Why Do Women Take Sexy Selfies? - Dr Khandis Blake

Sexualization is not actually manifesting from this kind of patriarchal pressure where men force women to beautify. It's actually manifesting as a result of a state of the economy that has people want to strive to do better, to out-compete their peers, to keep up with the Joneses. It's linking beautification with status seeking and not with the patriarchy.

Why do women take sexy selfies? Ah, we're starting at the big ones, the big questions. Um, so this has been something that's been really fascinating for me for a while, partly because, um, I'm a woman, you know, and I've been through all of those teenage years and my 20s where beauty was, was really important to me. Um, and then I've kind of passed that. And whilst beauty still is important in your 30s as well, um, you know, you just see so many women taking these selfies and, and it seems to be so, so important to them.

And, um, one of the kind of strongest arguments about this, one of the most dominant arguments about this, is basically that women really care about their appearance, they really care about beauty because of the patriarchy, you know, capital P. And the idea there is that gender oppression leads women to value their bodies more than they value their other qualities. Psychologists call that self-objectification. That's the kind of techy term for it. Um, and, uh, you know, I think there is some truth to that. There's certainly a bunch of people been talking about it for many years.

But in my kind of opinion, when I first started looking at this topic of research, I thought that was doing a bit of a disservice to women. Um, because from what I could see, having kind of been in that world and having known many women in that world, there was something really Uber competitive about women engaging in sexy selfies and, and beautifying their appearance as well. Like it didn't seem to me to be something that was done to women, but very much something that women were owning and using quite strategically. Um, so that's kind of the background of what had me start to look at that question and why I was so animated by it.

Um, and we have found in a range of different studies now, um, that women take sexy selfies to, to seek status. But this is a status-seeking thing, you know, they're interested in gaining status in social hierarchies. It can be a very authentic and assertive behavior. Um, and that saying they're only doing it because they're pressed and the patriarchy tells them they have to is really kind of only showing a small part of the picture of that kind of motivation.

Are you suggesting that, uh, beautification and enhanced attractiveness and displays of attractiveness are one of the primary methods through which women can gain status?

I wouldn't say it's a primary. Well, would I say it's a primary method? Let me think about that. Um, yeah, I think I probably would, actually. Yeah, it's definitely a big way. And part of that is, you know, part of that just has to do with our kind of cultural history where for many women, even to this day, your survival, you're kind of flourishing relies on you marrying well. Um, because you can't necessarily hold much wealth for yourself. So in that case, looking attractive really helps. Because we know that men tend to prefer, all else being equal, a more beautiful partner to a less beautiful partner. I mean, I don't think we need to get up in arms about that. It's a kind of a pretty logical decision. Um, so partly, I think the, the importance of seeking status through beauty comes from that place.

But then there's something else about it that's just unrelated to that dynamic as well, which is humans have this tendency to think highly of beautiful people. You know, more attractive people, they're more likely to get hired, they're more likely to get job offers, they have higher earning potential in general, at something like 10 to 15% higher wages. Um, we think that they're smarter. They're not, right? But we think that they are. People have this bias. We think they're smarter, we think they're generally good, we think they're competent. Um, and all of these kinds of stereotypes and biases we hold means that investing in your appearance can be quite a smart move.

Why is it the case that for women, sexy selfies are a status-seeking mechanism if it's simply the case that this halo effect, pretty privilege, goes across the board? And yet for men, we don't see, I certainly don't see as many sexy selfies from my guy mates as I do from my girl mates.

Yeah, totally. So there's a couple of things about that. The, the evidence that shows that we have these attractiveness biases, some of that evidence is sex-specific. So some of it is stronger for women, right? So you see these effects manifest more for women than you do men. But not all of them. Um, you know, if you were going to do a blanket statement, I would probably say maybe a third of them are stronger amongst men, and then the other two-thirds, there's no sex difference. So that you get the same effects for men as well.

Um, I think there's kind of two things to say on why we see it more amongst women. One is, we do have that context of women needing, you know, of women having in the past, having to rely on beauty to get ahead, right? So that's that. But then the other thing is, um, men can tend to have other ways of, of achieving status, right? And part of that is historical, and part of that is, um, that in most cultures and pretty much all countries, I mean, the vast majority of them, men earn more than women do. Earning is this really great way of producing status.

And if you look at what age sex is looking for in a mate, you find that every sex is, you know, both men and both women, and, you know, people who don't identify as either, care about mates that are kind. People generally want mates that are, um, intelligent, compassionate people. But as a blanket population level difference, men are more interested in mates that are more attractive, and women are more interested in mates that have higher status. So men have these other ways of, of achieving status that aren't necessarily as easy for women to achieve.

I suppose if you were to compare the number of car photos or watch photos that guys upload online, big animal photos, get about those, you know, hugging a tiger. Yeah. And that as well.

What are some of the things that you discovered that can predict increases in sexy selfieing?

Yeah, so, uh, uh, one surprisingly is a, uh, economic condition of economic inequality. So one of the things we did was we, so I run a big data, uh, platform, right? I'm really, I really love big data. I think it's fun and exciting and yada yada. So I run this platform and we have, um, three billion geolocated tweets that we designed this algorithm to geolocate. They span 10 years, and we use it to try and understand trajectories of, of, uh, attitudes and kind of cultural trends. And one of the first things we did with that was look at sexy selfies, right? So by, by being able to take this kind of big geolocated social media data, and we have data for every country in the world, and look at the prevalence of something like sexy selfies across these different countries and regions, we can then link that data to, uh, popular population level data about that country, things like its degree of gender inequality, right? Its degree of income inequality, um, its sex ratio, which is, you know, the ratio of men to women, which is this indicator of reproductive competition, you know, income, education, all these kinds of things.

So we did this investigation and we found that sexy selfies happen a lot more in environments that are economically unequal. We also looked at gender inequality and we found that, consistent with that dominant argument, we did find a gender inequality effect, meaning that sexy selfies happened more in places that were gender unequal.

Just for the people that don't know, what does gender inequality mean?

That would be like how much more men earn than women earn, um, how many more parliamentary seats men hold, like, are men considered leaders in society more than women? And do they have more power, right? Um, so you could kind of think of that gender inequality metric as being an indication of, um, the power of the patriarchy, right? High gender inequality, stronger patriarchal power.

And can, and consent with that argument, we initially found this gender inequality effect, right? But once you put income inequality into that analysis, the gender inequality effect disappears. Um, and that may sound a little like a bit of kind of academic statistic mumbo jumbo. What's the real difference? It's all inequalities. But it's actually really important. Um, because what it's doing is saying that sexualization is not actually, in these data at least, manifesting from this kind of patriarchal pressure where men, men force women to beautify. It's actually manifesting as a result of a state of the economy that has people want to strive to do better, to out-compete their peers, to keep up with the Joneses, right? So it's, it's linking beautification with status seeking and not with the patriarchy.

Wow, okay. Why, why do you think that that's the case?

