#1016 - Rob Henderson - Is Having a Boyfriend Cringe Now? | Modern Wisdom

I miss the Cambridge recording studio, the dark hovel that you used to be in.

Yeah, I think we've recorded in every single place I've lived in since my start at Cambridge.

So I was living in this, yeah, it was a hovel, like the smallest dwelling I'd ever lived in.

Smaller than the barracks in the Air Force, believe it or not.

It was a shoebox.

And it was such a step down because when I was living in New Haven in undergrad, I was getting a stipend from the GI Bill.

I had a pretty nice apartment.

It was spacious, high ceilings.

But Cambridge required all the postgrad students for their first year to live in their college.

And I was like, oh, you know, it's Cambridge.

It's going to be grand.

It's going to be Hogwarts.

And I get there and it's a shoebox with a single bed and a tiny little desk.

And that's where you and I recorded the first.

One for Modern Wisdom.

I think it's very important for you to keep your feet on the ground.

I don't want you to get too big for your boots.

Published author, tons of books sold, very highly followed on Substack.

Remember where you came from, a hovel in Cambridge.

Yeah, that's what I tell people.

When I was at Cambridge struggling sleeping in that 12 by 12 prison cell.

But yeah, now I finally have the background.

The foster care system had nothing on this.

The foster care system was a walk in the park.

The uh no no, i'd always like this when i when i would watch other uh podcast guests and they had you know the beautiful background with the books and everything, and i'm working my way up to that.

This is like stage one.

Eventually i'll have you know the fucking, the grand library behind me.

Yeah, one step at a time.

What do you make of this?

Is having a boyfriend?

Cringe now article.

Yeah, that was going around, so i first came across that vogue magazine article.

Uh, it was a reel on instagram and And someone was commenting on it.

And then I saw that this magazine article is having a boyfriend embarrassing.

I've inspired, you know, a thousand Instagram reels, tick tock, you know, all these commentaries.

And so I went back and read the actual piece.

It was a striking headline.

And, you know, the first thing it made me think of was intersexual competition because, as I'm reading this article, the author, you know she's talking about you.

You know influencers and podcast hosts, these women with a lot of influence and status.

And they're talking about.

How you know, they try to not talk about their boyfriends that much or they try to discourage other women from entering relationships.

This idea of hetero fatalism,

But of course, like the funny thing to me was these women themselves are in relationships.

And, you know, she would ask, well, why are you promoting these ideas?

And these women would say, well, I don't want to seem boastful.

I want to show solidarity with single women.

And I understand how difficult the dating market is right now.

And so you know it is a little embarrassing to post about my relationship online and this kind of thing.

And yeah, to me, you know, connecting it with evolutionary psychology.

I think there are some interesting principles here around, you know competition, reproductive suppression and that kind of thing.

So I wrote this Substack article, which is one of my.

I very rarely come up with with titles that I'm proud of.

You know, usually they're serviceable, kind of gets the idea of the piece.

But this one, girl boss gatekeeping was the one I came up with.

And it captures this idea that, for if you're a woman with power status, influence and so on, you have some non trivial effects on the behavior of other women.

And if you are telling them that maybe it's not worth it to date anymore, men are trash.

It's so hard out there.

Having a boyfriend is embarrassing now anyway.

But then privately you're in a relationship and you are following those conventional life script patterns.

You know you're, you're kind of indirectly suppressing other women's ability to find partners to reproduce and that kind of thing.

Is this a luxury belief, using your nomenclature?

Yeah i, i think it's almost there.

So i listened to this very interesting discussion by this evolutionary behavioral scientist, danny solikowski um, and she's been, she's done a few interviews on this on this question of reproductive suppression, and And one thing she points out is a lot of this antinatalist messaging comes from elite institutions, people with platforms, journalists and academics, and corporate leaders.

I see this a lot in social science journals, for example, like the motherhood penalty, that kind of thing of oh, if you have children, you're going to be penalized in the labor market.

But you never see the reverse framing of where, if you choose to work and not stay with your kids, this is also a penalty, in a way, because there's a limited window of your child's life where you can spend a lot of time with them and where you're like literally the number one person in their world.

And so every hour you spend in the workplace is an hour.

You're not watching your child grow and develop and learn and form that kind of attachment.

And so if elite institutions and elite high status individuals are promoting this idea, But then privately, you see that marriage rates are the highest among highly educated people.

Privately, they're more likely than others to have children.

Now, this was an interesting analysis by The Economist magazine last year, which found that a lot of the so if you break down the results by socioeconomic status, it's actually low income women who whose fertility has declined the most, whereas college educated women's fertility has declined slightly, but but not by very much.

But the lower you go on education and income, the higher the kind of fertility decline.

And so is it a luxury belief?

Well, I define luxury beliefs as ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society.

And you see people promoting one set of views that makes them look compassionate and understanding.

And, you know, I understand how hard it is out there and maybe this isn't worth it anyway.

But then by promoting these views, they're actually reducing pathways to happiness for other people.

This is like consistent finding Brad Wilcox and others who I know you've had on the show.

There's a ton of data in sociology showing that the happiest people are married people with children.

If you look at women, single women without children are the least happy.

They report the lowest levels of happiness.

Married women report slightly higher levels of happiness than that.

And then married women with children report the highest levels of happiness of all.

And so if I'm trying to promote an idea, trying to shape your behavior in such a way that will reduce your happiness, then there is a kind of an element of a luxury belief there.

Well, I think there's two things going on.

There is what is being said laudable solidarity, very Gen Z TikTok brained.

How does this look in terms of my personal brand?

Swag gap, fucking aura, all that stuff.

And then there is, okay, what's the motivation that might be a little bit deeper than this?

So I think the thing that I thought that was interesting at first was the article is looking at much of relationships through almost like an influencer first perspective.

That how other people see you, particularly women, particularly online, is the most important currency that you as a woman have to trade.

And this ties in with Freya India's idea, which is most relationships now are more brand collaborations than they are meaningful connections.

Wow.

Yeah.

Damn, that is good.

Yeah.

You know, and it's funny like a lot of society seems to be participating in this discouraging of committed relationships bonds, family formation.

You brought up Freya India there.

I remember a really interesting essay of hers where she pointed out that if you are a 23-year-old woman and you're a recent college grad, you're in the workforce, you're hustling, you're struggling, you're working hard and you're dating around.

You're on the apps, you go on a date here and there.

Your parents are probably just thinking, okay, good.

This is what you should be doing at this age.

Dating exploring yourself, whatever.

But then Freya pointed out that if you are a 23-year-old woman and you tell your parents I'm engaged, a lot of educated upper middle class parents would respond with horror.

Like, you're too young for this.

You're going to ruin your career.

Like, you're derailing your life.

Like, why are you giving up everything for this guy?

You know, that kind of thing.

And this is like the reverse of what you would expect in more traditional societies or even our society up until maybe 50, 60 years ago.

That if you're a young woman and you find a guy you like enough to want to marry, your family would celebrate, society would celebrate, and now it's literally the reverse.

That's interesting.

I wonder what sort of parents would be like that.

At least in my experience, all of my friends who have got married pretty young.

Their parents were super stoked for them, but that might just be.

I might have an unreasonably normal and responsible set of friends with parents.

But yeah, the when it comes to like the cringe aspect, like a lot of this was around social embarrassment, rejection.

Again, we're talking about like the shallow, upfront lauded reasons, before we get into the sort of deeper motivations for this.

Um, but it seemed to be a lot to do with female intrasexual social status.

How do other women see me?

Uh, you know, the article talks about how, if you post about your boyfriend online, you're going to lose followers.

It doesn't mention that you lose followers uh, that are mostly male, because they were hoping that they might be able to tap it.

And now that they know you've got a boyfriend.

You remember when Brett Cooper announced that she she got married and the comments were just tons and tons of guys going it's over, bros.

Like, like the same thing will happen when Freya India gets married.

The same thing you know I'm sure would have happened if Louise Perry had been online before she got married like any sort of public facing woman.

A good portion of your following are guys that are like parasocial online orbiters, hoping that you may see their like or comment or DM.

