Female Psychology & The End of Empires | with Dr. Dani Sulikowski

I propose that maybe the civil rights, um, the project following World War II of increased equality among various different groups that we call the civil rights movement, eventually paved the way, the groundwork, the moral foundation for what woke would do to seize power.

Weaponizing bigotry or the, uh, you know, the accusation of bigotry only makes sense in the context in which bigotry is already wrong. Um, so I'm wondering if it is the case that wokeness is an aspect of civilizational suicide, and it's just using the vectors of bigotry and kindness because kindness and bigotry were just the cultural values that it latched on to. Like, what does that say about our society? How can we analyze this phenomenon of wokeness from a more behavioral point of view? Right.

So, what, so from, from my perspective, what wokeness is, if you were going to get down to the nuts and bolts of it, is it's manipulative reproductive suppression, right? And it is >> These are the big chunky words. Can you repeat that? Manipulative >> Manipulative reproductive suppression. So, reproductive suppression is just what it sounds like, right? That's that's suppressing individuals' reproductive output. Um, how many babies they get to have. Um, and manipulative implies that it is one individual or group of individuals doing it to someone else, right? It's it's it's not it's it's not voluntary. It's not something you're choosing to do necessarily yourself, right? It's it's manipulative, right? So, this is a malicious evolutionary strategy. Um, woke is. Yeah, I, I think that woke is woke. It's leveraged off whatever, you know, whatever cultural artifacts were going to be lying around at the time. And, you know, the, um, the key to that is to look at the different aspects of woke. And we can see that the trans thing, and not in Australia because we're just slow, um, but you can see the trans thing is running out of steam, right? Like, you know, the, the, the different countries are beginning to ban puberty blockers, they're beginning to ban, um, surgeries on, on minors. You, the world is waking up to this, this slowly, >> or at least starting to produce actual concrete research into the, uh, you know, the overall >> That's. And we're seeing lawsuits and we're seeing, right? It's it's beginning, the house of cards is beginning to tumble down. Not in Australia, we just brought in sex self-ID. Um, we've just, we've just done that. So, you know, that's just to give you an idea of where we are on this journey. >> But, um, but these individual things that are woke are each, you know, because you can't, you, you cannot stave off reality forever, right? Men are not women. You know, you, there's only so long you can put a six-foot bloke that's built like a brick [ __ ] house in the women's whatever event it is, and everyone's going to sit there and pretend that's a woman. That's only going to last for so long, right? So, any of this nonsense is is not going to persist in perpetuity, right? That the nonsense eventually reaches a point where people just cannot s it can't sustain itself anymore. It's too obvious. It becomes too well known what's going on. Too many people are like, "Hang on a minute. That's bullshit." >> Just like the, the land acknowledgements. >> Yeah, that's right. Exactly. People are getting tired of it now. It was a nice idea. It sort of, it was a, a lovely, you know, a gesture, um, you know, you know, a reach out for for reconciliation. But it's got to the point where it's gone well beyond that. It's now enforced. You know, you, you lose your job if you ask why we need to do this. It's heavily culturally policed, and it's obviously now being used. If you actually listen to a lot of the welcome to countries, not a lot, maybe that's unfair. Many of the welcome to countries, they are no longer nice and welcoming speeches, right? They are opportunities for various people to. Yeah. Right. So, all right. So, yeah, that's right. All of the individual things will all, you know, wax and wane because >> They're [ __ ]. Um, and [ __ ] can only sustain for so long. But we will keep getting more. We will keep getting more of these ridiculous, reproductively suppressing, culturally degrading, um, ideologies coming through, um, because that the circumstances that are breeding it haven't changed, right? That the, the cultural circumstances that are breeding this reproductive suppression are not going anywhere. So, yes, it's great that gender ideology, for all the harm that it causes, is hopefully beginning to recede and and be on the way out. Um, that's a big win. But the next thing is on the horizon. Like, the next thing is coming. There's nothing to, you know, I think when people are celebrating the end of woke, I think it's a little bit shortsighted. The, the next woke is. Yeah. The next woke is is coming because what we currently have >> across the West is, you know, suffocating levels of reproductive suppression, and and and that's the circumstances that breed all of these woke ideals. And so the next crazy thing is just around the corner. >> Okay. So, un according to some analyses, the slippery slope begins with anything that you say it will be a little bit controversial, but women getting the vote, or like, just the liberal project of expanding the franchise. And then certain liberal priors are, for some people, what the the predecessor to woke. What I hear you're saying, and I think I'll just push you a little bit further, you're saying it has something to do with resources. >> Yep. It, it has something to do with the amount of wealth that was unlocked after World War II in the West is the what what is breeding the conditions for this so-called reproductive >> suppression. So, so I was having a, I was having a chat, um, the other day with Ed Dutton, who's pretty clear. He >> Yeah. Yeah. He's he's pretty, um, firmly, you, he >> He's a hard. He won't, he won't get down to the details, though. He frustrates me. I, I'm going to talk to him again, and I'm going to make him talk about the details because the devil of this stuff is in the detail. And he, anyway, but I was having a chat with him. He is quite convinced, less so am I. He is quite convinced that this is cyclical, civilizational, and cycl. Not this is not specific to the West. Every civilization that has previously fallen has shown the same, goes through the same stages, shows the same types of things, and ends up extinct. And that's what's now happening to the West. This is not, there's nothing special about the West, which is why there's nothing special about it being caused by the civil rights movement. Nor is there anything special about it being caused by post-World War II wealth, or anything like that. There's nothing special about any of this, right? This is just how human civilizations work. This is what happens when civilizations begin to crumble. This is this is just how it goes. Now, he's quite convinced that that what's happening is cyclical, but he and I differ on exactly what's happening. We, we have different perspectives, and I don't think either of us convinced the other of those of those differences. I think we're just as far apart as we were, um, before we started talking. But with respect to his perspective of what's going on, which is not to do with intra-sexual competition, he has a different take on it. Um, he's quite convinced that that's happening cyclically in every civilization. I am cautiously, cautiously kind of approaching the same idea that this inter-sexual competition that, which I think is what is causing the breakdown of of Western civilization, um, that that is also what causes the breakdown of civilizations. If there's something special about the West, when human civilizations are growing and the populations are expanding, then male inter-sexual competition is the fundamental organizing force. You reach a tipping point where female inter-sexual competition becomes the fundamental organizing force, and the civilization goes downhill and begins to die. And this is the pattern that repeats. But before I want to strongly say that this is cyclical, I need to know a lot more, not just about, you know, civilizations rise and fall, and we know that they have a lot of things in common, but of course, of course, if civilizations rise and fall, and we know they do, then falling civilizations are going to have things in common. There's going to be things that happen when a civilization breaks down that's common to all civilizations breaking down, regardless of the cause. So, I'm not as confident as Ed that that specifically what I'm hypothesizing is happening now in the West is definitely cyclical and has been happening in human civilizations ostensibly forever. But I do think it is. Not as certain as it is, but I do think it is. That is the way I'm leaning. So, there's nothing special about the West, right? This is just >> What are you talking about? We're so awesome. >> We, we are awesome. >> That's why it's, you know, that's why it's profoundly sad that it's breaking down. But I don't think that the mechanism that is breaking us down is unique to us in any way, shape, or form. It's it's it's a fundamental, um, trait of being human. It's a fundamental property of human civilizations. So, this is kind of this is kind of how it goes, right? So, I'm, I'm leaving bits out, but, you know, I could talk all night, and I'd probably still only tell you like a little bit of it, but this is kind of the series of events. So, what you have is civil, you know, men build things, right? They build infrastructure, they build wealth, they work hard. Civilizations accrue institutions and resources and knowledge, um, on the, the back of the hard, you know, on the back of the hard work of men, and they build and they reach a certain point. They reach a certain point where you end up with civilizational wealth that results in the, uh, mortality rate going down. Everybody's mortality rate goes down, but infant mortality rate in particular goes down. In response to that, women start having fewer babies. Now, this makes perfect sense, right? If, if you're going to have, if you know that very few of your babies will survive, of course you're going to have 10 in the hope that two survive. If all of a sudden you find yourself in a situation where all your babies are going to survive, whether you don't have 10 because you can't invest properly in 10 children. So now the optimum number to have is now much lower, right? So, okay, mortality rate goes down, and so birth rate goes down. That makes sense. But, but because mortality rate has gone down, birth rate going down doesn't necessarily mean population size goes down, because you're having fewer babies, but more of them are living, right? So, population doesn't necessarily begin to go down. Um, okay. So, society is getting wealthier, women are having fewer babies. Eventually, what happens is because the whole of society is benefiting from whatever technology, institutions, you know, provision of medical care, whatever it might be, all of society begins to benefit. The women at the top who have the most wealth used to, by virtue of that wealth, have a reproductive advantage over the women below them who didn't have the wealth. As