Modern Wisdom - #1021 - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington - The Performative Male Epidemic

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Louise Perry is a writer, Press Officer for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This and an author. Mary Harrington is a writer, columnist and author. Why are young people having less sex than ever? Has something in our evolution shifted, or has modern life become so confusing that we can’t even tell what we’re attracted to anymore? What’s really happening to relationships today, and is there anything we can do to fix it? Sponsors: Modern Wisdom Merch available now - ⁠https://www.mwmerch.com⁠ 🚀 Live until Tuesday, 18th Nov See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get $100 off the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.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

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Finish the edge. Come to mwmerch.com. For fuck sake. Americans are having a record low amount of sex, even less than they did during COVID, just 37% of American adults have sex weekly down from 55% in 1990. Does this counter the view that sex is becoming more casually accepted than ever before? Who goes first?

Do you want to go first? I think I glanced at these statistics. And what I thought was interesting and sort of haven't really had a chance to borrow into is how does it split between the long-term partnered and the casually? and the unpartnered. Yeah. Because that's been generally the, that's where the commentary gets interesting and people have often, you know, the conservative side will say,

no, actually, the not getting any is very much the people who are not married. And actually the married are getting any. And if I remember rightly, the recent headlines, actually the people who are not, who are married are also becoming more panda-like. Sex recessions happening across the board. Yeah, yeah. It's happening across the board. Relationship agnostic.

So I think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently being at least more permissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue. So if people are less likely to be in long-term partnerships and people in long-term partnerships have more sex. So I think there's a model that works where, say, Gen Z are having casual sex, but they're only having casual sex. So like one hookup a year, for instance, works out as very little sex. but it's also not to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist. So you're able to have both of these things happening at the same time? And they might actually be causing each other. Yeah, but I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex. And that might be to do with things like obesity, things like, I don't know, xenoestrogens, like there could be biological things going on, or people just looking at their phones too much. I think people looking at their phones is at least as plausible in a practical level as xenostrogens or any.

of the sort of exotic biological explanations. I mean, if you're, it's, it's very, it's very absorbing. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, a certain amount of, a certain amount of action happens just, you know, nothing, nothing to do, nothing on TV. Spontaneously, you know, you're here, I'm here. You know, Alice Evans, who's a academic at KCL London, she blamed smartphones for the birthright crisis. I mean, the, the, the, the line starts going down.

They certainly track. Some time before smartphones. Well, it depends on what country you're looking at. It depends on which country you're looking at. But she notices, and I think this is true, that all the parts of the world that are seeing, have seen and are seeing the greatest drops in fertility, this does track with smartphone usage.

And the place is where fertility is clinging on in, say, sub-Saharan Africa is where people are least likely to have smartphones. I think she's probably, I think probably the third. factor that those things correlate with is actually modernity and affluence and is more and that's more complex but it's interesting I mean her theory is that people are just so besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered by their phones that they just forget to behave like normal normal human beings and reproduce do you think Taylor Swift's tradwife arc will be enough to reverse birth rate decline but she's not having a trad wife arc is she she's engaged

let us do it one step at a time come on What is she 35? Maybe, yeah. Yeah, it's not especially triad by music. You know what I mean, though. I mean, there was a poem by someone called Kailin Weird. It's got tens of millions of views. Have you seen this?

No. It's been floating around. The day Taylor Swift got engaged, little girls screamed, grown women cried, and the awkward child we all carry inside finally felt chosen. My point. Lots of women follow Taylor Swift. she's got engaged. Is this going to be a boon? Like, it's a non-zero impact on coupling, right?

But how big is it going to be? So these things are memetic. I'm with you there. But I don't know. I mean, that isn't, okay, that is an interesting question. Like, we know that with fertility, if your sister, say, has a baby, you're more likely to have a baby in the year following, and best friend, etc. But does it work when it's Taylor Swift? Well, maybe. I mean, I was thinking maybe if it, maybe parasycial relationships can have the same effect. And probably actually people spend more. I mean, it occurred to me the other day that I see Donald Trump's face so much more often than I see like my neighbor's faces. For instance, this is fine. And that's probably true for you as well. Because your neighbors are wearing Donald Trump mask as they walk. To wind me up, yeah. But the parasocial relationships, I mean, they do, everyone who's any kind of digital device is susceptible to them. So yeah, maybe. I mean, maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Taylor might be able to trick her biggest fans

into thinking my sister's just had a baby or when she does eventually have a baby, hopefully. So, yeah, I think it's not negligible. Birth rate decline might be a slightly bigger challenge than can be fixed by Taylor Swift. Maybe a little bit. I mean, you could also make the case. I'm going to be provocative here,

that birth rate decline is not so much a problem as just nature taking its course. Yeah, in the sense of a culture self-correcting from a kind of a terminal spiral into a kind of a structural state of sterility. I mean, if the logical end point of limbic capitalism, this superb phrase that Louise just raised, I mean, I don't know if you've come across this phrase before, it was coined by a writer called David Cautright,

who wrote a book titled Limbic Capitalism, which is a critique of all the ways that, especially in more recent years, the way people make money, the most profitable source of new innovation is hacking people's basic primitive drives and redirecting them from what they're actually healthily meant to do towards making money for companies. So, you know, selling junk food, selling pornography, hacking people's dopamine systems so that they stay hypnotized by social media instead of getting it on or having reforming relationships or even frankly going outside. You know, all of those

things are instances of what court right calls limbic capitalism. And I think you could make the case that if we're, if the direction of the general overall cultural direction of travel is such, that that's the end point that we're currently destined towards, you know, if it's, if it's resulting in people just not having babies, you could argue that, you know, if you take a step back, that's just evolution taking its course. You know, we are being selected against by our own, by our own commercial infrastructure. And the end point of that will be that the current culture will very literally not be reproduced and will be replaced in two or three generations by some other culture which has somehow managed to unplug from the skinner machine.

Yeah, okay. I mean, so in the long term it's kind of optimistic but in the short term for the people who are committed to the limbic capitalist architecture, it looks like a disaster. The conversation I had with Brad Wilcox, he was talking about why South Korea has got such a low birth rate. And one of his big theories is around K-pop stars. Have you heard this one? No. Fucking brilliant. So the K-pop revolution is very constructed.

These people sort of apply. They go through Navy SEAL selection week and then they're done. And they're locked into these ironclad 360 24-7 contracts. and in them they can't date to be completely celibate for the entire time which means

how long does it last the contract for as long as they're in the band and if they want to go and if they were to begin dating they would be out right maybe I don't know what's the reasoning I think he didn't say that

but I'm going to guess something like we want you completely committed to this huge project and anything which is off that might muddy the water I'm certainly also a cleaner parasocial relationship

isn't it as well. I suppose. You know, when you think about the relationship between Taylor Swift's fans, Taylor Swift's boyfriends and Taylor Swift, you know, historic, you know, what was it, Matty Healy? And when she was dating him, they all went, they, her entire fan base of, you know, squillion, bajillions of women went absolutely bananas. They hated him. And they bet like his, her fan base basically split up the relationship. That's a, that's a way to put it, that if you have a personal relationship, there is a part of you that is outside of the band. Yeah. Right. So there is no personal. Yeah. And his point is that because you have,

the most popular, most aspirational role models within a country are all uncoupled and childless. That created a huge generational impact of you shouldn't be trying to have kids. And if that's true, there was a great example. I think it's the country of Georgia, very religious, and they have this like superstar, rock star pastor. And he's the most popular guy in the entire country, and he tried to fix birth rate decline by saying, I will personally baptize the third child of any family. Oh, I remember that, yeah. And these families are speed running through children in a desperate attempt to get the third.

And so you can see people who are of high status are able to create incentives that encourage people who respect them in order to follow them. So the obvious thing, at least for Korea, that you could fix overnight, is the only way you can become a k-pop star as if you're already a mother or father like that's the how you get in and that means that every k-pop star now is a example and again the entire architecture of limbic capitalism militates against that because um the the excitement clearly i mean this is not a this is not a world i'm massively familiar with but there's obviously like huge volumes of gossip content and huge amount of exposure and like the every aspect of these these people's lives

down to their inner lives is made available for strip mining by the media machine and under those circumstances it's just not possible to be a parent because to be there

to be for your child or to be for your family is to keep some of that material some of that intimate stuff protected from being stripmined and commercialised in that way I mean this is something you and I talk about

isn't it Louise like how and in what how you go how one can go about existing in public while intentionally preserving a space of intimacy where family life happens and where that's, which is not subject to that. The digital modesty, exactly. And I mean, I'm very intentional about what I post and when and how I share any information at all about my family. You know, they're there and I love them. And if I don't talk about them, it's not because actually I secretly wish I wasn't part of that family. It's precisely because I respect their privacy and their stories are not mine to tell. but but you know to be a k-pop star under you know to say you have to be a parent to be a k-pop star would be to say you also have to be willing to strip mine your family that's true i suppose you're strip mining your ability to have a family in the first iteration of it though right like

you're refusing to have okay so on one side you are being puppeted by lack and on the other side you are being puppeted by transparency i mean i think you know at the risk of the risk of getting very anti-capitalist, very early in this conversation. You know, perhaps the problem is the strip mining. It's, I mean, the position that we're all in. You know, in the literal, physical, natural world as well as in the emotional. Good caveat. But my point is, we're all kind of under the impression of the awareness that that is a

problem that's too big to be solved. So you need interventions that can, this is the world that we exist within. That's so compelling to people and so seductive that you're not going to be able to stop that. you're not going to get people off smartphones you're not going to stop social media from hacking the bottom of the brain stem okay so what are the ways get Taylor Swift engaged

I don't know I think if there's any so I think it's not the case that South Korea has low fertility because of K-pop but it probably if there was one easy intervention that you could at least attempt it would be in the world of propaganda

right for the birth rates thing so whether that be intentionally boosting mothers and fathers or yeah obliging K-pop stars to shag

in an appropriate way or like whatever the rules are maybe that would work for trying to make parenthood higher status the problem with any other type of birth rate intervention is that

all of the other options are fairly appalling I think in terms of our actual ability to tolerate them because the cash transfers don't work is what we've learned

and so if the Cash transfers don't work. We could try propaganda after that. We're just going to have to go. Evolution takes its course. Stop the Wi-Fi networks and kill data access from your phone. We could try that, I suppose. Yeah.

Yeah. I just found the Taylor Swift thing's been, like, in the reaction to that, and then the subsequent re-reaction has been pretty interesting. Well, you try and design a clever study to see if she boots marriage and birth rates. And we'll see. correlate your marriage rate with your Spotify listening habits. Yeah, that's true. Save Taylor Swift.

I mean, apparently, supermarket loyalty programs can already tell when somebody's pregnant even before they sometimes they realize it themselves. My algorithm did that. Just by their search patterns and purchase patents. I got an ad for pregnancy tests before I knew I was pregnant the most recent time. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah, the internet's very clever.

It's uncanny. There's an app called A-U-R-A-U-R-A, and it's digital safety stuff. You put it on everybody's phone, but you can put it on your kid's phone, and it allows parents to have sort of surveillance that's safe without encroaching too much on privacy, at least that's the positioning. But it does things like it looks at how hard they're pressing the screen, and it correlates that with their level of psychological distress. And it looks at the last time that they went to,

the last time they used it, and the first time they used it in the morning, and then they correlate that with GPS data. It's all held securely, supposedly. And it's like it can deliver a report to a parent that says, when little Timmy goes to baseball, he sleeps for 45 minutes longer on average, and he's this percent less aggressive when he's pressing the screen,

which suggests that it's very regulating for him. His grandmother could have told you that, though. Yeah, yeah. A lot of this stuff is absolutely, it's a substitute for attentive, attuned, interpersonal relationships by people from people who love you. We're trying to re-engineer through. And there's a sense in which the more you offer a tech alternative to that,

the more you create, the more you open the possibility that actually you can just do without the relationship. Yeah. Whereas, and it's jumping slightly sideways from that to, you know, the power of older women for patent recognition. I was talking to a local friend who has a son the same age as my daughter. We're talking about schools as we were walking our dogs, you know, very, very, very, very, very normy, very, very, very, very normy, very countryside, very, and he, he was telling me, his, his wife, who's also my friend's mother, runs a local riding school, you know, it's one of those very classic kind of, you know, English, English kind of, English kind of, tier three riding schools where all the school ponies are very hairy and very muddy and, and those, and generation after generation after generation of local girls, sort of from tween, probably to mid-teens, have come through this riding stables.

So my friend's mother-in-law has observed patterns of behaviour in possibly, I think, 25 years' worth of local girls. And he and he and his wife are basing their school selection on what she has observed over 25 years about the change in disposition as those girls go off to different schools. So not off-stead, not even what other parents think, not even what other parents are planning to do, but which schools. schools instantly, which secondary schools instantly overnight transformed the girls that my mother-in-law saw from nice little girls into brats and which didn't. Wow. And that's the kind of stuff which you can try and replace with an app, but you can't, basically. A quick aside, you've probably heard experts like Dr. Ronda Patrick talk about the benefits of omega-3s. They support brain reduction. They support brain reduction. They support brain function, but they reduce inflammation. They

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slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout. If you ever read that classic blog, I think it's by an anonymous blogger from years ago, about WAMS versus Autists. So Wands is a made up term. So the argument in the piece is great is we spend a lot of time talking about autism and identifying it in people and seeing it as an obviously bad thing. And we'll list all the ways in which autistic people suffer in the world and we see it as something to be treated.

