Modern Wisdom - #1016 - Rob Henderson - Is Having a Boyfriend Cringe Now?

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

Rob Henderson holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. When did having a boyfriend become cringe? For as long as men have been men and women have been women, finding a partner to share life with has been one of humanity’s oldest goals. So what changed? Why has wanting connection become something to mock, and what can be done to reverse it Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D, and more from AG1 at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom Get 60% off an annual plan of Incogni at https:/incogni.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I miss the I miss the Cambridge recording studio the dark hovel that you used to be in. Yeah, I think we've recorded in every single place I've lived in, yeah, since my start at Cambridge. So I was living in this, yeah, it was a hovel, like the smallest dwelling I'd ever lived in.

Smaller than the barracks in the Air Force. Believe it or not. It was the shoebox. And it was such a stepdad. Because when I was living in New Haven, in undergrad, like, I was getting a stipend from the GI Bill. I had a pretty nice apartment. It was spacious, high ceilings. But Cambridge required all the postgrad students for their first year to live in their

college. And I was like, oh, you know, it's Cambridge. It's going to be grand. It's going to be Hogwarts. And I get there. And it's a shoebox with a, like, a single bed and a tiny little desk. And that's where you and I recorded the first one for Modern Wisdom. Well, I think it's very important for you to keep your feet on the ground.

I don't get too big for your boots. published author, tons of books sold, very highly followed on substack. Remember where you came from, a hovel in Cambridge. Yeah, that's what I tell people. You know, when I was at Cambridge struggling, you know, sleeping in that 12 by 12 prison cell. But yeah, yeah, yeah, now I finally have the background. The foster care system had nothing on this. The foster care system was a walk in the park. The, no, no, I'd always like this when I, when I would watch other podcast guests and they had, you know, the beautiful background with the books and everything. I'm working my way up to that. This is like stage one. Eventually, I'll have, you know, the fucking, the grand library behind me.

Yeah, one step at a time. What do you make of this is having a boyfriend cringe now article? Yeah, that was going around. So I first came across that Vogue magazine article. It was a real on Instagram and someone was commenting on it. And then I saw that this magazine article is having a boyfriend embarrassing. I'd inspired, you know, a thousand Instagram reels, TikTok, you know, all these commentaries. And so I back, I went back and read the actual piece. It was a striking headline. And, you know, the first thing it made me think of was intracual competition. Because as I'm reading this article, the author, you know, she's talking about, you know, influencers and podcasts hosts, these women with a lot of influence and status.

and they're talking about how, you know, they try to not talk about their boyfriends that much, or they try to discourage other women from entering relationships, this idea of heterophatalism. But, of course, like, the funny thing to me was these women themselves are in relationships. And, you know, she would ask, well, why are you promoting these ideas? And these women would say, well, I don't want to seem boastful. I want to show solidarity with single women. And I understand how difficult the dating market is right now. And so, you know, it is a little embarrassing to post about my relationship online and this kind of thing.

And, yeah, to me, you know, connecting it with evolutionary psychology, I think there are some interesting principles here around, you know, competition, reproductive suppression and that kind of thing. So I wrote this substack article, which is one of my, I very rarely come up with titles that I'm proud of. You know, usually they're serviceable. Kind of gets the idea of the piece. But this one, Girl Boss Gatekeeping was the one I came up with. and it captures this idea that for if you're a woman with power, status, influence, and so on, you have some non-trivial effect on the behavior of other women. And if you are telling them that maybe it's not worth it to date anymore, men are trash, it's so hard out there, having a boyfriend is embarrassing now anyway, but then privately you're in a relationship and you are, you know, following those conventional life script patterns. you know, you're, you're kind of indirectly suppressing other women's ability to find partners, to reproduce, and that kind of thing.

Is this a luxury belief using your nomenclature? Yeah, I think it's almost there. So I listened to this very interesting discussion by this evolutionary behavioral scientist, Danny Slocowski. and she's been, she's done a few interviews on this, on this question of reproductive suppression. And one thing she points out is a lot of this anti-natalist messaging comes from elite institutions, people with platforms, journalists, and academics, and corporate leaders of, you know, I see this a lot in social science journals, for example, like the motherhood penalty, that kind of thing of, oh, if you have children,

You're going to be penalized in the labor market, but you never see the reverse framing where if you choose to work and not stay with your kids, this is also a penalty in a way because there's a limited window of your child's life where you can spend a lot of time with them and where you're like literally the number one person in their world. And so every hour you spend in the workplace is an hour you're not watching your child grow and develop and learn and form that kind of attachment. Um, and so if elite institutions and elite, you know, high status individuals are promoting this idea, but then privately you see that marriage rates are the highest among highly educated people. Um, privately they're, you know, more likely than others to have children now. This was an interesting, uh, analysis by the economist magazine last year, which found that a lot of the, so if you break down the results by socioeconomic status, um, it's actually low income women who, uh, whose fertility has declined the most. Whereas college-educated women's fertility has declined slightly, but not by very much. But the lower you go on education and income, the higher the kind of fertility decline. And so is it a luxury belief? Well, I define luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while conflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.

And you see, believe, people promoting one set of views that makes them look compassionate and understanding and you know we i understand how hard it is out there and maybe this isn't worth it anyway um but then uh you know by by promoting these views they're actually reducing um pathways to happiness for other people this is like consistent finding brad wilcox and others so i know you've had on the show you know there's a ton of data um in sociology showing that the happiest people are uh married uh people with children if you will get women uh single women without children are are the least happy. They report the lowest levels of happiness. Married women report slightly higher levels of happiness than that. And then married women with children report the highest

levels of happiness of all. And so if I'm trying to promote an idea, trying to shape your behavior in such a way that will reduce your happiness, then there is a kind of an element of a luxury belief there. Well, I think there's two things going on. There is what is being said, laudable solidarity, very Gen Z, TikTok-brained, how does this look in terms of my personal brand, swag gap, fucking aura, all that stuff. And then there is, okay, what's the motivation that might be a little bit deeper than this?

So I think the thing that I thought that was interesting up first was the article is looking at much of relationships through almost like an influencer first perspective that how other people see you particularly women, particularly online, is the most important currency that you as a woman have to trade. And this ties in with Freya-India's idea, which is most relationships now are more brand collaborations than they are meaningful connections. Wow. Yeah, damn, that is good. Yeah,

you know, and it's funny, like a lot of society seems to be participating in this, you know, discouraging of committed relationships, bonds, family formation. You brought up for India there. I remember a really interesting essay of hers where she pointed out that if you are a 23-year-old woman and, you know, your recent college grad, you're in the workforce, you're hustling, you're struggling, you're working hard, and you're dating around. You know, you're on the apps. You go on a date here and there.

Your parents are probably just thinking, okay, good. You know, this is what you should be doing at this age, you know, dating. exploring yourself, whatever. But then Freya pointed out that if you are 23-year-old woman and you tell your parents, I'm engaged, a lot of educated upper-middle class parents would respond with horror. Like, you're too young for this. You're going to ruin your career. Like, you're derailing your life.

