Modern Wisdom - DEBATE: Why Do Gen Z Women Hate Men So Much? - #1094

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

In this evolutionary psychology debate, we explore: - Why women feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them. - Why men are more often demonised and women are seen as victims. - How differing political views are quietly becoming one of the biggest relationship dealbreakers for young people. - and much more... Guests - Freya India is a writer and journalist focused on female mental health and modern culture. - William Costello is a psychology researcher and Ph.D. student specialising in evolutionary psychology. - Dr. Tania Reynolds is an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of New Mexico. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠⁠ Get up to $350 off the Eight Sleep Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com⁠⁠ Timestamps: (0:00) Why Are Modern Women So Angry? (8:50) Do Most Women Lean to the Left? (15:37) The Rise of Male Looksmaxxing (21:10) Why Men and Women Have Different Preferences (32:38) ADoes Insecurity Make Us More Extroverted? (35:33) How Women Adapted So Well to the Modern Workplace (38:36) Are Male Mental Health Incentives Actually Pushing Against Opening Up? (53:26) The Hidden Rise of Benevolent Sexism (59:33) Do Women Find Aggression Attractive? (01:07:44) What Sex Dolls Reveal About Male Desire (01:14:10) Who Resents the Opposite Sex More? (01:19:15) Do Men Get the Ick Too? (01:21:58) Why Privileged Women Feel More Pessimisti (01:25:15) Can Men Be Victims Too? (01:28:20) Why Attractiveness Is the Ignored Privilege (01:32:59) Should You Be Friends Before Dating? (01:39:11) Is Effortless Beauty More Attractive? (01:45:04) Where to Find Everyone Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - 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

Did you read this new Statesman article? I did. Okay. What did you think of that? I thought it was fascinating. I thought I was concerning, but also a little bit predictable, that women are, well, there was a lot in there. There was, you know, women have a bleak outlook on life and that they are also spending a lot of time online, which is making everything worse. and that they dislike men so strongly more than men dislike women.

I think that this is to be predicted by an evolutionary framework. Throughout human history, women were very vulnerable because they are targets of sexual abuse, because they're reproductively valuable, they're smaller on average, and they needed assistance getting the calories for themselves and for their children. and the data suggests women's foraging isn't enough to sustain even themselves. So women who signaled their vulnerability through looking kind of pitiable would have been favored, but also any display beyond that. So communicating sadness, communicating need would have been favored.

So I think this kind of tendency towards a bleak outlook on life makes sense. And in fact, women perceive themselves around the globe to be less happy, less healthy than men, both mentally and physically. And so this is a common pattern. And there also seems to be like a social contagion effect to it. So if you look at women's interactions, when they are sad, their partners, whoever they're interacting with becomes more sad. Their depression spreads through networks in a way that men's doesn't.

So there's also like a social contagion effect. So I think a lot of this makes sense. And then if you look at like the men hating, it also makes sense that if women needed to signal their loyalty to one another. So if they were often in these patrilocal environments where they weren't around their family or kin, then one way to communicate to other women you can trust me is by being loyal, a really good friend, but also probably being a girl's girl. And one way to signal you're a girl's girl is by hating men. Hannah Bradshaw has some cool research showing that women who are guys' girls tend to be not trusted by other women. So if you have more guy friends, they don't trust you. They think you're more provocative.

And so I think some of this is also related to that. I think there's a lot going on. Is that in-group loyalty thing around the guy's girl stuff? I think so. So she didn't test it in that framework. She tested it as like just what do you think of a girl who only has guy friends or a girl who has girls' friends and women like the girl with girlfriends more and trust her more. But in some of our data where we looked at kind of this asymmetry and concern for men versus women, women showed the bias to a stronger degree than men did. So I think if you put those two together, I think women might be like advocating for women to signal to one another.

there, I'm on your team. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Tanya. And to add a few more evolutionary perspectives to that, I was listening to the podcast from the journalists who did the research, and I was just banging my head against the wall thinking, there's so much evolutionary psychology at play here, but you can't see it. There's also an error management perspective.

So everything in evolution is a trade-off and between costs and benefits. And for most of our evolutionary history, women were making the trade-off, that they were benefiting by selecting men who would be able to provision them with resources and be able to protect them. Those are no longer as salient as benefits to modern women who are earning their own money,

achieving their own status, and living in a pretty safe world, even if they don't always feel it's all that safe. So those are no longer really key benefits that men can provide. So they're looking for men to provide other benefits that they're just not stepping up to the plate to do. So if you think about it from an area,

management perspective, the costs of selecting a bad mate still are exactly the same as the word throughout ancestral history for women, but the benefits just so that basically the juice is not worth the squeeze for modern women. So like I read the article and our lab focuses on sexual conflict and one of the solutions to sexual conflict that we always kind of promote is to try and encourage cross-sex mind reading. For the last number of years, I've tried to get people to see it from the men's side that oh well imagine how it would feel to suddenly be asked to provide value in ways that you don't really know how that your status you're being outpaced in status and you can no longer add value in those domains but now I'm trying to put the the cross-sex mind reading hat on

and imagine it from the woman's side and from a trade-off perspective in terms of mating they're living up to their side of the bargain men value physically attractiveness far more than women, and that was one of the key benefits that women provide as a mate. Modern women look better than ever, right? And they're bringing more to the table. They're actually contributing resources and status as well. And it's not like men hated those things and only liked physical attractiveness. They just didn't look. It just wasn't as key a benefit as it is to women. So men are getting more and more from women, whereas women are getting less and less, and they're looking for different things. And that was the key thing that came

through is that the traditional benefits that men were providing were no longer ones that modern women were looking for. They were looking for things like shared political ideals, emotional intelligence, things like that, even humor and stuff. And I think that modern men are just a little bit lost, but there is a way back for them to provide value in different ways. But it's just the case that modern women are happier to choose singlehood than risk choosing a costly mate. And if you look at modern relationships, there's this pathway towards a long-term committed relationship that has to go through this ambiguity, that goes through this kind of uncertainty of dealing with fuckboys, going on these dates, getting spurned by men, because the modern mating market allows for deceptive men to pursue a

deceptive strategy at unprecedented rates. It's incredible, like you have unprecedented levels of anonymity, access to millions of potential mates. So for the first time in history, you can actually pursue a purely short-term deceptive mating strategy without weathering many of the classic costs that you would have. Her kin and her friends are no longer really

going to take revenge on you because, You live in a city millions of miles away from them. They don't know who you are and you just move city. And, you know, a lot of men are pursuing this strategy. So women are thinking, if that's the pathway towards a committed relationship, I'd rather not because they're not getting the benefits. So the pathway to get to a relationship is laid with all of these different tripwires that you can kick. And women are worried about kicking one or many of them or maybe have in the past and have gone, actually,

I can support myself financially, socioeconomically, without this. But I guess the rubber's going to meet the road eventually, because unless you're going to do IVF sperm donor, you need to have a partner eventually if you ever want to have a family. Yeah, but it's just the case that women's status-seeking goals have become very important to them. They've been crushing it in socioeconomic arena, and it's a fact that getting with a long-term male partner

is a massive hindrance to a woman's career. He's not really going to want her to be around other high-status mates and rivals at work. He's not too crazy about that idea often. He often wants her to stay home and be the caregiver. That's often what she wants when she gets into a long-term relationship. So if you culturally lionize, I know it's a bit trite to say like the girl boss culture, but that does clash with relationship formation. It takes time to pursue a career, and those two things are at odds.

My mother famously said, actually, women can have it all, but just not at the same time. So that's a bit of modern wisdom from Mammy Kostler. One in four young women say that their partner having a different political view to them would be a red flag in a relationship. However, on particular political issues, women's stances more hardlines. Six in ten say they would find it difficult to date to someone who disagreed with them on the Palestine-Israel conflict or did not share their views on Donald Trump, 74% say they'd find it difficult to be in a relationship with someone who did not share

their views about social justice. Young women are also more likely than young men to say they would not have a relationship with someone who disagreed with them over immigration. I mean, that's so interesting to me because I feel like my generation's view of morality is basically these far-away conflicts in the Middle East. It's things that aren't happening to our lives directly. But we seem to have this thing where we will treat how men behave as their sort of personal preference. It's their subjective judgment on things.

So it's like a morally relative culture. And so the only way we can judge a man by his morality is, is he posting about Palestine? How does he feel about immigration? Because you can't say this is right and wrong because we're not as religious anymore. We can't really say that there is morally good and morally bad. And so we have to use these really easy kind of signifiers of morality. It's the film finger waving on social media, right, of what can be easily identified, what can be easily advertised.

I thought it was funny when I was listening to the podcast that these women, their activism is very important to them. And they were very frustrated at what to me sounded like classically male typical status driving, even in these circles. So there are some men who are going to identify this as an opportunity. opportunity to woke fishing. Woke fishing, that's a nice term for it. But the women were complaining that the patterns of behavior they were engaging in, they were very interested in giving the speeches, running for positions of leadership.

And I was like, it's all just a different type of status game. And the same frustrations with men will exist in these domains as anywhere else. Why do you think it is, does this sort of lean to the left when it comes to women? And what's in a female disposition, predisposition, that seems to have this sort of progressive list at the moment being very compelling? I think it might have to do with if women evolved to evoke care, then, you know, and signal their vulnerability, then it would make sense from a niche construction perspective that you should design a world that gives aid to the vulnerable. You know, so like it's in your interest to design a social world that transfers resources to the vulnerable. Because you'll go to appear more vulnerable. Yeah. And so it can be, but I also think it functions twofold. It's both beneficial for them.

But it's also a signal of their kindness and other women really dislike unkind women or any signs of cruelty, competitiveness. And so what I kind of wonder is like, is this all a competition to display to other women? I am so pro-social and kind. And then maybe your romantic partner is a reflection of you. So it's a stronger signal that I'm committed to these causes if my romantic partner also is or if I don't have one altogether because they're not good enough. I'm willing to pay the honest signal of I'm foregoing a romantic partner because there are none who meet my standards on this measure.

And with kindness, usually there's target specificity that women usually prefer a partner who's really kind to them, and they're less so keen on a partner who's kind to others, except if there's a massive status associated with someone who's kind to others. And that is in this arena, in this political arena, signaling your kindness to others is the high status. It's kind of encouraging a bit of domestication as well, of everyone around you. It's interesting that a lot of men's behavior, men's portrayal of emotions are actually quite antisocial.