Yes, yeah. So, um, I think that in evolutionary psychology, in gender psychology, you know, in academia in general, we tend to underestimate the importance of status seeking amongst women. There is a, uh, quite dominant discourse about why status is important for men. You know, we talked about a little of it, like status is important for men to seek mates, obviously, status is important for money, money is important for everybody, and money is important for reproduction as well. So, you know, we tend to know that men are interested in status. But there's been this disagreement and this kind of, uh, neglect of the importance of status for women. I think particularly. There's definitely an element of that whereby any discussion of the more vicious sides of femininity are kind of swept under the rug. That's not really something that women do. There is a, a little bit of a culture at the moment that masculinity is not something that should be pushed too much further forward, which means the subtext of that anything which is more feminine should be something which should be better.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's one of the reasons why, um, I mean, I've had Joyce Bennington, Tanya Reynolds, Candice, uh, uh, Christina Durante, um, yeah, a bunch of different people on the show recently, all of whom are saying the same thing, which is, and for me, female intersexual competition is way, way more interesting than male intersexual competition because it's so much, you guys are just like vicious and cunning and nuanced and brutal. It's great. But very nice on top of all of that, over the on the outside. Sexy selfies as well. So, you know, it's great. Yeah. Yeah.

I, I, it fascinates me as well, you know, and I, um, I think, you know, the, the, this idea that women aren't ferociously competitive is just plain wrong. We just, we compete in a different way than what people have traditionally considered to be competition. Status gives us different benefits. It doesn't mean it's not really critically important though.

Okay, so status amongst women is important. Yeah. Economic inequality predicts sexy selfieing. Women are using beautification as a tool to drag themselves out of a situation in which there is increased economic inequality. Let me bro signs, presumably because they can see where they could get to because they're exposed to the heights of good, uh, economics, but they are also exposed to what happens if they slip a couple of rungs down the ladder. And that is a motivation to say, you do not want to go down there, you do want to go up there. What are the tools that I have at my disposal? I have a camera and a phone and an Instagram account. Allow the selfies to occur.

Yeah, you nailed it. That's, that's basically exactly what we argue is happening. Now, I think there's a wishes that affect of economic inequality on wanting to seek status is something that you see about both men and women, right? So this is a popular amongst everybody. Even rich people in economically unequal environments get more worried about status, presumably because they're worried about losing status, right? So every economic inequality makes everyone across the board want to seek status. But what you're seeing amongst women, and particularly women for whom beauty is, is a form of capital, right? Is that they invest in that to try and get ahead.

I think that, um, there's two kind of main pathways that could help them get ahead. One is the more obvious one, if they could use it to attract a high-quality mate, right? Or, and in this case, that would be a rich, well-off man in this economically ionic world. Um, but the other is all those other biases and, uh, stereotypes that we discussed about why beauty benefits people, is that they could use it to build social capital, right? People want to be friends with beautiful people. It allows you to move in the right social circles. We know that moving in the right social circles can have really important ramifications. It can help you build, uh, networks, it can, and these can be same-sex and other-sex networks. Um, it can also have you create advocates and protectors around you. And, and, you know, none of these effects are going to be sledgehammer effects where all of a sudden I put on lipstick and like 10 people are running to me going, how can I advocate for your interests? Candice. Um, I mean, this is not that strong, right? So gotta remember that this is, this is a subtle kind of finding. Um, it doesn't mean it's not meaningful though, and it doesn't mean that, uh, it's not strategic and savvy to invest in that.

Yeah, these one percent all the way up. I tell you what, I'd love to look at the, I'd love to get David puts in to get him to do his study about male vocal pitch. And I wonder if men speak in a lower vocal tone in areas of higher economic inequality. I bet they do. Yeah. I wonder if they do. And amongst beautiful women as well. Why do I feel like he may have looked at that already? I don't know if he looked at the amongst beautiful women thing. But you'd expect that some kind of environment that is increasing male competition could result in that kind of manner of wild [ __ ] happening. He told me the story about when he was at uni, before he'd even started doing his big studies on vocal pitch and stuff. And apparently he was stood in the queue at the supermarket and he could hear these two guys behind him and they were speaking. And he thought he was going to turn around and find two jazz singers or two sort of old guys that were smoking cigars or something because their voices were so low. And he turned around to find a pretty attractive girl in between him and two guys that were in their 20s. And they're right, it was a case that these two guys were trying to signal or audit to release signal dominance to this girl. Look at how big my vocal folds are. Look at it.

Okay, so that's how, uh, income inequality impacts sexy selfies. But it also, it has to impact female intersexual competition in other ways as well. What else have you learned?

Okay, so we have looked at sexualization. And what else have we looked at? Um, cosmetic use. Cosmetic use. Yeah. We have. So, um, one of the things that we were keen on in that study was not just showing the effect online, right? Because social media is its own world and, and we assume that what's happening online reflects what's happening offline. But it's always good to kind of test that assumption. So we looked at, um, women's purchasing of beauty products as well amongst all the states in the US where we had really good kind of data on that. And then we looked at, uh, beauty salons. And I think it was, yeah, it was beauty salons and cosmetics. So these two other kind of indicators. And we also found that in cities in the US that were more economically unequal, in counties in the U.S. that were more economically unequal, that people were spending more money in women's beauty salons and more money on women's cosmetics and women's beauty products. So we kind of replicate the effect there as well, consistent with physical appearance and beauty becoming really important in these areas.

And you saw that beautification increased assertiveness too?

Yeah. So a lot of my work is on beauty. You know, I, uh, uh, it's been, it's been a kind of long, it's been a long journey for me, partly, I think this is because I, uh, I, I grew up in a family where my mum had been a fashion model, my dad had been a fashion model, and then my brother was a fashion model, right? I was not a fashion model. Had no resentment about it, of course. I'm completely over it. Um, however, right, it's had me become really interested in beauty. And so we did these other studies where we had women come into the lab and we prepped them for this, right? So we gave them all these instructions and we told them they either had to come into the lab bringing everything they would wear if they were going to go on a hot date, makeup, hair tools, uh, or the apples are women bringing, are they bringing like a [ __ ] power drill or something? What have they got with them?

Curling irons, straighteners. Straighteners. People, I see. It's beautification tools, application tools, not DIY tools.

No, no. Um, so, and we were like, okay, so if you've got to hold out, you need to date, you can leave them at our office for the morning. But we're like, you have to bring these things in. You can't not bring them in. If you don't bring them in, you can't do the experiment. So they either had to come in bringing all the hot date stuff, or they had to come in bringing spending time at home with mates stuff, right? Um, and then they came into the lab and we gave them half an hour or 20 minutes to get ready in preparation for the hot date or the hanging out with friends. We gave them a cubicle and it was all locked and a mirror, full-length mirror. We also gave them additional makeup should they not have had a lot of money for makeup, but secretly super wanted red lipstick. We gave them stuff. We said you didn't have to use it, it's just there in case you would do it. But we emphasized you've got to do what you would actually do for a hot date. Don't do what you think we want you to do. Do what you would do.

