Modern Wisdom - #593 - Alex DatePsych - Why Is No One Having Sex?

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Alex DatePsych is a Neuroscience and Behavioural Science researcher whose work focuses on attractiveness and dating. We are in a new age of sexlessness. It could be that right now, the human race is having less sex than ever before. Given the rise of dating apps, the sexual revolution and hormonal birth control, how is this happening? Expect to learn what the science says about whether girls find it creepy to be approached, whether dating is harder for young men now than in the past, why women's sexual desire declines at twice the rate of mens' in marriages, why there is a PUA to Incel Pipeline, if it's true that women's standards have risen over the last few decades, whether inceldom is all about looks and much more... Sponsors: Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Alex's website - https://datepsychology.com/  Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/datepsych  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 Alex Datecyk. He's a new assigned to behavioral science researcher who's work focuses on attractiveness and dating. We are in a new age of sexlessness. It could be that right now, the human race is having less sex per person than ever before. Given the rise of dating apps, the sexual revolution and hormonal birth control, how is this happening? Expect to learn what the sign says about whether girls find it creepy to be approached, whether dating is harder for young men now than in the past, why women's sexual desire declines at twice the rate of men's in marriages, why there is a pick-up artist to in-sell

pipeline, if it's true that women's standards have arisen over the last few decades, whether incelden is all about looks and much more. Don't forget, if you are listening, you should have also pressed the subscribe button. It is the best way to support the show. It's the only way that you can ensure that you will never miss an episode when it goes live, and it makes me very happy indeed. So if you're on Spotify, there's a follow button in the middle of the page, or there's a plus in the top right hand corner of Apple podcasts. Thank you very much. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alex Date Psych. Half of single men report not approaching women out of the fear of being seen as creepy,

and 82% of women reported experiencing creepy behavior sometimes often or constantly. And yet, I saw in a different study that around 86% of women say that they want a man to make the first move. How do you square that circle? Well, on a practical level, if men are afraid to approach, women find a great deal of approach is creepy. How do you reconcile that? Men have to approach and they're going to be rejected and they're going to be found creepy, at least some of the time, right? There's no other way to reconcile that, that it's sometimes going to happen. Something that surprised me when I posted that thread and that research, a surprisingly large number of people came out and they said, you know, you should just never approach people in public, not at the bar, not at the gym, not in the street, not at school.

You should just online date. That's it. We have apps for that now. A surprisingly large number of people basically only thought that apps were the only appropriate venue now for meeting people. But certainly that's not how most people meet, right? A recent survey by the Kinsey Institute, by match, hires the Kinsey Institute every year to do this big pole of singles, nationally representative pole of singles, and only about 10 to 20 percent are actually meetings through online dating. Similarly, the few results from this year that were just published about a week ago for 2002, about 10% of all Americans meet online dating, about 20% of people under 30. So still, most people are meeting in public. A great deal of those are meeting through friends, maybe about 20 to 30%. So that's the way that a lot of people are meeting. Work, school, friends,

are a big chunk, and then of course online is a big one. And social media is becoming big one as well now. But you know at the end of the day you have to approach and people will find you creepy. Not everyone is going to like you and what can you do. As long as you're not violating any major social norms, it's okay to be rejected. One thing that William Castella reminded me of last week was it wasn't that long ago that people saw online dating as for kind of weirdos. Oh my God, you've got an online dating profile. What? You can't meet people in the real world?

How strange. How bizarre. It's like a sort of a, I know a quirk or some sort of fetish or perversion. Yeah, definitely. And certainly as a guy that's getting kind of older. Now, I was on okay, Cupid when it was new before Tinder. I was on plenty of fish when it was very, very new and no one was on those. And that was the general perception of that. It was like, oh, this is kind of a weird thing to do. And now it's become the norm.

People almost don't even want to, you certainly, there's a cohort anyway, if people that literally do not want to meet our approach in person, probably going out and approaching strangers at a bar would be entirely foreign to them. Because something I didn't mention, okay, so I said about 20% of people below age 30 meet in apps. But about another 20% according to the recent Kinsey and Match results are meeting through social media. So that's another big way, probably that people are meeting is through their friends on social

media, that sort of thing, if it's Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, whatever the case may be. That's interesting. So you're saying that a whopping four out of five new relationships. No, sorry, a whopping two out of five new relationships are starting through some sort of online medium. Exactly. And when I saw the recent Pew results that were just published a week ago, I thought, I thought, oh, 20% seems low because I recall results from last years that said 40% meet online. And then just the same day, or maybe a day or two later, I saw the Kinsey statistics. And I thought, oh, well, here's another 20% in addition to

that, the report meeting through social media. So if you're asking, did you meet online in past results? Perhaps you had people responding that were meeting in apps and you had people responding that were meeting Instagram and Twitter and that sort of thing and that kind of gives you that that 40 percent. But certainly online is the waste people socialize now. There's a bunch of contradictory data that I've seen about people that meet online having less success in long-term relationships, but also people who meet online getting married more quickly. Have you seen both of these things? I have not.

I have not. But certainly, there are personality differences between people who use apps at all to begin with and between people who never do, right? So that could be one thing that explains a lot of relationship outcomes. Certainly as far as long-term relationships job go, long-term relationship outcomes, and also relationship outcomes as far as age of marriage, if it's an early marriage, if you get divorced, those are all things that are influenced very heavily by individual differences in personality. And there's a lot of perception that apps are used just for hookups, which doesn't seem to be the case. Most people who use apps about 70% report,

like seeking a monogamous relationship, but at the same time, there have been studies on app use that say, okay, so apps are associated a little bit with people that might score higher in dark personality traits, like the dark triad. Those are going to be people that have very unstable relationships as well, and also be more impulsive. So, that could explain why they might be getting married more quickly, more impulsivity, and also why their relationships are not lasting as long in the long term as well. Yeah, these things aren't mutually exclusive. They could both exist together. One other thing that you put to just round out this terrible situation of men not being able to approach women and yet women still wanting men to approach them, it's worth adding that approaching women by itself didn't make the list of things

that women considered to be creepy. Thus, there seems to be some disconnect between what women view as creepy and men's fear of rejection or being creepy. Remembering that the very first part was half of single men, I think it was 46% report not approaching women out of the fear of being seen as creepy. And 86% of women reported experiencing creepy behavior,

but men approaching women wasn't one of those behaviors that women class as being creepy for the most part and men see it as the case. So this disconnect between what men view as and what women actually perceive as. And then the final thing, which I thought was such a great, a great piece of input. And David Busch talks about this in men behaving badly,

which is there is a small cohort of men that do almost all of the really creepy behavior. It's serial offenders, one man doing a thousand creepy things, not a thousand men doing one creepy thing each. It's not the men who follow women into the parking lot and refuse to accept no that are afraid of approaching women. They aren't the ones that are afraid of being called creepy. So if you are a man who is reticent about approaching a woman, the fact that you are reticent already select you out of the group of men for whom the creepy behavior

would have been accused. Oh yeah, exactly. That's, I mean, that's a great point. Certainly, being approached politely is not one of the things that women typically find creepy. I think a lot of the time with things like TikTok, right? Certainly you've seen these recent videos at the gym of someone who looks in the direction of a woman and then becomes this big online thing, like, oh, he was looking at me creepy. I think those can fuel perceptions for men that even approaching a woman or interacting with a woman at all is kind of dangerous. Kind of these, you know, one out of a thousand anecdotes

that appear on the internet and kind of fuel our popular perceptions in a way, but certainly asking women is being approached in and of itself creepy. As you said, they would say, no. And at the same time, exactly as you said, the men who are creepy, the ones who really cross lines are probably the ones that do not care if they're doing that all.

Maybe they don't know, maybe they don't care. You know, so being just a little bit conscious of being like pro social and not crossing a line, it will take you very far at least if your goal is to not appear creepy, right? Yes, I totally agree. I was thinking about this. I actually went back downstairs from bed last night because I had something that came to my mind, which was that the Me Too movement sought to sanitize the creepy elements of men's behavior and instead it sterilized all of it.

It just completely destroyed the desire. I often tell the story about a few years ago, I was in London with a friend who is a big time YouTuber. Lots and lots of followers, charismatic, outgoing young guy, slap bang in the middle of Gen Z. And I was bored of him and what he was talking about. And I said, oh, there's a group of girls over the far side. Why don't we go and talk to them?