You think about frustration, agitation, anger. rage, aggression. They're very antisocial. Joe Hudson's daughter was crying in the bath when she was nine, and it kept happening over and over, and he came in, and he said, you know, when you're crying, you sound like pretty agitated. Are you sad or are you pissed off? You said, I'm pissed off.

It's like, well, if you're pissed off, why are you crying? I said, well, because when I cry, my sister comes and gives me a hug, but when I'm angry, she runs away. The antisocial element of anger or of sort of more, male typical emotions, at least women when they get angry, sometimes they cry. Sometimes the men cry too, but less so. This was a frustration that the women had about the men in these activism circles. They said that their solutions to the problems of seeing a sad story coming out of Palestine was to mobilize some logistic held. And the women said that they wanted an outpouring

of emotion. Sit in the emotion. Yeah, one of them said, the guy was trying to organize the protest for tomorrow, but I just wanted to sort of get on with the crying. But the business of crying, not the business of activism. I think that explains why we have a proclivity toward progressive politics, because, as you said, the social contagions that spread online. And online, you're encouraged to ruminate and overthink and dwell on these issues. And so if your reaction to something is anger and a practical solution, that's not going to spread as quickly online as all of these girls coming together and saying, isn't it so bad? Isn't it so awful?

and then one-upping each other is who is the most emotionally affected by the issue. Well, I said this before, when I'm in a room with guys that are big into conspiracy theories, that there is this sort of race to the bottom of the iceberg for who can have the most insane conspiracy theory. So it's like, oh, dude, do you think that there's an ice wall about Antarctica? Let me tell you about the woolly mammoths. Oh, do you think there's woolly mammoths, dude? Let me tell you about, and it just keeps on going and keeps on escalating in that way. Weird.

Sorry, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Miss Andrea in the corner. It's just, I mean, you must have been around this same thing too. It is a weird sort of like entropy toward insanity or toward the most extreme position. And this is kind of the same, but it's entropy toward empathy. They're pushing as hard as possible into the most. I couldn't even leave the house because of how distraught I was about this particular issue.

And then intersectionality, which is like, oh, you think this issue is bad. I've looked into it from this angle and I know this from this perspective. You're just black? I'm black and a lesbian. I'm black and a lesbian. Or you're a feminist, but you don't think about trans women. There's always another way you can make it more neurotic and compete over that. What do you think, you know, you were saying the previous ways that men were able to add value and advertise their mate value to women has sort of fallen away.

What do you make of the Luxmaxing movement? I kind of wonder if it's a reflection of, so there's this general terms. towards the gender egalitarian paradox, where as the world treats men and women more equally, the sexes diverge more. So they do it on personality. They do it on... Yes, men actually get taller in more equal environments. Like, it's hard to say that socially constructed. Although people do say that, they say, oh, parents just feed the boys more. And that's the only reason why... And a more egalitarian? Yeah. It's... Okay. But anyway.

But anyway, so like you see... this pattern in both men and women, men get more like risk-taking. Women get more anxious and depressed. So what I think is going on is in this like, I think maybe gender egalitarianism is just like a proxy for social competitiveness. So as the world gets more competitive, our sex-specific adaptations get activated. And so if it's the case that, you know, women are more prone to like anxiety or depression, that's going to become amplified if men are more prone to risk-taking or maybe conspiracy theory, that might get activated. Where's looks maxing coming?

I mean, men and women have incentives to both enhance their appearance to the extent that they could. It's just through different techniques. So men might have a drive for muscularity. So, you know, that would allow them to be competitive in a really competitive world. Especially if the mating market is becoming at first more short-term mating oriented, if there's this first pass of kind of somewhat short-term mating-oriented relationship that becomes a long-term one, then physical attractiveness, which we know is massively over-indexed in online dating and kind of the media-saturated world. We even have data. I know you spoke

Macon about this, about just people are prioritizing physical attractiveness. Both men and women are prioritizing it more and more. Why do you think that is? Because probably they're not able to add value in those other ways. The short-term mating kind of attributes become more enhanced. And especially if you have a, the kind of the visually saturated world online dating, I think that's, that's the first gateway to jump through. Then you need to meet the minimum threshold on physical attractiveness. So it makes sense that men will increasingly engage in looks maxing.

Now there's some predictable effects that we might see there, and I think we are seeing them, is that men tend to be a little extreme with their status driving, with any pursuit to get sexually selected. Fisherian runaway everywhere. So they're going to go to extreme lengths. and that's what we're seeing, right? You're seeing like the looks max, the high-profile looks maxers.

Now, by the way, I don't think looks maxing is that bad. I think that micro-dosing looks maxing is probably good for everyone. Going to the gym is for a guy getting a haircut? Mark Manson's models came out in, what, 2014? Yeah. Have you ever read that book? Probably not. So Mark Manson, before he did the subtle art, he wrote Models.

And Models was like a sanitized pickup book. It's the best way to put it. And then Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Max did mate. So the two-car garage for guys. It's good, but guess a bit. It's kind of showing my age weirdly because they're both written in the teens or the tens. Mate by Tucker Max and Jeffrey Miller and then models by Mark Manson. But in models, it's like you should get a T-shirt that fits nicely.

Pick grays and navies and blacks. And you should get a pair of jeans that don't hang off you and you need a nice belt. It's like the most basic. But that's to a guy in 2010, that's looks max. Yeah. And men can move the needle on their image pretty close. quick, like good hair cut, getting good shape and wear a fit. A little bit of stubble. You're going to kill it. Like, that's a massive improvement. But I think what happens is men, given their

tendency to go extremes, and from an error management perspective, they go too far with the muscularity and things like that. Because, and there's lots of data to show that they go too far and it's not what women like. Men reliably overestimate the muscularity that women want. But I think of that from an error management perspective as well, because simultaneously, we do have lots of data that women do like muscularity. So if you're going to make an error on one side, would you rather be... Better to be more muscular than less muscular. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

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8Sleep.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep.com slash modern wisdom at checkout. What was that poll that you did about clavicular? Oh yeah. I asked whether, and at chose. I've really enjoyed to X bringing in the pictures with the polls now. It's really a nice little addition to the polls, which I'm an aficionado of.

Well, you need to fucking get off blue sky. Yeah, I'll get up. My main piece of advice to you is to leave the fuck away. Or do the polls on both and compare the results. I have no following on blue sky. It's just a... You go on there. The dozens of people that are there, they have no interest. You go on there as a form of self-harm.

Yes, I think you're right. Yeah. I do try and reach like both sides. of the academic kind of world. But they hate you. I don't know. They actively hate you. All that happens in our group chat is he posts, he basically comes in for kind of like emotional support.

Where is emotional support group chat? Lovely. And you come in, show their emotions. That's true. You're not showing your emotions. You're showing how you're being repeatedly beaten by the same social media platform. It's insanity. Why do you get attacked just because you're into evolutionary psychology?

Yeah, more kind of narcissism with small differences. about evolutionary psychology, I'd say. Yeah. But anyway, the polls on X are my... Catnet. My fund. I love them. Yeah. The whole Ollie Moore's situation went viral for that. But one, I've done recently, I posted a picture of clavicular, who's the most high-profile looks maxer. And I think a pretty handsome guy, he's one of the only looks maxers that I think looks pretty good. But I think he looked pretty good to begin with. So I think he was going to be handsome anyway. But anyway, he's the most high-profile looks maxer. And I posted a piece of a piece of a bit. And I posted a of, I can't even think of his name, but he's a popular K-pop singer that's a bit of a heartthrob in that arena.

And reliable sex difference, the men thought clavicular was more handsome. The women thought that the K-pop star was more handsome. So there is a somewhat of a mismatch in cross-sex mind reading happening between men and women around attractiveness. What do you think about the guys that say, well, that's just stated versus revealed preferences. women actually do want the gigacad face. They don't want to go with that sideway. That's just what they think is popular to say online. I think it's massive cope for people to respond to all my polls with,

oh, you can't trust anything women say that they just lie all the time. That must be such a comforting world to live in, to be like, oh, I don't have to worry about any of their criticism because it's just lies and I know how they really behave. This is often said by just basement dwellers. People who don't go off the internet. Yeah, exactly. So I would say that that K-pop star does pretty okay with women, I imagine, if he is so inclined.

I think he would be fine. But yeah, the key point is I think men overdo it with their looks maxing. They could hit a sweet spot because the signaling effects that they're giving by being too into looks maxing is kind of negative to women. I'd love your opinion on this. But I think it signals that they're active in the mating market. They're looking for other mates. They're self-obsessed. they're going to be not willing to have a takeaway on the couch with me on a weekend.

It's the dad of four who's still in shape somehow. Yeah, it's a bit sus, isn't it? And even it is a sign of infidelity, predicts infidelity of a guy is suddenly getting back in shape. Yep. It's like he's trying to re-engage with the major market. I also think it's feminine coded. And so it looks to me like the male symptom of social media addiction, where you see girls editing themselves, getting cosmetic surgery, obsessing over aging.

Have you seen these girls when they go to bed and they have like a sheet mask on and then I've seen the red light thing. Yeah, but they have like a hundred different things going on. There's a post maybe in slate or wired about this girl who had a hundred step beauty regime. Stuff like that. I spray the magnesium on my face before. I think that she was sitting under a lamp that's meant to keep bird eggs alive. She was like putting her face under a lamp like a fucking heater that you would put food on a hot plate under. Yeah, but I think if you see that, you'd think she's very neurotic and maybe not a good part.

If she's like obsessed with how she's coming across. But because the baseline for men is supposed to be lower, even if a man doesn't have a hundred-step thing, if he's got a 10-step thing, that's still quite a lot. Yeah, and it just looks like, as we were saying before, it looks like teenage girls on Instagram, but then applied to, it's how young men are reacting to the incentives. Like you said on dating profiles, they've got to advertise themselves like a product. But I think it's also just social media in general because when you match with someone on a dating app, the first thing you do is look up their Instagram. And that Instagram has to show, like they were just saying, that they're a good person. You've got to see evidence of that. You've got to see all the holidays that they've been on.

Are they social? And all of these things have to be marketed immediately. And so I think that is where a lot of the looks maxing comes from. So I was at dinner with, you know, Signal from X? Trends all the time. Fucking sick. I went to dinner with him last night. I didn't know who it was, just this like a non.