I mean, obviously, in extreme nonverbal forms, obviously that's appropriate. But to some extent, it is just a personality type, and it's a personality type you're more like to see in men, and is often pathologized. And the piece argues that, no, look, like autism is just one end of a spectrum in terms of a disposition, in terms of being more interested in things than people, and being very interested in systems and being quite socially withdrawn and whatever. We don't have a term for the other end of the spectrum, but we just don't talk about the other end of the spectrum. But there is such a thing as someone being more interested in people than things, not really being interested in systems, being very extroverted, and being very intuitive about everything in very, like, hypersensitive to emotion or whatever. Why don't we have a name for that? Because in extreme forms, that's also a problem. And so the writer, I think, is male, calls them whams.

Which stands for? Nothing. It stands for nothing. It's just a word that you made up. So whamishness is like the opposite of being autistic. And that's fantastic example of whamishness, just pure, like, intuitive. from the girl's emotional states. I don't know.

I mean, it seems like a robust example of patent recognition and the most kind of grounded and localistic kind. The reason I think it's whamish is because it's people-focused. I mean, I know this guy's mother-in-law, so I've met her on a number of occasions. She's the least kind of emotionally labile individual you can imagine. She's like small, small square, thick set, extremely practical English horsewoman.

You're relying very heavily on your neighbours not watching this. Sorry? You're relying very heavily on your neighbour's not watching. Well, I mean, I'm not going to name names, and these are all people whom I love and respect. You know, I cite this as examples of what a functioning social fabric looks like. This is classic British village life. Yeah, yeah.

And the reason I talk about affectionately and respectfully, really deeply affectionately and respectfully about my neighbours and my local community in this way is because living like this is only is what you have. before you start trying to reverse engineer a technological replacement for it. And I mean, you know, these are not people who are all up in each other's grills the whole time, you know. Small town, small town England is mostly people mind their own business. But there's a sense in which you're known cumulatively over time just because you will show up in the same places and you go to the same playgroups and whatever. And that's a very different way of being known and seen and observed than, for example, you know, creating a profile online or even, you know, having your data tracked and and monetise.

by a supermarket shopping app or an algorithm that wants to sell your pregnancy tests very different. It's certainly a missing archetype, I think, for the wise non-grandmother influence in some young person's life. I think we... We call those the aunties, really.

That's why the group chat I made between us is aunties. That was not as flippant as you might have thought. Yeah, like those anti-influences. I don't live in the town or the country that I was born in. I've been displaced by my own choice, but most of my communication now is mediated through all of that. Where is the opportunity for some older matriarch woman to, you know... Why aren't you married yet, Chris?

I'm aware. I'm aware that's... I'm aware that's... I'm aware that... Well, I mean, I'm not expecting you to answer it now, but this is what all of the aunties will beast you with on every possible occasion. I did highlight that at every... I actually dread now going to weddings because there's a 37-year-old unmarried man. Every time that the vows are completed, the fucking eyes of Sauron all turn to the people who, Whistopher, when are we? For fuck, so I feel like I need to, you know, do some Fugazi.

Are those old d'oeuvres over there? I must, I must, you know, escape the situation. But this is what aunties fall. But that is, that's what aunties do. So, I mean, you're a lot of poking. I mean, you're, you know, on the one hand, you long for the aunties and you want to create anti-grouped. On the other hand, you want to run away from them when they beast you at weddings. That's true. I think this is the, the anti-dynamic, you know, you, you probably was ever

thus. Yeah, correct. You know what I mean? All right, I want to talk about a kind of downstream from the Taylor Swift thing. I want to talk about picmes and performative males, because these are two memes that are taking off a little bit at the moment. Performative males? This is not one I've heard. Have you heard about performative males? No. What is a performative

male? You need to get back on Twitter. You need to get back on Twitter. I know, I am cut out of discourse. If Mary hasn't send me a tweet,

I just don't see it. Okay. I've also been deliberately not very online all through the summer. I took my holiday from the internet in England's last

remaining phone blacks. I've decided to pick your fucking sabbatical from online life. And today is the day that the kids go back to school. So how do I have asked you this in four weeks

time? Allow me to tell you about performance. male. Okay. So you're going to have to fill us in. Let me, let me do that. Okay. So performative males are, it's a call out. It's been very interesting. The trend emerged and almost immediately became kind of castigated. You know, like Woke had an opportunity to be a legitimate term before it was a satirical term. Performative males have almost immediately become satirized. Performative male is a guy with floppy hair, sort of oversized flared jeans. He's got a tote bag. He's

reading some sort of literary fiction. He's got a matcher. He's not quite like a cinnamon roll boyfriend husband thing. Is this not just the new soy boy? Maybe. It might be kind of like an elevated hipster, uh, like a soft boy archetype perhaps from sort of the late 2010s. Um, it might be the equivalent of women wearing like football shirts or pink Floyd t-shirts or like kind of like the male. Imagine the male equivalent of a pick me. But it's, stripped of most of the raw, aggressive, kind of more masculine, more domineering.

So let me, like, if I were to speculate, I would say, this is the kind of guy who might employ the sneaky fucker mating strategy. So this is why it's becoming, I think, immediately satirised. I think it's... Louise, of course knows what I mean. It's poorly hidden,

poorly hidden pliable male mating tactics being called out very quickly. Actually, interestingly, I'm not sure how well this maps to performative males, but I remember discovering how, very, very interestedly discovering just how high the proportion is of male feminists who subsequently end up being me-toed as sex pests. I mean, you're writing this piece. Yeah, yeah, I think the lie is very high. Yeah, four paragraphs. Yes.

Because they weren't sufficiently well because they were just rumours and it was just, yeah. Well, allegedly, allegedly, we must remember that allegedly. They gutted the article, but really the pattern. is strong enough that even if you don't name names, it's a thing. So these guys are, they're sort of droopy and feminized in presentation. Flacid, flaccid, man. At least in presentation. But heterosexual.

Heterosexual. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the performative males being this, I think it's... Is it the one guy who comes to Pilates with you and then just like tries to hit him? We're getting close there. We're getting perilously close to like what would have been the sneaky fucker male feminist. The performative male, I think it's as a. much an aesthetic as anything else.

Okay. So it's, it might be the aesthetic. Basically, it might just be a rework of the aesthetic of the sneaky fucker. What does he, what does he read? I'm not too sure. I'm not too sure what he would be, what he'd be reading. Yasmin. She left.

She's, she's, she's, she's, she's my source of sneaky fucker info. She's in, she's in L.A. But it would be, it would be him sort of matcher in how. He's the male embodiment of a matcher drink. So does he read it? Sarah James. us. I think this is what I'm trying to figure out. What it reminds me of is the 70s, when you had the men, simultaneously embracing long hair and free love and whatever, and being quite

feminine and, you know, dodging the draft and stuff. So on the one hand, being anti-masculine, but then fully embracing the post-sexual revolution opportunity to get women into bed. And feminists at the time complained about this. What it sounds like, though, is that the performative male adds a layer of like consumerism, which is quite distinctively 2025. Is that right? I think, I think you've nailed it. Yeah, with the tote bag, with the dress, with the hair. Yeah. I mean, one of my, on his bag. Almost certainly Labubu. Actually, that's a better way to put it. If you could find a lububu with a matcher, it's Labibu males. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, I said one of the, one of the sort of depressive, depressing thoughts that crossed my mind the

other day. You know, when you think about this sort of, like, this sort of noodle-armed male phenotype, you know, with a lububu on his bag and a matcher in his hand, and maybe he actually literally does read Sarah J. Mass. And I think about them and you think about, you know, do I need to wait on? It's okay. I just, the way that you, the way that you construct sentences, I can't keep a straight play. It's fucking brilliant. Okay, go on. Go on. I mean, you know, these, these kind of, this is stupid. Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry. So, okay, okay. Yeah, Labubu, man. Yeah. So, so the booboo guys, what if, in fact, they're more evolutionally fit in terms, in the context of what the working environment. Oh, they're fucking adapted to the new environment. That's what I mean. Because it's like when you think about, when you think about the kind of work that everyone actually does now, and when you think about the kind of social environments that particularly knowledge class people of either sex have to operate within, actually being the kind of high tea, aggressive. you're not sitting still in class. You know, those guys get medicalized and pathologized,

basically because they don't work in open plan offices. Question on this. Is this as close as a man can get to being female whilst still being reproductively viable for females to find attractive? And given that females have got this advantage socioeconomically in the education and in the workplace, this is like the new, it's, and also, I want to talk about me too at some point today.

I wonder if this is the sort of post-me-2 accept what men think, even though incorrectly, I've been told, do not be domineering, do not be too forthcoming, do not be somebody that could make women feel threatened in any way, what's the least threatening Labibu, Toebag, floppy hair, match a drink. It's very HR friendly. Yeah, and I do, I do get the imprint. There's a lot of guys, particularly those who are sort of, you know, socialized into a more sort of progressive kind of thought world, who genuinely feel very distressed by the sort of

heighty, aggressive male disposition. I just finished reading a book. I mean, it's a good book, very interesting piece of work by an ecological economist on care and the sort of Cinderella economy, as he puts it, of care and maintenance and, you know, systemic health and environmental and environmental sustainability and so on, which he sees as being, again, strip mind exploited and, you know, ultimately exhausted by the, the quote unquote real economy that we now have. And in it, he has a whole chapter about the patriarchy, which I just found a really interesting read from a guy who's, you know, he's a successful guy and he's got adult children and, you know, he's obviously, you know, sporty and fit and intelligent, well, he's, he's a successful guy and he's got adult children and, you know, he's obviously, you know, he's obviously, you know, he's obviously, you know, he's read and so on. So like, you know, perfectly manly man within the terms of, you know, modern, respectable, liberal society. But he's furious about the patriarchy, you know, and he's, and the passage I found most interesting is he has a little discussion about

Daphne D'Umorier's novels, and Jamaica Inn, particularly, and Rebecca. And he talks, you know, his reading of Daphne Diumori is as a feminist, you know, that it's a critique of gender relations between the sexes, you know, and particularly of, you know, the chronic kind of susceptive vulnerability of women to male violence. But at one point, he noticed, he observes that DiMorrié's female characters are both vulnerable to male violence and also kind of turned on by it. He doesn't quite put it up. He doesn't quite put it like that. But there's obviously a real ambivalence in the way she writes, and he doesn't know how to process it. And I find that really interesting, just in the context

of thinking about how the Labou Man presents, you know, I'm not suggesting that the author of this book as a Lubbuban. He's a, he's not quite that, but there's something really interesting going on there about, you know, guys who've internalised the idea that to be a straightforwardly aggressive man in a style, in, in a perhaps quote-unquote old-fashioned style or more overtly patriarchal is bad. And that puts you doing in continuity with Andrew Tate and other people who are bad, obviously by definition. And therefore, we must be something which is softer and more consensual and more kind of libububuish or I don't know something good news ag1 just released their next gen formula it is a more advanced clinically backed version of the product that I've been drinking every

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the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1. com slash modern wisdom. Circling back to Chris's opening question, is it possible that everyone's having less sex because of the Lubbubu man? But seriously, like, maybe we do need more. Yeah, we need more polarity. Well, look, this is, to me, this just seems like the progeny of me too, in many ways, that the message that I'll lot of men, the vast majority of well-behaved, sexually disciplined, not pushy men took was, I shouldn't be pushy. It's like, well, yeah, you already weren't that pushy, and maybe

you actually weren't pushy enough. So the issue with the message, don't be too pushy, is that the men who really need to hear it will ignore it, and the men who are already predisposed to believe it will take it to heart. So what you end up with is this weird selection effect where the bad actors still act badly, and the ones who actually probably needed a little bit of a helping hand to go forward are like, oh, holy fuck. And maybe the Labuba Man is just the final form of that. He's taking it too seriously. At the risk of just pouring petrol on this conversation and then flinging a matching, it strikes, you know, it strikes me that, you know, if your thesis is right, and in fact somewhere buried in all of this is actually a lovely,

level of sort of low-level revulsion at Lububu Man and a yearning for a more direct and unmediated form of masculine sexual aggression. It has been suggested by people on the internet whose names I now forget that this is some, this is in fact a factor in the extremely politically sensitive subject of migration into the country across the English Channel. As in, there are that there are progressive women who kind of enjoy the appearance of young men who haven't been lububified yet. Wow. This is not my thesis. Because Labibu hasn't reached Syria.

Laboubu has not reached Syria. These guys are not noodle armed. These guys, in fact, have demonstrated considerable gumption in making it from wherever it is that they originated to England. I mean, it's a genuinely impressive level of gumption. Yeah, involved. Yeah. And I don't know, maybe. That's spicy. What did you say?

Yeah, you really. So, okay, two things. Okay. So having, having just, I'm just going to do you say, I'm going to hand you the petrol can. So I do actually agree with you. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently. No, you're not agreeing with me. You're agreeing with people on the internet.

Sorry. Names I don't know. I was speaking to a journalist friend recently who had been in, Calais and speaking to these guys are trying to come over the channel. And he said, like, what is really amazing is you'll talk to these guys about their life stories. And it will be like, oh, yeah, so I came from Sudan and I walked across half of Africa and then I got to Libya and then I got enslaved. And so I was taken to another country where I was a slave. And then I was gang raped. And then I somehow escaped from that.