And he looked at me like I'd suggested that we go and kill them. Remember them and put them in a park. I've been told that under absolutely no circumstances should I ever, ever go up to a girl in a bar that's accusatory, dangerous behavior, that's me being a creep. And yeah, I think Joey Swole, who is the guy that you might have seen who's kind of doing God's work at the moment, re-centering everyone's expectations around gym culture and whether you should approach girls in the gym or not. I'm actually in talks with his manager

about bringing him on the show because I really wanna have a conversation with him about this. But yeah, the reason that these videos about approaching girls in the gym are catching fire online is that they're so obviously egregious, that everybody understands that this isn't something that's going wrong, that like for a guy, there is a threshold of staring that a guy can cross. Absolutely. You can stare too much,

but it's not the amount that we're being shown, and the reason that people are getting right-chisly angry is because it hasn't crossed that threshold. Everybody understands how to behave in it, or almost everybody understands about how to behave in a normal manner. The problem was me to try to sanitize and instead it's sterilized. Exactly. As you said, most people know how to behave in a normal way. Certainly, if you look at prosocial behavior and anti-social behavior, just throughout the normal day of a person, the vast majority of their behavior will be prosocial or neutral. It won't be anti-social. Most people behave normally in a way that is getting along with other people, kind of not rocking the boat too much and pro-social, not upsetting other people deliberately or crossing

moral bounds or that sort of a thing. So certainly another thing about these videos that we see on TikTok, like you mentioned, Joyce Swole, great guy. I love these videos. But people post things on TikTok like this because it gives them clicks, right? It's a whole genre of controversial things that are deliberately designed to offend people to shock people and all of that. And you know, they're these anecdotes. A lot of them are probably close to fictional in a way. You know, did this woman even actually think that this man was staring or did she know in a very deliberate and kind of McIvoyally way like, hey, I can make this controversy and it's just going to get viral just because I can predict that.

And it's going to get the clicks and it doesn't matter if the attention is positive or negative. And certainly, you know, those interpeople's minds and then they form this perception of negativity. The same, as you said, about the meat to movement, you know, as I mentioned, a lot of relationships begin at work. That's been the way that it has been. Certainly work is also a place where people who are married, you know, it leads to affairs because you're spending all of the day with one person. And so if work or school or something like that becomes an environment where

people are afraid to form these kind of connections and relationships, that can also contribute to what's been called the mating crisis, right? Or what's people being single or being lonely like, hey, these are the only people I interact with. Maybe this person is interested in me, but I don't want to lose my job. I don't want to get kicked out of school or whatever the case may be. Even if it is appropriate, even if the interaction is pro-social and healthy, it really should not be something that is stigmatized in that sense. You're familiar with Pozlaw, right, which is you can't work out whether a joke is a joke

or not. I think we need to meme into existence an equivalent, which is for clickbait on the internet, that you don't know if the girl's gym TikTok video is actually her opinion or if what she's doing is farming for clicks and because you can't determine which is which so we need to I'll let the comments try and come up with some suggestions for a cool law that kind of relates to Poes Law but isn't quite it and yeah dude I mean the stuff about the workplace I always remember the story about how Bill and Melinda Gates met.

You know this one? I know how. So Melinda Gates was a receptionist working at Microsoft, I think, in the 1980s, and Bill had noticed her around the office, thought that she was really hot and decided that he was going to call her on the internal company phone and ask what she was doing. So it's Bill.

I would be interested in taking you out. You said, well, when are you thinking? And he said, how about three weeks tomorrow? And he says, Bill, I just don't think that you're sufficiently spontaneous for me. This isn't going to work. Put the phone down. He rings back 30 minutes later and says, how's this to spontaneous? You've got the rest of the afternoon off. So can you imagine the headline CEO founder of Massive Tech Company, rings receptionist to ask her out, then after she says no, rings back and forces her to leave the office to go out on a date with him, like that's game over, that is completely game over. And yeah, again, going from sanitized to sterilized,

like is that creepy behavior? She didn't say no, she said when would you like to go out? And how can you tell the difference between, was it flirtation, playfulness that she was doing to kind of do a little bit of it like a joky shit test type thing, or was she genuinely rebuffing him? All of these nuances are exactly why having a hard and fast rule about you should never approach somebody in a bar or never approach somebody at work,

is going to end up with people having less sex and getting into fewer relationships. Yeah, certainly something like that in today's environment would be heavily criticized and stigmatized. And you know, there's arguments against it that are legitimate. And then there's, as we've been discussing, like, do we really want to cut off that conduit or that avenue to form relationships completely in the workplace. Certainly Bill and Melinda Gates, I think at this point they've voiced, but they had a

relationship that lasted for a very, very long time, and presumably was a very, very good relationship for that period. A relationship doesn't have to last forever to be functional or good, sometimes relationships end for whatever reason. But, you know, in a different environment environment would that have even formed at all and if that Way to form relationships is completely cut off What are the larger implications for singles in society as a whole for children and marriage and that sort of thing You know certainly population crisis and all of that

What do you think is causing this rise in sexlessness amongst young men? Okay, so this is something I've certainly talked about a great deal. I think there's actually a very compelling evidence that a large amount of the variation in that is caused by a decrease in alcohol consumption. About 30% of the variants from a recent set of Ayurvedic could be attributed to lower alcohol consumption. In the 90s, certainly, I'm old enough, I was coming of age in that area, people would go to parties very often, they would drink, they would have sex when they were drunk, and that sort of thing. And alcohol contributed a great, great deal to casual sex. Young people are using much, much less alcohol. They're using drugs at lower rates as well.

And in addition to that, people are extending, or as I say, young people are extending their adolescence. There's many fewer young people between 17, 18, 19 who have jobs, who are getting drivers licenses, who are entering school, particularly men, in that case fewer entering university at that age. And so you have this extended adolescence. You have what has been a trend, I say alcohol, but it's actually a trend as far as lower risk of version, because sex at that age, you know, with strangers, casual sex, or forming relationships,

it's linked to some degree of risk tolerance. It's sort of a risky behavior, And certainly people were taught that in the past when it was more common like, hey, don't go out and have unprotected sex, don't have sex with strangers, it's risky behavior. And now, the youngest cohort of adults are kind of following that advice more and they're saying, hey, why is no one having sex, why are people not forming these relationships and all of that? Another interesting thing in the pure results and in the recent Kinsey results as well, about half of people who are single,

both men and women report, and this is for individuals under the age of 30 as well, report not actually looking for a partner. So again, a great deal of the variance in singleness seems to be people who have dropped out. And is that because they really don't want to date or they become frustrated with the dating market, you know, more research would need to be done to look into that specifically. But for whatever the case may be, a lot of that variance isn't people that are like out

there really hustling trying to find a boyfriend or a girlfriend, they've given up or they don't want to date or something like that. And if there's a generational shift in people who legitimately do not want to date the opposite sex or the same sex whatever the case may be, that's an interesting question, something that really needs to be examined a lot. I wonder how much of that is stated in revealed preferences smashing up against each other.

If somebody asks you, are you single? Yes, I am. Why you single? Because I want to be. That's a much more acceptable, publicly acceptable answer to give than I'm trying and continue to be rebuffed. Or I can't find somebody that's attracted to me. Or for women, especially, I can't find somebody that I'm attracted to.

It's a really, really difficult answer to give, I would imagine. But yeah, I wonder how much the degrading and the evaporating of hedonic kind of Larry behavior has contributed to this. I certainly remember my time at university, which was 15 years ago, and we would go out, drink heavily, got lots of parties, that was unique. The university part of university got in the way of partying. It was one long party that was interspersed every so often

with exams that I had to remember the lectures that I didn't attend to try and continue to stay at university. But the advent of smartphones means that we're all living in basically a panopticon that at all times any drunken mistake that you make is captured and put on the internet and you could potentially turn into a meme. If you are dating someone but not official, you're going to get rumbled. There are fewer opportunities for people to kind of make up and break up because you've got to change your relationship status or delete their photos from Instagram. MGK and

Megan Foxx broke up yesterday or the day before and she went, did all of her photos with him and you know Everybody's relationships are a lot less private than they used to be even the people for whom they want to try and keep them private And if the people aren't you know movie stars or rock stars. So Yeah, I um, I think that that definitely contributes to an overall trend of risk taking behavior being diminished. Definitely seems like it makes sense. Yes. And in a way, social media enables a sort of risk aversion that we have never seen in the past. If you wanted to interact with people in the past, you know, say in the 90s, you know,

you go to a party where there's all the people. You're going to be drinking and maybe at the end of the night, you and someone else who was drunk, you do something and even if you read it in the morning, whatever. But if most of your social interactions are with people online, you can carry out an entire relationship with someone online, a romantic relationship with feelings and that sort of thing and never actually meet them, never have sex, and be very, very cautious with that person before you actually decide to meet in public. So there can be a long lead up to actually meeting, which is certainly in having sex in that case, or form a relationship, or whatever the case may be,

that is very, very different from, you know, I met someone in the bar, and I got drunk, and we went home at the end of the night. Those are very, very different situations. So I think, in a sense, social media, being able to have social groups online, relationships online, most of your interactions and socialization online also puts kind of a layer of protection between you and the world that may not have existed in the past. Yes, it's like a prophylactic against any kind of discomfort.

