes back to Freud and other people as well. And it has a lot of history behind it, and it's also what Masters and Johnson were trying to overturn. So we're very, very careful to stay away from those things for a whole bunch of reasons, partly the history, and also because, as I was just showing with the clitoris, the clitoris is the seat of orgasm, but it's quite a large organ. And all orgasms, all female orgasms seem to involve the clitoris in some way, so we wanted to keep away from all of that. But when we just asked women to describe their orgasms with quite a complicated questionnaire, and then analysed them, they did seem to fall into two fairly distinct categories. Ones that were very, very broadly, ones are experienced on the surface, which tended

• 23:29Speaker 01

  to be more intense, and ones that were experienced deep inside, which seemed to have more of the oxytocin elements. Although I have to stress, we weren't measuring oxytocin directly. We're measuring plausible concomitants of oxytocin, like the breath apnea, the floaty feelings, feelings of trust and all the rest of it. And it looks like the ones that are associated with penetration and deep inside have more of those kinds of things associated with them. However, that doesn't, we didn't want to sort of separate them into these are better than others, and certainly the women themselves didn't. There's no, there are some neo-Freudian scholars who want to sort of argue that, like Freud did, that certain orgasms are more mature than others, or mentally healthier than others, and we weren't going down that route.

• 24:12Chris Williamson?

  Right. I guess the obvious link here is that the deeper orgasm with the more oxytocin results in the peristalsis, results in the pressure changes because the deeper orgasm is brought on by something being in there and that something has maybe got some sperm that's coming out the end of it. And the surface orgasm is maybe just you on your own or something else. So you don't need that level of oxytocin. Is that the theory?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Something, something like that. Yeah. I mean, although I, I, I would be, have to be honest and say we're, we're going beyond, I'm speculating somewhat because I, you know, we haven't, we haven't measured the oxytocin levels. But it looks like, and also, I mean, that would, that would also help explain why we don't need to decide between whether it's a mate choice or a sire choice thing. It could be doing both. And it certainly seems to be the case that if you, if you find cultures where, for example, the man giants in Polynesia, who were sort of people that Simons was talking about, but I think he was trying to impose a model on one, on a group that where it didn't fit. The, the, the women in those, in those cultures are very much in charge of the sexuality.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  And the young men in those cultures are not allowed to have sex with the young girls of their own age until they prove themselves on the older women. And quite a lot of that involves them having to make sure that the older women have, have several orgasms before a penis goes anywhere near them. So it looks like when women are calling the shots, they are very happy to have, you know, whichever orgasms and they, they may well all contribute to fertility in some way.

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are the biggest predictors of female orgasm?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Oh, and the, the biggest one we found was attractive partner smell, which we, we found really interesting. Because that was, that was, when we went from the sort of describe your orgasm types to us to, well, describe your partners to us. One of the first things that they said we should ask about was partner smell. And it turned out to be the, the, I mean, none of these are huge effect sizes, but, but that's because the sort of data you collect with these, these things is, tends to be quite, quite muddy. But it was the, the largest effect size. And that's interesting because it suggests that the, the biggest predictor is, is something to do with genetic compatibility. Because that's how we're advertising our genetic compatibility to each other with, with smell.

• 26:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay. What else? What are some of the other predictors?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Dominance, sexual dominance, and also at the same time, considerateness. So those things might seem to be pulling in opposite directions, but I actually don't think they are for a bunch of interesting reasons. We also asked a raft of the usual bunch of questions that evolutionists ask about things like muscularity and that kind of stuff. And none of that, none of that came out. So it looks like people want somebody who is a sexually dominant, but not, but also considerate, nice smelling partner who pays close attention and provides deep penetration. Those would be, those would be the big four.

• 27:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Where does attraction come into this? Where does the level of attraction come into this?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  I, yes, it's an interesting one, isn't it? I suppose it then depends on how you're going to decompose desire. If you're going to break it down into just sort of whether a guy is good looking or not, we haven't actually found anything that's a predictor there. But there's so many confounds in there because women are often not going to go to bed with someone they don't find desirable in the first place. So we need to be able to make, we need to be able to discriminate between the various guys that the women are talking about. That was, that was what was interesting in the, in the 2012 study we did is because we were asking women explicitly to make comparisons between different sexual encounters

• 27:58Speaker 01

  because we're asking them to describe different orgasms. And I'd like to, I'd like to follow that up with a, with a bunch of other, a bunch of other measures because there are some sort of fairly obvious things that make males attractive that as far as we know so far, aren't predictive of orgasm. So I mean, I haven't done this research myself, but Dan Nettle and I've just forgotten the guy's name, his student at the time, Tom, it'll come back to me. They looked at things like, like finance and that didn't seem to have an effect. I think some people have looked at height and that doesn't seem to have had an effect. They're the kind of things you think might, because you might think, well, these, these would, we would, would spark off certain triggers saying, you know. High status, prestige.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  Growth acquisition, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  All of that kind of stuff. And I'm not for a second saying that they aren't there to be measured, but we haven't measured them in such a way yet that they've come out as being predictive.

• 28:48Chris Williamson?

  I suppose it's interesting because trying to get a representative sample of men having sex with women would require women to get rid of their filter for which men they want to have sex with. It's like, no, no, no, no. You must have sex with one from each category. It's like, no, I've already pre-selected. So when you try and control for other things, it's pretty difficult.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's one of the reasons why we have to use data which are not necessarily the most most, but we can't do randomized control trials here, alas.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  And if we could, the ethics teams wouldn't let us. I'm pretty confident of that.

• 29:29Chris Williamson?

  Getting in the way again. Okay. How much of female desire of men is driven by other females' desire of those same men? Do you think?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yes. Considerable. I mean, there are female groupies, there aren't male groupies. And there's good reasons for that.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  The crisis of female rock stars.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Well, right, yes. You know all about this stuff. The whole Fisherian sexy son stuff. Women need to queue off one another because what counts as being success in the local environment is not always immediately obvious. Whereas what counts as being fertile in the local environment is obvious. Men have a baseline, you know, what they find attractive. And I mean, women might do as well, but it's a considerably different one. I mean, the number of men who can just get away with being beautiful, well, we know their names. You know, they're the ones who can be on telly being models and being film stars and all the rest of it. The rest of us have to have some other kinds of qualities.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  Not allowed to play the guitar or do poetry.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  That's the kind of thing. Yes. Yeah. And there's a reason why those groupies get all excited because it makes sense. You know, if the local peacock is just slightly more pretty because his feathers are slightly brighter, then he might have sons who feathers are also brighter. And so it makes sense for them to queue off each other, which they seem to.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Sexy son hypothesis is so fascinating to me and it makes an awful lot of sense. I remember seeing some fascinating research around the attitudes of women to casual sex based on whether they had sons or daughters.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  So interesting to me like that. I guess, like ecological component of how we show up, of how our programming can be adapted to the local environment. Okay, so.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  And it's also one of the reasons, I think, a lot of the time that we men are blind to female, female competition, because there's a real, I mean, the mere existence of a sexy son's hypothesis immediately means that there's going to be a tension, doesn't there? Because the women are going to be.

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  Only one sexiest son creator out there. And then if you don't get him, then it means you need to get

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Someone's actually going to get him.

