The Shocking Research On Sexuality They're Trying To Hide - Michael Bailey

J. Michael Bailey is a Northwestern University professor of psychology, researcher, and an author known for his work on sexual orientation and human sexuality. Scientific research has had public scrutiny for a long time. But Michael's most recent study was placed under so much pressure from upset dissidents that the journal formally retracted it. Today we get to find out just why human sexuality is such a dangerous topic to look into. Expect to learn what it's like to be in the middle of a global cancellation furore, what exactly the concept of gynandromorphophilia is, how malleable your sexual orientation actually is, whether lesbians are more likely to become straight again, if bisexuality actually exists, how accurate our gaydars and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Bubs Naturals at https://www.bubsnaturals.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on your first order from Collars&Co at https://collarsandco.com/ (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #research #trans - 00:00 What Happened to Michael’s Recent Article? 04:29 The Topic that Got Michael’s Article Cancelled 12:49 Why Transgenderism Has Increased 21:20 Is Gender Dysphoria Linked with Autism? 25:17 Solutions Following Michael’s Research 31:00 Sexual Orientations of Trans People 41:50 Is Being Sexually Attracted to She-Males Common? 47:14 Are Women Aroused by Straight, Gay & Lesbian Porn? 54:07 Why More Men Experience Strange Sexual Interests 1:00:48 Environmental Impacts on Sexuality 1:10:28 How We Have Become Better at Identifying Gay People 1:14:47 The Malleability of Male Mate Value 1:20:29 Where to Find Michael - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - 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?

  What happened with your recent article?

• 0:03Speaker 01

  So the short answer is that our recent article has been retracted by the publisher of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior where it was published.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Retraction is something, I've never had an article retracted before and it's something that I've associated with terrible things like fraud, plagiarism, grievous mistakes. None of that is true about our article.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  Frankly and honestly, our article was retracted because of the ideas and the evidence it presented that angered transgender activists and their allies who pressured the publisher, who either agreed with them based on politics or chickened out or were worried about business concerns. I can't read their mind, obviously. But I will say that the retraction was a sham.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I would also say that the retraction has backfired entirely from their perspective. Our article has gotten far more attention than it ever would have. The publisher Springer Nature Group keeps metrics on this. Our article has been downloaded almost 100,000 times, which is, you know, that's not perhaps a big deal for mainstream media, but for an academic article, that is extreme. We have received more news

• 1:58Speaker 01

  coverage. We're about 40, ranked 40 out of 400,000 articles of about the same age in terms of media coverage.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Here we are talking, you know, I'm on a big podcast with you. And there have been articles and so on. So I'm not hurting. I just want people to download and read our article. And

• 2:31Speaker 01

  don't pay attention to the retraction notice. It's meaningless.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  If people want to get a hold of the now forbidden article, where should they go?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Same place they ever did. Our article was published, open access. That means we actually had funding from Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, SAGM, to

• 3:00Speaker 01

  publish the article for free reading. You know, most articles, academic articles, have a paywall that non-academics can't get through easily. There's no paywall.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  The retraction simply means, for practical purposes, that Springer stamped the words "retracted article" on every single page of the article, which doesn't affect your ability to read it. And frankly, I

• 3:33Speaker 01

  wear those words as a badge of honor now.

• 3:39Chris Williamson?

  That makes it kind of sexy. It makes it, it feels like it's a top secret seal. So what's there's someone that's listening that wants to go and search, what should they search for on the internet in order to get this article up in the right form?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  So

• 3:54Speaker 01

  what I search in order to go to the site to keep track on our current metrics, you know, I'm really waiting for when we get $100,000 viewed, I'm sorry, 100,000 views. Diaz, D I A Z, Bailey, B A I L E Y. R O G D for Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which is what it's about. And then you'll have links to choose from, choose the one that says Springer, and that'll take you right to the site. You can read the article right there.

• 4:29Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so we flirted with it so far. What was in your forbidden study, which was so reprehensible that caused it to be retracted and stamped with a wax seal?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I'll tell you in a moment, but I just want to give a bit of background. This article was published by me and a co-author, Susanna Diaz. That is not her real name. I don't know her real name.

• 5:06Speaker 01

  She is the mother of a gender Dysphoria child whom she believes has rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is rapid onset gender dysphoria is something we need to talk about. I assume that your audience doesn't necessarily know what it is. It's very important. And it is the reason why the trans activists came after us.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Rapid onset gender dysphoria is the explanation of the surge in cases of gender dysphoria that has happened over the past decade, and especially the past five years.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  The idea is this.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  A subset of gender Dysphoria cases, and now it's by far the greatest percentage, are adolescent girls who never showed any signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. They were not tomboys. They were not masculine. They did, however, have issues. A lot of them had some mental health problems. They had some social problems and so on.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  In adolescence, they tended to hang out with a crowd that was unconventional and progressive and ideological. And they got the idea, based on ideology, that all of their problems are due to underlying transgender that they never knew of before. They suddenly, or rapidly, announced, or they decided that they're transgender, and they announced to their parents. And many of these girls, it's mainly girls, about three quarters. There may be some boys too, but we should talk about them separately.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  A lot of them are demanding very serious

• 7:23Speaker 01

  treatments, including medical treatments. They want testosterone, which has very serious effects on the body. And some of them want surgery, like the amputation of their breasts.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And some of them are getting this.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Our evidence in our article is entirely consistent with that. We surveyed 1,655 parents of youth whom the parents believed had this syndrome. Three quarters of the youth were girls.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  The parents said that indeed, these youth had pre-existing

• 8:20Speaker 01

  mental health issues, and that the mental health issues actually preceded any indication of gender issues by four years. That's a long time.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  The

• 8:37Speaker 01

  youth who were most likely to socially transition, now, social transition means changing their pronouns, changing their style of dress, changing what they call themselves, boy or girl. The youth most likely to socially transition were the ones with the most problems.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  That was also true for medical transition, which was thankfully rare, only about 7% had sought medical or had obtained medical treatment, whereas about 60% had taken many steps to social transition. Parents said after they socially transitioned, they got worse.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  And the best-

