Is Feminism an Intrasexual Competitive Strategy? | Dr Dani Sulikowski

The more that I thought about it and read into it and looked into it, the less I think that intersectional competitive motives have hijacked feminism. And the more I think is that feminism was always actually just intersectional competition. I don't actually think it's ever been anything else.

To me, it just looks like something not something that women wanted to do to each other, but out of that resentment.

What feminism is doing is not making women hate all men. It's making women despise the men that they actually should be attracted to. My resistance to the theory is that removal of agency. Today I'm joined by Dr. Danny Silicowski. She's an evolutionary psychologist from Australia. She's a senior lecturer at the Charles Str. I'm so excited to have her on today. Welcome, Danny.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. So your work is just so fascinating how you're talking about women's subtle ways of competing with each other, the the mechanisms, the female aggression, all of that. What really caught my attention and what I wanted to talk to you about today is uh how this relates to feminism and your thesis on how feminism is a sort of covert way women compete with each other to suppress reproduction. So that's really what I wanted to hone in on today. Should we jump right in there and have you explain to us what you mean? What are these hidden mechanisms?

Okay. So, in order for in order for this to sort of all make sense that the key bits to understand is that when women are competing with their rivals, the currency of competition is reproductive success. So, when we're talking about women sabotaging other women, we're talking about them doing things that ultimately will have the effect of lowering their rivals reproductive success. And so when we look at then sort of applying that really simple premise to feminism and we have a look at what feminism's impact across society have been and we can talk about the big impacts which you know we've sort of seen obviously there was uh universal female suffrage and we've seen tremendous increases in female participation in the workforce and we've seen decline in marriage and we've seen as a result of all of those things we've seen sort of downstream birth rate decline. So it's those big things that are sort of typically associated with feminism, but it's also so many of the little things. So feminism has also attacked female all of the sort of visible physical signals of female v mate value that women would typically use to intimidate samesex rivals and attract members of the opposite sex. So feminism has sort of demonized the idea that that women should look attractive and that looking attractive and being attractive is something that women should aspire to. That's very much been demonized by feminism and we've seen it go much further than simply demonizing being attractive. We've actually seen feminism, especially sort of more recently actually celebrating being unattractive. So you think about the the body positivity movement. It didn't take very long to morph from, you know, some sort of appreciation of healthy bodies into a really unholy celebration of morbidly obese and extraordinarily unhealthy bodies. Going back a little bit prior to then, we've seen previous valorization of hyper skinny bodies and hyper muscular bodies in in women as well, which are also part of the same mechanism.

So I was initially when I first started sort of looking into feminism as a vehicle for intraexual competition between women that's sort of what I thought it was you know a vehicle that had been hijacked or co-opted if you like whose original attention had original intention had been women's rights and women's social progress as it as it claims. Um, and it's been and it has been hijacked because I think it is a fair comment to suggest that most every female female interaction has sort of intraexual competition has like an organizing principle. So if you've got this sort of institution, this social institution of feminism that's dominated by women, we should expect to see it getting infected by female interexual competitive motives a lot. But the more that I sort of thought about it and read into it and looked into it, the less I think that intersectional competitive motives have hijacked feminism. And the more I think is that feminism was always actually just intersectional competition. I don't actually think it's ever been anything else. Um, I think it's always just been rival sabotage under the the guise of whatever was a socially acceptable story to tell at the time.

Okay. What what led you to to believe that?

I think the main thing that led me to believe it is that if you if you suggest that there was a time when feminism got co-opted by intraexual competition motives, then you need to be able to say when did that happen? And so you go back in time and you look for the the points in time where feminism was not obsessed with separating women from motherhood. And actually you can't find that time period. So you can't find a a period in in feminism's sort of existence where it was concerned with the things that individual women were concerned with in the main which was primarily being excellent mothers and you know excellent homemakers and you know playing that social role really well is actually what concerned the majority of women and that was never it was never something that concerned feminism. So that that's sort of the first um of stumbling block I guess to suggesting that feminism has been co-opted. You need to find the time and place where that happened. And I actually don't think I can find that time and place. I can't go back far enough in time to find that. The other um sort of observation that convinces me along those lines as well is having a look at how in sort of where when Rome's birth rates declined as well and having a look at what was the a lot of the social um like like you know the social discourse that was happening in the time that was surrounding Rome's birth rates. And even though they didn't call it feminism, it was all of the same rhetoric that we're seeing now. So women were demonizing men. They were demonizing marriage. They were suggesting that motherhood was a sort of prison. They introduced the like I guess like Rome's version of a of a baby bonus to try and incentivize women to get married and have children. And to the extent that that that incentive worked, all it did is that women got married, got children, got the money, and then deserted the husband and in some cases both the husband and the child taking the incentive. And so what we're sort of calling feminism and what we tend to think of as being sort of something that is unique to this particular time and place, I don't think a lot of the rhetoric around feminism is unique to our time and place actually at all. And I don't think that it's, you know, if it's a consistent across different cultures and different societies, then it requires an explanation that's not culturally specific and interexual competition provides that explanation.

I thought, you know, let me have your thoughts on this because if you go back to Elizabeth Katy Stanton when this first appears as we know it in the 19th century, what is so clear from her writing is that resentment towards men. And so when I look at your theory, my first thought is this looks like born out of born out of that resentment and that hatred, that jealousy and envy towards men and then seeing them as the oppressor. And then when it happens that we feel oppressed and that someone has power over us, what we want to do psychologically is to become them. And so that's what women did. They then tried to become like men. So to me it just looks like something not something that women wanted to do to each other but out of that resentment much like you know I I think it's so similar to communism in that way they harness that resentment and jealousy and envy in in humans and I think there are other parallels as well with feminism and and Marxism. How does that fit into what you're saying?

