The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable

In this evolutionary psychology roundtable, we explore: - If 20% of the men actually get 80% of the attention. - The biggest red and green flags to look out for in the dating pool. - Why women's sexual desire fades faster than men's. - and much more… Guests: - Macken Murphy is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne, a writer and a podcaster. - Steve Stewart-Williams is an evolutionary psychologist, a professor, and an author. - Rob Henderson holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. - Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:00 Is This the Most Attractive Dance Move? 3:14 Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick? 13:07 Why Do We Get the Ick? 16:52 Are Chads Stealing All the Women? 25:23 Is Marriage Affirmative Action for Men? 31:00 Are Humans Meant to Be Serial Monogamists? 34:52 How Rich Women Change Men’s Resourcefulness 44:18 Abundance vs Scarcity: What’s More Attractive? 55:34 Do High-Earning Women Have Higher Standards? 01:05:03 Can Surveys Accurately Measure Sex Differences? 01:10:36 Are Dating App Users Worse Partners? 01:16:53 What Matters More: Height or Looks? 01:20:46 Why Male Beautification is Exploding 01:31:27 Do Women Prefer Formidable Men? 01:35:22 The Rise of Female Teacher Sex Scandals 01:42:56 Is Being Desired What Women Want Most? 01:47:32 The Dangers of Minimising Sex Differences 01:50:46 The Latest Evidence on Mate Switching 01:52:20 Why Marriage Kills Women’s Sex Drive 01:56:40 How Do We Determine Human Nature? 02:03:34 What Do Lesbians Find Attractive? 02:05:57 Where to Find the Guys - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spotify.modernwisdom.com or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.modernwisdom.com 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?

  I'm starting an OnlyFans and I'm selling merch. This has taken way too long and I'm very sorry, but it is so worth it. The designs are unreal. We've upgraded the blanks so they're even better quality than last time. And this bursting heart design with Japanese text in the middle is just so beautiful. Also, your girlfriend's new favorite hoodie. I apologize to anybody who buys this because I get the sense that your girlfriend's just gonna steal it. All of it is available right now at MWMerch.com and it's only available for six days. So get it. Once it's gone, you won't be able to buy it again. That's it. Completely sold out, never to be printed in the future. MWMerch.com. Have you seen the type of dancing which is scientifically most attractive to women?

• 0:39Rob Henderson

  I've not seen this.

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  According to a study at Northumbria University, the dancers found this one. This is the dance that women found most attractive.

• 0:47Rob Henderson

  This is a man dance.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  According to a study by Northumbria University, the dancers women found most attractive were ones who moved their head, neck and torso the most, while also mixing up their moves creatively and showing more variation in rhythm. To test this, researchers used motion capture technology on 30 male dancers, turned their movements into computer avatars. The best dancers were the ones who used their whole body naturally instead of awkwardly repeating the same arm and leg movements.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Look like they're dancing to me.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  Well, Asian people have got natural rhythm, Rob, so I imagine that's how you dance.

• 1:28Rob Henderson

  What I was noticing is he's keeping his elbows close to the body, so it looks like-

• 1:32Chris Williamson?

  Protecting the femoral artery.

• 1:34Rob Henderson

  He's a, he might be a trained boxer.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  Which could be you as well.

• 1:38Macken Murphy?

  Actually, I know the guy who, I know the guy who did this study. Funnily enough, I was just at HBES with him. He's my friend Ismail. And one thing that he was actually talking about was that the dance is quite feminine. And this mirrors something that you sometimes see in facial attractiveness research, where the initial assumption is like, oh, masculinity is just gonna be amazing, as much masculinity as possible. But then in some areas with some traits, femininity is favored. And I think it's, seems like dancing-

• 2:08Chris Williamson?

  Dancing femininity would be favored.

• 2:10Macken Murphy?

  Well, what would a masculine dance look like?

• 2:11Chris Williamson?

  That's the question.

• 2:12Macken Murphy?

  Kind of like throwing yourself around at a, in a mosh pit? Is that particularly sexy?

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  Shadow boxing.

• 2:17Macken Murphy?

  Shadow boxing.

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  Shadow boxing. Shadow boxing. There's two things that British guys do that I think must give women the ick more than anything else. One is shadow boxing on the way to a night out. And the other one is football chants in the queue of a nightclub. Like doing football chants as you walk down the street, I think is just the most like vaginally repulsive thing that you can do. But second only to shadow boxing.

• 2:43Rob Henderson

  Why shadow boxing? What is it about shadow boxing that would give them the-

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's this-

• 2:47Rob Henderson

  I share that intuition, but what is it about?

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  I, what I think is it's guys posturing how hard they are. Like, look at how formidable and aggressive I would be if only it wasn't air that I was fighting.

• 3:00Rob Henderson

  There's no opponents.

• 3:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Macken Murphy?

  I think that it ruins the positive illusion that they actually could win a fight. It's like, oh-

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  It's their shadow boxing, they're even losing their shadow boxing class.

• 3:07Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 3:08Chris Williamson?

  They're like this.

• 3:09Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:09Rob Henderson

  How many punches do you have to throw at this invisible person?

• 3:14Chris Williamson?

  Does looks maxing give women the ick, Rob?

• 3:17Rob Henderson

  I, I think it does. I'd be curious to hear Macken's thoughts, Steve as well, on this, which is, um, the clavicular, the looks maxing influencer. He became very popular, uh, you know, uh, through propagating this idea of looks maxing, bone smashing, optimizing. And, you know, he told the New York Times that he is now sterile because he's injected himself with so many chemicals. Presumably he thinks it's worth it, though. I recently wrote a piece suggesting that this gives women the ick and that people mistakenly think that clavicular is attracting women because he revamped his physical appearance. I actually think that he, that most of that attention he's receiving from women is due to the fame. He got famous through promoting looks maxing.

• 4:00Rob Henderson

  And people mistakenly think it's the looks and not the fame that draw the women to him. For an ordinary man, like a clavicular fan who's doing all of the same looks maxing protocol, the bone smashing, the injections-

• 4:11Chris Williamson?

  But without any of the fame.

• 4:12Rob Henderson

  The, the-

• 4:14Macken Murphy?

  Just quietly bone smashing?

• 4:16Rob Henderson

  The, um, he recently, I think, got a nose job. I saw something going around on X. And an ordinary guy doing all of that stuff, optimizing for appearance, I think most women would find that kind of guy very vain, very self-centered. Uh, you know, someone who is maybe uninterested in a relationship and is more just interested in themselves. And so maybe it works for a clavicular because it made him famous. But for the average guy, I think that amount of looks maxing would be counterproductive.

• 4:44Chris Williamson?

  What do you think it signals?

• 4:46Rob Henderson

  I mean, I would say that it signals narcissism, vanity, um, maybe sort of short-term oriented mating orientation, kind of, you know, more interested in being immediately attractive to someone rather than someone who you would be interested in forming a long-term bond with.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and some of it's just a bit weird as well, right? The bone smashing, that kind of thing is just odd.

• 5:06Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I saw this clip recently. He was, clavicular was in this interaction with this girl, uh, at this, this bar in New York. And he was telling her how reading is a total waste of time. And I don't read, that's ridiculous, that's absurd. And I couldn't help but comment at how shocking is it that the guy who hits himself in the head with a hammer isn't fancy?

• 5:26Rob Henderson

  Sometimes people surprise you.

• 5:27Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 5:29Macken Murphy?

  That's funny. And actually, it's funny that you say that because on the main forum, uh, looksmax.org, it actually, if I'm not mistaken, it used to say, first rule of looks maxing, don't talk about looks maxing.

• 5:41Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 5:41Macken Murphy?

  Which reflects a open understanding, like, never say that you're doing any of this stuff. Like, looking good helps, uh, but being transparent about the things that you're doing to look good, uh, probably won't improve your life.

• 5:55Rob Henderson

  So is the reason for that, though, so I'm, you know, I'm looks maxing, but I don't tell you about it? Is that because, what, like, to bypass all of the, um, what the prejudice is involved there? Like, I don't want you to think I'm vain, I just want you to think that I'm naturally good-looking. Is that the, that natural beauty is better than artificial beauty?

• 6:12Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I believe that that was part of it. Uh, then a second facet was actually that they didn't want, I mean, a lot of the methods that they use are, such as bone smashing, already been mentioned, is, are probably very dubious. Um, but I think that part of it is that they wanted to protect it with the, honestly, a view that a lot of us might agree with, which is that the mating market is competitive. And so if everyone gets better looking, uh, it may be the equivalent of everyone's, like, kind of running faster but staying the same.

• 6:40Chris Williamson?

  But they were worried that other guys would learn the exploit.

• 6:42Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, basically, yeah. It's like, if other guys figure out that wearing makeup makes you more attractive, then-

• 6:47Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's gonna be wearing makeup and then the makeup advantage gets negated.

• 6:50Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. And you've seen that, you've seen that already happen to women. I mean, women, this is something that I said on your podcast, uh, three or four years ago, that women have been looks maxing for decades and decades and decades. This is before, uh, it came in as a, as a real trend. And that's kind of what's happened, right? Is that all women are wearing makeup and now, or almost all of them are. And now if you skip that part of your routine, it almost comes across, and it shouldn't, it's unfortunate, but it almost comes across as unprofessional in a workspace. I mean, it's just this extra burden of-

• 7:19Chris Williamson?

  Minimum bar has been raised for what presentable is.

• 7:22Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly. So if all men start, uh, doing the same thing, then yeah, I would say that the minimum bar probably will. I, I think that intuition, even if some of the methods that they're coveting and protecting are ineffective, I think that the, the intuition about competitiveness and how it works is probably correct.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  So we should do it, just shouldn't talk about it.

• 7:38Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly, yeah.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Uh, the thing that I wondered is whether or not it's to protect the costliness or the reliability of the signal. That if you find out that the only reason that this guy is good-looking is not because of what you might intuit is the ultimate reason of got good genes, strong immune system, uh, sort of a natural sense and way of him, but it's too contrived? You actually think, well, what am I dating? I think this is the same thing. There is a kind of ick that women had where if they learned a guy was doing Real Social Dynamics or Reading the Game by Neil Strauss and doing Pick-up Artistry, or even if, if you'd said, I went away to a, uh,

• 8:20Chris Williamson?

  sex train, an intimacy training, sex training course weekend thing that was all professional and not, not creepy, but that means that when you go and do something in bed, it's not because of your sort of natural proclivities, it's because you've crafted and curated it. We're happy for people to learn to become better at playing the piano. We're less happy at people learning to become better at being themselves, in a way. Does that make sense?

• 8:47Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, well, with beauty, no, you're not. And with beauty, there's actually some evidence for this in women already. Uh, I'm not aware of any study that's been done on this in men, uh, but Zia and colleagues in China, they actually tested, um, so it was makeup and plastic surgery that they tested on real women's faces. And they had men assess their attractiveness, their datability, et cetera. And what they found was that these methods worked to make them more attractive. But when men were informed, uh, meaning once men knew, like, oh, this woman looks better, but she's had plastic surgery, uh, they, they had a reduced datability effect. So it was an increase that was attenuated. Um, so the attractiveness boost was still, was still present, like, they were still considered more datable.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 9:25Macken Murphy?

  But that effect was attenuated when you were aware of the effort that had gone in.

• 9:29Chris Williamson?

  What was the net, did you say?

• 9:30Macken Murphy?

  The net was still that there was a benefit. Um, and you could see in these faces that the attractiveness difference, I can send you the study. The attractiveness differences in their example were, were large.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 9:39Macken Murphy?

  Um, but it was an attenuated effect where it's like, oh, if, if they know, if they detect it, then they're less interested. And it may be because of what attractiveness evolved for, where it's like, it's meant to be this health signal, youth signal, et cetera. But if we have this cognitive knowledge of like, oh, this isn't a real youth signal, right? This is a woman with facelift. That may change the valence slightly.

• 10:00Chris Williamson?

  But I'd be interested in Steve's thoughts.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, I completely buy that that effect is real. Um, but I'm not sure if that's an, an evolved tendency to, because the evolved tendency is just a gut level reaction to cues of health and fertility, I would, I would argue, rather than a tendency to think that that person's healthy and has good qualities that I would wanna mix my genes with to create offspring. And so finding out that it is not a real signal, I'm not sure if that would, uh, like I say, I think that would, does have the effect of reducing attractiveness judgments, but I'm not sure if that we've evolved for that to be the case.

• 10:38Macken Murphy?

  Do you think we might have like a general kind of cheater detection thing where it's like, oh, this person is deceiving me in some way? And so it's not like, um, I mean, cheater detection refers to a specific phenomenon that's different, of course, but-

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:49Macken Murphy?

  In terms of-

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Just general-

• 10:51Macken Murphy?

  Just general, like, what do you think, what do you think would drive the effect of, uh, false beauty being, uh, a slightly less preferred compared to natural beauty?

• 11:00Speaker 02

  I think it could be that. I think it probably is something more general like that, just a general tendency to be wary of, of deception. I guess, yeah.

• 11:10Rob Henderson

  I'm intrigued by this finding that it was attenuated, but still overall a net benefit. And I think this suggests, at least to me, and I'm curious what Steve thinks about this, is that we evolved to respond more so to signals than to the underlying property. So I'm imagining a sort of a variation of the study you described where you see someone who's very plain looking, and for whatever reason, you know, it's a contrived scenario, but they used to be very hot and then they got some surgery and now they're unattractive. And you have a choice between sleeping with this artificially unattractive person who's naturally hot, or a person who is artificially hot, but naturally is unattractive. Who do you choose? I think most people, especially most men, I think, would choose the artificially hot one, because we respond more so to the signals than the underlying sort of trait that it's meant to communicate.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  At a gut level, I think so as well, actually. And actually, maybe, I'm thinking maybe it's not deception exactly that reduces the attractiveness, but maybe the inferences that we make about the personality of the person.

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's an insecurity.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:07Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm speaking from memory about the study, but I actually think that's precisely right. I'll check it after and send it to you over WhatsApp. But if I'm not mistaken, it actually was that there was a negative personality inference, and that that was part of the story. So it was like, yeah, they're more attractive, but now I'm not as impressed by their personality under this condition.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  And they might be just as impressed by the looks, but we don't judge people just on looks. And so the looks elevate it, the personality takes it down.

• 12:35Chris Williamson?

  Which is where attractiveness was up, but datability had...

• 12:38Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it was either datability, or it may have been overall personality perception, but it was some variable in that mix, for sure.

• 12:44Chris Williamson?

  It's probably worth saying that a lot of this stuff is going to be either subconscious or sort of like Perry subconscious, this sort of thing that you intuit, you don't really know why, it gave me the ick. Right, what the ick is, is a kind of nebulous, ephemeral, really hard to grasp on to, I'm not so sure about that thing, but that might actually be pretty evil. You know, it would be great, an evolutionary theory of X would be wonderful.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I've got a PhD student who's working on it right now.

• 13:14Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way. Dude, I, don't fuck with me on evolutionary psychology, dude. I'm on the fucking frontier.

• 13:22Macken Murphy?

  There was a guy, I don't know if it was the same one, but he was presenting a poster at HBAS on the evolutionary psychology of the X. So it's something that people are, it's something that people are interested in.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  It's up and coming, yeah.

• 13:31Macken Murphy?

  There's been a couple of publications on it already.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  So it's my student, Louisa Lee, there were no publications when she started, and then one has come out that, you know, she got scooped, we got scooped, basically, but yeah, she's doing some good work.