I could have been abducted last night. We turned out to be a really interesting guy and now we're friends. And I was going through my little bit about what I think's happening with looks maxing, that guys have a failure of cross-sex mind reading about what other women find attractive. And what they're doing is they're basically coding for other men's formidability and respect, not for female attractiveness. Because there's evidence that suggests that women prefer a slightly feminized face, a neutral or a slightly feminized face with a masculinized body.

But when you look at some of the lengths that the guys are going to with the jaw surgery, going to get comical. Hasn't yet for clavicular, but I think he's having jaw surgery today. Congrats. Oh, no. Another one. He had overdosed two days ago. Yeah, that's fine.

Well, maybe that might be, you could just build the overdose into the jaw surgery and just steam straight through it. I don't know. But after a while, the guys are kind of overshooting, overshooting the really intense cheekbones. and the huge jaw. And again, you can say, well, women don't really know what they want. They do want the giga chat.

Something tells me not across all of the different studies that have been done about what is preferred by men and women. You know, it would be an awesome thing to do? You should do this. One of your polls should be take clavicular's face now, run it through coves, take it to Macon or whatever, get them to feminize it a little, get them to masculinize it a little, get them to masculinize it more, and say of these. And don't say which one is his. Right. Because that would kind of blind it a little. Anyway, so I'm explaining this, I'm like, guys, because they maybe haven't been around women, because they're not women, they're just, what would women want?

Well, they would want what I would think is attractive or respect worthy or whatever, so I'm just going to, like, optimize for the androgy thing. Yeah. And to men, the ultimate reward is short-term mating success. They hate being told, oh, you're the guy I would marry, but not the guy I would have a one that's sand with. Bingo. Fucking bingo, dude. So men are optimizing, well, if women like Chad at all. all, they want him for short term.

And that's true. There's some evidence that women prefer masculized just specifically in the short term context. So given that that's the ultimate reward for men, they're thinking, I can pursue that. I'll optimize that. So Signal's thing, his point, was he thinks because all women are basically scrutinized in group chats and living on Instagram. And if you're going to date with someone, all of the people in the group chat are going to ask

what's his Instagram. guys are optimizing to be as presentable as possible. So the self-butification that men are going through right now is basically them future-proofing themselves from the girl they're going to go on a date with group chat scrutiny of his Instagram. Yeah, yeah. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, I think that is true. Well, it's like the app, you know, the T app. Yes, fuck. The same guy. Yeah. But you can literally rate and review men based off pictures of themselves. and like rate them a green flag and a red flag. But that is happening in group chats.

And I think a lot of young men think, even before they've met someone, all of their memories have to be marketed in a way for a future partner who's going to be scrolling through their life. So it's like, yeah, when you go on holiday capturing images, not for the memories, but for this future woman who's going to be scrolling through your profiles. That's a nice segue into the mate copying of Nikki Glazer. You heard about that? Was this the call her daddy thing?

Yeah. So what happened? So she had an interview where she kind of revealed her, I wouldn't describe it as a cook fetish, but she kind of told this. Was it not called Monopoly? It's monopoly. What, that's a cool turn. Monopoly. Yeah, so she basically described that she enjoys seeing her male partner fuck other women.

Now she's not into being with other men and this very kind of fallacious story. And I think there's a number of things happening there is there is some evidence of mate copying that's what's stronger in women, the social proofing of other women's opinion of a guy. It's pre-selection. It's way more important to them than it is for a man. So let's say I was going out with someone that I was head over heels with and in love with. And you said, no, no, she's not that beautiful. It would have less of an effect on me than it would for a girl, having all her girlfriends to say, no, he's not the one.

He's trash. And it makes sense because women's mate value is more observable. So you can only do so much, you know, you have eyes. It's like, I don't care if you can see. Whereas men's mate value is less observable, so you have to use these indirect cues, like their partners. So if a guy goes through into a club and he's surrounded by four women, some women are looking at that saying,

there must be something. Or if a guy doesn't look that good, but he has a really beautiful partner, they're thinking there must be something. He must have something going for him. Yeah, there's a, I was talking to Coleman Hughes, and he was telling me about when he first started dating his fiance, say, maybe in New York somewhere. And he'd be sat down at a table and some guy that read his book, I listened to his podcast

or whatever, would come over and be like, Coleman, I just wanted to let you know, I'm such a huge fan of the podcast and whatever, sorry for interrupting you know, I hope you have a wonderful night or whatever, would you mind taking a photo? And Coleman was like, there is no better wingman. I've just recruited some guy that I don't know, that it's a fan of my work and I'm really glad to have as a fan, but I'm even more glad that you spotted me in this steakhouse with this goal and yeah there is this that's why i think the black pill ruling of lMS yes l if you get the if you don't hit the minimum level of looks you are going to be at a serious disadvantage that

maybe doesn't get to enter the party but beyond that i don't think it's m next i think status counts for so fucking much yeah like it's just it's able to wipe away because we would how long have we had money how long have we had status yeah absolutely and especially when too much physical attractiveness can actually be off-putting to a female partner. They're like, oh, I don't want to have to make him that hard, and he's too obsessed with himself, and too many women like him. It can be off-putting. Is that right? I get stressed out about men who are too attractive or too extroverted. Don't trust it. Why? I just know they'll have so many alternatives and they're more likely to encounter them.

It's like, it's a numbers game, even if you're really desirable at some point, I mean, people are bitch weight. So it's just, it's risky. There's a relationship between infidelity and extroversion, right? Yeah. And I kind of wonder if that might play a role into like why women show some of these traits is like there was an incentive from men to not be super extroverted, high confidence, because if that's a cue of sexual profuscuity. Well, no, for women. If women are too extroverted, other men might infer she will cheat. And if men have the, concern over paternity certainty and cuckoldry, then they might have preferred women who were slightly more insecure, more humble, right. And so women might have encountered mate preferences

that selected them to be slightly more insecure. It's less threatening from a mating perspective. It is interesting, though, because I feel like at the moment, my generation of young women are on average very insecure about how they look and they're very anxious but they also seem to be louder than ever in terms of I'm empowered, I'm strong, I'm independent and so you have women who are really trying to portray that they never get jealous and they never get insecure but then they seem to have this deep risk aversion and anxiety and I don't know where that comes from there are some studies where women who are really agentic and assertive if they're negotiating they experience backlash where people don't like them, but not if they're negotiating on behalf of someone else.

So I kind of wonder if it's like the only way women are allowed to be like tough and agentic is to be an advocate for some moral cause, for someone more vulnerable. It's like the only way you're allowed to be. Because it seems like that's the domain where you see women all of a sudden be very hostile when you don't get that hostility in any other context. And so maybe that's the one domain where people allow it. This episode is brought to you by Whoop. According to my whoop, I've tracked nearly 2,000 days of my life. And the thing that still gets me is that I could have predicted almost every bad day before it happens. That's because Woop gives you a complete picture of your health every single day. Your sleep, your workouts, your recovery, your breathing, your heart rate, even your steps. And over time, you get to see what's working and what isn't. And the Woop 5.0 is the best version yet. It's 7% smaller. You get more than two weeks of battery life from a single charge. It's got health span tracking to see how your daily.

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slash modern wisdom. That's join. dot whoop.com slash modern wisdom. How do you think about the hidden nature of female intracultural competition with the need for assertiveness, independence, freedom, modern world, stuff? Because I would think, I'm surprised by how well women have acclimatized to the sort of modern career, fast-paced capitalist society thing. I think they're really, not only are they out.

performing, I think they're outperforming what my expectations would have been of that. I don't know whether that makes sense, but given what you know about women's disposition, predisposition, selection pressures, is it surprising that they're doing as well as they are? I don't know. I think in a lot of ways, like the modern world is more conducive to women's traits than men's. Like, we're not allowed to be aggressive. The only way they can be aggressive is very subtly, which women are experts at. We're bored and so, and now in a workforce, and now in a workforce, we probably are rewarded for being the egalitarian boss or the one who checks in with their employees. So like

over time as we move to like a prestige based competition system, that's more conducive to a lot of women's traits than a dominance based competition system. But I see your point that at the same time, you also have to be like agentic and assertive in the workforce. So it'd be really interesting to see how women navigate that in practice. But there are some data showing that more agentic women are particularly disliked by their female colleagues. And so I think that might lead to women's using these egalitarian strategies as a way of simultaneously being competitive and assertive while looking kind along the way. And I think you could say for good reason, the modern world or workplace is kind of designed

to neuter men's most aggressive tendencies. You can't exactly get into a physical fight to settle something anymore in the workplace. It's just not acceptable, but you can spread gossip, and that is kind of rewarded. So in that style, of aggression, women will far succeed. Have you ever done any bless his heart stuff? Men do gossip too, right? It's not like just a female thing. Yeah, we try. So we manipulated whether a man said it about another man or a woman said it. Can you do, you're going to have to just give a 30,000 foot view of the bless her heart

effect. Okay, basically, if women phrase their negative gossip with concern, people didn't register it as gossip. They were more likely to believe that she was a good person. And so it seems like you get these benefits by believing you're concerned about your gossip target or maybe doing it consciously. And then there was a different study where we did look at men and women, where we looked at women's use of like complaining, venting about their friends, like complaining about how their friends treated them. Like, oh, you know, Susie always says these weird comments to me and they hurt my feelings. If men did that, other people didn't care as much. So it just doesn't work. I think it's whiny.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. It's non-agentic in a way, right? Yeah, they don't have the same sympathy. In terms of bless his heart, maybe it would work for men because you're just seeming compassionate. I don't know. It would be interesting to test.

There's a substack called men are good. Have you come across this? It's like it's controversial. It's really well written. I mean, look, it gets a bit men's rightsy. but some of the insights are fucking money like really, really good. Tom Golden, I think he's called.

That name rings about. Really good substack. Anyway, he had this one bit where he talked about how men are told that they should open up more about their emotions, but every single incentive pretty much pushes against it,

including that of other men, that men don't like to see men who are opening up about their emotions. There's a kind of ick and an aversion. Like, you look like an unreliable ally. You're not maybe thinking this consciously, but two things are true that men are trying to do at the moment. It's like men's mental health is a really big issue. But, okay, if you see a guy that's crying on social media, will you give him sympathy or will you laugh at him?