Like, why are you giving up everything for this guy? You know, that kind of thing. And this is like the reverse of what you would expect in more traditional societies or even our society up until maybe 50, 60 years ago that if you're a young woman and you find a guy you like enough to want to marry, your family would celebrate, society would celebrate, and now it's literally the reverse. That's interesting. I wonder what sort of parents would be like that, at least in my experience, all of my friends who have got married pretty young, their parents were super stoked for them, but that might just be, I might have an

unreasonably like normal and responsible set of friends with parents. But yeah, when it comes to like the cringe aspect. Like a lot of this was around social embarrassment, rejection. Again, we're talking about like the shallow upfront lauded reasons before we get into the sort of deeper motivations for this. But it seemed to be a lot to do with female intracultural social status. How do other women see me? You know, the article talks about how if you post about your boyfriend online, you're going to lose followers. It doesn't mention that you lose followers that are mostly male because they were hoping that they might be able to tap it and now that they know you've got a boyfriend. You remember when Brett Cooper announced that she got married and the comments

were just tons and tons of guys going, it's over bros. Like it like it. The same thing will happen when Freya India gets married. The same thing, you know, I'm sure would have happened if Louise Perry had been online before she got married. Like any sort of public facing woman, a good portion of you're following are guys that are like parasocial online orbiters hoping that you may see their like or comment or DM and this is going to be the beginning of but beyond that what the girl because that would be that would be shallow to say I'm going to lose male followers who are only there because of the prospect that they might be able to get easy sex or a relationship out of me the article talks more deeply about the fact that girls unfollow you partly because well

you posting about your relationship makes them feel uncomfortable. So if you have a mating market, which is tough for women to be in, you being successful when success is in the minority, that makes other women feel a little bit uncomfortable. So like, oh, I don't have a relationship, and you do, and this makes me feel bad. That's like, I guess, a nice explanation up front, but the one that was more interesting was your content becomes boring. Like you become more bland, as if the most exciting sort of woman that you can be is one who's single and out with the girls and going to brunch, as opposed to a cute Halloween photo

of you wearing a lot of brown tones hand in hand with your boyfriend as you walk through a pumpkin patch. Like, that's more boring content. And because your content is going to be less exciting, that means that your followers are going to drop, as if, again, the most important thing is how other people, particularly women, particularly online, see you. Like, that is the most important currency that you're trading with and it was all seen through this um this perspective of what does an online like how exciting is your online life not how enjoyable is your real life yeah i'm thinking about uh as you're saying this good hearts law or that old phrase what gets measured gets managed and for uh an online influencer or a writer um you know there's a very

visible metric of likes and views and followers and that kind of thing. It's very, you know, it's quantifiable. You see it on your phone or on your screen. But relationships aren't like that. There's no, you know, you don't wake up one morning. Oh, my relationship today is at a 77 out of 100 compared to yet, like an eight sleep thing, right? Like, oh, yesterday it was an 81. Today, you don't get those quantifiable numbers that that can be, you know, serve as validation or as motivation to improve things or to, you know, rework the relationship. If your score feels particularly low, you could have the conversation with your partner in the same way that if your follower account seems to be dropping, you can rethink your strategy for your brand or for

your product. So, yeah, I think people are, you know, kind of, kind of misguidedly focusing on the wrong thing here. Well, at least what I've seen, a good bit of this sort of focusing around seems to be this sense that your online persona is the most important thing that you can have and yeah maybe that's because it is it is a quantifiable metric in some ways like it's an observable rather than a hidden one uh i learned this morning that sabrina carpenter's entire recent album is about how barry keegan wasn't cool and he was like that the man-child thing i didn't know that they'd been dating i didn't realize that barry and Sabrina had been in a relationship I didn't realize that they'd broken up

and I didn't realize that her entire album was about that but Sabrina Carpenter's most recent album like Manchild's in there a lot of it is about sort of the immaturity of men the uncoolness of men Olivia Deans The Art of Loving is all about loving yourself

and loving your friends because men suck so what we're seeing is this sort of solidarity women on women thing which is interesting and I think both me and you agree the dearth of good guys like apparent dearth

of apparent good guys is basically sending women insane like if you can't find an eligible male partner you still have all of the drive to do stuff but there are fewer vectors that you can point it down so female introssexual competition gets tuned up but pointed inward as opposed to like compete for mates

it becomes more vicious it becomes more subtle and uh yeah like look if if you can't find a good partner like if you're struggling to find a good guy or find a guy that you're attracted to or can settle down or is prepared to commit to you again one that is sufficiently attractive socioeconomically successful and prepared to commit right like because the third one is the hard one you can probably find the casual sex out of the first two pretty simply but the third one is really tough um quite rightly you end up with this inner citadel thing which i learned from you if you can't get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get so if you struggle to find a good guy or find a partner that you can settle down with a much easier solution

is just to say well like men are trash and relationships are for mugs in any case who needs to be partnered like girl he's destroying your aura like just you know your your your instagram account is getting more boring yeah i uh i took a screenshot of that vogue headline is having a boyfriend embarrassing now and I wrote on X next up is owning a house embarrassing now you know like if you don't if you can't get something you train yourself to not

want it or you teach yourself that this is undesirable anyway so now we're yeah we're going to see what next up is having money embarrassing now dude it will be it will if you can't get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get I learned that from you what five years ago when you first wrote about the inner citadel yeah yeah it's uh I borrowed it

from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin um and And yeah, it's, you know, what I think about is kind of the evasion of envy a little bit that if you, you know, like rich people who dress down and who try not to display their ostentatious lifestyle online, like they want to show solidarity with people who don't have money. And so you, you know, maybe play it down or something like that. I'm trying to think of a sort of analogy here that, okay, you have a boyfriend and your life's going great, but you don't want your followers to hate you or to envy you or to feel like you think you're better than them. and so you're going to say, actually, this thing isn't so great, or actually I'm going to point out the flaws, or I'm going to hide my own kind of good fortune here so that you don't target me for it. And, you know, I think this is aligned with, you know, some really interesting work. Tanya Reynolds, so I know you've spoken to the bless her heart effect that, you know, as you said, intersexual competition among women is more subtle, more indirect than it is for men. And if you, you know, if, If you're concerned with this increasingly scarce pool of desirable partners, you're going to want to reduce the amount of competition for that scarce resource. And so one thing you can do here is to tell them that it's not desirable anyway.

You want to get yourself out of the mating pool. I talk about this a little bit in my book when I talk about what I was observing the competition for internships at investment banks when I was at Yale. So you would see, you know, on Wednesday, you would see, you know, Yale grad say, oh, investment banks are emblems of capitalist depression. You shouldn't work at them. And then on Friday, you would see them at the recruitment session for Goldman Sachs. And what they were trying to do is convince you not to go for those jobs because they're so hyper competitive so that when they go to the recruitment session, there are fewer rivals that they have to go up against. And I think something may be happening here as well that if you, you know, if you want a partner or if you have one and you want to reduce the number of meat poachers, then you start to introduce these ideas of, you know, disguised in the language of compassion and concern and that kind of thing. You know, like Tanya Reynolds talks about the bless her heart effect, where, you know, women will disguise negative gossip in the language of kindness, of positive emotions. So they might say, you know, oh, you know, I'm really concerned about Katie.

she, um, she's been bringing a lot of boys home from hinge and I just don't want to see her get hurt. Um, so, you know, maybe we should talk to her or, or, you know, just introducing these ideas about maybe she's not the most sexually chased person in the world, but you're saying it in a way that you're concerned for her rather than, you know, hey, Katie's kind of a, you know, kind of, kind of a skank or whatever. Um, and so, and so, you know, similarly, you could say, um, you know, hey, it's really hard out there, girls. Maybe guys aren't worth it anyway. like, you know, take care of yourself, self-care, you're good how you are. You don't need to worry about presenting yourself in a certain way just to get a man. Instead of saying, like,

you know, actually, there aren't that many good guys out there and I don't want to compete with you. So maybe you should just stay at home and watch my videos on TikTok instead of going out on dates with guys. And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of this going. But like you said, there are always those kind of two levels in evolutionary psychology. They talk about the proximate versus the ultimate explanations. And so the proximate is the immediate reason why someone does something. The kind of deliberate verbally articulate, yeah, yeah, the verbally articulate reasoning that someone gives for something.