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  What does worse mean?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  They

• 9:32Speaker 01

  became less happy, they became less close to their parents. They decompensated. And the best predictor of transition was

• 9:51Speaker 01

  that the family had received a referral to a gender specialist. And if parents visited a gender specialist, they usually felt that the gender specialist pressured them to transition their child.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  So there were some other interesting findings too, but those were the ones that got people upset. And I think those are probably the most important findings because they are consistent with the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. Rapid onset gender dysphoria was first proposed by Lisa Lippman, who published the first paper in 2018. She also received tremendous pushback. Her, the journal where she published her article did not retract it, but they did make her make changes to her original article. And she suffered personal consequences. Brown University, where she was,

• 10:51Speaker 01

  cut off their ties with her. She, you know, she lost contracts with Brown University.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Activists cannot stand the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria. And I understand why. Because it is threatening to their belief system. They're strong, they strongly believe that

• 11:23Speaker 01

  gender dysphoria is always real. And that the best

• 11:29Speaker 01

  way to proceed is to transition as quickly as possible. And furthermore, that youth are always right when they say that they are gender Dysphoria. That they're trans, just believe them. All of these are contradicted by the idea of rapid onset gender dysphoria and our study was strongly consistent

• 11:57Speaker 01

  with

• 12:00Speaker 01

  the existence of rapid onset gender dysphoria. I will admit that ours is only the second major study of this phenomenon and there's plenty of work to do and I don't think that we've got this nailed shut so that everybody is obligated to see this world as we do. But it's an important study and instead of trying to silence our search, it would have been better if the skeptical had done their own studies to try to clarify what they thought was going on. But of course,

• 12:45Speaker 01

  they didn't want to do that.

• 12:49Chris Williamson?

  See if I'm right with my conception of the sort of two current explanations for what's going on with regards to the increase that we've seen over the last 10 years or so. One theory posits that

• 13:05Chris Williamson?

  The world's degree of acceptance of trans people at large has changed. It's called the left-handedness argument online sometimes, which is that during the Middle Ages, if you were left-handed, you were often accused of being a witch or a wizard or something, and it would cause you to be ostracized or sometimes killed or punished socially in some form or another, which meant that I think maybe only 3% of people were left-handed during the Middle Ages. But then, when left-handedness is no longer seen as wicked and it's socially accepted, I think the true number of left-handed people is closer to maybe 12%, let's say. So you see an increase in the number of people who identify as left-handed, I suppose.

• 13:45Chris Williamson?

  They can be their true left-handed selves, because there is no longer social stigma attached to it. There is a camp that argues that the rapid increase that we have seen in the number of people identifying as transgender over the last decade to two decades or so has been due to this releasing of the glass ceiling and judgment by the group at large. The alternative theory which is being put forward is one of social contagion. That explains why females in particular, the F to M transition, are particularly susceptible to this. Females are more socially aware, socially malleable and influenced.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  It's part of their sort of intersexual competition and status measuring apparatus that they have a greater susceptibility to trends around them, because it's important for them to remain part of the tribe in that regard, which would be part of the explanation for why girls seem to be more impacted by this ever-increasing number. It's almost like a memetic sort of feedback loop that's occurring. How far away am I and what have I missed in terms of that conception of the landscape?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  You put it beautifully, better than I did.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  So you- Should have got me on the paper. I could have been cancelled as well.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yes. Consider yourself a co-author on future research.

• 15:14Chris Williamson?

  Well, actually, I can take it. I get enough stuff on the internet as it is already. Okay, so what is-

• 15:24Chris Williamson?

  First question, is it impossible for these two worlds to exist together? Is there a blending of rapid onset gender dysphoria with the activist's theory about about this? Is there a way that those two worlds could coexist?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Certainly.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And I suspect they do. It's it's a question of which is predominating.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Obviously, we've become

• 15:53Speaker 01

  much more tolerant of the transgender fairly recently. I wrote a book in 2003 and people back then thought that transsexuals were really weird, interesting, but weird, and people were uncomfortable around them. Now I think, if anything, they're thought to be cool. And

• 16:18Speaker 01

  I'm glad that tolerance has increased for the transgender.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  But I also think that it's important to realize

• 16:32Speaker 01

  that there may be trade offs. I don't think we need to be intolerant, but I do think that we need to be aware that attitudes affect what people choose to do. Being transgender is partly a decision that a person makes.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Take a very, for example, a very masculine female. Well, she might decide, well, you know, I'm a just a masculine teenage girl. I like playing baseball, you know, I'll just be a girl. But or she may say, well, gosh, you know.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  I could imagine being a boy plus,

• 17:26Speaker 01

  you know, I get a lot of cred if I am transsexual. And also, really, something we haven't mentioned yet, which is happening, which I think is negative, is the binding up of transgender identity and victim status. And I just think that that's a problem with our world right now, that we're promoting victim status, not just among the transgender, but all kinds of phenomena, and I just think it's very negative.

• 18:03Chris Williamson?

  It creates a perverse incentive for people to pedestalize things which are actually negative in the long term.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:12Chris Williamson?

  Self-harm. You know, if self-harm gives you a degree of prestige somehow in whatever upside-down bastard world it is, there is now an incentive for people to do a thing which there should be a disincentive for them to do. So you, there is social renown now for self-harm or for MP, uh, multiple personality disorder. I don't know whether you saw on TikTok last year, there was a trend of people, um, they would have their others. I can't remember what the word was. It's like that other, the other versions of them would, would come out. And I'm a this person and I'm a that person. Which again, you know, I'm pretty sure, who was the guy that created eugenics? Who was the dude that did it in the 1900s?

• 18:58Chris Williamson?

