Modern Wisdom - #498 - Roy Baumeister - The Mystery Of Female Sex Drive

Episode Date: July 11, 2022

Roy Baumeister is a social psychologist at the University of Queensland and an author. The social psychology of sexual interactions is fascinating. Sex is more than just a physical act, it has cultural, emotional, spiritual, psychological and social implications, many of which we are unaware of. Thankfully Roy has spent years studying the literature on why people have sex and what's going right and wrong with it. Expect to learn why the female sex drive doesn't occur in the same way anywhere else in the animal kingdom, why women shape men more than men shape women, why more women have tried being bisexual but more men are gay, why there is very little evidence for a cultural suppression of female sexuality from men, why the male sex drive is a tragedy and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 2 weeks free access to Wondrium by going to https://www.wondrium.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERN30) Extra Stuff: Buy The Social Psychology Of Sexual Interactions - https://amzn.to/3yhzCaZ  Check out Roy's website - https://roybaumeister.com/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 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

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Roy Baumeister. He's a social psychologist at the University of Queensland and author and the creator of the world famous Marshmallow Will Power Test. The social psychology of sexual interactions is fascinating. Sex is more than just a physical act. It has cultural, emotional, spiritual, psychological and social implications, many of which we were unaware of. Thankfully, Roy has spent years studying the literature on why people have sex, and what's going right and wrong with it. Expect to learn why the female sex drive doesn't occur in the same way anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Why women shape men more than men shape

women? Why more women have tried being bisexual but more men are gay? Why there is little evidence for a cultural suppression of female sexuality from men? Why the male sex drive is a tragedy and much more? This episode may ruffle some feathers, I think, but it's just a fascinating overview of the literature and the current sort of cultural position and the social psychology that is behind what makes us have sex. Roy is a legitimate legend in the field and I'm very, very glad to have him on. I'm going to have him back on to talk about a ton of other stuff, but yeah, uh, enjoy, enjoy this one.

But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Roy Baumeister. What do you mean when you say that women shaped men, more than men shaped women? There's the biological argument that men are more changeable and continue to evolve faster than women do has something, and I'm not an expert on this, but has something to do with the Y chromosome doesn't have the backups that the X does. So if you get a mutation on the X chromosome that produces something weird, the backup, the normal one, might take over and keep the person normal, whereas for at least half of the Y chromosome, there's no backup,

which means that the men are more changeable biologically. You gotta put it, men are nature's playthings that there's a more Selection that operates on the male than on the female And it is evidence for it. There's just greater variance In in males than in females Mo geniuses and more retards in the more geniuses more retards Yeah, even with height, which is a very genetic thing. The difference between the tallest and the shortest man is bigger than the difference

between the tallest and the shortest women. So again, nature produces more variety on the male that if tech symbiologists about whether this is plausible and they sort of say yes, but I haven't gotten a firm straight answer, you see to drive evolution forward, there are a lot of mutations, some of them are, a few of them are beneficial, most of them are bad. So ideally, to improve the population, you want the bad ones to be flushed out of the gene pool, you don't want them to keep reproducing, whereas the good ones, you want them to spread as rapidly as possible. In our species and in many others, both of those are more easily accomplished with the male than the female.

The thing is most women have a baby throughout history. And hardly any have more than a dozen. Whereas there are lots of men who have zero. And there are men who have a thousand. And certainly it's easier for a man than for a woman to have a couple dozen, even in these days with serial monogamy and so on. So if the sun has a really great new trait, then it will spread faster than if it's in the daughter. And likewise, if the sun has a bad new trait, it'll be easier to get it out of the gene pool and not be repeated. That's so interesting.

That's such an interesting way to frame it. I really liked as well your idea about the fact that men are the demand and women are the supply when it comes to sort of the sexual marketplace. But that makes sense about why women would shape men, because men typically are the sexual protagonists. They, if women want men to have a house and a job and marry them, before they have sex with them, then sure enough, men will stick to those norms. If they want them to be the strongest warrior or the smartest crypto investor or whatever it is, that women kind of set the rules of the game and then men go, okay, is that what we're playing? And then they try and just do things. I don't know whether you follow Steve Stewart Williams.

I'm going to guess that you probably will know who he is. I don't. Okay, so he's an evolutionary psychologist where the APA understood the universe, fantastic book. And he loves posting up images from nature, animals, a lot of the time, birds, doing these ridiculous, like extravagant dances, colorful plumage, and they're doing death-defying stunts, jumping out of trees,

just trying to get women's attention, trying to get female birds' attentions, I suppose. But you do kind of see basically the same thing, and that I think is what I liked about women-shaped men more than men-shaped women. Yes, it seems, uh, have the impression men will do whatever is required by women in order to obtain sex, and not a whole lot more. sex and not a whole lot more. And so women can set the norms. One book that influenced me earlier in my career was Marsha Goudentag and policy cards book Too Many Women, who went through a ton of data about sex ratio differences. You know, some societies have a lot more men, others have more women. And sure enough, when there's a surplus of men, it's not majority rule, like in politics,

it's minority rule, like in economics. If there are too many men, as it were, and not enough women, the supply is not equal to the demand. The demand is high, and so men really have to make serious commitments and do whatever women want in order to have sex. And when it's the other way around, like after a major war that's killed a lot of the men, or on today's American college campuses, where women outnumber men, three to two, then the supply exceeds the demand. And so the price goes down in a sense of what the woman can demand and expect.

And long-term commitment, no, sexual fidelity, no waiting until marriage or whatever to begin sex, no. If she doesn't adjust to the man, then the man can soon move on and find another female partner. But of course, it's reverse in places, whether a surplus of man like in America's Wild West or China during the one child period when there was a lot of selective abortion and millions of surplus men, then the price is high.