society gets wealthier, that reproductive advantage disappears because now the women at the bottom are also having their babies survive. Okay? So, now we have an evolutionarily unstable situation where the women at the top have all of this extra wealth, but they're not getting any reproductive advantage. So, obviously, what are they going to be selected for to do? To put whatever resources they have into getting their reproductive advantage back. Now, they're not going to have more children because they stopped having children because it wasn't advantageous to have more. They've already found the sweet spot for, you know, how many children they should have as a function of their wealth. So, how can they improve their reproductive success without having more children? Well, the key to understand about reproductive success is it's not absolute, it's relative, right? In order to be winning the evolutionary game, your genes need to have more representation in the next generation than everyone else's, right? So, if you are having three children in a population where the mean reproductive rate per woman is 3.6, well, you're losing. If you're having three children in a population where the mean reproductive rate per woman is 2.1, you're winning. So, what do these women who are elite with resources, with resources and time to burn now because they're having fewer children? Um, what do they do with their extra time and resources and and and reproductive effort? Well, they channel it into manipulative reproductive suppression. They start changing society so that other women around them will have and below them will have fewer children. They start denigrating motherhood. They start saying that motherhood is oppressive, and that women should get out and work, and that women should get out and vote, and that women should start taking a part in the running of society, which is a nice, lovely equality-ish kind of vibe. But the, you know, the role of women in a flourishing society is to build the society, to have the, to have the people that make the society. That is where, you know, the, the women's effort goes for societies that are flourishing. If you take the, the people in your society who are the rate-limiting breeders, which is what women are, right? Men are not rate-limiting breeders. A man can impregnate an an infinite number of women, right? Women are the, the, the, the reproductive limit on your society. However, however many number of breeding women you have, that's how many babies you can have. If you t start taking your, your very valuable reproductive capacity and channeling that into the stuff that your very unvaluable men used to do, um, then you're going to start burning your society's reproductive capacity. This is what women began doing, not by accident, not because they wanted equality, but because by design, they needed to lower the background reproductive rate of the population so that they would have their reproductive advantage. This is where manipulative reproductive suppression comes from. And this is >> But it can't be conscious. The, the woman who already has three or four babies spending all of her time on abortion rights, um, in in the inner city isn't necessarily, she's still thinking that she's doing the right thing. >> I don't know. Maybe not. >> People asking about whether this is conscious. >> Women are not nice. You're going to go back to that that bumble. >> Look, this is the thing, right? The activists are higher on the dark triad. People on the left are higher on the dark triad. Women who are highly intra-sexually competitive are higher on the dark triad. So, the people who are doing this are actually not nice people. So, there isn't necessarily a, um, a need for them to convince themselves that they're doing the right thing. On the other hand, it would certainly be a more, by necessity, it has to be a socially palatable movement for the rest of society to get along behind it. I mean, what makes a socially palatable movement can sometimes be be surprising. Um, you know, who would have thought not that long ago that advocating for, um, you know, euthanasia for the old, the frail, the the mentally unwell would be socially palatable? Who would have thought that advocating for abortion literally up until the moment of birth would have been palatable? But, you know, you move a little bit, and you convince people that, you know, anything further in that direction is is better, and it's amazing what becomes palatable. So, so yes, to some extent, there needs to be a story told around these, you know, these social movements in order to get the the broader sort of female population involved. The, the other really critical thing to understand about about women is that women operate in, I was going to say covens, then. I've never called them covens before. Maybe, um, is that, you know, the, the social environment of women is incredibly important, right? If you become, if you become ostracized by other women, you lose access to society, right? Women use ostracism as an incredible, incredible weapon. Um, and so, I, in every female social group, there is a price to be paid to be allowed entry into that social group, and there is a tremendous cost to bear if you are kicked out of that social group. And so, women have very, very strong motives to signal their, you know, their, their, >> Allegiance. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Their allegiance. Thank you. Yeah. Their allegiance and their commitment to a particular group. And so, you know, an example of of the kinds of things that that you sort of see, um, is it's why all of the, the social contagions affect women so much more than they affect men, right? Um, it's it's all about that social pressure and the peer pressure that women feel to conform to whatever is the latest fashion, whatever is the latest trend, whatever is the thing that we're doing now, you know, all of that sort of thing, right? So, women have this tremendous social pressure to therefore be a feminist, right? To, you know, the number of people who have said to me, "I don't understand how you can not call yourself a feminist." Really? Isn't that hard? Um, but the very notion that a woman would openly say, "No, I'm not a feminist," um, is sufficiently confronting for some people that actually find it off-putting. Even if they agree with me about some of the reasons why I'm why I'm not a feminist, the idea that I would just say it out loud upfront like that is quite like, "Oh, you sure you want to say that? You should." >> Yeah. Yeah. You're self-ostracizing yourself. >> Exactly. That's right. Exactly. Why would I? Why would I want to do that? And see, this is the thing. So, women very much police their own their own speech, and and and this is all part of the, I guess you could call it, kind of the, you know, the female condition. And all of it is about this kind of, you know, cooperation, competition that women have. So, women form these social groups, and within these social groups, they attract men, right? That the women, um, curate the social network, if you like, right? They get to decide who's in and who's out. So, you get a certain number of women, and there's a certain number of men, and those women will cooperate to keep other women out, right? This is their social network, and this is their collection of men. They will cooperate very effectively to keep other women out, but they will compete rapidly within that group for those men. So, there is this constant tension between cooperation and and competition between women. >> Um, that makes female interactions very, very, can make them very, very complex, and very, you know, very fraught and stressful. It's why women have concepts such as frenemies that men don't appear to understand. Um, and woman instantly knows exactly what a frenemy is. Um, >> So, that's kind of how female social interaction sort of operates on that sort of proximate level, if you like. And so, because women have such, such strong motives to avoid ostracism, that in itself is a condition that allows elite women to, and by elite, I just mean any woman with social influence, frequently that means wealth and status, but not necessarily, um, you know, with social influence to sort of, you know, effectively kind of launch and promote these ideologies that other women feel compelled to follow or to at least, you know, act like they're following. So, there's also a tension between signaling that you are, you know, supporting the feminist cause and actually supporting the feminist cause. So, you might go and wave your placard at the pro-abortion rally, but would you ever actually have an abortion? Right? There's so, there's a constant tension between signaling and actually embodying. And the women who are winning this intra-sexual competition race, the women who are winning the the manipulative reproductive suppression game are the women who are promoting all of these causes. And if, and, you know, very successfully suppressing the background reproductive rate, but who are not themselves embodying any of it. So, they are managing to to signal this publicly and promote it and convince everyone else that yes, yes, they're on board, but they're not sucked in by having drunk the Kool-Aid, if you like, right? They're not wanting it. They're the ones who will win. And I've got some interesting data that, um, that I'm not convinced the sample, well, the sample size is not large enough yet. So, I'm not convinced it is not large enough yet. So, I need to be somewhat cautious. But at the moment, what it looks like is that it's actually, interestingly, women who identify as conservative, self-identify as conservative, who are some of the staunchest, um, public pushers of some of the woke feminist woke ideologies. Now, we presume, we didn't ask these particular questions in this data set, but I'm presuming that given that they're self-identifying as conservative, they are not actually agreeing with a lot of the ideas that they necessarily that they are actually indicating though that they would promote and that they would publicly support. So, we do have some evidence that there are women who are not ideologically sucked in, if you like, but are necessarily promoting these ideals, and they are the women who are ultimately going to win when the population comes down to a bottleneck, and there'll be a very small number of female lineages left when, you know, because when civilizations collapse, they don't collapse and disappear. There's ever a point in time where there's no people in a place or something, you know, that it collapses slowly and over time, and it gets swamped by other people's coming in. And so, what's what's what these women are ultimately fighting for, the prize is to have their lineage left and to be represented with whatever is left at the end, because that population will become like a founder population, if you like. And so, if you're there at the end, then your genes explode out into whatever rises from the ashes of Western civilization. And of course, if that happens, and you you won the manipulative reproductive suppression race, you, you were driving that race. So, you carry the genes for making this happen. Then the next civilization is doomed to go through exactly the same cycle because