  Francis Galton. Francis Galton managed to make himself go insane by worshiping a doll as a deity, right? My point being that you can, you can induce all manner of crazy psychological maladies if you believe them hard enough.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  That, so I don't want to weigh in on Galton because I don't know what you're just talking about. And I do know a fair about, fair amount about Galton. But what the other thing that you said, the key thing is absolutely true and really important and really fascinating that if people believe, they can enact all kinds of things. And when I say enact, I don't mean they're pretending exactly. They're acting as if.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  They're acting in accordance with their beliefs. This is not the first go around for multiple personality disorder. We had an epidemic in the early 1990s that was associated with an epidemic of recovered memories of sexual abuse. This was young women typically who went to therapy with a therapist who believed in this, who persuaded these women that their fathers typically had sexually severely sexually abused them repeatedly over years, despite these women never having any memory of this.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  And of course, these memories, these recovered memories were false. They didn't happen. And a subset of these women also came to believe that they were multiple personality disorder. And I, I think that this, what's happening now with ROGD, rapid onset gender dysphoria is the same thing. And the women that, the, the big difference is that the girls this is happening to are getting it younger, 14, 15, 16, instead of 24, 25, 26. And they're getting it from their peers rather than, than a therapist.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Otherwise, I suspect the same kinds of people are involved at both epidemics both times.

• 21:20Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why would it be the case that there are psychological risk factors like OCD, autism spectrum disorder and a few others? Why would they be predictive of ROGD?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Autism gets thrown around a lot as very common. I am not as impressed as many people are by the evidence for autism. For one, the diagnosis of autism has become so vague, I don't even know what it means anymore. It's become quite over diagnosed. The youth in our study did have an excess of formal diagnoses, but they were very general, anxiety and depression.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Why would women with these emotional problems have this susceptibility? I'm not sure. The 1990s epidemic, these were somewhat older individuals and so they had more time to get accurate diagnoses and the number one associated diagnosis was borderline personality disorder, which is associated with identity disturbance, not knowing exactly who you are, what you want to be, being manipulative, being prone to extreme emotions.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Now, do I have an explanation why it's they who are most susceptible to these false ideas? I don't think I do. I don't think I do.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation with David Geary a couple of months ago.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  What do you?

• 23:24Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating guy, absolutely fascinating, phenomenal episode. And one of the things that I learned when speaking to him, he was the first person that introduced me to the concept of rapid onset gender dysphoria. The group that, another ideology that would be associated with some of the people who seem to be suffering rapid onset gender dysphoria would be a denial of biological differences between men and women. The fascinating thing that's oddly sort of recursive and cyclical and almost ironic if it wasn't so odd is that the very reason that we have a sex difference in the number

• 24:06Chris Williamson?

  of F to M transitions is precisely because of the biological difference between men and women. It is the biological difference between men and women that predisposes these very goals to the increased susceptibility of transition, and that's the same group that is denying it. So it's both the supply and the demand and the denial that kind of all rolled up into one. Do you know what I mean?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they have a very strange set of beliefs that are mutually contradictory. For example, they believe in the idea of innate gender identity that may be hidden and so on, but if it's an innate gender identity, then and that men usually have one and women usually have another, that's got to be a biological difference. Yeah, I think that their science is not very coherent.

• 25:08Chris Williamson?

  Scientific.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  I don't think that's going to be a very useful way to persuade them.

• 25:15Chris Williamson?

  What are the, given you've had this relative landmark study, you know, one of only two massive N size of whatever it was, 1655 pairs?

• 25:27Speaker 01

  1655 parents reporting on, each parent reporting on a child of theirs.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  Got you, yeah. What are the implications of this moving forward? What have you thought about sort of next steps and such?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Well, my next step, I'm a, you know, I'm an academic, I'm a researcher, I'm not a clinician. I think that we need to get better and more detailed evidence, and I'm involved in what I think is going to be a really important.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Study that is about to launch this summer. It's in collaboration with Lisa Lippman, who is the person who first studied rapid onset gender dysphoria, and Ken Zucker, who is one of the world's leading experts in gender dysphoria. All three of us have been canceled at least once. So we're the collabor- canceled collaborative collaboration, but we also are experts who are unafraid to stay in here. We're in this study, we're going to be recruiting both

• 26:50Speaker 01

  gender Dysphoria adolescents directly and their families. And we have a very extensive survey about, you know, mental health and gender feelings about gender, history of gender, steps taken toward transition and so on. We hope to enroll thousands and we're going to follow these people up over five years at least to see how they turn out and to see how that affects happiness. Are the ones who transition going to eventually be happier than the ones who didn't? For example, that's, that's a big question.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating. Yeah, fascinating. I suppose it's one of those things where being able to spin explanations without a scientific backing can be done at lightning speed, but being able to test the hypotheses with science is actually a pretty arduous task. So you are always going to be playing catch up behind whatever the wake is that's left in terms of people's bro science.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. We sometimes have been frustrated ourselves. The scientific process is slow in part for bureaucratic reasons. We have to be very careful to get ethics approval for this, which by the way, was the reason, the ostensible reason, not the true reason, the ostensible reason why my latest article was retracted.

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  What's the story there? What, what, what was the reason that they gave you?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  The reason was this. Susana Diaz is not an academic.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  She just went ahead and put up a survey. She's allowed to do that. She's allowed to publish such a survey. I am an academic.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  I have constraints. Any research that I do, I have to get approved by something called an institutional review board, IRB, for ethics. Now, the data were already collected.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  It's too late to go through IRB. I checked with my IRB and they said, well,

• 29:11Speaker 01

  she didn't have to. And you seem to be okay being a co-author on this.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  But Susanna had not done this very legalistic thing

• 29:26Speaker 01

  that was a conventional informed consent, which is basically, this is exactly what you're going to be doing. Do you consent?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  That is what Springer said was lacking. That's why they retracted the article. Here's why that's ridiculous. She made it very clear to parents what the survey was about.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  They agreed by actually completing the survey. The last line of the survey said, we're going to publish this online when we get enough data. And that's something that Springer also said. She said, you didn't tell them that their data were going to be published. Well, of course, they want this published. They believe these parents are sick of ROGD being shoved to the side, being silenced. That's part of the reason why they wanted to participate in the first place.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  So that that's the reason they gave. I don't believe it for a second. But, you know, in our new research that we will be launching soon, we went through all of the IRB procedure. We are so covered that there's not going to be any chance of any problem like that.