• 31:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose, you know, going back to the groupies thing, the idea of lots of other men competing for the same woman as you is very different to the idea of other women competing for the same man that you're after. I guess, in the same way that men like to go to the gym in order to get bigger muscles, the kind of male male competition is inherently exciting. But I don't, you're totally right. Like, I don't know. And I suppose the other the other issue that you have is because women are so much more choosy, the pool, the groupie pool that you're pulling from as a woman of high, I mean, like, what do you even, what's the level of attractiveness? Like, status, the guys don't care about your status. But that,

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  comparatively, you know, I'm speaking in very broad strokes here. They don't care about your ability to acquire resources. They don't care that much about your level of competence beyond being smart, you know, you being being nice, being caring, being funny, conscientious, like, stuff that people that have done a bit of work will have an understanding of. But for the most part, you know, the the most talented woman on the planet is competing with a 21 year old barista from Starbucks. And it's, I guess, in some ways, kind of a much more vicious hierarchy. And then in other ways, men's hierarchy is much more vicious as well, because it's much more sort of winner takes all. But yeah, you're so, I mean, female Intrasexual competition for me, I spent

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  basically. Probably half of 2023, just obsessing over intrasexual competition, especially among women.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  You had Benenson on your show, didn't you?

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  I think Benenson's been on, Christina Geranti's been on, Sarah Hill's been on, Corey Clark came on. You know, I've done the rounds, so to speak.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  First-rate scientists. No, no, these are terrific people to have on because I think men often need, they need their, we need our eyes open to this because otherwise we just miss stuff.

• 33:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, we do, but I, look, I think it's fascinating to observe the kind of very fine scalpel that women use, the way like venting, have you, have you looked at venting much?

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, sit down.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Tell me about venting.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Let me, let me spin you a yarn. So venting is a really unique type of gossip. Venting is gossip disguised as compassion. So if I'm saying to you, I'm Christina, you're Regina. And I'm saying, Regina, I'm really worried about Emma. You know, she's just sleeping with all of these guys. And I'm just really worried that she's gonna get hurt or, you know, like, it's just, I mean, I would never, I, I couldn't do that. Like, I couldn't do that to myself. I'm just really worried about her. And so what am I saying in that short sentence? What am I telling you? I'm telling you about how much sex she's having.

• 34:42Chris Williamson?

  I'm positioning myself morally in terms of purity, fecundity, all that sort of stuff above. I, I would never. It allows me to derogate a potential sexual rival whilst couching it in care and compassion. So if I ever get called up, it's, look, I'm sorry, but I'm just worried about you. And I didn't think she was gonna tell anybody either. And it is, and guys are just, it just goes past us. We just, we had. Absolutely blind to it, like the kid from The Sixth Sense, but in reverse.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Right, yes. Yeah, no, I first had my eyes opened to this by, I told you I was a school teacher. And I, some of the students I was teaching were going, you know, why, why, why don't we study female female competition? I mean, and this was just a few years ago now, so 20, 25 years ago, we don't really study that. Well, you should, you know, and we had an afternoon, so they made me watch Mean Girls. And, and it was just sort of, okay, so I've realised this is sort of a world that I'm aware of, but like a dog, you know, there were these whistles I wasn't picking up. And then we've just, in the last 30 years, I've, I've seen it happen. We've just got, we've got far more female scientists doing behavioural science. And, you know, they're just not letting that kind of stuff not be studied.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  And it, it, it's sexy. I mean, I don't think it was, I don't think it was the, the men being sort of deliberately sexist. It's just, we weren't picking up on those things a lot of the time.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, come on, there's, there's ways that men compete. I actually know that's a lie. I was, I was going to try and make some equivocation, but it's wrong. Because male competition is very upfront. It's very obvious. Female competition, but female competition, I'm, I'm just going to go down the Intrasexual thing. I want to show off to you for a second. The reason that female Intrasexual competition is so subtle and couched and deniable. I think that's really, really important, the fact that the deniability of it. The reason for that is that, on average, women are more fragile and more valuable, right? You can't afford to lose them and they are easier to kill, basically, is one way to say it.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And also frequently, I think in history, not around their kin. I think that was a big, that's a big feature as well.

• 36:48Chris Williamson?

  They've been pulled away, yeah, they've moved over.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  They've had to form coalitions, yeah.

• 36:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, what's that called, patro local?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 36:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so they've been patro localised, I guess. And what this means is, if you try to start a fight with fists as a woman, well, the woman that's up against you, like the, the damage is going to be maybe quite high and it's a big risk and all the rest of it. So you have to use these very subtle forms of status interplay. And one of the, one of the real concerns, again, because there is a guy at the top, but the guys tend to be more collaborative when it comes to looking at how the status hierarchy works. Because someone can be really great in one area, but not in the other, whereas. This might be a controversial thing to say. The winner takes all happens for women

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  too, right? Because they get the guy, they get the guy who's got the most resources. So they're downstream from his level of status also. And there's this great, really great study, I think it was Joyce Benenson, I can't remember quite who did it. Female basketball players on the same team show less physical affection to each other than male basketball players on opposite teams.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember the study. Yes.

• 38:00Chris Williamson?

  So fucking interesting.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  I've got a colleague, a colleague in pretty much the next office to me, and she was a national level player. I can't remember what she, I think.

• 38:12Chris Williamson?

  Did she agree with the hypothesis?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  She absolutely agreed with it. And she said, no, I've been on the receiving end of that repeatedly. I could, I could show you, I could take you to places and show you that in action, she said. This is absolutely true. Yeah. And have you seen the research done on the number of deaths among children of co-wives? So there's, I think, I think, is it the Dugon? Don't quote me on this, because I'd have to look it up. But there's, there is a, there's a group where they're still, to some extent, polygamous. And the, the law courts of particular countries, one of the, one of the ex-French colonies are largely taken up with poisonings where the.

• 38:53Chris Williamson?

  Is this Cinderella effect stuff?

• 38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, well, except the, yes, they're, but they're, they're still living stepparents. So you, so the high status man will have three or four wives. But, but a couple of the, couple of the sons of one of the wives, the child mortality is a lot higher than it should be, that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of tensions going on beneath the surface of humans, you know, and we, and we sort of, and I think sex researchers, we, because we tend to be sort of softy liberal indoor types, we tend to sort of assume that everybody would like to, everyone else to have sort of mutually satisfying sex lives. And so when we actually come across the reality of, of human sexuality can be, can be a bit of a bit damaging, because of course, it's not true, you know.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  I remember. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Sleep. Isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night. And this is where eight sleep comes in. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20 degrees. Plus it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HRV, your snoring, your heart rate, all with 99% accuracy. It even starts cooling or heating your bed an hour before you get into it, which is why eight sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep by up to one hour every night. Best of all, they've got a 30 night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 nights. And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Plus they ship internationally.

• 40:16Chris Williamson?

  So head to the link in the description below, eight sleep.com slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. I remember reading in Gad Sads book, talking about happiness. He said,

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  the right amount of sex that you want in your relationship is not just as much as you want, but it's just a little bit more than the amount that your friends around you are having as well.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:46Chris Williamson?

  The most intimate, private thing that you're going to do, maybe except for prayer, is still you've got this, you're enmeshed in your local hierarchy. And you're thinking, how many times did you win the, oh, three, fuck, we only did one. You know.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  I wouldn't believe, that was, that was one of the things that really got me interested. I mean, way, way back before I switched careers.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  But back when I was doing my first degree, there was, I was, I'd be about 19, I had a new girlfriend. There's a friend of ours doing the degree. She was a lot older than us. She was, actually, she was the editor of the face. So she was almost a generation older than us. And I remember we were at the pub and she said, well, how do you know she's not faking with you? And it wasn't quite the scene from where Harry met Sally, but it was sort of, and I just remember thinking, and I just in my innocence, I was going, well, why would you? It'd be like sort of, and then the whole table just sort of erupted in laughter. Cause yeah.