the women driving it who won the game are the founder population for the next thing. So, it's just got to keep happening. Hm. The, the particular attractiveness of this, uh, evaluation of what we call wokeness is that you can plug in every single cause and you can see it operating this manipulative reproductive suppression, like >> Immigration, like "no human being is illegal," right? That that will, what's going to happen if you import a bunch of people, low-skilled workers, let's say, from all these other countries, is that they're going to gobble up and suppress all of the lower class. In this example, white people are going to be out-competed. But you necessarily, you won't necessarily, even if the long-term, even if the long-term, you're destroying the civilization, you're still winning at getting >> childhood >> So, immigration, trans, the childhood transition. If you can convince all these lower-class women to castrate and to suppress the reproductive possibilities of their of their children, then you're going to you're going to win out. Um, the only problem is that that might bite you in the >> Yeah. And what a virtue signal, the trans child is. You know, all these, you know, all these, um, Hollywood elites, but not quite the A elites, right? They're not quite the A-star celebrity at that next rung down. >> And look at the, the virtue signal trans children, they're all running around with, right? That's kind of this playing out at the very upper echelons of the elite society. I think it's, I, I think that the same thing was happening back in the like before before trans came became a thing. The same thing was happening with celebrities back in the 80s and 90s when they were all adopting their fair trade kids, right? The reason why they adopted kids from Africa is because there needed to be a visual signal that this child wasn't theirs, right? There needed to be that visual signal. It was no good adopting a white kid from somewhere because then it's not obvious that you've adopted. It's not obvious that you have foregone your own reproductive success to pour tremendous amounts of resources into a child that you're not related to. So, there had to the push had to come from, you know, from from from a place in the world where the kids would be obviously not related to you. Otherwise, what's the point of the virtue signal, right? >> It had to be obvious. So, you know, trans is just, you know, so, you know, it's exactly the same phenomenon. All of these celebrities now with their trans kids, you know, again, just destroying their own reproductive potential in order to signal to the upper echelons of Hollywood, that's what the, you know, that's what the, the, the adoptions of of, you know, of African kids back in the 80s and 90s was. It's exactly the same signaling function. >> Okay. Um, to compare and contrast that, I, it's, it's really evocative that when society's expanding, it's the masculine virtues that that predominate, or to put it in your terms, intra-sexual competition is work playing itself out on the male side of the equation. How, what are some typical intra-sexual competition? So, female inter-sexual competition is, um, centers around sabotage. Male inter-sexual competition centers around, it's much more like a running race, right? So, male inter-sexual competition is most guys just trying to do the best they can and not really wasting time and energy on trying to pull other guys back. And the reason for that is that, so, if what I've described with with women, the reason why that works, the reason why women are able to suppress the background reproductive rate is because female reproduction is capped, right? If men tried to do a similar thing, um, they would be a lot less successful because even if you could create a social movement that could convince 95% of men to decide that they're not going to reproduce, the 5% of men who were left would be able to provide enough male reproductive capacity to replace the 95% of men who were jumped out the gene pool, right? So, men don't have that, have not been selected for to have the same mechanisms of sabotage of each other, right? So, what men just do is men are really just like, eye on the prize. You know, focus on yourself, be the best you can, show off, run, get strong, fight, buy stuff, be rich, be flashy, try to get the girl, and try to have a lot of sex. Basically, that's what male inter-sexual competition does. So, when levels of male inter-sexual competition are very high, you get, um, a lot of things being built, a lot of guys being really strong, a lot of sex, and that leads to a lot of babies. >> Mhm. >> Uh, when female inter-sexual competition begins to dominate, then you get the exact opposite, and birth rates just go straight down. M. Uh, I'm thinking there's this meme of the, the, the lion at the head of the pride, um, kicking out the loser. I'm wondering if there is, uh, some sort of influence if females value, uh, men putting other men down, then it would be a reproductive strategy, or like, they could influence how males behave towards other males. Women, if they're orchestrating their selection in such a way that they're demanding a certain sort of intra-sexual competition where men do sabotage each other, sabotage could become the rule, right? >> It's, it's an interesting thing because I think at the moment, with the number of women that have kind of invisibly removed themselves from the mating market. So, you know, the number of women of a sensibly reproductive age in their 20s and 30s who are just not available for reproduction means that we have a massive skewed pool at the moment, right? We have a, it doesn't look like we have a shortage of women because we've got about the same number of men as women, but we actually have a massive shortage of of women because women are just not prepared to reproduce in their 20s and and 30s anymore, right? So, we actually have this really skewed sex ratio in the in the reproductive at the moment. And it would seem that in response to that, we are seeing some attempts from men to convince other men to withdraw from the mating market. So, we're seeing the kind of incel movement, which initially began as a just a, I think, as just a disparaging, um, insult for women to hurl at, you know, low-quality men who still lived with their parents and played video games all day. Um, it's kind of now become an identity that men are almost choosing to identify into and to proudly declare themselves of that, which of course means it's no longer involuntary to some extent. Um, and then you've got the, the other kind of men going their own way movement, which is a much sort of healthier, um, or at least on the face of it, a much healthier kind of movement, which again is encouraging men to not put their efforts into relationships and families, but to just focus on themselves. And that's, you know, that that's, um, largely motivated, I think, by a lot, you know, divorce rates being so high and family court outcomes effectively being so bad for for men. And so, it's basically kind of saying to young men, look, you know, don't get married, don't have a family, just look after yourself, be fit, be strong, be healthy, work out, have lots of girlfriends, earn lots of money, live a great life, and don't get caught, you know, don't find yourself in family court giving everything you've ever worked for to someone who hates you. Um, so we are actually now seeing these sort of, but I, because I wouldn't expect men to be strongly selected for to be withdrawing themselves from the mating market, the way I see it is that that is a response to a severe shortage of women, whereas the the female withdrawing from the mating market is you know, very much female inflicted reproductive suppression. So, I think what you're seeing in men is just kind of like a whole bunch of men effectively coping with the fact that there just aren't women out there for them. And so having to kind of organize into these primarily male social groups, and this is what emerges in those primarily male social groups. I'm not sure that it's a intrinsically driven male trait to be doing that. Um, and I don't think to to answer your other question, we finally get back to what you asked. I don't think that female choice would select for men to be, um, sort of Machiavellian and and socially manipulative like that. Um, women generally, um, just as a straight average, tend to have much better social skills than men do, certainly in terms of the kind of, you know, keeping track of social relationships and predicting how people are going to act and and all. Women have a, a fair social advantage. Um, and I don't imagine most women would want their male partner to have that advantage over them. You know, given that it's kind of the, the, the female domain to be curating the social network and to be deciding who gets to be friends and who doesn't get to be friends, I don't think she wants the male partner that's going to be pushing back too hard on that. Mhm. Uh, you, you made me think of yet another cause that is touted by, uh, women, that is evidently manipulative reproductive suppression. Sex work is work. Like, like championing more and more, uh, lower-class women to to get into sex work. >> Sex work is work. Um, you know, "no one cares about your body count." That's a lie. Um, you know, having the, the thing that I think we don't talk about enough that I think is central to how women achieve this kind of social manipulation game that they play is inversion. The amount of inversion that that you can see in this, once you start to see it, it's kind of everywhere. So, you've got women on the one hand, you've got all these like, you know, New York Times op-eds about, you know, "Don't have sex with your husband if you're tired. It's not your job to do that." You know, "Don't let him," you know, basically be a terrible wife. And yet, at the same time, though, "Oh, but if you're single, have sex with everyone because that's empowering, right?" So, all of a sudden, you know, your husband, you know, your own husband, you know, wanting to have sex with you and snuggling up to you at night is, you know, misogynistic and disrespectful and rude, and how dare he when you've had a big day. But going out and, you know, sleeping with 23 men at the one time, that's that's not misogynistic at all. That's awesome. Go and do that. And it's, it's these contradictions that I find so, you know, once you begin to see them, the, the inversions, what's what's good is bad, and what's bad is good. They're, they're everywhere. