Modern Wisdom - Why Sydney Sweeney Has Two Big Targets On Her Chest - William Costello - #1152

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

William Costello is a psychology researcher and Ph.D. student specialising in evolutionary psychology. Expect to learn why the internet is in an uproar of Sydney Sweeney's latest ad campaign, why so many women vehemently hate Sydney Sweeney and not other creators who do similar stunts, why Sydney became so polarising in the feminist movement, what the double standard Sydney Sweeney is held to says about the modern feminist agenda and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get the brand new Whoop 5.0 and your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Extra Stuff: See me live in the UK & Ireland this October: ⁠https://chriswilliamson.live 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

People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that. Me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left, and you can get yours now at chris Williamson.com. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it.

So if you're a fan of everything, Modern Wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland, Chris Williamson.com. I feel like I bring you in when there is a evolutionary psychology-informed furor happening. And obviously our third guest today, Sydney Sweeney, has a big natural pair of problems that she's embroiled herself in. Before we get into that, can you just make it known? What was that feminism, feminist award that your research team won a while ago? A while ago, I myself won an award, the Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society, FEPS Award.

for a poster I did at a conference a couple of years ago, but it's nice to have that in the back pocket when I'm accused of sexism or whatever. I mean, not that that happens that often. It is me flagrantly putting your legitimate feminist bona fides out there ahead just in case we get shouted at today. So, look, for the people that didn't see it, Sidney did an ad for a betting company called Novig Sports Betting Company,

prediction market adjacent thing, but it's exclusively for sports. and she does an ad and I guess we probably should start off by watching the ad yeah it's for research purposes you know sports prove it

Novick is just sports so they wanted to show just sports you can trade this sport and this sport how about this this sport too

or this? Sports, sports, sports, sports, sports, sports. You can't trade this. I just look at here. No betting on wars or deaths and no politics. Just you, your takes and sports. Yeah, so the internet responded as in the most predictable way, I think. anyone that's surprised

who can call out that there seems to be some double standards going on here, that it's not reflective of what was actually meant, that they're pointing that eye in the wrong direction, there is nothing surprising

to me about that. Were you surprised at all? No, I mean, she has a significant stake in this company, so she wants it to be a success. It's obviously geared towards young men. They're the target market

for any sports betting company. So she understands the oldest maxim in advertisement or marketing that sex sells. And she backs herself on that front to be the face or body of her own brand. It makes sense. But hearing some of the backlash, I mean, I heard an Irish radio presenter. I can't think of his name. But he claimed that she in 40 seconds has set female sport back 40 years. And I hear that, and I think, what an incredibly sexist, low kind of view of female sports. Well, that they're so tenuously held in popularity that a girl with big titties is able to undo it in an ad.

All undone with cleavage, yeah. It's like, that's ridiculous. That's absurd to suggest it, especially when there's other bigger issues threatening female sports, trans athletes. It's very interesting, very interesting that nobody has an issue identifying who the women in sports are during this conversation. Absolutely, yeah. And these commentators were presumably silent about the trans women in sports issue as well. Yeah, the New York Times had this piece where one of the quotes, the reason Sydney-Sweeney's advertisement has infuriated so many women in sport is that if there is a group that has managed to genuinely force change in the perception of what women are capable of since the turn of the century, of what it means to be a strong and powerful woman to be a girl

without prostrating to the male gaze, it is women in sport. Pretty good reply to that. It's pretty amazing to watch them suddenly pretend to be offended by risque images. These people have insisted for years that the full-blown prostitution of women is legitimate and empowering. They've adopted countless graphical, sexual, female rap and pop songs as anthems for their movement. Now a naked woman in an inversement is setting women back, not even the slightest attempt to be consistent. And I do think that one of the first things people saw was, hang in a second. I thought it was my body my choice. I thought empowerment and the sexual revolution was something that was giving women freedom as opposed to taking it away. Most of these commentators will probably be

pro sex work, pro only fans. They'll certainly be pro female financial independence. And I didn't know this until today. Sidney Sweeney isn't an ambassador for that company. She is an owner. Yeah. She part owns that company. Yeah. So she has legitimate skin in the game. and upside enticement, a justification for doing it. She's profiting from every single one of these. So, yeah, it does seem like the modern conception of what a desirable woman is supposed to be is kind of coming into conflict with, yeah,

but we don't want you to do it that way. Yeah, or if you're the wrong person, the very same act of self-sexualization can be seen as empowering if it's the right person in the in group in your tribe, but if it's someone who's coded as in any way right wing or even just not sufficiently woke, for want of a better word, then the same behaviors are kind of criticized.

And it's remarkable how puritanical and conservative some of the criticism has been, how sex negative it's been as soon as it's just targeted. Put your fucking clothes back on, who do you think you are? Literally, yeah. Yeah, very strange. I mean, I'm trying to like steal man the case for why this is bad.

It's kind of hard to do because it seemed like this weird raw shark test that I failed where lots of people that had a problem with it seemed to assume that Sidney Sweeney was saying this is what women's sports is like as opposed to this is a gambling app and you should go and use it, regardless of the gender of the person that's playing the sport.

Yeah, and then also the double standard of literally last week there were viral videos going where the tennis player, the Spanish guy, taken off his shirt, and women literally, the camera panning over to them taking out their phones, married women. Yeah, with the wedding ring. As you do, congratulations, by the way. Williams, Williams engaged. Everybody give him a round of applause.

There we go. You fucking made it out. Dude, you got escape velocity. Yeah, out of the infel life. In cell research is no longer research. Well, you are not yet, not until you've made it down the aisle. But yeah, very strange to see that. And then a lot of the pushback is trying to steal, man it.

The reason I struggle is that a lot of the pushback was you are saying something about women's sports, as opposed to you are saying something about women in gambling. I don't quite get even the you are upsetting women back in sports thing because ESPN has done a naked issue over and over. There's like countless examples. Ronda Rousey was naked on the front cover. If it's Serena Williams or Venus Williams was naked on the front cover, cover of it. There was a chick that I saw, a blonde girl with a full back piece, looking real strong with an amputated leg and a prosthetic limb climbing naked. There was an entire, Megan Rapino

did it, the female soccer player from America. There was this entire lineup. It might have been, was it the female USA team, were all naked back to back? And you go, okay, so what is going on here? And then the thing that really struck me, Basically, women have done everything they can in sports to avoid the male gays or to escape the male gaze. Like, that was the one that was the most insane. The only reason anyone is watching female sports is because of the male gays. Like, who is the biggest consumer of female sports? Men.