Then they came out of the, uh, came out of that room and we did these experimental tests on them to see whether they were, uh, feeling more assertive after doing that. So we did, um, what's called a kind of self-report test where we just asked them explicit questions on a computer monitor. It's all done privately, but we might ask them, um, how much get-up-and-go they feel like they have, how assertive they feel they are, how, you know, how interested they would be in promoting themselves, that kind of thing. But then we also do these implicit tests. And these are computerized tests that look to the participant like they're measuring word associations and reaction times. So it literally looks like you're staring at a computer screen, words flash up on a screen, and you have to press a button to categorize that word into its most relevant category. Um, and we had categories related to assertiveness, right? Agency, which is this assertiveness-related concept, and in height, so high assertiveness and low assertiveness. And then they, these words flash up on the screen, like go together, and you'd put go-getter in the assertiveness category. And then other words flash up on the screen, like lazy, and you'd categorize lazy into the non-assertiveness category. Um, and all that's well and good, that's really just to train people that they know what the task does. But then we have their name flash up on the screen, and we have the word "may" flash up on the screen, and they have to do this in split seconds, and they have to go, "Oh," and they have to categorize their name as high assertiveness or low assertiveness. And we do this hundreds of times to make the test, you know, statistically valid. And then we're able to use that as this other indicator of assertiveness. You know, that on the implicit level. And these implicit tests are good because a lot of research has shown you can't fake them, right? You can't tell people what they want to hear. You just have to react kind of intuitively.

And after running this study, we found that women who were in the hot date condition, who'd had to put on the clothes and put on the makeup and do whatever they were doing for a hot date, uh, felt more assertive. They rated themselves as more assertive. They were implicitly more assertive. Um, and that was this other indicator that this kind of strategic beauty strategy can lead women feeling more assertive as well.

When it comes to thinking about all of this, one of the things that you haven't, you mentioned earlier on about the sex ratio. Um, have you looked at the proliferation of beautification and sexy selfies in connection with what the local ecology sex ratio is?

Yeah, we did look at it in terms of sex ratio. And we've looked at this, um, twice. So the first time we looked at it alongside that sexy selfie study, and we didn't find an effect there. So it didn't seem to matter what the sex ratio was, whether there were more men in the environment or more women in the environment. Um, just reliably, there was just not, it just didn't matter. And then we, we also did an experimental study where we had participants, um, do an online experiment where we primed them for different sex ratios. Um, and how we did that is we, I think this was people in the US signed up to do the study. We found out where they lived, they gave us their county, right? And then we, um, use that information to, automatically create an infographic, like a mini poster, right? Kind of the sort that you would see your government produce about maybe how much men in compared to women and why we should readdress gender inequality. We have this poster, and the poster talked about the number of men versus women in their environment. And, um, we did kitchy things like talk about the number of fish in the sea. And then we wrote, uh, fake news articles where people were complaining about there being a man drought or a woman drought. And we gave fake statistics about there being five, only five, uh, you know, five men available for every one woman, or the opposite way around, basically. We did all these different manipulations to give people the impression that their environment was a good dating environment, right? Lots of opportunity, or a poor dating environment, lots of competition. And then we measured women's interest in, uh, physical appearance and using physical appearance to get ahead. And we found no effect there either.

Wow. I would not have predicted that, given, yeah, all of the stuff that sex ratio hypothesis would predict things to do with short-term mating, fewer dates before sex, more in, all of that stuff. Um, I don't know why that wouldn't cross over into the digital realm. I'm gonna guess that that's why you probably had another crack at it to see if there was something in there, because it makes so much sense before you actually get into the data.

Yeah, well, we thought the same thing. I was really surprised. Um, and the more I thought about it though, and the more I looked into it, I came up with some potential reasons why we may not have found that effect. Um, one of them is that the sex ratio literature mainly looks at sex ratio at a population level. It's very rare that it's experimentally manipulated, right? So usually what you do is you actually take the real sex ratio in a place and then look at real outcomes in a place. Um, and that's willing good, and that has some strengths, but it leaves open that kind of correlational analysis, leaves open the possibility that there is some other predictor that is not being measured that could account for that finding. Um, an experimental test is really the kind of strongest test you can do of many of trying to find the relationship between something. And, and very few studies have ex, have looked at sex ratio experiments. So that was one thing. But then the other thing is, you know, these sex ratio effects tend to be stronger amongst men than they do amongst women. Um, and what I mean by that is the sex ratio tends to affect male behavior more than it does for your behavior. And I wonder if that's, I think that may have to do with this biological trade-off between quality and quantity, right? So when people are interested in, well, not really when people are interested, because these kind of motivations happen in the background, but, you know, the motivation to, to mate, right? For a male, is, is benefited by, in a lot of ways, by quantity, right? There's no kind of cap for male reproductive success. So in one framework, you know, from one point of view, is a male is able to go and just kind of sleep with as many women as possible, right? Some of them are going to get pregnant. Um, and if, if he sleeps with 100 women, multiple of those women get pregnant, that's going to be a more of a benefit to his reproductive success than finding one super awesome, really high-quality woman and just sleeping with her. And I'm talking purely numbers, right? Obviously, there's a lot more complex things going on. I'm not saying all men do that or that they should do that. But from a numbers perspective, that's what's going to benefit male reproductive success. From the female perspective, it's very different. Um, having sex with multiple men is not going to increase your reproductive success necessarily. You're limited by the costs of pregnancy, lactation, you, you know, that's, that's that can take nine, 10, 11, 12 years, right? So quantity is not necessarily the important thing there. The important thing is quality. Um, so the operational sex ratio, that is an indication of quantity, right? The number of men or the number of women you have available. And I, I think that we may find these lesser effects amongst women because that quantity distinction is, is just not so relevant. That's interesting. That's my thought anyway.

Yeah. Would it not be the case that in an area that has more men, there is a greater chance of you finding a higher quality man? Let's say that there are 10 men out of every 100 that you would be prepared to get into a relationship with. But now there's a thousand men. Oh, well, now there's a hundred men that I would be prepared to get into a relationship with. I have no idea how that would affect behavior. I can see why, given that men are playing in numbers game and women are playing a quality game, a manipulation of the numbers in the local ecology in terms of sex ratio would result in men adjusting their behavior more than women. But fundamentally, the pool of quality men is in impacted by the volume of man also. And given that women are more picky, maybe that compensates in some sort of a way as well. It is, it is very, very interesting.

One of my other favorite things that I saw you look at was social inequalities affecting conflict between the sexes. And this is something that I've been pretty obsessed with, this sort of mating crisis that's occurring at the moment, the difficulties that, um, poorer men and richer women are having. What did you find in these models?