• 13:42Macken Murphy?

  Well, what's the, what is the evolutionary psychology of the X?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  She's trying to explain it in terms of mate choice, she's predicting that because women on average are choosier, women are more prone to the X, which is, I don't think anyone would disagree with that intuition, and we've now got good evidence that that's the case. Yeah, and she's looking at it in terms of evolved disgust reactions.

• 14:04Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is interesting, and still looking at it in terms of...

• 14:08Rob Henderson

  Behavioral immune system.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, behavioral immune system and evolved disgust reactions and response to sexual stimuli, the sort of stuff that's gross, associated with disease and the like, and moral disgust as well.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  So I was gonna say, is there maybe, maybe something in that women are more adept at reading social cues, which means that if a guy does something which is socially ungainly, he might be able to breeze through it, or his friends might be able to breeze through it, or if a woman was to do it, it's a partner of a guy, he might not notice it, whereas if she's able to pay more attention more closely to how people are responding, understanding that sort of social hierarchy a bit more. So it's fascinating, and yeah, there's lots of things that you could do, being unhygienic, being unhealthy, being rude, but the funny thing is a guy trying to pick up a moving ping pong ball, like, why is that an ick? Or why is a guy who misses a turn, like, in a car, like, doesn't drive dexterously,

• 15:09Chris Williamson?

  why is that a particular, like, stuff that's a bit more lifestyle-y and certainly more, yeah, more modern novel. I mean, Diana Fleischman said this before, she's very, very attuned to her husband Jeffrey's sort of social status and his level of competence, and if he misses a turn when driving, she literally feels her attraction to him go down for a little while, and then it comes back up. If he says, if he says a joke that doesn't land at a dinner table, she's actively unattracted to him for a little while, and then comes, she's like, I have some psychopathic tendencies, I'm aware of that, and then blew through, like, just kept on going.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  I can't see that going the other, in the other direction, as much I can't see.

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my missus missed a turn in the car, I'm sorry darling, I can't have sex with you this evening, I could not, I could never, the way that you would press the indicator, I could never.

• 15:53Rob Henderson

  I mean, we place more value on looks, so would it be something like, you know, seeing, you know, if your spouse, you know, gains some weight, or maybe first thing in the morning looks a little disheveled, or something along those lines that...

• 16:06Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, but then men are just, men are so much less choosier, even in long-term relationships, I think that that gets offset.

• 16:14Macken Murphy?

  I think that's exactly right. Yeah, I think that the, it's a reflection, this sex difference in the X, which Steve says is now, you know, backed by good data, and it's also something that everyone knows anecdotally, I think it reflects different risk levels between men and women, where for men, the biggest risk is, and this is something that a lot of evolutionary psychologists talk about, biggest risk is that you miss a mating opportunity, whereas for women, the biggest risk is that you mate with the wrong person, and so it's more important to have, like, this visceral response, where it's like, oh, you know, that last thing just pushed me over the threshold, and you're now selected out, like, I do not want to...

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  More discerning.

• 16:51Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 16:52Chris Williamson?

  What's the, speaking of the sort of current world of lux maxing, guys trying to rise to the top of the level as much as they can, what's the myth of the Chad?

• 17:02Rob Henderson

  Well, so I wrote this piece, The Myth of the Chad, and I think I dropped it in the group chat, which is, you know, for a long time, we've heard this story, I think you and I talked about this on a previous podcast, Chris, because it made some level of intuitive sense that as the dating marketplace has become more deregulated, people can meet each other...

• 17:22Chris Williamson?

  I love the idea of a deregulated mating marketplace.

• 17:25Rob Henderson

  We live in sexual capital, late sexual capitalism. And so now you have, you know, with dating apps, online dating, people can meet each other more easily, we are supposedly placing more value on looks as a result of social media and dating apps and so on. So the story was, and we saw some statistical trends that supported this notion, at least initially, that a small percentage of men were getting the majority of female attention, and that men are sort of on the lower end of mate value were getting increasingly less female interest. And so the story was, what was it, like, 20% of men are getting 80% of the attention? There's some truth to that, at least with regard to sort of match rates and swipe rates

• 18:08Rob Henderson

  on Tinder and so on, but if you look at the actual data, you dig into it, and more statistics and findings have come out since, you and I've had those discussions a few years ago, suggest that actually that story isn't completely true, that in fact, this, this has been going on for a long time, that very attractive men have always had the opportunity to mate with more women. So when you look at the data, it looks like something like about maybe 18 to 20% of men report having three or more sexual partners within the past year, and that really hasn't changed since about the year 2000, which is as far back as I could find data on this. And so you might think, okay, well, that's, there you go, you got the Chads, the 20%

• 18:51Rob Henderson

  of men are getting three or more partners a year, those are the guys, you know, hogging all the women, but then when you look at the sexual behavior of women, you find essentially the same pattern, which is that something like 12 to 18% of women also report three or more sexual partners a year, and what this means is that the vast majority of men and the vast majority of women have relatively unexciting sexual lives. The most common response to the question of how many partners have you had in the past 12 months is one, followed by zero. So most sex is going on in relationships, followed by people not having sex at all, and then a small fraction of men and a small fraction of women who are high in socio-sexual orientation, very promiscuous and open to short-term mating, they're having a lot of sex with each other.

• 19:35Chris Williamson?

  At least partly attractive as well, presumably.

• 19:36Rob Henderson

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm sure, physically attractive, and what I suggest is that because dating apps have made this, you know, sort of frictionless, and because social media has created this kind of panopticon, where, you know, men in particular, you know, they're, you got sort of the pick-up artist and red pill guys who claim to be very successful with women, bragging about how many women they've hooked up with, and then you have the incels on the other side of this, who are, you know, not bragging, but, you know, I guess whining and complaining about how little sex they're having, this gives the impression that, oh, wow, you've got one segment of guys who are having all of the sex, and then you have this other section of guys who are having none of the sex, and then women are just passive bystanders, who are maybe getting, you know, duped by the pick-up artists or the Chads or something.

• 20:20Rob Henderson

  But what this suggests, actually, is that, you know, there is a kind of a Chad, but the myth of the Chad is that, yeah, that one, a segment of guys are having all of the sex with all of the women, and it's not the case, that there are, you know, there are females, there are women in relationships, there are women who are just uninterested in dating, and any kind of, see the mirror image of this for men as well, that, and weirdly, this suggests that men and women are more alike than many think, which is maybe a point to your book.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  It's one of the key ideas in my book, yeah. And I think that, you know, the average number of sexual partners that men have, if you exclude sex workers and like, is somewhat higher, but I do think it's a very important point, that, yeah, among the guys who are having sex with lots of women, generally having sex with the women who are having sex with lots of guys.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  And that's the socio-sexual few, right? This is Alexander Date Sights.

• 21:10Macken Murphy?

  The promiscuous 10% is the kind of meme version of it. But I actually, so I think that tons of people at home and in the YouTube comment section, all right, like, I 100% think it's interesting and take it for granted that what you're saying is true, but where do you think the myth actually originates from, and what do you think explains the, because it's not, it's not just necessarily the myth of the Chad, it's also the illusion of the Chad, where it's like, people have this profound felt sense that they're being excluded from the mating market, where some other, you know, some gorgeous guys are having tons of fun.

• 21:44Rob Henderson

  Yeah, well, you know, I think a part of it is the trend of dating apps, so, you know, the swipe rates are very easy to measure, there's been a lot of research on this, and... We mistakenly kind of over interpret the findings of what people see on Tinder or on Hinge, which do show, you know, on Tinder, it's something like 4% of the men get the vast majority of the swipes. And then much smaller numbers, or rather, larger numbers of women get liked versus versus men. Same thing on Hinge, that the top 10% of male users on Hinge gets 60% of the likes. And so it's very easy to come away from that, thinking like, oh, that's reality, that 10% of the guys are getting 60% of the female

• 22:26Rob Henderson

  attention. There was that other finding about male attractiveness. You guys have probably seen this, that OkCupid data, that's kind of, you know, it's a little outdated, but it also kind of makes sense in a way that people would come away from that, thinking like, oh, most women are only attracted to that small section of a fragment of guys. And, you know, men are much more even and kind of fair in their assessment of women. And then I think social media as well, that you're seeing guys, like, they take these very anomalous interactions, where women suddenly lose interest in them, or ghost them, or something, and they tell this, you know, elaborate story, and it's very attention grabbing, and then those stories go viral. But the reason they go viral is because they're anomalous and atypical. Normal stories of, hey, like, I met this girl, and we really

• 23:10Rob Henderson

  liked each other, and now we're engaged, we're getting married. You post that, you'll get, you know, 17 likes. But if you post, you know, I had this one night stand with this girl, but then she ghosted me, or like, I, you know, she was leading me on on the app, but then she greeted me, but then she didn't talk to me anymore. And you tell this story, it's like, oh, it's over, boys, or whatever. Like, those are the stories that go viral. And then I think the other, the other point I want to make about this is that, you know, this, this promiscuous 10%, this, on the side of the women, that is a highly sought after group. And, you know, there is, you know, a small fraction of women who are more promiscuous than other women. And the very attractive men have access to that group. And the unattractive men who see this, they get jealous, and they want

• 23:55Rob Henderson

  access to that small group of women as well. But they mistakenly think that that's all women, that all women.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Realizing that there's a huge cohort of women that have had zero or one partner in the last five months.

• 24:04Rob Henderson

  Yeah, it's sort of this, you know, this availability bias thing of like, well, I'm seeing all this stuff happening online, all the chatter about sex and chads and whatever, but you're not seeing this dark matter of women who aren't posting, who aren't on the apps, who are just like, living their lives.

• 24:17Macken Murphy?

  Dark matter.

• 24:19Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

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• 25:05Chris Williamson?

  So you can try it every single day for three months, and if you do not like it, they will give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free AG1 Welcome Kit that includes a bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Flavor Sampler, and that 90-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below, heading to drinkag1.com/autumnwisdom. If there's, so if there's this Porsche polygamy, like Scott Galloway calls it going on at the moment, at least even if it's an online dating, even if it's not represented in who's getting laid and all the rest of it, but if there's some degree of big bucket of attention going towards small number of guys, historically, does that mean that monogamous marriage was basically affirmative action for men?

• 25:44Rob Henderson

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so this, there was a recent paper about this, where they, they suggested that marriage was affirmative action for.

• 25:53Chris Williamson?

  Sexual redistribution.

• 25:55Rob Henderson

  Yeah, sexual redistribution of women. They also use the phrase DEI for men, that, you know, by definition, most guys are not in the top 10% or top 20%. And so, monogamous marriage was a way to, you know, sort of pair men up with women one-on-one. And it was a form of, I'll sometimes tongue-in-cheek call it sexual communism, sexual social. The deregulation of the dating marketplace. And, and now that we've, you know, we've kind of lifted that norm.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Sexual capitalism.

• 26:24Rob Henderson

  Now we're in, yeah, we went through a phase, I think, maybe arguably, starting in the 1960s, we deregulated things, and now we're in this sort of the late stage. And I think now people on, well, for a while, on the right, the kind of, I don't know, the manosphere right, have been calling for some kind of a return, return with that V thing. And then on the left increasingly, I think women are becoming fed up, and they're the sort of, you know, finding ways to, you know, reinvent, you know, what's that phrase? Demisexual, there's this phrase, demi-sexual.

• 26:54Chris Williamson?

  I'm only going to sleep with people that I'm emotionally connected to.

• 26:58Rob Henderson

  Yeah, I'm not going to have sex with a stranger. You know, it requires its own category.

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  And then there's sapio-sexual, that's being attracted to people that you're intellectually stimulated by. And then there's solo poly. Solo poly, solo poly's my favorite. It's fucking hilarious. Solo poly is just one person sleeping around.

• 27:18Rob Henderson

  Okay, just a slide.

• 27:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, or, or like, just like a normal thari or dude.

• 27:25Rob Henderson

  Man whore.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Just man whoring about. But yeah, the, I wonder whether part of some of the pushback against reintroduce sexual norms, regulate the sort of mating marketplace from women, that you do sometimes see online. I mean, it's pushing back against freedom, independence, it kind of harkens back to pre-1960s type of restrictive expectations, gender stereotypes, et cetera. But I wonder if another part of it is that there is this implicit understanding that it maybe benefits men more than it benefits women, to have marriage norms because it redistributes. It means that if it's got to be one-to-one,

• 28:10Chris Williamson?

  then maybe I'm going to be less able to compete. Whereas if there's a little bit more free-flowing ness in the casual sex marketplace, I may be able to show traits that aren't immediately obvious to a partner and be able to get somebody of a higher value. Whereas with guys, they're always going to struggle a little bit more because women are choosier.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  I'm not sure, because I think if that were the case, then women wouldn't be so keen on the idea. And women often are very keen on the idea of having just one guy to themselves, rather than having a guy who's going to have other women as well.

• 28:38Chris Williamson?

  I think that's why it was a puzzle to me about why it would be pushed back against to encourage monogamous norms from women.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:46Chris Williamson?

  Given that the benefits, at least traditionally, I'm trying to go through late-stage everythingalism to work out where the culture has sort of come into land. Do you understand what I mean?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I do, I do, yeah. I've seen a paper arguing that polygamy actually can be beneficial to women, because women can choose to marry a high-status guy who's already got a wife, and a high-status, rich kind of guy, rather than having to.

• 29:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's like Elon Musk being able to have a thousand wives.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it takes away that choice, if somebody wants that. That means that the only choice is have no partner, or have somebody further down the totem pole.

• 29:22Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I will highlight that this, this discussion is bordering on a really controversial debate in the evolutionary social sciences, which is whether humans are more like maximally constrained polygynists, where it's like, we're naturally an animal where males mate with multiple females and accumulate wives, so to say, but cultural practices and cultural evolution has restrained us. And then the other perspective is that, you know, in as much as we, like, obviously, humans have a menu of mating systems, as a lot of evolutionary psychologists like to say. But in as much as we have a default state, it's pretty clearly monogamy. And you'll hear different EVO social scientists from different backgrounds argue

• 30:07Macken Murphy?

  for very different cases. I personally, and I think in reading Steve's work, he's actually been quite influential to me in this, I personally think that the monogamy case is stronger for a few reasons that I could speak of. And, and one of them actually is just that, what we've said in this conversation is like, yeah, in theory, we've deregulated the market. So it's like, look, if an attractive man, if honestly, even if a kind of good-looking man wants to just have infinite sexual partners, essentially, that is on the table for him, right? He can, he can spend a lot of time doing that. But in the data, we're not really seeing people do that. Even though you're, you're now as sexually permitted to do basically whatever you want with minimal judgment, most of what people do is still just do the boring thing and mate monogamously.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  They fall in love, are largely interested in one other person, for at least for a while. Yeah, I agree. I agree with my views.

• 30:55Macken Murphy?

  Your views, which you gave me, then I repeat them, and yeah.

• 31:00Rob Henderson

  Are we serial monogamists, though? I mean, I've seen some ethnographies, hunter-gatherers, where, you know, it's, it's common to pair bond with one person, maybe have a child, maybe two children, and then the kind of, the romantic feelings can dissipate and then form a new relationship with someone else, kind of swinging to.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, very common. I've seen data as well. In those kind of societies, though, often like, a small number, small, but like, non-trivial number, 5% or so, of first marriages do last for life. So I think serial monogamy is probably more common. And I think we know that because most people fall in love more than once in their lifetimes. But it does sometimes happen. And we have a polygynistry as well, I think. But, yeah, so when, when the guardrails are off and there are no strict rules, you tend to find that most relationships are pair bonds, and largely exclusive pair bonds. But you do also find that you have a small level of polygynium, and a small level of, and, yeah, small level of full-life mating, but switching is not uncommon.