So a simple example would be eating. Like that, yeah, I guess, why are you eating? And you would say because I'm hungry or I'm bored or whatever. But then, of course, the evolutionary explanation is you need calories, you need energy, you need to sustain yourself, you're an organism that requires food to, survive and reproduce. And I think the same thing with intersexual competition. So you have the proximate explanation, which might be something like, you know, I'm concerned for women or I want women to be taken care of or I want them to take care of themselves. And I don't want them to be

so caught up in, you know, thinking about other guys or whatever. But then the ultimate explanation is, you know, this more kind of a Darwinian calculus of, hey, you know, maybe you shouldn't be going for these guys because there's such a limited pool that I don't want. to compete with you or I don't want you trying to take the one guy that I have and you see this a lot more interestingly like like the whole like red flag discourse and the whole like I see comments on TikTok and stuff sometimes you'll send me one and I'll see the comments from women and they'll be like like why are you with this guy or oh my God that's a red flag or like girl you need to leave him I very seldom and I mean maybe you have but I've never seen or very seldom seen

male commenters like the equivalent of like a male influencer posting you know his girl with him or something and then the male commenter saying like oh dude that's a red flag she's saying this to you she's saying that like you need to dump her you need to leave her you need to get away from her like run as fast as you can and it once in a while I'll see it but but it's not like every comment the way that I see it with with female influencers and their female fans and same with friends to anecdotally so I'm reading that bog article and I'm thinking about anecdotal cases of um you know have female friends if they start dating a new guy you know their friends will be like you I'm not so sure about this guy, or what does he do again, or who are his friends?

Like, they're trying to find reasons to introduce doubt into the woman's mind. But when guys say, hey, I'm dating this new girl, it's not like, you know, let's pick her apart and find all her flaws and try to tell you why she's not worth being with it. So, you know, and I think like intersexual competencies, it's interesting because this method of reproductive suppression, I think it's more prevalent among women. So, you know, I mentioned Danny Slocowski. She points this out where if you, you know, you imagine a small-scale society, you know, where a lot of these behaviors and traits and tendencies evolved, even if you did manage to take one male out of the mating pool, you somehow manage to tell a guy actually don't date women anymore. You know, because other men are capable of fathering so many children, taking any individual male out of, out of the mating pool does very little for. you as a person. I mean, you know, you, in the logic here, it's, you know, there's a math problem here where, you know, even if, if you convince, you know, 100 guys to get out of the mating

pool, one guy can still father, you know, 100 children or whatever. Whereas the reverse here, where for women, because they're so much more reproductively valuable, and again, you're a small scale society, there's 100 people, a small fraction of whom are young women, you know, getting another young woman, young woman to exit the dating pool would be huge for you. You know, that's more resources for you, more social attention, more social support, that kind of thing. And so for women, it actually is kind of a wiser, more beneficial strategy. And it's also more possible, I think, too. There's also been a very practical thing of because women's sexual desires are a bit more modifiable, I think, you can convince women to go on a sex

strike. You know, try to convince like, you know, actually sex isn't worth it. Forget about it. And it's funny, like, I've seen like, the black pills, the black pills having a crack, but without porn, I think, I think that this would be a complete dead end. Yeah, yeah. Well, I see, I see like William Costello posts these things sometimes where like, you know, like an insult will get a girlfriend and then they'll exit the exit that whole community or whatever. Like most guys, if they receive even a, you know, a modicum of attention from a woman who likes them, like they're like, oh, yeah, forget all that. And so, you know, midtow stuff. Like, finally a girl likes me. Our principles are very flimsy in that way. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Whereas for women, like, you could imagine her being very invested in this, like, you know, all men are trash thing. And then finally, a guy shows some interest in them.

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modern wisdom. We'll look at the four bees movement in South Korea. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I think we saw a version of that attempt to lift off in the U.S. after the election, but I don't hear anything. Oh, yeah, I'm swearing off all men until Donald Trump is out of office because

men voted this man in. Yeah, I wonder how long that lasted. Well, maybe this is sort of a part of it. The reason that I was laughing when you said about how many guys sort of say she's not good for you like try and tear her apart whether it's sort of in terms of friend groups or online. I saw it once and it was a video of a girl. It looked like this guy and this girl were about to go to a wedding and a girl was in front of him and he was sort of stood quite stoically maybe posing for a photo because it was a vertical video and

he looked sort of like he was trying to pose for a photo or just like waiting and she was like doing dances and like doing like this and like sort of moving around and um the caption was um once there are certain girls who are one in a one in a billion once you've dated someone like her there is no other and the number of guys that were in the comments that were it was basically like this girl is so free she's a flighty bird like look at the energy that she's bringing to it it seemed like a sort of pro chick video and dudes in the comments were like this girl looks like a fucking nightmare. Like she's not chill. She's evidently from their perspective sort of advertising her sexual availability despite the fact that she's in a relationship with this guy. She looks

quite disagreeable. She looks like she isn't going to be trainable. She looks like she isn't going to be able to, you know what I mean? Like all of the like sort of online internet problems. But you make a great point that if a girl gets into a relationship, I was talking to my housemate's girlfriend. And she was saying loads of girls who get into relationships end up losing their friend groups, not in the way that guys do. Guys lose their friend groups because it's like, oh, he's fucking wiped up again. The old ball and chain means that he's not going to hang with us. But as soon as he's sort of, that's not because they feel bad that the guy's in a relationship. It's that the dude is not allowed out or that he's spending too many evenings

watching Netflix. The reason for the goals, I think, is, again, if you're struggling to find a partner and your friend gets into a happy relationship, that throws into harsh contrast the fact that you do not have a partner and that makes you feel pretty uncomfortable so again if you can't get what you want you must teach yourself to want what you can get but the um like suppression of fertility thing the mating suppression thing is really interesting because it happens hormonally right you can you can actually step in and this is one of the potential explanations for why human females have got concealed ovulation. Yes.

Can you dig into that and then sort of the hormonal? Because we've got two, two forks on how the mating suppression thing is going on here, the fertility suppression. One is like literally hormonally, you can fuck with women. And the other side is like socially in terms of their drive, memetically, what is it that they're trying to do? I think that's the right way to frame it, right? We've got one side, which is a physiological intervention and the other side, which

is a memetic or cultural intervention. Yeah. Yeah, really quickly on your point about, you know, when you enter a relationship, you know, like for guys, they respond differently. Like, oh, like, we miss you, man. That's kind of the sentiment here. Not so much like, oh, she's taking you from us, whereas the reverse often happens. And I see this with, like, other kinds of examples where someone gets something that's really desirable and then the friend group gets mad at them. Like, like for successful people, often I think there's this trope out there that, you know, if you come from community that doesn't do so well and then you do really well for yourself and then you lose contact with those people you spend a lot of time around grew up with whatever it's because your head

got too big you think you're better than them like you got a new group of friends you don't like them anymore but the pattern that i see that's more often uh that takes place is uh is the opposite where it's the people who feel uh that left behind they're like you know you're doing better than us so we're just going to stop talking to you because you remind us of the fact that maybe we aren't doing so well and just like your very presence makes us feel uncomfortable. And so they're the ones who actually pull back more so than the successful person, I think. And then your point here about, yeah, I mean, as you were talking about, you know, the first thing I came to mind was birth control.

Like, it's literally a hormonal manipulation technology. And, you know, I think like one of the founders of birth control, Margaret, was it Margaret Sanger? Like, she thought that this would be good for poor people, low income people, historically marginalized people. And, you know, that's, you know, as we've described, it's a very nice story to tell you're helping these women. But then on the other hand, she's also reducing the number of children out there, the number of women who are reproducing potential competitors and rivals. And so, you know, if you can, if you can, and you see this with, with a non-human primate species like tamarins and baboons where dominant females in these hierarchies, sometimes it's like open, like intimidation and bullying. tactics, harassment. Like, they'll push these subordinate females around, they'll scream at them, they'll prevent them from having access to food and resources. Because if there's a malnutrition

factor going on here, then they're not going to be able to reproduce. This also elevates cortisol and stress hormones that can suppress ovulation and fertility. And so, you know, you see this very clearly in these primate groups. But then for humans, there's a version of this that's more so mediated through culture and through socialization and technology and these kinds of things where you know you don't usually see human women like openly bullying but you can increase stress through indirect means so you know there's there we talked about the pill but then beyond that you can also you know spread memes um you can tell them that actually uh family formation is unwise or irresponsible or actually you can have a much more fulfilling life if you focus on yourself on self-care