• 30:59Chris Williamson?

  Moving on to some of the other work that you've done, what is the typical sexual orientation of F to M and M to F people who identify as trans?

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Well, I want to start with

• 31:18Speaker 01

  what was typical

• 31:22Speaker 01

  20 years ago. And

• 31:26Speaker 01

  before, which which was

• 31:30Speaker 01

  pretty well established. Back then, most F2Ms, that is, natal females who wanted to become men, first of all, they were

• 31:43Speaker 01

  adults before they were able to achieve that. There was no transitioning of children or even adolescents.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Almost all of the female to males were female attracted.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Or in the vernacular of sexology, homosexual female to male, transsexuals. Though about 10% were attracted to

• 32:15Speaker 01

  men.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  For male to female, these are natal female, I'm sorry, natal males who want to become women, there were two types.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  The first type was the the type perhaps we are most familiar with, the kind that comes to mind immediately, it would be a male who was feminine from early childhood. Little boy who wanted to be a girl, who became an adolescent, who was basically a girl. And then when he could get surgery, he did in adulthood.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  That type was male attracted. And sexology called that a homosexual male, the female transsexual. Jazz Jennings, I don't know if you know who Jazz Jennings is, she's a reality TV show. I have considered her that type, though I'm less sure now for various reasons. But the other type is at least as common, but it is quite unfamiliar because nobody talks about it. And it is autogynephilic male to female transsexualism.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Autogynophilia is a sexual orientation, I guess. Whereby, a man is sexually aroused by the idea of being a woman. Most of these natal males are attracted to other people in the world, and they're attracted to women. But they are also attracted to, and sometimes much more attracted to, a woman that they create inside themselves.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  It starts typically in adolescence where they will put on their mother's panties and bra, look at themselves in the mirror and masturbate. Fetishistic crossdressing. Many of them will have fantasies about having breasts and a vulva. And some of them will actually do what they need to, to get those.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Autagonophilia is very controversial because

• 34:53Speaker 01

  trans activists have tried to

• 34:57Speaker 01

  sweep it under the rug. They're embarrassed by it. I'm not. I don't judge these people.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Also, many autagonophilic transgender persons

• 35:15Speaker 01

  experience the theory as a narcissistic injury because it really means a lot to them to think of themselves as like women.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  But I'm saying, and the theory says, not my theory, it's something that I endorse, but I didn't come up with it. The theory says, they're not like women. They're men with this weird sexuality. And so that hurts their feelings.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  So I published a book in 2003 called The Man Who Would Be Queen. And only about a third of the book was about adult transsexualism, including autagonophilia. And the trans activists back then, a few of them got so mad at what I wrote that they tried to ruin my life.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Briefly, I thought they might.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  But, you know, they did back then what

• 36:29Speaker 01

  is happening to our paper now. They caused a Streisand effect. So

• 36:36Speaker 01

  more and more people have heard about autagonophilia, including

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Persons with autogynephilia? And I want to stress that many of the, many autogynephilic males are great people. In my experience, if they are open and honest, they're admirable. I have many autogynephilic followers on Twitter. I have some autogynephilic friends and so on. And these people are angry at the activists who have tried to censor any discussion of autogynephilia.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  It has prevented us from knowing things like the best way that autogynephilic individuals should live their lives. Should they transition? Should they not transition? We don't know. The studies haven't been done because people haven't even felt free to ask the questions.

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  Is there a natal female equivalent? Have you ever come across anyone that is the opposite of autogynephilia?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  This is controversial.

• 38:13Chris Williamson?

  That should be, that should be the preface for every single sentence that you say.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  This is controversial, I would say scientifically. I don't think anybody is politically upset about this, at least yet. Give it time. So the word for that would be autoandrophilia. And I know.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Transgender

• 38:43Speaker 01

  persons who insist that there really is autoandrophilia. There's a guy who named Phil Ily. I L. Phil Ily, I L Y, I think he's about to publish a book called Auto-Heterosexuality. Very smart guy. But he believes that autoandrophilia

• 39:15Speaker 01

  occurs commonly among transgender females. I am less convinced, you know, I'm being a hard ass scientist, you know, I maybe, but I, I, I kind of doubt it because male and female sexuality are so different. Autogynophilia is something that requires a male type

• 39:40Speaker 01

  sexuality, which is very focused and fixed and strong. And autogynophilia occurs kind of sporadically, a male finds out on his own and becomes, even though he's never heard of it before, it dominates his early sex life. And I'm really kind of skeptical that that happens in male females, but we'll see.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Does that, if someone, and if it's common that somebody that's never heard of it before, kind of stumbles upon this thing, this particular interest, this orientation, does that suggest that there is a biological disposition precursor?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  I would bet.

• 40:34Speaker 01

  More money than I have, that we will find that eventually. I think autagonophilia is strongly biological. Now, can I prove that? No.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  But what is going to make a 14-year-old boy decide to put on his mother's panties and go into the bathroom and look at himself and become aroused and so on? Nobody teaches him that. You know, there's a lot of

• 41:04Chris Williamson?

  I should hope not.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of interest now, especially among gender-critical types about something called "sissy hypno porn", which is, it's a type of pornography consumed by autogynephilic males. And they're saying that this porn is creating autogynephilia. Well, I don't believe it. I feel like these guys have this interest and they're finding the porn. I don't think anything plausibly is going to

• 41:42Speaker 01

  raise this idea in somebody that doesn't already have the interest.

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  The other word that I learned when looking at some of your work is "gynandromorphophilia",

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  one of the longest words I think I've ever said in my life. What's gynandromorphophilia?