• 32:04Chris Williamson?

  Can you chat GPT? How, how many people, how many romantic partners does the average person?

• 32:13Chris Williamson?

  Fall in love with across their lifespan. Because until you had reliable contraception, anybody that you fell in love with presumably you were having sex with. And outside of either infertility issues or fertility compatibility issues, pretty much all of those people eventually would get pregnant if it was more than, I don't know, a couple of years, something like that. And the honeymoon period typically lasts around about that long.

• 32:34Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's like 85% fertility for a couple for one year. Then it jumps up to in the 90s after two years.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Here we go. 2026 Kinsey Institute study of over 10,000 US adults found the average number of passionate love experiences is 2.05. 14% reported never having been passionately in love. 28% reported being passionately in love once. 30% twice, 17% three times, 11% four or more times. Measured passionate love, the intense falling in love experience, not long term attachment or commitment. Some people can fall deeply in love only once, others do multiple times. People also experience renewed feelings of love within the same long term relationship, which is harder to count. So about two times on average throughout your life. So that would suggest like, if you don't have reliable contraception, if having sex leads to having babies, and if you're having sex when you're in love with somebody,

• 33:21Chris Williamson?

  you know, 11% of people just going through the machinage, forget culture, forget anything over the top. Like those people would have cycled through multiple partners across their lifespan. Surely this is just the most unencumbered that that you don't, you don't get to dictate your attachment system, unfortunately, as much as lots of people would want to not fall out of love with a partner that they're attached to or fall in love with a partner that they can't, whatever.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  This seems to just suggest like, that's what our system is doing. Most people, by a distance, only, is it, so 14 plus 28, so 42%, so only 42% of, of humans, less than half, have said that it's only happened once or none. That it hasn't happened twice or more.

• 34:09Rob Henderson

  I think that's interesting because it aligns with the data I had mentioned about a number of sex partners as well, that most people say that in the past 12 months, they've had sex with one person or zero people. And that a small number of people, I don't know what the number exactly was up there, three or more times, it was a small fragment of people who say that they've had sex, or rather, well, have sex, have had three or more sexual partners in the past year, but then also fallen in love three or more times in their lives. So I think this is like

• 34:32Chris Williamson?

  If we weren't seriously monogamous, what's going on there?

• 34:35Rob Henderson

  We tilt toward monogamy, but then maybe a small percentage of people are more polygynous or high social sexual orientation, less, less monogamous.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Yes, and I guess one thing in this kind of discussion is to remember individual differences.

• 34:47Rob Henderson

  Yes, yeah. Yeah, that humans aren't all the same. You have different mating strategies.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:52Chris Williamson?

  What's this new study that shows preference for resourceful partners softens when women are richer?

• 34:59Macken Murphy?

  Are you talking about the PNAS paper that we did? Yeah, well, I mean, this is this is something that I could talk about for hours. So please, you know, tell me to shut up after 30 to 50 seconds if you can manage it. But basically

• 35:12Speaker 02

  You can say 30 to 50 minutes.

• 35:14Rob Henderson

  I was like, all right, kick back, crack open your tongue.

• 35:18Macken Murphy?

  That's funny. Yeah, so, so there's been a longstanding debate over the last, I would say, 37 years. I mean, it's been intense for 37 years, but it's, you know, it actually predates that even, about the causes of sex differences in mate preferences. And a huge variable that people consider in this topic, probably the variable, if you were going to pick just one, is gender inequality. And if you're going to pick a second one, it's probably income.

• 35:47Chris Williamson?

  And base What does gender inequality mean?

• 35:49Macken Murphy?

  Well, I'm glad you asked because it means different things depending on which social scientist you're talking to. So there have been, so we know, and anyone who listens to this podcast has heard a million times that men have a stronger mate preference for looks on average, at least certainly in their state of mate preferences and in some revealed measures as well. And then women have a stronger state of mate preference for resources. And then obviously there's the sex difference in age preferences where men have a preference for youth and then, and then women have a preference for slightly older than them throughout their lives. So you've got all those differences. And there's been this very longstanding debate over the extent to which this is explicable with reference to social and economic factors,

• 36:33Macken Murphy?

  and the extent to which it's explicable by evolutionary factors.

• 36:39Macken Murphy?

  So what we did, if you go through this debate, there's been tons of cross cultural studies. There's been, there's been seven really, really big ones. And those have generally found that, I mean, in, in

• 36:54Macken Murphy?

  five out of the seven have found something there with regards to mate preferences for resources and gender inequality. All of the ones that checked age found that when gender inequality is lower, age mate preferences and age gaps get smaller. And then the beauty basically doesn't move. In fact, there's even some evidence that it goes in the opposite direction in one of those analyses. So you've got this kind of mixed result there. And then you can look at the individual level studies as well, where you look at when people have more money, what happens to their mate preferences? And I could talk about that more. It's actually a bit controversial. So there's, there's different ways of measuring this. But basically what it finds is, is that it does not move in the way that you would expect

• 37:39Macken Murphy?

  from the social role theory perspective, where it's like, oh, when women have more money, they're going to start wanting young, gorgeous men. Individual women who are rich, that, that doesn't seem to happen. However, there, there are some caveats there. So what we did, we've got all this cross sectional data. Basically, you're hearing about correlational study, correlational study, correlational study, until the cows come home. And we said, well, we're testing causal relationships and we know what's happening correlationally. And there's been critiques, both from the evolutionary psychologists and from the social role theorists about the correlational nature of these studies, depending on which ones they don't like, essentially. And so we said, okay, well, we'll, we'll do an experiment. And so we did a really complicated, unfortunately complicated, complexity is not a virtue,

• 38:22Macken Murphy?

  but it's just necessary for this sort of study design. We did a 45 condition experiment that varied people's individual income and local gender economic inequality. And then we tried to see how those variables would predict changes and mate preferences. So basically, participants were put inside of a virtual environment where their economics were different. Now, I'm sure the timer has probably gone for five minutes. I feel like I'm giving a massive speech here, but it is just a complicated background to review. And what we found was actually something that was slightly inconsistent with the EVO psych perspective, slightly inconsistent with the social role perspective, and actually most consistent with a perspective that's been common in behavioral ecology for a very long time, which is that people will adjust their mate preferences strategically

• 39:06Macken Murphy?

  based on what the environment incentivizes them to want. And what we found is that when people are poor, as in, as individuals, they're poor, or as in the opposite sex is rich and their sex is disenfranchised, they upregulate their mate preferences for resources. So they wanted, they wanted, this is true in ranked preferences, in rated preferences, and also in hypergamous preferences. So desire to mate with someone who's richer than yourself.

• 39:30Chris Williamson?

  And this goes for both men and women?

• 39:32Macken Murphy?

  For both men and women, yes.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  Is the effect less of a men than it is for women?

• 39:36Macken Murphy?

  The effect, it's really complicated and it depends on which specific measure you're talking about. And, and so, so it depends. We could, we could kind of go into detail on there. Our main analyses were, were testing the effects of the variables on, on both sexes.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Interesting, mate.

• 39:51Macken Murphy?

  And we didn't find beauty preferences moved, which actually it didn't, wouldn't make sense to a social role theorist. It would make, but

• 39:58Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain?

• 39:59Macken Murphy?

  As in, social role theorists, they generally say, oh, the reason that mate preferences for beauty are different is because there are social and economic gender differences. But those experimentally, it doesn't really show up in the cross cultural data to begin with, but also doesn't show up in the experiments. And then weirdly, the age differences didn't move, the age preferences, those didn't move. And I really expected them to, because the cross cult, we pre-registered that we thought that that was going to happen, because that's what the cross cultural literature showed, but it didn't. However, mate preferences for resources, which is really what you'd expect to move in this sort of experiment, because that's the, that's the strategic variable that's being adjusted. It makes a lot of sense. I think verbally, like I could talk about the modeling work and I could talk about it in like a really obscure way. But at a very basic level, I find it very intuitive that it's like, if I was poor

• 40:45Macken Murphy?

  and if women were rich, yeah, I would want to

• 40:47Speaker 02

  You're going to prioritize it, yeah.

• 40:48Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I would want to date someone rich more than I currently do now. And vice versa, like we even saw this in our qualitative data where, you know, when women were in conditions where it's like, oh, you, you have a lot of money and men are really poor. They're like, well, then I don't really need to date for money, that's fine.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Interesting, but do you think that that's an evolved tendency? I would kind of think that there's a evolutionary push toward men being, sorry, women being more interested in resources and status than men are. But they're, they're also just, you just think about things and you just, but reason, what's the best way for me to make a living in life while I'm poor? So I'm just going to reason about the fact that it would be better for me to marry this person who's wealthy than to measure, than to marry someone who's poor. If you see what I mean, so you could just explain it as a rational thing, a reasoned thing rather than

• 41:31Chris Williamson?

  Just game theory.

• 41:32Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I take, I take an evolutionary anthropological approach. My whole, my whole background is anthropology. And so it's slightly different from the EVO psych approach, where there, there's actually this maneuver that's used in EVO Anthro work, which is called the phenotypic gambit, where you basically say, well, I don't really know what's happening inside the mind. The mind is a bit of a black box, but I'm interested in the inputs and I'm interested in the outputs. So let me see what the inputs, let me change the inputs and see if the outputs match what you would expect from a strategic perspective.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:02Macken Murphy?

  So, look. It could be the case that it was purely conscious strategic thinking, which is also an evolved trait, right? That's an evolved ability that we should use presumably in ways that help our fitness. Otherwise, it couldn't have evolved. If strategic thinking didn't improve fitness, it wouldn't have evolved. But there have been some scholars like Gangestad in 2006, who have played with the idea that there might actually be a domain-specific evolved psychological module in the mind that is designed to essentially detect scarcity and change your resource preferences to some degree. I'm not sure if he focused on scarcity. He looked at a couple of variables, but I do remember that he did posit this. So I'm open to the idea that there's some evolved resource scarcity

• 42:45Macken Murphy?

  detection thing, but I don't know, because the experiment didn't test that. It just tested the inputs and outputs.

• 42:50Chris Williamson?

  Have you considered that the reason that the age didn't show up is that the single biggest predictor of wealth is age? And if you control for wealth, much of what is added by age gets taken away?

• 43:02Macken Murphy?

  That's exactly what we wrote in the paper. Dude, don't fucking test me, okay? I know this shit.

• 43:08Rob Henderson

  On this point about resources, so if you...

• 43:12Chris Williamson?

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• 43:57Chris Williamson?

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• 44:17Rob Henderson

  You know, this is generally sort of controversial, but the idea of the evolutionary-adapted environment, or the environment of evolutionary adaptation, wasn't scarcity more or less the norm. And so this idea that we have an evolved module to detect scarcity versus abundance, I mean, everyone was roughly equally poor, because in these communities, people shared just about everything. Yes, you had talented hunters, but generally, my understanding is they shared their spoils. And, you know, it wasn't until after the agricultural revolution that we were able to stockpile large amounts of resources.

• 44:52Macken Murphy?

  Well, this, yeah, this is actually something that's controversial in anthropology, because it's true that if you go off of modern hunter-gatherers, then you do get this impression that like, oh, scarcity is the norm. But all the good places became agricultural. So it's like, there could have, like, you look at, there are animals where it's like they're in environments that they're very well adapted to, and they're not really struggling. And I would say that there-

• 45:11Chris Williamson?

  Would that have been around for long enough for us to have been able to develop modules that would be baked in to be adapted to?

• 45:16Macken Murphy?

  Well, again, I personally don't have an opinion on the module thing, so it's not something that I'm, it's actually not something that I think is true. It's just something that I'm kind of putting out there. Like, I'm genuinely open about mechanisms. I could hear any side of the story. But I do think that it's, like, there is some interesting shit here. Like, for example, there's the studies that we've talked about before, where when men are primed with scarcity, such as when they're hungry, or when they're acutely poor, or when there's a local famine, they shift to preferring larger women, right? And that seems to suggest that there may have been some fluctuations in how valuable larger women were that selected for some-

• 45:55Chris Williamson?

  And also, it suggests that there was fluctuations in how large women were.

• 45:59Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:59Chris Williamson?

  That there were times, we spoke about this earlier on, there were times of surplus to the point where people could at least gain a little bit more body fat.

• 46:06Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, and there are very realistic depictions of obese people in prehistory. I know it's, I know it sounds surprising, but it's-

• 46:11Chris Williamson?

  Dude, if you manage to be fat in prehistory, that is a real accomplishment.

• 46:16Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Chris Williamson?

  Real accomplishment.

• 46:18Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I think that there probably were some, I think that there probably were some cases. You won't find it in modern hunter-gatherers, because they've been pushed out by the agriculturalists to these places that are really difficult to live, for the most part.

• 46:28Chris Williamson?

  Ah, that's so fucking interesting. Okay, so when we do studies of modern hunter-gatherers by design, they're not in the desirable locations.

• 46:36Macken Murphy?

  No, they're usually in-

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  The desirable locations have all been populated by modern people.

• 46:39Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  So modern hunter-gatherers are in the scraps, the bottom of the barrel, from an ecological perspective, from a soil condition perspective, from how much wildlife they've got to hunt. So that's just not, whereas you could have the equivalent of a Galapagos Valley-type thing with no natural predators and an abundance of food and fresh running water. And even if you're not yet at the point of doing agricultural-induced abundance, you're still so overwhelmed, just from a resource perspective, there's fucking deer running everywhere, and rabbits, and berries, and-

• 47:13Macken Murphy?

  And there is paleoanthropological evidence of these massive kill sites, where it's just like, you wouldn't believe how many animals they were killing. So it's like, it seems like they may have been doing okay in some cases. But I don't know, again, the module thing, it's-

• 47:25Speaker 02

  It's tricky, right?

• 47:26Macken Murphy?

  It's not something that I, it's genuinely not something that I've thought very deeply about, because it's not an interest area for me.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  So what's the adaptive rationale, though? If there's lots of abundance, you would want a more attractive, a more heavier woman?

• 47:41Macken Murphy?

  Oh, right. Well, that's separate from the PNAS paper.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Indeed, yeah, yeah.

• 47:47Macken Murphy?

  So the rationale there, yeah, exactly. So some people call it that, and others call it the insurance hypothesis. And there's some kind of disagreements as to what exactly is going on there.

• 47:58Rob Henderson

  It's in scarcity specifically. So in environments of scarcity, they prefer heavier women.

• 48:03Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so it's-

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Did I say the other way around? Yeah, scarcity, yeah, yeah.

• 48:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. It's something that shows up with a lot of different study designs, which is pretty cool, right? Like, you can do the cross-cultural anthropological stuff and see like, oh, yeah, among the South African Zulu, they're saying that up to, or in Jamaica, or in St. Kitts, they're saying that, you know, women who have BMIs in the 30s are quite beautiful. And then you go somewhere like, really affluent Singaporean women, or something like that, they have different preferences. So, or Korea or someplace. Then you see experimentally where, when men are hungrier, they have a preference for larger women. And the idea is that it's like, well, what is fat? Fat is literally like a bank account filled with calories. And so if you're in an environment where it's,

• 48:49Macken Murphy?

  and also, we know that when, when women are acutely starving, they become infertile, right? So it's not just like, oh, this person knows where food is, and will be able to feed me, and offspring, and do provisioning and stuff. It's not just that. It's also like, a practical thing of like, oh, if we're in a famine right now, these women can definitely get pregnant. These women definitely, definitely can. So that's, that's-

• 49:11Speaker 02

  But why does it flip, then, in conditions of non-abundance?