And then I swam across the channel, whatever. It's like, they tell this story. And it's the most appalling thing you've ever heard. And they're physically, it's evident that they've been through this. And these are like 20-year-old guys or something. And then you ask them, why do you do it? And they're like, just like Manchester United. They'll offer some like really weird, inadequate answer. It's not even like I want access to the welfare state, because you could have got that in other European countries. It's quite like strange. And I do kind of get your point that there's an element of like crazy machoness about it. Wow. If you're prepared to go through all of that for Manchester United, imagine what

you do for your family and your partner. I suppose so. The only thing I would say, though, is the impression that I get from a lot of women who are very, very invested in refugees welcome kind of stuff is that they really infantilize these men at the same time. And there's a degree to which they're kind of scooping up the vulnerable, you know. You think this is a bit like the American pit bull ladies phenomenon. Yeah, yeah. He's just misunderstood. I'll just add some.

That's okay. This is another one of these discourses, actually probably related in a, obliquely to Lubu Man. It was one of these memes that sloshes around in which a certain subtype of usually single American progressive women are accused of adopting actually, obviously, murderously, sociopathically dangerous, rescue pit bulls as a kind of proxy for the sort of man they would never dream of admitting to fancying in real life. Right. Okay. So in a sense, you know, officially they're only allowed to date Lubu Man and that's in fact the only people who are within their social. circles immediately. Okay. And so they adopt a pit bull to just kind of compensate. So I see his lack of... I see your Lubu Man. Yeah. And I raise you the newly nomenclatured hymbo, which has actually come back around. The new dream guy is beefy, placid, and politically ambiguous. Amid

pitch debates about masculinity, the hymbo stands stoically above it all. As an alternative to the thinking man, the Renaissance man or the family man, today's hymbo offers just man, a blurry image, a blunt political instrument or just a caricature, the human equivalent of a smiley face. The hymbo is, in many senses, unreal, a wish-fulfillment fantasy. His true self is concealed behind a set of dough-like eyes, the content of his inferiority forever unconfirmed. So is this like Ken in Greta Goerwigsby? He says towards the end, if I'd realized patriarchy, wasn't just about horses, I wouldn't have bothered. Hunk with a heart of gold. Hunk with a heart of gold. I think, who was the dude that did Magic Mike? Who was the guy, the actor that played Magic Mike?

Channing Tatum. Channing Tatum is often put forward as like himbo. I actually, Channing Tatum follows me on Instagram, so I actually quite like him. But Hunk with the Heart of Gold, the human equivalent of a smiley face. What we've got here is basically I think you're trying to cross the streams between Lubbubu Man in terms of disposition and front cover of a dark romance novel in terms of presentation. I mean, it's a tricky tightrope for women. Because on the one hand you want, an eternal conundrum. You want a man who is going to protect you and protect your children and provide for you in times of extreme threat, right? But you also don't want someone who's going to beat you up and beat up your children. And so that's tricky. The line that you've got

to perennially walk. Yeah, yeah. And so the hymbo is, it is, I love a hymbobo, right? And the impression from my female friends is that hymboos are very high status. And I'm a friend talking to me about how, how attractive a hymboombo was. And she said she really, really didn't want, I guess, a luboo man who was like excessively intellectual she said if i came home and he was like i just read something in the new york review of books i would kill myself is not what she wants you a man right um a hymbo does kind of tread that tyro like he's physically capable clearly of doing what's needed if you're at risk but he's so sweethearted that he would never turn on you all again i mean skipping sideways through this this sort of untidy territory there was a there was a piece i think it was in the new york time

which is often a sort of barometer for what American middle-class women in the 30s think about stuff in general. I think it was the New York Times, but it was somewhere in that zone, that discursive zone anyway, on how, on a fascinating new trend of women marrying down. And what they were actually talking about, but what they were talking about wasn't actually women marrying down. It was women marrying below their educational level. Actually, financially, they were marrying up because these. These were women with maybe a degree in a master's or a degree in a PhD or something, but no money and a mountain of debt. It's like complex hypergamy. Who were marrying construction, you know, construction entrepreneurs or, you know, a successful plumber with several employees who was turning over, you know, chunks of change.

And so, you know, in straightforward financial terms, you know, it's at least a match, if not marrying up. But in intellectual and in terms of a particular type of caste as distinct from straightforward economic levels, you know, she was experienced, you know, some of these women were experiencing it as kind of marrying down. And I think there's something, you know, I think that speaks to your hymbo in the sense that very sensibly, these extremely overeducated women, have married some guy who's going to appreciate their brains and also be able to pay the mortgage, you know, without trying to compete. It seems like the hymboos. The hymbo is economically prepared and maybe educationally underdeveloped, whereas the Labibu man is maybe

economically underdeveloped and overeducated. I mean, would you rather have a guy who can talk? Would you rather have a guy who can talk contemporary literature but can afford to buy you dinner? Or some guy who can fix the plumbing when it goes wrong and just doesn't care what you think about books? I have a funny story about this. It occurs to me that my parents technically have that dynamic

because my mom has a PhD and my dad. dad has an undergraduate degree and then became a lawyer. But anyone who knows, PhDs don't translate into big money, right? So my dad's always earned more. But there was this funny story about a time when he was at work, this is the age full of the internet. And someone referred to King Lear in talking about office politics. He was like, oh, someone is, someone's behaving like King Lear in relation to someone who didn't understand what they were saying. He called my mum, like, very quietly and said, what happens in King Lear? It was a funny example of this. Well, there's something there.

How much do women find that endearing? How much do women find needing to intellectually coddle their partner beyond, up to a certain point? How much do they find that as, oh, noble savage? I personally find that endearing. I don't know if he's also, if he's also sort of generally red-blooded in his bearing behavior and is also capable of fixing stuff around the house that goes wrong, I don't really see the problem. Read by fiction is very girly. What about if it's the opposite, though?

What about if it's somebody who can tell you what has been happening in the New York Review of books, but needs to call his dad if there's something broken in the toilet at your house? I mean, competence. Competence is very hot. Or should, you know. Right. But this is competence within a particular domain because you can say the noble savage is incompetent when it comes to his intellectual development. I mean, I suppose, you know, zooming back a bit, you could probably make the case that we're currently in an age of flux where these never-ending growth really does feel like it's come to an end. You know, politics is quite uncertain.

You know, we've got war in Europe for the first time in a very long time. And all kinds of things don't feel as certain and safe and stable as they used to. And it could be that in fact some of these very instinctive mating patterns are shifting, are going to shift or are perhaps already shifting in the light of how people assess their own prospects in that very much more uncertain world. So women who might have automatically, who might have gone for the intellectual guy because you can always buy in a plumber are going to assess, you know, who their looks match and economic match is likely to be for a long-term partnership

and think, you know what, actually, like Labibu Man, I need somebody who knows how, who knows how to use a shotgun or, you know, or, you know, there are various levels of deranged preferrishness that you can apply to that depending on your filter bubble. But there are, you understand what I'm saying. It's like that study that men like fatter women when they're hungry. Right. So I'm sure you've, economic security hypothesis. Yeah. So it sounds like perhaps the equivalent for women, women like more, more masculine men when it seems like there's a chaos going on. That's a fucking awesome. Mac and Murphy, if you're listening, go and do that study form.

I mean, it seems like if that's empirically researchable, but intuitively it feels completely right. Super easy. Whatever the equivalent of the social, you know, the VIX index, you from the volatility within the market, whatever the social equivalent of that is. Okay, let's just have, what are the popular types of the preferred types of men. Would you want one that's more domineering or one that's a little bit more casual? Whereas the point of being able to discourse about the New York Review of Books is

status games, right? And so if, and that's very much Maslow's hierarchy of needs tippy top. So that's the sort of thing that you're going to judge us them pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. In these kind of conditions. Oh, so the fact that you have the ability to do that suggests to me that in some ways maybe it's a luxury position, oh, you've got the bottom levels looked after, or

maybe you're unable to look after the bottom levels and you've kind of have outsourced them or skipped over them in some sort of way. Yes, I think that my friend who threatened suicide if her boyfriend read the new review of books, I think what she was referencing was someone who couldn't do the other stuff. He turned the triangle upside down. Yeah, yeah, that's what's unattractive. So the only final bit on this hymbo thing, what is it about the kind of, it's not someone who's saying, I want the Renaissance man, I want the thinking man, including, because presumably

you could say, I want to max out his physicality and also max out his mind. But it seems like it's actually preferable to have the slightly more doughy-eyed human smiley face as a partner. The one thing that I would maybe throw into the mix there is that if you have somebody that is both domineering, prestigious sort of able to make things happen in the physical world and also has the intellect to be a little bit more conniving, you run a much higher risk there of this guy's maybe going to be quite sought after in many ways. maybe going to be able to outwit me, is that an element?

Or what do you think is going on with this desire to actually kind of turn down the volume on the intellectual nature? Simplicity? Or is it maybe a bit? I mean, realistically, guys like that are just relatively rare, so partly it's just a numbers game. Yeah. But also, I feel like it's a bit girly to be too preoccupied with. Thought and emotions.

Just looping all of this, looping all of this back to the Taylor Swift theme, would you not say that actually Taylor's choice of a husband perfectly encapsulates the hymbo. Also Lana Del Rey. I love her choice of her husband. Yeah, yeah. She's the kind of right wing coded equivalent, isn't she? Lana Del Rey has married a crocodile wrangler. It's incredible from Louisiana, I want to say. He's a completely normal blue collar guy. I don't know if a blue collar is the right word if you're a crocodile wrangler, but he does a completely like, very skilled, very like impressive. Big arms, masculine.

Yeah, and has enough to do. But then I was thinking, if you're Lana Del Rey or your tailor, you don't need the money. You don't need the money. And actually, marrying someone who's in your field of work and it will inevitably less successful than you is a nightmare. Because you're able to do more comparison hierarchically. So what does it mean to date hypergamously if you are going cross? Who's above you if you're tailor?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I pick someone from another industry. There is no way of doing hypogamy if you're talking. Taylor Swift because she's just right atop of her own hierarchy. She's the apex. She's the apex of so many different hierarchies. This is, will, have you read the status game by? But, but Travis Kelsey, you know, he's enormous. He, you know, he's a successful. They'll outlift her. He's able to outrun her. He can pick her up and chuck, you can probably juggle her. But he's got prestige in a, and he's got standing in his own field. And specifically in a cohort that she does not.

That's right. So if you walk into a different room, there are tons of people that couldn't give a Fuck about Taylor Swift, but we'll sprint toward Travis Kelsey. Right. Yeah, exactly. And this is, if you've read Will Stores a status game, you've probably interviewed him at some point. His really, really good piece of life advice is that everyone is completely plus with status. You can't pretend that you're not. It's just the natural human condition to be preoccupied with status.

But you can choose which status game you compete in to some extent. And you can say, I realize that that one is bad for me or that I'm not going to flourish in it. But you can just choose another one. And so, yeah, choosing, having a spouse who's a spouse who's a bad for me. competing in a different status game from yourself, I think he's very sensible. A young friend who also has something of an internet platform told me recently that he had tried dating women who also were internet figures of some sort, and it was just hideous. It feels too similar.

Yeah, it was just, it was too much of a visual. Comparisons too direct. And I guess, I don't think, like this wasn't his point, but it struck me that if you were, if you're both, if you both have a platform, you both have an audience, the temptation to turn your relationship into context. would be almost, would be totally overwhelming. This is for your India's thing, right? That all relationships are just brand collaborations. Right. And it doesn't have to be like that.

But you really, if you're very online, you have to, you know, you're going to survive much longer and stay much saner if your partner is not online at all. Or is it just not very interested in that? Have you heard the theory that aliens are just the end of human evolution that they're complete, yeah, I'm bringing it back, I promise. They're sort of huge heads. Human heads have got bigger over time, although they actually got smaller at one point as well. But human heads are big.

we seem to be getting lower testosterone, less muscled, less sort of, you know, domineering physically, and that aliens, the classic sort of big head, big eyes thing, is the completely atrophied in the body, but overdeveloped, cognitively. Well, they are to us as we are to chimps. And, yeah, because we are weaker, bigger brains, yeah, and then you just keep running that forward. Even less hair on aliens as well. Good point. I never really assessed the hair of an alien, but I... It's just interesting to hear where your mind goes.

I wonder whether Labibu Man is kind of the same sort of I've adapted to my local environment. My local environment is one where if I'm quite flaccid as a human, I'm like a very flaccid human, I can sit in an office chair for longer, basically. Right. So the interesting question, you know, what civilizations can go down as well as up. How long would it take after the shit hit the fan, hypothetically speaking? in civilizationally before the boo-boo man got his got his act together

and was either selected aggressively out of the picture altogether or actually just learn to shoot yeah I mean how many people say if our country went to war there's no way that I would fight for them I've got asthma

sorry no my my athlete's foot precludes me from being able to go into the you know there's like all manner of different excuses and yeah without selection pressure people fold around whatever that's situation is. They kind of get molded and shaped by it. I think it's a really serious problem right now. If we did have some kind of serious

strife in this country. I mean, it strikes me that one of the structural problems is that two or three generations of young people have now been now been taught, you know, very methodically by the education system, by the sort of ambient public conversation, that nation states are just not really, they're not the real political community. And actually the real political community is everyone, is every human on the planet. You know, we're all just a continuous one big happy family. And under those circumstances, the idea that you could just snap people overnight back into thinking of themselves as an us just in the context of the nation state, particularly in an age of high demographic challenge. You're trying to redraw territory.