And this is going to be the beginning of, But beyond that because that would be shallow to say I'm going to lose male followers who are only there because of the prospect that they might be able to get easy sex or a relationship out of me.

The article talks more deeply about the fact that girls unfollow you Partly because well, you posting about your relationship makes them feel uncomfortable.

So if you have a mating market which is tough for women to be in, you being successful when success is in the minority, that makes other women feel a little bit uncomfortable.

So like, oh, I don't have a relationship and you do.

And this makes me feel bad.

That's like, I guess, a nice explanation up front.

But the one that was more interesting was your content becomes boring.

Like you become more bland, as if the most exciting sort of woman that you can be is one who's single and out with the girls and going to brunch, as opposed to a cute Halloween photo of you wearing a lot of like brown tones, hand in hand with your boyfriend as you walk through a pumpkin patch.

Like that's more boring content.

And because your content is going to be less exciting, that means that your followers are going to drop, as if again, the most important thing is how other people react, particularly women, particularly online.

See you, that is the most important currency that you're trading with.

And it was all seen through this perspective of what does an online.

How exciting is your online life, not how enjoyable is your real life.

Yeah, I'm thinking about, as you're saying, this Goodhart's Law or that old phrase what gets measured, gets managed.

And for an online... influencer or podcaster or writer um you know there's a very visible metric of likes and views and followers and that kind of thing it's very you know it's quantifiable you see it on your phone or on your screen but relationships aren't like that there's no you know you don't wake up one morning oh my relationship today is at a 77 out of 100 compared to yet like like an eight sleep thing right like oh yesterday it was an 81 today it's you don't get those quantifiable numbers um that that can be you know serve as as validation or as motivation to improve things or to you know rework uh the relationship if your score feels particularly low you could have the conversation with your partner in the same way that if your follower count seems to be dropping you can rethink your strategy for um your brand or for your your product so yeah i think people are you know kind of kind of misguidedly um focusing on the wrong thing here well At least what I've seen, a good bit of this sort of focusing around seems to be this sense that your online persona is the most important thing that you can have.

And yeah, maybe that's because it is a quantifiable metric in some ways, like it's an observable rather than a hidden one.

I learned this morning that Sabrina Carpenter's entire recent album is about how Barry Keegan wasn't cool enough.

And he was like, the man-child thing.

I didn't know that they'd been dating.

I didn't realize that Barry and Sabrina had been in a relationship.

I didn't realize that they'd broken up.

And I didn't realize that her entire album was about that.

But Sabrina Carpenter's most recent album, like Man Child's in there.

A lot of it is about sort of the immaturity of men, the uncoolness of men.

Olivia Deen's The Art of Loving is all about loving yourself and loving your friends, because men suck.

So what we're seeing is this sort of solidarity women on women thing, which is interesting.

And I think both me and you agree.

The dearth of uh good guys are like uh apparent dearth of apparent good guys um, is basically sending women insane.

Like, if you can't find an eligible male partner, you still have all of the drive to do stuff, but there are fewer um vectors that you can point it down.

So female intersexual competition gets tuned up, but pointed inward, as opposed to like compete for mates.

It becomes more vicious.

It becomes more subtle.

And yeah like look, if you can't find a good partner, like if you're struggling to find a good guy, or find a guy that you're attracted to or can settle down or is prepared to commit to you again, one that is sufficiently attractive, socioeconomically successful and prepared to commit right.

Like, because the third one is the hard one.

You can probably find the casual sex out of the first two pretty simply, but the third one is really tough.

Quite rightly, you end up with this inner citadel thing, which I learned from you.

If you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

So if you struggle to find a good guy or find a partner that you can settle down with, a much easier solution is just to say well, men are trash and relationships are for mugs.

In any case,

Who needs to be partnered?

Girl, he's destroying your aura.

Your Instagram account is getting more boring.

Yeah, I took a screenshot of that Vogue headline is having a boyfriend embarrassing now.

And I wrote on X, next up is owning a house embarrassing now.

If you can't get something, you train yourself to not want it or you teach yourself that this is undesirable anyway.

So now we're going to see if having money embarrassing now.

Dude, it will be.

If you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

I learned that from you, what, five years ago when you first wrote about the inner citadel?

Yeah, yeah.

I borrowed it from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.

And yeah, it's.

You know, what I think about is kind of the evasion of envy a little bit, that if you, you know, like rich people who dress down and who try not to display their ostentatious lifestyle online like they want to show solidarity with people who don't have money.

And so you, you know, maybe play it down or something like that.

I'm trying to think of a sort of analogy here that OK, you have a boyfriend and your life's going great, but you don't want your followers to hate you or to envy you or to feel like you think you're better than them.

And so you're going to say, actually this thing isn't so great, or actually I'm going to point out the flaws, or I'm going to hide my own kind of good fortune here, so that you don't target me for it.

And, you know, I think this is aligned with some really interesting work.

Tanya Reynolds, I know you've spoken to the bless her heart effect that you know.

As you said, intersexual competition among women is more subtle, more indirect than it is for men.

And if you're concerned with this increasingly scarce pool of desirable partners, you're going to want to reduce the amount of competition for that scarce resource.

And so one thing you can do here is to tell them that it's not desirable anyway.

You want to get yourself out of the mating pool.

I talk about this a little bit in my book when I talk about what I was observing with the competition for internships at investment banks when I was at Yale.

So you would see, you know, on Wednesday, you would see, you know, Yale grads say oh, investment banks are emblems of capitalist depression.

You shouldn't work at them.

And then on Friday, you would see them at the recruitment session for Goldman Sachs.

And what they were trying to do is convince you not to go for those jobs because they're so hyper competitive so that when they go to the recruitment session, there are you, a few arrivals that they have to go up against.

And I think something may be happening here as well that um, if you, you know, if you want a partner um, or if you have one and you want to reduce the number of mate poachers, then you start to introduce these ideas of you know, disguising the language of compassion and concern, and that kind of thing.

You know, like like Tanya Reynolds talks about the bluster heart effect where, um you know, women will disguise negative gossip in the language of kindness, of positive emotion.

So they might say, you know, oh, you know, I'm really concerned about Katie.

She's been bringing a lot of boys home from Hinge and I just don't want to see her get hurt.

So, you know, maybe we should talk to her, or you know, just introducing these ideas about, maybe she's not the most sexually chaste person in the world, but you're saying it in a way that you're concerned for her rather than you know hey, Katie's kind of a skank or whatever.

And so, you know, similarly, you could say, you know, hey, it's really hard out there, girls.

Maybe guys aren't worth it anyway.

Like, you know, take care of yourself, self-care.

You're good how you are.

You don't need to worry about presenting yourself in a certain way just to get a man.

Instead of saying like you know, actually there aren't that many good guys out there and I don't want to compete with you.

So maybe you should just stay at home and watch my videos on TikTok instead of going out on dates with guys.

And so, yeah, I think there's a lot of this going.

But like you said, there are always those kind of two levels in evolutionary psychology.

They talk about the proximate versus the ultimate explanations.

And so the proximate is the immediate reason why someone does something.

The kind of deliberate explanation verbally articulate reasoning that someone gives for something.

So a simple example would be eating.

I could ask, why are you eating?

And you would say, because I'm hungry or I'm bored or whatever.

But then, of course, the evolutionary explanation is you need calories, you need energy, you need to sustain yourself.

You're an organism that requires food to survive and reproduce.

And I think the same thing with with intersexual competition.

So you have the proximate explanation, which might be something.

Like you know, I'm concerned for women, or I want women to be taken care of, or I want them to take care of themselves.

And I don't want them to be so caught up in thinking about other guys or whatever.

But then the ultimate explanation is, you know this, this more kind of a Darwinian calculus of hey, you know, maybe you shouldn't be going for these guys because um, there's such a limited pool that i don't want to compete with you or i don't want you trying to take the one guy that i have and you see this a lot more interestingly like like the whole, like red flag discourse and the whole like, like i see comments on tiktok and stuff.

Sometimes you'll send me one and i'll see the comments from women and they'll be like like, why are you with this guy?

Or oh, my god, that's a red flag.

Or like girl, you need to leave him.