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that's why that's why, um, accusations of hypocrisy from the right to the left don't stick because it's not about hypoc. Of course, it's hypocritical. Like, that's not the >> That's not the vector of of honor. Um, what about societies that articulate the balance between male and female sexual compet, intra-sexual competition? You can see, um, like what makes the West >> like a a tipping, they could stay at the tipping point. You mean? >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm wondering if there are religions that allow that. I wonder if that's why religions are so powerful because they figure out a way to articulate the drives within the sexes, and why Christianity might have led to the predominance of the West. It's its attitudes towards sex, um, and the sexes. I think to some extent, I think all societies, um, actually do, even the terrible ones, you know, the ones that we would say by Western standards are arguably terrible, you know, barbaric, uncivilized, cruel, oppressive, actually do a a reasonable job of policing human mating behavior. So, marriage is actually, you know, that is most definitely a cultural institution. And the reason why it's a cultural universal is because cultures that didn't impose marriage degraded very quickly, which of course is why feminism attacks marriage, right? Um, but cultures that don't impose marriage degrade very quickly. Um, you know, marriage and, you know, enforces that, um, mating market exchange, right? His resources in return for her fidelity. And the, what you end up with is the, the, the marriage, um, contract, if you will, the, the one that matters is not the marriage contract between the, the man and the woman. The marriage contract that matters is the contract between the couple and the rest of society. So, what that contract is, is you two will be together. You will stay together. You will not interfere in the, uh, mating, you know, the mating of other members of society, and in return, we will afford your relationship special status, right? So, you know, a child born in wedlock is okay, a child born out of wedlock is not okay, right? So, we afford marriages special status, and in return, the people who are married are expected to be faithful, not because we give, you know, not because we give two hoots about their relationship to each other, it's who they're being unfaithful with that the rest of society cares about, which is why we police infidelity so heavily, right? And, and marriage is a cultural universal. Some form of marriage is a cultural universal because human societies are terribly unstable if you get rid of marriage. Um, and so, I think, I think all societies, just to to exist and to function and and to, you know, become in any way civilized, have to impose these cultural constructs on the human mating system, and and that's why you get marriage being universal. Um, so they all do that to some extent, but if my theory is essentially correct, and I'm, I'm not saying it is, you know, I do still refine it and change it up a bit and sometimes think a bit harder about things, but ostensibly, if, if the thing that, you know, humans are such that when we are in this situation, we behave like this, and by behaving like this, we create this situation. When in this situation, we behave like this, and by behaving like this, we create this situation. So, you know, this is how you get, you know, changing circumstances, and then behaviors respond to those circumstances, which changes the circumstances, and you get these effects. Um, that's basically the mechanism by which this happens. If the circumstances that kind of trigger this, this whole kind of flow-on effects are effectively, um, sufficient wealth, technology, um, luxury, knowledge, that mortality begins to go down, then any society in which that begins to happen, these types of things are going to emerge. So, it's not about policing marriage or or or having other things or or whatever, unless you're going to stay in abject poverty and as a society not accrue knowledge and technology and institutions and comfort for your people, this is where you're going to end up. Um, and so, it's very difficult to see, um, how you create circumstances. Maybe it's not impossible, but it's very difficult to see how you create circumstances where you won't get this, this massive female manipulative reproductive suppression. What, what kind of a society would we have to build that women wouldn't do that in? And I'm not sure, you know, you can't change the fundamental nature of being human. So, people are going to behave however they behave in any given situation. So, we can try and create a situation in which women won't do this, but I don't know what that situation would look like. >> Well, I mean, it would be a, a viable society to live in. >> Well, I think so. I, I think religion is is a good thought experiment because right now, with the young people, it seems like, well, like, like the whole reason we I contacted you, brilliant response to why women are getting more liberal and men are kind of becoming more conservative. But you see this available, like this dating market that provides more stability for men and women within these traditional, uh, you know, niches, which are kind of encoded by religion, right? Certain certain, um, clades of Christianity have preserved these these formalities, um, and have resisted the the dis, the dissolving, uh, ideologies. Like the churches that withhold their blessing on gay marriage because they still prize marriage as specifically between male and female, they kind of survive that reproductive bottleneck because once the franchise of marriage is extended to non-heterosexual marriages, it loses kind of its power. And once gays get the right to marry, then why not polyamorous people? Why not, why not groups? Like, it, it no longer has that, that reproductive purpose. It has a, a social, um, >> It's no longer the social contract. >> Yeah. So, I'm wondering, um, if, and this is what I talk when I, uh, interview the right-wing guys, um, and they're mostly guys, um, I'm like, well, what's your, what's your pitch to women? Because you're, you're selling this thing to guys where, like, if they behave a certain way, they'll, you know, and and they prize certain relationships over other relationships, and they, they go for the long haul. They clean their room not just to have a clean room, but to land a woman, and not just to land a woman, but to land a family, and, uh, you know, and to assume all the different behaviors where you have to think less of yourself as the center of the universe and more of yourself as a provider. Um, but what's your pitch to women in a liberal society? It says, you know, go and get your own thing. Um, you know, uh, build your own wealth, get that cushy job, be the girl boss. Uh, and, and the guys say, "Well, they'll end up with a cat and a bottle of wine rather than a family." But you see this really interesting thing where where kind of B-tier or like A-minus tier elite women are always saying like, "Look, I don't have a family, and look at how wonderful I am. Like, look at how how great, uh, life." >> And they go home and they cry while they drink the wine and pat the cat. >> Yeah. So, I, I, the, the message that the pitch to women, because they need, they need the women to show up to to complete the circuit of what they're promising men, is kind of by compare and contrast. If you can kind of see through, um, this manipulation and ask yourself what you really want, it's probably better to, you know, as soon as you're done with college, speaking to women, to have a family, sink the 15, 20 years into raising children, and then go back to your, uh, cuz you're going to have plenty of time and plenty of energy and plenty of smarts. You're not, you don't like your mind doesn't just end and your ambitions don't end when you're 40. They actually pick up. They, you have like another, uh, kind of second wind in life. Um, so I think the, the, the strategy to to achieve a society that doesn't result in in self-castration and self-sabotage is to promote longer-term thinking. Is to, the feminist cause, or true feminism, would be to naturally align your reproductive, uh, lifespan to to a life that, like, I do this after college. I don't go into the workforce. I like my, my job, and my beauty, and my destiny is to have children, and then I can >> go into the workforce. I don't know. Yeah, but certainly it would be much more, it would be much more adaptive, and it would make for a far more flourishing society if women on the whole, uh, value doing those things in the opposite direction, right? So, you know, have the children first, have the family first, while you're young and your body is best suited for it, and then do the career stuff later. But of course, the feminist, you know, line is always, "Get your career sorted first. Don't get married too early. If you have a baby, it will ruin your life." That's my personal favorite. Um, >> Do they say that? >> I know they imply that, but >> No, they do. I guess they do. >> That, trust me, they say it as a as a 15, 16, probably everything up to about 25-year-old, everything from basically from the moment you become capable of getting pregnant up until your mid-20s. Any, you know, as soon as you tell someone that you've got a boyfriend, don't get pregnant. Don't ruin your life. Don't have a baby. That, that's all that gets drummed into you. At like, me now, I could not imagine having a termination. I couldn't even, wouldn't even contemplate it. Couldn't, couldn't contemplate it. Thank God I never fell pregnant when I was in my late teens because I think I would have had a termination. Not, I wouldn't have thought about it. I wouldn't have decided. It just would have been a foregone conclusion, like, of course, that's what you're going to do, or your life is over. It wouldn't have even been a decision to make. It just would have been, well, of course, that's what you do. >> Um, and so, you know, it's only by, you know, good luck that that never happened to me because I'm pretty sure that's what I would have done, and that's what so many young women do. And the, the, the insidiousness of that is that the, the human mating system is is not motivated by a conscious, um, overt desire to have children, right? Men are approximately motivated to have sex, and women are approximately motivated to to hold on to men, you know, for for their resources, but for their provisions and and their protection and other >> Right. And, and those motivations result in sex, and sex results in babies. So, if you can convince women that any unplanned pregnancy should by default be terminated, then you are going to convince women that the primary route by which the majority of babies are conceived should be closed off. That's what's so insidious about teaching women in their, you know, late teens and sort of early to mid-20s that you should by default get rid of any pregnancy that you hadn't planned is that human pregnancies are by and large not planned. That that is how humans reproduce. They do not reproduce by planning children. They reproduce by getting boyfriends and girlfriends and having sex. >> Well, I mean, this is in a world without IVF and, uh, surrogacy and >> Technologies are there to >> Yeah. Uh, I, so, the whole IVF thing, I find fascinating in the in the world of female inter-sexual competition. Just a couple of observations on that. Um, France, uh, I think Macron, a little while ago, um, announced that he was going to have free fertility screening for all women, cuz obviously France has a, you know, has a birth rate problem, like the rest of the world. He announced free fertility screening for all women up to a a certain age. So, if they had, you know, because so many women are not having babies until in their mid-30s, by the time some women discover they have fertility problems, it's, you know, it's really late. They could have discovered that.