on career, on climbing the corporate ladder, on foregoing, dating altogether. Sometimes you'll see these articles, like, every two or three years I see like these legacy media outlets will say, like, you know, why can't we focus on friendship rather than romance, you know, and then it's targeted toward women where women should, you know, like, we should de-center romantic relationships and instead replace it with friendships. And so, you know, women should form these, you know, female communities and for grow men altogether, stop dating men, and all of these things, too, reduce fertility. But then this idea about culture, and this is very speculative, I think, I wrote about this in my

substack, that if you can convince women that you're only a successful mother, if you can fulfill these very expensive requirements, this also introduces stress. And so if you look 50 years ago, a middle class family in the 1970s, you know, you have a modest house, you have one car, one television, you know, your children may share a bedroom. College was not necessarily the, the only marker of success for your kids. There were other pathways to having a fulfilling career, or at least perceived, you know, the perceptions of a fulfilling career. Now you fast forward 50 years. you know, who sets the standard for what acceptable parenting and acceptable family arrangements look like. Generally, it's elite women who talk about this. Men don't talk that much about,

you know, this is what a successful family looks like. This is an aspirational lifestyle if you're a parent or if you're a mother. It's generally elite women who contribute the most to the discourse around, you know, successful motherhood and parenting and family formation. And for them, you know, what is a successful parent? It's someone who can give each kid their own bedroom, having a nice house, paying for ballet lessons, music lessons, sports teams, SAT prep, you know, college tuition, ideally at the most selective and expensive college the kid can possibly get into.

Walkable City. Right. And even for something like, like even before all of that begins, weddings, right? Like weddings are more expensive than ever. And so, you know, if you can convince people like, oh, your marriage, is only valid or legitimate if you can spend 50 or 100 plus grand on a wedding. Whereas 50 years ago, our parents, grandparents' generation, it was considered like perfectly reasonable to have a

very modest ceremony, go to the courthouse, sign some paperwork, and, you know, you're locked in. Whereas now, I mean, in part because what I think is going on here is because marriage is so easy to dissolve, you have to have a very costly and ostentatious display of burning resources to demonstrate your commitment. And so, you know, in a world where you can sign papers and have divorce right away. How do you prove your commitment to this other person? You, you know, publicly burn $100,000 on a wedding. Isn't there a, there's an inverse relationship between the size of the engagement ring and the successive relationships? I've seen some studies like that. Yeah, it's really amusing. The speculative explanation I saw for this is that it's almost like a

counter-signaling thing. Yeah, compensation or counter-signaling for the people, only people who are very confident in their relationship would feel comfortable spending very little on an engagement ring. Like, you know, we love each other. We don't have to prove it this way. And so, yeah, I think like, so this is what's going on here. So, so, you know, elite women, high status, women say, this is what a successful family looks like. And you need to be able to afford all of this. You need the expensive wedding, the expensive house, multiple cars, family vacations, fly international, send your kids to, you know, all these expensive activities. And if women who are unable to afford those things low-income women, women with less access, can't afford them. And they're thinking, well,

you know, I don't want to be looked down upon, you know, elites in any society get to, I get to decide for the most part what's considered a desirable high status, laudable behavior. And if people lower down, the latter think, well, okay, that's what success looks like. And if I can't do that, you know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be a mother who can't give my kids everything that is expected of me. And so this two introduces, distress and issues around fertility as well. And of course, you know, it is the case that a lot of credentialed affluent women for a time, they will abide by this, a lot of them. Like, they really do believe it. And they will live by it for a time. But something I point out is

that these women have the resources to freeze their eggs. And then even if later in life, they reach their later 30s or early 40s, they can afford expensive fertility treatment. and then failing that, they can pay a surrogate to have a child for them. So there are so many pathways available. So they're promoting this one set, this one line here of, you know, marriages and everything, family, you know, maybe you shouldn't have kids, having a boyfriend is embarrassing. And then in their own lives, they have so many options to not live by those ideas. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's, I can already sort of imagine,

what cogs would be turning in a well-meaning woman's mind who may be partaking in this sort of a meme. It would say, what are you talking about? I don't think these things at all. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm not trying to get my friends to stop getting into relationships. The guys out here just aren't very nice and I'm trying to protect my friends from getting hurt and men are trash sometimes or maybe even a lot of the time. And these are just mean like how can you imbue on me all of these supposed motivations when that's not what I'm doing at all and I think it's important to just say the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons very rarely are we aware of what the ultimate reasons for our behavior are like you are much more

effective at deceiving other people if you also are deceived by the motivation that you're doing this through right it I think the thing that's the thing that's the that makes it particularly unpalatable or, like, weird to talk about in a way. Even I find myself being like, fucking hell. Like, this really doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light. And I think that that is because the subtlety of the way that women compete seems much more conniving and manipulative than the way that men compete. Like, men compete in a way that may be, like, ruthless and brash and cutthroat, but it's much more kind of up front. and I've said this

to every intracultural like fucking Tanya Reynolds Deborah Lieberman like whoever it is that I'm talking to from the EP world on the woman's side I'm so glad that I'm not a woman like it would be I'm not constructed and I just don't have the mindset

to be able to deal with the very fine finessed like delicate gamesmanship balance thing that needs to be done to be able to navigate this stuff to real samurai blade meets a scalpel of sort of social dynamics. But the point here is the reason that somebody does something is not necessarily the reason that somebody does something. It's best explained. My favorite example of this is Bill Buzz bit about

the WNBA and body positivity. And he says, women, if you could only support your friends, if you could only support the WNBA in the same way that you support a fat chick who's proud of her body and no longer a threat to you, that league would be doing better. numbers than the NBA. He goes, oh my God, you're a goddess, you're gorgeous, you look great in a bikini, I'd kill myself if I look like that, keep eating, keep eating, lose a toe, you fat bitch. And it's literally the same as if you saw an alcoholic and said, oh my God, you're lying face down, your kids are crying, you're a hero, you're a god, keep doing what you're doing. And like, this is basically, if you can convince women to eat themselves out of the mating

pool, couched under empathy, compassion, acceptance, like very pro-social, motivations, you have managed to appear publicly like somebody that's very empathetic, very supportive, very inclusive. You're beautiful at any size, while also secretly taking GLP1s, dieting, having a PT, wishing that you want the size that you are or trying to actively sort of diet yourself down. And like, am I saying that all body positivity support is by women trying to encourage their friends to eat themselves out of their mating pool competition? No, obviously not. And in many ways, maybe not at all because your conscious, like, awareness of why you're doing this isn't that. But we have motivations for our behavior that we are not

aware of. The reason that we're not aware of it is it makes it way more compelling and easy to deceive others if we believe it ourselves. And when you sort of spin all of this together, you end up with women being very pro-short haircut. You should cut it off. You've got the breakup hair. Cut it all off. Cut it all. You're going to look. Girl, you look beautiful. It's going to look so cool and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you know that guys prefer long hair. Like very reliably, it's a sign of youth. It's a sign of fertility. It's a sign of fecundity. Men on average prefer longer hair on women. And women that are high in intracultural competition advise potential sexual rivals to cut off more hair. In other news, this episode is brought to you by RP Strength. This training app has made