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain, go a little bit more deeply into it, reveal the veil of what you're talking about here?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so I mean invariably, I mean, if I do talks on this, I'll play that scene from Harry Met Sally, the famous one, you know, where she fakes orgasm and everybody sort of collapses into laughter. It's a great scene, but it's also a very curious event when you think about it. I mean, if, you know, if I, if we had a game of tennis, I mean, it'd be a very bad idea because I'm, I can't play the game. But, you know, imagine that, you know, I could, and I sort of go, well, you know, I had a great game with Chris and Chris is saying, yeah, idiot Robbie, he thinks I enjoyed that game of tennis. I didn't have a good time at all, idiot. I mean, it wouldn't make any sense. Yeah, this is meant to be something of mutual enjoyment. And yet somehow, it's sort of obvious to people that they're, and so you look at the proximate level and women will say, well, of course,

• 42:32Speaker 01

  I'm faking it because I'm bored with him. I just want him to stop. He's just, he's not pressing the right buttons. I felt sorry for him. Or it's his ego. And all of those things might be true, but they're very superficial. They don't take us to the nub of anything. Firstly, they don't tell us why men are interested in it as a signal. I mean, so that, so male comedians might tell her, I go, well, I don't care. So she's faking it. I'm fine with that, you know, which they're not, but they can make a joke out of it. Secondly, it doesn't, doesn't explain why, why you go to that kind of effort to signal, because, I mean, women are usually quite happy to turn around and tell men they're not interested in them. That's not usually a problem for women to go to go, not if you, you know, even, even in, you know, they'll say things like even in a competition of zero of

• 43:15Speaker 01

  one, you'd be a loser, you know, which is what, if you were the last guy on earth, I wouldn't sleep. That's right. Yeah. Even in a competition of one, you still come out with zero. So, yeah, women aren't usually that shy about it. So why in this case? And I think, once you start thinking about these things in terms of signals, then you start thinking, well, what exactly is being signaled here? Well, one of the things is being signaled for the guy. I mean, I think, and I was, before Covid happened, have you had Athena on your show, Athena at Kipis? She does.

• 43:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Didn't she do stuff about, fuck, the end of the world?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  She did do stuff about zombies in the end of the world. Yes. Yes. Um, I, and at one point, we were in touch with you. She did a lot of stuff about laughter. And we were going to do a joint thing about laughter and then sort of think Covid came along there's other things got in the way. But one of the main things she found was that laughter can be faked. And that you can actually, you can look at the sound pattern of laughter being faked. And basically, if it's voiced, it's more likely to be fake. So if I go, ha, ha, ha, you know, that's, that's an obviously fake laugh. And there are, but there are some edge cases where it's not obvious where it's faked. And we're going to apply the same thing to orgasms. Because there are, there are signals of orgasms that are voiced and unvoiced. And the moment you start bringing that into it, so, so, well, why, you know, why do people fake laughter? Well, because laughter is a signal that you're accepted. Laughter is a signal that you're dominant.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Laughter is a signal that somebody likes you, you know, and those are all kinds of things you might want somebody to think, even if they're not true. And so why would, why would somebody want to think that, you know, that they're orgasmed when they haven't? Well, similar kinds of ideas, you know, that, that actually you have got a good chance of making this person pregnant. Therefore, you should invest or you, you know, this person is attached to you, even if they're not. And at some point, it'd be nice to do a follow up and, and apply the stuff that she was saying about laughter to, to orgasm sounds. The other thing, of course, is you're not just signaling to the guy. You could also be signaling to people around, you know, this guy is now attached to me. We could listen to.

• 45:12Chris Williamson?

  In the same way, this is a really cool Intrasexual competition insight around women who get their husbands to buy them expensive handbags. So the, the, the unique thing about handbags is that it is a kind of signal, like plastic surgery. A lot of the money that gets spent by women is beautification. But beautification is something that's picked up by men. But there are certain types of, I guess, enhancement in some ways, or certain types of expenditure that are only picked up by women. And these are the ones that are really interesting. And, you know, a, a niche collector's edition handbag.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, like that, that eight million pound one that was sold the other day.

• 45:56Chris Williamson?

  I didn't see that, but I, I imagine probably something like that. And you go, okay, well, what is that saying? It's, it's saying only to other women. Beware, my husband is so invested in me that he's got this fucking niche mulberry bag that's got the the orange liner and the the longer strap, whatever, whatever. So it's a special type of signal like that. And I suppose it's it's not too dissimilar in this way. So I guess what's interesting here is sex, we think of as being cooperative, unless it's unless it's coercive and that, you know, that's a a world that we don't want to talk about. Sex is cooperative. But you've you've just made the case there that sex can absolutely be competitive and deceptive as well.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, no, it has all of those things associated with it. And the thing is, one of the things I find fascinating is we kind of know this, and yet we keep on pretending that we don't. I mean, let me give an example of exactly what I mean by sort of pretending we don't know it. So roughly every every generation, the same book basically gets published, and it's always written anonymously by a woman, and it has the same plot, which is you have a sexually dominant male who is brought to realize that he wants to commit. Yeah, he wants to commit to this particular female. There are always very strong BDSM elements to it. There is a nonaccidental spread of male names. They're quite often

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Mr. Gray. Quite often, they just have a title like a captain. They don't have full names at all. There are often very strong BDSM themes. There is there is Anais Ninns, Delta of Venus. There was Emmanuel, by Emmanuel. There was Nine and a Half Weeks. There was Secretary, which was, I missed out, Story of O. And of course, Fifty Shades of Grey. And each time one of these books comes out, people go, oh, my God, you know, this is a woman being subjected to the evils of the patriarchy. What terrible man has written this? And and and but we just keep doing this to ourselves as a species. And a woman comes out and she goes, no, I wrote this. And then and then the reason you've heard all of those is because a movie has been made out of each one of those, very successfully,

• 48:07Speaker 01

  to which women dragged their menfolk in droves going, be a bit more like that. And then we and then and then we just pretend it doesn't happen again. And I tried to write a bit about this in the book, because I'm not saying it's the only female fantasies, it's far from it. But it's it's a not uncommon one. It's a not uncommon pattern.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  So fascinating insight on that. Fuck, who is?

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  Who is the, I'm gonna have to be really crude here.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 48:33Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna have to be really crude, because I can't, I can't remember a fucking name. Who is the blond haired, big boobed sex researcher who did the come on face research?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Oh, not, not, um, not, not, um, well, I mean, the, the, the, I've got, no, see, the thing is, I know these people. So whatever I say, I could, I could get myself in trouble here.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  You're gonna mislabel.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Either Catherine Salmon.

• 48:56Chris Williamson?

  Catherine Salmon, thank you. Don't say the second one. No need to say the second one. Catherine, Catherine Salmon told me, and this is one of my, this is one of my favorite insights. When you had the ascendancy of the dark romance genre, um, there was, as you've kind of alluded to there, a little bit of a pushback. Well, this is a, a very sort of barbaric base, um, uh, perspective. The female sexuality, it seems to pedestalize the man in a way. It has a lot of elements of dominance that we don't like. And in a time where Time's Up and Me Too and all that stuff was coming about, there was a sense that this needed to be sanitized a little bit.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  So they came out with, have you heard of golden retriever husbands or cinnamon roll husbands?

• 49:45Speaker 01

  No, I haven't.

• 49:46Chris Williamson?