And the man really has to make a serious commitment and do whatever the woman wants in order to get into a sexual relationship. Who did you find out was having lots of great sex? Well, that's a, uh, I looked at the research on that. It's very unequally distributed. You know, if you just sort of casually read the magazines and watch movies, you get the impression that lots of young people are just falling into bed with each other

very casually all the time. But the numbers and the survey data tell a different story for looking at people in their 20s, which is the sexual dream age age in the sense everybody younger than 20s wants to be older and everybody older wants to be younger. So if you look at those people, there are a handful of very attractive people who are having plenty of sex and others a lot less. who are having plenty of sex. And others a lot less. I mean, there's the sort of perito principle

that shows up in a lot of things where 20% of people are responsible for 80% of the action. I mean, this is true, like even in a scientific field, you know, 20% of the scientists are doing 80% of the exciting new research and publishing and so on. So numbers, something like that may be, maybe true. And it's true for both men and women,

but again, women are more selective. So the inequality is bigger for men. And as I said, I saw a small fraction of the men are having the majority of the sex. There's lots of women I'm interested in them and the rest of them can hardly get a response. Now I've read some journalistic columns and so on. After 30, it changes for both men and women, but in somewhat different ways.

A lot of those men who really couldn't attract a lot of interest, sort of the middle of the pack, attractive men. By the time they're in their thirties, they've got more money, they're a little more grown up, they have a little better understanding of the world, so they find the women are attracted to them, and so they will do well. The women in their thirties,

a lot of them are putting career first and so on, and some of them start to complain where are the good men. We're not getting the quality of men, even that they got in their 20s, and they're sort of disappointed to find that some of the men in their 30s just refuse to date women in their 30s. They don't want women in their old age, in their own age. They want they want younger women. So there may be this sort of party party cohort of men in their 30s and women in their 20s. Do I have a fine time? And as I said, plenty of sex and it's exciting to the women because the the men are established and have money and are doing well. It's exciting to the men because the women are young and beautiful, but others get left out.

What about the great bit of sex? Lots of great sex. Lots of great sex. Well, that narrows it down some. you're just going to bed with one person after another. Doesn't necessarily produce the highest quality of sex because it's better if people get to know each other and to... Is that born out in the data? Yes, in terms of quality of sex, you know, people are more likely to report a good quality interaction with a regular partner. Again, there's a bit of a gender imbalance there. Most men are not that difficult to get to an orgasm whereas women's bodies are more complicated and then maybe take some time to learn how to do it. And so to please a particular woman

might take a little more practice and skill. I believe I read some data that even on the the hookups, you know, with no future or, you know, commitment or anything, the woman's rate of orgasm is low, but if she hooks up with the same man twice, even without her relationship, the second time her orgasmic frequency goes up. All this suggesting, again, it takes a little while. So the impression married people and single people kind of envy each other. I think the other's having a better sex life. The data suggests married people tend to have more sex for the single person.

There's often feast and famine kind of periods. You might have several people or have an intense relationship and have a lot of sex when you start out, you're often having sex every day or twice a day. Most marriages don't sustain that, but they're also long periods for a lot of single people of no sex at all. And I'm friends with the great sex researcher Helen Fisher and she has national survey data saying majority of single people are now saying they did not have sex one time in the past year.

So when they do have it, if somebody knew, it is all very exciting because it's a new person. As I said, the competence issue on a first time thing, assuming you figure it out and you get to know each other and have an ongoing period. Again, you can have a phase where you're having plenty of very exciting sex every day or two or three times a day. And so the quality is better and the excitement is better, but that's compensated by long periods when there's nothing. Yeah, it's a trade-off between novelty and the advantage of intimacy, right? Sometimes novelty, at least for men, seems to be an advantage, but for women, intimacy and familiarity and understanding. I read a great paper about how the, they've done self-reports from women about what it was that

was getting in the way of the orgasm, and it seemed like self-referential thoughts, concerns about performance, expectation to orgasm, oddly was one of the biggest barriers to women finding orgasm, at least in this paper. And I thought that was really interesting, but it makes complete sense because you think about what gets released during the female orgasm, bonding hormones. Do you really want to bond with a male that you haven't become familiar and intimate emotionally with just because you managed to have sex. You know, this would be, in cases of forced sex, this could be a bit problematic.

And I know that there are cases where I don't know whether it's due to what happens during sex, but where women can sometimes almost fall for sexual attackers in kind of a bizarre way. So yeah, I think it kind of, it does make sense. Data about sex are all a little bit weak. A scientist would wish for better data. I think sometimes I compare sex and violence. Those are two big issues in any society and so on. In terms of being a social scientist and trying how much can we learn about this, we can

learn a lot more about violence than about sex. Because with violence, you can do laboratory experiments with simulated things, other sorts of aggression, to really test causal hypotheses very carefully. You have great real world statistics in terms of murder rates and so on. Sometimes reporting of assaults and so on may change locally, but even so you can look

at trends over time. Pretty good data. Murder data tend to be quite reliable. In contrast to sex, we have very little like that other than births, which are also objectively recorded, so we know somebody probably had sex if there's a birth. But we're much more relying on what people say and what people say about their sex lives is not the unvarnished truth. There's allusions of wishful thinking and other things that intrude on it. So it's scientifically challenging. It's still

worth doing because it's important. You want to know something like how long does it take for people to have sex? Well, I don't know anyone who sits there with the wristwatch or the stopwatch. It's keeping track, so people may estimate, but you know, times are to stand still perhaps. I don't trust their estimates all that much either. What did you find out about the mystery of female sexual desire? Well, the one reason it's mysterious is it's more changeable than the male one. I got this idea sometime. I remember I was reading history of the sexual revolution, and

all the scholars who studied it said that it was a change in behavior for everybody, but women changed much more fundamentally than men. The men after the sexual revolution had a lot more chances to do what they wanted, but their desires and all that were pretty much the same. Whereas women's attitudes but their desires and all that. We're pretty much the same. Whereas women's attitudes towards their bodies and feelings about sex and acceptance of their desires and everything changed in a much more fundamental way. So I wondered, well, why is that?