So I completely agree with the parallels between feminism and and Marxism. I don't think they're I don't think they're that different. I'll be honest. So I completely agree with you there and I also agree with you. I'm not sure if you said harness is what you said that that the feminism harnesses that envy and I think in some sense you're right, but the envy itself is not what drives the the feminist propaganda or the feminist messaging. that the women who are pushing that messaging are not themselves envious of men, but they know that they can convince other women to become envious of men instead of sort of, you know, adoring of men how they ought to be. They can convince them to become envious of men and then to, you know, everything that follows from that. And we see exactly the same demonization of men now. It's not something that only happened a hundred years ago. We're seeing it now and we're seeing it continue. And so we get a chance because we can sort of we're living it in real time. And so we get a really good chance to interrogate what it actually is about men that's being demonized. And what's being demonized are all of the traits that make men excellent fathers, excellent husbands, and excellent providers. Right? Those masculine, strong, competent traits is what gets demonized. So what feminism is doing is not making women hate all men. It's making women despise the men that they actually should be attracting to. So it's skewing female mate preferences and it's skewing female judgments of the mate value of prospective men such that instead of being turned on by, you know, men who are excellent husband and father material, they're highly suspicious of such men. And at the same time they've they've been made to be highly suspicious of the entire institution of marriage and motherhood as well. So I you know even though yes there is absolutely this deepseated resentment for men that weaves its way all throughout feminism which we're seeing reach like a special crescendo now um in the here and now. Um, I think that the targeting of men is less about targeting of men specifically and more about demonizing excellent husbands and fathers and thus compelling women to make terrible mate choices, which women frequently do.

Right? And then that also leads them to, you know, it's it's not like feminists are having a lot of kids either. Is it like a suicide bomb?

Yes and no. So um so you I'm sure you will have heard and I'm sure your listeners will have heard as well of Gad Sad's um you know theory of of suicidal empathy. So you know he has this idea um that empathy has become and I haven't read his book that's just come out. I will concede that I haven't read it yet. So I'm only going to offer the kind of overview of his theory that he has given himself in hundreds of Twitter posts and interviews. I'm not commenting on the book directly but he sort of you know has this theory that empathy has sort of gone into like become hyperactive right and that it's caused in this notion of people to have empathy towards others that you know are going to hurt you you know the people that you can't trust and the people that you shouldn't have empathy for. And so his argument is that it's sort of represents this this excessive hyperactive empathy. It's basically a bug and not a feature. My argument about the kinds of events that he frames as suicidal empathy is that it's not suicidal empathy at all. What it is is homicidal virtue signaling. So the people who are engaging in what potentially looks like suicidal empathy, especially if it goes wrong, are taking a calculated risk. And what they're doing is virtue signaling behaviors that are incredibly dangerous, potentially more dangerous for other people than for them. And that's part of the the calculated risk in order to set these behaviors as some sort of a social standard as some sort of a thing that's expected in the hope that other people for whom these behaviors represent even a greater danger will then actually engage in them and be harmed by them. So there was an excellent example that I just actually saw just this evening. This will come back to your question. I'm working my way back around. I promise. There was an excellent example that I saw this evening where there was a man who was murdered in the US in the subway. He was pushed down the stairs by a another man who was just psychotic by all accounts. The man that pushed him down the stairs in the subway and killed him had only months earlier, maybe even weeks earlier, very recently, done a similar thing to a woman who had survived. but she refused to cooperate with the police and the prosecutors because she didn't want to be responsible for putting another black man in prison. And so a few weeks later, someone else gets harmed. Someone else gets, in fact, much worse harmed than her. And they were talking about that as, you know, an example of her suicidal empathy. But it wasn't her suicidal empathy. It was homicidal empathy because it wasn't her that ended up getting hurt by this man. It was someone else. And exactly the same thing is happening with all of this feminist stuff. So the women who are responsible for driving these ideologies and pushing these sort of cultural norms that are really really hostile to reproductive success. Yes, they're driving down everyone's reproductive success and that's why we are seeing birth rates like just continuing to sink and sink. However, it's not suicidal. It's homicidal because what happens is that the the the currency of evolution is reproductive success, but it's not absolute reproductive success. It's relative reproductive success. Provided that you are having more offspring than the background rate of offspring per women in the population, you will continue to win the evolutionary game. So if you drive the population background rate down, you don't need to have as many children to win the evolutionary game. Now what will happen at the level of the population is the population will collapse. The society will collapse if birth rates plummet. However, evolution doesn't care about whether or not societies collapse. It cares about whether or not your genes propagate. When societies collapse, rarely are they just left to their own devices to peacefully collapse and die. They get overtaken and they get invaded. Now, what happens when weak collapsing societies get invaded? The men get killed. The women do not. The women go on to become a part whether they want to or not. The women go on to become a part of the founder population of whatever rises from the ashes of the collapsed society plus whoever comes in to raid it, to invade it, to take it over. And so what you end up with is the women who were driving these birthlimiting ideologies but still were, you know, still reproduced enough that their lineages were there at the end. It's those lineages that become the founding women of the next population. Which means the genes that promote this behavior proliferate throughout the growing civilization just waiting for the circumstances to be right for these types of ideologies to reemerge and for female interexual competition to reach a crescendo for birth rates to decline and the whole process to happen again. So it's cyclical. It's not it's not suicidal genetically. It's it's homicidal. It's these lineages driving this process and wiping out all of the competing lineages, but the ones that win were the ones responsible for driving it in the first place. So, it just keeps happening.