I, i very seldom and i mean maybe you have, but i've never seen, or very seldom seen, male commenters like the equivalent of like a male influencer posting you know his girl with him or something, and then the male commenter saying like oh dude, that's a red flag.

She's saying this to you, she's saying that, like you need to dump her, you need to leave her, you need to get away from her.

Like, run as fast as you can.

And once in a while i'll see it.

But but it's not like every comment, the way that i see it with with female influencers and their female fans, and same with friends too, anecdotally.

So i'm, you know, reading that vogue article and i'm thinking about anecdotal cases of um, You know, I have female friends.

If they start dating a new guy, you know their friends will be like.

You know, I'm not so sure about this guy, or what does he do again, or who are his friends?

Like they're trying to find reasons to introduce doubt into the woman's mind.

But when guys say hey, I'm dating this new girl, it's not like you know.

Let's pick her apart and find all her flaws and try to tell you why she's not worth being with.

So you know, and I think, like intersexual competition, it's interesting because this method of reproductive suppression, I think it's more prevalent among women.

So you know I mentioned Danny Slakowski.

She points this out where, if you, you know, you imagine a small scale society.

You know where a lot of these behaviors and traits and tendencies evolved.

Even if you did manage to take one male out of the mating pool, you somehow managed to tell a guy actually don't date women anymore, you know, because other men are capable of fathering so many children.

Taking any individual male out of the mating pool does very little for you as a person.

I mean, you know in the logic here.

There's a math problem here where you know, even if you convince you know 100 guys to get out of the mating pool, one guy can still father.

You know 100 children or whatever.

Whereas the reverse here where for women, because they're so much more reproductively valuable.

And again, you're a small scale society there's 100 people, a small fraction of whom are young women.

Getting another young woman to exit the dating pool would be huge for you.

That's more resources for you, more social attention, more social support, that kind of thing.

And so for women, it actually is kind of a wiser, more beneficial strategy.

And it's also more possible, I think, too.

There's also the very practical thing of because women's sexual desires are a bit more modifiable.

I think you can convince women to go on a sex strike.

You know try, try to convince.

Like you know, actually sex isn't worth it.

Forget about it.

And it's funny.

Like I've seen, like the black pills, the black pills having a crack, but without porn.

I think.

I think that this would be a complete

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Well well, I see, I see, like William Costello, post these things sometimes where like um, you know, like an incel will get a girlfriend and then they'll exit the, exit that whole community, or whatever.

Like most guys, If they receive even a modicum of attention from a woman who likes them, like they're like.

Oh yeah, forget all that.

And so, you know, MGTOW stuff like finally a girl likes me.

Our principles are very flimsy in that way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And whereas for women like you could imagine her being very invested in this like you know, all men are trash thing.

And then finally a guy shows some interest in them.

And like, I think it would be harder for her to pull away from that.

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I saw it once and it was a video of a girl.

It looked like this this guy and this girl were about to go to a wedding and a girl was in front of him and he was sort of stood quite stoically, maybe posing for a photo because it was a vertical video.

And um, he looked sort of like he was trying to pose for a photo or just like waiting and she was like doing dances and like doing like this and like sort of moving around and um, the caption was um, once there are certain girls who are one in one in a billion, once you've dated someone like her, there is no other.

And the number of guys that were in the comments that were.

It was basically like this girl is so free.

She's a flighty bird.

Like look at the energy that she's bringing to it.

It seemed like a sort of pro chick video.

And dudes in the comments were like, this girl looks like a fucking nightmare.

Like she's not chill.

She's evidently, from their perspective, sort of advertising her sexual availability, despite the fact that she's in a relationship with this guy.

She looks quite disagreeable.

She looks like she isn't going to be trainable.

She looks like she isn't going to be able to.

You know what i mean, like all of the like sort of online internet problems.

But you make a great point that um, if a girl gets into a relationship, i was talking to uh, my housemate's girlfriend, and uh, she was saying loads of girls who get into relationships end up losing their friend groups, not in the way that guys do.

Guys lose their friend groups because it's like oh, he's fucking wifed up again.

The old ball and chain means that he's not going to hang with us.

But as soon as he's sort of uh, that's not because they feel bad that the guy's in a relationship, it's that the dude is not allowed out or that he's spending too many evenings watching netflix.

The reason for the girls, i think is again, if you're struggling to find a partner and your friend gets into a happy relationship, that throws into harsh contrast the fact that you do not have a partner and that makes you feel pretty uncomfortable.

So again, if you can't get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get.

But the suppression of fertility thing, the mating suppression thing is really interesting because it happens hormonally right.

You can actually step in and this is one of the potential explanations for why human females have got uh, concealed ovulation.

Yes uh, can you dig into that?

And then sort of the hormonal, because we've got two, two forks on how the mating suppression thing is going on here.

The fertility suppression one is like literally hormonally, you can fuck with women uh, and the other side is like so socially, in terms of their drive memetically, what is it that they're trying to do?

I think that's the right way to frame it right.

We've got one, one side which is a physiological intervention, and the other side which is a memetic or cultural intervention.

Yeah yeah, really quickly on your point about um, you know, when you enter a relationship, you know like, for guys they respond differently like oh, like we miss you man, that's kind of the sentiment here, not so much like oh, she's taking you from us, whereas the reverse often happens, and i see this with um, Like other kinds of examples, where someone gets something that's really desirable and then the friend group gets mad at them.

Like for successful people.

Often I think there's this trope out there that you know if you come from a community that doesn't do so well, and then you do really well for yourself, and then you lose contact with those people you spent a lot of time around, grew up with whatever it's, because your head got too big.

You think you're better than them.

Like you got a new group of friends.

You don't like them anymore.

But the pattern that I see that's more often that takes place, is the opposite, where it's the people who feel left behind.

They're like you know, you're doing better than us, so we're just going to stop talking to you because you remind us of the fact that maybe we aren't doing so well.

And just like your very presence makes us feel uncomfortable.

And so they're the ones who actually pull back more so than the successful person, I think.

And then your point here about...

As you were talking about, the first thing that came to mind was birth control.

It's literally a hormonal manipulation technology.

I think one of the founders of birth control, Margaret Sanger.

She thought that this would be good for poor people, low-income people, historically marginalized people.

As we've been describing, it's a very nice story to tell.

You're helping these women, but then, on the other hand, she's also reducing the number of children out there, the number of women who are reproducing, potential competitors and rivals.

And so you know if you can, if you can, and you see this with non-human primate species like tamarins and baboons, where dominant females in these hierarchies sometimes it's like open, like intimidation and bullying tactics harassment, like they'll push these subordinate females around, they'll scream at them, they'll prevent them from having access to food and resources.

Because if there's a malnutrition factor going on here, then they're not going to be able to reproduce.

This also elevates cortisol and stress hormones that can suppress ovulation and fertility.

And so you see this very clearly in these primate groups.

But then for humans, there's a version of this that's more so, mediated through culture and through socialization and technology and these kinds of things, where You don't usually see human women openly bullying.

But you can increase stress through indirect means.

So we talked about the pill, but then beyond that, you can also spread memes.

You can tell them that actually family formation is unwise or irresponsible, or actually you can have a much more fulfilling life if you focus on yourself, on self-care, on career, on climbing the corporate ladder, on foregoing and dating altogether.

Sometimes you'll see these articles, like every two or three years.

I see like these legacy media outlets will say, like you know, why can't we focus on friendship rather than romance?

You know, and then it's targeted toward women, where women, should you know like, like we should decenter romantic relationships and instead replace it with friendships.

And so women should form these, you know, female communities, and for men altogether, stop dating men.

And all of these things, too, reduce fertility.

But then this idea about culture, and this is very speculative, I think.

I wrote about this in my substack that if you can convince women that you're only a successful mother if you can fulfill these very expensive requirements.

This also introduces stress.

And so if you look 50 years ago a middle class family in the 1970s you know you have a modest house, you have one car, one television.

You know your children may share a bedroom.

College was not necessarily the the only marker of success for your kids.

There were other pathways to having a fulfilling career, or at least perceived the perceptions of a fulfilling career.

Now you fast forward 50 years and who sets the standard for what acceptable education, parenting and acceptable family arrangements look like?