  The reason that I know this.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  But I should write this down because I don't want to forget it.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, thankfully, we're recording it. So, um, cinnamon roll husbands, uh, golden retriever husbands. I spent, I spent every summer from the age of twenty six to about thirty two, travelling to America because I was a cover model for Dark Romance.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Right. Oh, right. Oh, you were the guy who was on those. Okay, that makes sense.

• 50:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm on, I'm on quite a few. And what was fascinating, what, what they would do is they would fly out the male models. And imagine a freshers fair, any kind of, any kind of, um, convention. What you want, what you want is people to come to your stall. What a great way, if you're an author of dark romance, to get people to come to the stall. Put the model that's on the cover and you can get a photo and he'll sign your book and the author will sign your book and you sell more books, right? And the bigger authors realised that if they flew the models out, that they would sell so many more books that it compensated for my flight plus, you know, to pay me to eat. Very nice, yeah. Yeah, it was very fun. But what I noticed was some of the books, some of the stands had these guys that were

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  very non-dominant, not heavy brow, not built, not high, you know, not V-shaped, all of the cues typically, not brooding. And Catherine brought this up on the episode and she said, this was an attempt. Don't tell me to be gay. This was an attempt, you can see where I'm gonna go here. This was an attempt to try and sanitise the overly patriarchal, worryingly dominant world that we had. And unfortunately. Didn't sell, yeah. The books didn't sell. Of course they didn't. That being said, that being said, I mean, balance it out. The man that you fantasise about is not the man that you want to get into a relationship with. Sure. And in the same way as guys might watch, and this is for men, when we're talking

• 51:41Chris Williamson?

  about visual stuff with men, like this is a really big effect, right? If it, if it's, if men want to say no to a woman who's attractive in a kind of a way, men will happily watch porn of a woman that they would probably not marry. Oh, sure, yes. Right? So you go, oh my God, like there's a hot woman that you want to have sex with that you wouldn't marry, that's a, you know, what an insane, so you go, okay, well, even in men, we can see this effect, but in women, absolutely. Because what is it that you're looking for? Like, are you wanting this guy who's got all of this attention? And I think that this, you know, going back to the male groupies for women as opposed to the female groupies for men, the main concern that you have as a guy is cookholdry. And if you've got this orbiting pool of a bunch of other men, that makes that partner

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  less desirable. Because you think, well, fuck, how much additional energy am I gonna have to expend with my mate guarding and my jealousy and my Intrasexual and Intrasexual competition, all this bullshit? Okay.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Sure, and there's a big sort of short term, long term mating split as well. I mean, the people that we might consider, in general, I think men would lower their standards for one night stands, women tend to raise their standards for one night stands, that kind of stuff.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  And Oh, that's a perfect, that's a way quicker way of saying what I just said. That's perfect.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  But, but, but, and there's very good reasons why that would be the case, you know, and I think we, if we're actually going to be a bit, you know, if we're going to learn, I mean, as a species, as a culture, if we're going to learn from this and sort of move forward and, you know, we, one of the things I talk about in the book is aloof and intimate societies. And aloof societies are the ones where the sexes just don't get on. They don't talk to each other. They live in separate villages. They can live in separate parts of the same villages, separate parts of the same village. Sometimes they have different languages. And there are quite a lot of cultures that are like this. And they still have to come together and have sex. And the women, they're quite often the anthropologists call these female gardening ecologies, which is sort of code for the women do all the real work and the men preen and make magnificent spears and fly into magnificent

• 53:41Speaker 01

  rages and have duels with each other all the time. And there are cultures that are like that. And to some extent, the English public school system modeled itself to a bit, you know, on things like Rome and Sparta and places like that. The trouble with places like that is, you know, the men in it are very exciting, but they're, they're just, they're not, they're not doing the housework. And they're, you know, you probably wouldn't want them around the house. They're not, they're not properly domesticated. But that doesn't mean we can't pretend, you know, if, if, if women find those kinds of guys sexy, well, you know, we are, we are, we are very much a species that can pretend to do things. And this is one of the things that those, those movies I was describing, or the books I was describing, get into, you know, they get into role play, they get into pretending. And if you, you know, you read women's fantasies, they have

• 54:26Speaker 01

  a lot of that stuff going on. It doesn't need, it doesn't need to be that, what's it, Dan Savage, the sex advice columnist, he calls a lot of BDSM, he says it's kind of like cops and robbers, but with your pants off. I think it's great. Which is sort of

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late. And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design and Organisation and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap. It actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomadic's done with their new Method Check-In luggage. It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger and hold more. It's got best-in-class materials, 360-degree silent glide wheels, patent-pending micro-welding technology and integrated TSA locks. Basically, you can pack for between one and two weeks of clothes. It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space and it's lighter. So no more panic attacks every time that you weigh your bag.

• 55:21Chris Williamson?

  And their new carry-on can hold up to 20% more than other carry-ons, which means you can fit nearly a week's worth of clothing without checking a bag. And they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee. Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. So you can buy your new luggage, try it out for a month. If you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a 20% discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com/modernwisdom. That's nomatic.com/modernwisdom. So I've been fascinated by this narrative, this sort of meta. For the last few weeks, I've only recently seen it being commented on. So it's a commentary on, outside of sex, just for a second here.

• 56:04Chris Williamson?

  The Notebook, The Notebook's a really great example of this. It's a commentary on the romanticization of the kind of hopeless thug. In a way, the kind of noble thug you might be able to say. So The Notebook's a fucking great example of this. Because you have a guy who is kind of good as a handyman, but can't really hold down a job and is passionate but kind of loose. And he is victorious up against a decorated war hero, who is a successful businessperson and really slick and equally attractive or whatever. And the same

• 56:42Chris Williamson?

  Meta, I wonder what this is feeding into because as we've said before, if female desire can be mediated by other females desire, you have to assume that female desire can be mediated by culture as well. What are the archetypes that we think are part of our, did you, was your sexual awakening a bad boy? Or was your sexual awakening a pops, a clean pop star or whatever? That has to colour the way that you look.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  I just, just being famous. Yeah. I mean, Colin Firth came to the school where I taught and not far long before I left. And one of my students showed him around the school, uh, because he was thinking of sending his kid there. Um, and she was one of the sixth formers, so she'd be about 17 or 18. Uh, and she came back to the class and she was appalled of the behaviour. And then this is the, this is the funny bit. She was pulled at the behaviour of the female staff who were following him around the school spying on him and just behaving like just, I mean, it was, now, I mean, he's a good looking fella. Um, but you know, mainly because he's famous, you know, he's, he's been presented to them as, uh, who, who was Mr Darcy, wasn't it? I think it was at the time, you know, I know he's, he's a good looking chap, but he's not, he's not the best looking chap. He's not the only good looking chap. But the fact that he was, uh, sort of the object of desire

• 57:48Speaker 01

  in certain films just meant that, and I think he was just, he was just bored, bored with it by that stage.

• 57:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. So getting back to sex. Um, just do a recap for me of what the predictors are. It was good smell, so immunocompatibility.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  Uh, it was dominance.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  Dominance, uh, penetrative vigour.

• 58:06Chris Williamson?

  And, and also. Vigour.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, yeah, we, we, we went there. Yeah. Um, and, uh, um, and also considerate. So.

• 58:15Chris Williamson?

  Give me, give me, we're not, we're not moving on beyond penetrative vigour, I'm afraid.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:20Chris Williamson?

  What's, what's that?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Well, um, okay. So, um, uh, hu- humans got the largest penises of any primates and, um, they also.