And the same thing, it goes back up to what we were saying before. Men being afraid of approaching women, they already had this predisposition toward it in terms of rejection and now it's been tuned up even more with not wanting to be cancelled and have their names made on the internet. And then women also are increasingly concerned. The post-MeToo era has definitely caused women to be more vigilant around men that misbehave.

Maybe that's meant that women are a lot more safe. But it's also meant that some women who aren't unsafe consider themselves to be unsafe. They are looking for problems whether or not the kind of fire alarm hypothesis of negativity for how humans have that negativity by as well. What about women raising their standards? Do you think that they've been doing that over the last few years? I'm skeptical of that. Certainly that's a very, very common narrative in the atmosphere, particularly in relationship to online dating. The idea that people on apps have, particularly women, I say women on apps, have access to this huge list of men, and

they can pick from the best ones at any given moment. And that has raised standards. I think that's probably not the case. Certainly, there was a large study in about 2018 that looked at longitudinal data from before and after when Tinder was released and the rise of online dating and it looked at Greek students, right, in students and fraternities So kind of like the the students that you would expect to be the most risk-taking, to be the most popular to have the most sex, the jock athletic chads. And these guys only self-reported about one extra partner per year on average following

tender. Another thing, certainly we talk a lot about the self-reports and stuff with these sexual behaviors, but sexually transmitted diseases also did not rise in that time frame. Whereas on the other hand, where we do see a current rise in STDs is among a cohort that's actually much younger, about 15 and 16. So I'm not sure that it's really the case that exposure to more mate options has made women raise their standards in a sense. I think it might be the case though that, well, I mean, it is the case, apparently that many are just refusing to date. They're not enjoying what they see out there.

And there's many things that might contribute to that. Certainly, questions like obesity could be won. You know, particularly in the United States where you see a lot of people falling into the obesity epidemic, perhaps, mate value overall for men and women kind of has dropped. Fewer people are attracted to one another. And that could explain it as well without actually having to be kind of a rise in standards, kind of a lowering of standards for individuals across the board, be it men and women in that case. Would you fold into this the female over achievement in education and employment?

Obviously, you don't need standards of women to rise if their level of achievement has gone up. It's not as if you need hypergamy to get any worse. If women start to sit further and further up the overall both sexist dominance of competence hierarchy, you end up with women having the tall girl problem, right, that they have fewer and fewer men that are open across. Exactly. And certainly that's something that has been researched a lot and that they're looking more into recently, right?

We're beginning to see more women graduating with undergraduate degrees. We're seeing women beginning to earn more than men across many fields and many areas, women outnumbering men in educational roles, having higher graduate degrees as well. And if it is the case that women prefer men who are high in status, right? Hypergamy. The idea is that they want men that are high in status, but that means high in status relative to them in some sense.

So if women are more educated, if they're making more money, it's going to be difficult to find someone who might be higher in status relative to them in that case. And this isn't an unreasonable expectation either. This isn't like a super high standard like, hey, I have a master's degree and I have a job. I'd like someone else with a master's degree and a job. Well, if you get to about age 30 and you look at the married population, you know, about 70% of the population is in relationships at that point and people who have advanced degrees are say anyone that has a bachelor's degree, master's degree in PhD, you're increasingly

more likely to be married both for men and women as your level of education goes up. So that pool, it gets smaller. And certainly anyone that's not paired up by that point that actually has a really, really good job or a decent job and that has some level of education, they're dating pool for someone who's going to be small, especially if they want someone who's a little bit higher in status than they are. It's particularly brutal, I think, for women because if you've spent most of your 20s accumulating education and employment, you're now competing not only with all of the other women who have done the same thing,

but you're also competing with a 20-year-old barista that at Starbucks that still lives at home with their parents. Like, the bottom line is that men don't value education and employment prospects in their partners really at all. I think in order for a woman to achieve the same difference in make value increase that a man does for a I think it's a twofold increase from a man. The woman would need to have a thousandfold increase in her income in

order to be able to make the same change in make value because guys use no matter and it might actually be a contrary indication. You know there's some evidence that William tweeted the other day that said men in relationships with women where they are not the primary breadwinner are statistically more likely to use a rectile dysfunction medication. So there are actually some negative correlations going on here. How about being single for a long time impacting people's happiness? Have you had a look at this? I have had a little bit of a look at this.

So certainly people who are single happiness is something that's actually quite resilient. There's been a lot of research on long-term happiness and the way that it kind of pans out after adverse life events. Some classical research into happiness looked at people who experienced disabilities following accidents and also people who went to prison.

And so they've assessed these individuals, you know, self-reported happiness when they enter prison following an accident immediately. And of course, happiness is very, very low. You go back and you talk to these people later, six months, a year later, and their happiness is about the same as the general population. So people become very, very resilient as far as happiness is concerned over a long period of time. Whatever the case may be for someone's life, they tend to kind of adjust to it and it's the new norm. So I'm not sure if long-term singleness directly impacts someone's happiness, but certainly on an intuitive level, you would think that it would. And if someone wants to be in a

relationship, because maybe they come to acceptance that it's not going to happen for them. And they accept that in their happiness, adjust, and they move on. But if someone is very, very focused on this relationship goal, and then they're continually forwarded, that's an ongoing frustration that can stay with them. And certainly, even if it didn't manifest as something that would show up if you gave someone

a measure of happiness, it could certainly manifest in other areas of their life as some sort of discontent. A few of people in relationships overall now, have you got any data around that? Well, overall in the population, so I looked at the general social survey statistics for 2001, so the most recent GSS is for 2001. And people in relationships, even in younger cohorts, have actually been pretty stable as far as that's concerned. Typically, when you look at the youngest cohort,

about 18 to 25, anywhere between 40 to 50 to 60%, in the recent Pew data now, it's at 60% of men. And that was just from a few days ago. And that's actually pretty high. If you look back to about 1984, it was about 46% of men. So in the youngest cohort, there's more single young men. It has been going up. But since about 2012, it's been pretty, pretty stable. About 56% in 2012, if I remember correctly, it was 50 something. By the time you get to the 30s though,

that's an age group that has remained very, very stable. Most people form relationships and you have about 70% of people who are either married in a committed relationship and then the 30% who are not. So long-term singleness actually seems to have remained pretty stable, but it has increased for the youngest cohort. It's always been pretty high for the youngest cohort,

especially for young men, but it has gone out. Yeah, that increasing variability in male success, especially at young ages, is a reason that I think both of us agree that some of the black pill and in-cell culture that young guys are attracted to is the sort of thing that they very well may just grow out of. But over time you're going to end up realizing, oh hang on, this was a poor period, maybe I was late to become socially unawkward, maybe it took a while for me to grow into my looks, or grow into my confidence, or to accumulate enough status or money or whatever. But over time you end up at a place where you probably couldn't have predicted it when you were a good bit younger.

And it is an interesting consideration around how many of the trends that we see are just frictionless communications of the internal thoughts that all young people used to have in the past, around women's fear of safety safety when they're too young and vulnerable and they don't actually know how to Put themselves into a situation where they can always be safe or how to understand what actual boundaries are and what might be dangerous Behaviour and what might not be or with guys about just how hopeless they are going to be in the mating market or whether or not This is just a blip up to the age of 21 or something like that to be in the mating market or whether or not this is just a blip up to the age of 21 or something like that. What about the top 20% of men on dating apps? Is it true that all of these chads are being showered with attention and poaching all of the average attractiveness women?

Well, something to consider about dating apps first off is that it's not a one-one ratio of men to women, right? There's about three men for every one woman. So even if, imagine everyone on an app at any given moment just paired off one-to-one, every man got one woman, about 66% of men would have no match, just from the ratio alone. So already, the fact that there's a big, big sex disparity explains a lot of why there's this top percent of men that get most of the attention. So certainly that's something that has been seen pretty consistently. Another thing is actually, if you look at the ratio of likes for profiles,

from this is from the book, Data Clism by Christian Rudder, he looked at this as far as a ratio. And certainly women get more likes, women swipes or whatever the kid, well, this was okay, cupid. So I guess it was likes or even messages in that case. And I think that was from back in the days in okay, cupid, when you could just send a message to someone, at least that's, I think it was that long ago when that data was from. Certainly, I remember you would just write someone a message. There was no match or pre-selection kind of thing. So certainly, women get more attention on these apps. There's fewer women, men are less choosy, and men have this strategy where,

they will just swipe on the other one, throw out the big, big net and see what fish are caught in that sense. Women are much, much more selective. There was a recent study as well that found kind of a shift in selectivity over time. The more women swipe, the more selective they become as well. So the app has an acute effect in that sense on making women more selective.