Much earlier, they could have done something about it much earlier. So, the idea was just to offer this free fertility screening to all women up to whatever age it was so that if they did have fertility problems, at least they would know and not discover when they're 38 years old.

Um, feminists went bonkers. They went mental. "How dare, how oppressive. We have so many more important issues and all you want to do is check which one of us, you know, whether or not we..."

"That's right. They went it went nuts."

The other really, this is just a little anecdote, but the other great thing that I saw was on. Great. It's terrible. But the other thing I saw in that vein is that I'm not sure whether you've seen there's a little video that does the rounds on on X every now and again. And it's taken under a microscope and it's this little nano robot that curls itself around the tail of a sperm and directs the sperm into the egg. And it's, it's real, right? It's a, it's, it's reproductive um technology. And I think in the little video, I think it might be cow sperm that it's actually doing it. I saw, I won't say who it was, but I saw a a feminist on on on X with a pretty decent following share that video and what she wrote about it. Want to have a guess? I'll just let you take a guess what she wrote. Have a guess what she wrote about that video. Just pick something. What, what do you think a feminist might have said about that?

"Handmaid's tail is the first thing that comes to mind or something like that, which is another not not too far away."

What she said was, "This is the stupidest invention ever." Now, we live in a world with some pretty stupid inventions. Like, that's a, you know, that's a pretty competitive field for stupid invention ever. We've invented a micro robot that can go in and target sperm towards an egg so that you know in this particular video cows um but also people potentially, you know, are able to reproduce who would otherwise not be able to have children and her response to that is this is a stupidest um invention ever. So the, you know, the the feminist anti-reproductive technology sentiment is alive and well. It's very alive. In fact, that's um one of the empirical studies that I think I need to do. I'm starting to work up a list of empirical studies I can do. Um, 'cause it's hard to test a lot of these ideas, right? But I'm trying to sort of come up a list of the empirical studies that I can do that, you know, at least I can tell whether they're consistent with what I'm saying or not. And and that is is one to try and look at how feminist endorsement and intra-sexual competitiveness predict um, you know, support for government investment in maternity care, reproductive health, fertility treatments versus abortion care.

"And yeah, no, I mean the amount of money that the government has uh in America, I mean Planned Parenthood is a pillar, but any sort of pro-family thing has to be run by by a church group."

Exactly. Exactly. Because you've now got you've now got women, you know, one thing that happens when women stop having children and they free up all these hours, is they now have time to go to work. And so they become entrenched in the institutions in large numbers. And what institutions they become entrenched in? Universities, hospitals, schools, places where they can um have real influence on these social decisions and these social um movements that society tries to adopt. And so what you end up with is, you know, the whole of society reformulating itself around reproductive suppression, which of course is the death knell for a society. You know, it becomes organized around those principles because it's now full of women promoting those ideals in all of the key parts of society's, you know, load-bearing institutions.

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The teachers unions, um..."

"...centers of indoctrination, bureaucratic, uh, systems more than..."

"What, what about like the, uh, likelihood of a female strongman? I mean, I, it, it doesn't even make sense as a sentence, but we've uh loosened like like a Charlemagne or like what, what like the great man theory. Why, why are there no like women?"

"Because the the female equivalents of that are the ones who are out there loudly and proudly pushing all these ideologies but very quietly having babies."

"They're the one, you know, they're the, they're the ones who are winning this game, right? They're the ones that's what they're doing. They're not out there trying to to save the civilization, right? They're out there winning and that is how you win this game."

"So that there are women like that, but you know, they don't behave like Charlemagne."

"Yeah. Or Genghis Khan for that matter. Um, because they're they're capped. They're reproductive."

"Well, exactly. That's right. You can't get that you can't get that same function out of women that you can get that you can get out of men obviously, like the. Yeah. But you know, the female equivalent of that though is having as many babies as as you can whilst driving societal reproductive rates to the floor. Right. That, that is the female equivalent of that. We can't, you know, women can't have 10,000 babies. But, you know, if they can drive societal reproductive rates down to virtually zero, then the babies they're having is many, many times more than the average woman is having, right? So, that's that's how they win, right?"

"It's, yeah, it's it's so uh it's so fascinating because it's like the function of the woman is to create life, but politically the function is to suppress life in order for her life-making to be more valuable. So it's like so counterintuitive. Um, uh, so if we, if we, the problem that I have with um, the evolutionary theories is that they have tremendous amounts of predictive power and analytical power. I mean, they they unlock a lot of understanding of phenomena, but like it's all kind of framed within this hopeless zero-sum game like where you can't like use these theories to to push society in a different direction. Or maybe you can, but I'm wondering from like where is the the pink pill? Like, like that's a term for um birth control. Where's the, where's the white pill in this?"

"That is the problem. The pink pill is birth control. That's the problem. Um, oh, look, I think I think it's really, I think it's really hard because, you know, it's a little bit like it's a little bit like, you know, it'd be great if the rabbit grew wings so it could get away from the fox, but the rabbit's not going to evolve wings, right? It's not going to happen. You know, people, you know, you, you can't implement solutions that rely on, you know, humans being fundamentally different to what they are, right? So, this greatly constrains um, you know, it greatly constrains what we, what kind of social engineering we might want to do and hope to see the kinds of outcomes that we actually want, right? Like, you know, the theory of um, you know, the theory of of, you know, communism and and Marxism and the utopian, you know, world that it promises doesn't work because that's just not how humans function, right? It's never going to work, not because it's never been done properly, but because you cannot change the fundamental nature of being human such that that kind of society will actually function like that. It's just never going to happen. And so, you know, this is the kind of, you know, it's sort of the question that I probably sort of like the least in terms of what can we do because I, I don't know that there is anything that we can do. You know, what I'm just, I just don't know that there is anything not inevitable about it. So, you know..."

"It, it reminds me a lot of the hard men, good times, good times, weak men, weak men, hard times, hard..."

"That, that is basically the cycle. So, you know, as, as you know, we, we know that, you know, one of the..."

"You know, one of the the tactics of of female um inter-sexual competition is to disrupt the mate selection um decisions of of other women, right? So, you know, trying to convince other women that they don't actually want, you know, high-quality men. So, you know, this, that, that's where the whole toxic masculinity narrative comes from, right? People think that feminists are attacking men and, you know, I can understand why they would think that. That's certainly what it looks like. Men are irrelevant, right? Men are, men are collateral damage. That the impact that all of these things has on men is entirely beside the point. At, at best, it's a happy accident as far as the feminists are concerned. The whole toxic masculinity narrative is entirely focused towards women. It is about convincing women that masculine high-quality men are bad and should not be chosen as mates. And the result is that men are adapting to female, to changing female mate preferences. So, you know, male testosterone levels are ridiculously low now compared to like 20 or 30 years ago. You know, men are um sort of, you know, I, I'm not suggesting that evolution has happened in that time. I'm assuming it's a, a, a plastic response. Um, but yeah, men are adaptively adjusting to what women now think that they want, which of course is not what they should..."

"Not what they want. Well, not what they actually want, but you know..."

"No, it's not most adaptive. It's not what's most adaptive to want, but that's, you know, that, that whole toxic masculinity narrative, that's not actually a narrative that's about attacking men, although it obviously has um, you know, terrible social impacts for for men and boys. It's, it's about disrupting female mate choice. That's what that is."

"Wow. Uh, because I'm, I'm thinking now of like, uh, the school systems and how it, it's not designed for high-energy boys, right? High, high-energy boys are either castigated or drugged in order to fit into those..."

"...realms. And then the men who get through that end up being, uh, selected for certain behaviors that can be more constrained within those certain environments. So you have, uh, the rise of more, um, I mean, autism, you know, people who are are more like locked into screens, locked into these bureaucratic systems or can be controlled by these bureaucratic systems. Uh, and then you probably have, uh, more entertainers, like like comedians, the class clown. I'm, I'm making a jump here, but like there's certain, certain male characteristics that do operate within, uh, female, like the long house, so-called."

"Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To, to some extent. I mean, those environments are also no good for women and girls of course as well. So the, the school environments, you know, yes, they have been um, you know, certainly shaped for female achievement, but much like how, you know, we were talking before about how that the supposed, you know, anti-racist woke ideals and all the affirmative action and and the way that's implemented is actually bad for the groups that it's trying to help. In exactly the same way, the school system that is being tailored towards girls is not helping girls. That's why there is a, you know, a female mental health crisis. So if you, you've seen, presume you've seen those graphs of the female, you know, mental health just going like the mental diagnosis, like the bad things just like going through the roof, right? Um, and that's because of the, the focus on what is supposedly, you know, soft skills or or whatever. And this constant focus on mental health. What that is, is just uh, you know, much worse for girls than boys. And it's, you know, it's causing girls to become extremely neurotic. Like girls are already prone to to neurosis and concerns, right? That's why girls are are prone, much more prone to um, all the social contagions, you know, they're prone to the eating disorders and the, the, the trans contagions and the, you know, all of the other various trends and fads and things that that girls jump on. Um..."