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Gynandromorphophilia. So I'm going to say a word that I think is fine, but some people are touchy about it. Gynandromorphophilia is sexual attraction to she-males. What I mean by a she-male is a natal male

• 42:22Speaker 01

  trans woman who has both breasts and a penis still.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  You know, I assume.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  I can see, I can, I can see it in my mind's eye. Yep.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's not hard to find it online. That, that is a kind of pornography I have come across. Uh, and it actually is, uh, quite a common form of pornography. And even I think just plain old, normal, straight men get into that sometimes. But they're, they're different than the kind of men who need that and prefer it. And for example, I had a,

• 43:11Speaker 01

  I had a girlfriend at one time whose ex-husband

• 43:20Speaker 01

  had that preference. And in order for them to have sex,

• 43:27Speaker 01

  they needed to bring a picture of a she-male on the computer screen so he could look at it and become aroused. That became a problem for her.

• 43:38Chris Williamson?

  I can imagine, I can imagine that that would create complications. Yes.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that's, you know, I, some other just plain old, I think mostly just plain old, straight men. They just, I think, don't have the hang up about the penis being there too.

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  This is what, you know, back in the nineties, you know, on Alan Partridge, which is a famous British comedy show. One of his friends, it turns out, was going to Thailand and he comes back and all he wants to hear about is the ladyboys. He, all he wants to hear about is ladyboys. Tell me about the ladyboys. He keeps on saying.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's right. The ladyboys. That's, that's what they are. Yeah.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  They still tour as ladyboys of Bangkok in the UK. I don't know if that's the same in the US. But the, I mean, there's posters everywhere for ladyboys of Bangkok.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  To my knowledge, they don't come here, but, um, you know, there, there are, um, she-male escorts that you can find online.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  I, I knew.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  In writing my book, the 2003 book called The Man Who Would Be Queen, I actually at that time knew some transsexual prostitutes, some of whom had worked as she-male prostitutes and then they got surgery and continued to work as female prostitutes.

• 45:14Chris Williamson?

  Opening up to as many markets as possible.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the one that I'm thinking of preferred the the men who liked women to the men who like she-males. I think she thought that the ones who liked she-males, I don't know, that they treated her differently as a...

• 45:38Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. So this is, this is an obvious follow-up, which is, is this a new category of sexual orientation? Are these people closer to gay people or are they closer to straight people?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Great question. And so I can answer the second part of that question. They are very close to straight people. They're not at all gay. Guys, guys who get into she-males. So if we bring these guys in the lab and we show them pornography featuring just women and the kind that we use in this situation is two women having sex with each other, female, female porn and male, male, male porn. Those are the best kind of stimuli because if somebody gets aroused,

• 46:33Speaker 01

  there's no ambiguity about who they're getting aroused by. Guys who are into she-males get aroused to the females, but not the males. But they get slightly more aroused to videos of two she-males getting it on.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  And that's a little different than typical straight men who get more aroused by two females than two she-males, but neither gynanomorphophiles nor regular straight men get aroused to two men getting it on.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Right. Next, next obvious follow-up question to that is, I've heard you say that heterosexual women are genitally indifferent. What does that mean?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I would say not just genitally indifferent, they're, I think that their conscious feelings are indifferent in the laboratory to erotica. So if we bring women into the lab and we show them the same kinds of stimuli, two men having sex, two women having sex.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Straight women show an indifferent pattern of genital arousal. They get equally aroused to both, by both, and they get, and they say they get equally aroused by both. Now, they don't get that aroused

• 48:12Speaker 01

  psychologically. They don't, straight women do not get as aroused to watching either kinds of erotic stimuli that I just mentioned, as either straight men do or gay men do. But it is interesting that they seem to show this flat pattern. Lesbians, in contrast, do show both a genital preference and a subjective preference for female stimuli.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  Is there a vestigial arousal among lesbians for men?

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Lesbians do get more aroused by male stimuli than they do to nature scenes.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  But what about, do they get more aroused to gay men than gay men do to lesbians?

• 49:13Speaker 01

  These questions are hard to answer.

• 49:17Chris Williamson?

  These are the studies that we need, Michael. These are the, these are the hard, hard charging questions that we need.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Well, they're, they're hard to answer because the kinds of

• 49:27Speaker 01

  apparatus that you must use to measure genital arousal in men differs from that that you must use to measure it in women. And the best evidence that we have, we've taken it out of the genitals into the brain. We've done FMRI scanning of people looking at erotic stimuli. And it pretty much shows the same patterns as the genital stuff does.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And your excellent question, I, I

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I think I'm going to have to hold off answering because I don't remember.

• 50:16Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. So we kind of, I, I remember I, um, I had a conversation with Christina Durante. And she taught me about a study where they brought

• 50:30Chris Williamson?

  women into a lab and they sat them down opposite, uh, two different guys. One guy was really nerdy and one guy was kind of a bad boy leather jacket and sort of like quaffed hair and stuff like that. And they analyzed the

• 50:48Chris Williamson?

  Verbal responses and the physical responses that women had to each of these different men. Now, they had a Oscar-winning film writer, some award-winning film writer, write the script that the gentleman actor was using. So it's like, you know, if you were going to cut it the cool guys, like, if you come with me, I'll show you the best night of your life, and it's going to be really cool. But I don't really care. So it kind of, it doesn't really matter so much. Very, very high status, prestige, prestige, prestige. Whereas on the other hand, the other guy was something else. Now, the interesting thing is, it was the same guy. The same guy was playing both roles. They just styled him differently, and his mannerisms had been adjusted. One of the most interesting takeaways was, there was a number of lesbian,

• 51:33Chris Williamson?

  female-attracted women who were in the study. And when they looked at their behaviour with the lower-status man, it seemed relatively straightforward. When they looked at their behaviour with the higher-status man, even though they had a self-report of not being attracted to him, and their verbal behaviour wasn't particularly forthcoming, their non-verbal behaviour was much more flirtatious. So they were playing with their hair more, they were kind of leaning in, they were pouting a little bit more. And what that kind of suggested to me, which I think kind of leads into some of your work, is that even for women who are not attracted to men, for a very long time, men have been the gatekeepers to so much with

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  regards to survivability, reproduction, protection, resources, et cetera, that it feels like even exclusively female-attracted women just keep this skill set in the locker room somewhere, where if they need to deploy it, because the chieftain's come over, and she's just finished up with her girlfriend that nobody knows about secretly in a cave somewhere, that she can still kind of turn it on. And I thought that that was really interesting.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  That is really interesting. I wasn't familiar with that. Also, I think that lesbians, women who identify as lesbians are not as exclusively...