I understand. Yeah, it's very compelling. How does it explain mothers behaviors to their sons? Because evolutionarily I am far from an evolutionary biologist. So please correct me. But I've understood that male offspring they produce more offspring than female offspring. So why then are we seeing that mothers, feminist mothers are sabotaging their sons. They're basically neutralizing them, pathologizing them.

Okay. So yes, a couple of big questions in there. So firstly, men can't have like sons can't have more offspring than daughters. So an individual son has a larger reproductive potential potentially very few men you know have anything you know end up fathering as many children as they theoretically could. So obviously yes that is true. However you have to remember of course that every single offspring that is born has a mother and a father. So men and women as groups have exactly equal reproductive success. exactly equal because they share a 50% um share in every single offspring that the population produces. So therefore, mothers of sons and mothers of daughters do not a priority necessarily have an advantage over each other in terms of whether or not their son or their daughter is going to be a better reproducer. As you start to get into different quality of offspring, then you start to see some skew. So because male reproductive success is more skewed than female reproductive success. So you end up with it's not a huge difference to by the way it's it's not anywhere near as big a difference as it in as it is in other species that don't have a sort of social monogous monogous sort of issues like system when we're not monogous but we kind of we like to pretend we are and that constrains a lot of what happens the fact that we at least have to pretend that we are. But male reproductive success is definitely more skewed. Female reproductive success is more evenly spread over the population. So if you are a really high mate value individual, then yes, you may be better off with a son long term because he too will be high mate value and so might be lucky enough to be at that end where the skew is going to benefit him and therefore he might have more offspring than a a daughter with a similar mate value just cuz female success is less skewed. And then obviously for exactly the same reasons but in reverse. If you're very low mate value, you might be better off having a daughter for reproductive success. So there are potentially differences between sons and daughters in terms of the reproductive success they can provide. But on average it has to be by definition has to be identical, but they could be skewed as a function of other factors. But as to the question of why are mothers of their sons doing this? And I think this comes down to the the notion of social signaling. So with what I was sort of saying before about the idea of this suicidal empathy actually being like it's it's not suicidal, it's it's homicidal, right? The idea is you engage in this virtue signaling, which is a term that I used to hate and it desperately annoys me that I now feel like I have no choice but to use it. Um, you engage in this virtue signaling. Um, but it's not about how people see you. That's I think that's the mistake that people make when they think about virtue signaling. That virtual signaling is just showing off. It's not. The function of virtue signaling as a social signal is to manipulate the behavior of others. So, what you're trying to do is engage in certain behaviors for show. So you you uh uh engage in these behaviors in a very uh exaggerated way and and in a time and place where there is an audience. So you know social media makes like a perfect place for this type of social manipulative signaling to happen because it's done in front of an audience but it can also be curated. It doesn't have to actually be what it looks like, right? But they engage in this social signaling, whether that's treating their children a certain way, whether it's emasculating their sons, whatever it might be. And the the sort of function of that behavior is to attempt to influence other people to do the same thing. But if you're trying to do it in a superficial way and only doing it when people see, but your goal is to make people think that this is what you do all the time and thus that this is what they should do all the time. So the idea is to try and yes you might bear some cost of doing this to your own children but your hope is that you will influence other people to think that you know this is an excellent role model something that they should follow especially if it's the kind of thing that comes with a tremendous amount of kudos. So much virtue signaling does come with a tremendous amount of social kudos. to think about, you know, the the the women who are transing their kids. Think about the social kudos that comes with that. And of course, the reason why it comes with such social kudos is because it is so costly. Other people are celebrating moms transing their kids, not because you're so what's it brave and and something else. No, they're celebrating it because you are destroying your own future reproductive potential of your children. And that's something that your rivals are celebrating. They've got no idea that that's why they're celebrating it. But that's why they're celebrating it and that's why these mothers are clapped and cheered and yes, you you go girl. You I mean this is this is what it is. So it's that virtue signaling. And so what you're looking at when you're seeing women, you know, particularly when it's sort of wrapped around, you know, feminist virtue signaling and and which is can get really awful when it when it's turned towards children in a whole bunch of ways. I've known women who make a point who who claim critical may not be true, right? This is signaling, right? It's not it's not honest. You can't assume it's honest. Women who claim to have made a point to have never told their never told their daughters they were pretty because I don't want their daughters to think that that's important. It's just mental, right? But what you know what they're doing is trying to so you know they may say they never do that but they may do it all the time. What they're hoping is that other women will hear them. other women who look up to them, who who see, you know, them with a wonderful relationship with their daughter and see their daughter doing great things may look up to them and think, "Oh, maybe that's where I'm going wrong. Maybe I'm emphasizing the wrong things and, you know, making my daughter care about the wrong things and and then actually take that as, you know, seriously good advice and decide that they're going to that they're going to take that on board and do it." So, when you're seeing this manipulative signaling, that's what it's about. So you're either seeing someone who is dishonestly signaling these behaviors and sort of winning the game. So, you know, pretending to do these things. These are normally people with influence. They're normally people who have the capacity to to show off in public to a large audience and perhaps then have opportunities to undo that damage in private, if you like, or to behave quite differently in private to offset the damage. Um, that's what you could be looking at. The other thing you could be looking at, of course, is that the fruit of the labor of these women, which is the women who have been completely sucked in by the virtue signaling and the manipulative signaling and the kudos that goes with it and whatever, and is doing these things actually causing genuine real harm because they have been tricked that, you know, they're they're not they're playing the game, but they're not winning it, they're losing it. They are genuinely just harming their children because they have been successfully manipulated into doing that by other women. So, it can be hard to know what you're looking at in any given point in time. Is this someone who is just putting on a show? Um, or is this someone who has actually taken these harmful messages on board and internalize them and is now sabotaging their own, you know, their own future offspring and their own future reproductive success.