So having said, no, no, no, actually universal humanity, yada, yada, yada, and explicitly teaching that and explicitly teaching children that nationalism is bad and that it caused Hitler and the Second World War under carnage and death and disaster. for decades and generation after generation. And then you turn around the next day and you're like, oh, by the way, we're going to reinstate the draft because Putin. No, do you blame the kids for saying no? Fuck off. That's such a good point. Holy shit.

I mean, you know, even leaving, you know, there are various kind of uglier and more bitter versions of that story to do with us no politics and so on. But fundamentally, I think that's the crux of it because it goes across the board. It's not just the right wing zoomers. It's also the left wing ones. They just don't buy it because they've been taught not to buy it. Except that generally, I mean, if you watch these endless vox pops that you're referring to where you ask people, would you go to war for your country and they all say no, what normally happens is that anyone who's member of an ethnic minority will say, oh, but I'm Jamaican, or no, because I'm not from here or something. And actually you scratch the surface and everyone has a degree of ethnocentism. And this is actually what worries me, that having abolished or done their best to educate young children and young people out of thinking in terms of nation states, that people,

People are not going to abandon having a tribe, but they're just going to draw the tribe around people who look like them. And once you scale that up to the level of, you know, you start looking at lines of conflict internal to the country, you know, along possibly different tribes, but a kind of ulster situation, you know, potentially even within the country itself, which is a disturbing prospect. Yeah. Because, of course, nation states are modern inventions and they are a bit fake. They are. They are. And I mean, if you look at the flag phenomenon that we've been seeing a lot recently, you know, You know, that feels to me like a precursor to a kind of ulsterization happening within the United Kingdom, which is deeply, deeply concerning.

I've been watching loads of TikTok videos of people increasingly commonly having confrontations between people putting up flags and people trying to take them down. A bridge near our house has now had, I think, four iterations of people putting up flags, taking them down, putting up. And they leave the cable ties every time. So there's just like a porcupine kind of thing on the... The graveyard of where patriotism used to be. Yeah, and people putting up counter things. whatever, it's like a whole thing. And there's quite a lot of TikTok videos of people having these confrontations. The main thing that jumps out at me as a Brit who's very sensitive to

these things is the class difference. So the flaggers are always working class and the D flaggers are always middle class and it's really obvious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And why is it obvious or why is this happening? Why is it happening? Because I think the whole thing is a class rule. Always has been. I think that's basically right. Yeah. I mean, I was sort of obliquely thinking about the, you know, writing about the normal conquest earlier this week. This is where that particular class war began because the English class system was originally not just a caste system but also a racialised caste system in that the ruling class. The Normans arrived and just replaced the whole Anglo-Saxon ruling class with their own. And they were a different ethnic group.

And I guess didn't interbreed that much. Well, I mean, to an extent after a while, but people with Norman surnames are still, to this day, more likely to be wealthy than those with Saxon. No way. Overrepresented at Oxford. People with names like Smith and Cooper are less likely to be rich than people with names like Glanville or, you know. Dennis. Or Grovener, indeed. The current Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grovener, can trace his ancestry all the way back to 1066.

Yeah. And is still a billionaire, still one of the richest people in the country. I think he's number 15. Gregory Clark is punching the air right now. So, I mean, you know, you can never mind critical race theory. England has had a racialized caste system. all for a thousand years and I think

actually really genuinely that's a significant factor in what Louise is describing about this class war there is a subset of more well-off culturally middle-class middle or upper-class

English people who identify much more with the Norman disposition and then there are a group of people who think of themselves I mean it's even right there in the conflict between English

and British British values branch flags English flags Right They mostly alternate them But I've noticed that Like if you go to touristy places

They have union jacks up anyway Because it's a bit twee That's not flagging The St George thing is Saxon Flagging has to necessitate St George's crosses at least some of them And it's an anti-government gesture And again the comments

You'll get all the time on social media It's such a classic like midwit norm we take Is oh they don't have any GCSEs And they don't have any teeth like basically something very, very classless directed at nativists. And I'm like, I mean, yes, you are right to identify that rift and it's a consequence of the relationship with the globalised economy. If you do the sort of job that is vulnerable to the importation of cheap labour,

then obviously you're going to hate it so much more than if you're doing a completely working a completely different industry. Like, yes, you've correctly identified this class fissure. And what we've seen for decades now has been up middle classes inviting demographic change, which doesn't hurt them and does hurt. the work of classes. I mean, it drove Brexit and they learned nothing. Yeah. It's a similar dynamic to what

happened in America, but it's got uniquely British flavour because of how... Because of the class system. Correct. Precisely correct. Bluntly, because of the Normans. Yeah, well, look, I use the word posh and get laughed at in America because it feels like me, I don't know, talking about herringbone or something.

It's just an odd term to use because even though most Americans understand what I mean, it's such an odd, archaic, like you don't talk about that you would talk about race or education or wealth. You're from the northeast aren't you? Newcastle, well, Stockton. So you probably don't exactly have skin in either

sides of these game because you're probably Viking in heritage. I have no idea. I need to do my 23 meet. I need to do my ancestry. Well, don't because data security. They're about to sell the whole database. Oh God, and all of the murders I've done all come up. Yeah, they sell my data. No, don't do that. But I mean, people from the northeast are ancestrally much

more likely to be Danish, Scandinavian inheritance. I sit outside of the hierarchy. So you can throw tomatoes at the Normans and I do. And I do. I'm sure. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health to your hormone levels to your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. And getting your blood work done and drawn and analyzed like this would usually

cost thousands, but with function, it is only $499. And right now, they're giving a thousand modern wisdom listeners another $100 off, bringing it down to $39.9. So just go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth.com. slash modern wisdom i don't know whether this is precisely true and i hate the word going back to something that it feels like we just dispensed with because the word woke is so sort of tried and and done and kind of lame um however this feels like a uniquely new british brand of something akin to woke flagging yes and and the response to it and it's the reason that i want to that i haven't got a different word for it broke wouldn't work as britain woke um it has

a dynamic that is exclusively present or mostly present in the UK, which is this sort of classist approach, because it exists a little bit in the US that people that were left of centre that were very pro-immigration. But the reason that they were doing it and the sort of accusations that they would make weren't the same. They weren't about, in the same way about being uneducated, in the same way that people sort of presented the no-teeth thing. Although, isn't that what Hillary was saying with the basket of deplorables? Like it was basically a class statement. It was more veiled, Whereas I guess here it tends to be more explicit. Which was probably because we've had a thousand years of not being invaded, right?

So you can build up. They can ossify. Exactly. The situation in America is much more complicated because they've, because everybody there. Where do I stand in this hierarchy? I'm not sure I've only been here for five minutes. Almost everybody there is technically an immigrant. Yeah.

At one point or another. Yeah. So it's very much harder to have to do the nativist thing because, you know, the most recent Anglophone arrivals weren't that long ago. And it's also a problem, of course, because here our elites are so incredibly Yankee-brained that they assume you'll hear people talk about Britain being a nation of immigrants. No, it isn't. That is factually incorrect. Like, Britain was 99% plus white British in the 1950s. It does strike me out at times that casually conflating invasion and immigration is possibly not the wind.

It's middle class advocates. Yeah. Imagine it is anyway. Yeah, they're like, but what about the Vikings? I can see some ways that that could back back home. I remember Linda's farm. Did we not embrace the Vikings? I know. But because they're so Yankee-brained, they don't realize that actually, no, like, people here are indigenous to these islands going back a very long way.

I did not the same as in America. I did wonder about what a land acknowledgement in the UK would look like. Douglas Murray did this once actually at giving a speech and he did a land acknowledgement to the Duke of Westminster who owned the land. It was very funny. It's a classic Douglas. Although really, I mean, strictly speaking, the Duke of Westminster also counts as a coloniser. Well, because that's Hugh Grovener who arrived with the Normans. Oh, there we go. So, I mean, Hugh Grovener ought to be doing a land acknowledgement to the Saxons. Your surname has scuppered you.

Looping it back to the perennial discussion about stupid things to do the relationships on the internet. Have you heard of princess treatment? What? No. Oh, allow me. I mean, you are spending a lot of time on TikTok. I would have expected this to come across. Okay.

Princess treatment refers to various supposedly fairy taleworthy gestures made by women's partners, including but never limited to lattes in bed flowers every Friday, partner-funded pedicures, and doors being open for you, nearly 130,000 Instagram posts congregate under it. However, this is immediately being taken to reductio ad absurdum. Courtney Palmer, self-proclaimed housewife princess. I do not interact with the waitress. I do not open any doors and I do not order my own food. You do not need to talk unless you are spoken to.

You are not going to be laughing loudly, speaking loudly, or demanding the attention of the restaurant. so princess treatment is this not sort of lifestyle BDSM with it I was going to say it's a sex thing it's totally a sex thing how have you both arrived at this this is like that

this is like that fucking anti-wisdom thing where I haven't seen it like you're looking at this optical illusion I'm like what to be I mean this is kind of explain to the muggle in the room it's a Mary Louise group chat running joke about the trad wife and there's the Trad Wife or Autagonafael

but that's not this and there's also What the Trad Wife auto gynafile. Or, but there's also, there's also the continuity between right wing, right wing complementarian tradwife discourse and lifestyle BDSM, which it seems to me is just, it's, it's really just a question of inflection, but it's basically the same conversation. You're going to have to bring it down to earth a little bit for me. Which of us is going down?

Imagine that I didn't read the first three Harry Potter books and I've come in at the for, please. So on the one hand, you have, you know, it's often very Protestant code, it's sometimes quite America. There's a sort of religiously inflected discourse about how men do one set of tasks and play one set of roles within a long-term relationship and women play the other. And everyone comes together as ordained by God in this dual dance of complementary unity and then everything is good. And then, in an entirely different political filter bubble, you have the people who embrace lifestyle BDSM, which is a it's a way of living in a long-term relationship where one person is always explicitly the dominant one who just gets to decide everything and the other person is also always the submissive one who just says yes master there's a degree of entitlement though here which doesn't sound superbly submissive does it well I mean this is this is where it gets this is actually both both complementarian right wing trad types and also lifestyle BDSM as will tell you that he's In fact, the wife slash submissive, depending on how you're framing it, you know, has plenty of say because in fact it's...

She's the one putting it online. It's never the man who's filming content about us, is it? That's always the woman. That's true as that, well, this is too much of a rabbit hole. No, go ahead and do it. Let's run it. I'm fascinated. I'm already fucking Alice in Wonderland here. Women do this simultaneous, like, I'm so submissive.

And there's a lot of humble bra going on. as well. By the way, my husband could afford to buy me all this stuff. It's the long nails on their high heels of. But also, she's calling the shots in terms of their social media presence. Yeah, and also. Which is really what matters. In these sorts of very deliberately stylized, polarized relationships, you know, assuming it's a long-term affectionate relationship that both parties want to continue and sustain and maintain, then actually the person who's formerly giving way all the time has a lot of say because the other person has to second guess what they want all the time.

That's interesting. Because, I mean, you can't just order somebody around and say, no, you're going to go and lick the floor clean or do the dishes or whatever. Because if you just, if you make decisions for both of you for long enough, and actually the other person doesn't like that, it doesn't like your decisions eventually, you know, the nominally submissive one. Well, the nominally submissive one will vote with their feet, you know, assuming that it's a consensual loving relationship otherwise.

You have to make decisions that both people, both of you want to. abide by. So, so actually it's not as, it's not as, it's not as commanding as all of that, you know, but it just sort of reflects. Yeah. I think, I mean, we both feel like there's nothing wrong with complementary gender roles, like with, within reason, they make sense, it's fine, like no, no complaint. What is weird about the lifestyle BDSM is when it's clearly done in an exaggerated way as a sex thing, like the motivation is not, this makes the household run more smoothly, this makes sense of our financial lies, et cetera. It's, this turns me on and I'm also doing it for an online audience. That's weird. Yeah.

that's good. But I mean, you know, the difference, I don't really see a huge amount of difference in kind between that and princess treatment. If she's like, I'm just going to sit there, sit there at a restaurant, and you have to guess, you know, you as my date slash partner have to guess what it is that I want to eat and get it right. And you have to do all the legwork of interacting with the underlings. You have to pay. And I'm just going to sit there. And nominally, yes, you know, you get to decide everything and you have the power. But also, you have to guess and you have to get it right. So who actually has. the power in that situation. It's a great point. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I really have seen through the matrix here. Fuck me. Women are so much more sophisticated than men are with this bullshit. But yeah, I mean, all of this, of course, you know, with the caveat that it's, it assumes that it's a mutually affectionate and consensual relationship. You know, under, you know, there are, there is also a continuum between that and domestic abuse. Because if the one person is, financial imprisonment, domestic abuse and so on, where somebody is calling the shots and actually the other person isn't free to leave.

through whatever combination of coercive control or other kind of unpleasant dynamics. Does this not play into another one of those lines that needs to be walked, that it would be nice to be looked after. Yeah. It would be nice for my partner to know me so well that I actually can sort of take my foot off the gas a little bit. Wouldn't that be lovely? And then if you overdo the dose, the response curve gets really squirrely. When you get toward the point, well, I can't leave anymore because I don't have my own phone.