Generally, it's elite women who talk about this.

Men don't talk that much about, this is what a successful family looks like.

This is an aspirational lifestyle if you're a parent or if you're a mother.

It's generally elite women who contribute the most to the discourse around successful motherhood and parenting and family formation.

And for them, what is a successful parent?

It's someone who can Give each kid their own bedroom, having a nice house, paying for ballet lessons, music lessons, sports teams, SAT prep, you know, college tuition, ideally at the most selective and expensive college the kid can possibly get into.

Right.

And and even for something like like even before all of that begins, weddings right like weddings are more expensive than ever.

And so if you can convince people like oh, your marriage is only valid or legitimate if you can spend 50 or 100 plus grand on a wedding,

Whereas 50 years ago our parents, grandparents' generation, it was considered perfectly reasonable to have a very modest ceremony.

Go to the courthouse, sign some paperwork and you're locked in.

Whereas now I mean in part, because what I think is going on here is because marriage is so easy to dissolve.

You have to have a very costly and ostentatious display of of burning resources to demonstrate your commitment.

And so you know, in a world where you can sign papers and have a divorce right away, how do you prove your commitment to this other person?

You publicly burn $100,000 on a wedding.

Isn't there a?

There's an inverse relationship between the size of the engagement ring and the success of relationships.

I've seen some studies like that.

Yeah, it's really amusing.

And the speculative explanation I saw for this is that it's almost like a counter signaling thing.

Yeah.

Compensation or counter signaling for the people.

Only people who are very confident in their relationship would feel comfortable spending very little on an engagement ring.

Like, you know, we love each other.

We don't have to prove it this way.

And so, yeah, I think like so this is what's going on here.

So, you know, elite people.

Women, high status women say this is what a successful family looks like.

And you need to be able to afford all of this.

You need the expensive wedding, the expensive house, multiple cars, family vacations, fly international.

Send your kids to all these expensive activities.

And if women who are unable to afford those things, low income women, women with less access can't afford that?

And they're thinking.

Well, you know I don't want to be looked down upon.

You know elites in any society get to decide for the most part what's considered a desirable, high status, laudable behavior.

And if people lower down the ladder think, well, okay, that's what success looks like.

And if I can't do that, you know I don't want to.

You know I don't want to be a mother who can't give my kids everything that is expected of me.

And so this too introduces stress and issues around fertility as well.

And, of course, you know, it is the case that a lot of credentialed, affluent women, for a time they will abide by this.

A lot of them like they really do believe it and they will live by it for a time.

But something i point out is that these women have the resources to freeze their eggs and then, even if later in life they reach their later 30s or early 40s, they can afford um expensive fertility treatments um, and then um, failing that, they can pay a surrogate to have a child for them.

So there are so many pathways available.

So they're promoting this one set, this one line here of, you know, marriages and everything.

Family, you know, maybe shouldn't have kids.

Having a boyfriend is embarrassing.

And then in their own lives they have so many options to not live by those ideas.

Yeah, i mean one thing that's, i can already sort of uh, imagine what cogs would be turning uh in a well-meaning woman's mind who may be partaking in in this sort of a meme.

They would say how, What are you talking about?

I don't think these things at all.

That's not what I'm trying to do.

I'm not trying to get my friends to stop getting into relationships.

The guys out here just aren't very nice.

And I'm trying to protect my friends from getting hurt.

And men are trash sometimes, or maybe even a lot of the time.

And these are just me.

How can you imbue on me all of these supposed motivations when that's not what i'm doing at all?

And i think it's important to just say the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons.

Very rarely are we aware of what the ultimate reasons for our behavior are.

Like you are much more effective at deceiving other people if you also are deceived by the motivation that you're doing this through right it.

I think the thing that's that makes it particularly unpalatable or like weird to talk about.

In a way, even I find myself being like fucking hell, like this really doesn't paint women in a particularly flattering light.

And I think that that is because the subtlety of the way that women compete seems much more conniving and manipulative than the way that men compete.

Like men compete in a way that may be like ruthless and brash and cutthroat, but it's much more kind of upfront and And we've said this, I've said this to every intersexual company like fucking Tanya Reynolds uh, Deborah Lieberman, like whoever it is that I'm talking to from the EP world on the woman's side.

Um, I'm so glad that I'm not a woman.

Like it would be.

I, I I'm not constructed and I I just don't have the mindset to be able to deal with the very fine finessed, like delicate gamesmanship, balance thing that needs to be done to be able to navigate this stuff to real.

Samurai blade meets a scalpel of of sort of social dynamics, but the uh.

The point here is the reason that somebody does something is not necessarily the reason that somebody does something.

It's best explained.

My favorite example of this is bill burr's bit about the wnba and body positivity and he says uh women, if you could only uh support your uh friends, if you could only support the wnba in the same way that you support a fat chick who's proud of her body and no longer a threat to you, that league would be doing better numbers than the NBA.

He goes, oh my God, you're a goddess.

You're gorgeous.

You look great in a bikini.

I'd kill myself if I looked like that.

Keep eating, keep eating.

Lose a toe, you fat bitch.

And it's literally the same as if you saw an alcoholic and said, oh my God, you're lying face down.

Your kids are crying.

You're a hero.

You're a God.

Keep doing what you're doing.

And this is basically...

If you can convince women to eat themselves out of the mating pool.

Couched under empathy compassion acceptance, like very pro-social motivations, you have managed to appear publicly like somebody that's very empathetic, very supportive, very inclusive.

You're beautiful at any size.

Yeah, secretly taking GLP-1s dieting, having a PT, wishing that you weren't the size that you are, or trying to actively sort of diet yourself down.

And am I saying that all body positivity support is by women trying to encourage their friends to eat themselves out of their mating pool competition?

No, obviously not.

And in many ways, maybe not at all, because your conscious awareness of why you're doing this isn't that?

But We have motivations for our behavior that we are not aware of.

The reason that we're not aware of it is it makes it way more compelling and easy to deceive others if we believe it ourselves.

And when you sort of spin all of this together, you end up with women being very pro short haircut.

You should cut it off.

You've got the breakup hair.

Cut it all off.

Cut it all.

You're going to look, girl, you look beautiful.

It's going to look so cool and blah, blah, blah.

And it's like, you know that guys prefer long hair.

Like very reliably, it's a sign of youth.

It's a sign of fertility.

It's a sign of fecundity.

Men, on average, prefer longer hair on women, and women that are high in intersexual competition advise potential sexual rivals to cut off more hair.

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Yes.

And the first author on that paper is this woman.

I've been referencing the evolutionary behavioral scientist, Dani Silikowski.

And Yeah, this is a common trope.

And it's funny.

When I read that paper I thought of this quote from another comedian, Adam Carolla, who said something like short hair is something that chicks always tell each other.

They're always like, oh, you'd look so good if you cut your hair off.

And then he says what they're really thinking is that's one bitch I'm not going to have to compete with anymore.

Just to round that out, man.

My point here is when, talking about this stuff, Male intrasexual competition seems like for want of a better word it seems fairer.

It's like, oh, that's like, you're like playing a fair game here in some sort of a way.

Like you tried to steal his girl by saying to his girl that he's a fucking bitch and that you're hotter than him, bigger than him, richer than him, faster than him, will look after her more than him.

Or you tried to beat him up or you, you know, you did.

Guys don't typically have the social... finesse to be able to do the things that women do.

And I think the reason that it sometimes feels a little icky or accusatory or uncomfortable to talk about this stuff is it does like belie a lot of like coercion and manipulation and connivingness on women.

And that's simply because they're more complex, right?

They are more socially, they are more complex than men are.

And it's funny because sometimes people will hear You know these, this distinction between ultimate and proximate, and the hidden motives that women have.

And and this turns them off of evolutionary psychology.

And they think, oh, this is just like, you know, fueling this idea that women are bad or something.

But the thing is like, those very same patterns of behavior can be easily understood with an evolutionary psychology lens, which is that women are reproductively more valuable.

They can't compete out in the open, because then you are potentially inviting physical violence, right?

Like if you just go up to you know a girl or a guy or whatever say you should leave her, like she sucks, whatever.