Is that a general property? Is something about female sexuality more changeable? Or was that just some specific issue with the sexual revolution? So I waited through a large amount of other sorts of data and it's very much true. The way I put it sometimes is the sex drive, everybody agrees, is influenced by both nature and culture. I mean, there's genes and your hormones and all that, evolution, but there are also societal pressures and what other people are doing and expectations and reputations and all that, evolution, but there are also societal pressures and what other people are doing and expectations

and reputations and all that stuff as well. So they argue about how much of each is there. And my conclusion is that the recipe is somewhat different by gender, the male sexuality being more on the nature side of female being more on the culture side. So you look at for example immigrants when they move to one culture to another, the women pretty quickly settle into whatever the new the sexual norms are at the new place, whereas the men retain more their their others. They don't they don't change as much. Or in terms of going through adult life,

women's sexual desires of 20 may be different from 30 or 40 and she may try same-sex relationships or take up masturbating or want to be spanked or whatever. Whereas the average man, Or whatever, whereas the average man, his desires at 20, 25 are pretty much the same at 55 to 60. They're just diminished a bit in intensity, but he doesn't pick up new ones as much. Or another sign, you look at highly educated women and uneducated women. The masters and PhDs, so versus the dropout of high school, they have very different sex lives. Education really seems to alter the women's sex life, whereas the men are not all that different as a function of level.

What's the change that it makes to women's sex lives? The more educated women try a lot more things, do a lot more things, they are much less traditional and conservative. Have you got any idea why you think that might be? Well, I think one would say education exposes people to new ideas and new practices and people to new ideas and new practices and so on influences. And it's interesting religion is another way, another set of institutions, also very powerful in society. And again, the most religious, to first is the least religious women have quite different sex drives whereas the men are almost depressingly similar across that and their religion sort of seems to push in the opposite direction from

education whereas the higher you go in education the more the woman is open to trying oral sex or anal sex or threesomes or whatever whereas with religion as you go to more highly religious, the less she is open to trying these different practices and multiple partners and all those things. So, again, looking at this as a social scientist, it is really interesting here, two powerful sets of social forces, of institutions and society, pushing in opposite directions on the sex drive and both having a bigger effect on women than on men.

So I noticed too, back in the sexual revolution when I was a young man, there were all these books explaining female sexuality to them, her bodies ourselves and whatnot. They had produced these books for men. There was some advice on how to understand the female body and so on, but there's much less mystery there. So for a woman, part of this is the complexity of the physical response, perhaps, but also for a woman to understand her sex drive, it's a moving target. So even if she figures it out when she's 20 or 25, when she's 35, she may have different feelings,

different patterns of desires and so on, and what worked then didn't. And for the male, as I said, it's much less mystery to begin with, and once you've figured it out, you don't really have to continue changing or updating your understanding of what you want. One of the interesting things that I saw was that women have the ability, but men have more motivation when it comes to their desire for sex, but the way that they actually performed

during sex. So women have the ability to have more sex, multiple orgasms, etc. Men have a, I mean, even the most virile man has a pretty big latency period after having sex. I just find it really interesting that it's the group which has the biggest sex drive, which is actually restricted from having sex or orgasming as much and the side which perhaps has a lower sex drive on average seems to be able to perform more. Yes, I didn't know if we call orgasm a performance, but depends depends if it's real enough. There is that. I think part of the answer is that the male orgasm because it's so fundamental process of reproduction evolved much earlier than the female. And so the human female orgasm is a fairly novel thing. They have done studies with vibrators and so on, indicating that some of the other great apes

do seem to have contractions. I joke that I'm glad I'm not the research assistant who had to go to the gorilla with the vibrator and say, sign a consent form and then we'll do something here. But somebody did it. And so they are capable of it. They doubt that it happens very often because the coupling doesn't last very long and the male gorilla isn't really caring much about

pleasing their partner and all that. Sorry, does that mean that most other animals, dolphins and elephants and stuff, that the orgasm as a sensation isn't a thing? Well, I'm not an expert on this. I have read some other experts who's and it's not totally known again human orgasm. We hear about male-efficent people talking to them. But it looks as far as we can tell that a lot of them there isn't even the capability of the female orgasm or if it's there, it's probably not a very common thing. One of my lines of thought recently is that in order for humans to evolve, the way we did, and to become these cultural beings, there had to be a whole bunch of changes, including bonding the male and the female for a longer time.

This goes back to, you need a bigger brain to do culture, you have a big brain, it's going to burst the birth canal if it's there in the womb. So it all has to grow after birth, which then compared to other apes. Human babies are way prematurely born. This is all babies. You know, young chimpanzee can kind of take care of itself, you know, year or two. Whereas the human is fully dependent at least till seven or eight and to some degree, till into the teen years. So it needs the father and the mother to work together to provide more food. The human mother could not possibly feed multiple children by herself, particularly when she's pregnant again.

So for that whole thing to work, they had to get the man Recruited into the provider role and to form the commitment to the women so all kinds of the changes in evolution From humans to others I'm starting with just facing each other during sex and kissing you know facing you can look into each other's eyes and form an attachment there You mentioned both sides have these orgasmic release of hormones. They start to feel love for each other. It was one of the surprising findings during the early days of the sexual revolution.

People were just having sex all over with strangers, but yeah, they still started falling in love. They weren't able to keep them as separate in that kissing. And so I would consider the female orgasm to be one of those that really improves the quality of the experience for both the man and the woman, obviously particularly the woman, and helps make them have this romantic love for each other that bonds them together for some years so that the children that come when you're having sex will be adequately provided for, at least until they're seven or eight. I read about the hunter-gatherers, and as you know, through, if you say,

human civilization's been around for 150,000 years, 140,000, we were 100 and gatherers. And in those, yeah, they do bond in a pretty monogamous fashion, but only for a while. By the time the kids are seven or eight off and they're getting on each other's nerves or the man is off to find another younger woman or whatever. But that's enough to get the job done. Anyway, it's more than you probably wanted to hear, but the female orgasm I look at is part of that constellation of things that helps bind a young couple together and make them stay together

through the transition to parenthood and through the early years of the child's life. What about male and female changes in sexual desire when you get into marriage and during marriage and then after having kids? Oh, yes, well, read this book some years ago, this Australian woman, a journalist with some social science background. Australian woman, a journalist with some social science background.