Almost every guy is going to go, simp, cuck, soy boy, you're an idiot. This is lame. You need to man up. It's like, okay, so which is it? And we spent two hours talking about some of the paradoxes of sort of modern female culture and capitalism versus independence and freedom versus motherhood and just a mom and all this stuff. But I think it's important to call out the ones where guys, you do not get to say men need to open up more. Men need, we need to have more services for mental health. Let's say that men don't believe that because a lot of men might

say men don't need to open up more. They need to man up more. And you go, okay, do you think that suicide prevention is something that's important? Okay, how do you respond when you see a guy that's incredibly depressed on social media and really struggling? Because, what is it, 95% of men that took their own lives, had sought mental health advice from the exact services that they're supposed to in advance. Presumably, if you're remotely online and young, you've maybe tweeted or posted something that's a bit sad at some point. Have you checked in on your bro? Like, if you were at dinner and one of your friends started crying, how comfortable would you be at sitting in that, especially if you're British? It's just not, it's not a conducive

environment. So men want room for their struggles to be acknowledged, but when other men are struggling, they don't acknowledge their struggles. Does that make sense? This is where I think the insight from our ancestral history and the selection pressure as men and women faced is so informative. William, you fucking put a billboard above your head that says evolutionary psychology is real. It's coming right. Okay, but no, the specific pressure. So men have this deep ancestral history of a co-oitional value to each other. So to express vulnerability is a massive liability and risk to you and to your allies. So the message that I think struggling men that would be more effective than, oh, you can come cry on my shoulder is we need you, actually, and you're valuable.

You're useful. And we need you to be stronger. So whatever you need to do to get back on your feet, and I know you can do it, you just got to rally. We've all kind of been there. That, I feel, will resonate with men more compelling. You know, what's a good example of that. New York divorce lawyer was on the show a couple of months ago. James Sexton. Yeah, James Sexton. And he was saying to me, he told me this story about he was in relationship with two different women, one after the other. Okay, I was like, okay. As a divorce lawyer, that would be a high risk strategy. Yeah, it was fucking, no, it would have been safe. So both women didn't like the fact that on a weekend he doesn't shave. He has to shave every single day,

before he goes into court because he doesn't want to look stubbly. And then on Friday, or Thursday night, he would shave, and he wouldn't shave again maybe until a Monday morning. So by the time it gets to a Sunday, he was real scratchy. And the first relationship he was in, the woman said, it irritates me so much. It makes my face red. It makes me break out in spots, and I really don't like it,

and I wish that you'd shave. It doesn't make me feel very good. That relationship didn't work. Next woman had the exact same preference, but instead she said, you know what, It is so sexy, one of your clean-shaven. I think that it's just the hottest thing in the world. Immediate.

I'm doing it right now. I love to have my hair, buzzcoat, short, the fade for about 15 years. I'm doing the broflow now because my miss is just insistent upon it. But she hasn't said, I hate you with short hair. She said you're hotter with... Not quite. She said that you're hotter with long hair? Yeah, she prefers the long hair.

Yeah, but he prefers the long hair as opposed to doesn't like the short hair. You know what I mean? Oh, okay. Well, fuck. I feel like, do we need to do an intervention? She's quite a domineering woman. Yeah, yeah, I've met her. She has a lot of leather.

Yeah, but I like that about, like, I think men do respond to encouragement, and I love that about male friendships. Like, if you ever see men in the gym, they'll be honestly giving each other feedback on how to improve, whereas women will be, like, not commenting on each other's form and just chit-chatting about their lives. And so it seems like men really want each other to be better, because if that's your, like, brother in arms, you need him to be the best. soldier he can be. And so it's so funny because if you listen to like male directed podcasts,

they're always like how to maximize productivity. And, you know, and then female directed podcasts are like the exact opposite. They're like, you're a queen no matter what you do. If he doesn't recognize it, leave him. And so then it makes me wonder, like, if we're receiving this feedback from our same-sex peers, what is that going to do to men and women over time? Men are going to go into looks maxing, finance maxing, and then women will do. just go into like wallowing. Yeah, I feel like women wouldn't call each other out either. So if like a young woman posted on social media that she had this horrible experience with

a man and it was kind of unfair toward the man, the comments are all going to be in support of her because if she's, say, crying or she's upset on camera, we're all going to co-ruminate together and then also confirm her maybe neurotic assumptions of what's happened. Whereas I feel like with men, as you said, it doesn't engender the same empathy. and so maybe they would have a load of comments. Men prefer the tough love. So there's this new trend I've got where I retweet kind of these random masculinity behaviors

as tonic masculinity. And one is this guy, he was morbidly obese and he was going to die. Like he was really that severe. And his friend text him every day, you fat fucking pain. And the guy loves this friend. He's like, he saved my life.

He's literally like just doing that, checking him at me every day. and you're checking in with me. Well, it worked. Like he said, if he cares enough about me, he needs me to be better. Yeah, yeah. Like, that was it. It was, that worked.

Whereas women would be like, you look better than ever. It's queen. What does it engender for women as you look at sort of the next generation? The best thing about this, you know, critical drinker? He had this fucking awesome take. So he compares the first Mulan movie, which was the Disney animated one, to the live action one that came out maybe five, six, seven. years ago. And in the first one, the protagonist is smaller and weaker than all of the men, and she needs to disguise herself. And she has to use feminine guile and agility and speed,

and she has to work even harder. And eventually, after doing that, she's able to become the hero. And it's kind of a female story of self-empowerment through determination and agency and working hard and stuff like that. Roll the clock forward by two decades. The protagonist is immediately better than all of the men. She doesn't need to work at it. The only, the only restriction that she encounters is the fact that the world doesn't believe in her enough. She's a Mary Sue. She's got some, like, what's that? Mary Sue, some a character who's just already perfect. Okay, yeah, that's like, um, uh, Wonder Woman, well, no, not Wonder Woman. The Skywalker film. No, what's the one in Avengers that can like fix everything? Wonder Woman. No, not Wonder Woman,

Miss Marvel or Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel is like, she's, she's, like off saving other shit in the universe. And you're like, hey, hey, hey, Thanos just killed 50% of everyone. It's like, no, there's other problems elsewhere. And she's like the most powerful of all the superheroes. Anyway, second Milan movie, she's got this magical estrogen she, whatever it is. She's got like some super feminine thing that she's able to just use and she's immediately better. And you go, well, when I think about if I have a daughter, which I hope to, what role model do I want her to have?

Do I want her to believe the worldview that the only time that you encounter obstacles is because of something systemic that's out of your control because the world doesn't believe in you? Or do I want her to believe that you can overcome stuff just the same way that the men can? And that if you do encounter obstacles, that's par for the course. There's no entitlement. There's no, this isn't something that's wrong. The world is filled with problems. You just need to work out a way to solve them and you can. Not that they're a bug, but they're a feature.

And it's also quite sexist because they lionize the male default. So if a woman shows male typical behaviors, that's how she shows she's kick ass. If she shows feminine guile, like you said, that's not quite the same. They don't want to promote those gender typical behavior. I came up with a name for it, the soft bigotry of male expectations. And you remember when there was that hunter-gatherer paper that came out? Can you explain what that was when it was re-analyzed and then re-analyzed again? So they tried to present data to show that, oh,

the man, the hunter is basically a myth and that loads of cultures have women as the hunter is in the society, but they were really coding their data where any society that a woman did any hunting at all, a rabbit, one rabbit killed, that is coded as woman was hunting as well, even if men were by and large responsible for... 364 days of the year they were doing it. Yeah, and what's really annoying is there's actually a really cool story, if you look at our hunter-gatherer past, is that women contributed as many, if not more, calories to the society through their gathering. And that's cool, but it's sex-specific.

But it's just as good. You don't have to be just the same as the men to be as good or good in a different way. It's like, it's actually really sexist if they think you have to be like men. It's a fucking massive amount of bigotry that devalues what would have been, whatever, female coded behavior. And this is the line from Andrew Schultz, where his wife who used to work at Google had their first kid and would then be walking around the supermarket near where her ex-co-employees and colleagues would walk around. They said, what are you doing now? And she'd say, I'm just a mum.

And he said it was the just that killed him. That there's something about doing something that was inherently female coded that was seen as less valuable. You go, how is this not sexist? Is this not fucking sexist to say the thing that came to? you naturally, the gathering as opposed to the hunting, well, women can do it just as much as men and maybe sometimes even better. And you go, well, yeah, but that implicitly devalues the thing that they were doing more of. Like, it's very, I don't know, it feels like bigotry to me. Is there something going on whereby, like, feminine guile is meant to be kept mysterious and you

don't want to set out loud the way you do things or something? I don't know. I just think, like, maybe it's like an assumption that, like, women are, a block, a monolith, when in reality, women have competing interests. So, like, feminism isn't operating on behalf of all women. It's really good for hyperagentic women. It might be penalizing the women who are more female typical, who are more nurturing, who want these things. And so it's kind of tragic that, like, as a result of championing these women, we have to also, like, denigrate these women. And it seems like, if you really wanted to be pro-women, support, them in whichever direction they take.

For a community that's trying to be very inclusive, it's highly exclusionary. Yes. Yes. To critique some women for wanting love and babies. It's like, that's beautiful. Support all types. I also think it's because we have a somewhat therapeutic culture now where the ultimate goal for women is like self-actualization.

So it's becoming their authentic selves. And that's why you see these storylines in movies where the woman is basically trying to find her authentic self and then everyone else is a distraction and an obstacle the men then become obstacles and it goes back to the beginning of the conversation with marriage and women having a negative view

of men and the risk aversion because they will be an obstacle to their self-actualization and that is now the ultimate mission. There's a moment in the second Doctor Strange Marvel movie where a zombie version of Benedict Cumberbatch goes back in time to tell the female protagonist who is a Latina daughter of a lesbian couple called America Chavez that she just needs to believe in herself.

Like that's where she's the most power. She was born as the most powerful person in the world and she's got this thing, but she just didn't believe in herself enough. And that kind of goes to the podcast thing, which again, like, it just to me, it feels really patronizing to tell women that, You're perfect as you are. Like, you are immutable and the world is mutable. You don't need to change yourself. The world should bend around you.