I don't have my own bank account. I don't have my own access to anything. It's the big, big trade-off of traditional gender roles, that the woman has no financial independence. And as soon as you derogate loyalty, as soon as you end up with divorce becoming more societally accepted and people being able to move from partner to partner more freely, that means that the cost for the man,

the cost for anybody of leaving is so high and so common, sorry, it's so low and it's so common, that you need to have the insurance policy at all times because the likelihood of this just being marriage one as opposed to the marriage means that you've got to have the back door. I mean, it strikes me that maybe a possible explanation for why these complementary gender roles

tend to appear either where somebody is extremely online and posting about it a lot or else in the context of religious communities. It might make sense in terms of that failure mode, the sort of abusive failure mode. in that if you're posting online about what a surrendered wife you are, actually you're probably making bank. And so you're not all that surrendered after all.

There's this other dimension to it. You remember the whole discourse about Ballerina Farm and that... No. Oh, okay. She's Instagram star married to the air of JetBlue. You don't know about Ballerina Farm. Don't turn and look at me. You didn't even know about hymboes?

Fucking hell. You have how many bazillion followers on Instagram? You've never crumb across Ballerina Farm? Okay. Entirely distinct influencer universe. Look at the echo chambers are very echoey here, yeah. The internet is a big place. Okay.

So a ballerina farm, very beautiful, very accomplished sort of trad life. Hannah Neelman. Hannah Neelman. Married to this scion of the JetBlue family. You've inherited a load of money. And they have a farm where she does trad things and has lots of beautiful children. Okay. And makes yogurt and it's all very crunchy.

And almonds. I mean, right, exactly. It's lovely content. It's also like the content engine which powers actually a very profitable business for them selling like kitchen aliens. Yeah. Like, I think her sourdough starter kits cost like $100. Yeah. You know, she's doing, she's doing all right at it. And yet, you know, there's this whole discourse about whether or not she's actually oppressed. And I'm like, what? Have you? One of the things that people, because she was profiled in the times, the times of London a while ago. And it was mentioned, there were various details mentioned, which a lot of women primarily on the internet thought were alarming, like how exhausted she got. I mean, I'm not surprised she gets exhausted because she has so big kids.

close together, yeah. But things like they don't have a nanny, they don't have any domestic help, despite obviously being out of afford it. And they were like, oh, this is a sign that he's a pressing on. I thought, no, you know what? I actually get it. I think that she, there's a weird kind of Anglo thing going on, including Anglo-American, of like, no, I'm going to do the hard thing on my own.

I'm going to do the deliberately difficult thing. But also, you know, having recorded a few podcasts and seen how the sausage gets made, you know, you look at how well-produced her content is. There's a ton of people in that house all the sort of. Oh, yeah, just not a nanny. specifically. But like that makes sense to me. I think that makes sense of her personality. And of course, it is Hannah who is making all the content. She's running the show in that sense. She's driving. Yeah. But it makes sense

to me that the the trad meme gets propagated either from within religious communities where there is actually a much thicker relationship, there is a thicker community of people surrounding the couple. You know, again, this is not foolproof because, you know, domestic abuse happens within religious communities as well. But it provides some kind of ideological scaffolding for a couple such that, you know, potentially that could help to keep a relationship in line, you know, and stop abuse creeping in and make sure things are able to remain healthy. Is that kind of a insurance policy that if I'm the one that's in control of the Instagram account, that ultimately if I am mistreated, it might be a financial victory for you, but it's a branding victory for me? Well, I mean, again, it's not foolproof, you know, I mean, this is, I can't name names, but I know from, I know from one noted right-wing, uh, content-producing woman that she's, she knows of, and several women within that space who are posting sunny tradwife content while their husbands are also not treating them very well. You know, this is, this also happens. So it's definitely not foolproof as an insurance policy. I mean, at the end of the day, it's a fallen world, right? You know, people, people screw up and do horrible things. You know, I'm not sure there's a guaranteed way of hedging against that.

One way that does traditionally sort of work to hedge against being mistreated by your husband is male kin, your own male kin. Like, is it Sonny Corleone and Godfather who beats up his sister's abuser or something like that, right? Like, in really those really traditional societies, if your recourse as a woman, if your husband is mistreating you. Your dad goes around and breaks his leg. That's the issue of patrilocal and matrilocal. Yeah, I mean, this is probably something, Chris, that you're more able to speak to than either of us, which is about the formation, like the, the, the formation of virtuous men. I'm glad that you look at me and you think formation of virtuous men.

I mean, as the only guy in this conversation, you know, unfortunately, I think this one's yours to speak. But it seems to me that, you know, where have all the good men gone? Actually, the one part of the answer to that is that, you know, if we want good men, we need to be forming good men. And actually, what forms men is not women, it's other men. And so, and I'm not sure we think nearly. hard enough or specifically enough or concretely enough about how we go about forming men.

And I mean, this sort of goes to your Lubbubu figure. You know, if the men that we're forming are sort of noodle-armed Lubbubu guys rather than virtuous, capable, competent men, then that's not just a problem for men. That's a problem for everyone. Well, I think a lot of the advice that men are given is about how to behave in a man of makes women feel more comfortable, but if the, which it seems to continually be reinforced, male competition theory seems to be highly predictive of female attraction as opposed to actually female attraction. So this is the David Putts study. Have you seen this one where they

looked? Oh, this is fucking brilliant. You're going to love this. So photos of men were shown to both men and women the women were asked to rate how attractive these men were the men were asked to rate how likely they thought it was that this man would be able to beat them in a fight the photos of the men

were real people and they were tracked 12 months later they brought the photo men into the lab and said how many sexual partners have you had over the last year the female attractiveness rating was basically non-predictive and the male intimidation rating was highly correlated.

Competence is hot. And competence cashes out ultimately as can this guy protect me in a fist fight. They also have higher sex tries maybe, right? They're higher tea. There's some variables in here. They're going to be more forthcoming. They're going to be less agreeable. They're going to be chasing after it, making it happen as opposed to waiting it for it to come to them.

But still, you would think at least given that women are the gatekeepers and this is a direct, I find this guy more attractive than that one, you would have assumed it would have had like maybe equal. amounts of predictive power. But it didn't. The ovulatory shift thing got another decapitation the other day, which was women don't find men with beards any more or less attractive, but they are more sexually successful and men find them more intimidating. So it's this, whatever it is, women don't help you win. They just wait at the finish line to see who goes first. And it is male competition theory for this. But the issue is if guys are trying to Lubbubu reverse engineer their way into what they think women want, a lot of the time...

They're entirely going about it the wrong way. Yeah, because... Have we made Laboo and Traverb? Yes, yeah, they have labubed. Oh, you've done gone, labubed yourself. Oh, no, he's labubed himself. Oh, the usual is just climbed up into my chest and died. So...

I think the issue is, and this is what I really want you to get into here, post me too, being able to talk frankly about anything which is not nuffed, rounded off edges, labubuified, flaccid soy man, seems to be encouraging a type of guy that is perilously close to this world that we only just managed to reach escape velocity from. Like, we just got away from this thing, which was entitlement, domineering, controlling, entitlement, even though the Lubbubu men also have their own type of entitlement in a very sort of conniving malicious. Yeah, yeah, sneaky way. I don't think, I don't know where you get male to male advice on what it is that women truly want for long-term success. because what you end up with there is just going back to Pickapartistry. Like almost all of the advice that comes out of the Red Pill world is for short-term mating, right? It's almost all about how to sort of do the Fugazi thing to get a woman into bed.

That's not necessarily what is good for you as a man to signal for long-term intention to her or to be effective for her as a long-term partner or for yourself to actually form yourself into the kind of partner that can be a good long-term option. But it'll probably get them into bed. I mean, I can't, I keep coming back to my conviction that this has to happen offline. Like, online, online advice is no good. Like, whether it's Jordan, you could be the most brilliant. Because they're reductive? Well, because they don't, because they don't, the person doesn't know you.

And actually, you know, actionable advice, actionable model, it probably comes from trusted, trusted, decent older men in your own community. And, you know, and really the, you know, to. uncles, not the aunties. Yeah, the uncles. Yeah, but the structural problem is that those intergenerational networks are in some cases almost completely gone. And I think that problem is particularly grave for young men growing up in fatherless households.

Especially if you... And which is, you know, it's not a coincidence that those are the guys who end up joining gangs because there they're finding mentorship from older men. And that's literally the only kind form of older male, you know, peer group mentorship. I literally... Older mentorship that you can get. Sat there with Bugsie Malone, Aaron Davies, who was... famous ex-gang member, now-turned rapper and actor in Guy Ritchie movies, lives in Dubai,

phenomenally wealthy, very, very well-read, all the rest of it. And he was telling me about what it's like to be in a fatherless home. And then you have this gang, which is the surrogate of that. I think even for me, because I didn't have many older friends or no older brothers or sisters or younger brothers or sisters, I was hungry or thirsty for. I was hungry or thirsty for role models in a way that I don't think I would have been if I'd had a more connected nuclear family, if there was more hooks for me to get in, even if it had been an older sister, right, there would have been advice that was coming down. And if your dad is busy, even if he's not absent as in not in the household, if he's absent as in there's one person working to try and

fund on a, not a salubrious wage in an attempt to try and fund three people's lives, like that's something that you, yeah, and you're like, fuck, like I, I, I, I, I, you're I'm hungry for more. I need more, more, more. And especially if most of your interaction occurs online, but online you're worried about saying something, which is going to be deemed so toxic or old from, you know, this was only allowed in 2012 and we've got past this

and you can't talk that way about women anymore. I also think that there's something structurally feminizing or feminine about social media discourse just in general because it forecloses physical violence, obviously, because it's materialized. It would selling your way through stuff. Yeah, your word's telling away, like, it encourages endless, endless talking and it forecloses physical violence. Whereas in my observation, I mean, maybe you can, you, I mean, I'm not really, in my observation, like the society of men absent the relation to women, sort of works the other way around.

Like, actually, most of it is not really about conversation at all. It's about cooperating on getting something done. That's why the men sheds initiative in Australia was so good. Yeah. And, you know, it strikes me that, you know, getting men together to talk about their feelings is precisely the wrong way to go about it. Get them together to fix a lawnmower and they might talk about their feelings alongside it. Or just not in a way which is mutually understood and mutually respectful. But it seems to me civilizationally suicidal to create a situation where there are ever fewer opportunities for men to be together constructively offline,

learning from older men about how to work together and get stuff done. Except gang situations where actually the only thing you're learning to get done is stabbing, raping, raping, murdering, or the drug trade. That seems to me like a completely insane scenario. I wonder of low birth rates as part of it as well, in the sense that there was this great article in the Atlantic recently about the decline of cousins. You have so many fewer cousins now than even a generation or two ago because of people obviously having fewer children.

And also when people are having children later, you end up with these long, thin families where you have very old, very young, but not much in between. It's just not that many people. And it makes me think of that lie from Kurt Vonnegut where he says, when a man and a woman have an argument nowadays, I'm just paraphrasing, they might think that they're arguing

about sex or work or whatever. But what they're actually shouting at each other over and over again is you are not enough people. Like it's not realistic to expect your spouse to be everything that you need socially, everything. And maybe if there were more brothers and cousins and uncles, because obviously uncles have to be brothers to begin with, right?

Then there would be more... You wouldn't need to be as many people. because there would be more people. There would be more male infrastructure available in particular. And again, this is also the dilemma because Anglos actually don't like having. Anglos quite like being left to learn. Chris doesn't want the aunties. You don't want the aunties.

I made the fucking WhatsApp chat. Okay, look. I'm a, what's that? You run away from the IRS. What's that thing? Did I contradict myself? Well, I'm deep. I contain multitude.

Chris multiplexest. Yeah. Yeah, that's me. Before we continue, this might be the most refreshing flavor that element has ever made. It takes the classic taste of lemonade, makes it functional, giving your body back the sodium potassium and magnesium that it loses when you sweat. No sugar, no junk, just the stuff that works. I've been drinking Element for over three years now, and it genuinely feels different when I take it versus when I don't. And they back it with the best policy. You see that

that I've ever seen. No questions asked refunds, no time limit. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you love it. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US. And right now you can get a free sample pack of all of their favorite flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. I'm like Neo in the Matrix, dude. You're not going to win. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. Let's do, can you do a little post-mortem on Me Too. Now, we're kind of like, what, 10, 12 years post the peak of that. We're both married and have been for a while. Were we the best people to do this? I don't know.

One thing I'll say about Me Too, which I think people often get wrong, this idea so that there's a common idea maybe it's true that men used to approach women in bars or at work or whatever and do kind of cold approaches and now they don't do that because of Me Too has made them scared that period I think where men would find their spouses by doing cold approaches was really brief I think you're completely right it roughly coincides with and is connected to the very short flash in the pan era of free speech absolutism you're right free speech absolutism and cold approach dating are basically the same phenomenon where you abolish a whole load of old-fashioned moris and everybody just does what they want but the but the afterburner of those mores is still strong enough that nobody did nobody gets up to anything too disgusting they're huffing on the fumes at the yeah yeah they're basically huffing on the fumes of conservative sort of pre pre-sexual revolution yeah um behavioral norms why is that important why is the uh inclusion of that period of guys is cold approaching women in bars or at work, even having women in the workplace whilst men

were able to date them, also relatively narrow window. Well, it also, because cold approach presupposes a whole load of basic behavioural norms in order not just to be absolutely terrifying, call the police stuff. You know, being chatted up in the street by some guy assumes that they're going to be able to judge it so that you don't just scream and run away. Right. And so that it, like, there's an edge of fun, excitement and danger. It requires a high trust society.