She had contacted me and had a book called The Sex Diaries. I wanted to know if I could help her publish it in America. I didn't know what to do about that, but I read the book with great interest. She had the idea she would keep records of people, get couples to keep records of their sex lives, and it would make a racey, bestseller with lots of juicy details And there was some of that but the more of it was The husband begging for sex and the wife saying no, no, no or the boyfriend and the girlfriend Whatever and so she said it just seems like women go off sex once they settle into a committed relationship, that the excitement, the attraction

is there for forming the relationship, not sustaining it. And it's certainly consistent with the idea that it's there in the female to form the relationship. I think nature learned to turn up sexual desire in the young woman, especially when she's sort of getting involved with a man, because that will help him think, oh my god, this is great. And even if she's a little difficult to get along with it at times, I have great sex every day for the rest of my life is totally worth it. But then nature says once the bond is formed, that's checked off, and the natural agenda turns her attention to bearing and raising a child, and so she's not

so eager to have sex anymore. I asked to my relationship expert friends if this was true in the research literature, this was just the woman's, the journalist getting these people to repart it, and they said, you know, it's not known in the literature, but we have data that could address that. And they had both collected data on married couples. And they just collected tons of data over the first five years of marriage. So they went and analyzed the data, which showed essentially this right at the time of the wedding, the man's desire for sex is higher than the woman's, but it's a fairly small difference. It is still significant. Manor horne of the women, every measure shows that, but a small difference. And then across the first five years, the man's sexual desire stays

about the same while the woman's progressively drops. And so five years into the marriage, they have a mismatch even though they were pretty close at the time when they first got married. And so this, between aren't in a book, this X-diaries, her impression does seem to be correct in the research, at least in these data, that female sexual desire tends to do indulgent to diminish once the relationship is formed and the commitment is established. So again, I think it's something that women are doing

consciously, I think often the women may even be somewhat baffled and disappointed themselves to find out that they don't desire sex the way they did. This is one of those things. A piece of advice that I read in mate by Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx is a lot of the time relationships can begin and the couple are attracted to each other. And then if the woman comes off the pill, perhaps because they've got married and they're deciding to maybe have children, her hormonal profile can change. And that can actually mean that she is averse to the smell of the man, there's also some state that I've seen in the final month also of pregnancy that the woman can feel very averse to the smell of her partner

and very bonded to the smell of family. And this kind of seems to make a little bit of adaptive sense that let's say that you get into an argument with your partner when you're heavily pregnant, that could be dangerous for you. So you stick with your genetic kin in an attempt to kind of keep yourself protected. And I like both of those, but it comes back to this idea again about the fact that the female sexual drive is super malleable, right?

And it's constantly influx. It's changing in response to its ecology, what's going on around it, it's changing in response to its hormonal profile. Now, males' sexual drive is also in response to testosterone levels, right? Higher testosterone level, more desire for sex, more desire for new partners, sexual novelty, masturbation, all that sort of stuff. But the male sex drive is like linear. It kind of goes up and it's, do you want more of it or do you have less of it?

The female sexual drive can go left and right. I think you looked at data that said more women have experimented going, are they swing more from men to women and then back again, whereas the bisexual category is a lot less occupied by men. Yes. It's complicated there. I guess there are more gay males than gay females, but the overlap between the bisexual category is a much bigger proportion of women who've ever had same sex than for men. Why do you think it is that there's more gay men than gay women?

Well, that continues to be debated. You have to understand the scholarly issue, the scientific issue is how does homosexuality continue at all. Why is it not repeated out of the gene pool, yeah? Yeah, nature is against it since it doesn't reproduce. And a lot of cultures have been against it, although some have tolerated it, but in certain of the last few centuries. So we looked in nature and culture as the two big explanations.

For once they agree on not favoring homosexual activity, and yet it continues to survive. There's some interesting answers starting to emerge. And I make colleagues in University of Queensland, Brendan and Siege, paper in science, and I think a second one coming along, finding out that, okay, yes, there are genes that predict homosexuality. It's not a particular gay gene as they were once saying and apparently they found one and contrast its sort of combined activity of hundreds if not thousands of them And the interesting finding is that the siblings of the gays who the heterosexual the brothers and sisters are heterosexual you know this so also is gay The heterosexual, the brothers and sisters are heterosexual. So I was always gay.

His brother is heterosexual. And he has more sexual partners than the average man. So the way I put it is that the super manly man who only is entirely masculine in all his traits, he doesn't relate to women all that well. It helps a man to be attractive to women to have a little more emotionality and warmth and nurturance and all these things. They like some degree of feminine traits to be present. They like a manly man too, but some of it helps.

So, it becomes a hit the middle problem. You want to have more of these genes, which will produce more feminine traits in the man, but maybe beyond a certain amount, since they're being mixed together at random in the fetus, that if you're high amount, then turns him to be more attracted to other men. And so it becomes, his genes made him homosexual, which again, nature doesn't reward since that sex doesn't produce children. But the same configuration of genes, just a little bit on the other side of the barter, produces extra children by making others more attractive. And that's enough to keep the genes replenished in each generation, so it will continue to appear.

That is so interesting. So a couple of things. First off, one of the best tactics that you should have if you're a guy that wants to be successful with women is to have a gay brother, basically, that genetically you're going to have a homo profile, a genetic profile that's going to be good for you. And also, it kind of suggests that gay men are a lot closer to highly successful heterosexual men than we might think. You know, you've got not too far away from the genes. Also, I saw in your book, didn't it say that

Mono's I Gotick Twins, identical twins have a 50% likelihood of the other twin being gay if one of the twins is gay? Yes, those data are a while ago. I don't know if there's any update or anything, but that was an estimate, which shows there's a lot of nature and a lot of culture. I mean, 50% likelihood of being gay, that's way above the, it's probably two or three percent. It must for in the population. So if your twin brother is gay and you're an identical twin, yeah, the odds are much higher than average. On the other hand, 50% is far from 100%.