So there is kind of this select group of individuals on apps that it works for. At the same time, outside of that data, other papers and studies on Tinder showed that about half, including the pure recent data that was just released just a few days ago, they had an online dating survey as well. About half of people on these apps report being happy with them, about half of people report having gotten a date from them. So it's not the case that it's only 20% of people who ever get any action from an app, so to speak. I think another thing that people kind of misconstrued about that is they see this ratio of attention and they think, oh, these people are monopolizing all the women.

They're having all the sex with all those women, but certainly, swipe data or who goes on dates or who gets messages is not the same as like, oh, these people are actually meeting up and having sex or even going on dates for that matter. So what was that? What's that term that you talk? Is it the the social socially select sexual few or something that there's basically the people that the most sociosexual just keep having sex with each other? What's that? Exactly. So this was a term that I first found I think and when I began researching sexually transmitted diseases, they referred to the promiscuous 10

percent and certainly these are people that score very very very high in sociosexuality. Now, again, researching sexually transmitted diseases, they referred to the promiscuous 10%. And certainly, these are people that score very, very, very high in sociosexuality. Sociosexuality is a measure that indicates basically people's willingness to have sex with, not more strangers, have more casual sex, they're less sexually restricted, more willing to have sex in that sense.

So this promiscuous 10% in research on sexually transmitted diseases described, okay, we have this 10% of people who report having way more sex. This is both men and women. When they get tested for diseases, they report their sexual behavior and they constitute a much larger percent of the population that's responsible for, you know, the spread of these diseases, so to speak. And these are people largely having sex with one another. So rather than the idea that there is 20% of men

who are having sex with all of the women, because this is something that has never been shown in any of the data. And that's something that you would see in sexually transmitted disease statistics. People talk a lot about self-reports. If you look, because certainly what the self-reports show, they show that about almost 50% of men and women in 2021,

per the general social survey data report, no sexual partners, another 20, 30% or so report one, about 85 to 95% report having sex, only in a monogamous relationship. So as far as self-report data goes across any data set that you use, people report overwhelmingly being not especially promiscuous and then you have that promiscuous 10% who makes up like, oh yeah, between five and more people in a year, one partner per month new or something like that. And this is the same population, the same cohort that is responsible for or

actually responsible for, but that when they go into get tested, they constitute many positive tests for sexually transmitted diseases as well. This is your way of splitting apart the revealed and stated preferences thing, right? Okay. So yes, I understand, I understand. What about attractive women? Are they the ones that are having a lot of sex or attractive women extra promiscuous with this death of globalized sexual marketplace and shakes on Instagram being able to message them to come out to Dubai? Well, certainly the research seems to indicate the opposite with the most attractive women actually indicating fewer partners and women who are neither the least attractive, nor the most attractive, reporting more sexual partners.

And that's something that is kind of in line with evolutionary theories for why that might be, right? Because if you're a very, very attractive woman, first, I guess some background here would be that women, there's a huge difference. One of the most well replicated differences between men and women given from evolutionary psychology as far as replication replication crisis and psychology something that's very very well replicated is

Very large differences in socio-sexuality between men and women men are very very open to having a lot of sex many partners being Permissionless women much much much less so so given that basis a very attractive woman, physically, has many, many more options. She can be more selective. A woman who is slightly less attractive, say, medium attractiveness or something, she may actually need to use sex more to secure mates,

to secure a partner or something like that. And in that sense, sex serves as sort of a function to secure a mate in that sense. And then people who are very, very low at the end of attracting this, they may have difficulty finding a mate at all in that case. So that's probably how you get that middle range of female attractiveness that's associated with more sexual partners. Men, on the other hand, the most attractive men, attractiveness is linear as far as predicting sexual partners for men, but it's also not a very strong correlation either.

What does incentivize female short term mating then? So certainly the paradigm for short term mating would be the dual mate hypothesis in evolutionary psychology for a long time. This is what it has been until relatively recently, right? And the idea here was that men and women, but we'll talk about women specifically in this case, have a dual strategy for selecting a mate. One strategy is looking for a long term mate, who can provide resources for repair bond and raise a child, basically.

And the other is a short term strategy. And that short term strategy was very closely related to the regulatory shift hypothesis, right? Because the idea is that women and woman is fertile. She looks for a man with good genes, you know, and gets pregnant by this man so that she can have the good genes and then at the same time have this long term mate at the same time. So this was an idea that persisted for maybe a decade and a half in evolutionary psychology. And at this point now evolutionary psychology has shifted very, very much away from that.

There's that, you know, there actually isn't that much evidence for this dual mate hypothesis. Something David Busch and Schmidt recently wrote in an article on Sexual Strategies Theory, which is what I've just described. It's called Sexual Strategies Theory, was that really this short-term mating strategy probably only applies to a very, very select few women. And those are going to be women who score very, very high in sociosexuality. If you look at, as I mentioned, sociosexuality, big sex differences. If you were to look at the two distributions, they're about one and a half standard deviations away from one another, if I remember correctly. So,

a lot of men and women don't even overlap at all as far as these sociosexuality scores. So, what would drive short-term mating in that case? Well, one of the big motives mentioned in the recent article by Buss and Schmidt would be money. And certainly that's not what a lot of people I think think about when they have this short-term mating discourse, they think, oh, they want a Chad who's hot and everything and all of that. But if money is a big one, you know, and you can see this in things like sex work,

you can see this in things like the kind of, who is this recently? Leonardo de Caprio. He finds very, very young women. Now he was an attractive man before, but he's getting very, very old. Do we believe that these women are interested in Leonardo de Caprio because he is an attractive man or because he has many, many resources? So these are things that would incentivize short term made strategies. But more interesting than that perhaps is that the shift has gone from saying, ah, people have this all-women have this dualistic mating strategy, short-term and long-term, saying, okay, there's actually a lot of overlap between short and long-term made strategies. That short-term strategies may actually be

kind of a springboard or a doorway into long term made strategies. A good example of this reported by David Bus in his research was that about 70-something percent of women who have affairs, they report for example being in love with their fair partner. This has led to kind of this new paradigm in evolutionary psychology that's called the Mate switching hypothesis, which is that short-term mating is not something apart from long-term mating. It's not going out there to secure the good genes.

It's looking for a new long-term mate. So this short-term mate, this playing the field outside might be like, okay, maybe my satisfaction with this mate has decreased, but I don't want to break up yet. I need some kind of security going into a new relationship, so I'm kind of exploring these short-term things to see if they become Something larger or something longer in that sense. Yeah women monkey branching from one relationship to another I found it so interesting the because the the dual mating hypothesis was founded by bus as well, right? Yeah, so David David bus comes up with theory, then he kind of reassesses the data,

recants his original theory, and the problem is it's kind of like the same thing when you have a newspaper article that accuses someone of someone of something and then publishes a retraction a little bit further down the line. The issue that you've got is the retraction never gets as much exposure as the original accusation does, and now we are stuck in this sort of liminal space, The issue that you've got is the retraction never gets as much Exposure as the original accusation does and now we are stuck in this sort of liminal space where the guys that did the study Say that the study no longer holds water and this original theory is still continuing to kind of plow ahead I don't know I can't really work out why it's the case that the dual mating hypothesis seems to keep moving when the guy's that says it hasn't replicated either, right, when

they tried to do this again. Certainly. So something, yeah, that David Bus said in this recent paper, it's titled Sexual Strategies Theory 2021. It might be a book chapter in the new Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology or it might just be a review. But, you know, he says, okay, so these aren't entirely contradictory. You can have short and long-term strategies, but this may switching seems to be much more common and this, you know, actual women pursuing short-term strategies pretty rare. So, that's something to consider. What hasn't replicated well? So, one of the things that this was very, very heavily based on initially was, it was

called, you know, the dual-mate hypothesis, but a longer title for this or a version of this would be the dual-mate hypothesis of ovulatory shifts. And the idea is that when women ovulate, when women are fertile, that's when they're especially attracted to men with good genes, right? And that's when they're more likely to cheat and all of that. So that's what specifically hasn't replicated very well. What we see instead is actually that women are pretty much

attracted to the exact same type of men for long term and for short term relationships. The reassessment that bus instrument kind of made in this paper was like, okay, so good genes are not just physical either. Good genes include things like intelligence, they include things like prosocial behavior, they include the behaviors that would make someone stay with a partner and raise a child and provide resources and

all of that. So why would none of those things be selected for in a short term mate? Why would it just be physical? That's one issue with that. We don't see the shift in actual preferences. That's the big thing that has not replicated that I think undermined this a lot and kind of caused that shift away from it. We don't see that women seek men who are more physically attractive when they're ovulating. They want physically attractive men all the time. That's something, you know, if you talk about the black pill, they're not wrong about that. People like physically attractive people. They like facially attractive that. People like physically attractive people. They like facially attractive people, a muscular man and that sort of thing. That's a real thing.