It requires a high trust society. fundamentally. And so actually does free speech absolutism because you're never really free to say anything you want. There are always lines that it's possible to cross. That's just never not been the case and it never will be the case. But it seemed as though it was the case.

The people who are still really annoyed about the disappearance of free speech absolutism are maybe 10 years older than me. I'm in my in 40s now. And they were like they came of age in an era where the social norms were still robust enough that people could make edgy jokes but basically got away with it. And nobody really

crossed the line too far. Now we're just too diverse for free speech absolutism because there are so many different perspectives it's possible to have that you could actually genuinely end up frightening or offending or inciting violence from any number of different subgroups

by... You've crossed some random norm that you did know. Yeah. So it's just no longer possible. And it's the same with cold approach. Because I mean, you know, going back to the sort of petrol flames, conversations we were having before.

You know, a lot of those scenarios are really, you know, genuinely about mutual cultural incomprehension. You know, there are guys who've shown up in the country from wherever and maybe the only information they have about what British girls are like comes from, I don't know, porn hub or, you know, Instagram or whatever. So they have this very old picture of what social norms here are like. And then they do their best to put them into practice, at which point some 14-year-old girl just screams and runs away, calls the police, he gets arrested.

And then, you know, there's a crowd outside of my hotel. And there's a crowd outside the hotel where you've been put up. And, you know, I'm not trying to excuse any of this, but I'm saying, you know, the to a degree, you know, this is a problem generated by, you know, it's cold approach. It's PUA stuff that they're trying to try. Literally, that's what they're trying to do. But the cultural differences are such that it's just not possible. The game got translated into Syrian and now we've got cold. Yeah, and now we've got protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping.

Yeah, yeah, I didn't, I just... I don't really know how you... Yeah, I'm not even going to try and speculate on how you solve that, but, you know, certainly, like, the age of PUA is not coming back. No, no, no. Sure, you know, until we have some kind of homogenous culture again. And even that, I'm not even sure it should. But also historically, like...

It's just not, it wasn't ever a thing. Even in a super homogenous society, that's not how you meet your spouse, right? You meet through people who know you, there's, like, reputations and interlocking social networks and stuff. You don't just go up to some lady in a bar and marry. No, no, I mean, that's why people used to have dinner parties. You know, people don't really have dinner. parties anymore do they but that was how that was how you set people up with your friends

it's certainly not if you're bringing it's certainly not a collegiate uh one where you've got both genders coming in right you know when i think about the dinners that i have in austin maybe someone brings a woman but that woman is not there to try and meet one of you it's their partner yeah but i mean as recently as the as bridget jones's diary in the early aughts um you know she's she she writes very very amusingly at for the time about being being being invited along by her smug-married friends to dinner parties where she's been set up with some unbelievably awkward sort of supposedly eligible lawyer. And this keeps her because all of her friends are trying to find someone for her to pair off with. This is just a completely normal way

of doing things pre-internet dating. The smug-marrieds would have dinners where they'd invite and, you know, one or two other smug-married couples and then a smattering of the eligible singles that they knew. Well, you know, the eligible singles and would be, you know, in a sincere effort. They're doing anti-behaving. Yeah, they're anteing. Yeah. That's literally what it is. It's anoteing.

Both virtuous and awkward. Yeah. Virtuous and also often incredibly cringe. Yeah. Okay, so if you've got dissolving social networks in IRL, because everybody is living their life mediated through the internet, they've got fewer friends and they're spending less time outside. Does that for you explain the demise of this particular path for people meeting? Fewer parties, fewer friends. Also, people are poorer and their houses are smaller.

Yeah. Because the parties are shitter, so you don't want to. There's just, I mean, you know, if you're living in a house share until you're 35, you can't really invite eight of your friends around for dinner very easily without annoying your housemates. I'm trying to think about why I haven't done more of these dinner parties. We often do lunches and dinners with like another couple, particularly if they've got kids and then the kids play and that's great. But I don't know if I've ever done one when I've invited singles. That's just scaled childcare.

That's just smarter child care with scones. Yeah, just hang out with your friends with kids on a Saturday. Your sassay is immediately improved. But I've not done this in singles. It's also a massive effort. Everybody works full time. And the time and mental energy you might deploy towards that is pointed at other things. And I don't, I'm not really sure how that happened.

So needing dual income here means that there's just less time perhaps for the wife to think, oh, how should we get, we'll get the Joneses over. For me personally, it's more to do with the fact that we live at the very edge of the city of 10 million other people and our friends live at every point on the clock face. Right. And realistically getting everyone in the same place at the same time is quite difficult. That's probably what it is. If you're all going to get together, you'd probably just meet somewhere.

Also, we can only seat six people at our dinner table. It's what I mean about, you know. Small furniture is more than that's interesting. Bridgett Jones was living in what Islington? Right, exactly. She's living in a central lawyer. On a journalist salary, age like 30. Oh, I know, yes.

On her own. So, I mean, it's obviously fiction. So I have been, I was thinking for a little while about Me Too to Me Tea with the T app. And you did see the tea app, right, okay. This was a little older. Come on, Louise. The tea app. T app.

Unsubstantiated gossip circulator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says a reputation ruining app. Yes, but so it was women gossiping about men. Men who'd screw them over in their view. Yeah, and then there was a big data breach. There was sequences of big data breaches. Yeah.

And there was a bunch of people on the internet who made a comparison between these videos of women in Manhattan who steal men's salads. Look at the name. on the top of it, then message them on Instagram and say, I'm so sorry that I stole your salons. In a deathbed attempt to try and overcome approach anxiety from men to women. There's these videos of girls in maxi dresses with their hair done just going, I just want one guy to buy me a drink. Mid-20s, very voluptuous. There's another one of a woman walking through Central Park, big naturals, low top, and she's

saying, look at me, the skin's flowing, the boobs are out, and not a single guy is going to approach me today. Some people made comparisons between the videos made by women saying they wished men approach them more, who seemed quite eligible and like the sort of women that you would imagine it happens to. With the data breach from the T app, that was not the same cohort when it comes to female mate value. It was much more short hair piercings, a little bit heavier set, and it was just an interesting world where you have the women that you think this might happen to a lot, wanting it more and it not happening, women who you might think it was a bit more

scarce for being a part of a community who warn women off of men and actually are actively disincentivising this. So it could be kind of this inverse luxury belief thing, which is like Isaiah Berlin's inner citadel. If I can't get what I want, I must teach myself to want what I can get and then bind together. Like the female equivalent of sort of in Seldom, I suppose. Well, doing someitosexual competition there, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the problem for the The hot woman in Central Park, it's the classic cartoon where the hot guy approaches and she's delighted and then the ugly guy approaches and she calls HR. I mean, that is the difficulty. Like, you don't want to be approached all day every day.

I want to be cold approached, but not by you. Not by you. Not by you. Yeah, exactly. And every guy sees themselves as the not by you guy. Well. Apart from the ones that are too pushy. Because I don't think that guys have a good understanding of their own.

I don't think guys have a good understanding of their own mate value. They have a good understanding of their own confidence. or their disregard for female rejection, but that is not the same thing as a success rating. Like, I am friends with some of the fucking most eligible men in America that are single. And these guys are, you'd be like, you must actually swim through women in order to get to your front door. And they're just, like, drenched in self-doubt and uncertainty

and this sense of not knowing. And maybe this is a little bit of like, a luxury challenge, it's a challenge of abundance, not one of scarcity, where they actually need to weave through things in a different sort of a way in these problems when you get to the higher altitudes as opposed to the lower ones. But men do not have a good understanding if they're a mate value. I mean, yeah, just I'm going to stick my hand up and say, you know, I remember cold approach, like I was there.

You know, I'm old. I lived it and survived. I just about, yeah. I'm old enough to remember when that was actually a thing. And, you know, being what was the word they used now? chirpsed, be it chatted up, we called it. Rizzed. Yeah, I remember that being a thing.

And it was understood, you know, it starts happening to you when you're about 12. And it was understood by, you know, you and your girlfriends compare notes that the kind of guys who do that are probably not the ones who are going to become your boyfriend. That's just, you know, cold approach might have been a thing. And sometimes maybe for those guys might be. Because it's evident that you're one of a number. Those guys would be fun, you know, you might let them buy you a drink. and sort of chat to them and let them float with you for a bit. But it was understood that those are probably not the guys that you, that are going to become your boyfriend, for a whole host of reasons.

But they're just not. Yeah, it's, you're going to have to unpack that, Louise, because this is more your wheelhurst than mine. Surely every modern wisdom listener knows about this. RK selection, right? So, our strategy, this is true in evolution biology in general, not just humans, that some species are more are strategists in that they will have lots of, of sex, lots of babies, except that most of those babies are going to die, the fast die young kind of strategy. Whereas K selection is like elephants or blue whales. Elephants versus rabbits, maybe.

Yeah, so they'll have one baby that they'll really invest in and, you know, and humans are kind of both, depending on context. We're more K strategists, but there are individual variations and you can kind of nudge in one way or the other. And yeah, I think the guys who come and checks you in the bar. This is a big theme in your book, isn't it? there's the guys who there's the chatter uppers who are probably they're about sewing the seed as widely as possible and then there's the husband material we're trying to find this balance right it's some i think 80% of women say that they want a man to make the first move um but how is that supposed to be done in a manner and this is how you labooboo yourself right in a desperate attempt to try and uh couch your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior but actually that's a desperate attempt to try and uh couch your forthcomingness in a sufficiently cinnamon roll exterior but actually that's what you need is not to lubibify yourself, it's, it's, what you need is the social scaffolding, you know, even whether that's sort of, you know, but you don't have, but you don't have that. But you don't have it exactly. You've got to bootstrap it yourself, right? The way that I did this with my husband,

as a sneaky get round, is I heard that he was single. And so I told a friend, who was a mutual friend, like, tell him to hit on me and if he does, I'll say yes. And so we, we basically did that loop round. Uh, okay. But that requires social scaffolding. This is what I mean about the social guffled in, you know, there are, you sowed some seeds that this would be like a high return strategy. Like, oh, this horse, the odds might look a little bit, like, difficult, but it's a sure end. You drop the silk gloves, basically. Exactly.

And so, you know, there's an element of that, you know, the women have to be willing to drop the silk glove if they want the man to make the first move. I mean, I'm sure you, you know, the metaphor, you know, and then he can graciously hand it back. Why are all these eligible men, you know, still not finding wives? It depends. It's for different reasons. Some of them...

Some of them have got... Some of them have got themselves to the stage where they've got so much exposure that they are basically... They see any interaction as a potential downfall of their career. Right, and they're worried about gold diggers, presumably. More so about reputational destruction, like post-Me-2, I didn't consent to that,

he is this or that or the other. Yeah, okay. Especially if you've got a relatively squeaky-clean public image or you're in an industry that is not as forgiving as... say podcasting. Like, Andrew Huberman's survival rate should be a positive reinforcement

for anybody in my side of the internet. But if you're in slightly more... Was he completely fine after all of that? Better, I think, actually. He just posted through it. He was fine. That's always the advice, isn't it? Just post through it.

Yeah, just keep looking at sun in the morning and everything is fine. And he is lived by that strategy. There's other reasons for it. I think that in the same way women who are emotionally developed and want to find a partner who is able to hold their own in a conversation and understands their emotions and can be honest and truthful and wants to build a family and do all the rest of this stuff. That's a pretty refined taste for the most

part. And a lot of the guys, your lamp analogy around if you haven't yet bought a house, trying to find a lamp that you like and put it in a house is pretty easy, whereas if you've spent two decades building a very, very carefully crafted interior, trying to find the perfect lamp to fit in that is much more difficult. That's also a challenge and your ability to discern good from bad lamps or your standard for lamps has also increased along with the complexity of the room that you're trying to put it in. It's probably complicated further by the fact that people are not lamps and people come with

their own agency and preferences. And quotes. The answer to the first problem about can I trust this woman not to wreck my reputation is probably it's to do with longstanding social reputation. You basically need to know her friends who will tell you what she's like. Yeah, is she trustworthy, is she crazy, whatever. But that's not going to work with a cold approach at all. So much of this is, if you're not enmeshed in social fabric,

where you know their friends and them and maybe their family, and they know the same, because it also disincentivises people from doing fuckery, right? Because the blast radius of that is going to impact so much more. That's the charitable interpretation of what the T-Ap was trying to do, isn't it? is to try and... Surrogate... It's trying to compensate for the lack of social architecture.

That's the best steel man case for the TAP that I've ever heard that it is a surrogate local community because everybody is... Because I mean, that's how women used to keep in a sort of village scenario. That's how women used to keep men and like... Is he trustworthy?

Can I... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You heard what he did with such and such thing. Exactly, exactly. And it's a, it's an attempt to provide a tech fix for the absence of that. It's just that because it's only a tech fix, it doesn't work in quite the same way.

And in fact, it has all, all sorts of other horrendous. So there's no repercussions if you make false accusations. If you say, oh, you heard what he did? And someone says, what do you say that I did with such and such a happened? Whereas in a grounded, real world, in a grounded, real world, relatively stable community, if you spread false rumours about somebody, eventually you'll get the blowback. So TAP is an artificial solution to an artificial problem.