"...and the schooling environment is encouraging all of those neuroses. And of course, that's why the, the performance of kids in schools is getting worse, not better. So literacy is dropping, numeracy is dropping, education theory is a joke. The way schools are being run, they're just appalling. Um, and, you know, even that, and that is itself driven by the fact that they are female-dominated um institutions and so all of the same, you know, motives are directing the decision-making in those institutions as well. They're not actually interested in education outcomes. They're supposedly interested in all of these other social welfare, inclusivity, blah, blah, blah outcomes, but all the outcomes you get from from those things are all negative."

"You know, all, all of the interventions to assist mental health are what's causing the mental health problems."

"Could, could you concretize that in my mind a little bit? Why the, cuz you know, one theory is that the, the smartphone or social media is driving women's poor mental health, but how is, how would your theory plug in to the same?"

"That's Jonathan, yeah, that's Jonathan's kind of stick. That it's about the smartphones. And look, I don't, I don't think that they're helping, but, you know, women have never needed, you know, smartphones and and the internet and social media to launch, you know, social contagions and and whatnot. We've got it now and I guess it makes it a bit easier, but it's not, I think it's a little bit of a red herring. Um..."

"So I think, is, is her name Abigail Shrier? Is that, yeah?"

"Is that wrote a whole book on on the mental health crisis in schools and basically what they're doing by constantly focusing on these introspective activities and emphasizing mental health and getting kids to um, you know, reflect on what upsets them and it's, it's having the exact opposite effect. It's destroying the, the mental health of children, in particular girls, because they are so much more vulnerable to those kinds of activities, I guess, that, that kind of of self-introspection and..."

"So market man, this is so evil."

"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's evil. The worst thing you can do. So I think they've just, someone has just announced, was this an Australian announcement or I can't, I've lost track. Um, someone recently has just announced um that there's going to be compulsory mental health screening in in all schools. It's just, there's going to be so many false positives. Number one,..."

"...um, they're going to be screening all these, you know, mental health screening tools are designed to be used on people who are exhibiting symptoms of having mental health problems. The, the number of false positives you're going to get if you just subject the entire population to those mental health screening tools is going to be outrageous. Um, so it's going to be a massive waste of money and it's not going to be a waste. Diagnosis and you get a diagnosis and you Oprah over there, adrenaline and SSRI."

"Yeah. So, you know, so the entire school system that has become warped by all of these, you know, again, these female um oriented and and female dominated obsessions with mental health and inclusivity and well-being and, you know, the, the kind of rejection of discipline of any kind and the softly softly approach. It's, it's awful for for education, for education outcomes in the West. Um, and and it hurts girls more than it hurts boys. And I think that is the, the, you know, that and the, the fact that um women much more than men at the moment are subjected to inter-sexual competition because levels of female inter-sexual competition are through the roof. You know, if, if I'm essentially correct, right, we are living in a stage of of civilization where men are not suffering from much inter-sexual competition compared to what women are suffering from. Um, and as we know, female inter-sexual competition is much more nastier and sabotage-oriented anyway. And so I think that, you know..."

"Yeah. And and I think that um female mental health would probably be suffering because of that regardless of anything else. Um, potentially, I would, you know, that would be my prediction. You know, this, this theory is just so, this, uh, reproductive suppression, it's, it's so good because like now I'm seeing all these different college social movements, like the whole push towards consent, like where you have to ask to to be touched and like the..."

"...like like Bob and Jill both get drunk and have sex. She didn't consent. It's his fault. You know, like if, if you make sex like this rapey thing..."

"Those posters, they look like they're satire, but they're real. Yeah."

"...like they're real. Um..."

"...but it's an inversion because it, it's ostensibly to protect females, but what it does is that it causes more, more neuroticism in in females, which causes them to reproduce less."

"Yeah, that's right. It's the same as the whole like the entire Me Too movement was just a scandalization of flirting. That's what it was. It was turning normal human courtship behavior..."

"Yeah. Scandalization that you know that is what 98% of the Me Too movement was."

"It was an attack on and, you know, now, now courtship behavior is banned. You can't flirt in the workplace, that's sexual harassment."

"Mhm."

"Oh, and then the HR departments, which are staffed by women, are the ones who are bottlenecking."

"Precisely. Of course, this stuff. Well, the Me Too movement is fascinating, too, because the women who, uh, you know, I, well, so the men are corrupt. I'm not saying the men aren't aren't corrupt, but the women who are willing to do the sexual favors to get ahead, uh, then can kind of double dip and and like, oh, I'll use my sex to get ahead, but then I'll, I'll, I'll say that it was not my choice. Like, you know, like and that I was not, that just that I'll use it to get ahead, then I'll use it for victim status, then I'll make sure that other women understand what a terrible thing it is so that they can't use it to get ahead. Right? So not only are you using these strategies, you're then demonizing these strategies. Right? So not only, you know, so that, you know, there was a point in time when, you know, not necessarily all women, and I'm not sure if this was a mainstream view, but there was certainly, you know, a large enough minority of women who very openly acknowledged that sex was a very good weapon and why would you not use it? You know, why would you not sleep with that guy if it's good for your career? He's handsome enough. Why wouldn't you? Um, and so, you know, and so what the um, the, you know, the Me Too movement has done, it's not just about scandalizing normal human courtship behavior, which of course helps reproductive suppression if people can't pair up because the places where they spend almost all of their time interacting with members of the opposite sex at work, they're not actually allowed to form any relationships. I mean, not just that, but hey, not just not just that courtship at work is now not on, um, but also, you know, many HR departments have explicit rules against workplace romances. I mean, if you just think about how tyrannical that is that a workplace gets to say of the, you know, 3,000, 5,000 people that work here, none of you are allowed to have relationships, even though this is the only place for most of you where you have any prospect of meeting a prospective mate because this is where you spend all of your time."

"And yet this has just been accepted by people as, oh yeah, no, that's that's really good. Yeah. No, you should ban because, you know, like power differentials as as if um..."

"But anyway, it's ridiculous."

"There's something there. What do you mean?"

"Yeah. Now, oh, about the power differentials being really..."

"Oh, because men do not have and have rarely had a power differential in terms of the sexual politics in the workplace. So the, the female, uh, I should say the feminist argument that every man essentially is a would-be rapist and that, you know, the corporate world is just full of these men who are just pressuring, you know, the women um beneath him is an unfortunate choice of phrasing. You know, pressuring, pressuring the women um who rank below them in the company for for sex all the time. Um, is, uh, you know, is at best a massive exaggeration of the, uh, the number of men out there who would be prepared to do that. And even if there are, you know, men out there who are prepared to do that, you know, if it's not being coerced, if it's not rape, if it's just like, oh yeah, you know, I'm willing to sleep with these women on the implied promise that it's going to help their career, even if it's not going to help their career. Well, I mean, if you're sleeping with him because there's an implied promise that might help your career, well, I guess you, you know, you're both playing a bit of a game here and someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. And that's what sexual politics has always has always been. But the power differential has by and large almost always been with the woman for a very long time because you can have a perfectly consensual sexual relationship and then turn around and say that it wasn't consensual and in the workplace environment where it becomes a work, workplace complaint, doesn't have, I mean, not that courtrooms have that much protection for falsely accused men these days either, but, you know, the workplace environment has no protection from from from for for those who are falsely accused. That was the, the problem, or one of the big problems on the, the university campuses when the university rape crisis was such a big thing. There were so many of these, you know, young men supposedly rapists, you know, being accused of rape. Now, if these men are actually guilty of rape, why did all of the feminists and the, the universities not think that calling the police maybe might be a good plan? I mean, if you've actually got someone who you think has committed what I presume would be a, you know, a felony in every jurisdiction, why are they not wanting to call the police? Because then there's an investigation and then you're going to actually need some evidence and you're going to need to be telling the truth. What they set up was their own little university tribunals which had no accountability and could do whatever they wanted. Now, you would only prefer that kind of a kangaroo court to an actual court if you knew full damn well the majority of men who were being accused were innocent. If you actually thought these men were all rapists, why would you want a kangaroo court where the worst punishment is they'll get kicked out of university? That's not a punishment for a rapist, get kicked out of university. You know, those [ __ ] belong in prison. If you actually think these men are rapists, you go to the police. You know these men are not rapists, so you go to the university tribunal and you get them kicked out of prison. So all the other boys learn that they can't have sex with the girls, 'cause that will happen to you too,..."