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Female attracted as gay men are male attracted, even if they might deny that lesbians are more likely than gay men to become non lesbian.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Relapse.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  To go back, yeah, there's a researcher named Lisa Diamond, who has studied something she calls female fluidity, which refers to women's greater propensity to, I don't know, become romantically interested in somebody regardless of their natal sex and not all women do this and there are some, you know, let's say gold star lesbians who would never go for a man, but I think there are more lesbians who have the capacity for sexual attraction to men.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so in your opinion then is male sexual, men's sexual orientation is more fixed and women's is more malleable?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and that's, that's part of the reason why men, but not women,

• 54:20Speaker 01

  not many women have paraphilias, which are these weird sexual interests. Autochopilias is paraphilia, but some others are, for example, pedophilia, sexual attraction to children.

• 54:36Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what's the amputee one? What's that one?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Uh, that is called acrotomophilia.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Yes, which we've been studying. There's and zoophilia, attraction to animals.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Lipophilia, which is attraction to morbidly obese people and the guys who are into them tend to be just normal weight guys. And we just, we have a paper that is about to be published, it's accepted and I'm working on the proof now, which I think is. He modestly says, I think it's very interesting. Uh, but we studied, we, we studied guys into amputees, guys into animals and guys into the really huge fat people. And for each of these three kinds of paraphilias, a lot of these guys also have the

• 55:38Speaker 01

  inversion, they are sexually aroused by the idea of becoming

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I

• 55:45Speaker 01

  a fat person, an animal, uh, which, you know,

• 55:53Speaker 01

  and, and I think we have about 10

• 55:58Speaker 01

  guys into amputees who've actually managed somehow to get amputations.

• 56:03Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So I first learned this from Dr. James Cantor and spoke to him about it and, and he described it in this really lovely way, which was, um, a lot of the sexual, let's just call it a lot of the paraphilias that people have and, and the odd fetishes that people are turned on by, um, is reflected both outwardly and inwardly. So there are people who are attracted to amputees. There are people who see themselves as amputees. They have their limbs. They have all of their limbs, but they feel like they should not. They feel like they shouldn't have that. He also, uh, I don't know whether you believe that this is true, said that there are people who are attracted to children and there are people who see themselves as children. There are men often who want to be dressed up as babies.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  We did the first study of this. Kevin, my PhD student, Kevin Su and I did a first study of autopedophilia. And that's right. Uh, and

• 56:58Chris Williamson?

  The most ethical form of pedophilia.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when a really interesting finding of that, um, study was that men, some of these men are attracted to boys, some are attracted to girls. Well, the, the guys who are attracted to girls are sexually aroused by the idea of being a little girl.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Not a little boy, which is interesting.

• 57:25Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So you have, that is a great way to prove that the relationship outwardly and inwardly is the same.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:36Chris Williamson?

  Because otherwise you wouldn't have this relationship between the two. That's so interesting. Why is everyone not a sex researcher? Why is everyone not doing paraphilia?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I feel the same way. Yeah.

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  So interesting. Oh, okay. So in your opinion, does bisexuality truly exist in men? Like, how, how accurate do you think the stereotype is that bisexual women are really straight? And that bisexual men are really gay?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  In, I think it was 2005, we published a paper

• 58:14Speaker 01

  that failed to find evidence that male bisexuality truly existed. Where by that, I mean that men in the laboratory would show arousal to both men and to women.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  That did not make us popular. We were, you know, it got us into the news, but not liked. We have kept studying this by we, I and my then graduate student now, he's a professor in England, Geralt Rieger.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  And we've gotten several hundred

• 59:00Speaker 01

  several hundred subjects in the lab. And two years ago, we published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, a paper in which we

• 59:15Speaker 01

  showed beyond the shadow of a doubt that male bisexuality truly exists.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  There is a subset of bisexual men who clearly produce arousal to male stimuli and to female stimuli.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Most of them are somewhat more aroused by one sex than by the other. They're not exactly.

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  Predominantly gay or predominantly straight bisexual man.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but they're they're a bit bisexual. Yes. So I now believe for sure in male bisexuality. At the same time, if you talk to gay men,

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  ask, just ask them this question. Did you ever say you were bisexual? About half of gay men will say, yeah. Then you say, well, were you really bisexual? And they'll say, no. So it really does happen that some men misrepresent being bisexual, but it also seems to happen that some men are bisexual, as I would understand that.

• 1:00:30Chris Williamson?

  Understood, but it's a small cohort and also you it's difficult to stress test whether this is the thin end of the wedge en route to becoming a fully fledged member of the gay community, or whether you're actually going to just stop at the letter B. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  What what about environmental influences on sexual orientation? So we have at the moment in Korea, a very sort of sex negative culture, which you'll probably be familiar with, where there is the four Bs movement, women who are recanting. I can't remember what the four different Bs stand for. It's in Korean. But it's it's men and patriarchy and family and work or kids or something like that. And it is downstream of a whatever less than one birth rate and it kind of it's everything's career is just a mess. But

• 1:01:25Chris Williamson?

  that seems like, whether it be.

• 1:01:29Chris Williamson?