Whereas male podcasts say, the world doesn't give a single fuck about you. You need to do everything you can to try and counteract this entropy locally, bro. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients, and that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 NextGen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, and improve key nutrient levels in just three months. They've been refining the formula since 2010, 52 iterations and counting. And I love the next gen because it's more bioavailable, it's clinical validation, which, which is unbelievably rare in the supplement world. The older I get, the more I realize that the small stuff compounds,

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slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. On the topic of sexism, Freya, I'd like to put you on the spot a bit at the moment. I would include you. Well, we'll see. I want to ask you a few questions.

You've been described as the voice of Gen Z women. So this would be very interesting to get your opinion on these questions. So I'm going to read them up to you. So, Tanya, I already know what you think because we're working on this together. So is it closer to sexist towards men or women to believe the following things? One, women have a superior moral sensibility. Sexist toward men, I would say. Okay. Women have a quality of purity few men possess. Sexes toward men.

Women have a more refined sense of culture and taste. Sex is toward men. Okay, full house, sex is towards men. Next set of questions. We're almost done. Do you think it would be a good or bad thing if men mostly agreed with the sentiment of the following statements? A good woman should be sat on a pedestal. Uh, good. Okay. Women should be cherished and protected by men. Good.

Men should sacrifice to provide for women. Good. In a disaster, women need to be rescued first. Good. Every man ought to have a woman he adores. Good. Men are complete without women. Or men are incomplete without women.

Yeah, good. Despite accomplishment, men are incomplete without women. Yeah, good. And people are often happy without romance. Bad. Okay. You are a massive benevolent sexist. Those are the items on the benevolent sexism scale.

And I polled all my followers on this, and they, like you, believed that the statements were either sexist to men or a good thing, right? So it kind of begs this question of, what is this scale measuring? So this is an idea that Tanya and I and some other colleagues are working on that we call the mismeasurement of men. Now, that title is strategic because there was a famous book called The Mis Measure of Men by Stephen Jay Gould, who was very critical of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary approaches to human behavior.

And we think it's the precise opposite that's happening in scale development in psychology now, that a lack of insight into evolution. psychology and just science in general is creating these crazy problematic scales. So you've got scales that are measuring toxic masculinity, benevolent sexism, and male sexual entitlement that are actually problematic in so many ways. But one of the ways is they're measuring awareness of facts about the world. So one of the items is women are often attracted to muscularity and dominance. and that's taken as evidence of toxic masculinity.

And there's no attitude added on to that inference. It's just, do you know that that's sometimes the case? And it is sometimes the case. And these scales, they're like what I call the Cathy Newman of scales. They require an extra inference about the implication of agreeing with the statement. So you believe that women deserve to be protected. Oh, so what you're really saying is they should have their autonomy, limited to keep them safe for their own good. And it's like that's not measured. So it's a total

mismeasurement of men. And it also pathologizes women's own preferences. So women have strong preferences for protection and provisioning. And men care about being seen as attractive to women. So they're going to prioritize that over being seen as sexist. So it's a huge problem we see. But yeah, sorry to tell you if you're a man. So is that the same as internalized misogyny? Same concept. Not quite the same. So benevolent sexism, is one end of the scale of what's called ambivalent sexism. On one end of the scale, they have hostile sexism, which is like direct antipathy towards women to be like, oh, women are trash, basically, like really direct and obvious, whereas benevolent sexism is this more subtle,

putting, kind of infantilizing of women, which I believe could be a real concept. But when I looked under the hood at these items that were used to measure it, I couldn't believe it. I just thought that they're absurd. Well, that reminds me of the new statesman piece because the new statesman piece basically concluded that liberal women are unhappy. And then everybody was basically, we spoke about this, they were saying that this is,

no one's spoken about what's going on with liberal women, this is new, like the new statesmen are the first to have the balls to say it. A phrase that's not. Bang it out. But the interesting thing is, is that I sort of get viewed with the internal misogyny thing because I will say the same thing, which is liberal women are unhappy,

but I'll also say it's because they have these unmet needs. It's because they want to belong. And it's like a compassionate world view that I think women want to be protected. They want to feel like they're safe and stable and all of these things. But then I get the, that's a sexist point of view. But the new statesman can present it and say young women are unhappy and draw different conclusions. And then it's not a sexist person. I told you, your female privilege has been revoked.

You don't have the female privilege that you once thought you did. Because I'm white. Because you're white because you're right of Santa. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I then don't get treated as a woman at all. No, you're an honorary man. Congratulations, it's three on one.

So in the literature, there's this kind of confusion about, oh, women are perplexingly attracted to benevolent sexism, and this is like a problem, it's an inconvenient finding. But when you look at the way the items are written, it's needless because I think women are attracted to men who believe women should be protected. But I don't think they're attracted to men who would add on the extra inference and would say, oh, because women need to be protected, they need to have their rights limited for their own good. So if you had the item written in a proper way, in the scale designed in a proper way,

you would actually have no problematic attraction to benevolence. Do you remember that video of the two travelers in Thailand and a guy pulls out a knife? It's CCTV footage. I think that has been it. Yeah, it went super, super viral. And all of the replies and all of the quote tweets of it were, go, he's trash. So this guy pulls out a knife and he's trying to steal the woman's bag. And she fights him off.

And the guy hinds behind a fucking pillar. The dude hinds behind a pillar. So there's two things that are sort of, yeah, icky, right? And we all have this sense that you should protect. Dude, what was that fucking thing that I said? I put this in the group chat six months ago and I fucking called it and I was right about the fact that women would be less there would be more

oh here it is look at this oh no so that guy's got a knife oh my god home boy hides home boy hides behind the pillar while she is fighting him

and there's another dude that just comes over and let me he's with the guy and then this guy with the fucking benevolently sexist man yeah he's over and thinks the woman cannot defend herself and what a sexist son of a big I know what a pig

yeah what an absolute pig is it the dude on the bike? I think it's a... He comes in with a helmet. Dude, a helmet to the head. Commute to help. Yeah. So almost everybody was universal in this. That guy

that's hiding behind the pillar is what are you doing, dude? Come on. Yeah, it's a knife and fucking scary or whatever, but like do something. Women's preference for protection is seriously strong. So I ran a poll asking which would have a stronger effect. This was my idea. Don't fucking

say I would run a pole. This is my idea, dude. I would even surprised by the result. Women said it would have a stronger effect on their attractiveness to a man if they found out he was unwilling to protect them, then it would be if he cheated on her in a one-night stand. Yeah. That was really strong. I kind of wonder if like maybe that's one factor in like why women aren't interested in men nowadays is like men don't get to display those abilities. Exactly right. Like if we're not. No one's coming back from war. Yeah. If we're not seeing men defending our groups or hunting, like you don't get to see the value of male formidability or the display of it. What I'm starting to wonder is like

if women even realize how much stronger men are, when I ask my students, like I present the sex difference in upper body strength and they're surprised. And I'm like, what? Yeah. There's this viral trend on TikTok apparently now where it's like asking couples to ask the guy to go into the challenge of putting her in handcuffs in 30 seconds. And they're like, it's the greatest forplay ever. It's like women get so turned on by, it's like, wow, realizing the strength difference is crazy. Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing that Andrew Thomas was talking about. Does Andrew do Crave Mugar or some shit? He does some kind of martial artsy thing, right?

And he's saying that the ability to turn on and turn off aggression is really rare. Most guys, the aggression sort of bleeds out in the same way as your level of obsession and how much you pay attention to patterns is great when you're trying to write new piece but is not so great when you're dealing with your intimate relationship or whatever. Guys that are aggressive are good. If Homeboy comes along with the knife, forget running away.

He's licking his lips. The guy's like, oh, I'm waiting my entire life and it just pulls out an armory of things to kill him with. You're like, okay, it's like, everyone's like Tim Kennedy. But very few people have learned, very few men have learned to turn that off. And I think what women, what's got crossed over a little bit here is that women love the idea of a man who is able to be aggressive, but never to them. And unfortunately, the guys, I mean, how many MMA fighters have had, like, awful abuse,

domestic abuse situations that you've selected for a guy who is, he is going to really, really stand up for me. Well, yeah, but maybe that's also, that's not to say that all fucking MMA fighters are going to be, you know, home abusers, but this has happened a bunch of times. So you go, it's hard to turn that aggression off. And the protector thing is great, but the just raw aggression thing carries on. It's a trade-off women have to make. And it's predictable the ecologies in which they'll actually select a really formidable mate.

And it's predictable based on the individual differences in that woman's size. Smaller women in those dangerous ecologies tend to have a stronger preference for a really strong, aggressive form of... What would a dangerous ecology in the modern world be like? So, I mean, there's rough areas of... I used to live in Birmingham. There was rough areas of it. It's as rough as it gets. We did a study where we tried to see this. We tried to prime women to think about, so we had them learn about, like, imagine your friend, Sarah, tells you about an experience with her boyfriend.

And in one condition, the boyfriend and her are in a fight, and he gets so mad that he punches a wall. And then in the other condition, the boyfriend defends her against this guy trying to rob her. And we thought it was going to make, when we primed women to think of, like, the man is the aggressor. punching the wall, we thought women were going to dislike the formidable men, but they had the same preferences as normal where they were totally fine with the formidable guy. But we did find when we primed them with the protector condition, they liked all men more. So like all men. And so, but to your point, like, I think like maybe women aren't aware of those tradeoffs totally because those two men are likely to be the same person. Yeah. Yeah. The guy that's really,

really competent and prepared to go for it in the protection thing, maybe he's going to punch as well. And they weren't registering it as like, well, maybe I should use cues of formidability as a predictor of like which men would be likely to be violent. And so it was odd that they didn't show that aversion. And so I'm not sure if that link is like as explicit in women's minds. Isn't it strange as well that there's a, especially among young girls, the sort of Gen Z girls, or I guess maybe more like Gen Alpha now, if you look at the phrenology of the guys that they're trying to go for, guys are almost signaling, like, anime character levels of cuteness, the Towsley hair, the very sort of thin body. Certainly, there's the lux maxing

teens that are going in the other direction that are basically trying to speed run manhood. The soft boy. Yeah, yeah. Is that what the aesthetic is? Yeah, and I think that's because it's less threatening. Exactly, bingo, bingo. POST me two worlds. This guy, he couldn't even force himself on me if he wanted. Like, there's no reason. He's basically like a cuddly teddy bear best friend that I get to be in a relationship with. Yeah. But when you think about like what is that pushing toward, well, at some point those women are probably going to diverge away.