Yeah, so this was, I think what you're talking about is the simulation study, um, that we ran. So this was a study that I did with my collaborators, Rob Brooks and Woods Fromage. And Lutz is an excellent modeler. Um, and he, one of the things that he does is run these simulation studies. So for those who are unfamiliar with it, a simulation study is purely, uh, kind of a mathematical, um, hypothetical, right? What you do is you put people in, that you, they're not, they're not people, right? So you, you mathematically create actors in a hypothetical environment, and then you can assign those actors a particular property, right? Like wealth. And then you can assign the environment a particular property. Um, and in this case, we assigned those actors incomes, so wealth, right? And then we manipulated it to create inequality in that environment, both in terms of income inequality, just generally, some people really rich, some people are really poor, some actors. And then gender inequality, so actors that we assigned to be female, less than actors we assigned to be male, or vice versa. And we manipulated that across a number of different dimensions. So you have a lot of, in, in income inequality, just a little bit of income inequality, a lot of gender inequality, or maybe you've got perfect gender equality, or even the reverse where you see women earn more than men. So we played around with all these different metrics. Um, and then what you do in that simulation is you basically kind of press go and iteratively over, uh, I think we did a hundred simulation, I think we had a million individuals and 100 simulations, you can measure a particular behavior in that environment and see how those metrics affect that behavior. So we were interested in pairing success, which we, we kind of just, and we're interested in pairing success under hypogony, right? So hypogony is this general rule that you see across pretty much all human societies where women tend to marry up.

You call it hypergamy, but other people call it hypergamy. What's the difference between those two?

Yeah, so that kind of used interchangeably. Hypergyne is, is women, you know, Guinea, women marrying up. Hypogamy is, or sorry, hypogyny is just women kind of pairing up. Gammy more has to do with marrying up. So they kind of, they kind of mean the same thing. People talk about them in different contexts.

Okay. Yeah. Um, so we use this simulation model to try and understand what was the success of pairing for male actors versus female actors in this environment, depending on what they earned and what other people earned. Um, and the, it was a complicated paper, but there were some really key, two takeaway points. One takeaway point is there are consistently these groups in, in society, uh, that are disadvantaged in terms of pairing success. And, um, it doesn't matter if individuals in these groups are lovely, kind individuals, parent success will be harder for them based on the economy in society. And those two groups of people, the first is poorer men, probably no surprises there, and we can talk about that. But the second is rich women. And that one usually people do find quite surprising. Um, and what we see is that those two groups do quite badly at pairing when there is any form of gender equality, right? Those two, those two groups do worse when there is gender inequality. So if you kind of think how the status quo used to be, those two groups do better. And when there is income inequality, those two groups, especially men, do even worse than they were going to do before.

Hmm. I understand the first two. I understand why in an environment that has relative gender equality, if women are women, women on average run to date a man that's as rich or richer than they are. If there is an ever-decreasing pool of men that are across and above from them, they've got the tall girl problem. There are fewer and fewer men that they can date. Exactly. I understand how the reverse of that would mean that men, even poor men, are doing better than women because some of those women on average are just generally poorer overall. So it gives men a, a stepping stone. It gives them a raise up, which makes it easier for poor men to be that hypergamous sort of above and across male to women, even if it's lower down women. The income inequality thing, I don't understand at all, and I need you to explain.

Yeah, so it's kind of like what we're talking about with those sexy selfies, right? And in those economically unequal environments, people can see the benefits of perhaps delaying pairing now by waiting to pair with an individual of higher status later. Um, and what that means is you've got, uh, this kind of incentive operating in that marketplace that is when mating is hypergonas, is just making things worse.

I mean, this is the, the fundamental quandary that I've been playing around with for the last year and a half or so. Given the fact at the moment that the trends suggest two women for every one man completing a four-year US college degree by 2030, men are dropping out of the US labor force at 0.1% per month since the 1950s and it's going to dip to 65% labor force participation by 2050. 50.1% of women childless by 30, 45% of 22 to 44 year old prime working age women will be single by 2040, according to, I think it was right as or somebody like that. Um, what do you, as a woman who is successful and has a PhD and all the rest of it, what do you see in the future as a potentially useful way to frame this, not whether it be a conversation with the public or potential policy implications, or just like cultural interventions and technologies like mimetic interventions that we can do to try and make this easier? Because it sucks for women that given the fact they've only just reached educational and employment parity, that they're now basically facing a world where for every pound extra that they earn, their dating prospects get worse. And for every degree that they get, they're finding it harder to get married. And also men being forgotten and flown and retreating into porn and video games that rates greater than ever before. That if one sex loses, both sexes lose. And as far as I can see, sexlessness is increasing amongst men. I'm sure you've seen the stats about tripled since 2008 to 2018, blah, blah. It's not good for anybody at the moment. Right? And yet saying, women, have you considered being a little bit less educated or economically independent? It'll make your dating prospects better. Not a campaign that is going to be particularly successful for any politician to run on. Right? You must have considered this current sort of cultural challenge that we face, given the the ground truth of hypergamy. So what do you think?

Yeah, so I think, I, I tend to be a little less worried about the future, in all honesty. I don't doubt those statistics that you've said, but I think that, um, you know, my understanding of the way that these dynamics play out is it's always an arms race, right? So each sex is kind of competing to do the best that they can in the environment that they are in. And we're very plastic, you know, we're very phenotypically plastic. We respond, we, we alter our behavior to suit our environment, we adapt. And there are some big questions about how fast we adapt, but I think in, in a lot of these kinds of, uh, the, in this particular discussion, I think that people are just going to find a way. You know, that that pressure to, uh, that pressure to mate is such a strong one. I think people are going to find a way to do it now.

Um, my, you know, what I've often said to women when I talk to women in this position, and it usually tends to be women who are a little more educated, who are then shocked that they're at a disadvantage, right? They just, they're like, well, that was my experience, but everybody just told me that I was making things up or that I was just not seeing the people that are available. And I'm like, well, no, you are statistically at a disadvantage. So the, the one thing that I think hypogony may relax to some extent, and it tends to have done so in terms of education. So, what you are finding is that as women are getting more educated, their preferences for men who are more educated than themselves have started to relax. The income one is still a strong one. Um, but it's hard to test the strengths for that whilst we still have gender inequality and income, right? Because whilst there is gender inequality and income, there is always going to be an incentive, if you're a woman, to pair with a man who is richer than you. That incentive will always exist. So I think that we're going to continue to see that degree of hypogony in, in terms of income, continue.

Now, for men, in particularly for these these poor men who are in this worse prospect, it's a really tough one, right? I, I making that kind of argument of, well, we should try and have women be less educated is just not going to work, right? And particularly doing it in a way that you seem resentful and aggressive and and anti-woman is not going to appeal to any women that you might want to attract. But at the same time, to then ignore this group of men and say, oh, well, you should just toughen up or and don't complain about it is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Um, and one of the things that we have kind of advocated for and tried to speak about is that we need to find a way to support these young men without just telling them that what they're seeing in the market is inaccurate, um, or that because men in general tend to receive lots of benefits, that their gripes and their issues are something that we should ignore. How we do that in reality is a tricky question. One, this is a bit of an indirect approach. One is, you know, income inequality is something we consistently come back to being a problem. One is we could try and challenge income inequality. I authentically think that would make a really big difference, particularly amongst men's competition with other men, and that would help these these worse off individuals.