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So Likowski. And yeah, yeah, this is a common trope. And it's funny, you know, when I read that paper, I thought of this quote from another comedian, Adam Carolla, who said something like short hair or something that chicks always tell each other. You know, they're always like, oh, you'd look so good if you cut your hair off. And then he says, what they're really thinking is, you know, that's one bitch I'm not going to have to compete with anymore. But just to round that out, man, my point here is there are when talking about this stuff male intersexual competition seems

like for one of a better word it seems fairer it's like you're like playing a fair game here in some sort of a way like you tried to steal his girl by saying to his girl that he's a fucking bitch

and that you're hotter than him bigger than him richer than him faster than him will look after her more than him or you tried to beat him up or you you know you did guys don't typically have the social finesse

to be able to do the things that women do. And I think the reason that it sometimes feels a little icky or accusatory or uncomfortable to talk about this stuff is it does, like, belie a lot of like coercion and manipulation and connivingness on women. And that's simply because they're more complex, right? They are more socially, they are more complex than men are. And it's funny because sometimes people will hear, you know, this distance. between ultimate and proximate and the hidden motives that women have. And this turns them off of evolutionary psychology and they think, oh, this is just like, you know, fueling this idea that women are bad or something. But the thing is, like, those very same patterns of behavior can be

easily understood with an evolutionary psychology lens, which is that women are reproductively more valuable. They can't compete out in the open because then you are potentially inviting physical violence, right? Like if you just go up to, you know, a girl or a guy or whatever say, you should leave her, like she sucks, whatever, like just being very open about that, you are raising the risk of actually being physically harmed in some way. And then even if it isn't physical harm, because women don't, you know, they're not as physically confrontational as men, you are raising the possibility of ostracism, social exclusion, backbiting, all these kinds of things. And so if you can strategically express the same idea in a more plausibly

deniable way, you're reducing the risk of being killed or hurt or being ostracized. And that's important because, you know, historically, women who were, you know, tactful were more likely to survive and reproduce. And perhaps at some point in the human lineage, there were women who were more like men who would just openly and bluntly say whatever dumb thing came to mind. And then they were cast out or the women would ostracize them. And that was the end of that genetic lineage. And then, you know, your point here about, yes, it's not, you know, there's a self-deception element. And, and And so much of what happens, you know, with human beings, we're not aware of it. And sometimes I draw this parallel to animal species.

You don't need to know why a behavior is effective for it to be effective for it to work. So birds don't know in a conscious, articulable way why they engage in mating calls. You know, they're just obeying their instincts that have been honed through billions of years of evolution. Same thing with elk, you know, during mating season, the male elk lock antlers, and they're trying to impress the women. But, you know, if you could somehow communicate with the elk, they wouldn't be able to say, oh, I'm trying to impress the females around me. They're just obeying this impulse. Same thing with spiders. They don't know why they weave webs.

But all of these things occur because, you know, they inherited these genes that led them to partake in behaviors that enhance the likelihood of survival and reproductive production. I think the same thing is true for humans. you know, so many of our behaviors were unaware of, they operate under the hood, and sometimes it can be advantageous to believe we're doing something for one reason versus another, and the reason why it's advantageous is also tied to evolutionary reasons, that I'm going to give you this nice, kind, compassionate-sounding reason so that you don't hate me or cast me out or reduce my fitness in some way. So I'm going to give you this nice reason so that you still like me and want to be friends with me and whatever, like, I want to be supportive with romantic relationships

and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, and I think, like, what you said before about, you know, women might hear this and think, oh, how can you apply all of these negative motives and so on? I mean, as you're saying that, I thought, like, you know, why is so much of the discourse around men are all trash or focus on red flags? I think, you know, if you were a person with a platform in an audience, you could also focus on green flags. You could say something like, you know, here's what to, like, if you want a relationship that, you know, if you don't want a relationship, that's fine. But if you do, you know, here are some tips, some green flags. If you're in a relationship, you could say, here's how I chose my partner. Or, you know, here are the lessons

that I've learned along the way. There was that very famous essay a couple years back by Bridget Fetazy, why I regret being a slut. And she was speaking to young women about the lessons she'd learned throughout her life. That essay went super viral and grew her audience. And so there are ways, I think, to help people and, and, you know, not try to knock them out of the mating pool. It's very interesting. There's a great point. How many articles online are here are things to avoid, not here are things to chase. And it is all, this is a reason not to do a thing. This is a reason not to get into a relationship. The girl with the list 350 reasons not to have kids. Like this is a red flag. This is an ick. You shouldn't chase it. As opposed to these are all of the things to pursue. Like stuff that you're supposed to go after is really only framed as the absence of things to avoid. And it's like, it is all about that runaway element. I think, um, dude, your article on this was so fucking good. I want to read an excerpt from it.

And everyone should go and subscribe to your substack because I, I'm in love with it. Women in positions of power, corporate leaders, senior academics, influential media figures create environments that make reproduction difficult for the women below them. They do it through culture and expectations. Long work hours become mandatory. Women who prioritize family are passed over for promotions. The message is clear. serious women don't have children, or at least they don't let children slow them down.

The subordinate women absorb this message. This helps explain something puzzling about modern feminism. This is so fucking good. Progressive feminists often criticize capitalism. They talk about how corporations exploit workers, how the pursuit of profit harms people, how we should value things other than career success. Yet, the same voices insist that there's no higher priority for young women than organizing their lives around a career.

Many of these elite women have partners, many of them have children. They figured out how to balance career and family, or they had resources that made it easier. But they don't advertise that. They don't tell young women that women who are married and have children report the highest levels of happiness. Instead, they emphasize the importance of career and the burden of children. It's the primate pattern playing out in modern institutions, dominant females suppressing the reproduction of subordinates, not through conscious malice, but through the same unconscious evolved mechanisms we've seen baboons and marmosets. Non-elite women absorb the message that reproduction is incompatible with success,

their fertility gets suppressed. Dude, that's so fucking great. That squaring of the circle of capitalism is bad down with this sort of modern economic system and your career is the most important thing in the world. Make sure you go to college, university, complete your degree, go and chase down the career. Like, I've never thought that those two things don't square, but that's fucking brilliant. I thought it was so good. Yeah.

And you see, I mean, those highly educated, I mean, you see the, with men and women. You know, the higher up you go in education, the more likely people are to bash capitalism, but then the more likely they themselves are to pursue those very same careers. And, you know, so on the one hand, they're badmouting this pathway for others, but then for themselves, they're frantically working as hard as they possibly can to climb to the top of those same ladders. And yeah, this, you know, you mentioned. So it's, you know, influential media figures, academics, corporate leaders. I had this conversation a while back with an editor at a well-known magazine. It wasn't Vogue, but he was telling me that they had recently ran

this story of a woman who, she was married, had a family, and then she got a divorce, started on OnlyFans, and wrote about how happy she was with her decision. And I asked this magazine editor, I said, would you guys run the reverse story? Like, there's a woman on OnlyFans, and then she realizes she's unhappy with this, quits OnlyFans, finds a husband, gets married, and has kids and then writes an essay about how happy she is with her life now and with this decision and he said oh we would never run that like not in a million years and i find this absolutely fascinating because why why do you think that is i didn't i didn't ask him because you know we we were basically on the same page like he understood where i was coming from about the the messages

we received for media and you know one thing he told me which is interesting is like you know he was kind of a cog in the system too like he said you know i would like to run that but i know like that would get squashed immediately. But, you know, the reasoning here, I think, is, you know, tied to what we've been discussing that, you know, you want to suppress rivals. You want to convince people that maybe this pathway is unfulfilling and actually just, you know, getting naked for strangers for money is more exciting. It's more interesting. It's more titillating. And, you know, I don't know if if the world actually is objectively more competitive, but it's perceived to be.

I think there is this growing perception that, you know, Peter Churchin talks about surplus elites and truly competition and all this kind of stuff, that, you know, if you want to live a comfortable life, the entryway onto that path is narrower. And so if you can convince people to just opt out altogether, you know, this can be beneficial for you and for your own children.

And then, you know, kind of on a, maybe a more kind of proximate level. It's just, you know, it's more interesting. It's more clickable. Like,

that's a clickbait headline. You know, I left my husband for Onlyfans and I'm so happy. Like, that is a more sensationalistic. It feels counterculture. It fills uplifting.