By miles. Yeah. By miles. Yeah. So to steal man, the argument, you could make the claim that it's okay for female athletes to self-sexualize themselves. if a byproduct of their being in the sport is cultivating a very sexy body, they themselves can use that

to attract people to watch the sport. Could be argued that Sidney is trivializing women's sport on that grounds or it's just plain old tribalism, but I do think there's something deeper going on. She's not pretending to be a sports star. And to steal man it, okay, let's say that she's wearing the outfit, right?

Like she's got the kit on, so it's both, off, largely, but like some of it is on. therefore she's lopping as a sports star of some kind. Let's say that that's the case. You're okay, but still the priority of the ad is not around her playing sports. It's around the gambling. So if you were a sports star, like LeBron, I think, did he do Calci or Polymarket recent? I think he did Polymarket.

And if we found out that LeBron is somebody that you could bet on wasn't betting, you go, ah, well, he's misrepresenting the illustrious community of betters out there. The gambling people, he's not being, he's not sufficiently representative. So, okay, but like that is, I'm like nitpicking because I want to like try and point out some of the hypocrisy. Is there any way really to quantify if Sydney Sweeney is damaging the perception of female athletes or setting them back 100 years? Like, how could that even happen? Yeah, like extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but they're very flippant with these massive claims. And like I say, it's a low opinion of women's sport and how far it's come.

I'm from Ireland, one of our greatest athletes of all time, Katie Taylor, selling out Crow Park, one of the best female boxers of all time. I don't think her achievements are undone now by Sidney-Sweeney. Like that's just a preposterous claim. And yeah, it's just absurd. And it's kind of like the fixation on these micro topics. Another example that's kind of somewhat related is at home in Ireland, Michael O'Leary, He's gotten trouble recently for some flippant comments in the media.

He's the owner of Ryanair and he's always very kind of outspoken in the media. And he described other airlines' prices as raping the consumer lately. And, you know, crisis organizations are just up in arms about this and he won't apologize and they're demanding he apologize and he won't. He says, no, it's no laughing matter. it's a you know I use that word to describe a terrible thing what they're doing I don't demean the actual crime and just in the same week that they're fixating on that a girl in my hometown of Galway there's stories about her having been ganged by two migrants and total silence on that

story and the selected outrage yeah it feels like their focus on the wrong thing it's the same with the sport and the trans athletes like where was your outrage then Yeah, I do think that the counter reaction we're seeing could be more damaging to women than the ad itself. Women are being made to look in a month-long period where they've already been kind of emotional and hysterical in some corners of the internet with Lindsay Clancy. They're not looking that serious now. They're looking quite emotional. Would it have been better question? Would it have been better if it was a female athlete who was hot and right-wing coded adjacent still?

Like Sophie Cunningham. You know who that is? Tall, blonde, like, quite hot girl that plays basketball. It's six foot four, probably. And she did a thing, I think, at the UFC. I think she's come out against sort of transathletes. She definitely presents us right-coded. She's at all of those sorts of events.

If she'd done it, I don't think that the pushback would have been much less. It would have been different, but it would have been much less. It would have been about the sexualization of sports. The legitimacy angle wouldn't have been. sort of laughed at, but I still think that that would have been heavily pushed back against. Yeah, I think you're right. It just zeroes in on their tribal psychology that's activated. It's okay when one of our group does it, but not okay. If someone who hasn't expressed their bona fides of the ideology enough, then it's not okay. All right, I've laid out the cultural landscape as

best I can. I brought you in so that you can explain psychologically what's going on, sort of the evolutionary underpinnings of how intracultural competition, female co-oational psychology, all of that stuff works in order to cause this to happen and to keep happening because it happened last time with the American Eagle ad. I'm sure it'll happen again in future as she just continues to like basically use other people's ire as exit liquidity for her own bank account, which is kind of hilarious. So why do women hate Sydney Sweeney? So there are two big reasons why women hate Sydney Swede.

Sweeney. No. There are three evolutionary psychology ideas that are central to my take on why Sidney Sweeney specifically incurs so much ire from women in particular. So the three concepts that we'll go through are intracultural competition, which we've probably heard a lot of people talk about in this context, sexual economics theory, and the overlapping concept of female co-oitional psychology. So they're group psychology, how they make friendships. and how that's different to men's. So the first one, intracual competition, it's pretty straightforward. Once you know the mate preferences of each sex, that sets the ground rules for the zones of conflict

and for the kind of terms of intracual competition. So the types of things that each men and women get jealous or insecure or anxious about, about rivals are rivals that embody the mate preferences of their preferred sex. So men get jealous and insuffer. insecure and anxious around rich, formidable men who embody the preferences of women. I have a hypothesis that men get jealous around funny men, which I call the green-eyed giggle hypothesis, but maybe we can put a pin in that and come back to it later. But women are shown in the research to get jealous about younger, younger-looking and more

beautiful women, which are the key preferences of men. So Sidney-Sweeney obviously is very, very attractive young woman. But there are lots of attractive young women. Yes. Right? So why Sydney Sweeney specifically? Yeah. The reason is that she aggressively prostrates herself or kind of presents herself as appealing

specifically to the male gaze without first coming in and kind of assuring all the other women that she's not a threat, that she's not doing it for men, that she, she is actually specifically coming out and saying, I am for the male gays. She puts Instagram posts up saying this is for the boy. all of this and that just cues a threat to other women. If you think in terms of our evolutionary psychology, why women evolved an intracial competition style of being kind of more quiet about it. Subdued, yeah. Sidney-Sweeney violates all those norms.

Women are meant to compete. It's very costly for women to make enemies. Throughout ancestral history, they are responsible for, the well-being of their offspring. So if they die, if they incur physical violence, their offspring likely dies as well, whereas for men, they can get into physical alterations and it's not as direct of a threat to their fitness. So this led to the selection of intra, kind of social adeptness in women who are very good at kind of indirect competition.