Another indirect kind of pathway is, you know, maybe we work with those men to give them something else that they can offer to a romantic relationship that's not as important as income. Maybe we train them in being excellent parents. I mean, I know that seems like a bit of an odd thing to say, but, you know, if women are looking for at a population level, uh, taking care of their resources, right? And then wanting to be able to pair with someone who can be a good parent. If these men are really finding it difficult to handle that resource issue because they're disadvantaged in particular ways, or maybe they just don't have interests to go and be a stockbroker, they just want to do something else, which is completely legitimate. Maybe we find them a way that they can advertise their prowess as parents, you know, and we can invest in that way. I mean, these are some potential things.

Absolutely. I mean, I've played with a bunch of these solutions, so I'm trying to come up with them. Pedestalizing motherhood and fatherhood is definitely one of them because it acts, it steps outside of this existing sort of hypergamous relationship and takes us into this sort of more familial thing, a familial setting in which characteristics like, uh, kindness, attentiveness, humor, goodwill, grit, determination, conscientiousness, that's not being driven toward a capitalist, and all of those are able to come out, right? In a really good, in a really good way. However, it, it is currently very low status to be a stay-at-home dad. I mean, it's not exactly personalized to be a stay-at-home mom, but it's definitely not pedestalized to be a stay-at-home dad. So, so I, I think that that may be a little bit of an uphill battle, although it's not something that I would, um, be like too averse to seeing.

Totally. Right. Trying to claw back women's recently achieved parity and education, employment is not even going to begin getting anywhere. Raising up men, I, I really don't know what that means. Although I would love to do it. I speak to guys, everybody that's listening to this podcast that is a guy, is already outside of that bucket of people. They've already, they're super agentic, they've got sovereignty, they're trying to improve themselves. They can consume 45 minutes into a conversation about very complex gender dynamics, right? Like they know what they're doing. It's the group that aren't. And oddly, that's the strange thing that the people that would benefit most from listening to podcasts like this one are the people that aren't listening to it, which is a little bit unfortunate. Um, one of the things that I am, I don't know whether it's hopeful or not for, is trying to encourage both men and women to not see each other as adversaries anymore. I think that trying to have a collaborative, uh, conversation between the two sexes would make things a lot easier. I think that another start, which I picked up last year from Seth Stevens-Davidowitz's book, Don't Trust Your Gut, is a man who works in hospitality and earns $300,000 a year is the same level of attractiveness as a firefighter or a lawyer that earns $60,000 a year. So basically, there is a $240,000 disparity because status, especially from employment, can be conveyed in more ways than just your monetary contribution. Now, the problem is, in relationships where the woman is the primary breadwinner, they're twice as, 50% more likely to end in divorce. And if the woman contributes more than 80% of the household income, they're twice as likely to end in divorce. Women are roughly three times more likely than men to say that they would value the resource acquisition of their partner, because men just don't care about that from a partner. However, women do. So I don't know, one thing that Seth didn't look at is, yes, men are able to switch job titles and become more attractive without having to earn necessarily any more money. But he didn't work out what happens if your wife earns 100 grand and you go from 300 to 60. I think that crossing that, that income threshold is actually going to be kind of like a, a flaw, a hard floor that if you fall through, you're going to start to see some weird externalities, no matter how sexy you look in your firefighter's outfit.

So I absolutely agree with you on that one. It's an interesting one. You know, another thing that I, I think that we need to pay attention to is, um, the, the ramifications that these mating market conditions can have at a societal level as well. Right? So we need to be, let's take the, the poor men situation, right? So we need to be aware of the situation for those individuals, right? What it is like for those individuals faced in that kind of market. We need to be aware of things like, um, you know, amongst the incel population, for example, who are often associated with this group of, well, who are self-proclaimed disadvantaged in the mating market. One of the things we see in that particular subpopulation is huge rates of mental health problems, right? Huge rates of new neurodivergence, autism, depression, anxiety, that are, you know, double the rates, even more, just to the usual population.

Just to put it out there, we're not suggesting that not having sex causes you to be autistic. We're suggesting that a lot of people that are autistic and neurodivergent tend to be incels.

Yeah, yes, that's right. Yeah. Um, so, you know, we need to be sensitive and aware of those kinds of barriers as well. And I think it can be easy to just go, well, it's sex, whatever, like we should be focusing on people's, uh, on other fundamental life motivations. But for many, many people, sex is very, very, very important to them. And not just very important at a head of your stick, I like getting my rocks off kind of way. Important in terms of, uh, who I value myself to be, myself, my self-worth, my, my, you know, one of the things that motivates me to be living and feel like I am really, especially as a man, my masculine validity. Yes, right? And I, I think for far too long now, we have just ignored that as something that is deserving of time and attention. Um, but so that would be the first thing is the importance of what it's like for those individuals. The other thing is the massive ramifications that it can have for international security when you start to mess with mating market dynamics, right? And what that can cause for the prevalence of war, what that can cause for the prevalence of increased violence, theft, property crimes in general. Um, and if Valerie Hudson, who is a political scientist in at Texas A&M, has done a lot of work on this. And so

Has Rose McDermott, who's over at Brown, and they have shown that these mating market obstructions, where it's very hard for young women, young men to marry, um, particularly in areas that are polygenous, right? So that one man has many wives, and what that does is favor rich men who can afford many wives. It means that, um, I, I think in Afghanistan right now, the rate of buying a wife, because it's a, it's that kind of broad price environment, you have to buy a wife, the rate of buying a wife is so expensive that, um, only one son in each family, unless they're very ritual, ever be able to afford it. And all of the other sons, and these are environments which favor sons, so people tend to have more sons than daughters, all of the other sons will never marry. They just have to work to make sure that the elder son can marry. I mean, imagine being one of those guys, right? You're never going to find a wife, you're never going to earn enough money to find a wife. Your elder brother, if you give him all your money, will find a wife. But, uh, and and that's what your family culture has to do.

Now, then imagine a group like the Taliban comes along, and I'm simplifying a little, but not that much. A group like the Taliban comes along and says, "We need to get women out of education. We need to, I'll give you money, it will be religiously righteous, and we're going to get women out of education, and we're going to give you a wife if you join our insurgency and join our cause." And all of a sudden, in these environments, you have these men presented with completely bleak mating market prospects, and then presented with a group that tells them, "We'll get girls out of education," which for these uneducated men is a no-brainer. Why would you want girls being uneducated if you're an uneducated man? And, and you know that educated women won't be interested in you, then they tell you, "We'll give you a job, and we'll give you money." Right? Okay, well, that's a no-brainer. And you know, part of these dynamics is they're fueling these very, very problematic, uh, international security dilemmas to do with warfare, to do with terrorism, to do with violence. And then we kind of, we ignore that structural consequence as well.