Again, it plays into this sort of hyper-independent female. You can go and get it yourself thing. One question that, that people may have, is why would a successful career woman who already won the husband and the family

care about suppressing the reproduction of subordinates. Like, you've already reached escape velocity. So what do you do? You're no longer in the mating pool. What would be the logic of that woman still trying to pull the ladder up after her, so to speak? Well, so there's, God, I hope I'm getting the name of this right,

and I'm probably not. But there's this idea. It's something like the absent, oh, it's called the Absent Father, hypothesis, which, yeah, that is it. The idea here is tied in with the grandmother hypothesis that the reason why women have prolonged lifespans, one reason, maybe because they were able to help their daughters with child rearing. And so humans are one of the, I think we're the only primate species where women live long past menopause. And so the grandmother hypothesis is

So they can help their daughters raise their grandchildren, their own grandchildren. But then the absent father hypothesis is related, which is this idea that, you know, at various points in our evolutionary history, men were often not very invested as fathers. And so the grandmother could step in and support the child. And so one reason for absent fathers was, you know, things like warfare, hunting, you know, different ways to die, infections and so on. Mortality rates were higher. but another common reason is that men, especially higher status men, will leave their wives for

younger partners. And if you, you know, you could imagine that that kind of psychology has been passed on to us. We evolved in societies where there was a limited number of desirable partners, a limited number of potential mates. And so, you know, you want to hold on to the partner that you have and you can enact strategies to suppress competition from the few competitors you have in the small hunter-gatherer nomadic bands. In the modern world, this can express itself as, wow, my husband's a CEO, you know, maybe I'm getting a little bit older, and I know that men as they age are still, you know, often very desirable to younger women.

And so I'm going to, you know, convince younger women, like, actually, you shouldn't be dating men, you shouldn't be interested in men. Um, you know, and I've talked about this before, uh, who is often the most upset about, um, the age gap, you know, the whole age gap discourse is often women who are getting a little bit older and who start to become more stressed out about young women dating older men, especially if the woman, the young women happen to be younger than themselves. And so I think that's also, uh, playing a role here is that, uh, older women who have reached escape velocity, they have the husband, they have the nice house, they have the kids and so on. Um, but, you know, if you're a magazine editor or if you're, uh, politician, corporate leaders, something, you can still kind of introduce this idea out there to younger women to maybe avoid that same path so that you don't lose what you have. This episode is brought you by Incogni. If you've ever typed your name into Google and found your info on some weird website that you've never heard of, that's not a fluke. Data brokers and people search sites collect your personal information like your name, address, phone number, buying habits, your income, your medical history, and they

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and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's I-N-C-O-G-N-I dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Jamie Krems taught me probably the most unpalatable theory. The only people left are people that are amenable to this. I think we're safe now. Once you get an hour into a podcast, like all of the people that hated it have self-selected out,

Jamie Krems gave me the most ruthless proximate versus ultimate explanation for pro-life versus pro-choice that being pro-life means that the cost of casual sex increases and if you look at the data if the decision, this is the maddest thing dude if the decision around women's bodies

was left up to men Like men are trying to control women's bodies If the decision around women's bodies And reproductive rights was left up to men They would almost certainly have All access to abortion If you look at the Voting and the preferences

Women are more pro-life Than they are pro-choice And this skews older So you might say Well Women who go through the beauty of childbirth And see just how wonderful it is to bring a young baby into this world. Don't want women that are about to have a kid or potentially

going to have a kid to miss out on that. Also, there is this sort of connection to the beauty of rearing a child. You see this life come into the world and you want to protect that. But on the other side, you could say, well, I now am beholden to my male partner. His resources and his investment in me is very important to the future survival of both me and my child. And maybe some younger women might tempt him away. And if I am able to make it more difficult for them to have casual sex by raising the price of casual sex, by making access to birth control more difficult, they may be less likely to engage in casual sex. And as such, my male partner who I want to look after me and my child is less likely to engage in casual sex because there's going to be fewer potential suitors. That

was the most fucking unpalatable theory. Like, people fucking hated it because on the surface, it's like, what do you mean? I just don't want to kill babies. I don't want to destroy the future. I need to fix the birth rate. This is like part of the downfall of society. Like, when someone feels like they're doing something so good, and this is why I think the visceral response, body positivity, what do you mean?

Well, like, including these women, like, you're, oh, you just want to be exclusionary. You just want to tell people that. What do you mean about this? Like, men are trash. They're not looking after these. women. They're like, the 10 million men age 20 to 54 are unemployed. You want us to just be mankeeping and all of these things up front sound so laudable. And to hear that what on the surface is pro-social charitable and maybe a position that you take pride in, you're like,

I'm proud of the fact that I am such a pro-social caring person, that I do this for the world to then have a hole poked in it and for someone to say, ah, yeah, interesting. Shame that it's total, like, shallow self-promotion and survivalism that's more exclusionary than it is inclusionary. People don't seem to take that very well.

Yeah. And, you know, this is like a basic principle in psychology, which is that if something is aligned with your interests, your belief in it isn't reduced. increased. Your sincerity is increased, not decreased. So if you tell me that, oh, if you support this thing and it's going to help you in some way, I'm going to sincerely believe it. And I'm going to tell you how great it is. And there's not actually going to be any kind of layer of duplicity necessarily. And so, yeah, if you're, as you were describing this, and to paraphrase, right,

you're saying that older women are more pro-life because they want to reduce access to abortion so that their husbands don't strain and pregnant the young woman and so on. And so it's in their interests to actually genuinely 100% believe in the pro-life position because it's helpful for them. And so there actually is no duplicity at all, right? It strengthens their sincerity. You're right. There's no duplicity. The motivation is less pure, right? That might be a way to look at it. Yes, right. Yeah, yeah. The difference between the stated reason versus the the unconscious reason. And yeah, yeah, the Jamie Crems work, I mean, the other paper that she wrote that I find really interesting on this sort of abortion issue, you know, she basically found that people who are pro-life, there seems to be this unconscious motivation in part to increase the costs of promiscuous sex, right?

Like people who are pro-life tend to have more monogamous reproductive strategies. And so by raising the cost of promiscuous sex, there are kind of indirectly ensuring that people pair bond to one particular. mate. And I remember I had this conversation with her about this because this implies the opposite is also true that if you're pro choice, of course, there's the ostensibly compassionate stated reason, which is, you know, oh, like women may need access because, you know, they don't want to be real their life or their careers or what have you. So you want to have access for health care reasons and so forth. But if you take that sort of unconscious, ultimate level of explanation, if the pro-life thing is, you know, I'm a, I'm a monogamous strategist. The pro-choice stance is you're a casual short-term-oriented strategist.

I want to reduce the cost of casual sex so that I can partake more in it. I want to make it easier to have lots of promiscuous sex without having to pay any cost for it. Rob Persban, who I know you're familiar with, he did a similar paper years ago on political stances around the legalization. of drugs and he and his co-worker co-authors basically found that there's a there's a kind of a the relationship between your stance on drugs and your openness to casual sex um like that that is basically the the link there like that's the that's the relationship i remember that yeah basically hedonism at large people are going to be high and maybe they fuck each other Even if you try to control for, like, religiosity and all these other things, like, still, the much stronger predictor was your stance on casual sex.

And so this basically says, like, oh, people want to ban or prohibit illegal drugs because drugs tend to reduce inhibitions and encourage promiscuity. But then, of course, you could say, you know, the opposite is the case, that people who are very anti-drug, they have a more monogamous relationship strategy. and they want to reduce people from participating in casual sex. And so, yes, I think so many of our motives that sound very articulate and interesting and well thought through and sophisticated, there's often kind of an evolutionary motive going on under the hood. Yeah. So one of the other things, sort of beyond this stated versus revealed master class thing,

what do you think this atmosphere has done to the way that men show up? Because I remember your article, no one expects young men to do anything and they're responding by not doing anything. Yeah. How, what have you sort of come to believe about the way that this dynamic influences male behavior sort of in response to it? Because it's not as if this is a one-way street. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that I find interesting now is like, you know, you use the phrase mankeeping and, you know, there's this idea of toxic masculinity. And it seems like there's remarkably little resistance from men. I know there's

like the in-cell community and like all, but they seem very small and ineffectual, uninfluential. And it's a tiny group of guys who say anything at all challenging these ideas. And I think what may be happening here and these ideas were inspired by this amazing book. called Manhood in the Making by the anthropologist David Gilmore, he points out in this book that actually the idea of manhood, you know, and he surveyed cultures around the world, small scale,

non-industrialized societies from Melanesia, South America, islands of Greece, like all these kind of pre-industrialized societies. And what he finds is that, you know, these cultures created rights of passage for men, because if you leave young men to their own devices, they actually don't, like, they don't want to be men, is basically the conclusion he came to. Men, at least in the sort of traditional masculine sense, they are very happy to be withdrawn, self-interested, you know, non-contributors, lazy, selfish, and so forth.