It's the GLP ones for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a Zem pic for reputation management. Low trust, yeah, low trust relationship formation. Mm-hmm. Yeah. 65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 think that guys can have their reputations destroyed

for just speaking their mind and 85% of young men who voted for Trump agree with that statement See one thing just going back to our sort of light motif of the Lubbubu guy What I find interesting, and this occurred to me earlier, is that the obviously not very appealing nature of Lubbubu guy doesn't seem to have produced a kind of back swing towards this, this very much more right-wing identified male-final type.

No, no, you know what it is. It's what our friend Catherine D calls the male-to-male transsexual. That's the flip side to the Lubbubu man. What is the male-to-male transsexual? Guess, what do you think based on the name? It is a guy basically lopping as a much more masculine version of himself. Yep. Right.

And really devoting his life to that transformation. as well. Which is actually quite a feminine thing to do. It is. It is. These are the guys who are predominantly interested in lifting so they can post physique, which is just the girliest, girliest, girliest thing to do. You know, I firmly believe that guys should lift.

I don't think they should post physique. I think that's disgusting. Two days ago, I had some guys that were both over 250 pounds. I would have loved to have seen you say that too. They would have both taken it really well. They would have both gone, you know what it is? you're probably right. I do take too many photos. It's just really girly. Don't do it.

You know, be strong, be competent. That's really hot. Don't post physique. It's really girly. I mean, it's interesting. Your point about social media being inherently feminine is so true. And you see this come out of the dissident right kind of. Manosphere is the wrong term, but they're kind of hyper-masculine decision-right, which, yes, really valorizes masculinity, can be really negative about women, et cetera. but also includes a lot of selfies, a lot of gossiping on the internet, a lot of, like, girly bickering. Never seen purity spirals like it.

Oh my word. Who coined this meme? No, I coined that meme, that kind of thing. I have never seen a girly a bunch of men on the internet. There's not wrong about everything. There are exceptions, you know, some of my best friends, etc. But what you say is on point. And some of this is just produced by the sort of selection effects of the internet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the internet. You know, that milieu sort of draws, draws a diverse. The internet kind of optimises for a very one-dimensional perspective of a person. Yeah. So, Chris Bumstead, what's that thing that Yasmin was talking about, looks that can kill but heart of gold or something? What is it? Okay, oh, right, that's it.

looks that could kill you comma could kill you and looks that could kill you comma is a cinnamon role right and chris bumstead guy that sat here met he's a six-time mr olympies that basically the modern world arnold swastonigger 25 million followers on instagram met his now wife because she fell in love with a video of him crying on the internet um so that looks that could kill you comma is a cinnamon roll and that chris is one of a very small number of guys who have managed to thread the needle of highly masculine, highly feminine at the same time, or at least highly masculine and embodied, bothered about emotions, reads a lot of books and talks about, like, not, I don't believe in cry it out for raising our daughter

Bradley. We're actually trying, you know, I want to teach her that it's okay to feel, feel, and, you know, like deep in therapy culture at the same time, whilst being, like, Adonis is Adonis as a guy and super strong and big and all the rest of the stuff. I don't think that there is a particularly good place for that. There isn't much room for many people to be able to thread that needle because it takes a long time to explain the nuance of what you are as a guy. Like you look and it would be much easier for him to just be brash. Like if you presented in that way and had the personality of Andrew Tate, it's like, there we go. Like I've got that cliche. I've always got that archetype locked off. And if you're trying to accumulate attention online,

you need to make it quick. You don't want it to be effortful. And I think it's just bad for brand. Just do it explains what Nike is trying to get you to believe in as an ethos. It's not just do it. And here's a 5,000 word footnote explaining you precisely what that means. Yeah, I think I was absolutely right. The attention economy dynamic forces everyone to become a very reductive meme version of themselves. Yeah. And you have to accept that. I mean, I've long since learned that existing in public online means just not feeling obliged to correct like the bizarre versions of you that people have living rent free in their heads. Just like, don't waste your time doing that. No one's got time for that. The best quote that I've heard around that is I do not concern myself with the opinions of people who misunderstand me. I think that's so fucking hard to do because you want to correct the misunderstand. No, no, no. You don't see. It's like, I remember the saddest version of that I oversaw was when Mary Beard got canceled. for saying something really innocuous

and she posted a video of herself on Twitter crying and she was obviously trying to get people to understand that, you know, in fact she contained multitudes. There was a real person here. But all it did, all that did was incur more hate because that's just not how the internet works and you just have to, you have to post through it like Andrew Huberman. Be more Huberman.

That is a fucking phenomenal hashtag. Be more Huberman, less Laboooo. So what about the other side of this? I'm interested. I read this article on Substack, which both of you probably will have read about, Shlub feminism. The Me Too was the death of Shlub feminism. No. Okay.

So this was that the thesis is Me Too protected women who were maybe a little more neurotic than is optimal and got much more attention from men than they would like. And what that meant was women who actually would have liked a bit more attention from men and were, quite keen to try and find a partner were immediately told, oh, my sweet summer child, you're not doing that because you want the attention of men. This is for yourself. You're doing, you're wearing the makeup. You're doing the beautification. You're doing all the rest of the things because this is part of your empowerment. And it didn't allow any room for the schlub female. The Bridget Jones, the like hopeless romantic, immediately became derogated because in you are doing something for men, put power in men, and also inevitably meant that, well, you're encouraging some of that,

you're making a self, not subservient, but kind of at the mercy. It's like basically, Me Too killed the Bridget Jones archetype in women, and there's no place for that really. Do you remember the essay, Stacey is depressed, it was on a... I remember reading that, yeah, what was that? A similar theme, really, that there are lots of just quite ordinary-looking people of both sexes, really, who would be very happy to find an ordinary-looking person of the opposite sex to love and they're probably both a bitch lobby and so what um and that somehow somehow this

hyper competitive online dynamic of you know chads and stacy's and so on has just made it increasingly difficult like the guys are relegated to sort of neckbeard computer gaming basement dwellerdom and stacey meanwhile is just she's either she's either a sort of disposable plaything for some chad having been kind of sciopped into all of that by various kind of you know terrible internet discourses or else She's just terminally single as well, and also desperate for love. And Stacey is just miserable as a consequence. That feels sort of cognate with your... Have we killed Bridget Jones?

Have we killed that archetype? Sometimes there is just this great mystery about why some people are single. I was talking to someone yesterday he does a lot of like... She organises Christian mingling things to try and get Christians to meet in real life. And she said that they always have an oversupply of women. And it's a classic thing in churches to have loads of really like earnest, often lovely, really eligible, attractive, et cetera, women showing up desperate for a husband. And they can't find them. And I always, I think often you can't really tell without really, really knowing someone exactly what's going on there.

Because whenever you hear doom and gloom about people finding it impossible to find partners now, et cetera, I think of all the people I know who are Stacey-esque in, so is it Stacey's depressed? Stacey, yeah. In that they're completely normal people and they have happy flourishing family lives. Does that make you more skeptical around the perennially single and you think maybe everything's not as rosy on the outside as it might seem? It makes me assume something is going on. Yeah, I had a vigorous debate with a friend the other day who was like, it was a kind of a throwaway joke. He was like, oh, you know, maybe we should just send all of the insults to Ukraine where there's a massive shortage of men. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

What makes you think that Ukrainian women want anything to do with those? guys. Oh, what, sorry, to fight and die? No, no, no, no, to get married to Ukrainian women. No, to make up the shortage of, to recompensate the sex ratio. Right. I was like, well, you know, there might be, like, we're talking about actual people here and, you know, sometimes these things can be complicated. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something terribly wrong with people who are single. Like, I say comfortably right, it doesn't mean that. It's just that there's probably something going on that is, might be hard to see, like, excessive pickiness or getting up to the moment of committing and backing off every time or something like

that. So committed to a professional career that actually there's just no bandwidth. Because actually if you look around it, the people you actually know, in your life, not on the internet, there isn't a correlation really between how attractive you are and how likely you are to be married. No. There isn't. I did have this idea that maybe the birth rate and coupling is associated with obesity, but not because of some hormonal thing, but just that there is a minimum bar that humans will find other humans attractive at and if you fall below it by eating yourself out of that window

everyone's just less hot and now there's less desire across the board people tend to mate in terms of physical mate value and overall mate value broadly assortatively right they're within their range maybe you can eat yourself

below that it also plausibly becomes a hormonal thing in that weight gain is corresponds to higher levels of estrogen I agree. I just don't think you even need that dynamic. I think it's just that if we assume that a well put together body is something that people will find sexually attractive and as you get further and further away from that, actually on either side, but typically at the moment we've got problems. There's just less ogling going on generally. Yeah, you just think you're less ogleworthy. Like Donald Winnicott's idea of the Good Enough Mother. I'm not familiar with that. So he said that Mary will probably know this better than me, but he was a child psychotherapist. Yeah, he was a doctor.

that you don't need mothers to be perfect by any means. Like in order for children to be properly attached and develop happily, you just need the good enough mother, the mother who meets the standard in terms of providing care for her baby. And yeah, maybe it's the good enough partner. Body. Yeah, they just hit that standard. Although I saw some anonymous man recently comment,

which I thought was insightful that women of the last, I mean, Zempik is going to reverse this, by the way. We've surely hit peak obesity already. but women have in recent decades. Well, then it becomes even more desirable, right? I don't think weight is ever going to stop being a status signal in an obisogenic culture. You know, if a Zenpick looks like it might fix that,

they'll just put up the price of a Zen pic and it just kicks the can down the road. I mean, it's already happened. Eli Lilly just tripled the price, didn't they, in the UK? So immediately, thinness will remain a status signal in an obisogenic culture. Just the cost stops being one of the... self-discipline and becomes literally just a cost. It's a different sort of signal then, though. Yeah, it's a signal of, yeah.

That's true. The meaning of the signal changes. Yeah, massively. But the class, it's class-inflected nature does. True, but I don't know whether class is associated with, or previously was associated with weight. Yes, absolutely. Weight, obesity is strongly, negatively, is strongly correlated with poverty on both sides

of the pond. Okay, and it may still be that, but for different reasons. Yes, just the reasons for that might change. You can't afford this solution as opposed to... You can't afford the healthy alternative. Rather than exactly, you can't afford shock at Whole Foods. You're too busy working three low-paid jobs to go to the gym or whatever. It becomes you can't afford the jab.

Well, pre-Zempic and still probably now, I think women have simultaneously become fatter and prettier. Because there's a lot more money and intervention. Are those two separate dynamics? Well, in the face, right? And also things like hair and whatever. there's so much more sophisticated beauty tech available and using things like whatever retinels or getting your eyebrows microbladed or stuff that stuff has become very routine and very accessible and social media is full of like hacks on how to do all this expensive salon treatment on yourself

so I really think that the bar has moved a lot in terms of what women do to their faces and their hair even if they've also got but maybe maybe the technology for making men more attractive hasn't kept up in kind Men don't really try as well. Right, but... And also, what makes men attractive isn't really... It's only secondarily or even tertiary. Appearance is secondary or tertiary. But when we're talking...

Fake turn is not going to make much difference to me. But going to the gym, perhaps. You know, being physically competent remains the gold standard for being attractive. And earning breadwinner's wage. It goes with having a reasonable physique. But I don't know. This is a hill I will die on. scaffolder physique a wins over gym physique any day of the week.

I mean, I'm sure that you saw, was it Ollie Mers who did that transformation and William Costello posted, tweeted about it? That's right. Yeah. So, and then Sasha Baron Cohen did the same thing. Do you see he was on the front cover of men's fitness? I thought Olly Mers looked better shredded. Well, you would be in the minority.

Apparently I was in the minority. You would be in the minority. And I had an idea around this, which was. He posted physique though. It was posting physique. Instant turnoff. Sorry. On that basis alone

Like objectively Like he looked good in the second picture But he was posting physique Okay but what if it had been a candid physique photo That would have been a completely different ballgame Totally different ballgame Hard to say at that point But it wasn't

So there was basically Sasha Baron Cohen did the same thing I think he's in a superhero movie He is the lead actor in some superhero movie And he also got divorced At the same time So it was breakup physique Superhero Physique And then you compare him with Borat

So when guys get shredded, is that the equivalent of getting a new haircut? It's the pixie cut, but the dudes. Yeah, exactly. Going on a heavy course of testosterone is going and saying to your hairdresser, we're going to do it today. We're finally going to get it off. I'm going to get the pixie cut. Yeah.

So there was definitely an interesting question, I think, that Olly Mears is fat in one photo, shredded in another photo. He wasn't fat, though. He's just a knob. Relatively fat. He was maybe, I would guess, 15 to 18% body fat for the brolifters in the audience and then he probably got himself down to towards single figures he wasn't like striated delts but he was visible six-pack abs which is

that's not nothing like that's fucking and it was not in an unbelievably long amount of time either so you know he'd speed ran it which is you know it's impressive however lots of women said this isn't attractive and lots of men said you don't know what you find attractive what I think is happening there is that guys have they place so much pride and weight on if I can get jack women will find me attractive that is a big uh poltergeist to kill and if you do you go oh fuck maybe I don't have as much control over my mate value by going to the gym as I thought yeah fuck the illusion has been smashed this was my one recourse to, yeah.