And I think that... What Jordan Peterson used to say about you don't want to dominate your partner. So it's not a good long-term strategy to have a partner that you're not, that you don't find threatening at all and would never protect you and that you can dominate because you don't want to be in a relationship where you're controlling. You see them as a child eventually. Yeah. Well, this was the

Who's the blonde researcher lady that did the come on face? Catherine Salmon. Fucking hero. The research on the come on face. Shout out Catherine Salmon, dude. She fucking rules. But she was talking about how after 50 Shades of Grey came out

and the dark romance genre really started to pick up steam, which obviously I contributed to. And there was a world where this was politically inconvenient, especially for the sort of feminist, side of the aisle because all of the guys that were being chosen to be the protagonists were highly dominant, highly assertive, tall, strong, masculine, millionaire, billionaire CEO people. So they tried to put more pliable. They were called golden retriever husbands or cinnamon roll husbands. And they tried to put sort of a more soft, pliable guy on the cover and also the story throughout, shock, horror, they didn't

sell well. And this is short-term mating and fantasy the same way as what a man watches in porn. The porn that I watch, might be great porn. Or the sex dolls. Might not want to be in a marriage with her, right? Tell me about sex dolls. It's your specialist subject. Yeah, I was glad to make the shift from in-cell researcher now to sex doll researchers. I've got the full gamoo, and they actually kind of connect in a way. They're the main consumer base of sex dolls. So I came across this amazing. That's an unfortunate way to open the sentence. Let me rephrase that I happened upon this amazing data set that was publicly available that had all the body specifications of sex dolls that are on the market. And this study that was published was very descriptive in nature.

And it was just describing the dimensions rather than saying why they might be that way. So I did a kind of my own analysis on it and showed that they reveal all the kind of classically predicted male mate preferences. And it's interesting because these artificial depictions of female sexual beings are like a undiluted window into men's mate preferences because these dolls, they can take on any form. They're not limited by nature. They're just literally whatever the consumer wants them to be like. And there's this.

It's not just that the creators of sex dolls make them that way and the consumers have no choice. There's this co-evolution of the market with the consumer and the producer. A good example is... They wouldn't buy something they didn't want. Exactly right. There's no market for really obese sex doll. Well, there's a smaller market, let's say. Yeah, yeah. There's a niche for everything, William. But the dolls typified all the classic evolutionary predicted, mate preferences, but except they did so in an extremely supernormal stimuli way. So have you got images. Can we pull this image up? I do have an image. I did send through my image.

Here's something that you prepared earlier from your armory of sex dolls. It reminds me there are these beetles that will try to mate with glass bottles. Yeah. And I would show it to my class and I'm like, anyone who watches porn, that's also you. Like, it's the same thing. I'm going to easily convinced. I'm going to say it. I think that Romanticy is for women, what porn is for men.

Yeah. You know, there's a great video of this dude and the woman's saying she's comparing Disney movies to real life. and she's like, the dad's gone, the dad's gone, she's alone and the dad's gone. And like all of the problems that Disney princesses had to go through. And the dude does it with like a court of thorns and roses. And it's like, he's got a big thing. He's got a big thing and something in his eye. He's got a big thing and he can fly as well.

Like there's another one that I saw of a girl talking about what I read in my Romantasy novel. And it's, I would wait until the death of a thousand sons just to get to touch your cheek one more time and then it cuts to what she's got in her real life and it's like the trash is smelling again right from a partner but unrealistic expectations for what are the key triggers for romance and attraction and stuff like that supernormal stimuli is everywhere dude even in romanticcy yeah and one of the kind of the white pills on it is that it's still really low status for the guy to be a sex style haver I mean it's very embarrassing when you start talking about your collection Chris it kind of does lower your state my collection is just deborahs

so. I just have one and it's Deborah so. Oh my god. But yeah, but for now it's low status to have sex styles, but maybe that'll change in a while. I don't think it's going to change because there's no selection. It's the same reason that guys can't flex the amount of only fans that they subscribe to. Yeah. If you can get something that everybody else has, especially in a market where getting something that no one else can get is highly valued, it's seen as desperate. If I can see you naked for the price a cheeseburger per month. That's not going to be high value. It's going to suggest, oh, I can't get this really, so I'm going to have to get it privately. But maybe a subset of men will say, ultimately, I don't care about the status now. I'll just compete. This will satisfy

my sexual urges, more and more convincingly when you integrate AI into the system. Maybe they'll just retreat into that world and video games will be their other status game. They will internet. Mail sedation, dude. Male sedation turned up to 11. Jared, I want to see these sex dolls. Where are they? While he's searching for that, I'll tell you an interesting story that I learned when writing this paper is it's actually confusing from one level of analysis why women have smaller feet than men. But it's a sexually selected feature because adult human women are the only species, the only mammal, that carries a pregnancy on two feet. And it's really dangerous to have falls. It might terminate the pregnancy. So you'd actually expect them from a biomechanical perspective to have evolved really big feet for stability. and all that. But they don't. They have really small feet and men have a preference for small feet. And it is a sign of femininity because with each age and pregnancy, women's feet get bigger and bigger. You're fucking kidding me. Yeah, so they have small feet. Okay, so if you're a slightly older woman who's had a ton of kids.

Big feet, yeah. I mean, the same is true for women's faces. So men's preferences, well, actually, like, what we view as attractive in a female face is like miottomie, looking like a child. And if you amp up those features, they're the same features that make people want to take care of babies. Also make women more attractive and people want to help women more. So they're like just selected to be neon-ness. Quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem. It's also what's missing from it, which is why for the last five years I've started every single morning with a cold glass of element in water.

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So if you're on the fence, you can buy it and try it for as long as you like. like it for any reason. They just give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box. That's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of elements most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. One other bit from the new statesman article I thought was really interesting. Women feel much more negatively towards young men than young men feel about them.

50% of women have a neutral or negative view of men. Seventy-two percent of men have a positive view of women. For all of the talk about Manosphere-inspired misogyny, three times more women hold a negative view of men than men hold of women. Only 21% of women have an actively negative view of men, but only 7% of men feel the same. Men are told that they're the problem, but then you look at the data and young women are significantly more negative toward men than men are toward women. men get dragged in the media, but are still showing up more optimistically about women than the other way around. But women are fulfilling their part of the bargain. Like if you looked at it from a trade-off perspective, like women are... Here's my beauty. I'm contributing, bringing more to the table financially and everything.

The women, if you ask them, I bet they'd say, yeah, well, we're right, they're wrong. Or we're right and they're right. But why would you hold an actively negative view of men? Well, because they see only the risks. They see the... But this is not an active... This is not a view of relationships. This is an actively negative view of men.

This seems to be much more judgmental. Men are bad in and of themselves. Men are bad over there or they're bad when they're trying to get with me. Yeah. I would think that was something to do with porn because... And I also think that explains, you know, you say that women are attracted to sort of feminine-looking anime men. I think because maybe they've grown up watching very hyper-masculine, like porn stars

being really rough and violent with women and then they go for the non-threatening mate and then also they develop this view of men based off maybe the most brutal videos and seeing it from such a young age but then you develop, you generalise that to all men. I don't understand why you'd be actively negative, 21% actively negative.

I wonder if it's that signal to other women that I'm team women. Although my student, Michaela, she's designing a scale of opposite. is it sex hatred. And what's amazing, speaking of scales, no scale exists to measure sexism in both sexes. So you can never, no one has ever compared whether men or women are more sexist. Guess which one is more sexist? Which one? Women. Women hate men, more than men hate women, totally in line with this. Which makes sense from error management perspective as well, but yeah.

Yeah. I also think something I've noticed is that young women are often, again, because self-actualization is the ultimate goal, they're often deterred from committing and relationships now more so than young men. So if young men say that they're going to get engaged young, for example, other young men are usually happy for them, you know, like they've got out of the dating game and the dating market. If women do it. But if women commit early, other women express this fear for them, like, oh, you're going to give up some of your potential. And I think that's because we think that women, we think that women had more to be liberated from. And so now if women close down their options,

we see that as suspect and we worry for them. Well, also, it depends. If you get Danny Sulkowski-pilled, it would be there's an eligible man that's prepared to protect and provide and he's now off the market. And it throws into harsh contrast the... I mean, that was the whole variety piece

about having a boyfriend is cringe now. Yeah. The girls didn't want to post about their relationship online because it made their single friends feel bad. But if their single friends feel bad, that presumably is going to show up at some point in the pushback online, and they're going to feel triggered by the fact that fuck. It is tough.

The dating world is tough, especially for young people at the moment, especially for young girls at the moment. They're trying to navigate this thing. We talk about the problems of the dating environment for men and thereby kind of miss the problems that women are facing in the dating market, including ones that are not self-imposed, but they're at least like intrinsic,

either their uncertainty, their fear, their social anxiety, the worries about letting go of their freedom and their independence. These are real things. Whether they're manipulated or manufactured by a modern environment, there's still things that you have to navigate. And that fucking sucks for women. And I think the forensic kind of stalking that groups of women do on a potential new mate, I mean, even my girlfriend, she tells me about the deep dive she did on my years-old tweets. Lucky to come out of it alive, really. Yeah, yeah.

Glad that she didn't go on your blue sky. But I know, yeah, no one does. You're so bitter about blue sky. No engagement apart from people that hate you, dude. Get off that. Self-harm. Torture for them. But, no, they really do this kind of collective condemnation, deep dive.

And everyone is a little bit cringe in some way, and you can find how they're cringe. So in some level, you have to almost accept that your new boyfriend is a little bit cringe. And that's what I told my girlfriend. We're very happy together. Embrace the crin. Yeah. Tanya, what do you reckon about icks? Have you looked at?

Have you done any research on icks and stuff like that? No, but there does, like, anecdotally, there seems to be a sex difference where, like, women get the ick and then men do not. Yeah, I wonder if it's, like, a absence of a sufficient, like, you need at some threshold of masculinity. And if you don't cross it, then, or if you indicate anything that violent, you. it. I don't know, Frey, you'd probably know what's the stronger predictor. Well, I'm not obviously an evolutionary psychologist, but I see it from a cultural perspective that you have so

many messages coming at young women to be on guard, constantly on guard, like looking for problems. And so you have a feminist message that, you know, you have to be independent. You can't let a man get in the way of your goals. But then you also have a therapeutic message, which is like be on guard for any red flags, any signs that someone is not good enough, or you're incompatible. And so I think young women might feel something like an ick. And then there's a encouraged, especially by social media, to take that feeling really seriously, which is like, if you feel some negative emotion toward your partner, you're incompatible or there's something wrong. And so I think we're just way more, we're bracing all the time to see the red flags.