And the reason why manhood rituals arose independently in so many different societies throughout history is, oh, like, if we don't do this, guys are just like, going to like withdraw and turn into inert nothings. And so we're going to inculcate this ideal in them of you have to be a net contributor, you have to be brave, you have to be courageous, you have to be productive and assertive and all these kinds of things. And some of the raw ingredients obviously already exist in young men for those positive masculine qualities to emerge, but they have to be shaped and inculcated by their community. But because our society doesn't really have this, and you have, you know, all this language around toxic masculinity and men need to step aside and all this stuff. Like, a lot of guys are just like, you see this online too.

Like, well, I would try if women would stop badmouthing us or like, I would do this, but, you know, society hates us anyway. So why bother trying? Um, I think a lot of that, what they're saying is, you know, with encouragement and, and if there was some kind of incentive of reward, they would live up to it. And it's not entirely wrong. Um, but also, I think there's a bit of self-interested reasoning there. which is like, you know, inside of me is a great man, but I just need people to stop being mean to me so it can express itself.

If criticism ceased, they wouldn't become like, you know, strong traditional positive masculine men overnight. Like, they would not turn into that man. They don't have that yet. It would require years of effort and work to build that up. And, you know, some mean headlines and tweets and so on. Like, that's not going to be enough to undercut them.

It takes a lot more than that for positive masculinity to emerge. Yeah. I told you as well about the swag gap relationship, something that I read about a while ago. Let me, I'll give you a recap about swag gap relationship.

What I will not do is have a swag gap relationship says TikToka, it's almond milk honey in a video. I mean, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I can't stand up with a straight face. Having me showing up in public looking swagged out, looking fly, I have a cool outfit, and then my partner just looks like an effing mess behind me.

I can't do it. The swag gap can erode self-esteem when one partner compares themselves to the other, even if it's not too evident, it can quietly affect that partner's self-esteem. This may cause an imbalance, where the seemingly less cool partner may start to shrink, hold back our internalized feelings of inadequacy. The swag gap triggers a shift in perceived power. 2021 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships studied 181 heterosexual couples and explored how different aspects of power influenced relationship satisfaction. The research is distinguished between personal sense of power, how empowered a person feels, positional power,

formal advantages, general power motive and balance of power. They found that subjective personal sense of power rather than objective positional power or the overall balance predicted both couples' relationship quality. Couples who felt more empowered and satisfied with their own influence reported higher relationship satisfaction. This is true regardless of formal or structural power differences. Perceived coolness can redirect romantic attention. Feeling more confident than your partner can create an unspoken sense of elevated status for the partner who feels like the cooler one. While this may boost self-esteem and a sense of control can also draw the partner's attention outward by making them the seemingly cooler partner more aware of attractive alternatives

or opportunities outside the relationship. So I think, again, there's a few things going on here. First off, it seems like the primary use or the primary currency that your relationship is supposed to convert into is not relational satisfaction, but a branding option, opportunity and how do other women perceive you? Maybe part of this is, um, I, don't think that this is going to be a long-term investment, because this relationship is likely to be transactional and transient, my social status with other women is going to last longer than the relationship. Therefore, I'm going to prioritize how other women see me, as opposed to fully investing myself into this relationship. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Right. They're

optimizing for approval of women rather than, you know, the, I guess, secure attachment and relationship with, with a man. Because they think it's going to, it's going to drop off at some point in the near future. Their friendships are going to last longer than their relationships. Huh. Yeah, yeah. The followers are forever, but boyfriends are fleeting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if, yeah, there is something going on like there. Yeah, yeah. So you're the first person who told me about the swag gap that shows how out of the loop I am. So you told me about it and I went and read a couple articles trying to get a sense of what it was. And I mean, okay, so yeah, there's a gap where one person in the couple is more stylish and cool than the other.

And the photo that I kept seeing in these articles was Justin Bieber. He had the hoodie, but then a ball cap over the hoodie. And he's wearing shorts and crocs. And then the girl he's dating, I don't know her name is like, you know, decked out, you know, red dress, makeup, hair done. She looks very glam and yeah you see this I guess other other other cases to like Pete Davidson like dressed down and then whoever he's dating looks swagged out so the swag gap here and I think like a lot of this it seemed to be a lot of it was like women who were angry like you know women putting so much effort into their appearance how they look how they dress their hair their makeup everything and then the guy they're with just looks like you know homeless he looks like a bum

And I think this may be the result of people just kind of misunderstanding, you know, how status is generally evaluated by both sexes as well, which is that, you know, women are judged both by men and by women, more so on their appearance, whereas men aren't judged as harshly by men or by women on how they look. And I think a lot of the swag gap stuff, like, I mean, maybe you see it in ordinary relationships. relationships, but at least with the celebrity cases, you know, like Bieber is basically counter signaling, right? He's like, I'm Justin Bieber. I'm a world famous celebrity. I can wear crocs in a hoodie and my girl can be, you know, decked out. And this is fine because everyone knows, like, that I'm Justin Bieber. So dressing down is essentially a counter signal. And then I thought, okay, like, it doesn't really work for women, right? Because a man's, attractiveness, his desirability is indexed more so on his social status, which Beaver

has a lot of, so he can be indifferent to his appearance. Whereas for women, because so much of their status and their desirability is tied up with how they look, they can't really counter signal in the same way. And so I think, like, a woman, the equivalent of a swag gap would essentially be, and this almost sounds ridiculous to even say aloud, which I think just also helps to eliminate how the current swag gap discourse is silly, is this would be like a woman who's not working, right? Like, a woman who doesn't work a nine to five. And the unspoken message here, the counter signaling messages, I'm so beautiful. I don't have to participate in the rat race.

Right. And so you could imagine like a guy having a really cool high status, amazing job. And then his girl, who's beautiful but doesn't work and people saying like, oh, what's going on with the swag gap here? She can't even hold down a job.

Yeah, she can't hold down a job. Like, why are you with her, bro? Like, you're working, like you're doing all this stuff.

You're paying taxes. You're paying the bills. And she's not, you know, she's not working. What's she contributing? And you, I've never.

seen anything like that, like of men trying to convince other men that a woman who doesn't work isn't worth being with. I wonder whether part of this is that it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading that women are assessing other women's male partners in the way that women assess women. They know that primarily women tend to do more self-beautification. They're going to show up in that kind of a way and they're using that criteria of judgment and pointing it at the men failing to understand that what it is typically. But this would be strange, right? Because the women should be able to detect, well, I am attracted to men for things that are different to why men are attracted to women. But my point on this is, socioeconomically, if men are no longer

the breadwinners, on average, whatever, is the bottom 20% of male learners and top 20% of female learners are now in a relationship where the woman earns more than the man. Have you seen this data? I've seen something similar. Yeah, bottom two quintiles of men, top quintile of women are like the breadwinner is skewed toward the female. If that's the case, and Mac and Murphy put this proposal forward a few years ago, and I think it's true, men would start to show more, more beautification, men would start to try and present themselves because they need to compensate in some sort of way. If you can't compete socioeconomically, or if you can't contribute socioeconomically, you need to contribute in terms of beauty and lux. And maybe it's the case

that, first off, guys who are not just in Bieber and aren't bringing that level of socioeconomic resources to a relationship, trying to emulate sort of the Bieberification, it's like, hey, dude, Crocs, socks, like a homeless hoodie, you may not be able to get away with this if your partner is also the breadwinner. You have missed the fact that there is a huge skew toward Justin Bieber because he's fucking Justin Bieber. And then perhaps another part of it is just that women realize or women are starting to think, well, guys need to look better because they can't contribute in the same sort of a way. I don't need them socioeconomically. So I'm not going to put, like Homer Simpson. like how long is the swag gap relationship has always existed peter griffin wasn't cool

homer simpson wasn't cool like every archetype of the dad or even of the boyfriend typically has been the girl has a better sense of style and fashion and you know the guy turns up inappropriately dressed or uncool or with a stain on the front of his like polo shirt from ketchup or whatever i don't feel like this is a new, a new phenomena. It's just that the trade that was being made, I will put up with his lack of swag because he is keeping a roof over our heads. That trade no longer makes as much sense when you can afford the roof over your head without him. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense that, you know, if you look at this in a very sort of cold analytical way, that, you know, what is each party bringing to the relationship? And historically, it was resources.

sustaining the home financially economically. And then if men are falling behind in education and occupation and attainment and all these kinds of things, then what else could they bring? Well, they can look good. That makes sense to me. I think generally this sort of pressure now among guys, particularly young guys, to look good, that makes sense as, you know, and none of these explanations I think are mutually exclusive. They probably all play some role.