• 49:15Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so this is what's, this is what's so, this is what's so much more difficult to explain. And the leading hypothesis, I would say, for why thinness is preferred in abundance is because it's a very reliable signal to youth and nullah parity. So it's one of those things where-

• 49:31Speaker 02

  But isn't that the case in all societies? And isn't some degree of chubbiness a sign in all societies, regardless of their abundance or scarcity, that the person is going to be able to get pregnant? I'm just not sure why, I'm not really persuaded by the adaptive rationale for why it would switch, and also why it would switch so quickly. And you just get a little bit hungry, and suddenly your preferences switch. And then you eat some food, and then they suddenly switch back.

• 49:55Macken Murphy?

  The switches are very small in those, in those studies. So we're talking about like a 10-pound difference. Like, it's like, I believe the dining hall study, for example, which is the, has been replicated, it is pretty cool, where it's men going into a dining hall versus coming out.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:11Macken Murphy?

  It was a small shift. Like, it wasn't, it wasn't like they were preferring completely different-looking women. But the cross-cultural stuff, where it's really big differences in environment, then you're seeing genuinely different beauty standards. And a lot of people say it's like, oh, they're like, it's interesting how much Western male psychology often resists this. Like, I've had interviewers really push back on me, like, you know, isn't this just that they're taking what they can get? Like, these men don't have options, and so they have to go with the bigger women? And I'm like, no, no, you're not understanding. It's not, it's not, it's not, they are, they are given a chart of body types and asked what's attractive, and to what degree.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Indeed. And that's what they prefer.

• 50:51Rob Henderson

  2:00 AM at the bar, that's all that's left.

• 50:53Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, that's what they're thinking.

• 50:55Speaker 02

  It could just be a status thing, right? I wonder if it's that certain body types get linkless status in different cultures. And cultures where there's not a lot of abundance to be able to get bigger indicates that you have good access to resources, it becomes associated with status, and it's the reverse in more abundant societies.

• 51:12Rob Henderson

  On this point, total conjecture here, but in both environments, fatness or thinness could signal conscientiousness. So if you are in an environment of abundance and you're thin, that signals impulse control and the ability to withstand temptation, conscientious personality. And then, in environments of scarcity, if you're big, that means you're conscientious, because you went out and acquired the calories, and you're a hard worker.

• 51:33Macken Murphy?

  That's really cool. I like that. So the status, the status link is really interesting. What you're saying is really interesting. And it does fit with the cross-cultural beautification research as well, where what we see is that, I would say broadly, this isn't based on one study, but many, you know, individual sites, essentially. So maybe you do like a true cross-cultural regression, and it doesn't come out. But it does seem, based on reading individual accounts, that in environments where food is abundant, the signal is like, oh, I'm going to increase movement and restrict calories. And then you go to some places where, you know, they have the fattening huts, for example, where it's like, restrict movement and increase

• 52:16Macken Murphy?

  calories in order to try and be more attractive.

• 52:19Chris Williamson?

  What's a fattening hut?

• 52:19Macken Murphy?

  So this is something that's seen in some cultures, where women before marriage will restrict their movement and increase their caloric intake in order to-

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  Inside of a hut?

• 52:35Macken Murphy?

  I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's always literally the case, but, but, yeah, yeah.

• 52:39Chris Williamson?

  Where's the hut?

• 52:40Macken Murphy?

  There's, there's actually even, I was reading one account, and I can't remember which, I think it was Mauritania, but I'm not sure. Where it was them talking about how, and I really realized like, oh, this is a beauty preference. Like this, this is real. Um, because they were having to stop the men from spying on the women who were in the fattening huts because they were coveting, they were coveting this. So it was like, so it was like, they really wanted to see.

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  There's a supermodel beauty pageant going on.

• 53:06Macken Murphy?

  That's a sent, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's.

• 53:10Macken Murphy?

  So it's just a really.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  I imagine an actual supermodel contest as well, the same thing.

• 53:14Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So I would say that the status, the status thing is interesting. I have no doubt that there, there's that that could be part of it.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Macken Murphy?

  But when I look at the full range of evidence and include the hunger studies, it's like, well, the status benefits of thinness or fatness are the same when going into the dining hall versus coming out and the mate preference is still shifting. I think there's probably some kind of mechanism there.

• 53:34Chris Williamson?

  I got, I got fucking ripped on the internet, uh, until the guy realized that the clip had been cut both before and after what I meant, what I actually said about saying, I think that Ozempic is more, uh, pushed back against by people who are in shape than people who are out of shape because it derogates the signal, uh, of I got here naturally. And there is a sense that that is somehow superior, that is somehow better. And, uh, I, that whole world of what does, when you can manipulate the smoothness of your skin using makeup or Facetune or cosmetic surgery, when you can get limb lengthening surgery, or you can

• 54:16Chris Williamson?

  wear boots that have got heels on them. All of my friends, all of my friends wear cowboy boots because it's a two inch height advantage whilst wearing a cool piece of footwear. And in Texas, you can get away with it. Uh, like all of these different ways, it's this arms race that's permanently going on. But what you need to do is actually scrutinize now, and maybe this is part of the reason that people are more hypervigilant, that there are more ways to cheat the system, to bypass what this signal is supposed to mean. Well, are you actually in good shape? Or are you on a lot of TRT? Like, do you actually have the ability to gain muscle? Or are you somehow, are you, are you speedrunning that? Are you actually youth fecundity nullah parity? Or is, have you got foot reduction surgery?

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  And, and have you been, you know what I mean? Like all of the different, I didn't, I found this out a couple of weeks ago. I didn't realize that women's feet grow, like when they have kids, that women's feet get bigger, which is why there's a preference for smaller feet.

• 55:13Macken Murphy?

  Did you hear this from Will Costello?

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:16Chris Williamson?

  Is it true?

• 55:16Macken Murphy?

  Well, yo, he's got the sex doll study as well, where it's like those sex dolls have tiny, tiny feet. And it's like, why would that be? And he's like.

• 55:22Chris Williamson?

  It would even be like unusable feet.

• 55:26Rob Henderson

  Supernormal.

• 55:26Macken Murphy?

  It's part of the super stimulus.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Fish area and runaway, but in reverse.

• 55:31Rob Henderson

  No, no foot at all. We actually like.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's our optimal. Going, going back to the, the sort of inequality thing, what is the state of the gender pay gap in big cities now? Cause I saw some data, it's been for a while, it was 29 that women were out earning men by about a thousand pounds. I think now it's up to 31, 32. Does anyone know this?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Don't know these exact numbers, but I do know that in a lot of cities it's reversed and that, um, young women are earning more than young men.

• 55:55Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Major metro areas in the US. So, uh, New York, DC, Boston, LA, I think Seattle as well. I don't know the state of Austin, but it wouldn't surprise me if Austin showed the, the same pattern as well. For, for under 30s.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  I think it's squeaking into the 31s, 32s now. And that's what's going to be really interesting. Like, yeah, maybe you're right. And we've managed to, uh, preference for resourceful partners has reduced as women have gotten richer. There was some studies a little while ago, Vincent Haranam put this one out in his paper from like, well, his article from like six years ago, that suggested that very high powered career women had an increased preference for more high powered men. So ambitious people desire more ambitious partners.

• 56:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 56:41Chris Williamson?

  Specifically women to men, the, uh, effect didn't reverse. Uh, but it seems that what you're suggesting here, maybe for the middle bit of the bell curve, perhaps when you get to the top 10% of hyper ambitious people, they, that somehow flips because they have, they've warped so much of their sense of self-worth around ambition that inevitably it's going to bleed into what they find sexually attractive to, or the desirable in a partner, or maybe that they're such an outlier that they breach some threshold of being able to talk to the normies about what they're going through. You know what I mean? All of these things, like an elite athlete would, would probably be good if their partner at least understands how the game of American football is played.

• 57:21Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 57:22Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 57:22Macken Murphy?

  I think, I think you can take our, the gender economic inequality findings of ours to the bank because they're consistent with the cross-cultural literature. The income finding is very interesting, but it's matched with the cross-sectional literature on individuals.

• 57:37Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what any of this means.

• 57:38Macken Murphy?

  Okay. So the, it is true that higher income women, uh, in, so in our experiment, there was a broad, uh, like they, they were less interested in mating up economically. So higher income women, less interest in mating up. Um, but, uh, in, it's true also that in the wild, higher income women tend to still have strong mate preferences for resources.

• 58:07Rob Henderson

  About this. Yeah. So that's what you see in the real world is like, uh, high achieving, highly educated, high income women tend to marry men who are still doing at least as well as they are.

• 58:17Macken Murphy?

  So there's a couple of caveats on that broad pattern. Um, one thing that's interesting that comes from the social role theorists is that they say, well, richer women are qualitatively different from poorer women in that they, they, they are, they are different in lots of ways. And so to say, oh, they're different in this way, it's not really controlled. That's part of the reason we did an experiment, by the way.

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 58:38Macken Murphy?

  But then also richer women have stronger mate preferences in general, like in Koyama's research, in Lou's research, they want hotter guys too. And, and in fact.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's going on there?

• 58:50Macken Murphy?

  Well, the, I mean, uh,

• 58:54Rob Henderson

  There's an old David Buzz study that literally said like attractive women want it all. Like that was the title.

• 58:59Macken Murphy?

  But rich women, rich women also want it all. And I think that part of it is that people who are.

• 59:03Chris Williamson?

  If you're rich and attractive, you're fucked.

• 59:04Macken Murphy?

  People who are good at, people who are good at getting stuff probably are confident in their ability to get stuff. Um, people who are, you know, high achieving. I think that it's very, like, my older sister is a successful banker. If she has a preference for a guy who's doing well economically, that's like, that's a very realistic preference. Whereas for a woman who's working at a gas station, that's a very unrealistic mate preference. And then also when you look at the ratios of preference as opposed to just the absolute preference, I do have to kind of tip my hat to the social role people a little bit on that where it's like, it does seem that even though richer women have a stronger mate preference for resources, they have a lower relative mate preference for resources. Um, in Lou's data, for example, so it's like.

• 59:45Chris Williamson?

  Play in English.

• 59:46Macken Murphy?

  It's like, I want, so it's like, um, you talk to, I'll put it in a kind of, uh, imaginary example. It's like you talk to a poor woman, exemplary poor woman, and she says, you know, I kind of want a rich guy and I kind of want a hot guy. And then you talk to an exemplary rich woman and it's like, I really want a rich guy. And you say, oh, it doesn't match the thing. But then they say, but I really, really want a hot guy. And I also really want a guy who's going to take care of the kids. And I also want a guy who shares my same political beliefs. And it's like, oh man. So they just have higher standards across the board. And as a relative preference, it seems to decline. Also, I would say that there's the.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like it increases, not declines.

• 1:00:22Macken Murphy?

  So it increases absolutely, but then maybe decreases relatively. So it's like.

• 1:00:26Rob Henderson

  The rank ordering.

• 1:00:27Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So it's like, if I, they're, they're, they're maybe able to relax that preference relatively.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  Relative to other preferences, but not relative to their own level.

• 1:00:36Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  It doesn't drop away though. It doesn't drop away.

• 1:00:39Macken Murphy?

  It doesn't drop away.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  And I think they used to predict that it would, that it's just there because women are poor.

• 1:00:43Chris Williamson?

  There's a house that we need to hit and we can portion this out however we want between the two different.

• 1:00:48Macken Murphy?

  If there's, in as much as there's a winner, yeah. In as much as there's a winner on that bickering between the ego psychs and the, and the social psychologists, the ego psychs won that one because it was pretty clearly predicted. Like, hey, richer women are going to have a reduced mate preference for resources. And then they tested it in a bunch of different ways and it, and it didn't. But there is some caveats.

• 1:01:07Chris Williamson?

  What's fascinating here is it's just people with high standards have high standards.

• 1:01:10Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Chris Williamson?

  The high standards that got them to be valedictorian, the high standards that got them to get a high powered degree and then a good career, and then to work at it to get promotion and to make it to C suite or become partner. And then when it came to choosing a partner, they have high standards, high standards, high standards. It's like just kind of, it's the sort of thing that your parents would understand.

• 1:01:31Rob Henderson

  They have high standards for themselves and their own, uh,

• 1:01:34Macken Murphy?

  For everything else.

• 1:01:34Rob Henderson

  accomplishments, then also for partners.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  You see this with, uh, the research on perfectionism, that perfectionists, it, it comes in at least two broad buckets, but maybe three, I think actually. Uh, the first one is perfectionism around your own behavior and your own standards. But the other is perfectionism for the people around you's behavior and standards too. This is one of the problems that perfectionists have built themselves into a more perfect life. It's not one to one, might actually be net negative, but you have pushed yourself and reasonably to raise your standard of living. And then as you become more of an outlier in terms of your perfectionism in your own life, you look for more perfectionism from a higher baseline, which is your new one, in the people around you. And that happens more on average from people that are perfectionists.

• 1:02:19Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

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• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

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• 1:03:25Macken Murphy?

  Another thing I'll say on that is that the, there is also the caveat of the, I mean, I actually really would love to hear Steve's thoughts on revealed preferences, state of verse. If we can, if we can gently steer the conversation, if I can ask the captain of the ship to steer, I've actually wanted to hear his opinion. But there is the, there is the, there is, oh, this is going to be terrible in my head, but there is the

• 1:03:50Macken Murphy?

  revealed element where it's like, if you look at women now today, and this is from the Institute of Family Studies, where they, it's kind of, it's a kind of a way of visualizing the data more than anything, but they bucketed different income brackets. And in the top 20% of women, like the top quintile, they are already on average are dating down very slightly economically.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  The bottom two quintiles of men are doing the same thing.

• 1:04:13Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, they're dating up. So there's this really weird kind of thing there where it's like, you can say in the abstract, and I'm teeing you up for some thoughts on stated versus revealed, but you can say in the abstract, oh, richer women, they have a stronger mate preference to made up, let's say. But then you see what they're doing and it's like, oh, they're less likely to do it. So it's like, what is, what does stronger mean in that context?

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  But they don't necessarily, the fact that they, on average, going with somebody who's somewhat, earning somewhat less than them, isn't necessarily because that's what they prefer.

• 1:04:44Chris Williamson?

  What's available.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  There's not, at those kind of echelons, there's just not much available at all.

• 1:04:49Chris Williamson?

  Tall girl problem.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Tall girl problem.

• 1:04:51Rob Henderson

  Exactly. Okay. So if there's a shortage of tall men, then you'll settle for a guy who's not as.

• 1:04:56Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, like tall women are probably also less likely to.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Not because they prefer shorter men. So I don't think that's revealing a preference necessarily.

• 1:05:03Macken Murphy?

  Well, what about the, what would you, could you, I don't know if you've been following Paul Eastwick's work on stated versus revealed preferences. I've been, you know, I've been reading a lot of his scientific work. I haven't read his, his book yet, but I would love a rejoinder to his, so he makes the claim that essentially, I'll summarize it and then maybe you can tell me what you think about it. But he makes the claim that, yes, in survey data, you see these consistent sex differences in what men, women want. But when you measure it through speed dating, or through how these stated preferences predict romantic evaluations of partners, well, then, women care a lot more about looks than they say, and men care a little more about resources than they say, such that there's essentially no sex difference.