So, and that's something that persists for both long term and short term. So, we don't see that there. Another one that kind of hasn't replicated well that would have lended support to that as well was the good genes, immut-competence testosterone hypothesis. And the idea is, okay, so when women are overlighting their trapditamin, who have very high testosterone, high testosterone signals good genes. Why is that? Because high testosterone causes a handicap in immuno-competence. To have high testosterone, you're actually lowering your immune system a little bit. And that means that you

have to be especially fit to have high testosterone. So none of that has really replicated very well. So many of these things that we think of as signaling good genes from an evolutionary standpoint, perhaps they don't, we don't see the switch in mate preferences for short-term and long-term as previously believed. And we see in actual behavior as well as reports that a lot of these short term relationships are kind of, as you said, they look more like monkey branching than they do a different strategy. They look like someone that wants to leave, a particular like I should say someone to say a woman that wants to leave a relationship and enter a new long term relationship.

There's huge differences in sociosexuality, huge sex differences in preferences for monogamous relationships as well. All of that kind of leads toward, okay, women probably are not engaging in a lot of short-term mating. In a way, it's almost like when people talk about women that way, it's almost like the ascribed more male personality characteristics to women. It's almost like if I were a woman, that's what I would do. But that's, you know, women are very different in a lot of these ways. You've mentioned the Black Pills relationship with attractiveness there. Do you think that in seldom is all about looks? Well, I think the most interesting thing that's going to happen I think in research on in cells is when someone does a paper where they actually get a good

sample of in cell photos and get some attractiveness ratings. And then we can know to what extent looks are involved. I don't think looks are completely irrelevant. You know, there's a lot of people who look, looks don't matter. They just have bad personalities and then all of that. You can find some famous ones, you know, Elliot Rodger or something like that. This was a man who, faithfully, who, you know, he could have had a girlfriend. He, you know, Elliot Rodger or something like that. This was a man who faithfully, who you know, he could have had a girlfriend. He, you know, he wasn't ugly in that sense. But there's an intersection there where if people are not especially handsome and they have some personality issues, and when I say personality issues, I'm not saying bad people, but if they suffer from anxiety, which research

on end cells has shown, if they suffer from depression, many self-report autism, they have official diagnosis of autism about twice the rate, according to recent research by Brandon Sparks as well, you know, William Castell, he found that they suffer from depression and anxiety and that sort of thing. Those are things that can impact your relationship a lot. And if you have some of those things going on and you're not the most handsome guy, then you have this intersection that's gonna make forming a relationship really, really difficult.

What do you think guys get wrong about what women find attractive? So, okay, so I did a short study survey on the web about the Giga Chat. I took just one photo. Most people I think will know the Giga Chad, this meme. I think he's a very handsome guy, but importantly, he's an extremely dimorphic guy, right? His face is extremely masculine, big chin, big brow ridge and everything. So he has an extremely dimorphic face, and he's also considered to be very handsome, at

least in these kind of meme subcultures of the black pill. That's why he's also considered to be very handsome at least in these kind of meme subcultures of the black pill. That's why he's called the gigachat because he is kind of the archetype of the most attractive man. So I ran this across a large sample of men and women. Men overwhelmingly related or rated him as attractive. Women didn't but at the same time there was kind of, you know, it wasn't a distribution where most women, I'd love, I should say that'd be funny, most women found him unattractive, but there were some women who found him pretty attractive.

At the same time, most men thought he was attractive. So a lot of the time, men kind of get wrong what women like as far as the physical features of men. I wrote another long article reviewing the research and that on facial attractiveness and specifically facial dimorphism, masculine facial features. I think men think that very, very masculine facial features are attractive to women. Usually it isn't the very most dimorphic faces that are most attractive to women.

If you think about a really dimorphic face, it's kind of like a gorilla in a sense. But it's probably not going to be the least dimorphic face, the least feminine. There's a lot of research on how averageness is attractive. And sometimes when I say that people think, what do you mean, how can an average face? Certainly, average is not attractive. But average in this case means features that are not too extreme, that are symmetrical, that are not too extreme. So those are some things that predict facial attractiveness in any sense. For personality and what I think men often get wrong, at least in these manosphere cell cultures, they tend to think that women enjoy anti-social behavior. They tend to think that women are very, very attracted to certain anti-social traits, which is typically not the norm.

So if you look at something like the dark triad, for example, there is a research that indicates that the dark triad is attracted to women. So the dark triad is this triad of traits that are antisocial, psychopathy, macabellanism and narcissism. So looking at those individually, some of those actually predict attractiveness better than others, primarily narcissism. And that might be because people who are narcissists pay more attention to their own appearance, and because their behavior is very different. It seems like macavelianism doesn't actually predict this kind of attractiveness, not

attractiveness as far as physical ratings, nor mating success, as well as the other two do. So those are certain things to consider. Yeah, it is interesting about how the common-held wisdom on the internet about what it is that women want. I had a Seth Stevens-Davidowitz on the show who wrote, Everybody Lies and Don't Trust Your Gut. And in Don't Trust Your Gut, he did a autistic data scientists approach to

optimizing his personal appearance. And he split tested this website where you can do this now, but he actually back ended this back in the day. Um, he grew a beard, put a photo of him with a beard up. Should I get a beard? Should I have glasses? Should I have my hair short? Should I have my hair long? Should I wear this? Should I wear that? And he basically split tested all of the different iterations of his appearance down to, I should have a beard, wear glasses, blah, blah, this particular collection of things. And he is now by his own admission in relationship with a girl that he's punching out of his league with.

And the reason that that happened, he said, and he has dated to back this up, which is that you want to try and make people love or hate the sort of look that you have going forward. You don't want to be everybody's just okay. You want to be some people absolutely go for you and the same thing goes for personality as well that he said his girlfriend, maybe even now fiance, when they've, before they even got together, was with her friends and talking about being single and they've, before they even got together was with her friends and talking about being single and they said, so what are you into? What are you into?

What are you into? And they turn to his future girlfriend. So what are you into? And she says, I just love nerds. I can't say what it is about it. I have such a soft spot for nerds and that is the kind of guy that I find the most sexy. And sure enough, down the line comes Seth Stevens-Davidowitz, ex-data scientist at Google. And like literally the guy that's just done

a spreadsheet to work out how he should look most attractive, there you go. There's your, there's your, your nerdy guy. Now, certain corners of the internet would say, oh, well, you know, that's just her beat of books on the way to an AlphaFox solution or whatever it is. I don't know, it seems to be unlikely to me because a lot of the way to an alpha fucks solution or whatever it is. I don't know, it seems to be unlikely to me because a lot of the time I've seen guys getting to relationships

with girls who really love funny men or really love artsy men or really love athletic men or really love whatever. It's not all pointing in this sort of unidimensional, one-directional way of up and across towards hypermasculinity, the higher your testosterone, you're always going to win. There's certain universals, symmetrical face, for instance. I've never heard anybody say, you know what it is? I just love an unsymmetrical face. That's not something typically that I've heard.

But there are far fewer universalities and I think people would find, and when it comes to guys and advice for guys in dating, I think becoming sticking to some of the absolute undeniable rules and then going, okay, what am I? What am I really, really good at? If you're really, really good at being the artsy guy with the hanging earring that can play the guitar,

like, you know, lean into being Mr. Guitar player thing or if you're the super funny guy, you know, Pete Davidson's the root to go at whatever it might be, you can become more of what you are. And that to me seems like not only the smartest root to go down in terms of being effective with women, but it's also the root down which you're going to feel like less of a fraud. And this was something else that you've brought up with, which is this sort of pickup artist to in-sell pipeline that you had tracked through some data. I think one of the reasons that a lot of guys

became disenchanted with the pickup artist community was that what they realized, even the ones that were successful, if you were successful at pickup, what it taught you was that the role that you played was all that women were attracted to, and the further that the role that you played was from the person that you genuinely are, you realized, oh my God, I am so inherently unlovable and deficient in myself. However, women are this game to be played, that is adversary to be won, that is competitor that I'm supposed to gain control over. And if I play the game right and use the correct series of neuro- of newer linguistic programming languages, I will be able to win this game. And for the people who did try pick up, and it didn't work either

because they weren't able to do it correctly or because there was something about them that meant that they couldn't get it to work in no matter what they did, it was also disenchanting to them too. So pick up to me seemed like a un-falsifiably disheartening approach to dating. Certainly. So what you mentioned about attractiveness, let me comment on that and then go to the pick up, because there's two interesting topics. So a lot of research on facial attractiveness

up to this point has looked at how much people agree on attractive faces. And when you look at interrater correlations across a whole group on attractiveness, they seem really, really high. You can get correlations between like 0.6 and 0.9 for facial attractiveness ratings, which makes it seem like, oh man, people really agree on what an attractive face is. And it's true if you look at that metric. If you look within that metric, if you run an ICC correlation and you look at pair ratings, the correlation is much, much lower.