Like just being very open about that, you are raising the risk of actually being physically harmed in some way.

And then even if it isn't physical harm, because women don't, you know, they're not as physically confrontational as men, you are raising the possibility of ostracism, social exclusion, backbiting, all these kinds of things.

And so if you can strategically express the same idea in a more plausibly deniable way, you're reducing the risk of being killed or hurt or being ostracized.

And that's important because you know historically, women who were, you know, tactful were more likely to survive and reproduce.

And perhaps at some point in the human lineage there were women who were more like men, who would just openly and bluntly say whatever dumb thing came to mind.

And then they were cast out or the women would ostracize them.

And that was the end of that genetic lineage.

Um, And then your point here about, yes, there's a self-deception element.

And so much of what happens with human beings, we're not aware of it.

And sometimes I draw this parallel to animal species.

You don't need to know why a behavior is effective for it to be effective, for it to work.

So birds don't know in a conscious, articulable way why they engage in mating calls.

They're just obeying their instincts that have been honed through billions of years of evolution.

Same thing with elk.

During mating season, the male elk walk antlers and they're trying to impress the women.

But if you could somehow communicate with the elk, they wouldn't be able to say oh, I'm trying to impress the females around me.

They're just obeying this impulse.

Same thing with spiders.

They don't know why they weave webs.

But all of these things occur because they inherited these genes that led them to partake in behaviors that enhance the likelihood of survival and reproduction.

I think the same thing is true for humans.

So many of our behaviors we're unaware of.

They operate under the hood, and sometimes it can be advantageous to believe we're doing something for one reason versus another.

And the reason why it's advantageous is also tied to evolutionary reasons that I'm going to give you this nice kind, compassionate sounding reason so that you don't hate me or cast me out or reduce my fitness in some way.

So I'm going to give you this nice reason so that you still like me and want to be friends with me and whatever.

Like I want to be supportive with romantic relationships and all that kind of stuff.

So, yeah.

And I think, like what you said before about you know, women might hear this and think oh, how can you apply all of these negative motives and so on.

I mean, as you're saying that, I thought like Why is so much of the discourse around?

Men are all trash or focus on red flags.

I think if you were a person with a platform and an audience, you could also focus on green flags.

You could say something like if you want a relationship, if you don't want a relationship, that's fine.

But if you do, here are some tips, some green flags.

If you're in a relationship, you could say here's how I chose my partner, or whatever.

Here are the lessons that I've learned along the way.

There was that very famous essay a couple of years back by Bridget Fittazi, Why I Regret Being a Slut.

And she was speaking to young women about the lessons she'd learned throughout her life.

That essay went super viral and grew her audience.

And so there are ways, I think, to help people and not try to knock them out of the mating pool.

It's very interesting.

That's a great point.

How many... how many articles online are here are things to avoid, not here are things to chase.

And it is all, this is a reason not to do a thing.

This is a reason not to get into a relationship.

The girl with the list, 350 reasons not to have kids.

Like this is a red flag.

This is an ick.

You shouldn't chase it.

As opposed to these are all of the things to pursue.

Like stuff that you're supposed to go after is really only framed as the absence of things to avoid.

And it's like it is all about that runaway thing element.

I think, um dude, your article on this was so fucking good.

I want to read an excerpt from it and everyone should go and subscribe to your sub stack because i i i'm in love with it.

Women in positions of power corporate leaders, senior academics, influential media figures create environments that make reproduction difficult for the women below them.

They do it through culture and expectations.

Long work hours become mandatory.

Women who prioritize family are passed over for promotions.

The message is clear serious women don't have children, or at least they don't let children slow them down.

The subordinate women absorb this message.

This helps explain something puzzling about modern feminism.

This is so fucking good.

Progressive feminists often criticize capitalism.

They talk about how corporations exploit workers, how the pursuit of profit harms people, how we should value things other than career success.

Yet the same voices insist that there's no higher priority for young women than organizing their lives around a career.

Many of these elite women have partners.

Many of them have children.

They figured out how to balance career and family, or they had resources that made it easier.

But...

They don't advertise that.

They don't tell young women that women who are married and have children report the highest levels of happiness.

Instead, they emphasize the importance of career and the burden of children.

It's the primate pattern playing out in modern institutions.

Dominant females suppressing the reproduction of subordinates, not through conscious malice, but through the same unconscious evolved mechanisms we see in baboons and marmosets.

Non-elite women absorb the message that reproduction is incompatible with success.

Their fertility gets suppressed.

Dude, that's so fucking great.

That that squaring of the circle of capitalism is bad down with this sort of modern economic system.

And your career is the most important thing in the world.

Make sure you go to college, university, complete your degree, go and chase down the career.

I've never thought that those two things don't square, but that's fucking brilliant.

I thought it was so good.

Yeah.

And you see, those highly educated...

I mean, you see this with men and women.

The higher up you go in education, the more likely people are to bash capitalism, but then the more likely they themselves are to pursue those very same careers.

And so, on the one hand, they're bad-mouthing this pathway for others, but then, for themselves, they're frantically working as hard as they possibly can to climb to the top of those same ladders.

And yeah, you mentioned, so it's influential media figures, academics, corporate leaders.

I had this conversation a while back with an editor at a well-known magazine.

It wasn't Vogue, but he was telling me that they had recently ran this story of a woman who, she was married, had a family and then she got a divorce, started OnlyFans and wrote about how happy she was with her decision.

And I asked this magazine editor, I said, would you guys run the reverse story?

Like there's a woman on OnlyFans and then she realizes she's unhappy with this, quits OnlyFans, finds a husband, gets married and has kids and then writes an essay about how happy she is with her life now and with this decision.

And he said, oh, we would never run that.

Like, not in a million years.

And I find this absolutely fascinating because... Why?

Why do you think that is?

I didn't ask him because, you know, we were basically on the same page.

Like, he understood where I was coming from about the messages we received from media.

And you know, one thing he told me which is interesting is, like you know, he was kind of a cog in the system too.

Like he said.

You know I would like to run that, but I know like that would get squashed immediately.

Um...

But the reasoning here, I think, is tied to what we've been discussing, that you want to suppress rivals.

You want to convince people that maybe this pathway is unfulfilling and actually just getting naked for strangers for money is more exciting.

It's more interesting.

It's more titillating.

And I don't know if the world actually is objectively more competitive, but it's perceived to be.

I think there is this growing perception that you know Peter Turchin talks about surplus elites and truly competition and all this kind of stuff that you know, if you want to live a comfortable life, the entryway onto that path is narrower.

And so if you can convince people to just opt out altogether, you know this can be beneficial for you and for your own children.

And then you know, kind of on a maybe a more kind of proximate level, it's just you, You know it's more interesting.

It's more clickable.

Like that's a clickbait headline.

You know, I left my husband for OnlyFans and I'm so happy.

Like that is a more sensationalistic.

It feels counterculture.

It feels uplifting.

Again, it plays into this sort of hyper-independent female, you can go and get it yourself thing.

One question that people may have is why would a successful career woman who already won the husband and the family award care about suppressing the reproduction of subordinates?

Like you've already reached escape velocity, so what do you do?

You're no longer in the mating pool, like what would be the logic of that woman still trying to pull the ladder up after her, so to speak.

Well, so so there's um god, i hope i'm getting the name of this right.

I'm probably not, but there's this idea.

It's something like the absent oh, it's called the absent father hypothesis which yeah, that is it.

The idea here is tied in with the grandmother hypothesis that the reason why women have prolonged lifespans one reason may be because they were able to help their daughters with child rearing.

And so humans are one of the I think we're the only primate species where women live long past menopause.

And so the grandmother hypothesis is oh, they can help their daughters raise their grandchildren, their own grandchildren.

But then the absent father hypothesis is related, which is this idea that, you know, at various points in our evolutionary history, men were often not very invested as fathers.

And so the grandmother could step in and support the child.

And so one reason for absent fathers was things like warfare hunting, different ways to die infections, and so on.

Mortality rates were higher.

But another common reason is that men, especially higher status men, will leave their wives for younger partners.

And if you, you know, you could imagine that that kind of psychology has been passed on to us.