Right? Okay. So, and that would explain why you have now a lot of women coming out and look what we're and they're they start to advocate against transing kids because they're sort of waking up to what they have done and they went into it sort of subconsciously. they went into it subconsciously and I think it's also given that we've touched on the specific issue of transing kids um I think it's probably also you know sort of fair to point out that for many of the women who did that yes they were absolutely sucked into the ideology and pushed for it and you know in in many cases you know it was the mothers who were insistent um much more so often mothers than fathers it's also fair to point out that in many cases that the Children themselves picked up the ideology and mothers and fathers tried mothers you know again more often fathers but very often also mothers tried very hard to stop it but between the school counselors and the doctors and all the people insisting on them they you know may not have been happy about it or comfortable with it but were effectively kind of dragged along so I don't want to I just want to make sure that I don't sort of tar all parents of trans kids with the same

Absolutely not absolutely not which is why they're contain contagion, the social contagion is so important to talk about. And so that's that's how I thought about feminism. And it was more like a psychological virus, this resent that started with resentment towards men and uh that they are that they're infecting each other with much like that. And then you have that experiment 1954 with a with a mouse Milner at McGill where the mouse they have a they stimulate the reward center. Although that wasn't originally what they wanted to do, but they stimulated the reward center. Then effectively then the mouse kills himself because he keeps wanting that center stimulated. When we give women that sort of that grievance, that resentment towards men, it makes them feel good. So that's why I wanted to bring in that experiment with the mouse. It makes us feel morally superior for a moment. And you see it when you look at reals women post on Tik Tok and they're talking about everything from mental load talking about their how they divorced their husbands and and yes they also get applause from it but there is that pleasure they get from feeling momentarily superior and that grievance and and I just always thought of feminism as that women keep pushing that button to feel good in the moment even though it leads to them not having reproductive success. and that sort of as a psychological virus. What do you think of that?

Yeah, I I don't think that's a bad framing at all. I think that moral superiority that you know, you made the connection before between feminism and like Marxism, socialism, like communism, whatever you want to call it. And I think it's that same moral superiority that is what leads, and we're seeing it now. We're seeing it now in Australia. We're seeing it in the US and certainly in the UK. this desire of the the radical left which is the radical left is not in government at the moment in in the US not at the federal level but obviously different states

It's institutional

Well exactly that's right it's not in the white house at this particular point in time but that's less relevant to what's going on because as you say it's it's through the institutions it's it's baked into

Mental health

Mental health universities actual health hospitals schools education it's everywhere right journalism So, and it's the same in Australia and it's the same in the UK. And what you're seeing is the moral superiority of that radical left. Once you've got that, that can be used to justify anything. So if you believe that what you're doing is either makes you morally superior by definition, then there is nothing you can't do because everything you do by definition is ultimately morally justified because you are morally superior. And if it's something that you want to do and something you enjoy doing, then you either have to admit that you're an evil, horrible person or you just go along with this notion of moral superiority. So I think that that sort of particular psychological mechanism that feminism has hijacked on I think that's the same mechanism that all you know the the broader radical left agenda which obviously centers around feminism anyway it's not like these are two separate independent things right um it centers around feminism anyway um and you know I sort of like to call it the omnicause is that again that's not my word um but I think it's a good word because I think It captures the way that these different radical left-wing causes just kind of meld into one even when they're ideologically completely incompatible. Like if we think about Greta Thumbbergs, you know, she started off being like the climate crusader or whatever. Right now, she stands up and wears a, you know, kafir around her neck and screams about free Palestine. And you know, I'm not sure whether it's occurred to her, but I'm pretty confident that if we were to free Palestine and give them their own state, I'm going to guess that climate change is not going to be like high on their, you know, policy agenda. I don't think they're going to give a personally. Very similar story in Australia. We have had have past tense, present tense, a rather sort of famous feminist activist in Grace Tame who is, you know, sort of had a history of being sexually assaulted and sort of came out and did a bit of, you know, ostensibly quite good political activism in that space and then quite inexplicably decided to pivot and also stands in the front now of Australian, you know, protest screaming, you know, glob globalize the interifer and other such and other such nonsense. Also wearing also wearing the kafir once again pretty sure that if we were to globalize the interifer the resulting caliphate would not care much about you know women's rights and things like that. So you get these radical left-wing causes that are completely incompatible, but not only are they sort of not only do they cluster together statistically, like you know, if you tend to support one, you tend to support the other and we can sort of stat statistically measure that. Um, individual people become extremely passionate about causes that are completely ideologically incompatible. you know, Grace Tame, Greta Thumborg, and so it's I think, you know, that that in itself is a really interesting observation and it's because the cause itself is not what's driving it. What's driving it is this moral superiority that you're talking about. They latch on to these causes convinced that this makes them a good person and they use that moral superiority to use these causes in, you know, incredibly nefarious ways. like you know both the climate hysteria and the the free Palestine cause have both become highly toxic and highly harmful to society at large. Um and you know it's that sense of moral superiority that draws these radical leftists whether it's you know extreme versions of of feminism or gender ideology climate whatever it might be it draws them to that and it's not about the cause at all. It's got nothing to do with that. It's about the moral superiority. That's what