So if you're going to compete with another woman, you need to, you can't. be so direct about it's not overt it's much more covert it's much more subliminal yeah it's done by derogating what you actually that'd be interesting what is it that tends to be attacked in women against women and in men against men so women use things like feigning concern about another woman so that they're not seen as having attacked her it's seen out of oh the goodness of my heart i'm looking out for your well-being or something they will attack things they'll derogate stuff that represents the woman's mate value to men. So specifically with Sidney,

you see a lot of women online saying, it's not intracial competition, it's not jealousy, she just seems like the type of girl who would steal your boyfriend. And that's literally signaling to all the other women. This girl, you know, makes herself appealing to the male gaze so aggressively

and so directly without concern for what women think. she prioritizes the male priority over our group priority. She has to pay a cost from the sisterhood from the group now. So she will, in terms of coordinated condemnation, we all shun her. But also, you're telling other men, you think that this blonde, attractive girl with big boobs is your dream partner. But what I'm telling you is, because of the way that she's presenting, her fecundity, her level of loyalty to you isn't going to be what you dream. of being the bad boy that she's just the good girl for,

but she's a bad girl for everybody, and you don't want to be with that. It's like implicitly diminishing her long-term mate value and implying she has short-term mate value only, which most women don't want to only appeal to men's short-term mating psychology. Well, what's interesting is guys will say to another guy, when shit talking another guy, like, you're a pussy. They'll say something about his level of formidable,

something about his level of sort of status. He's a bum. Yeah, how well liked he is, what his prospect are like for the future. Whereas women, if they are shit-talking, which will tend to be behind the scenes as opposed to someone's face. But if they are doing that, it's going to much more be about this girl's sort of sexual morality, also about their looks.

She's getting old. She can't do her hair. Because those are two of the things that men really care about. What does the girl, what does the woman look like? and is she going to be loyal? Yeah, so the key thing is that Sidney has pretty aggressively and vocally signaled to other women and to men

that she is prioritizing men over the group, women as a group. So women are punishing her for that. And they organize this coordinated condemnation, that she's out. She must pay a social cost for doing that. The other key idea that's kind of relevant and kind of similar is the idea of sexual economics theory.

And the idea there is that if you think about sex or sexual access as a resource, there's different levels of cost that men typically have to pay to get it. And the highest cost is marriage and commitment or in the lowest cost is, you know, promiscuous short-term sex. And women kind of as a group, they're kind of like the cartel with the cost of sex. They have to kind of police each other on who's offering it for what. So women might really feel annoyed about what Sidney Sweeney is doing and think, oh, if she's appealing to the men so specifically and doing exactly what men want instead of what women want, then maybe I have to do that too. Because if everyone in your town or in your village starts doing that, then that will become the expectations for you. So that plays into it a little bit too. Yeah, the price enforcement mechanism of slut shaming is basically the same thing.

if we're two women and I give out blowjobs on the second date, but you don't give them out until the sixth date, I have a degree of competitive advantage in the marketplace. Therefore, it's in your interests. If you want to keep the price of sex to be expensive, it's in your interests to enforce a shame mechanism on anyone that is too freely giving with their sex because that means that they need to raise the price, as opposed to lowering the price. It means you don't want to be sort of beaten to the,

beaten to the jump. I had this theory a long time ago that the price enforcement mechanism for slut shaming is the same thing. The equivalent for men is the price enforcement mechanism for simp shaming. Absolutely. Women are giving away sex without commitment and men are giving away commitment without sex. Yeah. And I think that this is so beautifully mirrored. It's really nice when we see this. So like guys will call another guy a simp because if you withhold loyalty and resources until a woman gives you sexual access. That means she has to give you sexual access in order for you to trade off your loyalty and resources, which means if some guy is prepared to give loyalty and resources without sex, the price of your loyalty and resources is immediately brought

down. And if you don't like the example, talking about sex and blow jobs and stuff on a second date, sometimes rubs people up the wrong way, if you don't like that example, just invert it, make it about loyalty and resources, and you go, okay, it's the same dynamic, it's just a little bit less icky. Yeah, and we see this in sex ratio research, when the scarcer sex in any sex ratio in a city or a country. They have more bargaining power to get what they want on the mating market and they have higher standards for their mate preferences and they also shift a sexual strategy. So when men are scarce, men and women shift to a more promiscuous short-term mating strategy. When women are scarce and they're the rare commodity, they have greater bargaining power

in that sex ratio mating ecology, then men become more commitment-oriented. So it's a pretty well-established finding. This episode is brought to you by WOOP. Most people treat recovery like it's optional, but unlike politicians, data doesn't lie. How you recover is literally going to determine how good your next day is going to be. And Woop tracks all of it. Sleep, strain, heart rate, recovery. It's like dog the bounty hunter, but instead of criminals, it's tracking down your bad habits. All of this data gets pulled into a dashboard that actually tells you what to do with the information. And now the brand new Woop 5.0, 7% smaller. It's got two weeks of battery life, shows you how faster you're actually aging. It comes with hormonal insights for women managing the cycle or

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Tendencies were selected for like leveling, preferring that there's no contest, that we share the prize. Women are uneasy about taking credit for a victory. They prefer to play down their achievements, whereas men, they actually, they love there to be rules of the game. Even from very young ages, men and boys need there to be a winner and a loser. You need to keep score during the game or it's no good. And this has come through in the work of Joyce Benenson, Marianne Fisher, Tanya Reynolds. It's pretty well established that this is fundamental differences in how men and women compete and what they prefer. So Sidney Sweeney is kind of coming in all guns blazing, saying, I'm going to compete aggressively and prioritize what men want without prostrating herself and saying, oh, I'm not a, I'm one of the girls.

So take the opposite example is someone like Sabrina Carpenter, who self-sexualizes a lot, but aggressively signals that she's kind of more team girl. She's a girl's girl, and she writes songs about men being man-child. all of this stuff. She's very obviously signaling that she's doing it for girls rather than what was that tweet that we had that was a quote tweet of someone calling out why it is that women hate Sydney Sweeney, hate Sydney Sweeney but love Sabrina Carpenter. There was a tweet. So this is Sydney Sweeney with the football balanced on the back of her boots, naked line on a bench and Sabrina Carpenter on the front cover of Rolling Stone in a pair of thigh-high stockings and it says Sabrina Superstar. Sydney Sweeney is a puta and Sabrina Carpenter is a diva pop

and the quote here is the difference is that Sabrina does it because she feels good about herself doing it not encompassing our gender in hypersexualization for male pleasure. That is literally saying one is for the girls the other is for the boys. Yeah. Even though boys will enjoy it just all the same pretty much, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, click right. Yeah, exactly. The difference is one is clearly for male attention. The other is cunty.