It's not determined. The true number may be a little higher than that because some people don't want to be gay and will resist acknowledging it. But nevertheless, I think there's a sign that there's ample input from both nature and culture. What did you mean when you talked about the tragedy of the male sex drive. Yes, well, using the tragedy in the term in the more advanced literary criticism, Arthur Miller had a famous, I say, a tragedy is not just something bad happening, but it's sort of a fatal flaw in yourself and you're striving for something great, but because of the flaw you fail. He said, in a sense, tragedy, although it has unhappy ending, it's more uplifting

than comedy. This comedy sort of looks at people's faults and foibles and bad things. And so I describe it as a tragedy. I'm not saying it's a calamity. I'm not even saying that it's a bad thing, but it seems doomed to falling short of its desires, that man were just instilled to want more sex than they're likely to get. to get. I think a while ago we cited some research by one of my colleagues who surveyed her first-year college students of, well, if you wanted, how many people would you like to go to bed with for the rest of your life, assuming it was all up to you, don't worry about diseases or laws or pregnancy or anything, is just, you know, to experience experience sex how many people would you like to do it and the average for the woman was two and a half and average for the man was 64 now with that there's a

lot of disappointment ahead for those young men but it's it's true now must be said a lot of the men just said, I'd like to have one, presumably they hadn't had any yet. And do you think, well, I could get one, that would be perfect. But the man has had one kind of issues, he would have two or three and the man has had three, maybe wishes for six or seven and then he said, ten may 15 and you know I've known men who had over a hundred sex partners and they were still wishing for more. And that kind of again suggests this tragic fly aspect nature did not design you to be satisfied that I've had my sex and it was great and I'm done with that. No, and having it more makes you think of it more, so it stimulates more desire to try new things and do new things with different people or the same people.

So in that sense, it seems somewhat doomed to frustration. I've also been thinking in terms of what I mentioned before, that we're talking about how women shaped men. I think women probably shaped men toward higher sex drive. As I said, other apes, they don't take fatherhood seriously at all. The idea that you should provide food for your children, that would seem ridiculous to them, and especially doing it on a regular basis over many years, and even to the mother of those children, who after all is just some guerrilla you had sex with a couple years ago. No, no, that would seem ridiculous to them. And yet human males do this routinely.

So when that was evolving, there were probably plenty of men who had the same outlook that your average gorilla does and say, come on, I have to work twice as hard to produce twice as much food every day and give half of it to this life and baby. That seems nuts. And well, those men took themselves out of the gene pool, right? They didn't want to play a line and put up with supporting the women and, you know, known many women who are delightful fine people and so on. But inevitably, some of them are difficult and erotic and unpleasant and all that. And well, let's to make the man make the commitment and stay with them too.

They need providers to support them and their children. And the desire for sex is a strong thing. And so I'm suspecting that the human male population has a higher sex drive than the animals we evolved from and that they were specifically selected not in those terms, but the women would reproduce with the men who wanted sex enough to stay committed and put up with whatever the women's demands and problems are. So a high sex drive would be selected there. It's ironic, because of course women complain about men being too sexually motivated, and although they also complain when men stop making advances and so on. It's difficult. It's a difficult bargain. You know, that I'm not a young man trying to figure out what the rules are today as they

keep changing. Have you considered, have you heard of the term post-nut clarity? Do you know what that is? I have not. Okay, so it's like post-coital depression. And I think it's, it's like Nietzsche or Freud or someone that said that said after copulation the devil's laughter can be heard. And I think he's talking about this, like, such an apocalyptic way to talk about having sex and pillotalk. But many guys and girls as well I've heard will be familiar with the just had sex and then sometimes this sort of like quasi melancholy state can set in

Do you think that this plays into the Requirement nature's requirement for men to have a high sex drive that if you had sex and you laid there in the full body glow that I've heard typically is more common of a female post sex environment that I've heard typically is more common of a female post sex environment, that that would discourage you from going and seeking more sexual partners and also post-nut clarity is now something that you can add to your scientific lexicon. Yeah, this being sadder to press after sex, I haven't seen much about that. I spend more time on TikTok, right? Lots of people on TikTok are talking about post-nut clarity.

Okay, maybe I should try to find that, because it's really not something I've heard about from other men I read about, or they didn't fit my own experience either. But maybe they do it. As to whether it discourages people from seeking new sex partners, I rather doubt that that's it. That would, for example, for one thing, right after sex, hardly anyone goes leaping out

and running in search of a new sex partner. The new sex partners are sought later on different occasions. If you're single, if you just sort of back on the market. And if you're in a relationship, then, well, people seek out other sex partners for various reasons, dissatisfaction, or just excitement or curiosity. But I don't know that the effects of a particular orgasm could last long enough to make any difference at activity.

Yeah. What did you look at to do with massacism and kink and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, I wrote stuff about that a long time ago. I was actually doing research, I wrote a book on how people find meaning in life. So when I was reading for that, I was just sort of looking for interesting stuff and wanted some people who have interesting lives that would lead me to give me some insight. Because back then there was hardly any research directly on the topic. some people who have interesting lives that would lead me to give me some insight. Because back then there was hardly any research directly on the topic. So I thought, oh, maybe those people who like to be tied up and spanked and all that,

I bet they have really interesting lives. So I was on sabbatical at University of Texas. I remember I went over to the library and grabbed all the books they had that dealt with this stuff and spent a couple hours going through them. And I could tell pretty fast that I was not going to learn anything about the meaning of life from the kinky sex literature. But it was a challenge, one of my other lines of work is understanding the self. And mascarism just seemed to be directly opposite to all the prevailing wisdom about

the self, which is that you want to think well of yourself. You want to have high self esteem, you want to be regarded as a success in all that. And yet these masochists want to be embarrassed and humiliated and put down until we consume the self, seek pleasure and avoid pain, but these people want to be tied up and spanked and whipped and things like that. And the self wants to be in control. That's another widespread basic assumption in psychology that you seek to establish and maintain control over your environment. And yet the Damascus wanted to be tied up and ordered around and called slaves and things like that. So I wondered how to reconcile these and there must be some illusion that these facts about

the self were so well known that couldn't really be a contrary evidence. But eventually it was convinced there was. And in fact, that's one of the essential features of massacism is trying to get rid of the self, trying to escape from self-awareness, maintaining yourself and being confident and successful and all these things. That involves a certain amount of stress and people like to escape and forget who they are for a while. One of my colleagues, Jay Hall, had been doing a line of research on alcohol.