It can be about 0.2 to 0.3 or so. You're gonna have to explain what you're talking about here. Certainly. So if you take a big, big group of people and you have them rate of face and you look at their ratings, then you'll get a correlation that seems very, very high, like most people agree on what an attractive face is. If you take two individual people out of that group at random and you look at their correlation and then you take two more out of that group at random and you look at their correlation

and then you compute that, you'll say, wow, people don't really agree at all. There's actually a lot of variation on an attractive face. There's a good paper, I think it's from 2016, maybe it's a little older by a researcher named Honeycup, and he plots it out on a plot. And he says, okay, so here are all the actual faces, and here's the highest rating and the lowest rating. And almost every face, regardless of how attractive it was, got a really high rating and a really low rating.

I recently ran a survey, I have it up on the website now. I took faces from the Chicago Face Database and I selected these faces male and female faces to be kind of below attractiveness. And about all of these faces got about 25% of people that said, okay, that face is good enough I would date it, even though they were all kind of unattractive faces, as far as pre-radings were in. The pre-radings, highly correlated,

the ratings that people gave, the participants, highly correlated with each other and to these pre-radings. So people all kind of agreed on the attractiveness of these faces, even across different questions that I asked, like how attractive are these relatives of the population, how attractive do you find them. At the same time, if you go through all of these faces, every single one of these faces had people that rated it like a Likert scale, one through seven, seven, most attractive. Every single face had at least someone who said it was a seven,

a six, a five. So there is a great deal of individual variation in attractive face. Even if most people agree that a face is unattractive, there's still gonna be a pretty large cohort that says you know I actually kind of like that face. So that would be maybe Seth, the unconventional dude that manages to bag a hearty because he's exactly what she's looking for. Okay, and then what about pick up to Insel?

Great, so there was a cool paper from a few years back called, I don't think the title was the in-set, P-W PUA to Insel pipeline, but that's basically what it described. It might have been called mapping the Manusphere or something like that. So this used network analysis and it looked at something like 52 forums that were Red Pill forums, McDowell forums, Manusphere forums, PUA on Reddit, and then it looked at some of the big, big forums online outside of Reddit as well. And it used content analysis to kind of identify users or identify the kind of discourse and content

and track how those moved over time and as far as active users and active discussions and stuff. So a lot of the PUA and red pill forums, they declined. And then in cell forums, boom, they appear on the timeline. And already, they're beating everyone else. And they're cell forms, boom, they appear on the timeline and already they're beating everyone else. And they're looking at users that basically migrated from one to another. And you see a lot of cross migration in the discourse from those early PUA forms to the later in cell forms. And so the idea from that is kind of like, okay, a lot of

people began in PUA communities. And they moved into these in cell communities. Similarly, a lot of people that began in these red-sell communities. Similarly, a lot of people that began in these red pill communities, they now have a lot of overlap with the MIGTOW communities, which MIGTOW is, of course, men going their own way, men who do not want to date, kind of similar to in-sells kind of not. So you see these communities that began kind of like

a self-improvement and dating advice for men, like, hey, you want to be with women and you want to date and we're gonna give you like the tools for that. And maybe they didn't work, you know, because now all of the men have gone to these communities that said, no, we're going our own way now. We don't want to date or oh, we're just in cells now either way. Why do you think that this is the trajectory that seems to be happening? So I think something that you said was that even if PUA is successful it can be kind of

Disperialing to people so say you start PUA and you actually kind of have a little bit of success with it There's I think there's a question to be made is like is this helping people form lasting romantic relationships? Or are these just kind of moving people into that promiscuous 10% because this cohort, this promiscuous 10% so to speak, this is associated with a lot of personality issues, people that are very, very promiscuous risk taking, it's associated with things like not because, kind of, is a correlate to that. They might not be forming long-term relationships. They might have a hard time forming those connections. If your sexual partners are very promiscuous, probably, you know, that's associated with more infidelity. So something I noticed observing red pill forms and P-way forms, a lot of these people were

like, oh, you know, someone cheated on me, someone cheated on me, all of my girlfriends cheated on me. And at that point, I have to kind of wonder, like what kind of people are you selecting? Where all of your girlfriends have cheated on you? And then they end up, the men that started early in that and end up later with these very cynical and jaded views. And it's like, okay, but your own experience is selecting

people might have kind of shaped that trajectory for you in a sense. And then at the same time, there are many men who probably entered those communities, PUA or something, and got no results at all. And I think those are a lot of the people that have gone to Blackfield communities. In fact, I think even one of the early in-sell forums

was actually called PUA Hate, right? So it was. Yes, I remember that. Yes, yes. And I only remember that because I was listening to your show with Nama Kates today. Yeah. So certainly these were people that had experiences of PUA stuff and they thought, Oh, this is, you know, not going to work for me. It didn't work for me. It's a griff. I paid the money and they get the results that I wanted and boom, they're going. You can see

how that would be a black pill, right? You're telling me that the guy with the big furry hat and the massive sideburns mystery out of Neil Strauss is the game, even he could get laid with his stupid hair and his flares and oh, and now the real social dynamics Tyler and Max and everybody else, they've come along and they're not all of them were exactly, the pinnacles of gigachad masculinity

and it worked for them and it hasn't worked for me. Therefore, I should find distaste with this. Yeah, I can completely see why that would cause people to cascade down from hope to increasing gradations of hopelessness. Absolutely. And I think there's a personality trait that is closely associated with that, which is resilience. So some people, they can get rejected a thousand times and it just brushes off of them, you know, like water off of a duck's back. They can get rejected over and over and over. They have very, very high resilience and it doesn't affect them. If they get cheated on, they just move on to a new relationship. If they experience a divorce, they get married again.

These are people that, from their past experiences, they don't let it sit upon them in a sense. And other people, their girlfriend cheats on them. They're in love when they're 18 and they break up with their first girlfriend, and it just devastates them. And they never get over it again. So kind of very low resilience in that sense. And I think if someone is going from a position

of very low resilience, say they go into PUA, and they're like, okay, I want you to approach a thousand women, they go to the supermarket of the mall, and they approach a hundred women or whatever, and they get rejected a hundred times, that's going to shape the perception of someone of very low resilience, very differently from someone who doesn't care.

Remember what we were talking about earlier on, which is that most people are a non-insignificant cohort of people are not seeking relationships at the moment. More people seem to be risk averse, more people are spending more time online than ever before. When you combine all of this together, what you end up with are people who are less resilient, having to them traumatic experiences that can sometimes be pre-selected due to their, them being the common denominator between all of the abusive manipulative cheating girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever it is that they do, then the large cohort of people online who aren't disproving any of these theories in the real world, see

stories on Reddit that quite rightly garner tons and tons of upvotes because they're shocking. Here's the guy who left for milk and came back and his wife was having sex with the neighbor and the dog at the same time and she left him and took all of his money and now he's got Crohn's disease and he's living on the street and gluten intolerance and a clubfoot. All of these things have happened to this one guy. Oh my God, this is why all women are bitches, right? Like all women are like that.

One of the problems, or one of the things that I see online, especially when it comes to trying to encourage guys to get into a long-term committed relationship, especially one that encourages marriage, is that they would say, why would I get into a relationship? Like a woman's just gonna take all of my money and do this thing in any case.

Okay, did that happen to you? Or did you read one story or a small number of stories online that told you that this is something that's super, super common? Because dude, even the heads of the Red Pill movement, like even the most red pillie of Red Pill guys get into fucking long marriage relationships. Like Neil Strauss guy that wrote game, is now this completely renewed, Tucker Maxx, the guy that invented the entire genre of fratire lives 30 miles away from me at a ranch

in fucking dripping springs, surrounded by, he's made a Waldorf school for his kids and him and his wife have got four and he spends his days practicing shooting guns and corralling and stuff. Oh yeah, that's really the future that he had planned for himself at the age 25, wasn't it? No, of course not. Like obviously not even the people that were previously supposed to be the figureheads of these entire movements have transcended and included their experience to now become family men. And yet there is still a very, very common distaste, reticence, bitterness,

toxicity toward that long-term dating thing. Again, this is obviously not for either of us to say that some guys haven't got themselves into relationships with women who have destroyed their lives, who were the Machiavellian manipulative that he was perfectly fine and she took him for all that he was worth like yep that That happens and to those guys I have the absolute utmost sympathy But the fact that those stories are so egregious online and Ghana so much like Attention is for precisely the reason that they feel so outrageous that they are less also outrageous that they are less representative of most normal relationships. And yeah, I don't really know what the solution is for this because for as long as people will take their cues about what the mating market is like from the internet and don't disprove it in the

real world due to their concern and lack of resilience or just general fear for any one of the myriad of reasons that we said both men and women Women are going to believe that every man out there is a potential rapist and men out there are going to believe that every woman is a Spinster that wants to take him for 50% of his wealth Exactly. Yeah, and something you mentioned that's very important Many of these are very very young men. You said have you experienced a divorce? These are some of these men are 18 19 20 years old You said, have you experienced a divorce? These are some of these men are 18, 19, 20 years old.