"...right? It was a giant exercise in policing sex on campus."

"Wow, this is good stuff. Do you ever see that Barbie movie that came out last year?"

"No, I'm going to have to watch it. I refuse to watch it because it's Barbie, but I keep getting told how brilliant it is. And so I think I have to concede that I might judge it appropriately. And I need..."

"...with your tool, with your analytical tool, because it, I don't want to spoil the movie, but Ken wants nothing more than to serve Barbie. And so they take power away from all the girls, you know, and they, they institute this wonderful land of promise and patriarchy. And then the women conspire to have them, uh, commit a civil war. Or the women get back in charge and Ken's like, 'Oh, you know, I thought it was just about horses, you know, like I just wanted to like do this manly thing, but I really love you.' And Barbie's like, 'I don't need no man.' And Barbie goes into the world. This is the weird thing. And now I understand it. Barbie denies man, like denies this mate. And then she goes to the real world to a u gynecologist to get a vagina. She, like the last line is her asking for a vagina,..."

"...but the vagina doesn't have the purpose of reproduction. It has the purpose of just having an identity signal. It's just, it's purely a virtue signal because she doesn't want the men. She just wants a vagina. She wants to be like a woman. So, it's just brilliant. It's like this is reproductive."

"I have to watch this movie, aren't I?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, okay. I have totally misjudged the Barbie movie."

"Okay. And this is why the this is why right-wing uh guys loved it because it was so is such a self-own for the feminists because it made..."

"...self-own though. Was it a self-own or is or was it intended to be, you know, intended to be, you know, a a revelation of what feminism actually is like, you know, who was actually behind who, what was the ideology of the people behind it? So..."

"People were upset that people that the wrong people like the movie. Like these Hollywood movies produce things and then the wrong people like the movie, so they have to change. They have to..."

"That's disappointing. I, for a minute there, I really wanted to think that it was like a subversive, but it was just like, as you say, a massive self-own, which I'm happy to enjoy. I'm happy to enjoy it if it's a massive self-own, but I really wouldn't want it to be subversive. I really..."

"No, no, I think it was just unintentionally. I think the problem or the difficulty with your theory is that it assumes, and you, you carved out an exception for Machiavellian women, but but it implies that women are conscious about this. And I don't think that it has to be the case that most women are conscious."

"No, I, I, I don't think that. I think that the theory is largely silent on consciousness. I don't think it matters either way. So I, I mean, consciousness is a, is given a lot more importance than it should be. So I think most of people's conscious reasoning about what they're doing is just like post-rationalization or ex-ante reasoning, right? Like it's not, it's not actually the reasons why they did things. So what we've got is we've got people be according to you know, evolved mechanisms that make people behave in certain ways in certain circumstances because, you know, in in the past, those mechanisms effectively won the selection process, right? So they're now the mechanisms that we have. In the past, they resulted in the best net reproductive success and so those mechanisms dictate our behavior and kind of over the top of that, you've got this big messy thing called consciousness that tries to that observes the way we're behaving, attempts to make it coherent, tries to tell stories about it. Clearly, the fact that we've got consciousness means that you now need to kind of, you need to kind of contend with it. So, the fact that we are conscious and that we are empathic and that we have this theory of mind about each other. So, you sort of got to make up stories about other people's motives that make us either like them or not like. So you sort of got to contend with consciousness to some extent, but I think it is largely something of a fury in terms of determining people's behavior. It's just kind of this thing that people are aware of what they're doing to some extent. Like, you know, I think I think so, you know, some of the data I've got at the moment that I am writing up because I am convinced, right, um, is showing that women will give reproductively inhibiting advice to other women, even other women that they think are their friends. Right? So, you know, you ask them..."

"The whole cut your hair."

"Yeah. Oh, yeah. But, but beyond that, right? So, so yeah, the whole cut your hair thing is one thing, but even beyond that, so you give um a whole bunch of like reproductively consequential decisions to women. You say, 'Okay, if you were in this situation, what would you do?' And then you to a different group of women, you say, um, 'If a friend of yours was in this situation, what would you advise them to do?' Right? So, it's different groups of women. So they can't fix their responses based on what they said they would do themselves. Um, and so you then compare those and you see that the advice given to other women is more reproductively inhibiting than what women say that they would do themselves. So, you know, you've kind of got this um baseline level of even when there's no animosity, no antagonism, that's just kind of how how women behave. Now, do they know they're doing it? I mean, on one level, yes, they know they're advising their friend to not pursue this relationship or to have that abortion or to not have another baby or whatever the little vignette it is that you've written and set up for them. They know that's the advice they're giving. Do they consciously think that that's necessarily the best advice? Do they spend any time thinking about whether that's just the best advice or do they just speak to their friend and that's the words that come out of their mouth and they say it nicely and kindly and they say, 'Oh, you know, but you do whatever you want and make your own decision.' And they never really think that much about why that was the particular bit of advice that they gave when they themselves would not actually do that. I mean, I don't think that I don't think that anything about, you know, I don't think anything about adaptive behavior necessarily requires consciousness and most of the data kind of bear that out. So I'm not really a consciousness researcher, although I've dabbled. Um, and by and large, the answer of what is consciousness for is nothing as far as we can tell because there's nothing that we do that we need to be conscious for. Every time people think that they've got, oh, you need consciousness for this, actually no, it turns out you don't. So who knows what? I'm not, I'm never convinced by anything being a spandrel, right? Something that just happens. So consciousness is for something. But..."

"...it's for this podcast. I couldn't do..."

"I don't think it's going to be for what we think it's going to be for. It's, it's not for making decisions. It's not for sitting down and consciously thinking through your choices and then acting, 'cause that's not, that is not how people behave. So whatever consciousness is for, it's not for that. Um, what it is for, I'm not, I suspect it's perceptual. That's, that's my take. I suspect conscious primarily perceptual. I, I think that that consciousness initially evolved because the subjective experience of perceiving is potentially necessary for the processing of visual information and auditory information. Perception is not limited to the eyes. But my kind of, to the extent that I have a well-thought-out view on on consciousness, I think it is primarily about perception. And then once you are a conscious being, of course, it can get co-opted. And then of course, humans got these ridiculous brains. So we think about all sorts of stuff and we start, you know, going a little bit haywire. But, um, I, I think consciousness is probably um driven by perceptual advantages. I think that's probably where it arose from. It facilitates perception. Um, beyond that, I think it's something to be to contend with because, you know, there's a whole bunch of things that you can do less well when you're conscious of it. So, you know, if you don't think about it, you can enter your PIN number in the, in the little ATM pad. The minute you think about it, you can't remember what your PIN number is, you know. So, and then that's like, that's a quaint example, but there's loads of of of things that people can do when they're not consciously thinking about it that conscious actually gets in the way of when you're actually conscious of..."

"...you're a lot less smooth. So, you know, some people can sing in tune until they actually are paying attention to what they're singing and try to, and then they can't carry the tune anymore, right? So, you know, consciousness actually for a lot of things gets way..."

"It's, it's good for onboarding knowledge. It's not necessarily good for performing a task, but like learning how to tie your shoes. You do that."

"Yeah. Look, it can be good for onboarding knowledge, but you know, you can also learn a heck of a lot and do learn a heck of a lot without conscious and awareness. So, you know, humans are engaging in massive amounts of statistical learning, right? We engage in huge amounts of statistical learning when we pick up languages, for example, and none of that's conscious. We pick up all of the grammar and syntax of a language without being able to actually explicate any of those grammatical rules, right? We can, we can tell when a sentence is grammatically correct or not. Um, even people who haven't had any English training and can't possibly explain why, but we know which one's right and which one's wrong. So, you know, we onboard a lot of knowledge without consciousness as well. So, it, it might be, it may be that it's necessary for some types of learning, but I don't even think, I don't even think learning ranks as highly as perception for me. I think perception is the thing consciousness is, is most relevant to. But look, I'm not a consciousness researcher and I'm sure there are, there are people out there with far more knowledge than I do who would probably disagree. So, you should probably ask them."