• 1:05:47Macken Murphy?

  And I think, I even saw an excerpt from his book where he says, well, how could, how could these sex differences in preferences have evolved if they don't result in behavior? If they're just resulting in survey items? I know, I don't necessarily buy that, that kind of, I buy his data. I don't necessarily buy the follow-up part of the argument, but I'd love to hear what's your, with your billion years of sex differences background, what's the rejoinder?

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, let me say, I think he's a, he's a great scholar. I don't, I don't agree with him on this, but I do think he's a very good scholar and he's worth taking seriously and reading his work. So I think he, he seems to be, he seems to focus a lot on the two lines of evidence that don't show sex differences and mate preferences, and exclude pretty much everything else. So one thing, he focuses on the speed dating data that he's personally done, and often doesn't find the differences that you might expect. I'm not sure if it's representative samples for a start, like a lot of the studies that he'd done, he's done, have been university students, all of whom are quite possibly, I mean, presumably do have pretty good career prospects. So there's not going to be a huge amount of variance

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  there necessarily. In a speed dating context, you don't get to know somebody particularly well, so their looks are going to be a large part of what shapes your assessment of them. He points out that a lot of the data that evolutionary psychologists look at, dating app data, for instance, is evolutionarily novel. So with speed dating, it's an evolutionary novelty. It's nothing like what happens in reality. But he's happy there because you don't find the differences that you expect to find. So he focuses on that. And actually, there is some speed dating research that does show some of the standard differences. Rob Kurzman, I think, did one study that did find it. So it's mixed rather than showing

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  no effect at all of the standard, evolutionarily, psychology predictive stuff. With the revealed preferences, I think that, well, I don't know, it's also, I'm a bit dubious about it, partly just because it goes against the 90% of other, or 95% of other research, including real world data, that does find directions, effects in the direction you'd expect. Like, women are more likely than men to leave a guy who is unemployed, who becomes unemployed, or fails to earn a decent living. And actually, that's one, one reason that the revealed preferences data might not be accurate, is that when you're looking at how, how important it is in a

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  relationship, that the guy is earning quite a bit, among current couples, those are current couples, and it's going to be a bunch of couples who, partnerships that have dissolved already.

• 1:08:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you've got to catch them as they lose their job.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, or before they do, exactly. And so you're just looking at the subset that remains after, after those kind of processes have happened. So you're going to have reduced variance in terms of ability to make a living and earn a good wage, and reduced variance therefore means that the, the correlation is going to be weaker, and other things are going to become more important, seemingly more important. But maybe that's the problem with the data, rather than the fact that women actually don't care more about that after all than men.

• 1:09:01Macken Murphy?

  Did you see the worldwide preference matching paper?

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  I think I did, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Last year, right?

• 1:09:08Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So that was one to kind of remind people. I know that, I know that you spoke to Eastwick about it on the show, so people, people may already know.

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  It was the first episode that I did with.

• 1:09:16Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. So it was basically, he had people, and I'm summarizing someone else's work, so there's, there's a chance I make a, an egregious error.

• 1:09:23Chris Williamson?

  Academics, yeah.

• 1:09:25Macken Murphy?

  So it's.

• 1:09:26Chris Williamson?

  Directionally correct.

• 1:09:27Macken Murphy?

  So the directionally correct summary is that he had people assess their romantic partners on various traits, and then saw how much those assessments correlated with their overall romantic evaluations of them. And in that, he found no sex difference. And he also found some weird findings, like the, the number one thing people wanted was someone, by that measure, was someone good in bed. Yeah. So the overall, overall romantic evaluation was, which is intuitive, but and.

• 1:09:55Chris Williamson?

  It's very difficult, it's very difficult to separate that out from the fact that you're in a relationship with someone and needing to be physically intimate with them regularly, like almost all sex, for all the myth of the Chad and the fucking girls being ran through and guys are man whores and all the rest of it, almost all sex, the whole galax, the whole fucking galaxy of sex occurs in relationships, and then there's one brown dwarf star on the outside that's casual sex, from a like, portioning the sex across.

• 1:10:24Rob Henderson

  Exoplanet.

• 1:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. Am I wrong?

• 1:10:26Macken Murphy?

  That everyone on the other planets is looking at.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  It's almost all sex occurs inside of relationships, right? Like, the global amount of sex that happens. It's almost all inside of one form of relationship or another. Did you see Jake Kozlosky from Keeper AI put up the Ask Men If They'd Marry Down on Three Axis?

• 1:10:44Macken Murphy?

  I think I DM him every time he tweets out new data. I'm like, can I get another look at that? Can I go a little bit closer on this?

• 1:10:50Chris Williamson?

  Jake's got the possibility to be a really fascinating source of stated preferences with real world results, real, real world incentives. So for the people that don't know, Keeper AI is an AI matchmaking service. It's 50 grand, the guy pays, the women don't. It's five grand per date for the first, for each date, for the guy.

• 1:11:12Rob Henderson

  On top of the 50.

• 1:11:13Chris Williamson?

  It's credited against it, but it's only credited against it up to the first five. So if you have like 10 dates in order to get there, then you're going to pay 75. Anyway, they have a pretty comprehensive psychometric evaluation, personality testing, all of these sorts of things. Pull up the Keeper AI website, Jared, it's kind of, it's kind of fun. And um, anyway, because he's got this raw data and he's happy to aggregate it, and presumably the terms and, terms and conditions just say like, hey, fucking open this, open this sucker up. Asked if they'd marry down on three axes, women say no far more than men every time, earns less, women are 12 more likely, 12 times more likely to refuse, less intelligent, six times more, less educated, four times more. Marrying down is a near deal breaker

• 1:11:54Chris Williamson?

  for women and a non-issue for men, consistent across all three. Right? So especially when you bundle those together, like that is a real fucking covariant bastard, but a multivariate bastard. What I realized, thinking about Eastwick's stuff, if you're in a world where the new ecology involves this ability to sterile, autistically design what it is that you want, like, stated preferences become revealed preferences. Does this make, am I saying?

• 1:12:24Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, no, it makes sense. And what's funny is that I actually DM'd Jake that exact, that exact point where it's like.

• 1:12:29Chris Williamson?

  Don't fuck with me, dude. I'm on the fucking level of the academics. All day, I'm on fire today. One and a half Newtonics, don't fuck with me.

• 1:12:40Macken Murphy?

  You've been anticipating a lot of things. And it's interesting because it's, it's not, I don't really think it is a stated preference in the traditional sense, because it's a stated preference with consequence. And if you actually look at the tradition.

• 1:12:51Chris Williamson?

  Proper incentive.

• 1:12:52Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so I'm very interested in stated versus revealed preferences. I'm very interested in which, which people assign to what. And there's actually precedent for this scholarly precedent where in Buss and Schmidt's make preferences and behavioral manifestations, I think that they had classified ads as a, as a, as a behavioral manifestation, essentially where it's like, it's not like an expression, but like what people are actually shopping for.

• 1:13:17Chris Williamson?

  Put some skin in the game.

• 1:13:18Macken Murphy?

  And so that's, yeah, exactly. So it's like, if I tell my matchmaker, can I please have a young wife? That's more than just a statement. Like that's, that's an action. Yeah, in a way, but I don't know.

• 1:13:29Chris Williamson?

  Is this a unique, is because matchmaking, I guess arranged marriages are a kind of matchmaking, but they're not done with, hey, here's my fucking list of requirements type thing? Is this a new category that's somewhere in between stated and revealed preferences? When, when you look at something like Keeper AI and you, you, you go in with your preferred list of things? Is it stated? Is it revealed? What is it?

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  It's converting your stated preference into a revealed preference by going out of the world and making it, making it happen and putting skin in the game to do so.

• 1:13:58Rob Henderson

  So it feels closer to stated. I mean, revealed would be because you can, I can give, you can be my coach or whatever, the matchmaker, and I can give you the list and then you show me someone and I can still choose. Actually, I may give you this list, but then I meet this person and this actually isn't what I want. Let me scratch these two things off the list and add this other thing and then go that direction. So it still feels more stated.

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  Two, two slamming lines I've seen recently, one from Jake that says, being good at dating apps is mostly orthogonal to being a good spouse.

• 1:14:24Chris Williamson?

  But the people that win on dating apps are actually probably not the people that you want to get into a relationship with. And then Diana Fleishman, female dating strategy tells women to date only men who ask first, text within three days, pay and reliably plan the next date. Sure, this might be a good, good filter to make sure he's really into you, but it's also a way to select a man who is great at wooing side chicks.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:14:44Chris Williamson?

  Just the ability to play the game. Uh, but the Jake one about being good at dating apps is orthogonal to being a good spouse would be a fantastic study to do. How many swipes have you got? How many first dates have you got? It doesn't even matter really about conversions. And then how likely were you to cheat infidelity, level of relationship satisfaction with your other partners down the line? Like, tell me about your online dating era and tell me about your spouse's relationship satisfaction now and the quality of your relationship. Like, it might actually be that the traits that make you good on a dating app are opposite, contrary to what make you a good spouse.

• 1:15:22Rob Henderson

  There was a study a few years ago on, on Tinder users back when I think Tinder was still the number one dating app in the late 2010s. And this was only on college students and they looked at students who had never used Tinder and students who were currently using Tinder. And they, they looked at the dark triad personality traits and found that the users of Tinder scored significantly higher. Uh, I mean, pretty, pretty sizable effect sizes, point three, point four, uh, higher for the Tinder users and the non-Tinder users. So these are, you know, more psychopathic, more Machiavellian, more narcissistic. But I didn't say, as I recall, they didn't say anything about sort of, were the successful users, um, higher on the dark triad traits than the less successful users? But, you know, this, this is presumably people don't want spouses who are high on

• 1:16:07Rob Henderson

  dark triad traits. But that's what, those are the people who are using these, these apps, you know, they're more likely to use them.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  There is, uh, there is plenty of research, I think, though, that shows revealed preferences for some of the traditional EVO site predictions, uh, like the fact that, uh, guys who are wealthier, more likely to get married, more likely to stay married, more likely to have kids, more likely to get remarried if they divorce. Whereas it doesn't predict that anywhere there as well for women. Women's wages don't. And women's looks are a better predictor of whether they get married. And the, uh, the wealth of the marital partner, um, that is the case for men. Men, men's looks don't predict that anywhere there as well. And all of that's revealed preferences, right?

• 1:16:53Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that Whitmer study looking at facial attractiveness was 12 times more influential on swiping behavior than height is?

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Facial attractiveness?

• 1:17:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so they did. So I, I tweeted that and someone replied, um, photo competition app shows photos for the most important factor. And I was like, oh, you did kind of get them there, but it, but it is an interesting, it is an interesting study, right?

• 1:17:15Chris Williamson?

  Trying to find some white pills.

• 1:17:17Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, so what they did was they tried to, so what they, what they did was they tried to essentially set up a gamified, um, dating app. Importantly, there was no height filters on this app. So the, so that's usually how people see height in a dating app. That's usually how it has in a real dating app. That's usually how it has an influence. And I'd actually be interested in Rob's opinion on whether, uh, uh, kind of testing the intuition of whether a height filter is a stated or revealed preference, um, because that's also kind of in between. But yeah, they set up this game and then they, and it was, it was very sophisticated. I had a lot of people come back to me asking, including really prominent scholars coming back, like kind of challenging the study. And I had to open the study back up again and check. And I was like, no, they actually thought of that too.

• 1:17:59Macken Murphy?

  And yeah, they found that essentially face was everything and anything else was, you could put anything in your bio, you could have any height and it wouldn't really make that much of a difference with the caveat. With the caveat that filtering for height, um, wasn't an option. And then it had a typical dating app interface. So it's like, if you're looking at 50 different faces as, as a participant in the study and it's literally like face, face, face, tiny details, tiny details. There is kind of a click through temptation of like, I mean, this is what happens on real apps though. I mean, it's, it's, it's accurate. On real apps, people are doing the same thing. So I think it's methodologically, it's very ecologically sound. If you want to find out what's happening.

• 1:18:38Chris Williamson?

  Pokemon trading card game.

• 1:18:39Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:18:40Rob Henderson

  I wonder if, to your question, I wonder if after the introduction of height filters, did users come away more satisfied or less satisfied or the same compared with prior to the introduction of height filters on the apps? Like, are women happier? Are, presumably men aren't happier, especially the men who aren't at all.

• 1:18:56Chris Williamson?

  I've said this before, Tinder, Tinder released the height filter as a April Fools about a decade ago. And then just as a feature available to premium users, like three years ago.

• 1:19:08Rob Henderson

  And I've heard that six foot mark is like, it's somewhat arbitrary because I, I read this and I don't know exactly.

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  Guys just lie.

• 1:19:14Rob Henderson

  Well, guys lie, but then the six foot, it's just because it's a round number. And I've heard that in Europe, the number is 180 centimeters, which is something like five, 10 and a half or five, 11. And they just go 180 because it's a nice clean number. You know, if they wanted six feet, they could go, you know, 182.5 centimeters. And so even the six foot thing is somewhat arbitrary.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  So what you're saying is that we should change the units of measurement to make more guys six foot.

• 1:19:38Rob Henderson

  Got to get on the metric system. Scientists, drug dealers and short kings. You've got to be Europe maxing.

• 1:19:44Chris Williamson?

  If you're not Europe maxing, if you're not metric maxing dude, what the fuck are you doing?

• 1:19:48Macken Murphy?

  That would really be DEI for men if we could change it to the.

• 1:19:50Chris Williamson?

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• 1:20:35Chris Williamson?

  first purchase. We're going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. What about that, um, mate budget study that Norm Lee did? Because that was about trade offs, right? And typically some people generally have good things that come along with good things. But for the most part, there are, there are some sorts of trade offs with, with someone's spent an awful lot of time dedicated on one thing. They've maybe neglected another part of another area.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  It's an interesting study there, right?

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  Can you explain for the normies?

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  Sure. So.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  The normies.

• 1:21:13Speaker 02

  So yeah, Norm Lee, Norm Lee, he did a, did a study where he gave people a budget of mate dollars and then asked them, create, create the ideal mate that you can with this budget. Some people got a big budget and where that was the case, men and women, they both, um, wanted everything. They, um, they wanted good looks, they wanted, uh, they wanted like a good job, high status, blah, blah, blah, that the works. But if they had a smaller mate budget, which I think is probably more like most people's situation in life, no offense, um, if they had that, they, um, Sex differences became more pronounced. And so people, uh, men would spend more to get an attractive partner.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  Whereas women would spend more to get a, um, a partner with resources and status.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:03Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, he also did a study where he had people allocate for themselves, if I'm not mistaken. And it mirrored the, uh, it mirrored that, that same pattern where it's like when men were kind of RPG style, building their own character. I think it was him. I don't, I don't mean to give him credit if it wasn't, but, um, basically men tried to make themselves richer relative to women. And women tried to make themselves prettier relative to men. So.

• 1:22:26Chris Williamson?

  That's the reason why we don't see women turning up in supercars with expensive Rolexes at a nightclub. Or guys spending tons of time doing the beautification thing. But we know, we have an intuition about what is effective.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Chris Williamson?