It's pretty obvious. Sabrina Carpenter caters to the female gaze and takes pride in her sexuality. Swastick a Sweeney caters to the male gaze and wants men to validate her sexuality. I mean, it's like clearly a man's brain believes that everything is the same. Sabrina is sexualizing herself and it is in the world of art and entertainment where nudity is relatively normal. Meanwhile, Sydney is promoting a campaign that denigrant. greats female athletes this. No, it fucking doesn't. Of the two art forms, one being gambling,

and the other being art and entertainment, certainly if you want to say, that is so derogating to arts and entertainment to say, oh yeah, you're in the same league as gambling. Yeah. And also, so if you self-sexualized to fight the patriarchy and that's why you say you're doing it, then that's fine and believed for the girls. If you don't, if you don't signal to the female group that you're one of them and you care about their concerns. And that's another key thing is women must very vocally signal to other women that they care about the concerns

they have as well and signal that they're an empathetic, caring person. So Sidney Sweeney has never come out and aggressively fought the patriarchy. She's not signaled about Palestine or whatever the, you know, causes that women are caring about a lot at the time. In fact, she's done quite the opposite. And she's kind of signaled

that she cares about things men care about. And that can be seen as leaving women as vulnerable because the things men care about sometimes can leave women exploited. So maybe that's how they feel towards her. Yeah, there was this Stephanie girl who wrote a really interesting tweet that said, Sidney Sweeney is the funniest stress test feminism has ever encountered because I thought it was the patriarchy that reduces women to their bodies,

denies them individual agency and imposes rules on female sexuality, based on what everyone else thinks women ought to be. Meanwhile, Sydney is independently wealthy, produces her own projects, owns businesses, chooses to monetize her own sexuality, gains power from doing it, and appears completely uninterested in anyone's permission. And somehow, the feminist response is thousands of women

materializing to explain that her body is actually a collective political resource and she has a responsibility to use it in ways they approve of because otherwise she's set in women back 100 years. Fucking lull. So congratulations, ladies. You defeated the patriarchy, becoming an enormous decentralized committee of women policing another woman's sexuality,

scolding her for appealing to men and reminding her, the individual choices must remain subordinate to what is best for women as a class. Perhaps the funniest part is that the men supposedly enforcing this grand patriarchal system are mostly standing off to the side like, Sydney seems great, let a cook, while the feminist liberation committee is furiously drafting new regulations for what she's allowed to do with her own gigantic knockers. Incredible operation, you guys are fucking killing it, extremely boss babe, very liberation, no notes.

Yeah, absolutely. It's puritanical in style policing the sexuality, exactly like I said, with sexual economics theory. It all hangs together nicely. Yeah. Why is it, I guess the shared prizes thing in the downplaying, people might not necessarily realize that, like women are celebrated when they have accomplishments, but they tend to not be so celebrated by themselves. The best example that I can think of is when in school, girls used to get good grades and you would receive them in a class or whatever if they got if they'd scored really well or they were the top of the class or immediately oh you know I just got lucky it wasn't me so very humble in a way but what's the just why is that the case why would they not want to have

their accomplishments self-promoted at least well given that it was so important for them to stay alive and not make enemies throughout ancestral history the tall poppy syndrome of not wanting to show that you're above anyone else or that you considered yourself above the other women, it's a way of kind of ingratiating yourself to the other girls by saying, I'm not a threat, I'm one of you, I'll prioritize the group over myself as an individual. But yeah, you see it all the time. The first thing women do when they meet each other is tell each other how beautiful they look and then deny how beautiful they look.

Oh, would you stop? No, I've gained so much weight. I don't. I look terrible. Not like you. Nothing like you. Even in their Instagram post, you see it back and forth.

And another thing is in self-disclosure, so when women share negative information about each other, and you see this on Call or Daddy podcast a lot, actually, where women are kind of encouraged to share some embarrassing story about, oh, what a whore I was in college or whatever it might be. And it's done to put the other girls at ease and make them feel better about themselves. And if you notice that in a female group,

if one woman doesn't do that, declines the offer, the invitation to share something negative about herself, she will be shunned. That will be seen as, oh, she's too full of herself. She has, she's violated the code of, oh, I've shared something negative about myself. Mutual self-castigation. Absolutely, yeah. So it's all to make sure no one person, women are actually quite groupish in that way in their

coalitional psychology. They're kind of very consensus-oriented. They don't like norm violators. And that's what you're seeing here. Yeah, it is really fascinating to think about how much this is women policing the sort of behavior and body of someone that could have been sort of standing for their cause. Because when you read off the litany of things, self-powered entrepreneur, sexuality out there, like for the boys. Like, you know, this soft bigotry of male expectations idea that I've got, which is that there is a certain class of girl boss feminism that struggles to think about. female empowerment in any other way than kind of classic high status mailness, that like,

it's got lots to say about the breadwinner and the hunter and the CEO and surprisingly little to say about the mother and the carer and the homemaker. Yeah. Okay, well, if you were to create in a lab, the canonical sexual liberation fueled CEO type that is into sports, it would be Sydney, Sweeney. Yeah. And it's kind of an example of gamma bias as well, when the gendered nature of something is Sean a light on. You see this with, it's kind of like heteropessimism. Basically, Sidney appeals to male sexual psychology, therefore it's problematic. Whereas if she appealed for her own female sexuality, that's fine. I'm writing a paper at the moment called the mismeasurement of men, and it's all about scales that seek to kind of pathologize men about sexual entitlement,

sexism, or toxic masculinity. And so many of the items that they use to measure these attitudes in men are absurd things like if that if a woman said them, it would be seen as fantastic and celebratory. So for example, I deserve to have my sexual needs gratified by my partner. If a woman said that, she would be applauded and seen as, oh, fighting for closing the orgasm gap and yes, you get it, whatever. Whereas if men do it, it's seen as sexual entitlement. So it's another example is we're discussing benevolent sexism the other day. And I brought up the example of, well, women are benevolently, benevolent sexism is basically kind of infantilizing women by liking them in such a way and pedestalizing them that makes them infantilized. So, for example, taking, doing everything for

them so they never learn how to do anthem themselves. That's the argument. Whereas you'd never reverse that argument and say, well, a woman enjoying cooking every day for her husband, and doesn't let him cook. Is she infantilizing him? When he's the benefactor of her benevolent sexism, he would actually be described as weaponizing incompetence. Whereas you've never, when women are weaponizing incompetence and the benefactors of men's benevolent sexism,

they're the victim. So men are the morally typecast, as we know from research from Tanya Reynolds, they're always morally typecast as the aggressor, the wrongdoer. And you kind of see that with heterosexual. pessimism too. Anything that celebrates heterosexual male sexuality is morally suspect in a way that other sexuality isn't. If you're going to spend an hour in the gym, you might as well look hot and feel comfortable while you're doing it. And honestly, who wants to be in the background of a TikTok is highlight real dressed like a chump? Gym shock makes some of the best men's and women's