Wasn't there something in medieval Portugal where the first son, there was so few women, sex ratio was was split in a particular way, that the first one was the only one that could get a wife? Or maybe, maybe it was a gerontocracy, or maybe there was some barons that had captured all of the hot young women, or something, and they just shipped all of the other younger sons. First son, fantastic, you're laughing, you get family and wife. All of the other sons, what they did in order to, um, be a pressure release valve for this latent sexual frustration, was they sent them off on galleon ships, and they said, "Go explore the new world. You can go be pirates of the sea. You can go do all of this stuff." So they literally exported every man that wasn't the first son in a desperate attempt to try and tune down this young male syndrome.

So, okay, we've spoken about what's happening in countries where, no matter what you think about the West, the gender inequality is worse, right? It is. It's not as bad over here as it is over there. Yeah. Do you think that the West has an incel problem in terms of societal stability and security? I don't. I don't. I'm giving you my intuition on this because there's very poor quality data on it. But my intuition on it is that, um, what we're talking to, what we're calling incels in the West, is prevalent in all different environments. We just may not use that term. And in those environments, they may not be vocal on English social media and use hashtags to do within cells. But that underlying sentiment of disgruntled, aggrieved young men who have poor prospects of finding a date, and the likelihood of those men engaging in kind of societal disruption, I think is evident everywhere.

Okay, so I have a theory. This is the first time I've actually, it's the first time I've been able to talk about it since I put a name to it. And it wasn't me that put a name to it. It was, uh, Vincent Harem and William Costello. It's Williamson's sedation hypothesis. So, um, I noticed in one of your papers that you said physical violence is a rare, but growing problem. Between 2014 and 2018, reactionary incels killed 50 people across North America and Europe. So that's 50 people too many. Shouldn't have happened. One of them, in 2020 or 2021, happened on the south coast of England. Um, almost all of the killings that you do see when it comes to mass shootings that occur in schools, when it comes to Jihadi, uh, terrorists that come over, they're almost all, you know, categorized as incels. However, given the here to unforeseen and unknown levels of sexlessness amongst young men, we definitely should have presumed that we would have had tons and tons more incel killings. Where are all of the killings at? Is a question that I've been asking myself. And it is my current bro science belief that men are being sedated out of their status-seeking and sexual frustration behavior with porn and video games.

So this is Diana Fleischmann's uncanny evolvers theory that she's got about porn. And you can see easily enough what happens with video games. It's a ton. I saw some data the other week that said, um, nearly a third of unemployed men who are between the ages of 18 and 30 are spending their time spending over 2,000 hours per year playing, uh, video games. And of that group, there is a huge number that are on either prescription or recreational drugs while they do it. And my point being that if it's true that young male syndrome in 2023 is happening in the same way as it would have done in previously unstable societies where the sex ratio or the mating market gets messed up, all of these young men, why are they not running around graffitiing stuff and pushing over grannies? Like, where are they all? This isn't a call to arms for them to start doing stuff. It is good. Yep. It is me saying it's simply not there. The stats straight up are not that you could have, yeah, it could have been diluted down by one tenth and you would have still seen a significant increase.

2008 to 2018, 8% to 28% of men having no sex in the last year between the ages of 18 and 30, which is that age that would cause this trouble. And that finishes in 2018. Roll COVID on top of that, roll pathogen risk and increased levels of disgust and blah blah blah, social anxiety. All of this, I honestly think it could be over 50% of men walking down the street. Maybe 40% if you pointed a man on the street, a one in two chance that if he's between the ages of 18 to 30, hasn't had sex in the last year. That is such a huge increase in the state of less than two decades. There should be more of these troubles, and there isn't. And it seems that porn use and video game use are the two easiest outlets for that camaraderie, status-seeking, vasopressin, dopamine behavior. And they're getting some. It's not quite reproductive fitness signals, but it's good enough. It's a, you know, a titrated dose. Williamson's sedation hypothesis. I, I, I think the sedation word is just such a beautiful term in this one, right? And it actually reminds me of some work that I did with this, uh, so I've done a little bit of work with an evolutionary biologist, Mike Casamovich, and he has looked at violent video games and how they relate to mate value, and whether playing violent video games can give you this kind of boost of making, making you feel like you're more of a dude, right? Like you're more of a man, you've got higher mate value. And he actually does find effects consistent with that. But then he also finds these things where if you lose a game, particularly if you lose a video game to a woman, and you're a guy, you are super unhappy about it. You're like, more aggressive, you're more of a jerk. But if you lose to a man, it's not so bad. Um, and he does a lot of his work on, or a lot of his initial work was actually on spiders and on phenotypic, phenotypic plasticity in spiders and mating dynamics in spiders. But he's a super interesting guy. Now he does some human stuff and he talks about that people are playing violent video games to practice dominance, right? Because they're having trouble with dominance in the offline world. So maybe they use the online world to practice dominance. And I think that aligns nicely with your kind of hypothesis.

I, I also think that it would be simplistic to assume that the, and I know that you're not doing this, but it would be simplistic for people to think that the only outlet then from that kind of mating disadvantage is societal disruption. So one of the things that has happened over time and over development is we've kind of our brains have developed. We've found other ways to try and resolve the issues that we face and try and channel those, those kinds of problems into other ways. So I think that there is that ability as well. How you would go about doing that, other than, you know, potentially just complaining to your mates, is a really problematic question, right? I've looked at, uh, correlations between local sex ratios in the state of the local mating market and incel activity online, misogynistic tweets, and then that downstream related into domestic violence or domestic abuse and stuff like that too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we, um, so we do find this correlation between offline and online behaviors there. So one of the things we found was that, again, you know, consistent theme, income inequality in crisis, the likelihood of incel ideology, um, makes it more prevalent. Um, and we also find that when, when the advantage that men hold over women in terms of how much they earn, so that kind of gender inequality effect, when that gap erodes, so when men and women's earnings become closer and closer, there's more incel ideology there as well. Um, and then in relation to the offline world, one of the things we tracked was the kinds of misogynistic discourse that a lot of incels engage in, and we related that to domestic and family violence outcomes. And we find that there is this predictive relationship where when an area, when the social media chatter in a particular region, um, becomes more misogynistic, what you find is that you start to see more domestic and family violence in that area. And you even see this predictive effect as well, where if misogyny increases one year, right, next year you'll see more domestic and family violence there as well. And that's just a small effect, but these lag effects kind of suggest that one of the things that societies could do, this is a, this is a potential policy area. One of the, one of the things that we could do at a societal level is start to also track sentiment on social media to try and understand and predict where offline behavior is going to change later, right? We could track misogyny, we could start to track these, this incel ideal that you, we could track people's resentment and disgruntlement about the sexes and use that information to then look at some of these more pernicious crimes and, and, you know, the outcome of those crimes later on, and potentially then divert resources into those areas to try and rectify ahead of time, almost. It's like being able to see the future.