Have they even experienced a breakup at that point? They do not need to be worrying about someone taking their house. If they don't even have a job and they don't have a house and they're living in the basement. And that sort of a thing, baby steps first. Worry about forming a relationship, becoming resilient to deal with breakups. Because most relationships will end.

Everyone who gets into relationships experiences a bunch of breakups, that's something that happens to everyone. And worry about the divorce down the line. So you have, you know, men going their way, migtow. If you are like 45 years old and you've been through two divorces and you're migtow, I totally understand that. Like maybe you are done with dating and that's kind of reasonable. If you're 18 years old and you've only had with dating and that's kind of reasonable. If you're 18

years old and you've only had one girlfriend and never had a girlfriend, how have you sworn off women already? That's not reasonable. How much do you think guys actually want to cheat or sleep around outside of a relationship if they were able to do it safely? I suspect it's actually pretty high. Part of the reason I say that is because infertility actually seems pretty high, something about perhaps half of men report cheating in the past. If that's something that they would continue to do ongoing deliberately to seek it out is another question.

If someone is put in that situation and the temptation is there and they think they're not going to get caught, probably it's actually pretty high. That certainly seems to be something that's one of actually one of the consistently replicated things in evolutionary psychology is that may not much much more likely to cheat than women. Didn't you say the infidelity is heritable? Yes, yes, certainly. So people that have, and that's another thing about personality and behavior, we typically, a lot of the time we think about heritability as if it only applies to physical features, but heritab- you know, eye color and something like that. Heritabability applies to behavior. In behavioral genetics, there's

something called the 50-050 rule, which is kind of the broad observation that about half of personality is heritable. And sometimes when people say personality, I think they don't also understand that it also means behavior, the way that personality is expressed. So people that have had parents who have cheated, they're more likely to be victims of infidelity and more likely to cheat.

The same with something like divorce. People who have parents who have divorced, more likely to divorce. And so there's a question about heritability there like, oh, is this because they learned those behaviors from the environment or because they it's something genetic. And certainly the outcome in either sense is the same. You know, someone with that background, if the likelihood is higher, if it's caused by genetics or the environment, is perhaps immaterial as far as that outcome. The degree of heritability is usually estimated by twin studies, right?

So twins that are raised, and you can see how much that correlates based on a monosegatic or desegotic twin. So that's kind of how these heritability estimates come about, but certainly many, many behaviors, yeah. And infidelity among those and the worse as well. What about the consistency of somebody who's cheated before to cheat again? Ah, okay. So perhaps not as high as we would think that it's not that a lot of people have actually, well, I say a lot, let's say I read a paper originally, I actually made a video on this. I think it was about 30% of women that reported having cheated in the past, but a second time

and it was much, much lower. It was something like 30% of those women. So a lot of people might cheat once and actually never do it again. Certainly there's that aphorism. Once a cheater, always a cheater. And someone who has cheated in the past probably does have a higher likelihood of cheating in the future, but it's certainly not something that guarantees a history of infidelity.

If someone has never cheated, of course, that would be the lowest risk for future infidelity. What about the heritability of facial attractiveness? We spoke about that earlier on, and we're already on heritability here. Ah, so I don't know about the heritability of facial attractiveness specifically. Certainly, it would be very high because it's a physical feature. Physical features are typically things we think of as very, very heritable. Something like height, for example, has a heritability of point eight. And I imagine a lot of physical features are like that.

The environmental effects on your physical appearance, I guess it depends on an individual level what you're exposed to if someone doesn't ever take care of their face or something like that. Certainly that can lower facial tractiveness over time, but in a lot of sense, your face is kind of what you're born with. Yeah, it's interesting because the sexy sun hypothesis, which I learned from Costello as well, was a very interesting justification that one of the reasons that a woman would find a man attractive, and this ties into pre-selection, which I'm aware is kind of also been decapitated with a replication crisis, but if other women find a man attractive, it's likely that his genes will produce sons that future women will also find attractive.

So, whatever, like, grandparent optimizer, gene expression thing going on here, where you say, okay, well, if I have sex with that man, and we have some sons together, we'll have sexy sons, and thoses will be able to reproduce more effectively. Yeah, you know, that's certainly something that you would expect that traits that are attractive over time will be propagated more and they will continue to appear more and you can get kind of a runaway of those traits as well. A very good example of that would be something like the peacock and the peacock tail where originally the bird did not have this giant, giant tail, but it was something that facilitated that sexual selection and over time grew and now you have this very beautiful bird, huge tail, even if it's a detriment in other ways. So as far as if it's something that people deliberately think about, probably not. Like, I need to find someone attractive, so I'll have attractive kids.

Maybe it might be a consideration, but it's probably more like I like this person I'm attracted to them in a moment. Isn't there a species of deer or something that grew antlers that was so big that the entire species went extinct? That certainly could be the case. I think that might even be called fissure and runaway. The idea that could be the case. I think that might even be called a fishery and runaway. The idea that a trait is attractive and selected for to an extent that eventually becomes detrimental. The pickup tail is kind of like that. It's large enough where you could say, okay, this bird might not be able to escape predators as well. So there's a trade-off there in some sense when these traits become very, very attractive. Even height and human beings is kind of like that. Taller people

suffer more risks as far as health is concerned. So you might ask like, hey, why is height being selected for? Well, it's attractive subjectively for one. But also, the detriment is perhaps not so high that it's like killing people before they're able to reproduce. Yeah, the trade-off between these two things, I'm pretty sure it was a type of deer or something that grew antlers that was so large that it couldn't support its own head. And yet, sexual selection was preferencing these so much that Fishery and Runaway had just, it had, away it goes. And it got to the stage where all, there was so slow and so lumbering that they were just eaten by predators. And you go, it's game over, which I thought is pretty hilarious. I remember reading the first ever time that I learned about fishery and runaway, must have been before I even started the podcast six years ago.

And I was reading this article about Snapchat filters. Remember when the girls used to use Snapchat filters and they would make their eyes a little bigger and they would put those little dots on their cheeks. And hilariously, they would also put a mask, used to be a mask with like a B kind of like how we're used in COVID, which is also pretty funny that girls were using that previously as a, I don't know, it was like cute because you want to get to see their eyes. I guess if you've only done half of your face's makeup that day, you can get away with looking all right. But also that as soon as COVID comes around, I bet that that filter went completely through the floor because nobody wanted to be associated

with being the sort of person that would choose to wear a mask, especially not a virtual one. But yeah, this for sharing, runaway thing, the big eyes, the rosy cheeks, blah, blah, suggested that you could get to the stage where if guys had an unbounded desire for female butts and boobs that you might have, you know, these scoliosis, like having to wear a back brace, women, the only way that they could support these massive breasts and this ass is if they do that's what men want and this runaway would occur as well. And one other thing that we've spoken about privately and I was fascinated with and I really want to dig into is this decline in sexual desire by relationship length

in men versus women. So this is men first and women second and this is the decline in sexual desire by relationship length. So under one year, 13% men to 21.5% women, 1 to 5 years, 15.3% men, 28 and a half percent women, 5 to 15 years, 14.9% men to 39.8% women. So that's actually gone down a little bit for men. And then 15 plus years, 16.1% for men to 40% for women. So it seems like women kind of top out

within that 15 year age range and that men have still got a little bit more to go. Why do you think that this is the case? We would have presumed from first principles that a man's desire for sexual variety would have led him to be more libidinous and look to stray from his ever-aging wife. Why is it the case that women's sexual desire seems to decline more quickly and higher during a relationship?

Well, that's a very good question. Part of this can probably just explain by something like the libido gap that there tends to be a large difference in libido in desire at the very very outset for men and women. But over time, you know, that's something that can contribute probably to divorce as well and to relationship satisfaction. This big decline in libido over time. What could be the case that I've heard hypothesized as well is that as time goes on, if a woman has no children or if she has a past child, there could be a benefit to finding a new mate at that point, right? If the child is old enough kind of to take care of herself, if you do

not need kind of the pair bond at that point, then moving on to a new relationship, to have the genetic material of another person to increase genetic diversity, could have some benefit. So there could kind of be an evolutionary basis for that very, very, very gradual decline over the long term. That's one hypothesis I don't know how much validity that has, but it's something that I've seen out there. Certainly, another explanation that I think is a bit more intuitive is that when you look at decline over a very long period of time, like 15 years, so we're talking about people

that are married and the average age for marriage is about 30. These are people that, when you see that peak of decline, we're looking at people who are about 45 years old. By the time people are 45 years old, certainly not only has a lot of the novelty in a relationship born off, which may or may not matter, but a lot of people aren't taking good care of themselves at that point. Obesity crisis, people have gotten older, they're less physically attractive. Lobito for men and women both goes down with time and some of that could just be due

to kind of that general aging process as well over time. Because certainly, it's interesting to me that it's just so much high, you know, women double even from year one where you already can factor in that base rate of women's lower the libido gap, it doubles for women and for many increases by like 20%. It goes down, it does, it goes down a lot. And certainly a single good explanation, I don't know if it exists, something else to consider as well is that women in general have lower sexual satisfaction, as you mentioned, as far as orgasms as well.