  It's the, the failures just continue to stack up in really interesting ways.

• 1:22:43Macken Murphy?

  Well, this is something that we proposed actually in our PNAS paper. Uh, in the discussion section, we talked about this where it's like, it is interesting and quite conspicuous, but also quite circumstantial. That over the 1900s, there's pretty good data from David Buss. It's hard to do. It's hard to gather the survey data, but it does seem that over time throughout the 1900s, um, especially in the period after women's kind of financial emancipation, let's call it.

• 1:23:09Macken Murphy?

  Mate preferences converged quite a bit between men and women.

• 1:23:12Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:23:13Macken Murphy?

  And then also we're now seeing this tremendous behavioral convergence where it's like, women aren't doing sports cars and flashy watches, but they do have pretty nice handbags, pretty nice shoes, and they are pretty ritzy in terms of their financial.

• 1:23:24Chris Williamson?

  So yes, but that's only signaling to women.

• 1:23:26Macken Murphy?

  And that, well, maybe, and then, uh, but men are definitely, even if you say for the women's side, that's not true. On the men's side, we see that men have tripled their parenting effort since the 1970s. Um, and male beautification, I know that it's really trendy right now with the whole looks maxing thing. But this is actually just the newest instantiation of a documented trend going back to the 1990s. You can read the historian Lynn Luciano's work on this, uh, where male beautification has increased decade on decade to a point where basically everyone, even like a normal man who doesn't consider himself like a beautifying person. Uh, his daily routine would be unrecognizable to his grandfather, like the average.

• 1:24:05Chris Williamson?

  Shave your head, dude. Shave your head. You don't need to think about it.

• 1:24:07Macken Murphy?

  We did a, we did a little data analysis, um, on using health data, essentially seeing like, how much has weightlifting actually increased? And generation on generation, it's like you go from basically like not a behavior to every young man is now like every, every man, like every other member of Gen Z essentially is like a recreational bodybuilder.

• 1:24:30Chris Williamson?

  That's, I totally.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Women do find that attractive though, right? Um, they do find, uh, some, some muscularity attractive and, uh, good grooming attractive. They find parenting attractive, but I'm not persuaded at all. In fact, I don't think it's the case that men think that, um, she's really hot. I love that handbag.

• 1:24:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Macken Murphy?

  I don't think, I don't think so either. Maybe that was a bit cheeky, but I do think that it is, I do think it's conspicuous. Um, and so it's worth pointing out where it's like, I don't think that women are necessarily signaling their resources to attract men. But it's interesting that they're signaling resources more over the same time period. And then the male beautification, I would really put my foot down and say, no, that, that is to attract women. And I think it is because they have their own money.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So you're, this is your pet theory, right? That because the socioeconomic imbalance between men and women has been reduced or even reversed. Men need to find a different way. They need to compete on another domain of attractiveness. And that has been self-beautification. I'm going to make myself look nicer. Now.

• 1:25:28Macken Murphy?

  Beauty is the, beauty is the flashy one. Uh, parenting is the quiet one that's actually better evidenced where it's like men used to. Yeah, exactly. Where it's like, and we see this even in, um, in Lee's 2015 study. Um, where it does seem that when women have their own money, they recognize where it's like, well, I have the financial thing kind of sorted. I really need like a helper at the nest a little bit more. And that's been the preference shift. And men have definitely responded to that. I mean, men have tripled their, a man today spends more time with children. I believe, I think I heard this from you, that it was than, than women did in the 1950s.

• 1:26:02Rob Henderson

  There's a dramatic difference though, at least in the US context. I've read that this differs by socioeconomic status and education where educated, upper middle-class men are spending far more time with their children than fathers in the past, whereas non-college men, um, are spending the same amount as, uh, decades past or even slightly less.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  And the average is getting brought up by.

• 1:26:24Rob Henderson

  Primarily by college educated men.

• 1:26:26Macken Murphy?

  Interesting. Although those, those women don't necessarily have as much money.

• 1:26:29Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Chris Williamson?

  It's maybe though.

• 1:26:31Rob Henderson

  But then the men are also spending less. Well, yeah.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  It's part of it though, just that people are, um, guys are thinking it's only fair. You know, they're responding to arguments that have been made by, by feminists and others. Just that guys haven't been pulling their weight in the past and they think that they should.

• 1:26:46Rob Henderson

  To a degree, uh, can I, on this handbag point, I think I heard this from Tanya Reynolds, that, um, she suggested that, that it's not, it's not that, uh, men obviously aren't attracted to, you know, these luxurious handbags. And, uh, in some cases, women, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're buying these handbags or wearing them to impress women.

• 1:27:03Chris Williamson?

  I know what you're getting at.

• 1:27:04Rob Henderson

  But it's about deterring, deterring rivals.

• 1:27:07Chris Williamson?

  Look at how much my husband is in the hole for this stupid bag. That he doesn't understand what it is. None of his friends understand what it is. I'm not even doing it for other guys.

• 1:27:18Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Chris Williamson?

  It's not my boobs, right? Which would be the sort of thing that wouldn't be a deterrent. It would actually probably be the cause of ire from other women. Whereas

• 1:27:28Chris Williamson?

  women would compliment handbags more than they would compliment boobs.

• 1:27:31Rob Henderson

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:27:32Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:27:33Rob Henderson

  And so if you imagine that we're in an environment of, uh, you know, increasing mate competition, if you were in.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  The big engagement ring. Why the massive engagement ring? Look at how much he's in the hole.

• 1:27:42Rob Henderson

  Yeah. So ultimately it still comes back to mating.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  But what's the benefit though of intimidating other women and saying, look at this great handbag?

• 1:27:48Rob Henderson

  To keep them away from the, the partner.

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  But why, if guys don't care about it, why would other women think, well, I better stay away because I don't have as, as nice a handbag.

• 1:27:56Rob Henderson

  Well, I, I, if, if he's so invested in her that he spent 20 grand on a handbag, then it's probably not worth my time to poach him or to attempt to poach him.

• 1:28:03Chris Williamson?

  I see.

• 1:28:04Macken Murphy?

  So it could be, it could be mate poaching deterrents. It could also be just kind of classic, high status to low status threat behavior.

• 1:28:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Macken Murphy?

  Um, I remember literally the first day of my PhD, arrived in Melbourne, um, and went for a walk with Candace. And I asked her this exact question. I was just like, why, why do you think women love the handbags? Cause I knew that she was really into beautification stuff and that she really had her head around those things. And she just immediately said, scare young women, just immediately. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, okay, interesting. And I do think that it is, um, I, I feel like I've, I've since then maybe tried to observe it as like a second order thing. And I think it's kind of maybe the male equivalent of like, a guy who's really jacked walking into the room. When a woman walks in and she's very glamorous, she's got the expensive shoes, the expensive bags, throws it on the table.

• 1:28:47Chris Williamson?

  The long nails, the long hair.

• 1:28:48Macken Murphy?

  It's like, I like, I could, I run this shit. Like, it's kind of like that atmosphere.

• 1:28:51Chris Williamson?

  But there's also a sense, at least with guys, guys that have got a ton of muscle on them. Uh, you have to have spare time. You have to have spare time. You have to have spare money to be able to afford the food and the PEDs. You need to be at least somewhat disciplined. You need to have the time to be able to plan your training sessions and, you know, not be at work every single hour of the day in the same way as the long nails that a woman might have and the well-done hair and the good beauty regime is costly in terms of time. And that indicates an awful lot more about lifestyle than just resources do. But I totally didn't think about the fact that guys going to the gym is a form of male beautification. If you class that in, which I just like, totally did not consider. If you add in guys going to the gym as a form of male beautification, it's got to be

• 1:29:36Chris Williamson?

  four X, five X, six X, 10 X, what it would have been a hundred years ago for male beautification.

• 1:29:40Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what the best, uh, that's what the best study on beautification did. It's, it's Monica Wall's study. Um, it's, and she found that in all, except for seven countries, women beautified more. Uh, there were, there were seven that men beautified more, um, slightly. Um, and this was the weightlifting side of it essentially was, was, was the behavior where men were.

• 1:30:03Chris Williamson?

  It's the big Pac-Man chunk that's been taken out of the side.

• 1:30:05Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it is. And, uh, and some might say, oh, well, a lot of men beautify, a lot of men hit the gym, sorry, for health, not beautification. And some of them do it for status competitions. They actually, but they thought of that. They had a question in there that it's like, uh, okay, doing it for beauty though, basically how much time are you, like bodybuilding? And so they, they, they really were able to drill down on that. And there was one other behavior. This is so counterintuitive where among the people who did it. Men actually did this behavior more. So think about different beautification behaviors. I won't bore you by making you guess, but it was makeup. Among people who wear makeup, the men who wear makeup spend way more time on it than the women.

• 1:30:48Chris Williamson?

  Just because they're less good at it?

• 1:30:51Rob Henderson

  They've been grown up on YouTube tutorial.

• 1:30:52Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I think that it's, what she said to me was that she thinks that it's essentially men who wear makeup have some kind of special qualitative difference. Maybe it's that they're like a sense. I told her, look, you're picking up on like male beauty influencers essentially like, like who is? And so they just have different.

• 1:31:07Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be a small pool.

• 1:31:08Macken Murphy?

  Yeah. But I thought that was interesting is that the, is that in terms of numbers among the people.

• 1:31:13Chris Williamson?

  Just James Charles on repeat.

• 1:31:14Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, it's just James Charles clocking in 16 hours a day and causing the difference. But it was, it was interesting. So it was basically, yeah, there was this, uh, that was the second biggest difference technically was the weightlifting. The biggest was the makeup, but it was because of that effect.

• 1:31:27Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the clavicular thing, it's kind of fascinating, the weightlifting being the biggest change because I don't know whether guys increasing their upper body strength makes a bigger impact on attractiveness or formidability. Like if you were to just to rank it, starting at a baseline of this and you do, you gain 10 pounds of lean muscle mass. Are you more attractive or more, more formidable to other guys? That would be fascinating to work out because I don't know what the net gain is. And obviously you get both and that's what's great. But certainly when we look at sort of the myth of Chad and Louis Theroux's documentary and sort of the caricature of hyper masculinity at the moment. A lot of what guys are doing, it's the male to male transsexual, as Mary Harrington calls it.

• 1:32:11Chris Williamson?

  It's like the most caricatured parts of, of the masculine look to the point where that hyper masculinized face we know from tons and tons of data is not as attractive as a average or slightly feminized face on a man is to women. And all of these other things to me seem to be just signaling formidability. Signaling status and formidability to other men. It's the handbag of the face.

• 1:32:37Rob Henderson

  So the David Putz work would suggest it's more about formidability or rather the, the increase in formidability would outpace the, the increase.

• 1:32:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you want to just redo it? I mean, we've dropped it on the show like 10 times, but it's the fucking, it is just the best. Can you, do you know it?

• 1:32:51Rob Henderson

  Yeah, I know. Yeah. Yeah, I can do it. Uh, so David Putz, uh, and his colleagues famously did this study. Where they brought in a group of men and recorded them in these videos, uh, and very, very short clips. And then they brought in a different group of men to watch the men, uh, in these videos. And then they asked these men who were watching these other men in the clip, um, they asked them a question, which is, uh, how likely is it that this man that you're watching in this clip could beat a man in a physical fight? And it was arranged from very likely to very unlikely. Uh, and then they showed, um, a group of women, these videos as well of these men in these short clips.

• 1:33:32Rob Henderson

  And they asked these women, okay, this man in this video, uh, how sexually attractive is this man? And then, uh, these researchers followed up with those men in the videos 18 months later. And, um, you know, collected data on them, including how many sexual partners they'd had over the previous 18 months. And they found that how formidable they were, uh, predicted how many sexual partners they had. Whereas how sexually attractive they were to these women, uh, had no relationship at all. So formidability.

• 1:34:03Chris Williamson?

  The most fucking insane study.

• 1:34:06Rob Henderson

  Now, as, you know, as we'd mentioned, this is, uh, this, this was on, um, college students, you know, fraternity, uh, members, but.

• 1:34:14Macken Murphy?

  It was like a specific frat, wasn't it?

• 1:34:16Rob Henderson

  It wasn't. I think so. Okay. But, um, you know, this is consistent with David Putz's other work showing that formidability seems to have this huge effect on sexual success.

• 1:34:26Chris Williamson?

  This is my take, this is my take on clavicular and the looks maxing world.

• 1:34:30Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Chris Williamson?

  That they have closed their eyes, thrown the dart and hit the bullseye. If they've fluked optimizing formidability for male attention over attractiveness to only land in the middle of David Putz's study, finding out that formidability is better predictive of male mating success than attractiveness.

• 1:34:47Rob Henderson

  Fame is also this form of like psychological formidability too, where, you know, I've, I've seen.

• 1:34:53Chris Williamson?

  How well regarded I am.

• 1:34:54Rob Henderson

  And they'll, they'll keep their distance from, from a Leo, like a famous person, you know, like if, if there's a famous man who's getting a lot of attention from women. Ordinary men are going to be intimidated by that fame and they're probably not going to try to interrupt him or compete with him for attention and that kind of thing. But if you're famous and you're jacked, then it's like, you know, like imagine The Rock being surrounded by, how many men are going to be like, oh, I could take that girl. I can poach that girl from The Rock. Like he's famous and he's jacked. And so no one will attempt to interfere with his, uh, his mating success.

• 1:35:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, haven't you been studying female teacher sex scandals?

• 1:35:26Macken Murphy?

  Studying.

• 1:35:27Rob Henderson

  That was, that was behind the paywall, but I love Chris Williamson and I love modern wisdom. So, you know, let's.

• 1:35:30Chris Williamson?

  Bring it out.

• 1:35:31Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Yeah. This is, uh, this was my, you know, kind of, this is my conjecture. I, I don't have hard evidence for this, but I was building on something that Louise Perry had written. I believe this was in The Spectator. You know, she was kind of riffing on this idea of, of OnlyFans and how sexual attention for women can be as satisfying as, um, as, you know, actual sex can be for men. So, you know, men really like to have sex. Women really like sexual attention and these can be sort of equally powerful incentives. And, you know, in the context of OnlyFans, it's this supernormal stimulus in the way that porn is for men. So porn, you know, you do novelty, all these different naked women and so on. It's very exciting for men, whereas OnlyFans as a creator can be very exciting for women because you're getting

• 1:36:14Rob Henderson

  large, huge amount of sexual attention from thousands of men and all of them are praising you and telling you how beautiful you are. You could imagine this would be, uh, extremely, uh, enjoyable for some women. Now this, the female sexual scandal thing, the female teacher sexual scandal, I should say. And every few months we see these stories come out of some surprisingly attractive female teacher who sleeps with a male student, some 15, 16 year old kid. And, you know, all these, you know, the, the, the online discourse around this always goes crazy. It's also important here to remember that male teachers are still far more likely to, um, uh, commit this transgression of sleeping with an underage student than female teachers are. The reason why those stories go viral is because again, they're anomalous.

• 1:36:56Rob Henderson

  My suggestion for at least in some cases, why these female teachers sleep with their male students is because the response that they get from the male student is, is a one of a kind, unique sort of supernormal stimulus. Where, you know, if you're an attractive 25 year old woman and you get naked in front of, you know, your typical 28 year old guy who's seen naked women before. Whatever look on his face, whatever attention he gives you is not going to be nearly as potent as when you undress for the first time that you see. And you see a, uh.

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  Now that look.