We evolved in societies where there was a limited number of desirable partners, a limited number of potential mates.

And so you know you want to hold on to the partner that you have, and you can enact strategies to help suppress competition from the few competitors you have in the small hunter-gatherer nomadic bands.

In the modern world, this can express itself as, wow, my husband's a CEO.

Maybe I'm getting a little bit older.

And I know that men, as they age, are still often very desirable to younger women.

And so I'm going to convince younger women, actually, you shouldn't be dating men.

You shouldn't be interested in men.

You know, and I've talked about this before, who is often the most upset about the age gap.

You know, the whole age gap discourse is often women who are getting a little bit older and who start to become more stressed out about young women dating older men, especially if the young women happen to be younger than themselves.

And so I think that's also playing a role here is that older women who have reached escape velocity.

They have the husband, they have the nice house, they have the kids and so on.

But you know, if you're a magazine editor or if you're a politician or corporate leader or something, you can still kind of introduce this idea out there to younger women to maybe avoid that same path so that you don't lose what you have.

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Jamie Krems taught me probably the most unpalatable theory.

The only people left are people that are amenable to this, so I think we're safe now.

Once you get an hour into a podcast, all of the people that hated it have self-selected out.

Jamie Krems gave me the most ruthless proximate versus ultimate explanation for pro-life versus pro-choice.

That being pro-life means that the cost of casual sex increases.

And if you look at the data, if the decision... This is the maddest thing, dude.

If the decision around women's bodies was left up to men, like men are trying to control women's bodies.

If the decision around women's bodies and reproductive rights was left up to men, they would almost certainly have all access to abortion.

If you look at the voting and the preferences, women are more pro-life than they are pro-choice.

And this skews older.

So you might say well, women who go through the beauty of childbirth and see just how wonderful it is to bring a young baby into this world don't want women that are about to have a kid or potentially going to have a kid to miss out on that.

Also, there is this sort of connection to the beauty of rearing a child.

You see this life come into the world and you want to protect that.

But on the other side you could say well, I now am beholden to my male partner.

His resources and his investment in me is very important to the future survival of both me and my child.

And maybe some younger women might tempt him away.

And if I am able to make it more difficult for them to have casual sex by raising the price of casual sex, by making access to birth control more difficult, they may be less likely to to engage in casual sex and, as such, my male partner, who I want to look after me and my child, is less likely to engage in casual sex because there's going to be fewer potential suitors.

That was the most fucking unpalatable theory.

Like people fucking hated it because on the surface it's like what do you mean?

I just don't want to kill babies.

I don't want to destroy the future.

I need to fix the birth rate.

This is like part of the downfall of society.

Like when someone feels like they're doing something so good, and this is why I think the visceral response body positivity.

What do you mean?

Well, like including these women, like, oh, you just want to be exclusionary.

You just want to tell people.

What do you mean about this?

Like men are trash.

They're not looking after these women.

They're like the 10 million men aged, 20 to 54 unemployed.

You want us to just be mankeeping and all of these things up front sound so laudable.

And to hear that what on the surface is pro-social, charitable and maybe a position that you take pride in.

You're like I'm proud of the fact that I am such a pro-social, caring person that I do this for the world to then have a hole poked in it and for someone to say, ah yeah, interesting.

Shame that it's total like shallow self-promotion and survivalism.

That's more exclusionary than it is inclusionary.

People don't seem to take that very well.

Yeah.

And you know this is like a basic principle in psychology, which is that if something is aligned with your interests and Your belief in it isn't reduced.

It's increased.

Your sincerity is increased, not decreased.

So if you tell me that oh, if you support this thing and it's going to help you in some way, I'm going to sincerely believe it.

And I'm going to tell you how great it is.

And there's not actually going to be any kind of layer of duplicity necessarily.

And so yeah, if you're as you were describing this and to paraphrase right, you're saying that older women are more pro-life because they want to reduce access to abortion so that their husbands don't strain, and pregnant young woman, and so on.

And so it's in their interest to actually genuinely 100 believe in the pro-life position because it's helpful for them.

And so there actually is no duplicity at all, right?

It strengthens their sincerity.

You're right.

There's no duplicity.

The motivation is less pure, right?

That might be a way to look at it.

Yes, right.

Yeah, yeah.

The difference between the stated reason versus the unconscious reason is And yeah yeah, the Jamie Crems work.

I mean the other paper that she wrote that I find really interesting on this sort of abortion issue.

You know, she basically found that people who are pro-life, there seems to be this unconscious motivation, in part to increase the costs of promiscuous sex, right.

Like people who are pro-life tend to have more monogamous reproductive strategies.

And so by raising the cost of promiscuous sex there are kind of indirectly ensuring that people pair bond to one particular sex mate.

And I remember I had this conversation with her about this because this implies the opposite is also true that if you're pro-choice, of course there's the ostensibly compassionate stated reason which is, you know, oh like, women may need access because you know they don't want to derail their life or their careers or what have you.

So you want to have access for health care reasons and so forth.

But if you take that sort of unconscious ultimate level of explanation and Um, if the pro-life thing is, you know I'm a, I'm a monogamous strategist, the pro-choice stance is you're a casual short-term, uh oriented strategist.

I want to reduce the cost of casual sex so that I can partake more in it.

Um, I want to make it easier to have lots of promiscuous sex without having to pay any cost for it.

Rob Kurzban uh, who I know you're familiar with.

He uh did a similar paper years ago on political stances around the legalization of drugs.

And he and his co-authors basically found that there's a kind of a The relationship between your stance on drugs and your openness to casual sex.

That is basically the link there.

That's the relationship.

I remember that.

Basically, hedonism at large, people are going to be high and maybe they fuck each other.

Even if you try to control for religiosity and all these other things still.

The much stronger predictor was your stance on casual sex.

This basically says oh, people want to ban or prohibit illegal drugs because drugs tend to reduce inhibitions and encourage promiscuity.

But then of course, you could say the opposite is the case that people who are very anti-drug, they have a more monogamous relationship strategy and they want to reduce people from participating in casual sex.

And so yes, I think so many of our motives that sound very articulate and interesting and well thought through and sophisticated, there's often kind of an evolutionary motive going on under the hood.

Yeah.

So one of the other things was sort of beyond this stated versus revealed masterclass thing.

What do you think this atmosphere has done to the way that men show up?

Cause I remember your article no one expects young men to do anything and they're responding by not doing anything.

Um how, what have you sort of come to believe about the way that this dynamic influences male behavior, sort of in response to it, because it's not as if this is a one-way street.

Hmm.

Yeah.

I think um, one of the things that I find interesting now is, like you know the the, you use the phrase mankeeping and you know there's this idea of toxic masculinity and it seems like there's remarkably little resistance from men.

You know, I know there's like the incel community and like all the but they.

They seem very small and ineffectual uh, uninfluential uh, And it's a tiny group of guys who say anything at all, challenging these ideas.

And I think what may be happening here, and these ideas were inspired by this amazing book called Manhood in the Making by the anthropologist David Gilmour.

He points out in this book that actually the idea of manhood.

You know and he surveyed cultures around the world um small scale non-industrialized societies from Melanesia, South America, uh islands of Greece, like all of these kind of um uh pre-industrialized societies.

And what he finds is that um, you know, these cultures created rights of passage for men, because if you leave young men to their own devices, they actually don't like, they don't want to be men, is basically the conclusion he came to.

Men, at least in the sort of traditional masculine sense.

They are very happy to be withdrawn.

Self-interested non-contributors lazy, selfish and so forth.

And the reason why manhood rituals arose independently in so many different societies throughout history is oh like, if we don't do this, guys are just going to like withdraw and turn into inert nothings.

And so we're going to inculcate this ideal in them of you have to be a net contributor, you have to be brave, you have to be courageous, you have to be productive and assertive and all these kinds of things.

And some of the raw ingredients obviously already exist in young men for those positive masculine qualities to emerge, but they have to be shaped and inculcated by their community.

But because our society doesn't really have this and you have, you know, all this language around toxic masculinity and many to step aside, and all this stuff.

Like a lot of guys are just like, you see this online too.

Like well, I would try if women would stop bad mouthing us.