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sort of three decades. When you think about Freddie Youngberg, do you remember that ads that he did? Was it Calvin Klein? I'm pretty sure there were women running after the bus for him chasing him down and he was worried and he needed to get security. David Beckham, David Gandhi. You know, we're talking about

like classic man men, David Ghanby. Chris Williamson. Chris Williamson, front cover of lots of dark romance novels. But, you know, that, the sexualization about the Diet Coke ad. Yeah, right? Like, is anybody asking to repeal this primitive perspective of the male form?

So one interesting thing for me is why is it the case that men, if this ad had been done by a guy, Or if it was an ad for something that was female coded, because obviously we're trying to get men attracted to gambling here. So a guy taking his kid off would probably not be very good for it unless it was adjacent to Grindr. What would be the reaction if a man did that from men, do you think?

And why is it so different for women pushing back against? Like if a guy was built and buffed and been said, the Diet Coke ad, if that rolled back again. So I think, you know, men, just don't mind being sexualized in the way women do because it's not as scary to men. I know you see maybe the tin men sometimes gets up in arms about the Facebook groups of hot guys, hot dudes reading. I think most men would be delighted to be featured there because I'm desperately reading books in public all the time in an attempt to try me. They'll get you eventually.

Yeah, but yeah, being sexualized is not as big of a problem to men as it is for women. they're much more likely to be victims of sexual violence, and you can maybe perhaps understand why. So I think that's why if we saw someone being sexualized to sell a product, we'd see it as aspirational. We'd be like, oh, I've got to get my ass in the gym. And I think also envy works differently for men and women. Men see it as kind of motivating, whereas women kind of internalize it and feel that they're being put down. Yeah. Why is it the thing that women who assume,

seen as guys' girls are perceived with more mistrust? Yeah, so that's a specific piece of research from Sarah Hills Lab, led by Hannah Bradshaw. And specifically when you describe a girl as being a guys gal, having more male friends than female friends, women mistrust her, because they doubt the reasons for her doing that. And given all the research we know about cross-sex friendship and how often that activates mating psychology, perhaps as good reason. And if you think from an error management perspective, your inference about someone who hangs around mostly with guys and does things that appeal to guys, she may have a psychology that's going to prioritize their goals over women's goals. I'll just break down some of the DVD extra verbiage there. So because a lot of orbiting friendships that are of different sexes, men and women, end up evolving. into, some huge percentage of close friends from opposite sexes would sleep with their friend

and then some non-zero number turn into relationships. Also, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that there's backup mates on both sides, although more for women than they're often men, etc. And also evidence that in terms of mate poaching, one of the top tactics that mate poachers use is to infiltrate the relationship through friendship. So everyone knows like, oh, she's just a friend or he's just a friend until he's not. So because, if, If you have a girl that is around a lot of friends that are guys, many of those guys, some of those guys might be in relationships, even if they're not. She has a degree of understanding about their psychology, or at the very least, a degree

of access, right? Just proximity. Straight of proximity is close enough to activate some of this, which again is another one of those kind of hilarious hypocrisies, which is women can work in an office and there should never be any confusion about men and women being together or whatever. But also, at the same time, there is an implied understanding that a woman that a woman that's around lots of men is probably going to have a degree of access and maybe be hit on in a manner that makes her a sexual threat to you.

Yes. You understand what I mean? Or her psychology is going to be somewhat more similar to a man's as well, which may mean that she doesn't mind short-term mating. You'll often find that these women, these guys, gals, they sometimes derogate the mainstream women as well. So they say things like, oh, I've never been able to have many female friends. They're just too much drama.

Not like me. I'm not drama. I'm totally drama free here. You can play Xbox with me and then fuck me. Which you can imagine for some men that has appealed. It's all the advantages of being gay without having to be gay. It's like a covert strategy. So you do see the intersexual competition playing out on both sides.

Is there anything to say about the fact that Sidney Sweeney doesn't portray herself as a victim? Yeah, that could be part of it because like I say, that self-disclosure of vulnerability and shared vulnerability, I'm as vulnerable as you are. I understand what it means. to be vulnerable, so I'm going to lobby for things to protect our collective interests as women. She doesn't do any of that, really. Although I did hear she made one film about reproductive rights, about her none. I think I might be fuzzy on the details, but maybe that could save her reputation among women, or if she self-disclose, some embarrassing stories. I think what would have been interesting would have been if she'd said if there was this big narrative arc

around how I was really uncomfortable about my body for a long time, and it took a long time for me to get past that. And now that I have transcended what previously held me back, I am emancipated. I am emancipated. I ammancipated. I am I amn't finally liberated and free to be able to use my sexuality in a way that I couldn't do previously, which sort of plays to you also small, mousy woman that wears brown and gray that doesn't seem to be seen by the world. Like you too may flourish and blossom into this wonderful big titty lady in future that gets paid millions of dollars. Yeah. And I think she has come out With some of that stuff, like I have seen some interviews over saying she hates being sexualized sometimes, but that's clearly not that much.

Fucking hell, Sydney. I mean, you've really become like Stockholm syndrome for yourself, if that's the case. But she more often come out with media stories like thanking her mom for convincing her to not get a boob reduction and things like that. So that sends the opposite signal to women. It's like, oh, I'm so glad I have these massive tips that I can cash in on. Look at these scud missiles here, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, so it's like a brazen, proud of something that women know appeal. And also, boobs specifically, they...

Let's talk about boobs. Tell me about boobs. Sure, well, we can talk about boobs. It makes a change from talking about insults. So with boobs, like I always say to my wife, it's kind of like penises. It's not like the bigger is always the better. And, you know, she's come to accept that that's true. So that's good.