• 1:37:37Rob Henderson

  Do I look like a chef?

• 1:37:38Chris Williamson?

  That look with your race.

• 1:37:40Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Half, half Latino, half Asian.

• 1:37:42Chris Williamson?

  Does not scream captain of the ship when it's facing backward. I don't know what it is. You look like, you look like the guy out of Tintin.

• 1:37:50Rob Henderson

  Wait, I don't know this.

• 1:37:52Chris Williamson?

  Pull up the fucking, pull up the dude from Tintin in the hat. You can keep going for now.

• 1:37:56Rob Henderson

  Oh, I lost, uh, okay. So, um, you know, so, so the response, right? So you're, you're an attractive 25 year old woman. You get naked in front of a 25 year old guy. You know, the response is, you know, he's going to be like, wow, cool. Cause you know, women, men like seeing naked women. But a 16 year old male who has seen very few naked women in his life, he sees a fully grown, you know, woman at the peak of her fertility and so on. For the first time, the attention he gives you is going to be extremely potent. And it's the kind of look and level of attention that most people wouldn't have access to.

• 1:38:31Chris Williamson?

  The reason that this is interesting is what is the motivation for these female teachers to do it? For male teachers, we have at least a little bit more of an understanding.

• 1:38:39Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:38:39Chris Williamson?

  I think there is a question, and that's one of the reasons it's fascinating. It's so anomalous. Like, why? Why? You could go and get anyone.

• 1:38:46Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Well, well, so for this, it's, it's if you're, you know, if you're a predatory male teacher, you know, it's sort of this warped extreme version of the typical male, which is, you know, you want, uh, you know, someone who's, uh, attractive and whatever. And then like, you know, this, there's that kind of like vulnerability and a power asymmetry and so on. Whereas I think if you're a predatory female teacher, you get your rocks off through this extreme level of attention. It's not so much the sex in and of itself, although that may be part of it because again, you get to see this teenage boy have his first sexual experience with a full grown woman. And I think that in itself, that kind of power that you have over him and that level of attention is so unique. That you couldn't replicate in any other situation or context. In the same way that for the male teacher, right?

• 1:39:29Rob Henderson

  Like sleeping with this underage girl, you couldn't replicate that in any other.

• 1:39:33Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I read, I'm into like horrendous chick books, like, just like, like every Freedom McFadden book, I just blast through. And, uh, I've read The Teacher. Have you read The Teacher? Dude, it is, I mean, Freedom McFadden is the person that did The Housemaid, right? Uh, which Sydney Sweeney just starred in, and then she did The Housemaid's Revenge, and then she did The Housemaid Cometh Backeth. And then she's done like, uh, The Patient and The Teacher and a bunch of others. And it's just easy reading, right? It's my guilty pleasure. And, um, this one about the teacher, the, the main guy that usually all the guys in the books turn out to be the bad guy.

• 1:40:13Chris Williamson?

  Like the shock horror Freedom McFadden, like the guys turn out to be the bad guys and they're all scumbags, the way that they're presented. So like rightly so. But this one takes it to another level. And it turns out this teacher's being like wooing. First off, he's wooing a 16 year old and then you find out that he was wooing another 16 year old. But doing it when she was 15 and then it turns out that he's one, when she's 14. And I'm like, this is the, it completely changed. Even the 16 thing, you're already like, fuck me. And it's in the first few chapters, like, whoa, that's, okay, that's a little strange. The final, for people that want to read The Teacher, listen, listen away.

• 1:40:51Chris Williamson?

  The final, final, final fucking bit of it, the whole twist at the end is that the young jock who's in high school has been sleeping behind the back of the guy that was the nasty teacher with his wife. And the jock was 16 too.

• 1:41:09Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like, the only reason, the, the reason that you had to put in, oh, and he slept with this other student when they were 14 is to even the scales. But even then, when I read it, there's a bit of like retribution. The guy was real mean. And then he's like, tried to kill people and whatever, whatever. Like he had to come in and fuck him. But that, even this example that we've got in front of us, as I read it, I was like, good for her. She got railed in the shoe cupboard. You know what I mean? He's a guy that worked in, in like the local shoe store or whatever. And at the end you find out it's the high school jock. I was like. Is that really the, it just completely lays out, like however ethically dubious it was. I mean, maybe she means it as a, something for people to think about, because it definitely made me think, made me go, huh, how do I feel about that?

• 1:41:54Chris Williamson?

  Do I feel, does the fact that it was being done by her husband before and younger, make this less, because she's like a 32 year old woman, the 16 year old boy.

• 1:42:05Rob Henderson

  She described as attractive in the book.

• 1:42:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, and classically overlooked.

• 1:42:11Rob Henderson

  Okay.

• 1:42:11Chris Williamson?

  You know, like.

• 1:42:13Rob Henderson

  She wants the attention.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  That's with your theory.

• 1:42:15Rob Henderson

  Yeah, well, I mean, this idea of like, so I don't know, like, because every time we see a story, it's always an attractive female teacher. And maybe it's possible, again, there's this dark matter.

• 1:42:24Chris Williamson?

  The unattractive ones just don't make the headlines?

• 1:42:27Rob Henderson

  Yeah, because no one wants to click on an unattractive teacher who sleeps with some kid. But if she's hot, people will click on the story. But if it's the case that more attractive teachers tend to do this, I think that too sort of aligns with, well, well, two, two things here, which is one, like, they are likely to get that sort of intense reaction from male students because they're attractive. And then the other thing is they just have more opportunity, right? Like, if you're an attractive person, you just have more opportunity in general. And so, you know, that also sort of, you know, it's, maybe, maybe there are ugly teachers who would like to sleep with their teachers. They just don't have, you know, very many chances.

• 1:42:56Macken Murphy?

  Didn't you have a Twitter poll on this regarding, it was, it was really interesting, Would You Rather? Where you found a big sex difference on like, would you rather sleep with someone very attractive? Or someone who's very attracted to you?

• 1:43:08Rob Henderson

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I put it, two different polls on Twitter. First, for men, and I asked, you know, this is a forced choice, this contrived scenario. Would you rather sleep with someone who you find intensely attractive, but they are not at all attracted to you? Or would you rather sleep with someone who finds you very attractive, but you are not attracted at all to them? So I administered that poll first to men and to women and literally got the exact opposite, where something like 75% of men were like, give me the hot person who finds me ugly. That's way more preferable than sleeping with an ugly person who finds me hot. Whereas women, it was the opposite. Women were, about 75% of women said they would rather sleep with someone who they find ugly, who finds them attractive,

• 1:43:52Rob Henderson

  than to sleep with a hot person who was unattracted to them. So it's almost like men and women were made for each other.

• 1:43:57Chris Williamson?

  This was something, this was a mess up that I, this is a mess up that I did in my conversation with Esther Perel, where she said something to the effect of, when have you ever, she was talking about desire and what makes a woman feel desired? Said something to the effect of, when have you ever heard of a woman being turned on because her partner was like aroused in front of her? Like, women need to be wooed. And I was just like, in, I wasn't in my EP hat, I was in my relating and she's the expert hat. And I should have just said, dude, like, being desired is probably the number one thing that women want as a turn on. Or the other thing that women want as a turn on, just put this hat back on backwards for me. I've worked out who it is that you look like. I got it wrong.

• 1:44:36Macken Murphy?

  I thought that was the other.

• 1:44:37Chris Williamson?

  Put it on backwards.

• 1:44:38Rob Henderson

  Hold on, I got a, you know, I got a big dome, man.

• 1:44:40Chris Williamson?

  You do, both of you do, actually. I couldn't believe it. No, no, no, so, there it is. So I thought that it was Tintin. It's not Tintin, it's Indiana Jones, and it's this.

• 1:44:52Rob Henderson

  I'm just glad you.

• 1:44:53Chris Williamson?

  Is that not you?

• 1:44:55Rob Henderson

  I mean, oh, wait, but don't I have to wear it like this?

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Chris Williamson?

  No, he's got it on backwards, does he not?

• 1:45:01Speaker 02

  No, he's got it the right way, there.

• 1:45:02Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, it's not a captain's hat. Anyway, I knew that I was right.

• 1:45:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, uh.

• 1:45:09Rob Henderson

  Wait, that's Tintin?

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 1:45:10Chris Williamson?

  No, that's fucking the kid from Indiana Jones.

• 1:45:12Rob Henderson

  Andy!

• 1:45:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm like, I'm kind of fascinated by what's going to unfold over the next few years with what's happening with increased socio-economic successful women, male beautification. I actually think that what guys think they're doing, even if it doesn't work with the formidability, double loop, close eye, bullseye thing, is, uh, I think that it's a kind of rejection of the female gaze in some ways. Like, it's just male to male, intersexual competition. Do you ever remember Ziz? You know, Ziz, the, he was a, kind of the original Luxmaxer in some ways. He was a bodybuilding icon in 2010, 2011, 2012, and died, Aussie guy, real good looking dude, just trained in the gym. He wasn't like doing the hardcore Luxmax and stuff, but just trained in the gym.

• 1:45:58Chris Williamson?

  And he had this line, which was, disregard women, acquire dance moves. And it was just him talking about, you want to go out with your boys and have a good time? And he was saying this as a naturally very attractive man who then done some weightlifting to make him look real Adonis, Greek gaudy. But I get the sense that it is kind of a rejection of, I'm just going to focus on becoming the most, like, mog. Mog, you know where that comes from? Do you know the etymology of mogging is?

• 1:46:23Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, a mog.

• 1:46:23Chris Williamson?

  Alpha male of the group. That was what it came, and then that shortened to mogging. So alpha male of the group is referring to your status within the hierarchy of other men. Not like Chad of the group, Chad is almost rejected as a term. It's like, I'm not doing this for anybody else, and this is, you know.

• 1:46:42Rob Henderson

  This is, there was that, the clivicular profile, and, you know, I don't know how representative he is, but this is, this aligns with what you're saying here, where he said two interesting things. One, he said something like, you know, I, my, the main thing is mogging people, like, that's where he gets his rocks.

• 1:46:57Chris Williamson?

  All I want to do is mogging.

• 1:46:58Rob Henderson

  Mog, that's like, that's what's fun for me. The second thing he said was, knowing he could have sex with a woman was more satisfying than actually having sex with a woman. Just the knowledge that he could is, is good enough for him. So, yeah, it's like disregard women, you know, get, get jacked, hire dance moves or whatever, mog other men and, and not have sex with women.

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  How common is that ever going to be, though?

• 1:47:17Rob Henderson

  I think it's going to be that comment.

• 1:47:18Chris Williamson?

  Exactly, yeah. You've got to be a real extreme to say, I'm going to do all of the work to be able to have sex with a woman, but it's somehow more enjoyable to me to not do. I mean, this might be part of the medical castration thing that's going on, or the performance enhancing castration. How much do you think a denial of sex differences at the moment has led to the current mating crisis? Is that something that you've drawn a lineage through?

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  Hmm, you're looking at me, because I'm talking quite a bit in my book about the denial of sex differences. But I can't see a direct line from that.

• 1:47:51Rob Henderson

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

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  The dangers of minimizing, so we talked about this, right? So one danger is that just as people used to try to force boys and girls and men and women into traditional gender roles, even if they didn't quite fit them, you can get, you can get the reverse. If you minimize or deny sex differences and just think that they're due to discrimination, you're going to think that actually we should be trying to minimize them, we should be trying to push boys and girls and men and women out of traditional gender roles. And that is a problem if they don't fit into them. That's, that's one problem. Another one, if you minimize sex differences, is that you might fail to notice physical problems and psychological problems that present differently in one sex than the other.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  So a classic example is cardiovascular problems like, like heart attacks. The symptoms are different for men and women. And the male symptoms are better known. So the pain in the sort of chest and down the arms is quite well known. That's much less common in women. Shortness of breath is a much more common symptom in women. People don't tend to know that. They often, in the past especially, just didn't know that. And so women would have heart attacks and not be aware of it until they'd progressed quite a long way down the road. And so, you know, it cost lives and, by, by not noticing sex differences rather than, than noticing.

• 1:49:36Rob Henderson

  On that point, like, minimizing sex, I'm, I'm thinking about, with Chris's question of something like, you know, if you truly believe in sort of, you know, blank slatism for men and women, and then you're, like, you're a young and naive girl, and you go off to college, and you assume, oh, you know, men and women are basically the same, and then you go to a frat party and get really drunk, and you assume, you know, guys are kind of like girls, and there's no real, and you don't understand that there are like, you know, predatory men. You know, the average difference isn't, as you've mentioned in your book, aggressiveness is not that large. But in the tales, the most extremely aggressive, sexually predatory people tend to be men. And if you go to, yeah, get drunk at a frat party and you're 18, you don't understand there are sex differences here in terms of, you know, motivations around sex and so forth, that this can.

• 1:50:19Chris Williamson?

  I don't know whether it's a denial of sex, of differences between the sexes, it's a denial of where they come from.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  Well, there is both.

• 1:50:26Rob Henderson

  I think.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  And I think the one you're talking about is where you might fail to see the sex difference at all, regardless of where it comes from, and open yourself up to certain kind of risks that you otherwise might not. But you are right, there are a lot of sex differences, people will acknowledge the differences, including that difference, but just think you can attribute it entirely to, largely to socialization.

• 1:50:46Chris Williamson?

  What's happening with the dual mating and mate switching hypothesis race at the moment? Has there been any update?

• 1:50:52Macken Murphy?

  Um, I, I, I can't spoil their party, unfortunately, but there is, there's news.

• 1:50:57Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fuck you, dude.

• 1:50:58Macken Murphy?

  I genuinely can't.

• 1:50:59Chris Williamson?

  Behind the scene, under the bus, because you've got special behind the scenes access.

• 1:51:03Macken Murphy?

  It's not, it's not that, it's just that I recognize that when people present work that's, you know, like, at a, at a conference, it's like, oh, it's preliminary, oh, we're going to have to roll it out in its own.

• 1:51:11Chris Williamson?

  This is a modern wisdom conference.

• 1:51:13Macken Murphy?

  I know, I know. I mean, I'll happily, I'll happily tell you the full kind of update.

• 1:51:18Chris Williamson?

  All right, off air. You're like, when I, you know, you know what it's like? It's like when I bring Navy SEALs on and they go, dude, I know exactly what happened with the summer. I can't tell you on air.

• 1:51:26Macken Murphy?

  Well, it's, it's, it's not me trying to awe a farmer or anything like that. It's literally just like, I know that, I know that, I know that, I know that Ryan Dobson and, and his party are, are going to be rolling out some cool research pretty soon.

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  Is it not public once it's been put out at a conference?

• 1:51:42Macken Murphy?

  Well, I was told by Candace, no, but maybe that, that's kind of a social intuition.

• 1:51:47Chris Williamson?

  Come on, Candace.

• 1:51:48Macken Murphy?

  But I, I'm a, I'm a new academic, so to say, so I don't necessarily have the intuition.

• 1:51:53Chris Williamson?

  So this is the issue, this is the issue that Macken's got. Macken and Williams the same, and I don't understand it, but I kind of get it. There's sort of the mafioso of the human behavior and ecology world, and you don't want to step on the toes of anybody who's just a, a mere underling. But if you were the boss, right, or an underboss, if you're David, if you're David Buss, you can just start spouting theories at whenever you want. But if you're sort of a new entrant at the bottom of the pyramid.

• 1:52:18Rob Henderson

  That's constantly signaling.