The narcissism of it. That's why I talked about that in relation to the narcissistic traits. It's that striving for your own status and you don't really care about what you're screaming about. Just what it does for you. So, you're talking about a competitive strategy, not the evolutionary adaptation of it. Because as I understand it, evolutionary adaptation takes thousands of years. Whereas the competitive strategy is something that we're do we're hardwired to do and we use whatever we have at our disposal in our society to get that done. So that's a really interesting question is so so if I sort of get what you're getting at correctly the idea that you know these particular strategies that we're using now in this time and place don't look like the product of evolution because they're you know dealing with issues that we that are evolutionarily novel that you know we can't possibly have evolved to adapt to and things like that. Um so I I have spent some time thinking about that and I what I think is the best way to to sort of understand it is that what's been selected for in terms if we sort of bring the com bring the discussion back now to just sort of focusing a bit more on on female competition and and sort of manipulative reproductive suppression. What's been selected for is for women to target certain biological universals that will reliably lower birth rates in their rivals. And some of these universals you can sort of see number one very clearly they would always be biological universals and you can see them playing out as the triggers of a lot of the feminist behavior that we see. So one of the biggest ones is sexual dimmorphism. So sexual dimmorphism both in morphology which is sort of where the term comes from. So just the physical differences between men and women but also sex differences in behavior as well. So both in morphology and behavior those basic differences between men and women are the bread and butter of the mating system. So what makes a man a good provider and a good father and a good husband is that he is masculine and masculinity by definition are those aspects of men that are the most different from women. What makes a a woman a good mother and a good wife and a good partner and a good nurturer is that she's feminine. And so femininity is by definition those things that are least masculine. Right? femininity and masculinity are like polar opposites. And so the differences between the sexes is something that feminism will always that that the female manipulative reproductive suppression and thus feminism will always latch on to and attack. And so, you know, this sort of became prominent, I think, sort of to me personally, way back in, I don't even know, I guess, like the early 2000sish, I guess, maybe a bit later, sometime around there, when I was studying sex differences in spatial cognition, which should be of really logically should be of zero interest kind of really to anyone except the people studying it, right? It's theoretically interesting to understand why men and women. And I guess maybe it has real world practical implications as well. So jobs that require really really advanced spatial cognition are probably going to be better suited for men than women at the high end of the distribution. But generally speaking, this should you wouldn't expect this to necessarily be a flash point. And it was a massive flash point for feminists in the academy. So the the small number of researchers who sort of began publishing on these reliable sex differences in spatial cognition just getting attacked and pillaried by by the feminist social scientists. It was like why what what? But it's because they will attack anything that is sexually dimorphic. any sex difference becomes unacceptable because one great way to make a society completely hostile to reproductive success is to make that society intolerant of sex differences. If men and women are not able to occupy complimentary divergent and complimentary roles then they are unable to cooperate to successfully create a family. So when you have women out behaving like men and that behavior is being applauded and when you have men out behaving like women and that behavior is being applauded then the basis of human of of the human mate attraction system just begins to break down. And that's what we're seeing. And so a lot of feminism can be explained by, you know, a really sort of simple mechanism by which women react adversely to any sort of expression or celebration of sexual dimmorphism. And of course, sexual dimmorphism is a very very old evolutionary trait. So that the propensity to to react to that and to rally against it and to condemn it could certainly be very old evolutionarily. And we're just seeing that manifest using whatever cultural memes our society has available. And that explains a lot of feminism.

And uh which other sort of examples do we have that throughout? You mentioned Rome, other civilizations who fell where we saw something that we could equate with feminism or was another manifestation of intraexual competition.

Not so not so much in terms of the sexual dimmorphism specifically, although again that was you know that was seen a lot in Rome with women moving up into the institutions and women moving up into sort of civic positions and the you know feminist moves in they didn't call them feminism but moves to give women more economic freedom and more economic independence and and you know all of that all happened exactly in the same sort of way that we're seeing it now in Rome. So, I don't have expertise across too many other societies that we can point to the the attack on sexual dimmorphism specifically, although I'm trying to think if I can come up with any examples. But, um the point about sexual dimmorphism is more that what it does is because it is evolutionarily very old. Obviously, sex differences predate the existence of humans. um you know when when humans were various bipeedal apes. um you know what it does do though is provide a very workable mechanism by which evolutionarily old interexual competitive motives could now be playing out because if the trigger of those is simply sexual dimmorphism condemn it. If that's effectively the mechanism well that accounts for a lot of what we're seeing now. So that accounts for the celebration of women being aggressive. It accounts for the condemnation of men being aggressive and the celebration of men becoming passive and emasculated. And it accounts for the condemnation of women being beautiful and wearing makeup and doing things that attract men. It accounts for the the condemnation of women choosing to stay home and raise families while men go out to work because that's complimentary divergence of roles. So it accounts for a huge amount of what sort of is done under the banner of feminism and all of those things will all negatively contribute to overall reproductive success both at the society level and of any individuals who choose to embrace those particular decisions in their own lives as well.

Mhm. Okay. And I think when I think about it, my resistance to the theory is that removal of agency is that, you know, we tell men all the time, stop watching porn. It's the same, right? You watch, you pushing the button, you watch watching more porn, and we tell them, stop watching porn. And uh so that I think is my resistance to to this.