• 58:29Chris Williamson?

  Let's go.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  It sounded like I'm boasting. I, um, but yeah, we're, we're, we're bigger than gorillas. Well, gorillas compete with them. Yeah. This one, to your, to your, to your listeners. I'm sure gorillas can compete with their big 400 pound bodies, but they've got tiny testicles and tiny penises. Um, chimps are somewhat stronger and they're less sexually dimorphic, but their, their penises aren't as large. But oboes are as long as ours, but they're not as thick. Um. But also chimps and bonobos are highly promiscuous and so their testicles are huge because they're producing a lot of sperm genetic spermagenetic material. With humans, one of the things we seem to be competing with is penis size because we are larger than the other primates. And there are some supposed explanations to this based on the head size in the womb. I go into some detail in the book why I think that's unlikely to be the case.

• 59:14Chris Williamson?

  Just to linger there, is there a suggestion or a theory that human penises need to be bigger because babies' heads need to be bigger? Because, which means that women's vaginas need to be sufficiently sized, which means that the penis is playing catch up to the baby head. Because if it didn't, female pleasure wouldn't be able to be reached.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is, that's kind of roughly the idea. I go into some detail in the book.

• 59:41Chris Williamson?

  That our penises were in an arms race against our own babies.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't buy the story. I, as I say, I go into some detail in the book with, with sort of comparative sizes with primate heads and penises. I sort of try and show why I don't think that's true. But one of the big clinches is we don't have a baculum. So other animals, often they have a penile bone which keeps it stiff and we don't. So there's all this talk of sort of female orgasm being sort of inefficient and there's this idea, well, that shows it's a byproduct. But of course, male, yeah, male penises aren't always that efficient. That's, that's why we have a thriving trade in Viagra and Cialis and all the rest of it. Because it takes a certain amount of health and vitality to produce the kind of penis that will please the partner. Yeah.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  In that way, does it mean that male erections are a fitness signal identifier?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  I think, I think so. I, we haven't studied this directly, but yeah, the indirect evidence seems to be, seems to be there. Plus also, you know, if you ask women, they say it is. It's, it's, you know, it's one of those things where we get, get kind of coy about it, like, like we just did with, with breast size. I mean, there are these, these, these big signalers that we carry around on our bodies that if you ask the opposite, if heterosexual, actually, no, homosexual and heterosexual members of the opposite sex. You know, do you, do you care about this thing? Yeah, of course we do. Of course, of course we notice them and of course we care about them.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  What is the, what, is there any data around length versus girth? Is that something that's important?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Girth, we asked, we asked women about girth and girth was, was the thing that they, they prized the most. That seems to be generally true, that it is, seems to be thickness rather than length. Um, yeah. And that, that, that would, that would make sense because, uh, if, if we come back to my clitoris here, um, where, where the penis would be.

• 1:01:32Chris Williamson?

  You keep getting confused, Robert. It's a Pokemon. You keep getting confused by the.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  But it's the, it's the girth that's sort of producing sort of tension here, uh, around the, the glands, uh, the glands of the clitoris. Um, and, uh, this, these, these are regions that themselves become engorged with blood, uh, when the woman was aroused. I think that's, that, that is one of the, one, one things that causes a lot of confusion with this is that, that, you know, women do need to be more aroused than men do often. And that arousal is quite often internal. Um, but you know, um, attention spent there is unlikely to be wasted. Um, you know, and women take, take longer to, to, to get to that point than the men do frequently.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  Why is it very easy for some women to orgasm, even multiple times? It's hard for others and they need a combination of

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Chris Williamson?

  increasingly elaborate stimulation to get there. And it's impossible as well for a final girth.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Right. We, I mean, the, the, the, the, the simple honest answer is, is we don't know. Um, and I wouldn't want to suggest that my book is, is, is a clinical work. So, you know, there could be things that are clinically up with people. There could be drug interactions. It could be hormonal interactions. Um, all of that aside, um, it's, it, it, well, the things that, part of, part of the things that confuse it is that it's a variety of reasons women will have sex when they're not aroused. You know, they could be, uh, and I don't just talk, I'm not just talking about sort of the obvious grisly cases of coercion. I just a sort of, oh, let's just get on with it, you know, and I'm not really into it, um, kind of, kind of situation, which I'm sure happens, uh, all the time. Also, I think a lot of the time people, uh, can only have sex if they're on some kind of drug, including alcohol.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  That, that doesn't help. Uh, and they're coy about, uh, telling their partners what they want. I mean, one of the ways that you run interference on people, you know, if you're, if, if you're, if you're a dominant female baboon, you, you go around sort of whacking the other female baboons on the back of the head and that raises their cortisol levels and that, that makes it less likely.

• 1:03:22Chris Williamson?

  Pushes them out of, yes. Yeah. Well, this is one of the arguments for concealed female ovulation in humans, right? That it doesn't allow other women to fuck with you when you're ovulating.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Well, we're better than baboons because we do it by just going around and telling people how they're allowed to orgasm. I mean, there is genuinely no culture where, which is neutral about female orgasm. Now, and this is where it gets interesting, and I think I've got, I've got some speculative suggestions, but I, and some patents, but there are some cultures that celebrate female orgasm, I mean, to the point, there are those temples of Khan Attaka, I think they are, where they've actually got representations on the walls over a thousand years old of how to generate orgasm in everybody, you know, in every possible permutation, through to cultures where they chop off bits of the clitoris in order to infibulate people in order to try and prevent them having an orgasm at all. And there's everything in

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  between. And some of the things that are in between are things like use of guilt, use of misinformation, and all kinds of other stuff like that, which are basically just running sexual interference on each other. That's, that's what those mechanisms, that's what those, those behaviors are in. I mean, you just described some great examples with venting, but also, you know, telling people that they have to lie back and think of England is actually a sexual interference strategy, for example.

• 1:04:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, that if you don't enjoy sex that much, you're not going to be looking for elsewhere, which means that my partner who's supposed to be loyal to me isn't going to be taken away by you because you don't actually enjoy sex that much. Okay. Yeah, I, look, I, I'm sort of pretty fascinated by the range of physiological blessing and curse that I guess women have got when it comes to their ability to orgasm. Look, I, I have a non-zero sample of partners across my life, and aside from a kind of slow linear increase in experience,

• 1:05:22Chris Williamson?

  I've been the same person. So you say that we can't do random controlled trials, but at least I'm a pretty good control because I've been the same person.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  You are a longitudinal study, yeah.

• 1:05:32Chris Williamson?

  Of myself.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:34Chris Williamson?

  And unless I've had wild variation in how much women are attracted to me, which I'm sure that I have, but unless it's been like really, really high, there are. There is a barbell spectrum from one end, which is very easy over and over to another end, which is we could be here for days and it's not going to happen. And I think, you know, the conversation around female orgasming culture is really interesting because it's almost always laid at the feet of the man's job to understand the woman's body better.

• 1:06:17Chris Williamson?

  And I think that this is a, it's like noble in a way, like women are sensitive about their bodies and don't make them more fucking sensitive.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Chris Williamson?

  I haven't seen the same thing. So if a woman didn't reach orgasm a lot of the time, it would be, well, why don't you ask your partner to do this and the foreplay wasn't there and maybe attraction isn't there and so on and so forth. Very rarely is the finger sort of pointed toward, well, you know, maybe you're physiologically just unfortunate in this sort of a way or whatever. But if the reverse happens, if you have, I think kind of the only real equivalent that we have as men is not being able to get it up. But if that happens, I never see a headline that's like, men not erect, women to blame. It's like men not erect, men to blame, women not orgasming, also men to blame. So I do think, I do think this.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  That's how female sexual selection works. I mean, it is our fault. Yeah, no, we're right to feel judged. I mean, we are being, we're being judged.