Or like I would do this, but you know, society hates us anyway.

So why bother trying?

Um, I think a lot of that.

What they're saying is, you know, with encouragement and and if there was some kind of incentive or reward, they would live up to it.

And it's not entirely wrong.

Um, But also I think there's a bit of self-interested reasoning there, which is, like you know, inside of me, is a great man, but I just needed people to stop being mean to me so it can express itself.

If criticism ceased, they wouldn't become, like you know strong traditional positive, masculine men overnight.

Like they would not turn into that man.

Uh, they don't have that yet they.

It would require years of effort and work to build that up, and you know, some mean headlines and tweets and so on like that's not going to be enough to undercut them.

It takes a lot more than than that for for uh, positive masculinity to emerge.

Yeah, i mean, I told you as well about the swag gap relationship, something that I read about a while ago.

I'll give you a recap about swag gap relationship.

What I will not do is have a swag gap relationship, says TikToker.

It's almond milk honey in a video.

John's straight face.

Uh uh, Having me showing up in public looking swagged out, looking fly.

I have a cool outfit and then my partner just looks like an effing mess behind me.

I can't do it.

The swag gap can erode self-esteem.

When one partner compares themselves to the other, even if it's not too evident, it can quietly affect that partner's self-esteem.

This may cause an imbalance where the seemingly less cool partner may start to shrink, hold back or internalize feelings of inadequacy.

The swag gap triggers a shift in perceived power.

2021 study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships studied 181 heterosexual couples and explored how different aspects of power influence relationship satisfaction.

The researchers distinguished between personal sense of power, how empowered a person feels, positional power, formal advantages, general power, motive and balance of power.

They found that subjective personal sense of power, rather than objective positional power or the overall balance, predicted both couples' relationship quality.

Couples who felt more empowered and satisfied with their own influence reported higher relationship satisfaction.

This is true regardless of formula, structural power differences.

Perceived coolness can redirect romantic attention.

Feeling more confident than your partner can create an unspoken sense of elevated status for the partner, who feels like the cooler one.

While this may boost self-esteem and a sense of control, can also draw the partner's attention outward by making the seemingly cooler partner more aware of attractive alternatives or opportunities outside the relationship.

So I think, again, there's a few things going on here.

First off, it seems like the primary use or the primary currency that your relationship is supposed to convert into is not relational satisfaction, but a branding option opportunity, and how do other women perceive you?

Maybe part of this is um, i don't think that this is going to be a long-term investment, because this relationship is likely to be transactional and transient.

My social status with other women is going to last longer than the relationship.

Therefore, i'm going to prioritize how other women see me as opposed to fully investing myself into this relationship.

Does that make sense?

Yeah yeah, yeah right.

They're optimizing for approval of women rather than, I guess, secure attachment and relationship with a man.

Because they think it's going to drop off at some point in the near future.

Their friendships are going to last longer than their relationships.

Yeah, yeah, the followers are forever, but boyfriends are fleeting.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wonder if, yeah, that there is something going on like there.

Yeah.

So you're the first person who told me about the swag gap that shows how out of the loop I am.

So you told me about it and I went and read a couple articles trying to get a sense of what it was.

And I mean okay.

So yeah, there's a gap where one person in the couple is more stylish and cool than the other.

And the.

The photo that i kept seeing in these articles was justin bieber.

He had the hoodie, but then a ball cap over the hoodie and he's wearing shorts and crocs.

And then the girl he's dating i don't know her name is, like you know, decked out.

You know, red dress makeup, hair done.

She looks uh very glam and uh yeah, you see this.

I guess other other other cases too, like pete davidson, like dressed down and then whoever he's dating looks um, swagged out.

So the swag gap here and i think, like a lot of this, it seemed to be a lot of it was like women who were angry, like you know, women putting so much effort into their appearance, how they look, how they dress, their hair, their makeup, everything.

And then the guy they're with just looks like, you know, homeless.

He looks like a mom.

And I think this may be the result of people just kind of misunderstanding.

You know how status is generally evaluated by both sexes as well, which is that You know women are judged both by men and by women, more so on their appearance, whereas men aren't judged as harshly by men or by women on how they look.

And I think a lot of the swag gap stuff, like I mean maybe you see it in ordinary relationships, but at least with the celebrity cases you know, like Bieber is basically counter signaling right.

He's like, I'm Justin Bieber.

I'm a world famous celebrity.

I can wear Crocs and a hoodie and my girl can be decked out.

And this is fine because everyone knows that I'm Justin Bieber.

So dressing down is essentially a counter signal.

And then I thought, OK, like it doesn't really work for women, right?

Because a man's attractiveness, his desirability, is indexed, more so on his social status, which Bieber has a lot of.

So he can be indifferent to his appearance.

Whereas for women, because so much of their status and their desirability is tied up with how they look, they can't really counter signal in the same way.

And so I think like a woman, the equivalent of a swag gap would essentially be and this almost sounds ridiculous to even say aloud, which I think just also helps to eliminate how the current swag gap discourse is silly is this would be like a woman who's not working right.

Like a woman who doesn't work a nine to five.

And the unspoken message here, the counter signaling messages, I'm so beautiful.

I don't have to participate in the rat race.

Right.

And so you could imagine like a guy having a really cool, high status, amazing job.

And then his girl who's beautiful, but doesn't work.

And people saying like, oh, what's going on with the swag gap?

She can't even hold down a job.

Yeah.

She can't hold down a job.

Like, why are you with her, bro?

Like you're working, like you're doing all this stuff.

You're paying taxes.

You're paying the bills.

And she's not, you know, she's not working.

What's she contributing?

And I've never seen anything like that like of men trying to convince other men that a woman who doesn't work isn't worth being with.

I wonder whether part of this is that it's a failure of cross-sex mind reading that women are assessing other women's male partners in the way that women assess women.

They know that primarily women... tend to do more self-beautification they're going to show up in that kind of a way and they're using that criteria of judgment and pointing it at the men failing to understand that what it is typically that but this would be strange right because the women should be able to detect well i am attracted to men for things that are different to why men are attracted to women but my point on this is socioeconomically if uh men are no longer the breadwinners on average, whatever it is, the bottom 40% of male earners and top 20% of female earners are now in a relationship where the woman earns more than the man.

Have you seen this data?

I've seen something similar, yeah.

Bottom two quintiles of men, top quintile of women are like the breadwinner is skewed toward the female.

If that's the case and Mac and Murphy put this proposal forward a few years ago, and I think it's true men would start to show more beautification.

Men would start to try and present themselves because they need to compensate in some sort of way.

If you can't compete socioeconomically or if you can't contribute socioeconomically.

You need to contribute in terms of beauty and looks.

And maybe it's the case that, first off, guys who are not Justin Bieber are and aren't bringing that level of socioeconomic resources to a relationship, trying to emulate the Bieberfication.

It's like hey dude Crocs, socks and a homeless hoodie.

You may not be able to get away with this if your partner is also the breadwinner.

You have missed the fact that there is a huge skew toward Justin Bieber, because he's fucking, Justin Bieber.

And then perhaps another part of it is just that women realize, or women are starting to think well, guys need to look better because they can't contribute in the same sort of way.

I don't need them socioeconomically.

So I'm not going to put like Homer Simpson, like how long is the swag gap relationship has always existed.

Peter Griffin wasn't cool.

Homer Simpson wasn't cool.

Like every archetype of the dad, or even of the boyfriend, typically has been, The girl has a better sense of style and fashion, and the guy turns up inappropriately dressed or uncool or with a stain on the front of his polo shirt from ketchup or whatever.

I don't feel like this is a new phenomena.

It's just that the trade that was being made.

I will put up with his lack of swag, because he is keeping a roof over our heads.

That trade no longer makes as much sense when you can afford the roof over your head without him.

Yeah yeah, that makes sense that you know, if you look at this in a very sort of cold analytical way, that you know what is each party bringing to the relationship.

And historically, it was resources sustaining the home financially, economically.

And then if men are falling behind in education and occupation and attainment and all these kinds of things, then what else could they bring?

Well, they can look good.

Um, that makes sense to me.