Obviously, also very popular. And he found that people drink alcohol, they have less self-awareness, which is why they do a lot of crazy things. I mean, you're sober, you don't get up on the table with a lampshade on your head doing the, doing a wild dance. But so it seems there's an appetite for things that get rid of self-awareness and temporarily even transform you into someone else. So these say domesticistic sex scenes seem to do that. I remember reading somebody who was doing a research project

on the call girls in Washington, D.C. thinking, oh, this must be real interesting lot. You know, that's the American government is there. And so, what are these women like? And they interviewed a ton of them and, well, turned out they were just the same as call girls anywhere else. Well, it turned out they were just the same as co-girls anywhere else, but the clients that had all sorts of interesting information. And there was a lot of masochism in there. Like I think they said that, you know, these are rich men who could afford to do whatever they wanted, but the request to spank the co-girl or not nearly as common as requests to be spanked, something like 8 to 1.

So well, you think these highly successful, powerful men, they have a lot of more stress. Other people are always trying to expose them and get them down. They have to maintain a really larger than life image and keep up this impression and everyone around them continue to believe in how great they are. And so just getting rid of all that for a while, being tied up and who knows, dressed in women's underwear and licking the toes of a paid sex worker, you can't possibly think of yourself as a senator so and so while you're doing that, that it just gets you completely out of who you are, and that escape from self seemed to be a key part of the appeal of that. That's the best I could

figure out. So the writings I did, we featured massacism as escape from self. The sadism part, the compliment, that's much more complicated. And I didn't really get as far with that. For one thing, there are a lot fewer of those. I learned this while I was doing the research, like the clubs for SNM.

They typically have four times as many submissives as dominance. And a lot of the dominance started off as submissives and then just thought, well, I could give a perfect experience to someone else by dominating them. And so it's kind of a vicarious submission for them. So the dominant person, they might have their partner across their lap and be spanking them, but they're really empathically connecting with the partner and doing it just right to get the person. Because spanking is as part of a sex game. Is a dicey business.

If you do it too much, it will spoil the mood. If you do it not enough, it be like whoo. What was that for? So again, it's hitting the right hitting the middle Getting it just right. So it requires a high degree of sensitivity and empathy and attunement to the partner and people who have had that desire and done those things themselves They they liked They feel better able to do that. I hit this guy from the Kinsey Institute, I think when I was doing this research, and the Kinsey Institute, they encourage that people to not only collect data, but to actually go and participate in these things, which is not part of-

Bloody hell. That's one hell of a request from your research candidates. Well, you know, he wanted them to be welcome. It goes back to Kinsey himself. He said, yeah, we're trying to learn about this phenomenon that everybody does, but there's no scientific knowledge about it. So go ahead, explore. Go be spying. But go forth and be hit on the ice.

Anyway, what he said was that he would he found that if he could go up to usually a woman although maybe a man too you probably did both who was in the dominant role was sort of playing a top and he would tell him I really have this desire to dominate you and he said there'd usually be a kind of flash in their eye. I guess it was exciting to them because they remember that even though they're very much at present playing the dominant role. Often they'd started out with the other and they still had that kind of excitement at someone proposing the idea to them. It seems to me like a lot of the exciting stuff to do with these sexual taboos is crossing

a taboo line, right? It's reversing the polarity of a role, so you have the high-powered boss bitch or CEO that wants to play the other role. And I think that the cute girl next door that dresses up in leather and has a whip is an archetype for a reason because you think, well, that's her reversing her sort of polarity, her identity a little bit. Did you look at Paul Bloom's work about the sweet spot because he interviewed a bunch of dominatrix's, dominatry for that. And he was telling me that he spoke to one that was a professional

dominatrix and she said nothing captures attention like a whip. And what she meant by that was that if you've been hit in the face for a few seconds afterwards, you're not thinking about anything. And that kind of leads back to what you were talking about there that it's people want peace from mind, right? They want to escape. It's a type of escapism. It's the same as using drugs or alcohol. It's to get them out of their headspace. You know, they've got this high powered executive who has to do things and you needs to be executive function is through the roof. And then he's tied up and what can he do? He can't do anything. He literally can't do anything. Yes. Yes. I did this work long ago as before a new Paul Bloom and read his stuff

But that's true and I did read some of them make the same kind of comment I once I think a whip is a great way to get someone to be here now Because they can't look away from it and they can't think about anything else Now they don't usually hit them in the face. I think, because they don't wanna leave marks there. Plus that's risky. I learned the SNM communities really carefully wanna administer pain, but not cause any injury. So, and dominant who actually heard their partners

are often then shunned and not welcome anymore. But, but however they whip, I'm my bear ass was I guess the popular place that it's the same thing and it certainly gets one's attention. What about pornography? You looked at that. All right, well, what about it? It's certainly been a huge and revolutionary change or a couple centuries ago. There was very, there always have been some erotic drawings going back into prehistory. But the availability has been quite low and I assume the quality was too. I think I forget it was a remarks that a young man today could go online and see more naked female flesh in 10 minutes than his great-great-grandfather's son in entire lifetime. So it's clearly it's here to stay. I was young when people were still debating should it be made available and can store a cell at over the counter or only in the mail.

And if it's two-poornographic it should be suppressed and censored. Even people put in jail. Now I think given up on most of that, there's so much sexual stimulation available. Well, I don't know for better for worse, probably some of both. Interesting question for me is to think of novelty as a limited resource that you can get excited by new things, or as things that are the same, in the same sexual stimuli year after year

will become somewhat less exciting to you. So young men already have high sexual desire, it doesn't take much to turn them on. In a way, it's kind of a waste to look at all that pornography and get turned on there because what novelty you're going to find in your 40s and 50s and 60s to produce aroused the there. There's a writer from the UK called Mary Harrington and she did an article called The Three Laws of Pornodynamics and the second law of Pornodynamics is the Law of FAP Entropy, which states that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more weird and novel over time and she's basically

highlighting this, the fact that this isn't true, this definitely isn't true for all men, but a particular subsection of men need to continue to amp up the extremity, the novelty, whatever it is, and then before you know it, you're down in the annals of porn, who are watching blueberry porn or whatever it is that you can manage to get yourself into. But yeah, I think that that's a dynamic you're right that males overclocked sex drive gets really sort of weaponized and then down-regulated and then you've got to go again, like we need to ratchet it back up again, then it gets down-regulated again further because it just continues to adapt. up again then it gets down regulated again further because it just continues to adapt. Yes, the novelties there, it's probably a stronger factor in the male than the female sex drive, but

some degree new things are exciting, new practices, new partners, new things. If we think go back to like the Victorian period, the late 1800s, where women just were covered, had to foot pretty much. And I say like if the woman skirt came up and showed her ankle, I don't like them, and might get an erection. It's a turn on, a big deal. Now ankles are nothing and knees and all that. So at least though, if you're getting turned on by a glimpse of an ankle as a young man, and there's still plenty that's gonna be new. And the turn. You've got a lot of headroom to descend into.