• 1:07:20Chris Williamson?

  At all times.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Your performance anxiety is well founded. Not just yours, I mean, all of ours, you know. I mean, I count myself lucky that I was cuter when I was younger and older women sort of explained things to me and I pay attention in class.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  I see, I see.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  But I like the man giants. I suppose one of the things, I mean, being less facetious. I mean, we certainly discovered a pattern that women become more orgasmic as they get older. And I think one of the reasons, there's a bunch of reasons for that. One is that they they know the kind of men they like, also they know the kind of activities they like. And also, I think they they they become aware of of how their potential coyness could be exploited by other people saying, well, you shouldn't do that. You're allowed to do this and, you know, this would be a bit dirty if you did that and all the rest of it. And they just they they reject all of that. They go, no, no, no, screw that stuff, you know, I know what I want and I'm gonna be more demanding. And I also, you know, and I'll also announce to my male partner that perhaps I'm not as fragile as some people might have let him to believe, you know, all these kinds of things.

• 1:08:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, I wonder whether fears of signaling fecundity become less salient as you get older, right? It's like, who we, who we kidding? I'm 47.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:41Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, fucking like menopausal, you know, like we're not, this isn't the first time. So I wonder if that's part of it, certainly confidence in the bedroom, being able to take charge in that sort of a way. Have you seen any data around hormonal birth control impacting orgasm rate, ability, sensation, speeds?

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm I'm I have, and I'm I'm actually just, I'm just reading up about that at the moment. I can't remember the book I'm reading, but there is, it's, it might be your brain on the pill.

• 1:09:16Chris Williamson?

  It's your brain, this is Your Brain on Birth Control by Sarah Hill.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was listening to someone on your show, maybe think I like to go and study this in more detail. We did, we we've, we've certainly, interviewing people, we've certainly found that hormonal birth control affects who they find attractive. We haven't actually studied whether it has an effect on their orgasms. I will have to confess, I'd be very surprised if it doesn't. And I think it's a real gap in the data because I think it it it almost has to change.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  That would be, that would be a. That would be like a headline grabbing study if you did that. I really think it would because if you were to find out that this thing which stops you from getting pregnant also stops you from enjoying sex as much, like how many, how many girls go on birth control in, before they've had sex for the first time, um, you know, 15, 16, whatever, and then go through their entire adult life, their entire sexual career up until the point at which they decide to have kids, if they decide to do that, and they just have this assumption about the way that their sort of sexual mechanics work, and they don't realize that there was this hormonal like

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  This is, this is massive experiment we've, we've done on, on a huge amount of the population without, without a huge, without a, an awful lot of control on it. And it, and it's particularly ironic because frequently when we're doing experiments on, on, on the species, we, we, we leave the women out.

• 1:10:41Chris Williamson?

  Exclusively being done on the women.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Only women, yeah. I mean, I mean, actually it's not even just on our species. The, the number of experiments where people think, oh, you know, we've studied the brains of rats, and it turns out actually we've studied the brains of male rats exclusively.

• 1:10:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Okay. What do you make, or what do you make of the orgasm gap then? Like, well, how does this come to, to, to sort of settle?

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  Um, oh, well, I mean, it, it's, it's, it's definitely there because once, once a man gets erect, he's, he's, he's very likely to orgasm through penetrative sex, although, I mean, it's not, it's not certain by any manner of means, but he's very much more likely to. Whereas, um, if, if a woman gets aroused, then, um, there needs to be, there, there, there needs, there probably needs to be more than just penetration in order to, to create an orgasm in her. So there, there will probably need to be other things, and those things just might be lacking. Um, you know, whether there are a bit of external stimulation, a bit of additional stimulation to other areas, um, or, or, or just highly vigorous penetration, which, you know, a lot of guys aren't providing because it's, it's, it's actually, you know, it's a physical demand.

• 1:11:46Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I, I saw a study recently that said, women typically believe their marriages have about the right frequency of sex.

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  Whereas men wished for more, twice as much as they were having. This suggests that many couples adjust their sexual frequency to the lower rate of desire by the wife.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be surprised if that was true. I mean, with the usual provisos, you know, there are exceptions to this. You would expect there to be a certain amount of it's just fun and it's pair bonding and all the rest of it because that's going on. Have you come across the concept of lesbian bed death?

• 1:12:26Chris Williamson?

  No, but I love the name.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  And I've just forgotten, Pepper Schwartz is a sociologist who coined the term. And what and what and what she said was after a certain amount of time, lesbians just stopped having having sex. And I, and I think you could, it's more likely to be the case with heterosexual couples that it's the man who's being the instigator, just because of things like testosterone levels. You know, he's just, when you've got a lesbian couple, then the chances are that you don't have somebody with the kind of levels of testosterone. Either one person, you know, there won't even be one person in the relationship who is always doing the pushing. There could be, but it's possible that you wouldn't, but it wouldn't be.

• 1:13:07Chris Williamson?

  I have to assume that if we go to the other end of the barbell and we have gay relationships, man to man, that it's surprising they get anything done.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  I think that's often the case. Yeah. And you don't, you know, if you get a new, sort of new gay couple that you know, you quite often you don't see him for weeks or possibly months. Mind you, I mean, one of the other differences, of course, is that men have a different refraction period. So they will just kind of, you know, they will just kind of wear out after a while.

• 1:13:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What's the, have you looked, why is it that women can orgasm multiple times within a single session of sex?

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  We don't know. But it's, but it would be great. It would be great to know. I suspect it's because they, in the early stages, they're getting very demanding because what's happening is they're getting hold of a guy, they're signaling to him, I'm going to have your baby. Basically, that's like, he's getting massive signals of invest heavily in this person. They're orgasming a lot. As long as, as long as he's up, he's up to the mark, you have as much sex with her as possible and just make sure that she's pregnant. And once, once that's, once that's over with, then you, you need some kind of adjustments to happen, don't you? You don't want him to be continually pestering you for sex. You don't want him to be running off. So women have got a tough job to do. They've got to get this guy. They've got to make him very excited, make him have lots of sex. And then sort of, right, we'll slow him down at that point and go, well, you know, now do some other things.

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay.

• 1:14:30Chris Williamson?

  What can we learn then about female orgasm from casual sex compared with coupled sex compared with long-term coupled sex? Because it seems, yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Well, the most of the data are that the casual sex is less likely to produce orgasm in females.

• 1:14:50Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's simply because one of the things you're doing is you're learning what that partner wants and you're learning what pleases them. However, if it does produce an orgasm, I've got a feeling, and this is speculative on my part, but I've got a feeling it's the kind of thing that underwrites. You had Dave Bus on the show, haven't you, talking about the monkey branching? I, because initially, a lot of his research was on the idea of sperm harvesting behind the scenes. And I know he's moved away from that. I think that still happens. I think even if it only happens 1% of the time, that's plenty to drive adaptations.

• 1:15:27Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean when you talk about sperm harvesting?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  Oh, that you have a primary partner who is the investor and you're sort of the lady chatley strategy. So you've got the investing partner and you've got the sperm supplying partner behind the scenes who's clandestine.

• 1:15:43Chris Williamson?

  Does that suggest then, have you seen any data that women who are having extramarital affairs are more likely to orgasm with their extramarital partner than the marital partner?