  Outright celibacy slash abstinence or turning to lesbianism, I don't know whether that's true. That is a sexual orientation response to an ecological or environmental cue, right? Something has happened that has changed maybe the sex ratio, maybe the mate value of the potential available partners that are around. Downstream from that, we have declining birth rates across the West too. We have an increasing cohort of high performing women and an increasing cohort of underperforming men. Hypotically, that means that maybe women are going to be struggling to find men that are of the mate value that they would desire, even though we're in a society which has been the most sort of sex

• 1:02:14Chris Williamson?

  positive ostensibly than it's ever been. I think that there is a bit of a sex recession going on. There's a great article in the Atlantic about this. So with all of this folded together, how malleable is sexual orientation in response to the local environment? And could you foresee a future, given where we're at sexually and with the mating crisis at the moment, that this could continue in the future?

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  This is another one of those times when it's important to distinguish male and female sexuality. And this is, what I'm going to say is speculative, because this hasn't been established and there's a lot of disagreement. But my gut sense is that men's sexuality is not going to be responsive to cultural pressure much. I say much, because there

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  are parts of the world where men will have sex with other men, other males, let's not call them men.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  If the males are presenting as very feminine and perhaps transgender. So for example, in Samoa, there's uh natal males who are considered a third sex called the fa fa fina. And you got the ladyboys in Thailand and so on. It's pretty common for just plain old straight men to have sex with these natal males. Now, I don't think that makes them gay. They're not having sex with men. They're seeing these people as female like.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  But I don't think there's anything, any kind of cultural change. Even if I could build society from the ground up, that would make straight men want to have sex with each other. Uh, I think women are likely different and more responsive to cultural factors. Uh, and perhaps also things like um bad experiences with men. There's a uh, you know, this belief that uh, one route to lesbianism is being mistreated by men.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  We don't know that's true, but I find it plausible. But I don't think that uh, women mistreating men is gonna make them go gay.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  No, that's fascinating. One thing that I've been considering a lot is you've been talking about the thin line between what being gay means physically and what it means.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  In terms of appearance, you know, there's an interesting question. Is a very voluptuous, big boob, big lips, long hair,

• 1:05:39Chris Williamson?

  Thailand ladyboy type presenting person more female than a very shaven head, sort of more androgynous body type, but vagina-owning woman? And there's a really interesting question going on here, you know, that you highlighted there. It is in Samoa, it's referred to as a third gender. You know, there's a lot of accusations from the left of genital fetishism, which you might have heard of, which is that you're actually being, you're addicted to the genitals as opposed to the presentation. But there is an interesting question, given that

• 1:06:24Chris Williamson?

  our sexuality is so easily fooled. We are such rampant sexual beings that a six inch by four inch screen that has a small depiction of sex happening on it is enough to fool our brain to think there's some sex happening here. No, there isn't. There was some sex happening there a long time ago. And now you can see around the side of it. You know that it's not here. You know that you're not getting any of this.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  And that illusion is responsible for the internet.

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Correct, correct, yeah. So my point being that you, you already concede as soon as you accept the fact that porn is an effective stimuli, you accept the fact that it is not exclusively about the action. It's about the presentation, right? Is it just a difference of degree, not a difference of kind? All the way down to the more female presenting regardless of whether it's a XX or XY chromosome person? It really starts to blur the line between what is and is not classed as a same sex or an opposite sex attracted sexual orientation.

• 1:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that all we have for the most part are senses and you know, men especially, but humans in general are very visual species. And you're absolutely right that some trans women, even those who still have a penis, can look quite, they look like really attractive women. Although often you can kind of see the remnants of their maleness and their bone structure

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  or something like that. But yeah, and I think that in those cases, men who don't feel attracted to them, or say they don't, that's more likely to be mental, you know, some kind of aversion, an idea like that person is a man, not a woman. So despite the fact that they look like a really attractive woman, I can't go there.

• 1:08:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's so fascinating. So I've seen this, you know, I've seen this argument happen on, on dating shows or on right wing commentary channels and stuff like that around, no, because that would be gay. I'm like, is it? Is it more gay to have sex with what looks like a nine out of 10 woman, body shape, size, voice, presentation, actions, everything with a penis than it is to have the exact opposite? All of the presentation factors of a man could be on testosterone, could be all of the rest of it, but has a vagina that it, and it's a really, really fascinating question. You know, this sort of

• 1:09:37Chris Williamson?

  It falls in line with a number of other arguments, this sort of more biological essentialism side of things, especially the people that would say, unless you can change your chromosomes, and even not then, if you're a natal male, I'm calling you a man. If you're a natal female, I'm calling you a woman for the rest of time. So it's a suite of beliefs, I suppose, all of which interplay with each other and would also cascade down from there. But yeah, it's a really, really fascinating consideration around what it means. And this is when you get into the deeper and deeper into the layers of paraphilia and the nuances of sexual orientation, it all kind of starts to break apart. It's like the quantum level of sex research, I suppose.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, we are going on the outskirts here.

• 1:10:27Chris Williamson?

  What about people's gaydar? Do you think that most of us have an accurate gaydar?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is again, something we've studied quite a bit. And yeah, people have a much better than chance gaydar. Now, it's not perfect, but they are much better than chance at discerning whether a man is gay or straight. And they rely, so gay men, you know, just their outward appearance in the West currently is not necessarily very feminine, although I think gay men might

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  present themselves more attractively than straight men. But it's more things like movement, you know, and speech, speech patterns are

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you found that there's like a gay accent.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  There's a gay accent, yes.

• 1:11:31Chris Williamson?

  What is the gay accent?

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  So we know it when we hear it and, you know, actors can often affect the gay accent, even if they're straight. Interestingly, there's a lesbian accent, too. I think a gay accent may tend to be more expressive and gay men articulate more clearly than straight men. And lesbians have the opposite. They're less expressive and they don't articulate as clearly.

• 1:12:07Chris Williamson?

  Do you think, is that in any way gay men modeling female speech patterns? Are there any parallels there?