Yeah, you're right. Headroom. So this second law of pornodynamics may be well, have some valid basis. And yeah, I do worry a bit about the young man. I can totally understand. I mean, none of this stuff was available when I was young, if it had been,

I can well believe I would have been curious and passionate enough that I would have gone ahead and exposed myself to it, but in a way it was lucky it was not so available and more things were still new to me and later in life. One of the most interesting things, it's just a passing comment, I think it was your co-author on this that said there were fewer sexually transmitted diseases and cesterly when humans had fewer clothes because skin-to-skin contact was more common and that meant that the diseases were able to be transmitted through from an arm to a back

or whatever because we would be sleeping under a blanket together as a family because we didn't have enough hides to keep us warm and then you you develop clothes and These particular diseases realize that they need to mutate and one of the most reliable ways to get skin-to-skin contact Is to be transmitted through sex. I just thought that was so interesting Yes, that's my colleague, Dan Tase. Uh, um, she knows more about that than I do. Uh, so I don't know how strong the evidence for that is, but I know it's an important and influential theory and, and certainly very plausible, uh, with, with everything I know that, you know, as we see diseases continue to mutate and adapt so they can find new ways of being

transmitted and find new hosts. So yes, the advent of clothing really made it harder for those that were transmitted skin-to-skin contact and so they started to become sexual sexually transmitted diseases. There's also a section as well that I thought was really interesting about the suppression of female sexual desire. Like in the fact that that's happened a lot throughout our culturally. It's just it's one of those things where It's just it's one of those things where because men typically would the ones that were in power and the male insecurity or the sort of cook-old radar for men is so hyper-attuned that it kind of doesn't surprise me that it would have been the sort of thing that would have been suppressed because every man was fearful of it. Well, that's one of the classic arguments about it that it was perpetrated by the men. When we reviewed that literature, and I've done many literature reviews and I could tell in advance

this one was going to be a big, tangled, complicated mess. But we dug up all the research we could find, and it was surprisingly clear cut that the cultural suppression of female sexuality is mainly practiced by women. It's not the men who are doing it. I think if you surveyed men and said, well, suppose we could put something in the drinking water that would reduce women's libido by half.

So all women would have only half as much sexual desire. Do you think the men would be voting for that? Say, yeah, yeah, let's do that. I don't think so. So the idea that men want to stifle women sex drive so that they don't have to worry about them, that, that, I don't really think that's all that plausible, that there's much evidence for that. Why women doing it then? Women doing it probably for the economic reasons we mentioned before that sex appeal is in many cultures, the woman's main ticket to a successful and happy life. We all need resources, we need food and shelter and the more nice clothes and all those things.

And that in most societies, men produce the majority of resources and so women are dependent on men to get them and get them mainly in exchange for sex, often by marriage, sometimes shorter-term relationships, or with sex work, prostitution, even just a lot of pay for case-by-case basis. But in all cases, the higher the demand, the higher the price the woman can charge, the more she can get in exchange for sex and so restricting the supply with the same demand

means that the price will be higher It's particularly focused. I mentioned the Victorians So and that's roughly the period from about 1830, I think, to the end of the century to 1900, or sometimes they run it up to the beginning of World War One. But in that period, women were much more prudish than before or after. It was one of the most intense cultural suppressions of female sexuality that we've seen. And that's probably no accident. There were several interesting things going on for one.

Traditionally, in the farms, women had plenty of functions. The men were still the boss of the farm, but the women did the spinning and the weaving to make the clothes and the canning to store stuff and so on. And then the Industrial Revolution took over women's work. So, like, you started with the textile industry. So all that spinning and weaving, suddenly the women didn't have to do that. And the 1800s they talked about something called the women question. Like, what are women good for? What's the woman's proper place in society? They didn't quite have a sense of this is because of the industrial revolution that suddenly changed the rules of the game and taken away the economic

functions of women. But what that meant is that a woman had a lot less to contribute. And so sex became more and more important. You know, a man wanting to run a farm in, say, 1650 or 1700, really needed a wife. And it didn't matter if you loved her. It didn't matter. And all you wanted to have enough sex to produce children

so that they would take over the farm when you got old. But you didn't really have to get along or anything the family was an economic unit But by a couple centuries later the man doesn't he's not a farmer anymore Has an office job or something and he doesn't Have that same need for female input economically. So and have that same need for female input economically. So her appeal again is mainly sex that she's beautiful and he wants to have sex with her. So restricting the supply made him willing

to make the kind of lifetime commitment. The Victorian marriage has probably lasted longest in Western history. That is a factor too. That's because improvements of public health meant that people lived longer. And you think of a marriage that you think, like in the 1700s, the average marriage was 15 or 20 years, because one of the others would die. And then suddenly people will in Marriott 25

and they're living till 65. So they got to put up with each other for 40 years. Divorce was not available yet. The 20th century changed divorce laws and gradually became more liberal. And some people put this rather cynically to say, well, legalizing divorce was a substitute for plagues.

And illness is that you're the kept marriages short. I wonder how I wonder how many people were in Victorian marriages just hoping that a plague would come along. They were like, like, I can't deal with this anymore. I just want to be, I want to be taken out. Well, they were certainly stuck together for a long period of time and they wanted either themselves or their partner to be taken away, they were even sort of jokes about people praying for their spouse to die and then instead they get sick and die themselves and isn't that ironic.