So Seth, the guy that wrote "Don't Trust Your Gut," during COVID, during the first wave of COVID, he was able, using aggregated Google search data, he was able to predict where outbreaks were going to occur three to five days before they did with greater accuracy than the CDC. And what he was doing was he was using searches for things like, um, "Why can't I smell?" "Why is my temperature going all over the place?" "Why can't I taste my food?" He had a bunch of different search criteria. And sure enough, it mapped on perfectly. So I'm all down for some, whatever, what was that thing where, uh, Tom Cruise was able to see the future? What was that? Minority Report. Minority Report. Don't want, don't want people arrested before it happens, but you can prepare, um, you know, compensatory facilities to maybe help people with stuff if you could see things like that. Um, I was talking, yeah, I was talking to William Costello before we came on, and he has got some stuff from the paper that hasn't even been released yet that I thought I would tell you about. You said I'm allowed? Yeah. Great. Um, incels have a lower minimum mate preference than non-incels. So this disproves the incels just have too high standards idea. That incels have even lower standards than men of their say, mate value that are not self-identified as incels. So they lower their standards to try and compensate. And the other one, which is really interesting, incels and non-incels overestimate the importance that women say they place on financial resources and physical attractiveness, but underestimate kindness, intelligence, and humor. So this is what women say, so it's stated, not revealed preferences. And the unfalsifiability of some areas of the incel ideology might say, well, you know, "I know what women like more than women do." And you go, "Well, I don't know, maybe." But at least in this regard, they overestimated the importance that women said that they, uh, placed on it, which becomes a little bit of a self-defeating situation, especially if you're a man that is in that poor cohort. Yeah. It does. And I think it links to that real nihilistic view that some incels have that they're never going to find any. That black pill ideology of, "No matter what I do, I'm never going to be able to find a mate."

I, I've always found it really, um, perplexing. And what you've shared there kind of makes sense of that and is consistent with this. I've always found it really perplexing that there's this aspect of incel behavior that is so preoccupied with how men look. Right? Looks, looks, money, space, looks maxing, right? Right. And looks maxing, right? So it's all about looks. And the irony is, you know, when you look at the evolutionary psychology literature, women don't care as much about looks as they do about status. And this is what's made me kind of start to think about it. It links back to women's use of beauty, right, as well. I have this, I have this kind of intuition that for both sexes, that what you're doing is trying to gain status in any way that you can, right? And different people have different opportunities available to them. Some people have rich, fancy educations they can get and they can flash. And other people can have fancy cars, or some people can gain the prestige within their social networks and be very important amongst that social network. But other people don't have those kinds of options available. But what they do have available to them is potentially working on their body. And I think that amongst both sexes, what you may find is that in environments where people don't feel they have many status opportunities available to them, they look at one of the things that they could use to gain status, and then they focus on their body. And that, that might be why you see so much of that amongst incel men as well.

Did you see, I don't know whether you follow William, but if you don't, you absolutely need to. This was a tweet that he put up last week. This is from SciPost. "Heterosexual women prefer men who are taller and have broader shoulders and consider them more masculine and have better fighting ability. Larger upper bodies boost attractiveness ratings for taller men. They don't appear to have the same effect for shorter men." Where is it here? According to this study, it didn't have the same effect in improving attractiveness as it did for tall men. However, I think slight muscularity compared to fat, flab, scrawny, will give even short men a better chance. I'll tell myself this as I do curls in the mirror. William is a, a short king. So he, uh, I think he had a personal investment there. However, yeah, yeah. I don't get it wrong. We were talking about this as we were walking around. Me and my housemate were walking around the park the other day discussing the fact that, is it easier for men or women to change their mate value? Was the question in this modern mating world that we've got. And I think I came up with the idea that I think men are more screwed as a group, but have it better individually. And women are more screwed individually, but have it better as a group at the moment. I think that any one man who manages to ramp up their conscientiousness and their motivation for a little bit of time can easily add, you know, any average man can easily add sort of two points onto probably the out of 10 mate value, especially if they haven't cared about it before. A little bit of work on yourself in the gym, some good new clothes, work on career for a couple of years' time, you know, you've started to gain a little bit more income. That's relatively easy. I think that shy of cosmetic surgery, which has some resource limitations on it for women, you are kind of bouncing off an upper bound. And you are permanently from the age of 21, permanently on a downhill slope away from your peak sexual market value for most men. Right? This isn't to say that some women don't bloom and still look great into their 40s and stuff, but you know what I mean. Um, but my point being, when it comes to as a group, I don't know how we, uh, fix this 19 percentage point or 15 percentage point difference between men and women at universities at the moment, um, where you've got Title IX was brought in, sorry, Title IX was brought in when women were 15 percentage points behind men, and it's now 19 percentage points in the other direction. And I, I don't know how you fix that. I don't know how you fix the sort of, uh, labor force dropouts and stuff for men. Women, I think it is harder for them individually to change their mate value. I think that there are just fewer routes that are open to them. However, if you look as a group, I think women overall have at least a little bit of a brighter future in the, uh, both groups are going to be alone for a little while on average. Both groups are going to be increasingly alone. But at least women can be rich and educated while they're alone. Um, so that, that was my, that was what you're thinking from. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Look, I think both, both sectors have challenges. And I, I don't know if I would say that it would kind of be easier or harder for each sex. Like my devil's advocate view would kind of go, yeah, but as a woman, you could still be an absolute jerk and you could just find a great lipstick and, you know, a dress that was particularly satisfying and some of that kind of slimming underwear, and you've got a better shot there and fix it. Thanks. Right. Thanks. And as a, as a guy, it's going to take a long time to try and earn that kind of big bucks in, in that economically unequal environment. Like, sure, kindness always helps. So I don't know. I think both sexes have got disadvantages that we're playing with, and both sexes have advantages. And one of the things that you mentioned earlier was, you know, you think it would be helpful if people would stop being so antagonistic, right? And, you know, both sexes have to stop doing the other sex as a problem. And I 100% agree with that. And one of the things that I think is actually the access to that is having, and I don't mean this prescriptively, like people should just go out and do this so that would be good, is having a decent understanding of how this kind of evolutionary arms race stuff works, right? At the most basic level, everybody is trying to do the best that they can, right? Everybody has strengths, and everybody can be a jerk. Both sexes, both women, both men, you know, both men and women, we can all be absolute jerks, and we can all be great. And we're both doing the best with every, with what we've got. And I, I don't know, this might be my, I might be, this might be my life coaching background kind of getting in the way there, but I think the access to not demonizing the other sex is understanding that you can be a real jerk as well. It's okay. Like, it, it, if you can kind of look yourself in the mirror and know that you can be a total jerk, and that doesn't mean that you are a total jerk, right? It just means that you can have those qualities, and you can also let those qualities go, and so can other people. I think that's a real access to not making it the other sex's problem.