• 1:15:54Speaker 01

  I think the chances are that they're less likely to orgasm, but if they are, if they're more likely to orgasm, then they're more likely to mate switch, I think is.

• 1:16:03Chris Williamson?

  That's a lead indicator that the lagging indicator of the relationship being over is going to happen soon.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  I mean, I've got someone who now understands me, you know, I can move on. So I think that can happen. But I also, I mean, I think, I don't want to speak for Dave Bus here. I think he's, but I'm going to, but I mean, subject to his approval, quite a lot of the women will fall in love with the person that they're seeing behind the scenes, which would be a bad strategy if you're just trying to get genes from him and you're trying to keep your primary investment. So although the sperm harvesting thing does seem to be a strategy, it's probably not the primary one. The primary one is probably just to go from one partner to the next and use sex as a testbed of who is the one that you're, who's the one who's actually going to, you know, have your babies with you and invest in you.

• 1:16:53Chris Williamson?

  Because you want. I mean, it really just is female selection all the way down, eh?

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, have you, um, do you know, there's a evolutionary biologist called Olivia Judson? And she was kind of mentor of mine in the early days. She, she taught me a lot of evolutionary biology and she's, she's written a book which I recommend to everyone, it was called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to the Whole of Creation. And in it, she adopts this persona of a, um, she's like an agony aunt. And, um, the, the, the letters will be sort of, you know, Dear Dr. Tatiana, um, I can't have sex unless my husband's head has been ripped off and I've eaten it. Is this normal, Mrs. Praying Mantis? And then there's sort of the responses all sort of, you know, why, why you've evolved like this and why, you know, why it's good evolutionary biology. And it's witty and it's, and it's well informed.

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  Um, but one of the things that she says, um, well, it's a couple of things that she says, uh, one is that the battle of the sexes is eternal, insoluble and inevitable. So, you know, we need to sort of accept it and, and sort of try and live with it and, and also move on. Um, and the crucial point, well, the crucial point she, she, she, um, instilled from a, from an early age, uh, was that female choice is the, is the key driver in all primates. Uh, and that, and that we are no exception to that. I mean, it was, it was that, it was really that, that, you know, um, that made, made me look at female orgasm in that way. Um, because it's, it's, it's supposed uh, inefficiencies, um, the orgasm gap, uh, and all the rest of it are really just, they're, they're signifiers that, that women are being picky. Uh, they're not being coy, they're just, uh, they're extremely picky.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  And that's reflected in all of their behaviours. I think one of the problems we've got with social media is because, because female sexual selection is, is inherently quite a comparative one. We've just widened the, the potential comparative base to a point where I think you might be receiving a signal that the number of potential partners is in the thousands or the tens of thousands. And so actually making a choice between them becomes computationally just intractable at this point.

• 1:18:47Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if, I wonder if female orgasm rates have gone down.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. I don't know.

• 1:18:54Chris Williamson?

  Because there's more, you have this perspective that there are more available mates out there. That means that any individual mate is less likely to meet your bar, which means that this, you know, fitness test, this Navy SEAL hell week that you're putting, that you're putting.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  I mean, so sex can be fun as well. I, I, I, I'm sure.

• 1:19:16Chris Williamson?

  Exclusively competitive and, and, and conflict and deceptive, according to you.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  It's, it's the bit where you go into the chamber, they throw the gas in, that's, that's perhaps too much.

• 1:19:26Chris Williamson?

  Too much happening. Um, okay. How would you characterize modern sexual culture then? We've, we've got, well, we've just got, we've got shows like Love Island happening at the moment, which has kind of taken America by storm, despite me trying to flee away from it.

• 1:19:43Chris Williamson?

  We have, you know, like even in a, an interesting conversation around, are men kind of allowed to say what they want in the bedroom without it seeming, patriarchal or demanding or like it's subjugating their partner in some sort of a way. Women have got this, you know, they've got their vestiges of the past, which I think Cosmopolitan and those sort of magazines have done a pretty good job at dispensing, you know, five new positions to try with him this Easter and shit like that. Like we've normalized the conversation around female sex in a way. Actually, this is another, another point. I think that women believe that guys sit around

• 1:20:25Chris Williamson?

  and talk about sex, like, like it's sex.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  I mean, apart from just the two of us, you mean?

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, which we've done for an hour and a half.

• 1:20:34Chris Williamson?

  But I think that they believe that guys sit around and talk about their sex lives.

• 1:20:41Chris Williamson?

  I have an update. Guys don't sit around and talk about their sex lives in that sort of way. If, if I was to say, all right, mate, what's a sex like between you and the messes? You go. What do you fucking fancy her or something? Why do you want to know about the sex between me and my misses? Whereas I don't know how frequent it is, but I would bet a big fucking chunk of change that it is way more.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that definitely is. Yeah. And, um, yes, I mean, I remember when that, when that, the Trump grabbing women by the pussy thing came out and there was this sort of, oh, it's locker room talks, locker room talk. I remember thinking, I've been in quite a lot of locker rooms over the years. I have never heard that kind of talk. Maybe I'm going into the wrong locker rooms, or maybe I'm just not the kind of guy people say those things to. But no, I'd agree with you. I mean, there are guys who boast like that, but they, they just tend to be seen as being boastful and.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  It's only ever around short term mating. It's never around long term mating as well.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Right. Now, I think that's that. And I don't, I don't think that's changed. I think, I think it's because, it's partly because women have this incredibly difficult job to do. I was just talking about this, sort of one of the patterns is that they find sexual dominance in the bedroom very erotic. Not all women, but many women do. I mean, not enough, enough to fuel, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey, multi billion pound industry. Yet the trouble is if you, if you say that, if you say that openly, then you, you remove one of your primary mechanisms for being able to distinguish between the kind of person who you want to be dominant in the bedroom and the kind of person you wouldn't want within a million miles of you, who might then sort of go, well, she, she gave me the green light to behave like this. And so that's a, that's a very difficult, it's like the kind of signaling

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  problem that gay men used to have before homosexuality was legal. That you, you want, you wanted, you wanted, you wanted people to know you were gay. However, the wrong people might suddenly know that you were gay and you could find yourself in a lot of trouble, you know, either legal or, or, you know, or violent. But I, I don't think that problem ever goes completely away for women because there are always men out there who are potentially willing to exploit that. So you have to be on guard for that kind of thing.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  I mean, as for, as for the sort of the sexual culture, I've heard some people in my age say, you know, it feels like I've got the last helicopter out of Saigon, which may be a bit, bit much, but I, I'm glad I'm not a young person dating because it, I mean, I, I'm around a lot of young people because I was a school teacher and now I'm a university teacher and I see young people dating and they don't seem happy. They don't seem as happy as I was when I was their age. They, they, it seems to be really fraught. It seems to be really tense. And that isn't just sort of me being an old guy, sort of, you know, waving his fist at the clouds because, you know, they're not getting married. They're not having kids. There is a demographic collapse.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  Unfortunately, discussion of that has now become left, right, coded, God help us, which means that sensible discussion of it is going to be increasingly hard.

• 1:23:33Chris Williamson?

  I have eaten a metric ton of shit because I can't talk about birth rate decline without being accused of shilling for Ben Shapiro or something like that.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. Yeah. I mean, but well, every time Ben, Ben opens his mouth about female orgasm, he, he puts something in.