And it also kind of announces, like you said, kind of allegiance to the sisterhood alliance, but also elevates their own mate value. It's like, oh, there's just a total scarcity of guys in my standards are so high. Things are so difficult. I have a real. I have a real. I have a refined palette. I wouldn't be able to eat at a fucking eye hop this evening. I always feel like that about men who say they have types. I'm like, I just don't buy it. Like, oh, I only like... Dude, this was the, you know, of all of the things that I went through on Love Island, this was one of the weirdest ones, which is that you turn up, one of the first questions

that the press during your lockdown week and you're doing interviews and all of the interviews and all of the interviews for the show, one of the first things is, what's your type? What is it you're looking for? But not what are you looking for. It's who are you looking for? and maybe that would have changed 10 years ago when I was on in fact it was more than 10 years ago when I was on Love Island now right what's your type

what do you mean like who is like oh yeah it's it's ginger girls with a blue they have to have blue eyes they can't be too blue but like if they're a little I'm like who the fuck has these weird autistic preferences for a partner because they're only talking about it physically they're never saying oh I want someone

I want someone who is really in touch with their emotions I want someone who is, they wouldn't have even said, I want someone who has these interests. Like, physically, what are you looking for? I think it's just a way from, in guys anyway, I think it's a way of just pasturing like, oh, I can be so specific and narrow my choice parameters so much because I have so many options. Yeah, and I've been always a little bit susser that I've never bought it. Yeah. Some of the new polling done, the new statesman, suggests that privileged women are the most pessimistic of all.

Women in middle class professions are less likely to say they feel valued by society and less likely to believe that if they work hard, they will succeed in life when compared to their working class counterparts. Young men are now more likely to be unemployed than young women, yet young women are far more financially cynical. 21 points less likely than young men to believe they will ever out-earn their parents. White women are more likely to feel the country is racist than their non-white women middle-class partners. You white women are awful. I wonder how much of that is like related to that finding where the only way that women could be agentic was like on behalf of someone else. So like the more successful that you are or the more that you have going in your favor, the only like way that you can be agentic is to like be so deeply caring. There are some ethnographies on adolescent girls.

And the only ones that were allowed to be popular were if they were super, super, super, nice. And so they had to like kind of overdeliver on like kindness in order to be allowed to be popular. And so it feels a little bit like that same pattern that like perhaps women do this so the the envy or resentment of other women won't bring them down. Joyce Benenson has this. Hero, friend of the show. Oh, she's the best. I'm obsessed with her. She has this paper on leveling showing that like women are more likely to use a leveling strategy where they say like, oh, we should all be equal when someone is surpassing them. And so I wonder if like once you have all of these things operating in your favor, you kind of have to be like a martyr in order to like continue on.

Otherwise people might not like you. Where do you get your victimhood points from? Yeah. I won't say who said it in our group chat, but someone replied to Rob Henderson bringing this up and said middle class hay fever, Rob, when there's no high load of parasites, people's immune system gets bored and starts looking for things to react to and you get allergies to dust. and pollen. When the middle class has no threats, their threat system gets bored and starts looking for trivial things to blow out of proportion. White privilege, gender identity, ultra-processed foods, it's all pollen. You don't have oat milk? You're traumatizing me. No explicit segregation and blatant racism? Sensitivity to microaggressions increases. That's what I was going to say is I think it's more

time to introspect and ruminate, because you have girls and young women not just picking up on icks in their partner and like scrutinizing them and looking for flaws, but then doing that to themselves. constantly pathologizing, diagnosing themselves, wondering what's wrong with them, over-analyzing their personality traits. And so I do think it's just more time and less bigger problems, like, say, having children, where you put your neuroticism, you funnel it into something productive, and instead it then turns inwards or also against your partner. But there is status afforded to women doing that, in that ecosystem, in that social system of higher education, where women are dominating now.

They're rewarded for espousing views like that. So, you know, they're showing that they know the ideology of the leading status people in their world. This is me showing fealty to the cause. I understand this thing. What's the data around men and women being demonized and seen as victims? So we have some studies showing that, like, we have this, like, kind of cognitive heuristic of victim and perpetrator. and when men and women are involved in any instance of harm, we're more likely to see women in the victim role and men in the perpetrator role. We more likely to blame men and more likely to have sympathy for women.

And so it would suggest, like, perhaps some of the reason we don't see a lot of sympathy for men is it's like cognitively harder to see them as victims. And then for women, it's just cognitively easier to see them as victims. And so we feel that sympathy. but this is, it kind of sucks for both sexes. So in the domain of harm, men are disadvantaged and they're not seen as victims. But for women in the domain, in other domains where you'd want to be the agentic person, like if you're deciding on a CEO or a president, women aren't seen as as agentic and as capable. So it's not like one sex is clearly doing better than the other. They're both facing these like. One doesn't get sympathy and one doesn't get belief. Yeah, I guess that's, one of the challenges I think that women face when they go into the workplace that they feel like if they need to be assertive and dominant, they have to temper the throttle of it a little bit for fear of being bitchy. They don't want to be a bitch, right? Or a diva. Yeah, I feel like there's like an agency warmth continuum and women are expected to be here. And if they go farther along agency,

they're seen as low in warmth, bitchy. But the same is true for men. They're higher on the agency side. And so if they show warmth by crying, they're not seen as as competent. So like, we're both encouraged to stay in our lanes. But if women show too much warmth, they're seen as pliable and not competent because it's seen that people that are a little bit more brusque are seen as higher competence, right? Warmth is negatively associated with competence, I think. And I just think this kind of protectiveness that we have about women, it just gets repackaged as oppression in a way. And I get that you could be paternalistic and overly, and a lot of kind of abuse of women does occur under the guise of for their own good and protection. But it is astounding the extent to which

we are more protective of women than men. You have to really contort yourself into a lot of knots to see the women a wonderful effect and think of it as oppression toward women. Do you know much of the stats around the women a wonderful effect, like all of the different ways that people prefer women to men? I know one study that looked at this kind of where they looked at, um, hiring discrimination, and it's gone down against women, but people overestimate its presence. And so they assume it's still there, even though the data suggests clearly it's not. So it's like, we're almost like just sensitized to detect it, even if it's not there. And even when you learn about some discrepancy, if it's against women, people are up in arms about

it, but if it's against men, it's like, no biggie. Is attractiveness underacknowledged as a kind of privilege? Oh, I think so, yeah. So on both ends of the spectrum, so the pretty privilege, which also has its costs. There's costs associated with being seen as pretty. Other women in particular, see who as more promiscuous and things like that. But there are enormous benefits across the board to being attractive, male or female. But then at the other end of the spectrum, there's enormous cost to being unattractive. And there is new research that shows that we're not readily able to recognize this form of privilege. We acknowledge other forms of privilege, but attractiveness were reluctant to acknowledge that it even exists. And we also have evidence that women are far more attractive than men. It's not just one OKCupid study. Loads of data unpublished from our lab finds this attractiveness discrepancy. There's tons of data. Women are just more attractive. So arguably, a feminine advantage in the domain of attractiveness, when that can be translated into so many resources, there are studies to show that beauty is status for women,

women defer to more beautiful women in the way that men defer to more formidable men. So this is an advantage. And it could be another thing that's actually a less acknowledged point about what's putting women off, having children, is that they hear these horror stories. They literally have to take a massive beauty hit. And that's just, there's no way around that. It's less than they've ever had to take, but it's still there. It's so funny that having kids would impact your beauty, but the effect. pretty privilege is denied and hidden.

It's like, well, if that is playing into it, you have to admit the fact that it's there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think people would acknowledge at face value that's one of the reasons. Well, you do see them sometimes women are like, I'm not sacrificing my body for that. And, you know, we have new data come out that shows that relationships having being a parent, similar levels of happiness to not being a parent, greater levels of meaning for the parents, especially for women, but lower relationship satisfaction for the parents.

So it does take a toll on the relationship, but certainly on the woman's mate value thereafter, having the kids, the toll it takes on her beauty. So you can kind of see why women, if there's all these benefits, they can translate their beauty, which is their status, into, they'd be reluctant to sacrifice all that. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of what we were talking about before, which is that I think social media platforms have incentivized women to see themselves less as human and more as products. And so their life becomes about marketing themselves and optimizing themselves. And so I think, yeah, having a child disrupts being the perfect pristine product.

But then we're in this really weird scenario where don't you want to look good in order to reproduce and have children at base level? But now Instagram comes along and Instagram gives women so much dopamine and status that then that becomes their higher priority. Yeah, because it's a misconstitutional. about evolutionary psychology that we have these fitness optimising mechanisms. We're adaptation executioners. So it's not like, it's just that behaviors that over evolutionary time would have resulted in more offspring are passed on. So women still have the desire to have sex for the most part. People don't come into the world with, oh, I really want to increase my reproductive success. I want to have offspring. But they do want to be seen as a high mate value to others,

have sexual urges, and over time, those things would have resulted in reproductive success. So now it's a bit of a mismatch. Joyce Benenson, she has this cross-cultural study where she shows, like, among young people, one of their primary goals is finding a romantic partner, but one of their lowest goals is having kids. And so she makes this argument that, like, we probably evolved a desire to attract a mate, but we didn't need to evolve the desire to have kids, because so long as you were having sex. You were having kids. You didn't have reliable contraception. Yeah. It's a hugely evolutionary

novel technology that's really just thrown the whole thing up in there. I think also with young women, sometimes the relationship becomes an accessory to display online. What was your line about that in the episode that we did a couple of years ago? It was relationships are just brand partnerships now. Yeah. Yeah. It's something to display. And so the characteristics that maybe you would select for before social media are very different. Now it's presenting it to other women and how other women will react, seeing your launch of a partner online. Yeah, the soft launch. Yeah. They're not about this. 60% of romantic relationships begin as friendships, this is making the world harder to date in? Well, given that there's fewer and fewer cross-sex friendships, I think it should be celebrated