I think look, I think that's an understandable resistance. Um, I mean, I think the observation that that birth rates are declining globally. I think supports the notion that it's a manipulative reproductive suppression because even though my argument is that feminism is manipulative reproductive suppression, that's what it is. But that's not the only way that reproductive suppression manifests. So if reproductive suppression is a human universal, which I'm I mean it's not just a human universal, it's a a animal universal like interexual competition and and you know that's not a human thing. this is something that sexually reproducing species do. So we we would expect to see this happening and of course you know the world becomes more global then obviously there are still differences between countries but we're starting to see instead of this being like isolated populations and isolated societies and civilizations going through these cycles completely independent of each other because we live in such a global world where we are now communicating. There's not just gene flow between populations. There's communication of information and memes and behaviors and all things across populations. So, you're kind of seeing the whole world come into sync. So, we're all going through the birth rate decline together. So, I don't necessarily think that observing it in places that are not especially feminist is a problem for the intersectional competition theory because it has to be universal. It should be seen in places that aren't feminist as well. Um, it just has it just is called different things. Um, but I do appreciate the the resistance against um the idea that you know the resistance to the idea that we lack the agency that this implies that we lack agency and all and I and I'm not going to refute that because I actually think that this does imply not just that women lack agency but that people actually lack agency. So, and I think that's one of the sort of I think it's one of the fundamental sources of resistance that people have to evolutionary psychology. They're uncomfortable with the notion that maybe they're not engaging in the behaviors they're engaging for the reasons they think they're engaging in them. And that's something that some people find interesting and it's something that other people find deeply uncomfortable. And most people sit somewhere in in between those two things. But I think it is likely the case that the majority of the behavior that we engage in, we don't really understand why we do it. And even if we attempt to interrogate ourselves to understand why we do it, the answers won't be available to us. They're not there, you know, they're not accessible to our consciousness because the the phenomenon of consciousness itself, which is, you know, not something that I would say is well understood. There's no scientific consensus about what it is or what it's for. But there is at least sort of a or ought to be certainly amongst evolutionary psychologists and evolutionary biologists that whatever consciousness is for, it's not there for fun. It's not there because it creates beautiful experiences. It's not there because it's a wonderful sacred special thing. It is a wonderful sacred special thing and it does create beautiful experiences, but that's not why it exists. It exists to serve a purpose. And so whatever that purpose might be, that will shape what information about ourselves we have conscious access to and what information we don't. Now much of female interexual competition is very nasty. Feminism is very nasty. We've spoken about the just the toxin that is this notion of moral superiority that people can use to rationalize terrible behaviors. But must much of sort of reproductive suppression doesn't manifest in a way that would be recognized as nasty by either the person engaging in it or the target. So, you know, when women are sitting down discussing what they should do with their friends, individual women are not thinking, well, I'm going to get married, but I'm going to tell my friends that I think they should focus on their careers because that means that I'll have more babies than them. That's not what they're thinking. They're just talking through and it just feels like when they think about their own situation, it feels like the right decision for them is maybe to step away from the career and to start a family. But when they think about their friend's situation, it just feels like their friend's career might be more important or valuable than their own. And it just feels like the right advice to give is I think you should invest in your career a bit longer and and wait a little bit more. And neither the person giving that information nor the person receiving it perceives or feels or suspects that there could be anything nefarious in those motives. And no matter how much introspection they engage in, they're not going to find those nefarious motives because they're not there, right? They're not available to conscious awareness. So we've been selected to behave in ways ultimately, I mean there's sometimes there's quite complicated pathways to that reproductive success. It's not always a straight line, but ultimately we behave, we've selected to behave in ways because in the past on balance across your lifetime, those behaviors have ultimately boosted your reproductive success and ored the reproductive success of the rivals around you. And that's, you know, it's largely an inescapable fact. So it doesn't mean that we don't feel like we're behaving under our own agency. It doesn't mean that we, you know, that there are not genuine individual differences between people in terms of, you know, how pro-social you are and how much you respect others and how kind you are. It doesn't mean that you're not actually a good person and it doesn't mean that there are other people out there who are not actually bad people who do terrible things. I don't think that the lack of sort of the lack of agency that we're forced to concede in order to understand how behavior works. I don't think that that necessarily sort of strips away the notion that, you know, there are still good people who deserve kudos and credit for being good and there are still absolutely bad people who deserve, you know, punishment and confinement for being bad. It's just that the reasons why they're good and bad is probably not just because they decided to, you know, the reasons are much more complicated than that. But yeah, look, I can't argue with the ultimately with the lack of agency because ultimately I agree with you. I think that is the implication of the theory that it actually implies a lack of agency. But that's kind of true of all evolutionary theories of behavior ultimately they imply

We will do what we need to do to to propel our own genetic lineage and uh our own sort of reproductive success. But how is the fe the feminist ideology different from other ideologies? Are were they also intraexual competition like Marxism or is that something else?

I don't think that they're something else. I think they are also similar types of it's kind of like the omnicore I was

talking before how it all kinds of melds together. And I think that they are all sort of manifestations, maybe not exactly the same, but very similar psychological mechanisms at play. They've just been fed a slightly different, you know, social or cultural diet. And so they've come out, you know, to champion a slightly different cause, but ultimately those causes end up sort of focusing on limiting female reproductive success.