So anyway, a lot of their adaptations to that. I mean, we're much more formal. They weren't just sharing everything as much as husband and wife would separately dress up for dinner together and all those things. And maybe that helped them tolerate putting up with each other for a much longer period of time than in the past. Treating the enforcement of sexual norms of women by women and considering it like a price-fixing cartel that is sort of unspoken between all women but everybody enforces. I learned about that first in mate by Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx and they talk about the game theory of slut-shaming. So they say that what other women don't want to have happen is for the price of casual sex

to drop below a level that they would be prepared to get at. So if one woman is prepared to give blow jobs on the third date, but you want to wait until the fifth date, it's in your interests as a woman to apply social pressure to bring the price up. I mean, first off, that's just a fascinating way. First off, it is counter to what most people believe about where norms and the enforcement of them come from, right?

It's mostly the patriarchy and men that are telling women what they shouldn't do with their bodies. The same goes for beauty standards, the same goes. Look, men don't recognize the clothes that you're wearing. Who do you think it is that's telling you that you should, that pastel shades are in or that it should be this kind of a dress or whatever? It's women that are doing that. So the cultural side of that makes sense.

I had a theory that have you heard of Simps? Do you know what Sim SIMP is? No. Okay, so this would be the sort of guy on the internet, it's an internet speak language, a beta male who would be forning over a woman who evidently has no sexual interest in him, but he'll do things for her, maybe he'll buy her gifts or take her out on a date in the long distant hope that she may one day decide to see him as a potential partner, a lot of the time, guys that pay for girls on only fans or support sex workers without getting sex and return a kind of seen as simps,

all of some guys that pay for sex work may also be seen as simps. And I had an idea that in the same way as slut-shaming for women enforces the price of sex and ensures that it doesn't fall below a particular rate, that simpsshaming for men. So men that feel a particular amount of distaste for other men who are being, they would see, is a little bit sort of slimy and conniving. I think one of the reasons for that is that the price of resources and commitment without sex is what men have to offer women in the same way as the price of sex without commitment or resources is what women have to offer men. And I think that my theory was, simp-shaming is the same male to male enforcement. Women

don't typically enforce simp-shaming all that much. Well, why would you? You're going to be the beneficiary of this. Do you really want to say that more men shouldn't give away more resources and time and money and care and attention for nothing in return? Why would you do that? But men have an incentive to do that.

They're incentivized massively to do that because they don't want some woman to be able to go to the guy next door, not need to give up sex, but be able to get the resources and attention and stuff. So that was my uh, bro science theory around that. Yeah, um, that that's intriguing and uh, plausible. Uh, I don't know how much of that is, is going on. Uh, and uh, plausible. I don't know how much of that is going on. And I suspect the common reaction to men who are doing that would be more just feeling sorry for them. If there may not

be enough of them to pose a threat to the artificially boosting the price of sex so that a man are expected to pay even without getting it. And we noticed the laws have certainly gotten that way. I mean, you can think of marriages. The man contributes money and the woman contributes sex. Indeed, people choose their marriage partners partly based on those criteria. The woman wants a good provider and the man wants a sexy attractive body. But the laws are at the point where the woman's obligation to give sex probably ends after the honeymoon, whereas the man's obligation to contribute money

goes on for years, even many cases after the relationship is over. So he's not getting any sex anymore, any rights, but he still has to continue to pay. So I suspect men would be more concerned about things like that, although men seem to be suckers. Concerned about other things at the moment. So rolling the clock forward,

given all of this stuff that you've looked at, this imbalance that we have currently in the dating market, more women in colleges, two to one, pretty much by 2030, it's gonna be women out earning men between the ages of 21 and 29, more women achieving status, and all that sort of stuff. What have you got any ideas about whether sexual marketplace is moving in the future and what

dating will be like going forward? Because it doesn't seem massively optimistic from where I'm standing. Well, and always reasons for pessimism. I could come up with a few more that, to the extent there are these hookup cultures and patterns and that young men being single can have sex with a variety of women without much commitment or expecting to have to contribute much themselves.

This is exceptionally bad preparation for marriage. And so adjusting to being married may be increasingly difficult for the young man, and especially if it's true that the wife is going to be losing interest in sex. Well, he's going from the single life where at least there was a variety of options there and periodically would have episodes of great sex to having not so much and the sex being often divorced from a relationship context or commitment that also doesn't seem to prepare the young men well for marriage. Women also brought up today to think they can have it all and have very high expectations

for what is owed to them and what they're entitled to have and all that. So they also, so as I said, there are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the future of marriage. On the other hand, marriage has been a durable human institution. I remember being at a conference with a bunch of family researchers across multiple fields. And there's one of the points where the politicians were worried about the future of the family. And it looked, the family is always going to be there. And the family is not going to disappear. Yeah, there are stresses and changes and problems. And there always are.

And will always will be. But it's not going to disappear as an institution. So marriage will continue to happen. And people will continue to figure it out. The declining birth rate is an issue for some concerned about the population and apparently most of the, I just saw some data on this, that most of the developed countries, the population that lives there is declining, is not reproducing itself. And so it's only by virtue of immigration.

Africa is the one exception where the population is still continuing to increase. And it may continue to overflow into Europe and other nearby places. But that's an issue. And, you know, well, do we care? Does that make any difference? So where the people come from, their economic issues when the population shrinks, their environmental issues when the population expands? You can always find something to worry about. Overall, life is continued to get better for most people. So I have a generally upbeat outlook.

Despite all the problems and the misguided ways that we bring up boys and girls, they'll probably still manage to find each other. And there'll be plenty of decent people who will be glad to have a long-term relationship with someone and now someone of the same gender as well as becoming an option and accepted in society. So having a long-term relationship seems to produce a lot of health and well-being benefits. There are certainly conflicts and problems to be worked out, but I don't know.

So, yeah, I have a few concerns in some pessimism and so on, but in the long run, the society will model through, and the population will manage, and the men and women will still find ways to go to bed together and occasionally to make a baby. Good man, I like it. Roy Balmeister, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the work that you do, you've written whatever it is, 600 papers and 30 bucks or something like that, where's best to keep up to date with the things that you're up to? Well, I guess there's a website, roibalister.com, a very update periodically with the new stuff.

And I don't know, I can be easily found online if people want to know what the latest is. Also, doing a blog for psychology today. The book we talked about today was the audio book, what is social psychology of sexual interactions. And so there's plenty of stuff there. It's always a fascinating topic to explore and go on one of many, but an important one. Right, I appreciate you. Okay, thanks, Chris. Get over, get over, get over