• 1:52:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. Okay, well, I've got, I've got a question that I've never been able to work out. Why do you think women's sexual desire declines faster than men's in relationships?

• 1:52:31Macken Murphy?

  I genuinely don't know. I tweeted it as a question. I'm hoping that maybe Steve or Rob here have a better answer than I do.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  I genuinely don't know either.

• 1:52:38Chris Williamson?

  Bro, if I'm three for three here, this is fucking money.

• 1:52:41Rob Henderson

  I mean, would it not make sense that women at the peak of fertility would have the strongest desire for sex? I mean, for reproductive.

• 1:52:50Macken Murphy?

  But this isn't, this isn't, so that effect exists as well.

• 1:52:53Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Macken Murphy?

  But this effect is even more peculiar, where if they remate again later, the sex drive goes up again. It's just that it's like, oh, the first year or two.

• 1:53:04Rob Henderson

  Sort of a mate retention strategy, right? You're in a new relationship, so you would want to sort of boost your sexual, you know, whatever libido to.

• 1:53:12Macken Murphy?

  So you're getting, it's an adaptation to get them on the hook to say, if you mate with me, there'll be sex all the time.

• 1:53:18Rob Henderson

  Yeah, but once you have a guy locked in and you've been married for 20 years and you're no longer fertile and, you know, the risks to you are very low if you're, you know, in.

• 1:53:27Macken Murphy?

  I wish it was 20 years. The decline is, the decline is much, it's precipitous.

• 1:53:31Chris Williamson?

  So within the first year, I think it drops by half and then it drops again and then it drops again. But I talked about this earlier on, your.

• 1:53:38Rob Henderson

  Risks of pregnancy are much higher the older you get, too.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's not a big cost for men. So maybe looking at the women's side of it is the wrong, maybe it's just, it doesn't decline for men because it's not such a big cost for men.

• 1:53:47Macken Murphy?

  Maybe sex starts as a bargaining strategy, but then, sorry, a retention strategy, but then becomes a bargaining chip later. I don't know if that's too.

• 1:53:56Chris Williamson?

  That's fucking cool.

• 1:53:57Macken Murphy?

  I don't know if that's too out there, but maybe the, maybe the strategic function of non-concept of sex, because there's two types of sex, right? There's concept of sex and non-concept of sex, and humans are weird that we do both. And this non-concept of sex, I could see it having this retention function early. But then, once you're in the relationship, it's like, well, what am I doing with this? And maybe it's, maybe it's a bargaining chip of some.

• 1:54:17Chris Williamson?

  I remember that study that you tweeted, which was, uh, women say that inside of relationships, they have around about the, the amount of sex that they want, and men self-report that they would like to have about twice as much sex as they are, which suggests that the couple zero in on the preferred level of sex that the woman wants and that the man is making a compromise.

• 1:54:37Rob Henderson

  Yeah. Yeah, that was, that was from Roy Baumeister, if I'm not mistaken. And yeah, I think he does, he does, um, offer this as a, as an idea that, um, the, the, that sex can be a bargaining chip and that kind of as, as the relationship prolongs and endures and so on, that, uh, you know, sex is essentially used initially, the reason why it's so high is to lock the male partner in and to, you know, to, to, you know.

• 1:55:03Chris Williamson?

  Get this all the time.

• 1:55:04Rob Henderson

  Get the commitment and then, you know, once, once he's, uh, he's committed, then you don't have to have as much sex. You're thinking about sort of the costs and benefits of sex in general. And, you know, the, the costs are relatively low when you're in your twenties and, you know, early thirties. But then as you age, uh, pregnancy, you know, gets high and then you hit menopause and.

• 1:55:22Chris Williamson?

  But if you could, presumably these studies are controlled for age, though.

• 1:55:25Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, again, there is, the age effect is real. Um, there's actually some new data on that, which is not, uh, which is kind of, kind of weird, actually, but we can talk about that separately. But yeah, no, it's a, it's a, it's a within a relationship time span effect and it's surprisingly quick. So it wouldn't necessarily just be like fertility decline. It seems to be like genuine, um, I mean, maybe it's just non, maybe there's not much evolutionary storytelling to be told here. It's like boredom, but I don't know what's the.

• 1:55:53Rob Henderson

  Are we talking like, like in absolute terms? Like, how much does it actually decline absolutely?

• 1:55:57Macken Murphy?

  It'll be on my Twitter if you want to pull up the graph.

• 1:55:59Chris Williamson?

  Time one or time two, it's gonna be hard to find.

• 1:56:01Rob Henderson

  Because like, relative to men, it totally makes sense that men are always going to have a stronger sex drive, like in relationships, single, whatever the situation is, men are, just because, you know, like an error management perspective, it's better for men to just sort of be ready to go at any time. But for women, I'm just wondering like how much of, uh, the decline, uh, occurs from time one to time two to time three and so on.

• 1:56:22Speaker 02

  Not, not sure. Um, could I say, you know, the idea of, uh, women using sex to get guys into relationships? I think it's a bit more symmetrical than that. I think that, um, sex bonds both parties, both partners to each other.

• 1:56:35Macken Murphy?

  The, the king of sex differences telling us, I don't think there's a sex difference there, which is kind of fun.

• 1:56:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's always gotta be one.

• 1:56:40Rob Henderson

  I wanted to ask something, um, and then you can tell me if this is taking us too far afield here. Um, on our earlier discussion, something occurred to me, which is, you know, like, what's the question we're interested in? Like regarding sex differences? Is it, um, you know, how interesting that men are different now than they were decades ago? Or how interesting is it that sex differences are larger in this context, but smaller in that one? Or are we interested in, um, you know, what's like the true sex difference? You know, you strip away everything and like, once you really drill down, here's what it is. And I remember I had this conversation, um, I think I was in college, you know, working as an RA years ago. And, um, you know, we were reading about weird societies, Western educated, industrialized, rich democracies.

• 1:57:23Rob Henderson

  And, you know, there was this thing going on, both of you, you know, all of you are aware of this of like, oh, we can't really learn anything about, I mean, I'm simplifying some, we can't really learn much about human psychology, studying weird societies, because this is a very sort of peculiar time in history. These are very strange, you know, weird societies in both senses of the term. And so we need to collect data from other countries and other, uh, parts of the world and, you know, look historically and so on. And I, I wondered like, like when we're trying to study psychology and we're trying to study human nature, what is more reflective of human nature too? Is it, um, you gotta look at the hunter gatherers, you know, whether extant hunter gatherers or hunter gatherers, you know, in pre-agricultural times, when they were sort of scattered all over the world and had access to different kinds of land and territory and so on.

• 1:58:09Rob Henderson

  We gotta study the hunter gatherers in environments of relative scarcity, uh, because that's what humans, uh, that's how humans lived for most of our evolutionary history. That's what human nature is. Or is it, um, that can't be human nature because they lived in relative scarcity? And they're, they're only behaving that way because they're stuck in this kind of, you know, archaic, pre-industrial, pre-literate society. And actually, we should be studying rich societies because now that you have all of your needs met, now sort of the true underlying, uh, traits and attributes and characteristics can finally emerge and, um, you know, instantiate themselves.

• 1:58:44Macken Murphy?

  So it's kind of like the gender, gender inequality paradox, but except with, it's like the abundance paradox, let's say, we're becoming.

• 1:58:50Rob Henderson

  Like, like what, what, I mean, yeah, or, or, or does the question not even make sense? That there is no real, true human nature and that it'll always kind of interact with environments in weird ways?

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, both of the ideas came to my mind as you were, as you were saying that. Uh, in terms of what the evolutionary push is, just directionally, I think it's good to look at all the different, uh, types of societies. Do you find that in hunter gatherers, does it persist even in weird societies? But sometimes that's quite good evidence of, and weird societies often, you have a push against traditional sex differences and they often emerge anyway, suggesting that, that there is an innate nudge. Yeah, if they get bigger in, uh, abundant societies, it may be that they're, um, expressing themselves more than the level for which they were selected to be expressed.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  So it could be that, uh, human nature is able to express itself to an unnaturally extreme degree, uh, potentially. Yeah, does that?

• 1:59:48Rob Henderson

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 1:59:50Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, I spoke to, um, the anthropologist William Buckner about this and he actually had a real gripe about, uh, the evo psych studies on, um, on sex differences and mate preferences. And his gripe was that if the logic is that the EEA is what forged these, then they really should be more consistent. The environment of evolutionary adaptedness, which isn't, which is, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's, it's, yeah, it's caricatured as like, oh, there was like 10,000 years in the Pleistocene where we're really, but it's really, it's like a composite of all selection that has happened essentially, and Steve could probably summarize it better than me. But, um, his perspective, which I think is really fair, um,

• 2:00:32Macken Murphy?

  was that these sex differences and mate preferences are less consistently found in these small scale hunter gatherer societies, and they're more consistently found in these industrialized populations. And that feels like, it gives me a gut feeling of like, hmm, there's something, something's a little, uh, odd here. Um, because really, if it was like, these are formed by, you know, the, these sex differences and mate preferences evolved in a hunter gatherer context. And then you go and ask the schwa and they're like, hey, we actually don't really agree with you about that. That's, that's real alarm bells. I, it's not, it's not necessarily.

• 2:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Gender equality paradox, but just across time.

• 2:01:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. And you don't find it at all, at all. And some of those societies, right? Some, some sex differences aren't found.

• 2:01:15Macken Murphy?

  And some of them even seem to be reversed, like among the, um, among the wodabe of the Sahel region. It's men who are, you know, wearing tons of makeup and looking incredibly glamorous. And they actually stand side by side in male beauty pageants and the, the females actually pick, um, a, a partner based solely on, on the physical appearance or not, not solely, but you know, quite a lot.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Speaking of some, uh, some odd rituals, Craig Jones, BJJ guy, was telling me he went to go and see a, I don't know whether we're talking hunter gatherer, but certainly something that's got some primitive elements to it. And, um, the young women would walk through a kind of alleyway of men, guys on either sides. And the guys would pick sticks of a particular width and they would whip the girls as they walked past. And the girls were not to make a sound. And if the girls didn't make a sound, they were seen as high status because they could endure, their, their pain tolerance was higher. And every woman that was in this tribe, it may be hunter gatherer stuff, I'm not too sure. Uh, every, uh, girl that was in the tribe, their back was, it looked like some thing horrendous out of the 1700s.

• 2:02:20Macken Murphy?

  So they're signaling mate value through formidability as, as.

• 2:02:23Chris Williamson?

  Through pain tolerance, I could endure childbirth.

• 2:02:26Macken Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:26Chris Williamson?

  Specifically, I can, I can endure childbirth.

• 2:02:29Speaker 02

  We are very varied as a species culturally, right? It's amazing. Yeah, it does give me pause that mate preferences aren't found as consistently among hunter gatherers. Definitely does give me pause. Uh, the reason I don't just automatically just say, well, then it didn't evolve the way evolutionary psychologists have said, is that even though you do more consistently find them in, uh, non-hunter gatherer societies.

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

  You do find them very consistently in those societies, which I think would be surprising if there was no innate push. So I'm not exactly sure how to square the circle there. And it does give me some degree of pause, but yeah, I do think there's something there. And also, you know, there are other lines of evidence that do find it in more traditional societies that do find sex differences and mate preferences, maybe not in sort of self-report contexts, but if you look at folktales and fairy stories from right across the world, different world regions, you do find very consistently that people put more importance on women's appearance than they do on men's and more importance on men's resources and status than they do in women's. So a lot of it does depend on the kind of data that you look at.

• 2:03:34Rob Henderson

  It just occurred to me, Steve, in your book, I think you point out, you know, one line of evidence for, you know, the sex differences being, you know, sort of evolutionary in origin and not entirely socially constructed is the way that gay men, what they find attractive appearance in youth and so on. But do gay women, like, what are they attracted to? Do they like resources and status in their female partners? Does anyone know this?

• 2:04:01Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that they do. And I don't think they put like huge amounts of weight on appearance, even though they're evaluating women rather than.

• 2:04:10Rob Henderson

  Yeah, that makes sense to me because I've seen, you know, gay men tend to be very fit and so on and gay women less so. But then what are they attracted to the kinds of things that heterosexual women are attracted to in a partner, career ambition and success and those kinds of things?

• 2:04:24Chris Williamson?

  You know, I would love to see, I would love to see a sex toy study between what straight women like and what gay women like. Because like, there's no reason that the sex toys should in any way resemble a male.

• 2:04:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, except for female anatomy.

• 2:04:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes, but the way that it's put together, the humanness of it, but it shouldn't actually matter unless you manage to say that, well, and this is true, the penis is the optimal vagina penetrating machine, right? It's been shaped, it's been shaped across time. A billion years. Yeah, over a billion years of penis, penis evolution. Speaking of, speaking of the ways that humans are quite different. Macken, can you tell me what this hamster thing is?

• 2:05:03Macken Murphy?

  What hamster thing? Oh, my gosh.

• 2:05:05Chris Williamson?

  What's this hamster thing? Is this something, something to do with a hamster from you as a kid?

• 2:05:09Macken Murphy?

  What hamster thing?

• 2:05:10Chris Williamson?

  Were you not, were you not obsessed with hamsters?

• 2:05:12Macken Murphy?

  I was, yeah, but it's, I didn't realize that this was gonna be a huge, I didn't realize this was gonna be a huge.

• 2:05:17Chris Williamson?

  It's interesting that you say that because.

• 2:05:19Macken Murphy?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:05:20Rob Henderson

  Oh, nice.

• 2:05:23Macken Murphy?

  That's incredible. Well, I didn't realize that this was public. This is, I feel like I'm in a fever dream and I'm hoping this is happening. But yeah, no, I think that I was obsessed with hamsters as a child.

• 2:05:34Speaker 02

  Not sexually, right? Just to be clear, right?

• 2:05:36Macken Murphy?

  Not sexually, I was just.

• 2:05:37Chris Williamson?

  I pivoted from the penis thing to the hamster thing seamlessly there, but it wasn't for a sex.

• 2:05:41Macken Murphy?

  Yeah, this is, this is an incredible gift. Thank you so much. Yeah, my dad got me a shirt that said hamster man on it. And I think there, I think that there are some photos on Google Images floating around of me as a, of me as an eight-year-old.

• 2:05:51Chris Williamson?

  Be careful what you put on the internet as an eight-year-old.

• 2:05:53Macken Murphy?

  I didn't, I didn't even put it there. This is, I'm gonna put this on right now.

• 2:05:57Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Boys, I appreciate you all. You're all awesome. What did you want to plug? Why should people go to check up?

• 2:06:01Rob Henderson

  Rob Henderson's newsletter on Substack, robkenderson.com, and the paperback of my first book, Troubled, A Memo of Foster Care, Family and Social Class.

• 2:06:08Speaker 02

  Nice. My new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences, my previous book, The Eight That Understood the Universe, and my Substack, which is the Nature, Nurture, Nietzsche Newsletter.

• 2:06:17Macken Murphy?

  Nothing to sell. Follow me on TikTok.

• 2:06:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you do. At Hamster Man on TikTok, or at Macken and Murphy. Boys, I appreciate you all. These roundtable things are so fucking fun. It's the best. It's the best. I love you all. Thank you for coming.

• 2:06:29Speaker 02

  Thanks, Luke Smith.

• 2:06:29Chris Williamson?

  See you next time, everyone. Boys, yes.

• 2:06:32Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:06:33Chris Williamson?

  We've done it.