So I've got a a a data set that I'm actually analyzing and writing up right now that's demonstrating the link between pro-environmentalism and anti-natal attitudes. And so even, you know, the the the pro-environmental sort of movement, if you like, even that has bent around before too long to being both sort of civilizational destroying. So the the the pro-environmental net zero movement is just tanking entire economies, and it's being allowed to do that. And it's also bending itself around now to becoming, you know, directly anti, not just indirectly anti-natal by tanking the economy, but it's now becoming directly anti-natal. So the rhetoric is starting to build up about, you know, you shouldn't have children because that's creates your, you know, overall climate, your overall carbon footprint, and, you know, it's bad for the environment to have children. And it would be better if if people just didn't. Um, and so you're starting to see that rhetoric start to come out, you know, online and in blogs and whatever. And so I went and measured it, and yes, it's measurable and detectable, and it's there. There is that relationship between pro-environmental attitudes, and it is related to people's political orientation. So there is that bending of the pro-environmental movement toward anti-natalism. And I think so many of these, so many all of these ideologies are all bending towards that anti-natalism, and they're all the the left-wing ideology. So it's not a coincidence that sort of leftist progressive ideologies bend towards anti-natalism and conservative ideologies bend towards pro-natalism because when as societies get older, they become more what we call, even though again, the term left-wing is a quite new term for like historically speaking, it's relatively new, right? But you can see the the progression across societies. You can see the progression of conservatism to progressivism. You can see it reflected in the art, and you can see it reflected in the social norms, and you can, you know, you can see it reflected in a number of things, the way we're seeing it now. And the reason for that is because as a society, you know, begins to effectively pack itself up and go home, it becomes more and more progressive. And so it's not just that you have this stable individual difference where about half the people are conservative and about half the people are progressive and they have elections each year and it kind of goes back and forth. The entire population is actually shifting towards progressivism. So the the conservatives now are not as conservative as they were 40 years ago. Right. Absolutely. And the progressives now, of course, are much more progressive. And so that the very notion of political orientation is this mechanism in practice that that's just measuring the individual difference of how far along this continuum any individual person is. And so that the far-left progressives are the ones that are sort of like at the at the front of this civilizational decline, and the conservatives are the ones who are, you know, at the back of it. And that's just that individual difference. And that accounts for much of political orientation, which is >> which is one of the main reasons why I'm trying to look now at birth rate decline and and pro-environmentalism and political orientation and various other ideologies and link them all in together. So I think that is >> probably >> a big explanation for the, you know, what we call the left-right distinction between progressivism and conservatism.

So this isn't something that we can really deprogram. You think this is this is our hardware and then we end up with then what Ed Dutton was talking about, we had him on here before, that it's cycles and you they are have to be selected out or >> we're stuck with it. Yeah. >> So because people are still having kids and they are religious or have other. Yeah. >> Yeah. Look, so I've so where Ed Dutton and I differ is that he his theory predicts that the the kind of wokeist leftist um agenda, which he which he couples, not in a baseless way, like he's got pretty good evidence for this, which he couples with sort of a basic increase in in sort of how dysgenic individuals are. So the the difference is that his theory predicts that you get this declining birth rate and you get this crash, but the the people who survive are kind of like the the good genetic stock and so away they go again until the, you know, the dysgenics build up and then we sort of get a crash again in order to purge them, right? Whereas in my theory, the ones that survive the bottleneck after the crash are actually the ones that are driving the whole cycle. So actually they're the ones that are responsible for the fact that the new civilization they're founding will ultimately self-destruct and will ultimately pack itself up and go home too. So that's kind of where we differ.