I mean, I sort of feel like, actually, I mean, Jim body is not a meaningless signal in the sense that it points to a measure of self-discipline. Yeah, serious. Consistent. Consistent self-discipline and individual willpower and so on, which is, you know, that's a good signal. But it's not the only one. And if you're also a massive weirdo, it's not going to cancel that out. To be a little bit cynical about the women who said that they don't like the shredded physique,

I think that, like, most women in the West are, like a bit fat, right? I mean, the average American woman is like a size 18 or even 20 in American sizing. No, that's not right. It's a 16 in the UK, so it was 12 in the US. But basically the average American woman is like overweight. I don't think that she wants a shredded spouse because he shows her up. There was a story I heard from a friend who was a power lifter. Power lifters go through big weight fluctuations. They're the fat boy lifters typically, squat bench deadlift. and he then went and did a bodybuilding show and then he went and did weightlifting

so he went through all of the different strength sports and his girlfriend said to him my I felt my most comfortable when you were powerlifting which is when you were fattest and I felt my most insecure when you were weightlift when you were bodybuilding which is when you were leanest there's certainly an argument to be made from like an EP standpoint which is

if a man is spending lots of effort on his own physique that suggests that he is kind of advertising his beauty to other people, which may, the whole dad bod thing is actually true. If you've got one extra spare calorie to spend, should you be spending it on yourself in terms of self-beautification and enhancement, or should you be spending it on your family? And if you are getting more attention from the women around you, who are you doing this for? Or maybe you're not quite as committed to the family as we thought you were. Where are those extra calories going? They're going on yourself. You're eating the chicken. You're going to the gym.

That doesn't seem like the sort of thing that I committed fathers doing. Have we not transcended this? Have you not got past this? You're actually doing it for. But in the interesting female beautification, maybe, but it's at least a couple more second, third orders away. Men don't look at women wives that are beautifying themselves unless it's very provocative and overt in terms of the way that they present as you are doing that in order to advertise your eligibility to potential monkey branch lily pad backup mates. I feel like another factor in that is that, I mean, you know, feminists are fond of denouncing the male gaze, but there is, there is unmistakably a difference in how men look at and evaluate other people's physiques.

Actually, I think of both sexes and how women do. And there's a sense, you know, women, you know, if you're a woman, you beautify yourself, you might moan about the male gaze, but also I think you'd probably miss it. And like, you know, when women, a lot of women, when they reach middle age, do miss it, genuinely. And, you know, there's a sense in which being checked out is part of what helps to form your sense of who you are, you know, rightly or wrongly, but that's part of the ongoing, constant kind of ambient intersexual dynamics. But men, like, a man who's titivating himself is implicitly doing it for the male gaze, because women don't look at each other like that. This goes to what you were saying about. I don't think that men know that.

They might not realize it, but the point is that from a woman's. perspective, when a guy is titivating themselves, you know, implicitly it's for the male gays. And that's just a turnoff because that's like, you're like, dude, you're on, you're on, you're in my. It's either gay, yeah, or ignorant of female preferences. Yeah. Yeah. And or possibly, you know, it's, it's, it's somewhere in that male to male transsexual territory. Does it have to be gay? Can it not just be signaling to other men, but it's sort of, I mean, it can be homophilic. Yeah. Without necessarily being like actively, actively, kind of sexually, uh, yeah.

But it's orientated towards other men. But it's homo-stuff in a way which implicitly excludes the woman, excludes women from the dialogue. There's also a big failure of cross-sex mind reading because guys are going, I find that intimidating, you must find it attractive. And some things that are intimidating are attractive and women don't know it.

And then there's some things that men find intimidating, which maybe women don't find attractive. Women have to make the same mistakes. Like with choosing clothes, I will often run past out, if I'm like doing something publicly, I'll run past my outfit past my husband for not because he knows anything about fashion, precisely because he doesn't know anything about fashion. And sometimes because it's hard to tell the difference between do I like this because it's signaling status to other women and it's signaling that I'm very abreast of current fashions and I'm experimental in my choices and whatever. Or do I like this because it actually like looks good? and men are often actively turned off the high fashion impressing other women type of clothes. Have you ever seen, have you seen that video of the girl showing off her new boyfriend fit jeans to her boyfriend?

So it's an American woman and the boyfriend is in the kitchen washing up or doing something. He says, honey, I just got these new jeans. And they're the sort of super loose fit, loose at the knee, loose at the ankle. What do you think? and he daydreams away to 10 years in the past when fitted jeans that you could see a girl's thighs and a girl's ass existed and he's sort of like shakes

and swallows and he goes oh they're lovely and then she gets an even more baggy pair of jeans and he's on the floor sort of crying and holding himself and there is certainly this weird lack of understanding in both ways about what it is and then I guess at least with guys very few guys are dressing themselves to signal to other men. Almost all guys are doing fashion exclusively for women, but women are doing fashion for men and for women. So they need to cry.

I mean, it's the, I do not know the difference between a Birken bag, even though I know the name, I don't actually know anything else about them other than they're expensive and called Birken. I guess if it said it on it, I'd know what it was. And something that's from peacocks, right, and 10 pounds. I literally have no idea. So who is? is that for? It's for other women, right? It's the, I guess, red bottom loboutons. I know that just because it's a meme. But beyond that, I don't know the shoes. I don't know. So this signal is look at all of the luxury time that I have, look at all of the spare capacity I have. If I'm in a relationship of the partner, look at how invested he is in me. He's, you better not try and take my man.

Look at, he's fucking 30 bags deep on this back, on this literal bag. You're not taking him from me because he owes me. Yeah. So you mentioned before we got started, this trend of feminism and women turning to the right. What is that dynamic that we're seeing that's going on? So it's quite a common view on the dissident right that women are an early left wing.

so there are average psychological differences between men and women which we've all talked about at length women tend to be more agreeable than men more neurotic than men more sensitive to social signals and men are there are various differences obviously they vary between individuals

but they scale to being quite significant differences between the sexes and one thing that it does seem to be clear is that women tend to be more egalitarian in their own social groups or at least in their female friendships Avertly. More overtly egalitarian, yeah.

And sometimes this gets interpreted as that means that women are left wing, like innately. And if you let women vote and participate in public life, they will drag everything to the left. I tend to think that's not true because there are so many examples historically of women being very enthusiastic participants in right-coded political movements. I mean, obviously talking left-in-right is a bit complicated in the past, but say women participating enthusiastically. in temperance and prohibition would be one example the church ladies phenomenon where women are actually the ones

enforcing conservative social norms locally or even female participation in Nazism. I mean it's probably not quite right actually said that narcissism is right wing, it's complicated but women were passionate passionate participants in the rise of Hitler

and in fact often had like weird sexual obsessions with Hitler which you can read about at length and had a kind of Beatlemania when he showed up and things like that. So the idea that women are always and forever, like, woke, I think it's nuts. It clearly is the case, though, at the moment, young women in particular, skewoke a lot, and particularly in some country, skewoke a lot, and there's a big sex gap. I think it's more that there are some political movements which kind of tap into feminine preferences,

and woke is one of them. It has that, it's not so much the egalitarianism as the encouragement to scoop up and protect childlike figures, So whether that be trans people or refugees or whatever, encouraging women's channel those maternal energies towards certain groups. I think it's very powerful, yeah. There's also infinite opportunities for moral dogpiling, which is just incredibly appealing. Yeah. How so? I mean, you can, if you can arbitrarily change which words are forbidden sort of every few months and then mobilize your friends to attack. somebody for getting it wrong. And you can use that as a means of conducting office politics.

Attacking people from a moral infractions. Yeah, attacking people for moral infractions, you know, in a sense, it's kind of village, it's like women's village modus operandi on steroids on the internet and divorced from any meaningful application in real life or any sort of meaningful kind of breaking mechanisms. I also think workness is quite emotionally compelling in the sense of feeling like you have this sense of purpose and crusade. and, you know, I think that young women in particular find that quite enticing. Wokeness doesn't really work on men, though, apart from the Lububa men. But it doesn't, like, it doesn't hit those.

I think it, I like to think of it, like, Jonathan Haidt's idea of moral flavors, like it doesn't hit the flavors that men have taste receptors for. I mean, I'm going to say this carefully, because otherwise I will get dogpiled by exactly these guys. But I do think it's correct, even though this is, I do actually think it's right, that there's a subset of the E. Right, which is the equivalent of woke just predominantly for men. And by that, you know, I don't mean the woke right in the sort of James Lindsay sense of, you know, being some sort of terrible thing that must be expelled from polite discourse because something, something civil liberties or free speech or, well, no, no, civil discourse and objectivity and all of that.

What I actually think is going on is that the sort of woke pattern of social interaction and the E. Wright pattern of social interaction are both. updated versions very, very strongly gender coded of two political sides as mediated through the kind of interactions which are just normal on the internet, which are very much less rationalistic in both cases, actually just visibly the case, very much more, unmoored from material realities, unmoored from localized communities, very abstracted happening in the internet, you know, full of all kinds of perverse financial incentives and geared mostly towards rage baiting on both sides than really towards substantive politics or even really

getting anything done in the real world at all. They're extremely online. And actually, I've found it very interesting watching the emergence of Zoran Mandani in this context in New York. Bad bench press. Yeah, I mean, because he strikes me as a sort of, he's a sort of post-literate leftist. I don't mean he himself is post-literate, but he mobilizes a certain kind of. a very net native leftism. And that's the source of his popularity. You know, whether or not

he'll ever actually, you know, get elected and or deliver any policies is almost secondary to that. And there's a subset of Trumpism and Marga, which is that but for the right. And those two movements code that they are respectively gendered. You know, there are more women that embrace the Mamdanism and there are more men who embrace margatism. And yes, of course, there's some overlap, but they're both strongly gendered. Are we seeing a trajectory pivot then at the moment? Is there's some subversive yeah are women turning to the right i think that when they do they'll turn quickly that's my main take i'm actually going to quote a noted member of the erite in in support of that you know bronze age pervert who said memorably you remember also the mob is a woman

which i think is an important what's that means by by that i mean i'm i'm interpreting here but my the way i understand that is that the mob as in a group of people highly you know, morally errated, angry, sort of memetically charged, you know, wanting action now is actually, you know, is as much, is as plausibly all female as it is all male. You know, an angry mob can be of either sex. But the mob as a collective entity, Bronze Age pervert in this context is suggesting is actually a very, is a female phenomenon. Although, of course, if the mob's going to cut off your head, it will have to involve some men. Yeah, I mean, eventually. But the emotional energy. The emotional energy is memetic, it's contagious, it's collective.

So a concrete example of this would be what we've already talked about, refugees or, you know, immigration in general. And until now, the very strong energy from young women in particular has been to see ethnic minorities and refugees in particular as childlike figures in need of protection and also to have this slightly to see this cause as a very emotional kind of you get pulled along with the memetic energy kind of thing you could easily see that flip and actually it becomes and you're already seeing this among working class women in Britain definitely is that the childlike entity in need of protection is like literal children I think one of the really underappreciated scissors here is actually whether or not you have kids and I would bet any sum of money you care to name

that you'll find more women on the refugees welcome side who don't have kids and more women on the actually we've actually were full very straightforwardly for the reason Louise just explained if you're worried about your kids that's an entirely different and very much smaller and more particularistic set of affections than if you want to you love quote unquote the vulnerable in the abstract the inverse of this I think is a big part of the reason

why so many guys want to be entrepreneurs right now is displaced paternal instinct that they've got this project that they're working toward they've got a purpose and meaning they've got a single thrust and drive you know my my team my staff my purpose whatever this thing is that's interesting is yeah just supplanted yeah family yeah but you can easily easily see and I think we're already starting to see a right wing political movement propelled by women that is using exactly those political flavors that women are receptive to like fear women being more neurotic so fear of threat

wanting to mother childlike or actual children figures and the kind of memetic energy there's no reason why are we seeing that where are we seeing that well I think we're probably seeing it with the women showing up outside of migrant hotels the pink protest

yeah yeah that's what they're called yeah they're not they wear pink right yeah which is an interesting echo of the of the era pussy hat thing. Yeah. They're not wearing, but they're not wearing pink pussy hats. They're wearing pink t-shirts

and they're turning up saying close the hotels and send them home. Yeah, and they're all over social media. And at the moment, this is very much contained to being a working class thing. And middle class women are quite hostile to it, mostly.

But I think you could easily see that spread, easily. And yeah, women turning to the right could become, Posey Parker is an example of this already happening in that she's, yeah, she's able to

her movement is distinctively feminine and also not left wing not the very east yeah Louise and Mary you're both great I really really appreciate you where should people go to keep up to date with all of the

things you're saying and writing and so my podcast is Made Mother Matriarch all the places that you find podcasts my first book was the case against a sexual revolution I am writing a second book on birth rates but having children has kind of got in the way of writing it, but I will finish it eventually.

Put your money where your mouth is. Put your fertility where your buck is. I know, I know. Well, it would have as much credibility, would it if I wasn't walking to walk? I have a substack. Mary Harrington.com.com. You'll find it. My regular column is at Unheard.

I tweet, although not so much over the summer at Moving Circles. I post these days. School years started. Everyone can go and follow you and you'll be back at to speed. And you've got a book. And my last book was Feminism Against Progress. I'm writing another one. This one is on politics after literacy. So internet, politics after the singularity, if you like. We've already merged with our machines. What happens next.

Okay. Antis, I appreciate you very much. Thank you. It's been fun. Thank you. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting. But there wasn't a list of them. So I scoured and scoured and scoured and then gave up and just started reading on my own. And then I made a list of 100 of the best books that I've ever found, and you can get that for free right now. So if you want to spend more time around great books that aren't going to completely kill your memory and your attention, just trying

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