So that explanation of you got to bring something to be attracted. it's to a woman. The other, I think, is just we are, like, we've always been sort of obsessed with image, but I think this has been aggravated in the era of dating apps and social media, where, you know, we pay a lot of attention to how we look now and how we come across online. Because, like, that's all you have, really, to evaluate. In person, you have all these other things, like, like, charisma and how you speak and the sound of your voice and all these other things, like your, your mannerisms. There's so much, uh, kind of unspoken. unacknowledged information

that we're unconsciously absorbing when we meet someone in person versus seeing a 2D image online and then I think the other thing and this is this is I think is more speculative which is because the the I guess availability of cosmetic enhancement

for women has increased so much even within the last couple of decades like women can do all kinds of things with fillers and Botox and like ways to use makeup now that didn't exist like if you watch a movie from like 2003 you know like even the hot girls don't

have, like, whatever's going on with the sculpting and the airbrush. I don't know what it is. Like, I don't even know what to call it, but women look a lot different today, like hot girls today versus hot girls 20, 25 years ago. And I think, yeah, some of that is cosmetic surgery, but some of it is just, like, whatever, like, advancements in, like, basic makeup have taken place. And so as women get better looking, I wonder if there's the pressure on men in turn. Like, there's always going to be a gap where women are always going to be better looking than men, but the gap will stay constant. So as women start to be better looking. become more attractive, men feel, like, obligated in turn to, like, keep that gap the same

instead of, like, staying put while women continue to get hotter. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, I mean, you mentioned it before on the toxic masculinity thing, that the traits in men that are often being pointed at as red flags or things that are kind of out of vogue or base desires or, like, why does, I mean, even. Even in that Vogue article, there is something out of Voka, there is something that says, why does having a boyfriend feel Republican now? Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

Yeah, yeah. You're politically suspect if you have a boyfriend. Yeah. Yeah, that is hilarious. You saw that with Taylor Swift, right? Taylor Swift gets married and suddenly there are these think pieces about like, oh, you know, like this is a bad for women. It's like traitor to the cause.

Like, this feels very conservative now. It's the same. And, you know, hey, hey, to fucking full circle this and have a great. callback what happened when Adele lost weight body positivity community felt like she'd betrayed them in exactly the same way yeah yeah she would

I'm absolutely certain that she would have been accused of there would have been accusations of she's she's taking a hard right pivot she's right wing this is like Nazi-ish patriarchal thinness body standards heteronormative

you know cisgender fucking superstructure misogynistic keeping women down, forcing them to be thin and comply to the male gaze. I could fucking do this all day, dude. I'd be great. But the exact same dynamic happened with Taylor Swift when she got into a relationship. I actually went on to the Child Free and Happy subreddit thing, or slash Child Free, I think it is.

And there was a huge, huge discussion. I was pleasantly surprised with the fact that it was at least partly balanced. But there were some people in there, there were some commenters that were basically saying, like, I can't believe that she's with that animal. Like, how could she betray, like, basically the same as an in-cell that ascends throws the rest of the in-cell community into harsh light because it compares something that they have been able to achieve with something that the rest of the community hasn't. Like, if you get a girlfriend, then it makes my lack of girlfriend my fault as opposed to something systemic that's out there. Now, obviously, the

problem with the child-free community is that there are biological limitations to whether or not some of these women can have kids. But presuming that that's not Taylor Swift's issue, like what you're saying is this person should elect to adhere to the culture that I haven't elected to adhere to. Like if you're limited biologically and Taylor Swift is limited culturally or because of preferences, like that seems, that's like saying Yussein Bolt should cut off his legs in solidarity with the disabled community. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that kind of self-handicapping or whatever, like, yeah, it's selectively applied. And yeah, just this feeling of, you know, I'm going to behave this way in order to show solidarity. But it's often only expressed through like these, it's performative, right? Like I'm going to say this on my podcast. I'm going to post these inspirational quotes or these ideas or these clips or whatever. But then privately, you know, very few people actually. abide by it, right? And so, you know, even if, like, like, the body positivity thing, I think

it would be hilarious if, uh, if, if women who take very good care of their bodies, but like publicly espouse, you know, body positivity and fat acceptance, I'm going to gain 60 pounds in solidarity with differently weighted women who have difficulty with wage because of our, you know, present society, whatever. And I'm going to pack on 60 pounds because, you know, this is, you know, I'm supporting the sisterhood, I'm fiving the patriarchy or whatever.

And you never really see that. You see women who work out a lot and then they say, you know, they say all the right words. Dude, Lizzo's lost weight. Oh, really? I didn't know this. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, now we're in the era of GLP ones and OZMPIC and everything else.

So I just feel like, you know, I saw this, this, this tweet the other day, and it was something like, you know, it's really funny how you're seeing, like, less chatter from the fat acceptance community now that OZempic is becoming more widely available. Right. I mean, this was one of my favorite takes after the Golden Globes that GLP-1s have just proven that body positivity was a scam all along. Body positivity was the inner citadel for these people. And the second that they had a free route out of being bigger than they wanted to, who is not taking that? Yeah, I mean, that is...

Because there's a difference between choosing to not lose weight because of anchoring bias. It's like, well, I'm already this size. I've always been this size. Versus, hey, if you're so in tune with the body positivity community, why not gain 50 pounds? Like, why not pack on 50 pounds in solidarity? Because if weight has no bearing on health or attractiveness, if beauty is at every size, you could stand with your bigger sisters. And there are so many, like, you know, you see so many examples of this, Chris, like, you know, I spend a lot of time in academia and I would see like white male university professors and presidents people in prominent roles. And they would often say like, yeah, it's about time we stop hiring people who look like me and give a voice to women, people of color, you know, members of the LGBT community, whatever. And I'm always thinking in my mind when I heard these, you know, these grand speeches, like start with yourself. Yeah, just abandon the position.

It would be like, and you would be lauded for, at least, you know, temporarily, you know, if you said, like, I am publicly going to step down if the university can agree to replace me with a woman of color. Like, yeah, that would, like, why not do that? But they never, they never do anything like this. Dude, that is so funny. Just getting people to put their money where their mouth is. Yes. With regards to this really sort of reveals the, the luxury of the beliefs.

Is there anything else? You got anything else to say? Is there anything else that we haven't covered on the swag gap embarrassment cringe of boyfriends? No, no. I mean, yeah, I thought the swag gap. It's so funny. Like you said, like, this is, as I was real, I was also thinking, like, this has always existed. Like, you've always seen, like, a guy who doesn't put as much effort in how he dresses,

and then his wife looks much better than him or his girlfriend. So, yeah, it's funny now that it has a label. But, yeah. A deeper dive than either of us ever thought that we should need to do on a single article. Dude, I am stuck in. a world where I can't work out if this is TikTok brain slop or a genuine insight into important mating trends that will literally shape the future of humanity. Like that's the current world that I'm in and, um, alas, we will continue to assess it

way too deeply until that day comes and we work out, which is true. Rob Henderson, ladies and gentlemen, everyone used to go and subscribe to your substack. It fucking rips. I love it. You publish like two or three pieces a week. You're now doing office hours. your own little thing going on from a podcast perspective and stuff too i i think it's uh i think it's so good um anything else do you want to push uh no i mean my book's out in paperback

troubled a memoir foster care family and social class um and yeah always appreciate you having me on chris