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  You ask great questions and, you know, so nobody knows. And I think there are at least two good hypotheses there. One is that unconsciously, growing up, gay men, you know, some of them, they had somewhat feminine gender identity and they did model. The other is that there's something about gay men's brain, which is somewhat feminized and produces this speech pattern. Nobody knows.

• 1:12:55Chris Williamson?

  Well, when it comes to the ability to present clearly, my speech coach that I use for the podcast is gay, classically trained in theater, classically trained in improv, for not just an outrageous communicator, and probably the best communicator that I've had on the show is Douglas Murray, who is also, him and Miles, my speech coach, are like two peas in a pod that have never met. But just phenomenal, like out of this world precision with his ability to remain cool under pressure, to be able to communicate in a very precise way, to be able to use...

• 1:13:37Chris Williamson?

  Inflection and drama and whimsy and to then be able to pull it back without being fragile, just phenomenal. And so, yeah, I, I, I wonder, Andrew Doyle as well, satirist from the UK that runs the Titania McGrath Twitter account. I wonder, I wonder whether being gay is a competitive advantage in the world of online commentary, perhaps.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it's all of that stuff. So interesting. And you're right as well that you kind of, I don't think I've been around sufficient lesbians to be able to say that I would, I could pick up on that. The only real things that I ever notice

• 1:14:17Chris Williamson?

  with lesbians are sort of the, it's the dress. I think that lesbian, lesbians seem to dress significantly more differently to normal women than gays.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  They cut their hair short.

• 1:14:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the, the plaid shirts, the baggy jeans.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, gay, gay men dress somewhat differently, more stylishly, at least.

• 1:14:41Chris Williamson?

  It's just better, usually.

• 1:14:43Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:14:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very funny. What was that paper that you did about male mate value being more malleable than female mate value?

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's an old one.

• 1:15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, the student who was the lead author on that was interested in the explaining the sex difference in the, in depression. Women are more likely to get depressed than men are. And she hypothesized that it could be because,

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  you know, women's mate value is more tied to their looks, which she said, you can't.

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  Do that much about whereas men, it's their accomplishments which you can and and she got some evidence for that. I'm not sure that I that that's, you know, an old paper and I'm not sure I believe the theory because, you know, if women, if women really can't do that much about their looks, what's the cosmetics in industry doing? I mean, and you know, it's, it's not that easy for a man to go out and double his income. So anyway, but that that's what the paper was about.

• 1:16:10Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I find I had a conversation with Ed Hagen as well recently and Ed did a study where they controlled for upper body strength when looking at differences in depression and anxiety. And when you control for upper body strength, the differences between men and women get smaller and smaller and smaller and then essentially go away. And the, the, the reason that I was interested in discussing malleability of mate value is that it's, it's a common discussion that's had on the internet and it's born out of a contest between men and women about who's got it worse. It's like, well, it's easy for you because you just need to go and

• 1:16:52Chris Williamson?

  get a boob job, but I can't make myself any taller. And women would say, well, it's easy for you because, you know, at 21, I reached my peak sexual market value and it's all downhill from there and you get to continue to accrue status and resources. And it's very much sort of two people talking different languages that the sexual brains, the, the sexual attraction mechanisms that works for men, what they want from women and for women, what they want from men are not the same. It's not, you can't play a balancing act here. There is no ability to work out the equity. There's no exchange rate between these two. Like how many boob jobs is three inches of height worth? Do you know what

• 1:17:35Chris Williamson?

  I mean? Like there is no way of us doing it. Oh, well, you could wear high heels and put makeup on, but you can go out for five years and increase your earning potential by 40%. Like what, what does that even mean? When we're talking about this, I had a theory, which I maybe total horseshit. So I'm going to try and bring it back up again. I had a theory that

• 1:17:58Chris Williamson?

  Male mate value to the individual,

• 1:18:04Chris Williamson?

  to the individual is more malleable and to the group is less malleable. And female individual mate value is less malleable and to the group it's more malleable. That you basically have as a man, there are more degrees of freedom that you can move yourself on. And there is a longer timeline that you can do it on specifically because of the fact that, you know, a guy who's 35 is more attractive than a guy who's 25 to most women on average. And I don't know when that peaks, probably in your mid to late 30s perhaps. But even then, you know, Leonardo DiCaprio has been acquiring and disposing of under 25 year old girlfriends regularly for like two decades now.

• 1:18:46Chris Williamson?

  So with sufficient status and resources, you can continue to cycle through that.

• 1:18:52Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, what do you, what's your mindset at now when it comes to malleability? Especially with us facing this mating crisis and people having concerns around being able to be seen by the other sex.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Well, I think that in the sense that I understand you, I think we're probably very malleable.

• 1:19:14Speaker 01

  The culture has changed tremendously.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  You know, in a fairly short time and it's kind of guessing it will change tremendously still. I hope it changes back in certain ways because I'm not that happy with certain things now. But that's a different question than do I know how to change it? And I do not. And that has to do with male, female interactions as much as academic freedom, both of which, well, the latter concerns me more now.

• 1:19:51Chris Williamson?

  Michael Bailey, ladies and gentlemen. Michael, I really, really appreciate your work. Any opportunity to dig into people that are looking into sex is fascinating for me.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  I've immensely enjoyed talking to you. I hope that we get

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  more chances either in person or back here, whatever.

• 1:20:10Chris Williamson?

  I have, I have a laundry list of things that we didn't get to talk about to do with sexual arousal patterns, virtuous paedophiles, the birth order effect of homosexuality. So we can absolutely run this back. Let me know once your new paper is out. As a reminder, for the people who want to check out your article and also follow you online and stuff like that, where should they go? Where would you want to direct them?

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  I am a boring academic. You can

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  go to Google Scholar and search for J. Michael Bailey, or there's something called Research Gate, where you can find lots of my papers as well, or email me at my university address. It's J M hyphen Bailey, B A I L E Y, at northwestern.edu and I'll try to help you if you need it. Yeah, nothing fancy for me.

• 1:21:15Chris Williamson?

  Michael, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.