that this is an avenue towards relationship formation. And, you know, the age-old question, of can men and women ever just be friends? We've just got a new paper accepted that shows that we're called it courtship and cross-sex friendship where men provision financially to their cross-sex friendships that they're interested in mating with. 50% of people say they have romantic interest in a cross-sex friend. The same number have had sex with at least one, particularly young people. So I do think it's a good pathway to relationships and if you formed more cross-sex friendships. It would be a direct route to relationships because attraction grows over time. You get, you know, proximity breeds intimacy, but also you get to display a lot of the

same qualities that make for a good mate, make for a good friend too. And men and women select friends who have the same qualities that they want in a mate. So protection, physical attractiveness, resources. So it's a good pathway. But the secondary route is it broadens your networks. And it also helps you learn about cross-sex mind reading. So it's very hard to actually, you know, come to the boneheaded beliefs of some of the red pill, black pill world online. If you actually have in real life female friends that you know kind of disprove a lot of what you hear. I'm going to quote you back to you here. William Costello polled 527 heterosexual and bisexual people are opposite sex friendships ever truly platonic. 81% of women said yes, only 58%

of men said yes. Women were three times more likely than men to say their friendship was purely on. So I think it's a little, women hear that and they sometimes get very upset that to learn that their male friends see them as nearly half of your guy friends are trying to sleep with you. Would, well, not necessarily. It's just that they kind of would. So, and this is the kind of misconception that women maybe hear that and they think, oh, so he only wants to sleep at me. And it's not quite the case. It's just that he probably would. Yeah. When people hear about this, to the first time and they doubt it. I always say, just try it. Just try when you're out for a few drinks the next time. Do you remember that one in The Economist, a study of Americans finds that

in platonic couples, men are far more likely than the woman to find their friends sexy and far more likely to think that she finds them attractive to. Indeed, a man's assessment of how much his female friend fancies him matches how much he fancies her and is entirely unrelated to how she really feels. Clearly men are prone to wishful thinking. Yeah, yeah, well, men need to kind of pluck up the courage some way. Everyone wants to be asked out more. That was your thing. That's true also.

So, you know, on the one hand, women want to be approached more, but then are kind of unhappy to learn that their opposite sex friends are interested in them. But I do think women keep some opposite sex friends as backup mates too. Oh, there's certainly, you've got loads of data around backup mates. Come on. But yeah, I just think ultimately we should celebrate

and try and cultivate more opposite sex friendships because it could be a pathway to proper... I wonder if, on some, social media that disincentivises opposite sex friendships because you live in different worlds completely. So we were talking earlier and you hadn't heard of influences that like shape my childhood. How did I not know Moella? Zoella. Whatever.

Zohela. Do you know Zohela? I've heard of it. There we go. Sorry, you're an avid subscriber of Zola. Get it with the program. Did you get ready for today with Zoella? No, I didn't.

And you try on haul from Jim Sharne? I know that things. What happens? But it's like Zoella, but also FaceTune. FaceTune is a huge app among young women where they can edit themselves. I hadn't heard of it again. So I think one of the statistics in my book is like 70 or 80% of young women wouldn't post on Instagram without face tuning themselves first.

It makes me so relieved to hear this. Every photo should have that. Yeah, yeah. But it's been downloaded like hundreds of millions of times. It's a core memory from my childhood. But then, so I write this whole book about social media and the experience for young women. But then for young men, they have a completely different childhood. So it can be a young man that grew up me and me.

Roonescape. I did play Roonscape. You played Roonscape. You said that you're a bit more of a... I'm a bit more masculine. Yeah. But yeah, they will not even recognise things that were huge influences on young women. And so I wonder if we try and be friends with the opposite sex, it's like a whole different world because algorithms are suggesting.

You already didn't have that much in common and now you've got even less. Interesting. Yeah. What else? brandishing some graph I can see that you've got on your phone there. Did you find that sex style yet? I have a question about the opposite sex friends. Is there a sex difference in the degree to which our opposite sex friends match our mate preferences?

Because if there's not, if both men and women are like designing their opposite or selecting opposite sex friends based on their mate preferences, then when women say, oh, I'm not attracted to my opposite sex friends, is that true? I've seen data around this. I've seen data that shows that the same traits that you look for in a partner are the ones that you look for in your opposite sex friends. I've seen this. Yeah. So if men and women do that to the same degree, then is that really the case when women are saying? They can't be so shocked. Yeah, like, what are the odds that like all the male friends?

The tall, handsome guy that looks exactly the same as my actual boyfriend thought that. Oops. But it's kind of like from a jealousy perspective, you know, you can see why it. would be really jealousy-inducing for a man for his mate to have opposite-sex friends or work colleagues who are sharing, you know, a mission together. Like you hear of these things of women calling someone their work husband. And like, disaster tactic. Don't never say this is a bad idea. So I do think that men are inclined to kind of pump the brakes on women's careers for a mate-guiding perspective, you know, that's kind of, and an opposite-sex friendship perspective as well. One more thing on the looks-smacking,

Chris is I thought it was interesting that did you see the Australian guy who interviewed clavicular. Yeah, I was going to say he's more effortlessly good looking. Yeah, I think that's true that for men to be handsome, it needs to be like they didn't try. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I've done a little bit of a deep dive into that guy's Instagram and he certainly tries and he certainly knows he's a handsome guy and whatever. But he's definitely pulling off that effortlessness much more. But it's interesting that the commentary, around him being, clavicular being mobbed by this more handsome Australian interviewer, it's kind of proving clavicular's philosophy exactly correct.

He's like, you're saying that he's more handsome, so he mocks me. That's my whole philosophy. I'm exactly right. It's all about looks. Why do you spend time with people like that? All right. Have a nice day. Are you trying to, I see you want to make this political.

Too bad I didn't have time to look into anything about potentially who your wife cheated with. But don't try to go down that a lot of questioning with me because I'm not doing any political I'm married. Yes, really. I was simply out of the assing because obviously. Maybe you got a look max then. So I could teach you about looks max and then maybe you could switch that up. But thanks for the time.

Appreciate the interview. I mean, look, they did light them quite nicely, which was good. It was definitely quite a sultry. If that turned into gay porn, I wouldn't have been surprised. But yeah, and he proves this whole thesis right for people's reaction to be like, he's the more handsome one. It's like, yeah, you're lionizing looks. I thought we weren't judging people based on looks.

I thought that locksmacting was stupid and it didn't really matter. Exactly right. But isn't he more handsome because his demeanor, he's playful and he's smirking? I feel like clavicular just looks so tense. and neurotic almost. Called autism. Yeah. I think we're specifically

does those things on purpose like stages the walk out for attention. Yeah, yeah, of course he does. But yeah, that effortlessness, I do think is more attractive to women. Well, the same thing is true to men as well. Think about the difference between Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter.

Sabrina Carpenter is a female designed for the female gaze and Sydney Sweeney is a female design for the male gays. Are gay male gays. Yes, correct. Bingo. And yeah, it's why is it that men love Sydney Sweeney and hate Sabrina Carpenter? And why is it that women love Sabrina Carpenter and hates Sydney Sweeney?

There is research to show women hate women with big breasts as well. They're really. Well, if you see very small, very dull, very big eyes, very, like, you know, small body, big head. Meotness. Neatness. Sabrina does exactly what you've described, Daniel, though, the for the girls. Whereas, you know, Sydney Sweeney is very much for the guys. boys even says it in her Instagram posts and things.

So yeah, and I feel like women's fashion is like that where it's like, it's almost like you can tell immediately who someone is signaling to because women's will be like the baggiest thing you could possibly find and that's the trendy look. And it's like not revealing their body at all. I'm sure men hate it. Yeah.

Alex Cooper on Calla Daddy, they're always in big hoodies. They're always sort of quite souchy, very cozy. I do think the pick me in soul is really. really sort of drilled in to women of my generation where it's like it's not even if you're saying something that men would approve of or looking a way that men would approve of, but anything like masculine coded. Like even me just saying I'm interested in masculine podcasts rather than feminine podcasts, that's like a pick me statement. And so I feel like it changes not only how

women present themselves, but their mannerisms and their actual temperament and personality becomes shaped towards what women expect of them because they don't want to be a pick me. Yeah. It's such a clever form of intersexual competition to be like, don't be seen to be trying to appeal to men. Isn't that the same as like a cuck? Like men are doing it too. Simps shaming. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And sluts shaming and men are simp shame. Yeah. Anyone who appeals to directly, that's cheating. The game theory of slut shaming fucking blows my mind. I learned this inmate by Jeffrey and Tucker. And basically what slut shaming does is it's a price enforcement mechanism to ensure that the price of

sex doesn't drop below a level that most women would be happy with. So if William's prepared to give out blowjobs on the second date, but I want to wait until the fifth date, I have to lower my confidence. I know, I'm sorry. And that means that I need to lower my price. So it's in my interests to raise them up, especially given I would be able to undercut it. If I make everybody else wait longer to put out and then I can come in as like the bargain discount, that seems like a good deal. But what is it that's happening? It's women giving away what is seen by other women as one of their most valuable resources for negotiating with men, sex, giving it away too freely. So I started thinking about, okay, what's the equivalent for men?

What do men give away? And I think it's resources. So if women are prepared to give away sex without commitment and that gets castigated by other women, men who are prepared to give away resources without sex get castigated by other men, men who are prepared to give away resources without sex get castigated by other men. That's why men don't like OnlyFans women because they are extracting from the male dating pool the thing that if they weren't able to do it through OnlyFans, they might have to go on a date. Maybe with me. And that would mean that I would be in with a shot.

This is why I get attacked both ways because I'll get called an internal misogynist and then men will come to my defence and then they'll get called simps. Exactly right. That's four things in action, yeah. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I fucking love you all. You're all brilliant. Wege, what have you got coming out? You've got a book? Yes, just a bit of cool girls. My substack, freyat india.coma.kour. Daniel, what have you got to push? Anything? A new paper called The Greater Female Vulnerability Hypothesis. It's still getting published, so not yet out.

Okay. William. My blue sky. Just follow me on it. next. You'll see lots of fire poles and some exciting stuff coming out. Follow me on Google Scholar to see the academics. Unreal. Guys, I appreciate you all. We've christened Evolutionary Psychology Roundtable, getting in loads of trouble in the new studio. I appreciate you all. All right. Goodbye, everybody. This was fun. Yeah. Awesome. Love it.

Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, another one that I know you love, it's just here. If you're wanting to read more, you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out. And that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List, a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found. Fiction and nonfiction, and there's real life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it. And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillex.com slash.

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