Yeah. Look, I I really hate the question of is there anything that we can do about it because I fear that the answer is no. That's that is my concern. So I've spent spent a long time before I was studying birth rate decline and intersexual competition. You know, I've got a history of studying quite a few different things from an evolutionary perspective. And, you know, one of the things that I sort of often explained to people, you know, very forcefully is that, you know, you're not going to change the fundamental nature of being human. Like, you're never going to change that. So, if you've got a solution to some social problem that relies on changing the fundamental nature of being human, then forget it. It's not going to work. And that's that's just a >> well we have we have done right we used to before we had fire we worked very differently and then we had an evolutionary adaptation. >> I mean, that to some extent I think that's true, but I think that is also not something that happened like in the space of a couple of generations if you're talking about turning around massive birth rate decline. So I mean, there are examples of big changes, and there might even be, you know, individual maybe examples of massive turnarounds from the situation we're in now. The problem, the problem I think is that so on the one hand, like you can't change the fundamental nature of being human. So if what I'm saying is right, and I can't guarantee that it is. If what I'm saying is right, then from one hand, well, no, it's not going to change. Like none of the civilizations that have fallen in this way in the past, you know, well, I mean, they've they're in the past, right? So, they fell. None of them survived it, or they'd be here now, right? And they're not. So, we might be the first one to make it through somewhat unchanged. It's pretty unlikely. I think that's pretty unlikely. On the other hand, you know, every civilization has technology that the ones before it didn't have. That is much more true of us than of any other civilization. So that the technology gap between us and previous civilizations that have fallen is much much bigger than whatever the technology gaps were between those civilizations in terms of the knowledge that we can acquire, the knowledge that we can integrate, um, and what we might actually be able to do biologically, medically, whatever. Whether any of that can move the needle, I genuinely don't know. So I think >> this is behind this is a sorry, this is about behavior as well. And if you look at Hungary, for example, they changed the incentive structure. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the feminist ideology sort of rose after the industrial industrial revolution when things changed. So why if we change the incentive structure, wouldn't we be able to change female behavior towards reproductive success? The incentive structure is is one thing, but it's also about the environmental cues that trigger this kind of behavior. So, it's not just about the incentive structure. So, yes, people respond to incentives. Behavior responds to incentives. That's not the only thing that it responds to. And at the moment, we are in a world that is absolutely saturated. Um, and we I'd like to think it's saturated. It may not be. may in fact get worse. But we are absolutely saturated with anti-natal messaging and messaging that is hostile to reproductive success and messaging that is indicative that our society is in a state of, you know, basically like there is no market price of of sex anymore. The art has become sort of, you know, vulgar. We are in a we're almost in an anti-meritocracy. Not only are we no longer in a meritocracy, not only do we no longer even try to appoint the most qualified person or to reward competence, we're actually in an anti-meritocracy where we actually have implemented selection structures to choose people who will not be capable of doing a job properly. >> And so with all of these cues around us that this is the stage of society we're in, that is going to result in people all behaving in a particular way. So yes, we can change some incentives, but what we actually need to change is all of these environmental cues, and that's a very very difficult thing to imagine being able to change like, you know, how do you >> but the problem with the the the the strategy being because the feminist change came on so suddenly, right? If they pulled women in the 70s, they were all very conservative, and that change came on so suddenly that, you know, why wouldn't wouldn't be able to change it back? You need to incentivize women to have conservative values. >> I think if if we had if there was no a priori understanding of why it changed, then maybe we could say, well, it should be just as easy if we can sort of somehow manufacture the right conditions to change it back just as quickly. And maybe maybe that's possible. Maybe there is a way to do that. But certainly within the context of the theory that I'm arguing, these things happen sequentially and they don't go backwards because what you have is a population that is at a certain state, a certain amount of resources, certain political state, a certain social state, and that produces behavior in the people. That behavior then produces a different state, and that slightly different state then produces slightly different behavior, which produces a slightly different state. It can't go backwards. the behavior of the people just push the environment further in the direction that then pushes the behavior further into the direction. So in order to actually undo that complex process, it's not that it's theoretically impossible. Theoretically, we could attempt to undo each and every cue we can identify that encourages these types of behaviors. It's just that practically and logistically that would likely be an impossible thing to accomplish. I just I'm not quite sure that it can be that it can be done. And the implications of that are quite dire because what we've got coming down the pipeline with birth rate decline is I would say much worse than what we're currently dealing with with in terms of the economic problems, you know, completely self-imposed on us by net zero. and the productivity crisis that we're seeing across the world, which itself is being driven by, you know, the the anti-meritocratic attitudes in most institutions and blah blah blah, and, you know, these things are all sort of feeding into, you know, feeding into the problems. But I think when the the birth rate decline really hits economically, that's going to be much worse than anything that we're currently dealing with now. So it's a really, really hard and important question to know whether there is in fact anything that we can do. So I don't want to just say no. But evolutionarily, I'm probably think it's very unlikely.

>> Okay. Yes. Okay. Wasn't the answer I was hoping for. >> No, it's not the answer. I mean, I I don't I don't want to say a hard no because I don't want people to stop trying. At the same time, though, like I can't sort of lie and pretend that I think that this is something that we can change because I I don't think it is and I hope that I'm wrong about that. I hope that I'm wrong about a few things, but obviously if I thought there was a real chance I was wrong, I wouldn't be out here saying all of this stuff. So, you know, I I'm gonna be wrong about a couple of details, but I really don't think that I'm wrong in the in the main. So, it's a it's a, you know, it's a bad thing that's coming down the pipeline. >> But you have these pockets of conservative communities where birth rates aren't down, where women choose differently. >> That's right. And I think that they will be, you know, hopefully they will be amongst the pockets that persist. I mean, I guess the other sort of thing to remember is that, you know, it's we talk about civilizational decline, and I don't I don't think that's hyperbole. I think that's quite real, and I think that's happening. But civilizations don't fall the way buildings fall. They don't just come crashing down and then they're gone, right? It takes a really long time and they decline over a really long time. So it may not be possible for us at this point in time to do something that means that in 200 years when historians look back on this time, they don't call it a civilizational collapse. Right? There may be nothing we can do to stop what's eventually coming. But maybe what we can do is at least work out how best to manage it and how best to make sure that we have got some say in what comes out the other side. that might be the the sort of most optimistic thing to look forward to that yes what, you know, whatever we currently want to call Western civilization, or maybe it makes more sense to look at it on an individual country level or nation state, I don't know, but, you know, there are huge changes coming and I don't know that we're going to be able to stop those. But maybe we can make sure that, you know, the cycle will continue and so something comes out the other side, right? It doesn't it doesn't end. Something comes out the other side. And that's something might be where we need to put our energy and our efforts and our focus. Um, making sure that what comes out the other side maintains at least, you know, a serious center of gravity around a lot of the the values and freedoms and principles that we all want to preserve that that are all the reason that we don't want Western civilization to decline and to disappear. So maybe that's where the efforts need to go. Not on trying to turn time back or trying to stop the process, but on focus just focus on the fact that we're going to go through a bottleneck and we're going to go through a crash. But some of us will come out the other side, and we can have some impact on what that looks like. >> I thought it'll be either puritanical or a caliphate. >> They are probably two of the leading options. >> Yeah. Just ending on a note of hope. >> Maybe we can do better than that. Maybe we can do better than that. >> Do better. Do better. Do better. Oh wow. This is so fascinating. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um, really, really great conversation, and we didn't get to react to what I had selected for you. Maybe another time. And thank you everyone. Anytime. >> So, thank you everyone for watching and uh please let us know what you think in the comments below. Head on over to Substack. Where can we find you, Danny? >> Um, Dr. Danny S on both Substack and X. >> Great. I'll make sure to link that in the description, and then I'll see you next time.