But it really is the case with boobs research. very mixed evidence for the size that's deemed optimal. But what's more consistent is the shape and the texture. It's called the tosity, the tosus of the breast. So that describes basically the sagging. And like in all elements of mate preferences and evolutionary psychology, the male preferences for beauty, it's all about reproductive value. So as women age and as they go through each pregnancy,

their boobs kind of change in text. they sag, they head down south. So it's more about the firmness rather than the size per se. But we do know that short-term mating oriented men are, and the reason why that is basically the nobility hypothesis, that basically you're looking for high reproductive value woman who hasn't long reproductive career ahead of her and hasn't had children yet already. So that's Frank Marlowe that came up with that nobility hypothesis. And that seems to be the same. the consistent finding about boobs is that the texture and the tosus rather than size per se. But short-term mating-oriented men prioritize big boobs. So that could be another part of the

puzzle that's putting women off. We do know that women derogate big-boobed women as well, a lot more than small-boobed women, because it's probably queuing to them that this person is themselves a short-term maiter, even though there's no evidence that they may be themselves. women perceive them that way and even if they aren't short-term mating oriented themselves they know that men will perceive them as short-term mating oriented.

Induce the short-term mating strategy in the men around them. Exactly. It's kind of interesting. So I posted this research a little while ago that basically in a study of about 300, 400 Norwegian men there was a bodily focused group

that was both boobs and ass. There was a ass only. but there was no boobs only men. There was none. It was like you're either focused on both, just the ass or not the boobs. I don't know. That surprised me too.

Law of large numbers if you have enough men. But at the very least, it indicates that maybe in the current cultural climate, the ass is being prioritized more. Interesting about the ass. Let me tell you about the ass. What's interesting about the ass is that it is much easier to hide

than boobs for women. It's also in the back. So as you walk towards somebody, as you're talking to them, it's not front and center. It's also not at eye level. And I wonder whether that is, even if guys on average, maybe this is across all of time.

Let's say that that research would replicate throughout all of human history for all men, heterosexual men, that they were interested in the ass over the tits. But even if that is the case, it's so much more front and center. You're like compensating for how much you might not be as much of a fan of it by just the shelf height. You know what I mean? Like what is it? I level is by level.

as they say in CPG and retail. Okay, well, eye level is guy level for this one, I suppose. Yeah, and it kind of gives the impression you're emphasizing it and rubbing in their nose a little bit more. Right, absolutely. They should be so lucky. A quick aside, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I've started every single morning the same way

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What do you think would have happened if it was this? If Lindsay Clancy looked like Sidney-Sweeney, would women still have rallied around it? Would you reckon? Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty well-known fact that juries are pretty biased around their in-groups. And the OJ Simpson... So you're saying if the jury was filled with like big titty blondes, they would have been like, she's free, let it go. Not so much. but it's a pretty well-known fact that in the O.J. Simpson trial,

that because Nicole Simpson was a white, blonde woman who was perceived as having stolen really resource-rich, successful black man in O.J. Simpson, the majority black female jury hated that, and they just could not get any sympathy for her as a victim at all. So it's actually a big problem in juries that they're so tribal based on their own kind of in-group. So Lindsay Clancy may not have been threatening enough to them

in terms of their mating psychology and, you know, supporting her and giving group sympathy towards her issue was in women's self-interest more than it is to celebrate Sidney-Sweeney appealing to the male gaze. Have you seen any men pushing back against Sidney-Sweeney? Only the Irish radio presenter, yeah. Right, exactly.

which is kind of naturally a bit more posturing. Look at me, I'm for you. Going back to boobs, I wonder whether the unearned traits element of this is part of the reason. So I'm kind of fascinated about why men don't hate desirable men in the same way. If you were to do an ad that was the equivalent for men, that guy would not have a body that was an unearned trait, right? like just an inherent advantage that he was gifted, basically. I'm sure that Sidney Sweeney goes to the gym and has a trainer and probably follows a diet and doesn't overeat and all the rest of this stuff.

But she's not got a body that at least obviously is shaped by tons and tons of work. Yeah. Right. At least not in the same way that a man's body would be. Whereas a man's body, you would say, oh, but he's really had to sort of grind for that. And one of the really interesting takeaways, I think you sent me this tweet that was explaining how ruthlessly reminiscent it is, especially. to women in a way that it isn't to men for male attractiveness, that when you see a woman that is

beautiful, especially with big boobs, like that's just straight up natural boobs, straight up natural genetic endowment. And the effortlessness with which Sydney Sweeney sort of presents herself, whether that's true or not, the effortlessness that she presents herself with almost sort of rubs it in the face of women more. And I think this is one of the differences between Sydney Sweeney and Sabrina Carpenter. Sabrina Carpenter is a woman designed for the female and the gay gays. Like gay men loves Sabrina Carpenter. It's this over the top like princess, like there's lots of makeup. She's always did. I actually think that this is one of the reasons that if you watch a female chatty chatty podcast, a lot of the time, they won't be fully done up.

It'll be super slouchy, oversized hoodie. Look at me. This is me at my worst. But if you at your worst is Sidney Sweeney in her effortlessness presentation of this, what you're basically reminding a shit ton of women of is I am more desirable than you without having to work for it. Yeah. This is how unfair the genetic spread is. Yeah. And women with big boobs specifically talk about this all the time. Other women accuse them of...

Big booed women in the comments. We want to hear from you. We're your team of sticking them out. They like accused them of, oh, look, why is she showing them off so much? And they're just trying to live their life. Like, you know, it's like... But the sex difference is interesting. because men's attractiveness on most metrics is attainable, like you say.

But also men really formidable high mate value physical attractiveness men. And that's the physical attractiveness for men is formidability, muscularity, height. That makes you a valuable, coalitional ally to men for other reasons. You're useful as well. What the fuck use of women got for sitting in this sweetly's huge knockers. She's just going to take all the men. Or men are all going to be interested in it. Whereas for men, it's like, that really formidable guy, he could help me going to war.

We really need him. Yes. So that explains some of the sex difference. But unfortunately, height isn't a sexy trait you can cultivate. Although the Luxmaxers are doing their best to fast track the surgery on that front as well. That's true. I mean, this is very, how would you say, unpopular to say. So I'm going to have to put my disguise on for it.