Certainly something like the orgasm gap. And if you're already starting out kind of a low place, it can drop a lot to zero without a problem. If you're starting at a higher place, that might be enough motive to kind of continue with sexual behavior and to seek it out, even if the sex isn't that good in your man. So you start at, you know, your part, I have 90% sexual satisfaction and then it drops down to 70 and it's like, well, whatever the sex, you know, at least they still get off. For a woman, it might be like, I didn't get off that much and now this thing is just an

ordeal and a chore and it's not, it's something not only that I, I don't get pleasure from, but that is actively disagreeable to me. And so maybe that can explain some of that, that big drop as well. It because discussed sensitivity for women is significantly higher. And as soon as you drop through a particular threshold from that sex goes from, I imagine, yeah, William Castellas said, sex to men is like pizza. There is good pizza and there's pizza.

There is good sex and there is sex. Whereas to women, there is such a thing as bad sex. To men, there isn't really not such a thing as bad sex unless you descend into some ninth circle of hell after a night out. I wonder as well, how much perhaps the introduction of hormonal birth control has got to do with this. The fact that women's self-rated sexual satisfaction when they come off birth control tends to be lower than that of women who met their partner when they were off birth control and are now still off birth control. If you're naturally cycling

throughout, your levels of sexual satisfaction don't decline as much. And this is because women who are on birth control seem to prioritize different sorts of criteria amongst mates. They tend to opt for more provisioning, they seem to have a greater preference for objective metrics of success, like income and education. And that means that when they come out of a hormone field stupid, they can actually be like, oh my god, I'm in a relationship with the guy

that I don't find that sexually satisfactory. However, you can see that this is the case because the natural cycling data that's been assessed has a rousal level at exactly the same. So that's been assessed has a rousal level at exactly the same. So at the same level of a rousal, women that are on home on the birth control and women that are off home on the birth control, the problem that arises is the level of sexual satisfaction has decreased quite sharply for women who decided to come off. And that would be, you know, during this period as well, perhaps you've been together

for, you know, between two and four years, something like that. And, oh, well, maybe we've got married, and now we're going to try for kids, because, you know, typically that's still the way the lot of people decide to do it. Even though it's actually less than 50% now, so 51.6% of children born outside of wedlock in the UK last year, which is pretty crazy. That's huge. And certainly, as you said, hormonal birth control there's actually a lot of mixed results on that as far as the direction that it pushes things.

And on an individual level as well, some people will report hormonal birth control absolutely killed my libido. Things were good when I was on it until I stopped. I took it and then it raised my libido. Things were good when I was on it until I stopped. I took it and then it raised my libido. And the same thing, it's, you know, I think, sometimes I think men might not understand it intuitively as much, but imagine as a man, if you took something that suppressed your testosterone or that increased your testosterone or that could do either and you weren't entirely sure, certainly that can affect your libido in huge ways and it can have long-term lasting effects.

If you look at that over something like a 15-year trajectory, where you also have other things going on, for example, perhaps early menopause as well, or just natural shifts and fertility over time, those are all things that can come together and cause huge changes in libido that might last forever. Yes, as well, if it is on average people people getting married at age 30, you know, men and pals are going to kick in at around about that 15 year mark. But if it's at around about the 15 year mark, then you've already seen the lion's share of the double, well, you've seen all of the increase, right?

So that wouldn't actually explain anything strange, very, very interesting. One of the other things I've noticed, you've been accused of having a pro feminist or a purple-pilled view of dating. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I see people say that occasionally, you know, but I also see, it depends who disagrees with what I have written at the time, because someone might say, oh, it's an in-sell, and then someone might say, oh, it's a feminist. So, if someone is coming from a very different perspective, whatever I say is gonna be something that they don't like to hear.

And that's since, certainly I don't come from a perspective that hates women or that hates men or anything like that. And I try to report the research and what it says. And sometimes that doesn't paint men in a very good light. Sometimes it doesn't paint women in a very good light. Sometimes it doesn't paint women in a very good light. And in cases where the research might say, oh, you know, here's something kind of unflattering about men, and they'll say, oh, why don't you say something bad about women? And if it's the other case, then perhaps I'm a misogynist or something. So certainly, a lot of that is from the perspective of individuals in that sense.

Yeah, I understand completely. It's the conversation around men's and women's discourses become so adversarial online. And it's one of the things that I've really loved about doing the episodes over the last sort of 12 to 24 months on this show because at least 50% of the evolutionary psychology researchers have brought on have been women. And they're just as scathing of women as anybody else. In fact, most of the episodes that the critical of women have come from women, which has been particularly useful for me, because it was the other way around.

It would be far easier to criticize what we were talking about. But yeah, man, if I could gift the entire world of dating advice, one thing, it would probably be to learn about the lack of intersexual competition that people have going on and learn about how vicious intersexual competition is. It's like, look, you're not competing with the people across the other side of the aisle from you. You're competing within your own tribe. Men compete with men for men's stuff and women compete with women for women's stuff. That's why there's gossip and that's why there's posturing and that's why men lower their voices when they're with other men and around attractive women. Like, you know, all of the myriad ways that were completely stupid, like, that isn't because those people of a different

sex to us are the ones that are fundamentally our adversary. There are ally, you know, their collaborators, they're supposed to be someone that complements our life, that doesn't compete with us within it. And the problem is that it's not a particularly sexy narrative to sell online, because I wrote this in the newsletter that I put out today, which is anybody online who generates goodwill toward themselves

by primarily identifying an outgroup that you're all supposed to hate is someone that immediately I'm super skeptical about. Like my grifting and shill radar is on at maximum hypersensitivity because, look, like, if you can't get people to bind together over the mutual love of an in group or of whatever movement it is, even if the movement is simply curiosity or knowledge or intellectual, like, trustworthiness, if you can't get people to bind together over that, a very easy charlatan's solution is going to be to say, yeah, but at least we're not them, they're the problem. And you go, okay, I, a biology shrewd of Asama's on show, and he said a few months ago,

socialism is the quickest route to be able to put yourself at the head of a mob, because what you do is you identify the people that have everything and we don't, and they're the problem. And this is, it's like sour grapes at an existential level that people within, and this is the same, this isn't just the world of like bad men's advice, this is the world of bad women's advice as well.

Like our sash pink pill, or the female, what was the female dating strategy? That stuff as well. All of that is exactly the same. Like you're pointing at the other side and saying that they're the problem. It's got, okay, really great high agency sovereign way to take control of your life there.

Yeah, definitely. As far as relationship outcomes go, if you go into a relationship hating the opposite gender or looking at the opposite gender very negatively, that's already sabotaging your relationship from the beginning. How are you going to have a relationship with someone who you view negatively as some intrinsic part of them? You know, that's a lot of the discourse in these manuscript communities, online dating communities, not just manuscript, but dating communities,

as you mentioned, for women as well, which is a lot of negativity and vitriol toward the other sex. And certainly that's extremely kind of productive if you want to have a good relationship, especially something interesting in the data as well, is when people get older, they lose most of their friend group. This occurs about the 30 mid 30s. And the person they spend most of their time with,

there's going to be the person they're in a relationship with. Friend groups go to zero for most people at that point. And they spend most of the time with colleagues at work or a spouse. And it's like, okay, you know, if you're a heterosexual man in a relationship, you're going to be spending the next 20 years with one woman, you know, do that person or do you wanna have a good time with that person? Something else actually very, very related to that. So Dr. John Gottman, who is a marriage researcher, classic researcher, has identified these four horsemen of the divorce apocalypse, so to speak, which he could observe couples. Some of this has been questioned if it's replicable or not,

but the idea was he could observe these couples and predict who would be divorced within the next couple of years, with like 90% accuracy, and he identified these four things, and the top one of those was contempt. And that's what you see an enormous amount of in these discourses of relationships,

which are primarily, like you mentioned, like female dating strategy or red pill or something. These are people that are struggling to date and struggling to form relationships. And at the same time, they hold massive contempt for men or for women respectively. And it's like, wow, you're already entering this with like the behavior that just predicts right at the very outset that your relationship is going to fail. Dude, I love that. Look, Alexander, I really appreciate your work.

Everybody needs to go and follow you on Twitter and check out the stuff that you do. Where should they go? Well, on Twitter at Date Psych, I got a website, datepsychology.com and YouTube is Alex.date psych. So any of those mostly active on Twitter and... Alright, man. Until next time. Thank you. thank you thank you great great chat