I think, generally this sort of pressure now among guys, purely young guys, to look good, that that makes sense, as you know, and and none of these explanations, I think, are mutually exclusive.

They probably all play some role.

So that explanation of you got to bring something to be attractive to a woman.

The other, I think, is just um, we are like we've always been sort of obsessed with image, but I think this has been aggravated in the era of dating apps and social media, where where we pay a lot of attention to how we look now and how we come across online, because that's all you have really to evaluate.

In person.

You have all these other things like charisma and how you speak and the sound of your voice, and all these other things like your mannerisms.

There's so much unspoken, unacknowledged information that we're unconsciously absorbing when we meet someone in person, versus seeing a 2D image online.

And then I think the other thing, and this is this is, I think, is more speculative, which is because the the, I guess, availability of cosmetic enhancement for women has increased so much even within the last couple of decades, like women can do all kinds of things with fillers and Botox, and like ways to use makeup.

Now, that didn't exist.

Like if you watch a movie from like 2003, you know like even the the hot girls don't have like whatever's going on with the sculpting and the airbrush.

I don't know what it is like, i don't know what to call it, but women look a lot different today, like hot girls today versus hot girls 20, 25 years ago.

And i think yeah, some of that is um, cosmetic surgery, but some of it is just like whatever.

Like advancements in, like basic makeup have taken place um, and so, as women get better looking, i wonder if there's the pressure on men in turn, like there's always going to be a gap where women are always going to be better looking than men, but the gap will stay constant.

And so, as women start to become more attractive, men feel like obligated in turn to like keep that gap the same, instead of like staying put while women continue to get hotter.

Hmm.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Well, I mean you mentioned it before on the toxic masculinity thing that the traits in men that are often being pointed at as red flags or things that are kind of out of vogue or uh, base desires or like um, why does I mean, even in that Vogue article there is something out of Vogue.

Uh, there is something that says, why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?

Now,

Oh yeah.

I forgot about that.

Yeah.

You're politically suspect if you have a boyfriend.

Yeah yeah, that is hilarious.

You saw that with taylor swift.

Right, taylor swift gets married and suddenly there are these think pieces about like oh, you know, like this is, this is a, this is a bad, bad for women.

It's like traitor to the cause, like this feels very conservative.

The same dude, and you know hey hey, to fucking full circle this and have a great callback.

What happened when adele lost weight?

Yeah, body positivity, community felt like she'd betrayed them in exactly the same way.

Yeah yeah, she would.

I, i dude, i'm absolutely certain that she would have been accused of uh, there would have been accusations of she's, she's taken a hard right pivot, she's right wing.

This is like uh nazi-ish um, patriarchal thinness, body standards uh heteronormative, you know, cisgender fucking superstructure, misogynistically keeping women down, forcing them to be thin and comply to the male gaze.

I could fucking do this all day, dude.

I'd be, i'd be great, um.

But The exact same dynamic happened with Taylor Swift when she got into a relationship.

I actually went on to the child-free-and-happy subreddit.

R slash child-free?

I think it is, and there was a huge, huge discussion.

I was pleasantly surprised with the fact that it was at least partly balanced.

But there were some people in there, there were some commenters that were basically saying like I can't believe that she's with that animal.

How could she betray Basically the same as an incel that ascends, throws the rest of the incel community into harsh light, because it compares something that they have been able to achieve with something that the rest of the community hasn't.

If you get a girlfriend, then it makes my lack of girlfriend my fault, as opposed to something systemic that's out there.

Now, obviously, the problem with the child-free community is that there are biological issues.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think that that kind of self handicapping or whatever, like, yeah, it's selectively applied.

And yeah, just this, this feeling of you know I'm going to behave this way in order to show solidarity.

But but it's often only expressed through like these, it's performative, right?

Like I'm going to say this on my podcast.

I'm going to post these inspirational quotes or these ideas or these clips or whatever.

And But then privately, you know, very few people actually abide by it.

Right.

And so you know, even if like like, like the body positivity thing, I think it would be hilarious if if, if women who take very good care of their bodies but like publicly espouse body positivity and fat acceptance.

I'm going to gain 60 pounds in solidarity with differently weighted women who have difficulty with weight because of our society, whatever.

And I'm going to pack on 60 pounds because you know this is, you know I'm supporting the sisterhood.

I'm fighting the patriarchy or whatever.

And you never really see that.

You see women who work out a lot and then they say, you know, they say all the right words.

Dude, Lizzo's lost weight.

No, really?

I didn't know this.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, now we're in the era of GLP-1s and Ozempic and everything else.

So I just feel like I saw this tweet the other day and it was something like it's really funny how you're seeing less chatter from the fat acceptance community now that Ozempic is becoming more widely available.

Right.

I mean this was one of my favorite takes after the Golden Globes that GLP-1s have just proven that body positivity was a scam all along.

Body positivity was the inner citadel for these people and the second that they had a free route out of being bigger than they wanted to.

Who is not taking that?

Yeah.

I mean that is because there's a difference between choosing to not lose weight because of anchoring bias.

It's like, well, I'm already this size.

I've always been this size versus Hey, if you're so in tune with the body positivity community, why not?

Why not?

Why not gain 50 pounds?

Like why not pack on 50 pounds in solidarity?

Because if weight has no bearing on health or attractiveness, if beauty is at every size, uh could stand with your bigger sisters.

And there are so many.

Like you know, you see so many examples of this, Chris.

Like you know, I spend a lot of time in academia and I would see, like white male university professors and presidents, people in prominent roles.

And they would often say like yeah, it's about time we stop hiring people who look like me and and give a voice to women, people of color, you know, members of the LGBT community, whatever.

And I'm always thinking in my mind when I heard these, you know, these grand speeches like start with yourself.

Yeah, just abandon the position.

It would be like and you would be lauded for at least you know, temporarily you know if you said like I am publicly going to step down if the university can agree to replace me with a woman of color.

Like, yeah, that would like, why not do that?

But they never, they never do anything like this.

Dude, that is so funny.

Just getting people to put their money where their mouth is.

Yes.

With regards to this really sort of reveals the The luxury of the beliefs.

Is there anything else you got anything else to say?

Is there anything else that we haven't covered on the swag gap embarrassment cringe of boyfriends?

No, no.

I mean, yeah, I thought the swag gap.

It's so funny.

Like you said, like this is as I was also thinking like this has always existed.

Like you've always seen, like a guy who doesn't put as much effort into how he dresses, and then his wife looks much better than him or his girlfriend.

So, yeah, it's funny now that it has a label.

But yeah.

A deeper dive than either of us ever thought that we should need to do on a single article.

Dude, I am stuck in a world where I can't work out if this is TikTok, brain slop or a genuine insight into important mating trends that will literally shape the future of humanity.

Like that's the current world that I'm in.

And alas, we will continue to assess it way too deeply later. until that day comes and we work out which is true rob henderson ladies and gentlemen everyone needs to go and subscribe to your sub stack it fucking rips i love it you publish like two or three pieces a week you're now doing office hours you've got your own little thing going on from a podcast perspective and stuff too i i think it's uh i think it's so good um anything else do you want to push uh no i mean my book's out in paperback trouble the memoir foster care family and social class um and yeah always appreciate you having me on chris

[The Evolutionary Psychology of Modern Romantic Cynicism and Girl Boss Gatekeeping]-[#1016 - Rob Henderson - Is Having a Boyfriend Cringe Now?]

📋 Summary

The Rise of Romantic Cynicism and 'Girl Boss Gatekeeping'

Proximate Explanations vs. Ultimate Evolutionary Drivers

The 'Inner Citadel' and Luxury Beliefs

The 'Swag Gap' and Shifts in Relationship Dynamics

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[The Evolutionary Psychology of Modern Romantic Cynicism and Girl Boss Gatekeeping]-[#1016 - Rob Henderson - Is Having a Boyfriend Cringe Now?]

📋 Summary

The Rise of Romantic Cynicism and 'Girl Boss Gatekeeping'

Proximate Explanations vs. Ultimate Evolutionary Drivers

The 'Inner Citadel' and Luxury Beliefs

The 'Swag Gap' and Shifts in Relationship Dynamics

Conclusion

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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