I would say it is significantly easier for a woman to raise her physical attractiveness mate value. than it is for, sorry, I would say that it's significantly easier for a man to raise his physical attractiveness value than it is for a woman. If you go to the gym, what's the evidence of how much it improves your attractive? It's like significant. There's basically no guy that isn't made more attractive to women, on average, most women, by going to the gym. Yeah, and that's true throughout most of your life as well. It's a longer span of your reproductive value, whereas women's beauty is on a much more time clock. And it's harder to fight against.

Yes. So there's nothing you can do. Time is coming. The wall is undefeated, as the incels say. That is true to some extent in a way that it's not for men. So that envy must feel more uncomfortable for women who's, I mean, now it's pretty evolutionary novel, the extent to which women can extend their beauty. But for most of ancestral history, it would have been seeing youthful, beautiful women would have triggered serious anxiety about your own mate value running out. Whereas if you're a guy in his 40s who's never trained before, a couple of years of hard dieting and a good trip to the gym, and you've got a body that's comparable with

a guy that might be in an advert. You've got to be sufficiently disciplined with it. So yeah, I think that's tough. Like, you know, that deserves sympathy and like a degree of understanding where you're like, fuck. Like, of course you're going to be threatened. Yeah. By women.

And I would love to see the age split. Is it more threatening to a woman who is a little older than Sydney Sweeney, or is it the sort of narcissism or the rivalry of small differences in terms of age? I would imagine not so many women younger than Sydney Sweeney would have as much of a problem at the same rate as women around her age or older. I reckon you could even predict the nature of the derogations. I would predict that younger women would derogate things like her promiscuity, a little bit more. Whereas older women, when their mate value runs out, their value to a group

diminishes. It diminishes, but it becomes the wise grandmother or the kind of the wisdom. So they would start derogating her, she's a bimbo. What does she know about anything? So it's like, oh, I have new type of value to the group now. So I have to emphasize that rather than, I'm never going to compete with Sidney-Sweeney on youth and beauty. Those days are gone, but I might actually derogate her on waste of limbo yeah yeah this is the maiden mother matriarch arc that uh louise parry talks about yeah okay so the maiden side will look at and also the mother side as well like the middle the middle of the chunk will be looking at okay fecundity loyalty reliability etc but yeah that's interesting the sort of matriarch side might have to use something else oh she's an idiot she's

setting women back she's doing something yeah that is cool the supplement industry is full of products making claims that they can't back, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. Their co-founder, Jeff Byers, played in the NFL and saw firsthand just how wildly the quality of supplements can vary. So he built Momentus around a higher standard. Every product for Momentus uses evidence-backed ingredients, transparent doses and independent third-party testing. Everything is NSF certified for sports, so what's on the label is actually what's in the tub. It's why Momentus is trusted inside all 32 NFL locker rooms. It's why I've trusted them with my own supplements for years. Best of all, Momentus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy it and try it for 29 days.

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because, look, at least you've worked for it in one form or another. But I keep on coming back to, like, if a guy or a female athlete had done that, that was basically Sidney-Sweeney, not saying that I'm doing this for the girls, don't really care about them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think you would get still much of the pushback, even if she'd had abs, right?

Even if it had been like hot Megan Rapino or something, I think she would have still got a lot of the pushback. Yeah, perhaps. It's hard to know. What is there to say about sort of the focus? Because for me, one of the obvious misses was this is a brand new fucking sports betting company. It's that prediction market sports betting, I think, right?

So it's like Kalshi but for sports. By the way, sorry, I got to fucking pull this up. I was listening to, I haven't listened to The Daily Wire in forever. And I was listening to Matt Walsh and Shapiro and Michael Knowles and Andrew Klaven this morning. They're partnered with Kalshi. Oh, never knew that. Sorry, are we not against the degeneration of the modern youth and stuff? Very corrosive practice for young men and society in general.

The only other two would have been weed and porn. and you're certainly not going to promote. You're going to implicitly say that both of those things are fucking destructive. Things are upside down, Chris. We've got the woke progressives being puritanical and sex negative, and we've got the right-wing, you know, conservatives being, you know, degenerous. Motherfucking Matt Walsh doing a calciat. Yeah.

That blew my mind this morning. And that's the real story or should be the real story of this Sydney-Sweeney thing, is she's promoting gambling probably very successfully, given how, you know, sex sells and how much attention is going to be garnered on the back of this engineered backlash. But yes, sports betting. I mean, the American Institute for Boys and Men

have reports on how corrosive this is to young men. They've done some really cool research that shows predictable effects when you legalize online gambling in a specific area. Bankruptcy among young men goes way up and they go into way more debt, which is partially attributable to the change in law.

Like they've isolated that effect, which is really cool research. And my wife was telling me some really kind of sobering statistics this morning about men who have problems with gambling. It's detrimental to their relationships, which has downstream effects on their suicidality. And it's detrimental to their mental health and suicidality in and of itself as well. I think something like 30% of people who have a gambling problem of young men of gambling problems have felt suicidal, and I think something like 13% have attempted suicide

because of this. So it's a huge, and if you think about it from an evolutionary psychology point of view, the addiction from young men towards gambling makes sense. It's that try and win big in one fell swoop when I've got not much else to lose in an attempt to garner enough resources to up your mate value. So it's like, there's a... the exact vulnerable group. And that should be the real story about this, but people care more about harms to women or perceived harms to women in all sorts of domains in life. And this is just another example. I did a tweet one time, because some people don't agree with me on that. They don't think that men and society in general are quite protective of women, even though there's a preponderance

of evidence for this. I mean, Tanya wrote this article reviewing all the different ways in which this manifests. But I just asked the question, and my following on X, a lot of in cells, a lot of misogynist men, a lot of red pill kind of oriented guys. And I put up a poll, all things being equal, is it worse to kill a teenage girl or a teenage boy? And unanimously, people said it was way worse to kill the girl. And, you know, what can explain that unless we're actually a lot more sensitive to harms towards women. I think that that's obvious. It's seen, even in a group who's mistreating women and treat women as property,

it's seen as a great moral injury to that group if you harm one of their women versus if you harm one of their men. And it just, I think this is a clear example of it that people couldn't see, oh, the young men as the real victims in this scenario. The victims that are getting the limelight is, oh, women's sport has been. been, you know, fed back 40 years. Yeah, not the men that have now got another predatory fissure trying to break into their brainstem so that they can try and extract value and cash from them.