It's very wrong. Very, very. Yeah. It's, you are this thing, not you do this, right? Not you behave in a particular way. It's you are this. It's like infused your spirit. You [ __ ] unlovable harpies, or you like awful neck-bearded incels, or whatever it is, right? That's the way that this gets framed. And this is, I mean, this is my current pet obsession. It's what I'm writing about most mornings. It's, um, and also given that I'm coming into this world of, you know, gender dynamics, sex market imbalance, whatever, on YouTube, which if you are talking about this and you're a guy that looks like me, you're spouting off about how women are these sort of awful, coddled pieces of [ __ ] who have absolutely no idea about what their mate value is. And although there are some kernels of truth to like the fundamental basis, it is taken and blown up to such a degree that I think it's actually a net negative to this discussion because it makes people, both men and women, think that they have an understanding about what these evolutionary precepts are, and it's wrong. So not only do you no longer have the learner's mind, which is great for keeping you open to new things, you're closed off to any new evidence because you already have your ideology, which has come out of whatever corner of the internet you believe is already right. But now you're still dealing with the same problems and not prepared to make any changes. So yeah, I think, um, tuning down that adversarial relationship. And I see, you know, this isn't just the stuff that comes from guys like R female dating strategy. The pernicious thing about the advice for women is that it comes from more mainstream, uh, uh, outlets, magazines. Yeah. It's real [ __ ]. At least guys, if guys want to get [ __ ] advice, they've got to go on the internet. If girls want to get [ __ ] advice, they just need to go to the news agent because L and Cosmopolitan will happily write articles teaching women how to sleep with him and not catch feelings. Your article is teaching women how to disembody themselves from letting another person inside of them so that they can what? Claim that that's freedom? That doesn't sound particularly free to me. So that, that is definitely for women. They have that much worse. I think that the mainstream dating advice for women and and men is bad, but men, it's not harmful. Men, it's just useless. Like women, it's genuinely harmful. Yeah. Yeah. It makes it, stopping reading Cosmopolitan now and stuff like that, I think would make, would make the world a better place.

Final thing. Yeah. You used to do gender studies. I did. Yeah. How do you go from doing gender studies to being an evolutionary psychology scholar? Yeah. Look, for me, it was a, I think for me, there's one thing I've always been open-minded, right? I'm a pretty open-minded individual. And I did gender studies because I was really passionate about gendered issues and was that keen on figuring them out. Um, and then I worked as a life coach and business coach for a bit, and then I decided to start doing psych. And I didn't even know evolutionary psychology existed when I started doing my undergrad in psych. Um, and I started to, you know, in the first week of my PhD, I went to a summer school, and it was run by the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists. And in this summer school, um, I sat in a workshop in an evolutionary psychology. And, you know, I'm sitting there and I'm super excited to be there. And I'm listening to the presenter start talking about sexual conflict. I'm like, okay, yeah, this is right down my alley. I love this stuff. And then he started talking about the evolutionary reasons of why we have such common patriarchal backgrounds to so many different cultures. Then he started talking about mate value and pressures on appearance. And I sat in this workshop and I was flabbergasted, right? And after being flabbergasted, I then started to feel really pissed off. And I was pissed off not because there was this whole framework that in biology to understand what I was so committed by. I was pissed off that I'd spent an entire gender studies degree looking at it and no one had told me about it. I was like, I was not doing gender studies to be kind of pigeonholed into only looking at one framework to try and solve this issue. I was committed to trying to rectify sexual politics and make a difference to sexual harmony. I don't care what framework you throw at me. If the framework's going to make a difference, I want to hear about it. And it got me really rolled up. And, um, in, in kind of presenting it that way, it makes it sound like I think that the problems only in gender studies and that only gender studies is closed to other views. And I don't think that. Um, I think that both biological camps and socio-cultural camps can be closed to alternate views. And my kind of, uh, flag in the ground from that point onwards was that I was always going to find a way to combine nature nurture frameworks. That in the topics I cared about, you had to do both. And I really just made it my business to do both ever since. And it's, I find it really satisfying. I mean, it's challenging because you kind of sit in this crossroads where you're kind of not really part of either camp, and you are a little bit, but then they always judge whether you're really part of the camp in the right ways. But that crossroads works for me, you know, I tend to be a little more controversial. I don't mind sitting at the crossroads. And, and I think ultimately, at a values level, I really authentically believe you've got to be accounting for both biology and culture. And really, if you truly understand biology, you know that culture is part of the biology. Um, so yeah, I sit in both worlds.

What do you think most gender studies scholars misunderstand about human nature? I think that they, um, I think that they misunderstand how plastic everything is, um, and that, and what I mean by that is how responsive we are to what's going on in the environment. I think that they believe that, um, culture can be separated from biology. And I think they believe that, I don't think they understand really what an arms race is, you know, I mean, I'm sure they could define it, right? But I don't think they really understand how that plays out and how people are battling for, uh, doing well and flourishing in the environment that they're in, and they're going to use the tools available to them. And, and from what I hear about coming out of gender studies camps, there is a good bit of adversarial, sort of arms-race type language. Is that misguided? Am I reading it wrong? Um, look, I, I don't know if I would say you were reading it wrong, but I think that the, I, I think that my take of that world is it can be kind of very wrapped up in victims and persecutors, you know, there's no, it's kind of one directional. There is the group that is doing bad things to the other group, right? And then that group is, there's oppressors and oppressed. Exactly. Yes. Thank you. Much more eloquently said. Um, and, and I, so I think they get kind of wrapped up in that narrative. And then I think there can be a tendency to ignore the fact that an individual within an, uh, oppressor group does not mean that they are necessarily having a better life situation, right? So much more important than being in the oppressor or the oppressed group, or in, let's say, the male or the female group, much more important than which group you're in, is your position as an individual. I think that, you know, evolutionary biology has shown to us that individuals do not act in the best interests of their group. They act in the best interests of themselves. And that is one of the kind of core misconceptions and one of the insights that I think would make the biggest difference to these socio-cultural explanations.

Yeah, I mean, the idea that because of your sex or race or country of birth or whatever it might be, that you are inherently having a better time. Like, if, if I had the choice between being a middle-class black guy or a super working-class white guy, like, I know which one I'm going to take. And no one ever really wants to talk about class, especially coming from the UK. And people in America don't really understand this. I don't know what Australia's class system or lack is thereof is like. But the UK is still so class-based. I think it's because we're just so old, right? It's inculcated in the postcode that you live in, in the streets that you're on, it's, it's everything. And, um, yeah, coming from somewhere that is so class dominant, um, there was a really good article, a really good, um, hiring drive by a bank a couple of years ago that said, rather than it being, we're going to arbitrarily pick some like ethnic or sex group and we're going to have this amount of, this many people, they decided that they were going to pick, I think it was 30% of 30% of managers by this particular year were going to be from a working-class background. Uh, and I thought, that's a cool policy because that cuts across the board, right? Doesn't discriminate based on race, sex, anything. It's like, there we go. Anyway, Candice Blake, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do, where should they go? Follow me on Twitter. I talk about the work a lot there and the new papers there a lot. Or going to go outside at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. You can just Google Evolution Lab and you'll come right across us. Done this. I appreciate you. Thank you. Thanks very much, Chris. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace. [Music]