• 1:23:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's not, he's, he wasn't exactly fantastic on that, on that subject. But I, look, I, I was thinking about this earlier on today. One of the most painful situations that you can be in as somebody that sort of thinks about the world is to be right, but early. You want right, but early? Oh my God, the unrequited, the bitterness, the resentment, the sense of, do you not remember when I said that you just needed to listen to me? And I, I'm, I'm fucking adamant that birth rate decline is going to be one of those right, but early things. Everybody that's talking about it is right. And everybody that's pushing back against them is just disincentivizing a really important conversation to be had.

• 1:24:38Chris Williamson?

  Can this be weaponized and pointed in a direction that's real nefarious? Yes.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  I think we proved to ourselves there is nothing that can't be weaponized politically. I genuinely think there is nothing and we just have to set that aside. I'm afraid.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  This is a, this is an interesting stat that I've got for you here. Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women. It is far more popular among women than men. I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact. Fantasy life isn't always politically correct. The rate at which women watch violent porn is roughly the same in every part of the world. It isn't even correlated with how women are treated.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  That sounds like something Jermaine Greer said, and it got her into a lot of trouble. But I can top that. I can get people to hate me even more than they hate you.

• 1:25:26Speaker 01

  So we haven't even talked about another big strand of our research here, which is into spree killers. So I started studying spree killers a few years back and I got really interested in the different types of spree killer. And now I've got a PhD student, we've become interested in whether, because these are almost always men. Go out and they kill strangers publicly and they seem to fall into two types. And it wasn't really known when we first started this. There's an older type who tends to be a family controller and he tends to kill family members. And he has very little in common with the younger type, who tends to be the school shooter. And tends to have a history of mental illness, school refusal. The one is not an older version of the other.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Here's the bit that was really disturbing when a student of mine came along and said, have we tried studying the people who fetishize them? And so we did a study on hybristophiles. And these are exclusively women who fetishize killers. And we found, once again, we found two types there. We found the ones who didn't really distinguish between just the good-looking bad boys. And there wasn't really much difference in the fan material they produced, whether it was, say, One Direction or whether it was a spree killer. But there was a small number, a persistent number. And I'm not a forensic psychologist, but I used to be a forensic psychologist living next door to me in the department. I knocked on his door and said, is this interesting? You know, is this known? He went, no, you should publish this.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  This is really interesting because the subtype fetishize the killing and they're very open about it. And they go along to the courts and they produce erotic material that is extremely violent. Focuses on the pain and misery of the victims. And openly says they desire the people that do it and to join in.

• 1:27:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, look at fucking Luigi Mangione.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I know.

• 1:27:15Chris Williamson?

  Sex symbol overnight. People are like, the shoes he had on was sold out.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:20Chris Williamson?

  You guys are a style icon.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  We're we're we're we have a dark, we have a dark element to our our character as a species. And I, and I think um a lot of years of um looking at, for example, the, you know, the way that that women have been victimized in society and the, and no point am I suggesting that any of that is remotely false, uh, has sort of blinded people to the fact that, you know, women are, women hold up half the sky, yeah, but they also produce half the shit. And we're, we are, we are a sexually reproducing species, we're a mutually sexually reproducing species, and, you know, we need to stop having sex with the psychopaths, all of us.

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay, right, well, good luck, good luck interjecting that. I mean, this is, again, such an interesting area to think about when it comes to the relational, like, where, where, where culture meets desire and the story that we tell ourselves. Because as soon as you say, women can't be deceptive during sex, women can't, women can't be coercive during sex, they can't be manipulative, they can't steal partners from others, they can't monkey branch, they can't use, they can't keep their male friends, all the male friends they've got, the orbiters. Interestingly, they all seem to be around about the same, similar level of attractiveness to the man that they're with.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Chris Williamson?

  They, all of this stuff, and it's like, no, no, no, no, women don't do any of that stuff, or they do do it, but they don't do it at that much of a level. So, right, okay, so you're telling me that women are completely passive sexual objects who have no agency over their future, and all that they do is blow with the wind with whatever man comes in front of them first?

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:52Chris Williamson?

  Evidently not, evidently not. So square this, square this circle for me, dude, like, square the circle.

• 1:28:57Speaker 01

  So, are you, are you asking me to defend that position?

• 1:29:00Chris Williamson?

  No, not at all, like, the, the imaginary, my imaginary sort of blank slate, female agent, sexual agency denying.

• 1:29:08Speaker 01

  But what you're, what you're saying is itself a strategy. I mean, one of, one of the best ways of manipulating men is to, it's, and, and other, and other, other women in the environment is, is to pretend that you are a coy passive recipient of male ardor. I mean, that, that's one of the things that fooled the Victorian biol, male biologists, is that they, and it, it, it, it fooled Darwin up to a point, I mean, he, he could see the sexual selection was happening, but it can't be happening to me, surely, you know, and it bugged him, because...

• 1:29:34Chris Williamson?

  Charles, I would never, I could never do that to you.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, absolutely, I, I could never be on the receiving end of it. Now, of course, I mean, the, um, you know, heterosexual men, we are fooled a lot of the time, and facing up to that is tough for us, and... Also, it makes you sound like women are sort of, you know, conspiring behind the scenes. And some of them are, of course, but quite a lot of them aren't even aware that they're doing those things. Which is, you know, which is why, it's why it's good that, I mean, all of that is changing. People like Catherine, for example, you know, we just talked about her. You know, she's, she's, she comes on, she's unequivocal, she's, she's, she's smart, she, she's uncompromising.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  She's, she's not, not, not ashamed of the way she looks and, um, and she's willing to do the science. And, you know, it's, but 40 years ago, there weren't, there wasn't a body of people like that doing behavioural science. And now, now there is, and, you know, I think, I think that's almost certainly, you know, um, the hope for improvement, isn't it?

• 1:30:31Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. Dr. Robert King, ladies and gentlemen. Robert, you're great. Where should people go? They're going to want to check out the book and everything else that you do.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  Oh, that's very kind. I, I don't have a social media presence. I, I, I kind of got rid of my social media presence because it just felt, I wasn't, the, the, the, the net, the net worth wasn't there. I should probably set myself up a YouTube channel for things like this to be on. I've got the book, um, it's called Naturally Selective, um, and, um, I've got my academia.edu and all those kinds of sites where I put my, um, you know, papers and all the rest of it. That's it really. I, I, I should perhaps be more media savvy about these kinds of things, but.

• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  The book is a, a really great, deep work. So if what we get from you is books and what we lose from you is Instagram posts, I think that that's a good trade.

• 1:31:19Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I've seen, I've seen colleagues and friends, not, not necessarily ones here at UCC, but I have seen people who were more eminent than me suddenly go down the Twitter route and suddenly opining about things. And I'm sort of going, I know you, why are you talking about this?

• 1:31:32Chris Williamson?

  The work also takes a nosedive, a concurrent nosedive with that a lot.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  I said, well, why are you talking about this? And I say, well, you're getting all these Twitter likes for it. And it's highly, it's, it's clearly highly addictive. And, you know, we, we were the kind of nerdy types at school who weren't particularly the pretty ones or the popular ones. And I think getting a bit of that popularity, I'm just, I'm talking about scientists, not you. Um, I, because you're clearly both, but, um, but we were the, you know, the, the, the colleagues I'm thinking about, the kind of people who needed a bit of popularity and now, once they get it, it's, it's, um, they can't, they can't stop themselves. It's like a drug to them and I don't think it's good for them.

• 1:32:07Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay, dude, you're great. Thank you so much.

• 1:32:12Chris Williamson?

  I've really, really enjoyed this one. Until next time.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Actual interesting questions.

• 1:32:15Chris Williamson?

  I got you. Thank you, man.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

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