But this could have been, if you wanted to push back against Sidney-Sweeney, and this is where women are so much more sophisticated socially, like the fucking scalpel with which they're able to navigate, I thank the Lord every single day that I am not a woman and I don't have to deal with it. And I know that the same is true for like lots of women that are in workplace environment navigating that teachers. And surrounded by the way, oh my God, it's like so complex and burdensome for me to navigate all of it. Introsexual dynamics and stuff like that. That being said, there is a limit to their sophistication.

The limit to their sophistication is if they'd really, really, really wanted to do collective action with this, they could have got at Sydney by going for the unimpeachably perfect argument of this is predatory against men. Yeah. This is trying to take advantage of young men. it's hurting them. Gambling is fucking poison and we should not have Kalshi and Polymont. By the way,

for all of the things that I get accused of on the internet, we have been approached by every fucking prediction market on the planet over and over again and I have turned every single one of them down. Fair play. Right.

And that's a stance that I've taken. Even I don't have a gambling bone in my body. I suck at Vegas. I'm not that excited. I'd way rather go and see a show. I haven't got gambling in my family. But I did see what it did to people around me growing up,

northeast of the UK. People don't understand In England, there are betting shops on every single high street in every single shithouse village, Norton, right, which is the cricket club I played for. The guys would finish up playing the game and go and use the fruit machine in the pub afterward. That's 25 pounds. And now it's an app in your phone as well. That's available 24 hours a day. That could have been the angle. The headline of all of this could have been Sidney Sweeney uses her body to capitalize on men. Harts men, increases suicidality, reduces their financial freedom. I thought that. everybody was up in arms about the cost of living crisis. I thought everyone cared about financially uplifting the underclass. I bet that if you look at the people that are mostly using online gambling, it's going to skew toward the lower socioeconomic classes as well. It's not going to be the upper class and the middle class. Fast life history strategy people trying to make a big win. Yeah, this is how I'm going to get. It's Robin Hood for 2026. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I totally agree,

but it just comes back to this idea that women are a more, a better victim in terms of the media. People care more about their concerns. I would just push back on the thing you said about, oh, I'm so glad I'm not a woman because they're so hard to navigate. And it might seem like that with our male brains. Oh, but if I got the social navigation upgrade installed into my brain, because I'm a woman, my arms race would have been sort of appropriately difficult to be. That point, but also think of the modern world and the social arenas you have to navigate.

it actually kind of rewards the female style of aggression way more than the male style. Like, think of a corporate environment. You can't be directly aggressive and men, oh, we'll settle this in the car park or even just, you know, raising your voice. Men are neutered in terms of how they show aggression and whereas there's almost no policing on women's gossiping

or, you know, false accusations, things like that. So, you know, they're actually rewarded. for their style. Do you want to know my new conspiracy theory? A big new conspiracy theory. Sydney Sweeney keeps being used as a distraction from geopolitically inconvenient news drops. July 2025, DOJ released a memo stating

that there were no significant findings in the Epstein files. The one big beautiful bill is signed into law stripping over $1 trillion in benefits from U.S. citizens. While raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion, Sydney's American Eagle Ag drops capturing national attention, right? That's June 20, July 2025. September 2026, the UN cites concerns over U.S. war crimes in Iran. AI CEOs agree to slow down development after former employees warm over doomsday.

Trump refuses to slow progress, citing competition with China. The midterms are right around the corner. Sydney Sweeney appears in a Novigad. Yeah, never waste a good crisis, bury some other bad news. Barry the headline below two bigger headlines. You can just imagine them in their crisis room. It's like, we're getting a lot of heat. Break out to T.

Sydney. We need to hit break glass in case of geopolitical emergency, seen it's just Sydney Sweeney's phone number. Literally. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I think it's fascinating. It's interesting to consider how many more times like both sides of someone's mouth or group's mouths can be spoken out of. Is, in your experience, is like highlighting hypocrisy a good way to educate people? Because I think what, again, to steal man the critique side or the criticiser side, it's, hey, look, we're okay with you having a position. as long as the positions seem to sort of run in parallel and be...

Consistency. Yes, yeah, yeah. We want you to be consistent across your views. And because you're not, we just want one of these things to be stopped. Either sexual revolution, liberation, women can use their body thing. Like, that and this can't exist at the same time, right? Square the circle for me and become consistent. Like, hypocrisy is catnip for the internet.

In your experience, is hypocrisy identity? a useful tool of behavior change? I mean, using just my own self, it works on me. If someone points out a way in which I'm being hypocritical, I find that persuasive. Perhaps it's not. It might trigger tribal psychology too much and just signal that someone's the enemy. Yeah, so I don't know. I don't think so.

But I think it's worth highlighting anyway, because some of the examples are so fragrant. and it's, you know, so worth highlighting, I think. Just to get back to that idea on which sex has it worse, in lots of domains, it feels like the modern culture war is just a race to the bottom on people trying to fucking outdo each other on saying, oh, men have it worse in this domain. And the evolutionary psychological approach is always very domain-specific. So back to this paper, I was writing on mismeasurement of men,

Some of the statements in there are just way too global. It's like men are superior to women or, you know, all these things that are massive global statements. And the more appropriate level of analysis is find the domains or the specific context in which each sex has it bad or good. And there are different ones for men and women. And it's not just one has it worse or better than the other. Bingo. My chick says this all the time, that there's times where her sex has been a massive advantage and then there's times where it's held her back. You go, okay. Well, in that case, sweeping fucking statements don't really work. But there are some laws that seem to kind of be hold pretty true, like gamma bias, right? Men are, the sex of men is ignored when they do positive, but highlighted when they do negative. And the sex of women is ignored when they do negative and highlighted when they do positive. Like, that seems to hold as a relatively broad perspective across headlines. What's the fucking Carnegie Award? Like, 95% of that, it's people who are people who, risk their own life selflessly to help a stranger. It's like 95, 96% of people that do that. It's like

stranger saves drowning man. What a benevolent sexist. Yeah, I know. Fucking horrible. Dude, you're the best. I appreciate you. I'm glad for breaking this down. Where should people go? Check out all of you. X is where I'm hanging out. On your recommendation, I've given up the blue sky. I don't go there anymore. Not for you. So it's not built for you. Yeah. So yeah, follow me on X and I articulate myself probably a lot better than here and yeah, check me out there. You're the best. Appreciate you, man. All right, goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes. Fucking money. That's good. Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life?

You know, the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.