"Danielle, this has been an absolutely fascinating, totally just mind-blowing conversation. One of my favorites of the summer. Um, I have to, I have to wrap up um because I have to go off to my other job. But um, one more thing, uh, the whole body positivity movement, right, where like front and center. So, so Me Too happens and there's this meme that goes around with like Harvey Weinstein like keeping all these uglies off the screen and then you get rid of them and now like all the like everything is like all these ugly people are like front and center, like these Nike ads with like literally an athletic company promoting obesity. And then something happened in the last couple weeks where this buxom blonde..."

"...um, average to above average looking female, but obviously sexually appealing..."

"...female is making a huge splash and everybody's like, 'Oh, that's white supremacy.' And your theory just explains like why would all these feminists say re this reproductively available woman is white supremacy? Because they want to suppress white, white reproduction so that they can get ahead."

"Yeah, that's right. And I mean, the other thing too, the, the body positivity thing is really interesting because, you know, leading up to that, if you sort of look through most of like the 1900s, there were all these moves where women went from being like ostensibly normal weight to being really super skinny. So like in the '30s, you had like flapper girls were super skinny and they had like heroin chic and then you had like, well, that's like a bit later, but then you got like the Twiggy thing in the in like the '60s and '70s and everyone was really skinny and then kind of went back to normal 'cause that kind of, you know, extreme skinniness can't be maintained as a as a social standard, right? It's just too hard. Um, but you sort of got this constant like, you know, pushing for skinny and of course, the reason for that is because there's actually a really narrow, fairly narrow weight range in which women can conceive, right? So if you're too skinny, it's much harder to conceive. So having these skinny body ideals um makes it hard for women to conceive, which is why that's the direction that these trends always went in. Um, the other reason why the trends went in that direction is because most women were less curvy than what most men desired. So female inter-sexual competition wasn't going to convince women to become curvier because that would make them more attractive. So I was going to drive them in the direction of becoming skinnier and less curvy and less attractive to men whilst telling them that, oh, this is what men want and eventually get eating disorders. Um, but then people got fat, right? And so then before a whole bunch of, you know, social and cultural reasons, people got fat and all of a sudden the average woman was fatter than most men liked. So then you weren't going to get a movement that was convincing women to lose weight because that would actually be healthy for them and would make them more attractive. So then instead of getting another heroin chic or, you know, another, you know, Twiggy movement, what we got was body positivity where female inter-sexual competition went, 'Oh, you want to be fat? Okay, be really fat. Then be massive. Be so fat that if you fall pregnant, you know, you and your baby will actually be at massive risk.' So, as I discovered for a rather rather rude and obnoxious obstetrician, actually being not that overweight whilst you're pregnant is apparently a massive risk factor, but in all seriousness, it is. So, you don't have to be that overweight as a pregnant woman for that to actually be um, apparently the single biggest. So, in terms of like single risk factors, actually being overweight is one of the worst things that you can be for the health of you and your baby whilst having to to give birth. So women have a pretty narrow weight range in which they can effectively and safely conceive and give birth, which is why women's weight is always a target for inter-sexual competition. So it was making women skinny when that was pushing them away from what male preferences were. Then people got fat and so we got body positivity, which pushed women again away from male preferences because now most women sat on the fat side of the average male preferences. So then it started pushing women in in that direction. Um, and and yeah, now of course you've you've got this, you know, sort of layered on top of that again, we've got this inversion where for the last, you know, however many years it's been since it's been okay to put a size eight blonde in a jeans commercial, which apparently it's still not okay. Um, you know, where we've had all of these supremely unattractive people being, you know, all, all being lorded as though they're attractive and we're all going to need to go along with this pretense. And again, that's just about disrupting people's mate preferences and convincing people that, you know, these terrible, you know, the cluster B haircut and whatever that people get hair and the septum ring is attractive when it's not. Um..."

"...it's all about disrupting, you know, people's apparent mate value and lording these, you know, pretending that what's not attractive is actually attractive. And yeah, what you've seen in response to the the Sydney Sweeney ad, which I'm sure, of course, they they knew what they were doing. I'm sure the advertisers not so stupid that they did not know exactly where the 'you're a Nazi' crowd was going to go with Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. Of course they knew that's where they were going to go with that and it was and it was brilliant marketing. Um, but it's just, you know, it wasn't that long ago where that's what every jeans commercial looked like. Now it's an outrage. M but what, what explains the return to the ideal, uh, like the ideal weight range, the ideal amount of attractiveness, especially like like Sydney Sweeneying? It's, it's odd because she became some sort of right-wing um icon, which which, uh, people were like, well, I thought the the right was about suppressing, you know, uh, female sexuality, but I think the right wants female sexuality actually not suppressed, but controlled in order to produce. Yeah. What they want is for for female sexuality to be functional. So if, if the left, if, if the left are progressive and the right are conservative, and what the conservatives are trying to do is pull civilization back from the brink. And of course, what the progressives are trying to do is progress civilization, which sounds great until you realize that what they're progressing for is annihilation. And all of a sudden becoming conservative and pulling back from annihilation looks like a really good idea. So if that is that the fundamental difference between progressives and conservatives is that progressives are pushing for the breakdown of civilization and conservatives are trying to stave it off, then what conservatives want is functional sexuality for both men and women, right? They don't want it to be repressed. They just want it to be maximally functional."

"And part of being maximally functional is you need to be able to actually admit what's attractive. Um, and that's what's, you know, that is what has um, the, the progressive left has made anathema um, very successfully that, that, you know, everybody has collectively agreed to pretend that attractive people are are not actually attractive and unattractive people really are."

"Mhm. There, there was this um, couple years ago, there was this kind of viral clip and it was a, it was a genre of clip where guys out on the street would go talk to women, you know, like when when they're all milling about and, and, uh, the guy would say, 'Is Lizzo beautiful?' And all the girls would say, 'Yeah, she's so beautiful. She's so beautiful.' Like, 'Well, do you mind if I call you Lizzo?' And then they would be really, uh, shocked like, 'No, I'm not.'"

"So it, it sounds hypocritical, but that's actually the female mate suppression. Like we're going to call all the ugly beautiful, but don't call, but not me."

"Like..."

"Yeah."

"...because now, now you just demeaned my status when I was, I was playing this trick."

"They know full well. Yeah, because they, they know two things very well. They know that Lizzo is, you know, was she lost a lot of weight now. Um, but certainly at her heaviest, they know that she is not attractive, number one. Number two, they know that they have to say that she is, and they know those two things very, very well. Um, it's very easy to put them in conflict."

"Um, but they know that they have to say that she is, and they know that she's damn well not."

"Well, so you're, you're obviously one of the good women."

"Or maybe this is your, maybe this is your Machiavellian strategy of denigrating all the other women by calling them all Machiavellian and you have like..."

"Maybe, maybe I'm just like playing like 4D chess."

"Yeah, it's possible. Uh, uh, do, do you have a publication? I know you're an academic, so it's probably every five years you get to, uh, have your name out there, but where do people find you? And I mean, I found you on X and..."

"You find me on X. I also have a Substack that I have not written in for an embarrassingly long amount of time, but I am actually going to start writing in it because I have a habit of writing these quite long X posts. And really, I should just copy them into the Substack and add a little bit of extra explanation. And I'm going to start doing that. So I have my X account and I have my Substack, which is the same Dr. Danny S. Um, so you can find me on Substack and that's the only places where I say interesting things. So that's the only places where you need to find me."

"Where people can find you."

"Yeah, that's where I can be found."

"Well, thank you so much for taking time out of your. It's probably like 4:00 a.m. right now. So thank you very much for..."

"20 plus 3. And would you believe I didn't go to bed last night? I had to pull an all-nighter last night for for different reasons. And um, and I made the decision to stay up tonight 'cause if I go to sleep, that's going to be really bad. So I'm now at 3:20 a.m. Haven't slept all of last night or all of tonight. I'm smashing this."

"Yeah, you are. You're on it."

"So well, and I am going to absolutely collapse the minute I turn off this. I'll be lucky if I make it up the stairs. You'll probably like my husband will find me asleep halfway up the stairs tomorrow morning."

"Yeah, don't do that. You, you need a walk tomorrow. So, you know, you aren't as, uh, live as, uh, you were in your 20s. Not, not to denigrate you, but just sleep, sleep wisely, uh, so that you take care of yourself. But yeah, this is absolutely amazing stuff. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I'll link to your X and your Substack down below so people can find you and catch up on you. Hopefully, I can have you back on again."

"Yeah, 100%. I'll happy to come on anytime. I've always got something new to say, even if I'm like, just thought of it."

"Cool. Thanks, Dr. Danny."

"All right, take care."